Die Welt erreicht zum ersten Mal den Meilenstein von 30 % erneuerbarer Energien

7 comments

1. Yeah we’re ramping up cleaner energy. Problem is we’re also ramping up energy use. Crypto and AI have been using immense amounts of energy. Poor parts of the world are developing and starting to draw more electricity. Hotter temperatures are making air conditioning more expensive.

   We’re not winning.

   Four things:

   Natural gas needs to completely replace coal. No reason not to. It’s everywhere. It’s cheap. You’re just a greedy penny rubber if you’re burning coal for the marginal cost savings over natural gas. Also there should be an international treaty to satellite identify and patch gas leaks.

   Quantum computing is right on the cusp now. We need to push it over. Fast. Because of the energy savings it gives over classical computing calculations. The new functions are just gravy.

   A carbon tax would be great. Got to fund government somehow right? Why not in a way that encourages planet saving behaviors?

   You create more trees by moving water. Then the trees plant themselves. Divert water on the way to an ocean. Keeping buildings off riverfronts helps too. I think we should knock down a mountain in the Sierras as well.

2. The message implies that only 3 times as much renewable energy is needed and the planet is finally save. This is of course nonsense.

   The 30% refers to electricity consumption, the total primary energy consumption is 100 times as high, so 100 times as many wind turbines, photovoltaics and hydroelectric power plants are needed.

   The “milestone” is nothing more than a small pebble.

3. Too little, too late. This milestone should’ve been crossed 20 years ago

4. Did the CO2 emissions fall 30% as well?

5. Why are all of you (this comment section) so fucking negative all the time? Good news is still good news

6. It seems like humanity keeps increasing renewable energy production, and humanity’s demand for energy keeps increasing to match it. If we more than tripled our renewable energy production tomorrow, so that renewable energy production matched 100% of the current demand, would people stop burning fossil fuels? I think they would burn nearly as much as they do today. People would just use more electricity since there is more available, meaning fossil fuels would still be in demand. That’s not even getting into other issues that will complicate the transition to clean energy, such as the need for long distance power transmission and the intermittent nature of many sources of renewable energy.

   I’m just a guy on the internet, so feel free to correct me where I may be misinformed, but I really don’t think that the world passing 30% renewables means that we’re 30% of the way to solving the climate crisis. Adding more renewable energy production means that there is an alternative that competes with fossil fuels, but it doesn’t stop people from burning fossil fuels. To actually stop people from burning fossil fuels, either world governments have to cooperate to reduce the use of fossil fuels, or it must become unprofitable to use fossil fuels.

   So how far are fossil fuels from being unprofitable? It’s hard to put an exact number on it because the costs of extraction and refining different fossil fuels in different parts of the world can vary dramatically, but we can look at the cheapest oil extraction rates, where they would hypothetically be the last ones to stop pumping from economic pressures making the industry unviable. Saudi Arabia can get a barrel of crude out of the ground for $3-$5, and that barrel sells for around $80 nowadays. I think people are aware that renewables in the right place at the right time are already competitive with fossil fuels, but I think it’s important to stress that we are ridiculously far away from actually making fossil fuels unprofitable to extract, refine, and burn because the price of that barrel of oil can come way down before they stop pumping. What we’re doing is reducing the price of fossil fuels by adding an alternative that can take on some portion of the electricity demand, but the price of those fossil fuels has to fall below the price to extract, refine, and burn before people will stop doing it, and right now the cheapest places to extract oil are being paid 16 times as much for their oil as it costs to extract it.

   Alternatively, we can look at how the aggregate mass of humanity is behaving. Are oil execs sweating bullets because their revenues are crashing? Are rational actors ceasing oil exploration efforts because they don’t expect long term profit from their finds? Are students being advised against studying to be petrochemical engineers because that job won’t exist in 50 years? If none of those things are happening, then we will probably be burning fossil fuels for a *long* time to come.

   Or if you’re more statistically minded, we can look at a really simple and telling statistic, the global demand for crude oil in barrels per day, which has increased by nearly 25% in the past 20 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/271823/global-crude-oil-demand/

   I really wish I didn’t sound so pessimistic, but there is every indication that humanity today is generating massive short term benefits by setting up future generations for disaster, and we aren’t even close to solving the problem because individual people, individual companies, and individual countries benefit from a process to create cheap energy that doesn’t require them to pay for the negative externalities the fossil fuel industry imposes on other people. The least we can do is make them pay for the damage they’re causing, but again that takes political will, so it’s hard to say how likely that is to happen any time soon.

7. A positive in the most low hanging fruit way. The goal isn’t to get to 100% renewables, it’s to reduce our carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Renewables are just the way we believe we can get there. Where are our carbon emissions at? Because having 30% renewables and being worse off in the crucial metric still is frankly not all that positive.

   We are at the point of celebrating not cutting our finger off while hemorrhaging blood