As someone who's been pushing for renewables for quite a while now it's dismaying that it's taken a war to accelerate this push, but I'm glad to see that it's happening at least.
It's doubly dismaying that my own country (US) is still doubling down on fossil fuels despite everything.
The concern about a new dependency on China is real, but renewables do have the advantage that once you have the infrastructure in place it keeps working without continuously importing fuel. Nonetheless, China has done a good job building up their PV/battery manufacturing capacity (including via subsidies for a while if I'm not mistaken) and to the extent the rest of the world wants to avoid a dependency on them we should do that too.
I've been arguing with Europeans on twitter (including an environmental scientist) who believe this war shows we need to resume drilling in the North Sea and Groningen.
It feels like this collective insanity will never end
I wish there was somewhere I could talk about world affairs and European affairs with reasonable people, the way I can talk about tech on HN. But anywhere I've tried - Twitter, r/europe or any smaller subs I've found are just filled with reactionaries trying to stir up hate for whatever reasons they have. There are reasonable voices there, people who are capable of actual conversation, but they're just drowned out. I used to comfort myself by thinking they must all be 14 year olds, or Russian bots, or whatever, and some probably are, but now I'm convinced the large majority are just hate filled adults who've gotten stuck on Twitter, Facebook, reddit etc. and literally spend all their time there basically shouting as if they were lunatics on a street corner.
I might pass by but I wouldn't stand and listen to an angry man on a street corner, and I definitely wouldn't try and have a conversation nearby (or with) them. So why would I expect that to work on Twitter?
In this regard, the subreddit r/NeutralPolitics is interesting: it aims at evidence-based discussions on political issues. Threads are somehow in-between HN and Wikipedia. It is definitely interesting to read, and at the same time, participating in a discussion is quite daunting.
Had a browse around and these look good, although very US focused (standard for Reddit though).
However, on every thread I checked, about 70% of comments are deleted. That means that the noise is still there, but the mods are having to work nonstop to fight it and no doubt introducing their own bias as they do so.
I wish them luck and I'll keep checking these places out but I can't help but feel that by the time you're deleting 70% of all comments (and who knows what percentage of threads), you're fighting a losing battle.
You won’t find much quality in lay discussion boards, but magazines like The Economist and Foreign Affairs are worth a subscription. I’ve cut back my internet time and incorporated these into my routine, would strongly recommend if you want actual knowledgeable opinions on world affairs.
Well "Europeans on Twitter" are probably the kind of people who look at the owner of the site posting about a homeland for white people and that kind of thing and aren't bothered too much by it.
If your intention is honest engagement with people you disagree with, you should refrain from ad-hominem attacks like this. Work with their arguments, not with their tastes or appearances.
If your intention is to ridicule them and convince yourself they are not worth discussing with, then ad-hominem is fine, but not engaging at all is better.
GP reported on an opinion and called it insane. That's not an ad hominem.
There is a difference between judging an opinion and judging a person. If the response had been something like "what is crazy is to think the world can just switch off its dependence on petrol suddenly", I would not have reacted either.
> Countries that can be oil independent definitely should do that.
This does not necessarily follow.
Doubling down on becoming oil independent might have a massive price because the required investments into extraction and refining industry could also be spent on renewables.
Furthermore, we already see renewables outcompeting fossils on price/kWh, so ending up in a really inefficient sunk-cost pit is pretty likely, with all the refinery investments not even paying back their cost because a conflict now does not guarantee that fossil prices/demand will stay high.
I think Europe should resume drilling in the North Sea and Groningen if they have exploitable reserves there. Europe depends on energy imports and that won't change in our lifetimes (I'm in my early forties, so at least in my lifetime.) They should take advantage of whatever resources they have.
I'm guessing you think otherwise? Why? Do you think the energy transition will be faster? What makes you think that?
Because the continued survival of civilization depends on leaving fossil fuel in the ground. If the transition isn't fast enough then we will have horrible, lethal shortages, but that's still better than the worst climate scenarios.
Closing Groningen didn't leave fossil in the ground. It took LNG from US and gas from Norway out of the ground instead.
The decision to stop using fossil fuels is not tied to the decision to stop one of the sources of fossil fuels. They're divorced.
Stopping fossil fuels requires investments in alternatives, and price mechanisms that disfavour fossils. Absent those mechanisms, closing one source of fossil just shifts demand to another source of fossil, which is exactly what happened.
Meanwhile closing the gas source cost the NL a few hundred billion euros, the amount of money it needs to transition to renewables. Instead it is spending that on US LNG and Norwegian gas.
The field shouldn't have been closed in 2023, it should've remained open until e.g. 2030 and all proceeds earmarked for massive energy transition subsidies. Instead we're just importing expensive fossil now and have insufficient money to meet our green ambitions.
That may or may not be true. But it won't stay in the ground as long as there is money to be made by extracting and consuming it.
Right now all that's happening is the US is extracting that natural gas, and the middle east extracting that oil, and Europe is importing it. Which pollutes more and costs more. Just develop your domestic supplies.
The only direct thing we (the Netherlands) can do to prevent carastrophic climate change is to leave fossil fuels on our territory in the ground. Everything else is indirect.
I know this is an unfathomable concept, but to actually "leave fossil fuels [...] in the ground" you have to stop using fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels someone else refused to leave in the ground means--surprisingly--that fossil fuels weren't left in the ground after all.
And it turns out that we actually live on a shared planet with a common atmosphere; sourcing your fuels from abroad does nothing to prevent climate change. But it does mean that you are unable to secure some of the most fundamental inputs to your economy.
Plus you have no control over the standards for extractions (e.g. methane leaks), and shipping it causes more pollution.
They're actually worse off, and they pay more for it instead of creating jobs and keeping the money in their own economy. Meaning less money for e.g. green programs to move away from fossil fuels.
> That is because that money is allowed to be made by externalizing the cost to future generations.
I don’t understand why you wrote this in response to the comment you replied to.
No matter which way you slice it, the UK and Europe using the oil from wells physically closer to them has to be less energy intensive that shipping oil / gas from far away.
What bearing does externalising anything have on that fact.
Economics 101: if Europe taps new wells, global supply increases. Higher supply drives down prices. Lower prices induce more consumption.
We wouldn't just be cleanly swapping imported fuel for domestic fuel 1:1; we'd be making it cheaper to burn more fossil fuels globally. The marginal emissions saved on shipping are completely wiped out by the net increase in total carbon burned.
The only reason expanding that supply looks like a "win" on a balance sheet today is exactly because the long-term climate cost of burning that newly available fuel is still being passed on to the future.
> long-term climate cost of burning that newly available fuel is still being passed on to the future.
That’s not science.
That’s wishful thinking.
We can’t actually know the long term climate-costs of burning fossil fuels.
It’s unfalsifiable.
We don’t have a second identical Earth we can use as a control.
Expending the fossil fuel supply today (months) reduces the impact of global oil / gas shocks to people suffering high prices today.
Waiting for your team to invent new battery and storage technology, and littering the countryside with wind turbines and replacing the entire existing vehicle fleet does nothing to help people now.
You’re willing to sacrifice the lives of at least some poor people who exist now, or are likely to exist in the near future, for a theory that is unfalsifiable.
That’s not since.
That’s brainwashing, and it’s not even good brainwashing.
> You’re willing to sacrifice the lives of at least some poor people who exist now, or are likely to exist in the near future, for a theory that is unfalsifiable.
What exactly do you mean with "unfalsifiable"? We actually measure atmospheric CO2, sea level and temperature; that's plenty falsifiability to me. And the greenhouse effect itself is not even in question.
Fossil emissions are sacrificing people not just from climate change in the future, but right now from air pollution, too (about 5M deaths per year actually, according to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38030155/).
Climate science wants us to ignore the geological record and ignore geological processes.
A cubic kilometre of lava at 1200 degrees C is enough energy for thirty (30!) hurricanes.
It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.
But climate science wants us to ignore all that and place the blame entirely on human caused CO2 emissions and cow farts, while we are literally living through and ice age.
If you think that the greenhouse effect is real (CO2 contributes to warming), why would human emissions not have any effect? we currently emits tons of it per year and person for a substance only in the 400ppm range-- even if you split a single humans emissions over a whole cubic kilometer it makes a substantial concentration difference already.
> It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.
No, this is not remotely plausible, because we have a pretty solid understanding of how much heat is transferred from the earths interior (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget), and this is completely negligible (and off by many orders of magnitude) compared to the oceanic warming that we already observe (for a 0.5K increase in oceanic surface temperature you'd need thousands of times the total heat that we get from the planet itself).
> It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.
You're mistaking possible for probable. There's no evidence to suggest that's the case, and lot's of evidence that it's from climate change. In science you follow the evidence, not your pet theory.
> But climate science wants us to ignore all that and place the blame entirely on human caused CO2 emissions and cow farts, while we are literally living through and ice age.
I don't think you understand either science or ice ages.
What exactly is your argument here? That organic chemistry is all wrong and oxidization is unfalsifiable, or that the fossil industry itself is fudging the numbers to make it look life we're oxidizing less organic matter than we think?
It would be an inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration considering the deployment rates and cost decline curves of renewables and storage.
> But what the past year has shown is that it’s possible to go harder and faster in deploying solar panels and batteries, reducing energy use, and permanently swapping out entrenched sources of fossil fuel. Solar installations across Europe increased by a record 40-gigawatts last year, up 35% compared with 2021, just shy of the most optimistic scenario from researchers at BloombergNEF. That jump was driven primarily by consumers who saw cheap solar panels as a way to cut their own energy bills. It essentially pushed the solar rollout ahead by a few years, hitting a level that will be sustained by EU policies.
