The false narrative that fossil fuels are supposedly getting phased out!

12 comments

1. December 2023

   [The United States is producing more oil than any country in history](https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/19/business/us-production-oil-reserves-crude/index.html)

2. Bought solar panels, a big ass battery, and an inverter 🤙🏾

   Everyone who can do this, should.

   Exit the monopoly of fossil fuels and the utilities from having power over you.

   Save up and take them out of the equation.

3. China’s bringing 53? more coal fired plants online in 2024.

   >Coal power continues to expand in China, despite the government’s pledges and goals. In the first half of 2023, construction was started on 37 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power capacity, 52 GW was permitted, while 41 GW of new projects were announced

   Game over. No point in driving an EV or making any effort.

4. This sub has been overrun by propaganda as well I can see. The same 3 sources, blown out of numbers with zero references or sources for the same set of hashed out arguments etc

5. Cry, loser. We’re phasing out fossil fuels and we don’t care about your attempt at spreading propaganda

6. Of course from 1900 to today humanity increased our use of fossil fuels. But these charts, by leaving out nuclear and renewables, only tell a part of our story and do not show how worst it would be without nuclear and renewables.

   These charts show the trends of the replacement of coal (extremely bad for the environment) to oil (bad) to gas (better, still not great) but stop before the trends to nuclear and renewables (good).

   But, even leaving out nuclear and renewables, you can see in Chart 3: Per capita fuel consumption going down as nations develop. The west is on a downward trend and with China’s massive investments in nuclear and renewables, they are expected to peak and show the same trend in the next 5 years. Hopefully we can do the same or even better and decrease the time to shift from coal to renewables with other parts of the developing world.

   Could we have done better? Yes. Will and are people suffering because we didn’t heed the science earlier? Yes, we will continue to have to contend with the death and displacement of massive numbers of people for the foreseeable future.

   But, progress has and is being made. Those who understand climate change have made a difference. We need to be realistic and understand and prepare, but to only put out doom and despair and disregard the blood, sweat and tears that has gone into fighting against the greed and corruption surrounding the fossil fuels industry is wrong and counterproductive.

   TL;DR: We could have done better during the development of our civilization. People will suffer for those mistakes but progress is being made.

7. You are absolutely right, there is a non stopping social propaganda about the phase out.
   Nothing is showing in the numbers any signs of it.

8. I see a pattern of naïveté in the comments.

   There are two things that should be born in mind when thinking about these numbers.

   1) previous energy transitions have been energy additions and if we want to replace fossil fuel, it is not sufficient to just make renewables available. For example when coal became available, biomass usage went down in % but it continued increasing in absolute numbers, same for clean and oil. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629618312246.

   So looking at the raw numbers I think it’s legitimate to be concerned about the situation because we don’t need renewables to become 90% of the energy mix while increasing the global energy usage so much that the fossil fuel consumption didn’t decrease or even increased. We need to cut them down to as small as possible.

   2) energy transitions are not sudden breaks all around the world. The Industrial Revolution started 200 years ago and is still not complete globally. When a revolutionary technology is introduced, a plateau or even growth in the old (even in %) is not unexpected. https://rmi.org/insight/how-past-energy-transitions-foretell-a-quicker-shift-away-from-fossil-fuels-today/

   So it’s not unexpected to see a temporary increase in fossil fuel. It’s reassuring that in some countries the replacement has already been completed. It needs to also be the case in major economies. This is hopefully what is happening in China with renewables and maybe the hump that Europe already went over. The US may be following as well and it is my hope that we will even do it without the short term increase in oil and coal like China is doing but it’s not certain at this point.

   So although I don’t know OP’s intentions and I see some alarming comments from them which make me doubt them. It’s legitimate to track the energy consumption in absolute numbers and not only fractional because that’s what matters in the end. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/04/visualizing-the-history-of-energy-transitions/

9. Renewables do not replace current energy supply, they augment it. Produce it and they will consume it.

10. Given that SINOPEC, China’s biggest refiner and distributor of gasoline, has declared peak gasoline in that country this year, that peak diesel for North America and Europe was declared by Bnef last year and that peak fossil fuels was declared by Fatih Birol the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) a few months ago, I suspect the piece you are citing and your concerns are misplaced.

    https://cleantechnica.com/2023/10/11/chinas-oil-gas-giant-sinopec-says-peak-oil-demand-already-happened-in-china/

11. Sometimes we get people who are actually working in the industry, and sometimes we get drive-by shitposts with a dose of conspiracy on top. I mean, I could engage with this, but it’s so bad it’s not even wrong.

12. Oh you are a member of climate “skeptics” that explains a lot