(Europe has enough wind potential to power the world, their energy constraints are deployment rate of renewables, battery storage, and transmission)
You're talking about electricity, so I assume your answer is directed to the natural gas fields at Groningen. The EU imports a lot of natural gas. Don't you think it would be better to have a domestic supply? It's better for the environment too.
Heck right now, Europe is still burning coal (and worse yet - lignite coal) for electricity. Natural gas would be a huge improvement on that.
Note that drilling for oil in the North Sea is a completely different subject, because that's not used for electricity generation, nor is electricity a substitute. EV market share in Europe is still far too low for that to be a conversation for a long time.
Your comment is wishful thinking and ignores the current reality of how Europe imports and uses energy.
But even if your best case scenario were somehow possible (and it really isn't) there's still money to be made exporting fossil fuels to the developing world. So your assertion "inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration" is just flat wrong.
No, everything can move to electricity, China is doing it, Europe can too. You are free to your opinion, but the facts and evidence are clear. If you would like an hour of time with an expert from Ember Energy to explain this, happy to pay for that hour of time for you to update your priors and mental model on the topic of Europe's energy transition trajectory.
> Note that drilling for oil in the North Sea is a completely different subject, because that's not used for electricity generation, nor is electricity a substitute. EV market share in Europe is still far too low for that to be a conversation for a long time.
Europe's EV uptake will speed based on the price of oil increasing and remaining high for the foreseeable future.
> But even if your best case scenario were somehow possible (and it really isn't) there's still money to be made exporting fossil fuels to the developing world. So your assertion "inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration" is just flat wrong.
The developing world is leapfrogging fossil fuels and going straight to solar, batteries, and EVs. What will expensive LNG do to this market? It will force them to renewables and electric mobility faster. Ethopia's uptake of EVs after they banned combustion vehicles is an example of this. Why did they ban combustion vehicles? Because they have no domestic fossil fuel supplies and the import cost was crushing them; their EVs are powered by domestic hydro electricity production.
Doesn't the world only have about 50 years [0] worth of oil remaining in the ground? Climate change and war aside, it seems like that should be a major reason to accelerate the change to renewables.
No I don't think so. The oil industry is very good at discovering and developing resources previously thought to be out of reach.
People have been talking about peak oil for decades, as long as I can remember, and it never happened.
I think we're technologically capable of extracting more oil, coal, and gas than we would ever want to. We would cook ourselves with the damage we'd do to the climate. I think that's the real constraint - and I hope we pay attention to it.
Conventional oil actually peaked around 2005–2006, but the shale oil revolution in the U.S. and technological advances have certainly postponed peak oil itself.
Here comes the kicker, though: we obviously extracted the easy-to-access resources first. While there may be counterexamples, looking at ore grades makes it clear that this is not particular to oil.
What happens next is that the economics of the wells are getting worse, which means we need a higher oil price for them to be viable. This also results in a lower energy return on energy invested (EROI), which reduces the surplus energy available to transform our environment. Consequently, this implies slower growth in the economy. Which I think is pretty obvious in the west and would explain the explosion of debt.
I think your analysis is US-centric. I don't think non-shale oil has peaked yet globally.
What you say about the economics getting worse and lower EROI may be true. It certainly seems like common sense. There are some counter-examples though.
The inflation adjusted cost of extracting oil from the oil sands in Alberta, Canada has actually decreased over time, not increased.
But generally I'd expect increasing cost of extraction to be the norm.
I've done my best to educate with facts and citations. Appreciate the discussion regardless. My offer stands to pay for you to talk to a subject matter expert.
Edit (to respond to your edit):
> Global consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas all rose in 2025. We've not even peaked yet.
Do you think global LNG consumption will peak considering a material amount of production has been taken offline for the next five years as of today? If I am an LNG consumer on the global market, am I re-evaluating my options today for the next half decade of energy needs? And we are not even done yet with additional potential attacks on Middle Eastern fossil infrastructure as long as the conflict continues; there are more targets available, and more capacity that could be diminished for the foreseeable future.
> Renewable energy continues to expand rapidly, but not fast enough for a total reduction in fossil fuels. Emissions from burning oil are projected to rise by 1% in 2025, while gas emissions are set to increase by 1.3%, and coal by 0.8%.
These increases are not material in a world where 1TW/year of solar PV is being deployed. Global solar capacity doubles every three years [!!] at current rates. If that rate holds, without accounting for increases of that rate as more PV manufacturing capacity comes online, it will replace all fossil energy globally (not just fossil electricity, all fossil energy use) in under twenty years when you consider the efficiency gains of not burning fuel for energy.
> Solar and wind are now expanding fast enough to meet all new electricity demand, a milestone reached in the first three quarters of 2025. Ember’s analysis published in November shows that these technologies are no longer just catching up; they are outpacing demand growth itself. Together, solar and wind supplied 17.6% of global electricity in the first three quarters of 2025, up from 15.2% over the same period last year, pushing the total share of low-carbon sources to 43%.
> For the first time across a sustained period, renewables, including solar, wind, hydro and smaller sources such as geothermal, generated more electricity than coal. At the heart of this shift is solar, whose growth was more than three times larger than any other source of electricity so far in 2025, confirming its role as the dominant force reshaping the global power system. Another analysis showed that the world is set to add 793 GW of renewable capacity in 2025, up 11% from the 717 GW added in 2024. At this pace, only a modest increase in annual additions is needed for the world to stay on track to triple global renewables by 2030.
If that's true, I don't think we reach 50% of current levels by 2100. That's my very non-scientific WAG. I'll be long dead by then. Europe, if they continued drilling in the North Sea and Groningen would have long since exhausted them - a great capital expenditure and investment to bring things back to the original subject of conversation.
What do you think? That would give me a good window into how realistic your view is.
I think where you're going wrong is perhaps not taking into account continued increases in per-capita energy usage worldwide. But of course that will happen, not just because of population growth, not just because of the rest of the world rising slowly towards Western standards of living, but continued technological progress which depends on energy (or at least it has been that way historically.)
Doomberg (the green chicken) correctly observes that when we add a new energy source to the mix, we don't tend to decrease our consumption of previous energy sources.
For example: global wood consumption for energy is at or near all-time high levels, with approximately 2 billion cubic meters (m³) of wood fuel consumed in 2023, up from 1.5 billion m³ in 1961. While the percentage of global energy provided by wood has plummeted from over 90% in the early 19th century to around 3-6% today, the total volume burned has increased, driven by population growth in developing nations and increasing bioenergy use in developed ones.
Those people, and the world in general, would be better off burning natural gas for heating and cooking, rather than wood.
But environmentalists in the west deny them that option because they don’t give a fuck about poor people, they can just freeze in the dark or choke on the fumes of whatever plant fibres / dung they can scavenge from the local environment.
I don’t know how else to frame it.
I spent, more like wasted, two decades of my live in the cult of environmentalism, and they literally just out and say it: some people are going to die in the transition away from fossil fuels, oh well.
That’s easy to say when it’s not you who’s going to freeze in the dark.
> Why did they ban combustion vehicles? Because they have no domestic fossil fuel supplies and the import cost was crushing them
Your closing argument is that some far away land with no nat gas / oil reserves of their own isn’t convincing anyone with nat gas / oil reserves of their own.
Europeans need inexpensive fuels to power their existing fleet or vehicles now.
Europe has no choice but to lean into low carbon generation and EVs now, their hand is forced by geopolitical energy events outside of their control. These options are objectively cheaper than attempting to develop new domestic fossil resources.
China will build every cheap EV Europe will buy if the EU cannot build them fast enough (citations on EU EV sales are in my comment you replied to), so buy them or experience economic pain and ongoing energy inflation from choosing to continue to burn fossil fuels for energy. These are straightforward choices to make. The clean energy path is the cheaper path, based on all available data as of this comment.
(from your profile, "They force us to use extremely expensive renewable energy to run our energy efficient extremely disposable appliances," so I'm unsure how effective facts and data will be in this discussion, but I am trying very hard to share the relevant facts as a shared foundation to discuss from)
I am 100% bullish on both solar energy and EVs, and I share your optimism around the technology.
But I think you're being too optimistic about what this means for global fossil fuel usage. Definitely over the next decade, but potentially over much longer periods than that.
I’ve been following you for 13 years in this site, and I really expect more intellectually honest comments from you.
You’re trying to tell us that developing new battery technology, new storage technology, deploying more wind / solar and replacing the entire European vehicle fleet, is cheaper than building new oil / gas infrastructure.
I’m not buying it.
Regarding the comment in my profile, I’ve done warranty repair work on home appliances. Some manufacturers have moved to assembly methods that render appliances uneconomical to repair, or impractical. Also, in Australia, electricity price increases have been double or triple that of general inflation.
The comment in my profile is an objective assessment of the facts, not an ideological screed.
> I’ve been following you for 13 years in this site, and I really expect more intellectually honest comments from you.
I believe the failure is on your part, not my part, as I am simply providing facts. Whether you agree with facts is beyond my control. They remain facts. You keep stating, inaccurately, that renewables and batteries are expensive, when they are the cheapest combined generation technology. This is widely proven, and again, I am sorry if for whatever reason you are ignoring that fact.
> Also, in Australia, electricity price increases have been double or triple that of general inflation.
The facts do not align with your assertion. I have provided citations below to assist you in updating your mental model on the price and carbon intensity trajectory of the Australian power markets.
> Power prices on Australia’s east coast are predicted to fall from July because of increased output from wind generation and batteries, and falling electricity contract prices, with potential savings up to $1,320 for some small businesses. In a draft decision on Thursday, the Australia Energy Regulator (AER) proposed a price reduction for customers on standing electricity plans – known as the “default market offer” – of between 1.3% to 10.1% for residential customers, and between 8.5% and 21.2% for small businesses, depending on the region. Savage said reduced wholesale prices were the “biggest driver” behind the draft decision for 2026-27. “We’ve had lots more renewables come into the market. We’ve had good wind, solar and battery performance.” The draft determination also introduces the “solar sharer” offer, an opt-in plan that includes three hours of free power in the middle of the day to take advantage of abundant solar energy. The energy minister, Chris Bowen, said the idea was designed to share the benefits of Australia’s solar success. “For households that can shift some of their usage into the free power period, this can mean real savings on bills, whether that is running the dishwasher, doing the washing, or heating hot water during the day.”
Solar is so cheap and plentiful (as there is not yet enough battery storage on the network to time shift this power), they plan to give it away for free for ~3 hours/day in parts of the Australian NEM system.
Australia's renewables boom delivers coveted power price payoff - https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/australias-renew... - February 10th, 2026 ("Australia's wholesale electricity prices fell to the lowest in four years in 2025, bucking the rising price trends seen elsewhere and validating claims that renewables-heavy power system overhauls can help lower consumer power costs.")
Further data can confirm this at https://openelectricity.org.au/ (which has both carbon intensity and price data for all Australian electrical grids except the Northern Territory)
I’m an Australian living in Australia connected to the eastern grid.
I have the invoices from my electricity bills to prove my assertion.
I used to pay 12 cents per kilowatt hour, now I pay 36 cents or more. That’s a 300% increase for electricity prices vs, if I recall correctly, 26% for general inflation over the same 25 year period.
And you’re trying to tell me I’m wrong.
Why?
I’ll believe a drop in electricity prices when I see it.
Renewables do not reduce the need for grid investment costs between generators and you, that revenue and capital would be required regardless if you are unable or unwilling to produce all of the electricity to meet your domestic consumption requirements from rooftop solar and on site battery storage.
Wholesale generation costs + distribution costs + taxes = your bill.
> It feels like this collective insanity will never end
They simply do not believe that the consequences will be as bad as the models predict. And a lot of trust and good will has been expended on social issues, for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose, or to promote childhood reassignment surgery, etc. As a strategic decision, we have taken our eye off the ball, climate change is actually an existential threat, bathroom choice never was. You can argue that we can do two things at once, but there is a cost for dividing our focus and effort; even if it didn't raise the hackles of those already less predisposed to worry about the environment.
> And a lot of trust and good will has been expended on social issues, for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose, or to promote childhood reassignment surgery, etc.
I think a lot of people miss this: each time you take up the good fight, you spend some trust/goodwill. If you're going to expend the public's goodwill, make sure that there is nothing more important to you than what you are expending it on, or expend less of it to save some trust and goodwill for this.
> for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose
Ugh, I'm going to regret commenting here, but it really seems like this obsession is almost entirely on the right wing. In the US, the centrist Dems have been banging the appeasement drum for my entire political life, and it's gotten us nowhere.
Like... the right isn't going to wake up and start caring about climate change if everyone just shuts up and lets them discriminate against the hate group of the moment. The bathroom thing is also such a bait and switch, same as sports. In my state, we removed protections for housing and employment discrimination against trans people because... one trans athlete existed?
The real question we need to answer is why the right is so obsessed with other peoples' genitals, to the point that they have to make up stories and generate AI videos to get mad at.
I for one am sick of people focusing on a tiny fraction of the population and making them a scapegoat for everything. You're absolutely right that climate change is a bigger issue - so why can't we focus on it?
We can't focus on it because the anti-reality reactionaries are using trans people as a distraction. It's all one big malignant tumor on society, not a collection of unrelated issues.
The reality is that the US is divided on gender issues. Full stop.
It is a distraction and a useful one for MAGA. Among the Democrats, we keep getting tripped up by it and nominate candidates who don't realize the political land mine that it is. I am for gender equality, for racial equality, for renewables, for nuclear energy. But please win the election by prioritizing talking about jobs, jobs, jobs, economic disopportunity, and naked corruption. After winning the election, then you can address gender issues along with the full slate of Democratic platform priorities.
Dems are supposed to be able to talk frankly about their beliefs without the left wing of the party destroying them. There shouldn't be political consequences from within the Dem coalition for saying "I don't think we should have trans people in professional women's sports".
Since the Dems can't talk about the policies, the right wing gets to take up all the attention on them.
Democrats were NOT talking about transgender issues. Conservatives were.
Democrats talking about jobs, economic disopportunity, and naked corruption gets no votes, because republican voters are not motivated by those. They are using those as talking point against democrats, but that is about it.
It's all about propaganda. Rightwing media is incredibly well funded and a big portion of that reason is because rich people have been using propaganda to boost their industries since almost forever.
Republicans in the late 60s were the party of the EPA. What changed? People like the Koch brothers dumped literal millions into rightwing outlets big and small to talk about how awesome it is to burn oil.
A similar thing happened with smoking. Rush Limbaugh, even as he had lung cancer, was talking about what a myth it was that smoking caused lung cancer almost right up until his death.
Whenever you find highly monied interests, you can find a right wing propagandist that will tell you black is white.
And the insidious thing is that they don't spend their entire broadcast talking about the glories of oil or smoking. No, the best ones just insert it in as little throw away lines while talking about feminazis, gay people, trans people, black people, mexicans, etc.
That's effectively how the propaganda works. Get people highly tuned up on an emotional topic and then just slip in here and there lies that you don't even think about.
As a kid, I listened to probably a thousand hours of rightwing talkshow hosts because of my parents. Once I started viewing things with a more critical mind it became beyond obvious what game they are playing. Unfortunately, not everyone picks up on this game.
The propaganda machine is powerful, precisely because the ultra-wealthy who fund it want the people to fight a culture war instead of a class war. The wealthy have been successfully astroturfing right-wing anti-democratic movements for decades, to the point that fascism is making a comeback. Climate-change denial was one of their earlier experiments, and anti-trans psyop is their most recent. The result is the same, creating false divisions among the masses who have more in common than they realize.
The world is burning before our eyes. It is unconscionable to use the rights and the bodies of the marginalized to put out the fire. What would be the point of making a better society if it requires leaving the most vulnerable behind? How would that even be a better society? We must be cognizant of who the real enemy is and never do the oppressor's work for them. Billionaires have class solidarity; for our planet’s survival, we must build solidarity as well. Fight the class war, and you fight climate change, transphobia, and all threats to life and liberty.
> the ultra-wealthy who fund it want the people to fight a culture war instead of a class war
We're capable of fighting more than one political war at a time. All evidence points to the donor class actually being vested in these culture war issues. Democrat donors prioritise Gaza and trans issues. MAGA donors prioritise Israel and Bible thumping. The Adelsons aren't donating to GOP candidates to distract anyome class issues, they're donating because they have non-economic policy preferences to push.
> the right isn't going to wake up and start caring about climate change if everyone just shuts up and lets them discriminate against the hate group of the moment
No. But a lot of people in the center will listen to academics again if they don't think they're being lectured on a new definition of bigotry every fifteen minutes.
Also, from what I can tell, the issue of trans rights caused issues in the centre when it lept to kids' sports. Even the bathrooms were mostly the edges of the political spectrum screaming at each other. But when it touched kids' sports, a lot of folks got off their couches, and that was–given the stakes–a sort of needless battle.
> No. But a lot of people in the center will listen to academics again if they don't think they're being lectured on a new definition of bigotry every fifteen minutes.
I get annoyed by some performative language games too, but I just don't see any evidence that your broader claim here is true.
> Also, from what I can tell, the issue of trans rights caused issues in the centre when it lept to kids' sports.
Most people are willing to acknowledge that the sports issue is a bit complicated, but it's also such an incredibly niche issue and so much lower stakes than everything else. People got off their couches for the sports thing because it's a "safe" environment in which to express hatred towards an out group. You can tell that it was never about sports by the actions taken by the loudest complainers on the issue (enshrining housing and employment discrimination, weird laws about forcing teachers to report violations of religious principles to parents, creepy nonsense like the bill to make lists of all trans people or mass cancel all of their drivers licenses etc.)
> climate change is a bigger issue - so why can't we focus on it?
What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction. To claim loud and proudly that transgender issues were not important when compared to climate change. To refocus the public on climate change and take the wind out of the fringe issue.
Instead, we took to the street for BLM, when it wasn't an important issue, when compared to climate change. You can't blame the right-wing for the number of people who filled the streets for BLM... during a pandemic where we were supposed to socially distance. It cost us doubly. And not one important left-wing voice stood up and said so.
> What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction
Here's the reality: very few people actually believe climate change is an existential problem. As you say, this is abundantly signalled by very few folks being willing to compromise on other beliefs to advance it.
Want to build infrastructure? Cut taxes? Suddenly, people can put their differences aside. Want to do anything on the climate? Everyone has a policy bogeyman to attach, whether it be union requirements and gender issues or immigration and religious tests.
There's a Guante lyric I really like about this topic that I think highlights how I feel about your argument:
"Those who turn hoses on water protеctors
Are those who cage "Stop Cop City" protеstors
And enforce the brutality of the border
Same ones who enforce bans on drag performers
Same ones who enforce bans
On crossing state lines for abortions
Some of those that work forces
Are the same that burn crosses
Are the same that burn everything
For the bosses"
I don't think we totally disagree, but I come down differently on where to point the blame.
> What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction.
I mean, that did happen.
> To claim loud and proudly that transgender issues were not important when compared to climate change.
That was said, along with housing prices/inflation/corruption.
> Instead, we took to the street for BLM, when it wasn't an important issue
Here's where you're really, really losing me. You're:
1. Pivoting to a totally different issue
2. Ignoring the role of the media in promoting the most controversial takes and presentation of both issues. It sucks to blame people for having values when the real problem is for-profit engagement-based media.
3. Ick - it really rubs me the wrong way to see people say "BLM wasn't an important issue when compared to climate change". That seems really easy to say if you're not under routine threat of state violence, but BLM was a reaction to a very real epidemic of state violence against black people. To those people, that kind of immediate threat IS as big a deal as climate change. If anything, criticize the branding of "defund the police" (which was so bad I half wonder if it was a psyop).
Moreover, part of my original point was that climate change isn't a separate thing - it's a problem because the same systems that use wedge issues to divide us all benefit from the unsustainable status-quo.
The realpolitik take on this seems so short sighted - it takes for granted that some progress can be made on climate change by ignoring our values, while also ignoring that alienating the affected groups makes it harder to change our society enough to do anything about climate change.
No, i am not. It's the exact same issue. If you honestly believe that climate change is an existential crisis, then ALL other issues are by definition less important. That might be difficult to accept, because it feels like saying other issues aren't important. But that's not what i'm saying at all.
What i'm saying is, if something is about to destroy the entire world, then every other concern is a distraction. What does it matter what bathrooms we use, or if the police are using violence too much, etc?
Our actions speak to people who don't believe that climate change is real. Every time we take to the streets for ANY OTHER ISSUE, we re-affirm their belief that climate change isn't something to worry about.
You are showing exactly why we have been less effective at convincing people than we could have been. Because even you are diminishing the importance of climate change. Why should "they" give up any freedom, or luxury, in the name of climate change, if we give ourselves permission to assemble in public during a pandemic for a BLM protest, that let's face it, accomplished little.
> No, i am not. It's the exact same issue. If you honestly believe that climate change is an existential crisis, then ALL other issues are by definition less important.
You're using a very superficial argument and ignoring several of my points. If your literal home is on fire, is putting it out or running to safety less important than climate change? If you need to change an entire economic system to solve climate change, can you cavalierly ignore inconvenient members of that system that might be needed for a sufficiently motivated coalition? If you're worried about distractions, how can you blame the victims instead of the people committing the distraction?
> What does it matter what bathrooms we use
It ISNT about the bathrooms - that's the propaganda framing that you seem to have uncritically accepted. It's about random people trying to live their lives, and being denied housing and employment because of who they are. It's about the fact that we're talking about these people ONLY because of the propaganda machine.
> if the police are using violence too much
Must be nice that you apparently don't face the sharp end of this. To avoid triggering you with the "P" word, I'd suggest that your life experience is not universal and you should consider trying to understand a little bit about other peoples' lives.
> Our actions speak to people who don't believe that climate change is real.
And ignoring our values isn't going to convince those people, and those people will still think we're a bunch of woke idiots because their media has captured their minds.
> Every time we take to the streets for ANY OTHER ISSUE, we re-affirm their belief that climate change isn't something to worry about.
[all sorts of citations needed for unsupported reasoning]
I didn't ignore any of your points. If your house is on fire, then put it out. But DON'T start a social movement that distracts from climate change.
Don't distract everyone by claiming that fire is the most important thing, worthy of gathering during a pandemic about.
This isn't about propaganda, well not in the sense you're using it. The argument, which you seem to disagree with, is the importance of focusing on
a single existential issue, and ignoring everything else. To actually prove to people that are doubters, that WE actually BELIEVE what we're saying.
That this really is the key thing to be worried about.
Everything else you're saying all amounts to the same argument, that climate change isn't important enough to take focus away from these other
important issues. We just fundamentally disagree. And I contend your attitude is exactly why we have had so much trouble convincing the
doubters that we're serious about climate change... when we're so willing to give just as much (if not more) energy to these other "distractions"
Your argument basically boils down to "Climate change is the most important thing, so action on any other issue is bad."
I don't see you responding anywhere to the general categories of criticisms I raised:
1. Climate change isn't one thing - it's a systemic problem in a system with lots of problems.
2. It seems ludicrous to assume that suddenly people will listen to us about climate change if we ignore other issues, ESPECIALLY because doing so would make us (or at least, me) moral hypocrites. We haven't even discussed direct causal issues, like political corruption. I honestly think no meaningful action is possible in the US on climate change until we have major reforms of our electoral and media systems - where does that put me in your oversimplified schema?
3. You're completely ignoring my argument about immediate needs. This is actually kind of funny:
> If your house is on fire, then put it out. But DON'T start a social movement that distracts from climate change.
The fire in this metaphor IS a social problem! Putting the fire out IS a social movement!!
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree, but either way - here's hoping we can do something meaningful about climate change. Have a good day.
Social action has a price, both in effort, attention, and goodwill; there is
no free lunch. If you are blind to the COST of social action you will fail
to realize how you are hurting our chances of fighting climate change.
If you honestly believe that it is an existential crisis, then you must accept
that NOTHING WILL EXIST if we fail to address climate change. So any social gain
we make fighting fires will be wiped out anyway if we fail to deal with
climate change. That you don't see this, and that you are willing for all
these other issues to share the stage with climate change, is a big problem.
You want to blame the media, and the right-wing, and perhaps other things for
the lack of progress, without fully comprehending your own part.
> In my state, we removed protections for housing and employment discrimination against trans people because... one trans athlete existed?
I think you're sort of proving the parent's point - when you're in an existential fight, is it really that important that you use the limited attention of the public to fight for the rights of a single person?
Trans rights ain't even that popular; most people are okay with "you think you're someone else? Well, fine, no skin off my nose". OTOH, the majority of people globally aren't okay with "It must be a crime if you don't treat me as a member of the opposite sex".
The identity politics, of all forms, sucked out much of the air from the room leaving precious little left for discussing things like climate change.
Whether we like it or not, human attention is a limited resource. If you're going to allow a few vocal nutters to direct the course of your discussion, then you can't very well complain, now can you?
I mean, that's what leaders are supposed to do - direct the discussion. When the opposition says "They want to let men into women's changing rooms", then you say "No, we don't support that at all".
I mean, voters find some things distasteful - you have to choose which of those things you are going to argue for, and which you are going to back down from.
Diluting your message so that you mention a little bit of everything is just dumb politics, because human attention is a limited resource!
> when you're in an existential fight, is it really that important that you use the limited attention of the public to fight for the rights of a single person?
Yes. That's what rights are. If we don't support them for one person, we don't have them for any person.
> "It must be a crime if you don't treat me as a member of the opposite sex".
This is a thing that basically does not exist. This is, again, more right-wing culture war bullshit that was cooked up in a meth lab. It's not real.
Can you get fired if you purposefully antagonize your boss at work? Yes. That's always been the case. Guess what, if I call my boss a jackass I'm probably getting shown the door, and that's not even a pronoun.
Can you get in trouble for discriminating based on gender and sexual orientation? Yes, and that's been the case for a while.
Nobody is getting into legal trouble because they don't personally believe trans women aren't "real" women, whatever "real" might mean to them. Nobody, not a soul. It's just a non-issue.
What's going on is there is a set of people who are basically just doing nothing who are under constant new and innovative threats from the right. And, when they say, "hey, don't do that", we somehow have the gall to point at them and yell "Culture war! Culture war!"
It's not that people's goodwill is being burnt on trans people. It's that the right has been playing to the populist messaging they have in order to continue their crusade.
While the economy is burning down, and the climate is worsening, and we are entering wars, they are trying to convince you the problem is some set of people who are doing nothing. And, that the solution is simple: beat down this set of people.
This includes immigrants, trans people, gay people. Of course, it's just not true. But humans are stupid. We're already pre-wired to be uneasy around people we don't understand who are different from us, especially visibly different. And, humans understand and have high confidence in simple solutions.
I mean, God, look at the border wall. Will that work? Did that work? Of course not. But it's such a simple, almost child-like understanding of the problem that people had very high confidence in it.
> What's going on is there is a set of people who are basically just doing nothing who are under constant new and innovative threats from the right
Trans people haven't done nothing, there are many reforms that have moved the trans issue a lot that were pushed by trans people, that is not nothing. The right isn't innovating anything by rolling back those, they are just being conservative which is in their name.
You could argue those reforms are good, but you can't argue it is the right that is changing things here, the right just undo change they don't do the changing on these issues.
And you can't fault the right for trying to win the election. You have to try to win the election as well, throwing it away by sticking to unpopular policies such as trans in sports is just ignorant. It isn't just the right that doesn't want trans in sports, it is a large majority of the entire population that doesn't want that.
> I think you're sort of proving the parent's point - when you're in an existential fight, is it really that important that you use the limited attention of the public to fight for the rights of a single person?
Literally conservatives did that. THEY made this focus of the debate. Democrats reaction do not even matter here. It is ultimately irrelevant, because people like you then obsess over imaginary democrats positions democratic party never really had.
It does indeed matter - they were the ones who were insufficiently convinced of their nominees messages. Not convinced enough to vote for them, at any rate.
The opposition does not matter when your "supporters" don't vote for you because the message they received is different from the message you think you transmitted.
Conservatives focus on the points that splinters the liberals, and vice versa the liberals try to focus on points that splinters the conservatives. Liberals are very split on the trans issue, so it makes sense to focus on that.
It was a bad move to put themselves in such a position that they can't defend when conservatives attacks it, that was moving too fast and therefore we ended up with a conservative government.
You can say it was conservative that is to blame since they used this vulnerability of the liberals position, but you can also say that it was the liberals fault for doing things that is unpopular with a large part of their supporters so they are now in a vulnerable spot.
> Conservatives focus on the points that splinters the liberals, and vice versa the liberals try to focus on points that splinters the conservatives. Liberals are very split on the trans issue, so it makes sense to focus on that.
Not true. Conservatives are creating this point, because it makes their base afraid and more radical. It has nothing to do with what liberals do or don't do. It is not about splintering liberals, it is about creating a weak enemy so you can beat him. Liberals have two choices: join trans hate and gain no votes or do not join trans hate.
> it was conservative that is to blame since they used this vulnerability
I think conservatives are to blame, because they picked someone weak to bully him and use as political cudgel. Also because they lie.
> liberals fault for doing things that is unpopular
Except that it did not happened. There was no comparable democratic pro-trans campaign. You are just doing that funny thing where if there is a single person opposed to conservative agenda, then conservatives are absolved of everything.
> we ended up with a conservative government.
Conservative movement becoming fascists personality cult is the issue. In an alternative universe, there could have been pro-democratic lawful conservative government. Conservative did not had to imply what it does today. And conservative movement turning into what it is now is fully fault of conservatives.
In the US, it was the left who decided to push gender identity into law and policy, with no regard to the adverse consequences of doing so. That the right decided to capitalize on this for political reasons is just them taking an opportunity that was basically handed to them on a plate.
Interestingly it's a bit different in the UK. Both the main left and right parties had been promoting gender identity based policy for years, and it was only though the dedicated efforts of feminists who pointed out all the problems with this, and particularly the negative impacts on women and girls, that it recently started to be reversed.
I don't think you and I live in the same information universe, since I disagree with literally every thing you've said here. Unfortunately I don't have the energy to productively try to disabuse you of (what I believe are) delusions, misinformation and ignorance, so... have a nice day I guess.
Perhaps we have received different information on this topic. I am curious why you disagree though, as I consider my perspective to based in verifiable fact.
For example, in the UK, it was Theresa May's right-wing Conservative government who planned to reform the law to make it easier, and with fewer medical requirements, for people to acquire a Gender Recognition Certificate. They had a public consultation too. This move was supported by the left-wing Labour Party.
And in recent years, legal action and advocacy by feminist groups has been a highly significant factor in policy changes around this area, most notably For Women Scotland who took their legal challenge all the way to the UK's Supreme Court, winning the case with a statutory reinterpretation of the Equality Act.
The attention to those fringe issues is brought by those conservatives and lobbyists etc who explicitly want to distract and divide attention from climate change and renewables.
It's strongly my opinion that there are far fewer people championing 'wokeness' than there are 'getting outraged by it's pervasiveness'. Mainly for the fact that all media like to seize upon controversy, thus turning minor fringe issues into multiple days in a row of front page headline items.
Blech. I've done the same thing...
Address climate change, accelerate the shift towards renewables. It's something that actually fucking matters!
> It's strongly my opinion that there are far fewer people championing 'wokeness' than there are 'getting outraged by it's pervasiveness'. Mainly for the fact that all media like to seize upon controversy, thus turning minor fringe issues into multiple days in a row of front page headline items.
You fight this by keeping your own ranks in check. The right condemns nazis and racists, so you wont find any open racists and nazis in their ranks. The left doesn't do the same, so they leave themselves open to attacks based on having bad apples in their ranks.
You could argue the right is still worse, but you don't decide that the voters decide, so you have to clean up the ranks until the voters are happy with what you present, otherwise you leave yourself open to attack like this.
IMO, "wokeness" is usually a reaction to the reactionary.
Being transgender wasn't some sort of political football 10 years ago even though 10 years ago basically everything that was happening WRT trans individuals that made the pearl clutchers clutch pearls was happening then and earlier.
The only reason "the left" started caring about trans individuals is because right wing reactionaries decided that it was the source of all the ills of the world. It was a pretty natural "no it's not, you guys are being insane". Especially because as a result to the right losing it's mind over trans individuals, we are seeing all sorts of insane over reactions in the law (In idaho, they are passing a law with a 5 year prison sentence for a trans individual taking a shit in a public bathroom).
This is basically how the cycle goes. The right targets a minority, the left defends the minority, the media capitalizes on the "both sides" of it all at the exclusion of talking about things like taxing rich people, funding public services, or addressing climate change.
The only time I've seen the reverse was BLM, but it's pretty much the same outcome.
Dismissing all of this as some sort of right-wing moral panic avoids engaging with legitimate feminist objections.
It's not "insane" to question whether males should be allowed to access female-only spaces, or to resist the erosion of sex categories in law. Many women on the left have done exactly that, and have been vilified and harassed for it.
Kamala Harris started out with a surge of popularity. Talking about corporate price gouging and selecting Tim Walz as her running mate who had clear populist messaging.
Then the strategists who think like you got in her ear. Told her to stop attacking corporations to protect donations. Had her campaign with Cheney and talk about shooting home invaders. Then of course she refused to take a strong stand on the genocide in Gaza.
Her momentum faded and she lost. In the aftermath some braindead analysts tried to blame words like Latinx and transgender rights.
She didn't campaign on that shit. She campaigned as Republican lite and it fucked her.
The fascists aren't going to rewards you with good environmental policy just because you throw trans people under the bus. They'll just demand another sacrifice. Meanwhile gender affirming surgery on minors is so fleetingly rare that it basically only exists in right wing propaganda and here you are repeating it like it's a valid concern.
The funny thing is I don't think Kamala needed to be woke to win. She just needed to adopt policies the base liked.
Had she not campaigned towards conservative voters, I think she could have won. Really strong campaign positions like medicare for all or taxing the rich have pretty broad appeal. Heck, she even could have campaigned on abortion access and rights and that would have been pretty decent. She didn't need to touch or address immigration. And her "no tax on tips, me too" thing was just embarrassing.
Gaza was a major issue, and a major misstep of hers was to say that none of her policies would be different from Biden's. Even if that were true, she had a whole lot of popular policies and positions from Biden's cabinet she could have ran on (like breaking up monopolies).
She ditched all of that to run like you said and it absolutely crushed the giant boost she got from Biden stepping down and Walz calling Vance a weirdo.
> the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose, or to promote childhood reassignment surgery, etc.
This is entirely made up right wing hysteria. Complain to them for beating that drum constantly, because the more people hate the more they vote for them.
A couple of years ago the last of the exploration rigs in Norway left Norwegian waters. Because nothing that could be drilled (and hasn't already) can compete on price with solar etc.
Lots of people think someone should do this or that. They don't invest their own money though, they just think someone else should do, etc.
I notice that all the recent finds on sodir.no are close to existing fields, like 5km, or even in existing fields. My friend who told me this works in strange places, far from existing infrastructure. I assume there are different kinds of equipment, and he was talking about his kind, and I understood it to be more general.
If it's anything like the situation in the UK's part of the North Sea then it'll be development of new wells in existing fields rather than entirely new exploration.
The majors have effectively abandoned new drilling, leaving a bunch of smaller or independent players - but even they are mostly doing limited appraisal & development operations rather than exploration in the traditional sense.
If the Iran situation drags on for more than a year then there'll likely be a temporary increase in activity, but the declining trend will almost certainly continue in the longer term even without further regulatory intervention.
With respect to Groningen:
1. zero deaths reported ever
2. quakes in Groningen maxed out at 3.6 which is considered light. By comparison NL's worst earthquake wasn't in Groningen (North) but in the south of the country unrelated to the gas, a scale of 6. Again no people died.
3. the 450 billion m3 of gas left is worth 170 billion last month ('normal'), 345 billion at today's prices, and 1.6 trillion at 2022 peak prices.
4. Field used to supply 10% of EU gas, this shifted EU/Worldwide demand to Russian gas, helping them fund the cold-war against the EU and hot-war against EU's ally Ukraine.
Governments routinely put a price on a human life. The Dutch government puts a price of about 3-4m on a human life. i.e. if a policy measure costs 500m and is estimated to save 100 lives, it's deemed financially irresponsible because the 5m cost per life is more than the value set by the government. Whereas if a measure costs 100m (e.g. implementing an anti drunk-driving program) and it is estimated to save 500 lives, it's financially OK'd because the cost of 200k to prevent a death is less than the value of a life.
The estimates for the Groningen gas field are completely off. Even if you take another €50 billion out of the ground, experts don't expect an earthquake to kill any people. While on the contrary, if you don't, numerous people will die from alternatives (dirty coal and in russian war).
Should be move as fast as possible to renewables? Yes. But green advocates severely overestimate how fast we can do that. We have broken renewable records for 10 years in a row, yet we use about 80% of the fossil energy that we used 35 years ago. We didn't replace Groningen with renewables, we replaced it with Norwegian gas and US LNG imports, and Russia picked up the slack elsewhere because we dropped Dutch supply. So yes in the long-term renewables will make Groningen unnecessary, in the short-term we continue to use gas and keeping Groningen open longer seems to be supported by an objective analysis. Of course politics aren't just objective, they're emotional, which is why Groningen was closed, not because it was the best idea.
Yes, this is correct, Europe energy policy is catastrophically behind and needs to pursue all paths simultaneously, because the future is very murky, Europe needs a LOT of power, and it's not clear which will work best:
- Continue building out solar + battery storage
- Resume drilling in domestic accessible offshore locations safe from trade disruptions
- Recommission and build new nuclear plants
- Build LNG import terminals to eliminate dependence on Russian gas
> we need to resume drilling in the North Sea and Groningen
Well, there's also the simple reality that the US doesn't actually need fossil fuels from the Middle East or Russia in the same way Europe does. It affects prices here, obviously, and an increase in energy prices can do severe damage to the economy, but it's not a potentially existential crisis in the same way.
Funny part about oil is that it’s in everything. US is energy independent, but its supply chain is not. AI chips, for example, which prop up the entire economy need oil for the various materials needed to produce it.
The other funny part about oil is that it has an inelastic demand. A 20% reduction in global supply doesn’t mean a 20% increase in prices. It means increase in prices until 20% demand collapses (which could theoretically mean orders of magnitude of increase in pricing). Which means expensive fertilizers, medicines and pretty every other bare necessity.
With these two facts, pretty much every country needs the oil from the Middle East.
The Russian threat in the short term is very real and this is making Russia stronger. And the economic threat to Europe in the super short term is bigger then the one to America ... and will help internal fascist movements that are very much already empowered there (and sponsored and supported by BOTH Russia and America despite being very much homegrown).
"As someone who's been pushing for renewables for quite a while now it's dismaying that it's taken a war to accelerate this push, but I'm glad to see that it's happening at least."
It takes tremendous hardship and a lot of time to push people to renewables. Give them their cheap oil back and they are hooked on the needle again in no time. Historically we've been there, multiple times.
Sorry for the cynicism. I too hope it is finally happening at least, and maybe it is at last.
Resilience against geopolitical disruption has always been a nice characteristic of renewables (of course, centralizing the production in China is a mistake from that point of view, if for no other reason than the general danger of centralization). It is unfortunate though, if we needed an actual event to see this advantage.
Well, but in case you have already infra & ecosystem, you could then affort maybe to produce a little bit mor expensive in your own country, if supply from china will be under threat like oil today?
I would rather have solar everywhere and the risk depending on china (and the risk of producing something over market price) than the current ongoing forever riskof fossil dependency, because solar manufacturing you could resolve in theory in every country (at some scale), while fossil production is limited to a handful with no chance for anyone else to do it?
> renewables do have the advantage that once you have the infrastructure in place it keeps working without continuously importing fuel
There are issues if the infrastructure is network accessible and is updatable. The consumer end of it (e.g. home solar) is often dependent on apps etc. and is very vulnerable. I hope (probably optimistically) that critical systems are air gapped.
Its always been obvious to me that we should have a variety or energy sources for security and its complacent to think otherwise. Over-reliance on an unstable region makes it all the worse.
Germany is very slowly starting to understand, exiting nuclear power and installing a lot of intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar power, does not make your country independent of fossil fuels.
China builds a lot of renewables, but they don't build them to replace fossil fuels, they build them in addition to fossil fuels. We should absolutely not follow this way.
But even if it didn't, not only grid-scale but also large-residential-scale batteries+PV is cheaper in Germany than industrially priced nuclear, and even "small" batteries+PV are cheaper than residential electricity: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...
Yes, Germany has plenty of coal reserves. Germany has about as much subbituminous coal & lignite reserves as U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_reserves
(But neither should Germany, U.S., China, India or any other country burn fossil fuels if possible).
The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) are pure generation costs, you take total cost of generation (building power plant, operating costs, fuel, decommissioning) over expected life time and divide it total produced energy produced over expected life time. You don't take into account electric network as physical and economical system. For example you disregard transmission, demand for electricity, costs of stabilization of the energy grid, costs of backup - dunkelflaute.
I don't care, I was talking about power stations. Look at charts linked in previous comment.
> For example you disregard transmission, demand for electricity, costs of stabilization of the energy grid, costs of backup - dunkelflaute.
I literally said the word "dunkelflaute" on the first line; and I have absolutely accounted for that, that's why I said what I said about batteries, and why even with those renewables are cheaper.
Transmission and demand are approximately identical for all power sources, modulo only where the specific power lines go. Well, that and that in principle one can be off-grid for PV+batteries at a reasonable cost (especially for new builds given how much a grid connection costs in the first place), which is itself rather novel, but IMO will only be worth accounting for when almost all vehicles are EVs and/or literally all new houses come with PV and it's no longer optional (last I checked this was not yet the case).
If you want to go off-grid I would recommend in addition to PV+batteries also a passive house. In the long-term costs nothing beats good thermal insulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
The grid connection cost are so high because the high electric system costs, which are distributed to the market participants using grid connection cost: the transmission costs (upgrade costs of electric lines - digging earth is surprisingly costly, overhead power lines are cheaper but they are not for free, upgrade costs of transformers), costs of backup - Germany plans to build new gas power plants, which will have a very low utilization.
It’s just pulling forward future gains while shrinking the time horizon, if the world speeds the transition to renewables and electrification from this. Short term gain for faster irrelevance.
Oil to $200/barrel please, as long as possible, same with LNG.
Certainly, but you can solve for that with windfall taxes or nationalizing the oil industry in your jurisdiction, if there is the will. Based on all available evidence, the will does not exist.
Broadly speaking, the overall system dependent on energy must adapt or die. The capital exists to decarbonize rapidly. How hard the arm must be twisted is the natural experiment to observe. In the meantime, all critical fossil assets are legitimate targets in the operating environment.
These are all choices. If you are unhappy with the outcomes of choices you have the authority to make, make better choices.
Would you have made it anyway? Can we stop you? Does it cause a negative externality that will be more rapidly diminished if you pull forward this gain? Consider it a premium paid by fossil fuel consumers to encourage a more rapid transition from fossil fuels by pushing pain into the energy market for the next half decade.
Congrats to those who won the lotto, enjoy your luck.
It will take longer than the duration of the war to realistically transition to renewables in any quantity that truly matters.
So the oil companies are happy because this temporarily brought forward future demand and thus profit, as well as expend a bunch of money/resources from competitors of oil which predicates a high price per barrel to make financial sense. If/when oil prices drop back down, these renewable investments might not compete.
To truly transition over will mean doing it with the world kicking and screaming imho. It cannot be made smooth.
But why does US need any of that? It's a massive exporter of fossil fuels and will be much richer as a result (but yes just as every other way of getting richer, it will also increase inequality).
The argument that high oil prices are good for America is one of the most ridiculous ideas being pushed right now. Yes, on a trade deficit front, it slightly reduces the net amount of money leaving. But we are also the world’s largest consumer of oil, and it literally powers every part of our economy.
Saying that America is better off with high gas prices is like saying Americans will eat more beef if the price of beef doubles because we make lots of beef. Cattle ranchers will be better off; everyone else eats more potatoes.
Think of it this way: less trade deficit means more imports that come through without causing extra damage. It means more cheap products of all kinds for everyone.
And yes this is exactly how petrostates work. I wonder why is it surprising. Sure their population also pays higher prices for gas at the pump when the oil goes up, but they massively win in every other way.
It's simply a long, embedded stereotype of "high oil price = bad" because of traumatic experience of 1973 and 1979. It's different today. The higher the oil price, the better it is for America.
Also again, US gas prices are by far the cheapest among every halfway developed countries. Everyone else will suffer more. So relatively again, US wins even here.
It causes massive inflation of goods and food prices, as farming and supply chains are heavily dependent on fuel prices. How is runaway inflation “massively winning in every other way” for regular americans?
The price of oil isn't just about the "cost of gas at the pump". It's about how much it costs to transport anything. There aren't many products that don't need to be transported or that don't depend at least partially on something that does.
So yeah, when the price of oil goes up, oil companies make more money, and prices go up for pretty much everyone.
The difference between the US and a petrostate is that the US is rich because we use gas, not because we make gas. Put differently, petrostate economies rely upon on oil revenues; we rely on the actual product at every stage in our economy.
There is a segment of our economy that does benefit from oil revenues, but the vast majority of our economic output involves oil consumption.
"Oils ain't Oils" - old motor oil company slogan from the 1980s.
What the US exports isn't "car ready" - most primary oil sources are heavily biased one way or the other (heavy, sweet, light, etc) and the useful end product is blended.
It's not straightforward for the US to get high on it's own supply and even what it delivers to others is less useful to thse others when other non-US sources aren't readily available to blend in.
Also ... using sequestered carbon has been increasing the insulation factor of our common atmosphere, left unchecked (ie. stopping the use of fossil fuels) is a major problem for the coming century.
But US mostly wins from global warming relatively, right? I mean, it's going to suffer less than others (except EU), for geographical reasons, thus winning. I don't think global warming is a concern for US at all (some places sure, Florida will be royally fucked, but not most places).
Everyone is suffering sure, but what matters is relative degree of it. Side that suffers less, wins against others and that's the only thing that matters.
And no, in China global warming means worsening desertification, in Russia it means melting permafrost that covers 60% of the country, same in Canada. Europe and the US are uniquely positioned to suffer the least from it and many industries will win outright. For example, there will be year-round tourist season within continental EU: all summer on the Baltics and the North Sea and all winter in the Mediterranean; winemaking in Spain and southern France will suffer badly and in some places may become commercially non-viable, but will expand to great lot more territory in northern Germany, low countries, Poland, UK, thus enabling a lot richer wines due to great variety of soils.
> This seems like soft trolling. Global warming is canonically the opposite of a zero sum game. Everyone is losing.
No not everyone loses, people in colder climates win a lot from global warming, especially Russia and Canada. There is so much land there that is currently not viable due to being too cold that will open up from global warming.
Don't forget all the states in the middle that are experiencing the worst drought in a millenium, with snowpack and river flows at record lows, all while each state is adding more people (and thus more water demand), and interstate river compacts expire, and years-long negotiations on a renewal have been fruitless.
In the short to medium term, sure . . . again, left unchecked gets bad for every human when tipping points are passed.
Eg: When surface ice gets very low the trapped heat will go more torward heating water than melting ice.
That's very double plus bad (ask a high school physics teacher about the energy used to melt, say, a kilogram of ice .. then ask them by how many degrees C does that same energy raise the temp. of water).
Being a net exporter of a global commodity is only relevant in an extremely acute crisis (e.g. WWIII).
Plus one of the reasons why we export so much oil is because it's cheaper to import oil to a refinery in New Jersey from Saudi Arabia than to get it there from Texas due to some very stupid US laws.
The Jones Act requires that all goods transported by water between US ports be carried on ships that were built in the US, fly the US flag, and crewed by US citizens. That effectively makes it impossible to ship oil between US states at scale without a direct pipeline.
Though to be clear I believe we would still be a net exporter without the Jones Act, it's just one of those weird things about the US oil industry.
Unfortunately much of China’s perverse tactics (they’ve done this in a wide array of industries) is to steal patented tech and trade secrets from companies outside China, subsidize the manufacturing and development etc, then sell their product at an artificially low price which kills the original company and good faith competitors as they cannot compete with the artificially lower prices.
Then once the dust settles they’re the only company which can handle large order sizes required for supply chains to build downstream products, and the world becomes further reliant on them.
Security concerns and national defense aside, a prime example pre-ban was Huawei layer 1 infrastructure products which far exceeded feature density, and cost effectiveness than competitors due to the subsidies. They’ve done similar tactics with solar panels.
This doesn’t imply China or their state sponsored companies never create novel tech, but there’s a hugely perverse system whose purpose is to illegally undercut competition overseas with no real recourse from the victim countries outside of total company bans. And even then, people find a way around the bans and the damage is already done to the original companies.
The reason china was able to do this is because of the free trade movement that started with Reagan to undercut US unions. US companies outsourced all the manufacturing as much as possible and china capitalized on the market opportunity.
Am I supposed to be mad that jobs shipped to china who steals a tech weren't shipped to Vietnam who hasn't stolen tech?
China is hardly the only country that has used internal policies and loose intellectual copyrights to get ahead (Famously, the US did the same thing in the late 1800s, stealing factory designs from england). And part of the reason US companies still do business with them is because they are cheaper.
Ideas are cheap and execution is what matters. Any attempt to "own" an idea is an exercise in futility and a sign that you probably suck at execution. Sorry, but we should be encouraging competition and reducing barriers, not sitting here crying that the Chinese are running laps around us because of intellectual property "theft"
Germany ripped off British engineering texts because they had no copyright laws there.
America got started taking what was started elsewhere, the same can be said for any country except for Scotland.
I think those lovely Chinese people would laugh at your sinophobic 'thinking'. Maybe stay off the corporate media and do your own research.
Huawei are an amazing company, all of their kit is highly innovative, but too good for you and your slave masters. Hence the lies. In fact, if you want a computer that isn't 'NSA Inside', go with Huawei. You won't look back, although they won't sell you a PC with Nvidia in it or a phone with Google in it because of your government.
Solar panels? Germany did the work on that, China bought the IP and did the production engineering. All is legit.
Besides, that screen you are looking at, was that made in America? Nah, it is going to be China, outside chance, Korea.
I am an English person exiled in Scotland, and you would be amazed at the industrial heritage here. Scotland was once used by England to outsource manufacturing, much like how China fills that role now. Shipbuilding got too expensive in England, so the folks on the Clyde provided a better deal. It was how globalisation got started.
I have heard it said that Scottish people invented 'everything', and, after a tour of the museum full of ships, trains, trams, bicycles, cars and much else, I am not going to object to the wild claim, particularly since I am outnumbered up here. Scotland is a very friendly place, but I tell people I am from this little country that can be found south of the border, asking them not to judge me!
The profit marginsof these industries are ridiculously high, to the point that if you’re willing, you can manufacture many useful, high‑quality products.
only when China could build them, there are real "free" market
Yeah, I live in Spain and probably once again we'll have restrictions on AC in the summer just like at the start of the Ukraine war. Hopefully, we can avoid actual blackouts.
The bizarre thing is that our government still wants to close down the remaining nuclear power plants. One of the issues with our proportional electoral system is that smaller, more extreme parties can become kingmakers and in our current situation the centre-left governing party relies on the support of the far-left party to stay in power, and those guys are rabidly anti-nuclear power.
But this should be a clear signal that we need renewable power and nuclear power and we need to speed up the adoption of electric vehicles. Ending the tariffs with China that stop us benefiting from their affordable PV panels and electric cars would be a good step towards this.
Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear. In the case of Spain, it is cheaper to build more energy lines with Morocco and battery storage than to use nuclear. Spain already has some of the cheapest energy in Europe thanks to renewables.
In the case of Germany, nuclear makes sense, but it is not clear where you would buy fuel for it, It might still be a supply chain risk since Russia and Kazakhstan are the main players there.
It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments. Without them, closing power plants (of any kind) is, IMO, nonsensical.
Ironically, Spain has plenty of Uranium, but there is an environmental law that doesn't allow its mining.
> It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments.
The outage in spain had multiple complex causes.
While the grid had a rather routine instability/oscillation on-going during time of the incident, the actual point-of-no-return was completely non-technical: Prices crossed into the negatives, which caused generation to drop by hundreds of megawatts and load to increase likewise within a minute (!) because the price acted as a non-technical synchronized drop-off signal for the grid.
In grids where the price action is not forwarded directly to the generators and consumers there would be no incentive to suddenly drop off decentralized generation. So for example in Germany a black-out would not happen like this.
Unfortunately, to have an informed opinion, you pretty much have to read all these pages, because the situation is just so complex. Otherwise, you just fall for agenda pushing from all sides.
That being said, I was apparently also under the impression of outdated or just plain wrong information.
While the report I listed mentions the sudden loss of decentralized generation as starting point of the blackout, and also specifically mentions small-scale rooftop PV, it says that the cause for that sudden synchronized drop-off is actually unknown.
You can't get an "informed opinion" by reading crap like that report.
The Spanish systems have systematic design failures for stability and electricity market design. Working out the political failures that led to the design failures is much harder.
Only those working closely in that profession have any knowledge of the underlying causes.
Most everyone else (including this comment) is different levels of ignorance and cluelessness.
Edit E.g. Crap quote from the report "but no significant oscillations with
amplitudes above 20 mHz". The rest of it is about that level from what I could tell.
> Only those working closely in that profession have any knowledge of the underlying causes.
This report is literally from the ENTSO-E which is the main regulatory body for the grid in Europe.
> Crap quote from the report "but no significant oscillations with amplitudes above 20 mHz".
What is the "crap" about that?
An amplitude can still be measured in Hz, if you are looking at oscillating frequency deviations, if that is what you mean.
Very timely, the final report has been released today.
I hadn't read the document you referenced, and I admit don't have the prior knowledge, nor the time, to fully understand all the implications of what it says. My opinion is then the result of reading and listening a variety of experts and news sources, and it will have some biases, for sure.
Still, I have skimmed the final report to see if there was something that I could understand from first hand (and to support my original point, not gonna lie), and I found this:
_The increasing penetration of variable renewable and
distributed generation, further market integration,
broader electrification, and evolving environmental
and geopolitical risks place the European electricity
system under increasingly challenging operational
conditions, requiring higher levels of resilience._
Do you really think that my original point (as uniformed as it might be), namely, that the levels renewable energy currently present in the spanish grid require significative investments, was wrong?
Yes, I think it's wrong, or at least way over-exaggerated.
You can run a grid to supply approximately 80% renewables (long-term average) without significant technical changes.
Only if you want to get the last 20% to renewables, you get technical challenges, e.g. related to synchronization and load-matching. But that is also not unsolvable problems, e.g. instead of relying on the inertia of steam turbines you can "just" build specific-purpose fly-wheels to do the same thing. It's just less elegant.
Source: Volker Quaschning "Understanding Renewable Energy Systems", too lazy right now to look up the exact page.
This is also consistent with the section they quoted.
Generally, the load matching in grids is done by the system itself.
If you add more wind and solar, which depends on the weather and location, you have to more large-scale intervention, e.g. allow generation re-dispatch. But that doesn't immediately imply that this is a dangerous process.
I have not read the report yet, but in another thread someone gave a very plausible explanation of what happened.
The high levels of renewable energy happened to contribute to this incident, but not because of something inherent in renewable energy. All renewable energy sources are connected to the grid through inverters, and in Spain most of these inverters do not use an adequate control policy, i.e. they do not compensate the phase fluctuations of the grid, like the synchronous electromechanical generators do (i.e. they do not generate an appropriate amount of reactive power for compensation).
Technically it is easy to implement such control policies in all solid-state inverters, but it was not done in Spain because there were no incentives, i.e. there were no regulations specifying how the inverters connected to the grid should behave, otherwise than disconnecting when the frequency went outside a permissible range.
Yes, that is plausible indeed, but the problem is that there are many explanations which are plausible, but there doesn't seem to be a smoking gun.
Strange about that explanation for example is that the time correlation is backwards.
First the solar generation started to drop out and only then central generator stations tripped. Also the on-going frequency oscillations had already stabilized. If it was related to frequency issues, the solar inverters would either have shut down 15 minutes earlier (while the frequency oscillations were at the peak) OR 1-2 minutes later (when power stations tripped and frequency would have dipped)
But doesn't nuclear power present a complication when designing a power grid for renewable energy? It is basically very expensive caseload energy that needs permanent demand, when the entire proposition of a renewable-focused grid is that you manage a non-certain production with dynamic demand (via batteries and price-sensitive usage).
For power plants, this is glacial. A power grid has to balanced perfectly on a sub-second level. Also, you can only do this down to about 50% of rated capacity. Below that you have to switch it off completely.
If you combine this with renewable generation, it all falls apart. A cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop generation much faster than nuclear plants will ever be able to follow (by increasing generation). So if you want to have a substantial share of renewable generation (which, remember, is the cheap stuff), you can't have more than a token nuclear capacity, because you need to invest the money you might want to spend on nuclear on battery and hydro storage.
The other aspect is the economics of nuclear itself. Nuclear power plants are the most capital intensive generation capacity you can build. Even when driving them at the maximum of their rated capacity, the have a levelized cost of electricity several times that of PV and Wind per kwh. Requiring routine load following for nuclear would basically guarantee that no one ever builds a nuclear reactor again.
There are reasons to build new nuclear, but it's not cheap/reliable power generation. You build it to have access to a nuclear industrial base, as well as the research and professional community to run a military nuclear program. Or you actually succeed in creating a Small Modular Reactor, which might be suitable for niche applications (i.e. power isolated communities in extreme remote locations). Or you are simply fascinated by the technology and want to invest a ton of money on the off chance that it will produce some unforeseen technological breakthrough (though arguably you'd do better with investing in nuclear fusion from my limited understanding of the research).
> If you combine this with renewable generation, it all falls apart
Rubbish. Only true if the renewable generation is poorly integrated. Solar plus batteries can provide synthetic inertia if the incentives/regulations are correctly designed.
Australia has been adding oodles of solar, and they have been doing it surprisingly well.
> Solar plus batteries can provide synthetic inertia if the incentives/regulations are correctly designed.
Yes, but why build nuclear at all, if you are already building PV + batteries? Nuclear is much more expensive than that combination. And if you add nuclear capacity on a level that actually matters (i.e. 30%+ of peak load), you run into real integration problems.
As I've written elsewhere, a toke nuclear program can make sense if you want to keep the industrial base, institutional knowledge and expertise around, i.e. to guarantee independent access to nuclear weapons. But it is ludicrous to make nuclear a cornerstone of your energy policy. Not even China is expanding its share of nuclear in total energy generation. They keep it around as a strategic asset, but a subsidized one.
For countries like Denmark and Spain I'd be pulling my hair out if my government would start throwing money into the money pit that is nuclear power (and it is inevitably is government money, because no nuclear power plant has ever been built without government subsidies and/or price guarantees).
> Nuclear can load follow, within limitations
Yes, but it makes zero economic sense to do so. Nuclear is multiple times more expensive per kwh than PV + batteries, even if you run it at max capacity continuously. If you require nuclear to load follow on a regular basis, not a single reactor will ever be built again.
It's more cost efficient to keep them running all the time since most of the cost of nuclear is building the power plant, but power output can be adjusted if needed.
In another thread that comments the report it was said that most inverters used in Spain for the renewable energy sources do not implement a control policy to generate an adequate reactive power to compensate the phase fluctuations of the grid, like a synchronous electromechanical generator would do. The inverters only disconnected from the grid when the frequency went outside the permitted range.
Ensuring that the inverters produce compensating reactive power would have been easy to do, but it was not done simply because there were no regulations that requested this. Obviously, as a consequence of the report, this is likely to change.
Yeah, been trivial forever. In the US it became a requirement for new all utility scale non-synchronous generators a decade ago. And then a bunch of statewide rules for rooftop solar as well.
Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today.
It is NOT cheap, it is cheap for sellers, because they account on the basis of a MWh being equally useful all the time. It isn't. There are TWh-scale shortfalls in winter because, and a medieval peasant understood this, a shortage of ambient energy is what winter is, and it's worth paying energy penny you have to avoid its worst effects.
Business is not better. I've worked in the chemicals industry, and conferences in Europe have been like a wake for the last decade. I've overseen large orders go to China because, I could not give a shit how much it cost, the European green alternative - for delivery within Europe - could not guarantee timeframes, due to reliance on renewables. The Chinese shipped product could. That is your "cheap".
You can buy uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, Mali, Canada, US, Australia, or the sea if you really want to, all of those have large reserves, and store multiple years' worth more or less by accident, modern industrial processes actually struggle to make sense at the low volumes nuclear requires. Bringing that up as a problem is just not honest.
Can you please source and explain your claims? They don't match my understanding.
For example:
> Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today.
Do you mean cost per country (not levelized?)? Even then, UK energy is not the most expensive.
They can't (because LCoE is a per-project or per-technology measure, not a grid-wide measure, for a start).
UK energy is expensive because we have gas-linked wholesale pricing. That's nothing to do with the true cost of renewables. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're being disingenuous.
(Gas-linked pricing was implemented for sensible reasons, but I don't see how it continues to be tenable today).
>Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear.
With the storage for shitty winter weeks? What's the source on that one?
Mind you I love solar since i'd like to go relatively off grid one day but i've heard too much bullshit around this.
>but it is not clear where you would buy fuel for it, It might still be a supply chain risk since Russia and Kazakhstan are the main players there.
There's a lot of locations from my understanding and a lot more that don't produce anything simply because Russia and Kazakhstan and such don't make it worthwile.
It's a tiny share of the cost of production in the end.
Kazakhstan does uranium mining but doesn't do uranium enrichment. Other big uranium mining countries, which don't do uranium enrichment, are: Namibia, Canada, Australia, Uzbekistan.
"The following countries are known to operate enrichment facilities: Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States."
> Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear. In the case of Spain, it is cheaper to build more energy lines with Morocco and battery storage than to use nuclear.
But keeping nuclear open is an entirely different thing than building out more nuclear. OP was talking about the former, you about the latter.
Yeah, but that reminds me of Nick Clegg in the UK in 2010 saying:
> By the most optimistic scenarios... there's no way they are going to have new nuclear come on stream until 2021, 2022. So it's just not even an answer
Well, now we are in 2026, and we still have the same problem.
The UK has had complete political unity on building new nuclear power since 2006. That tells you the timelines.
For Hinkley Point C with the latest estimate being the first reactor online (not commercially operational) in 2030 that gives a "planning to operation" time of 24 years.
For Sizewell C EDF are refusing to take on any semblence of a fixed price contract and they are instead going with a guaranteed profit pay as you go model. Where ratepayers handout enormous sums today to hopefully get something in return in the 2040s.
The Americans can give Germany all the fuel they’d ever need. If you go solar, you are trading one supply chain dependency for another. France’s strategy is, once again, completely and totally vindicated.
> The bizarre thing is that our government still wants to close down the remaining nuclear power plants.
That is very weird, even Germany stated recently that closing down their Nuclear Plants was a big mistake.
For a very long time, I have always said France is smarter than what people give them credit for. Spain should take a peek over the mountains at France to see what a sane energy policy looks like.
Even France shut down the Superphénix. It was just built too! A waste of ten billion dollars because the government gave in to these extremist environmental groups. One of them even fired an RPG at it while it was being built.
Strange how there are so many progressive radical groups and somehow the anti-nuclear activists are the only ones that manage to change the energy agenda in favour of the very powerful lobby of the fossil fuels. The animal activists never changed the subsidies to animal agriculture, the activists for international causes like Palestine haven't managed much either.
... it was shut down in 1998, relevant section from German Wikipedia as the English version is lacking details:
In June 1997, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announced the closure of the power plant as one of his first official acts. He justified this step by pointing to the enormous costs the plant incurred. In the preceding ten years, it had produced no electricity for most of the time due to malfunctions. It even consumed considerable amounts of electricity to keep the sodium in the cooling system above its melting temperature. Each pipe carrying sodium and every tank was equipped with heaters and thermal insulation for this purpose.
... so it used a lot of energy while being shut down because of malfunctions for most of those 10 years. Seems like shutting it down was the best course of action.
It had problems but it was new technology. That’s always the case. Now only China, Russia and India have Fast Breeder Reactors.
Plus there was the pressure from Les Verts and Sortir du nucléaire, the Molotov cocktail attacks by the Fédération Anarchiste, the RPG attack by the Cellules Communistes Combattantes etc.
A lot of people thought France was just being arrogant for not going all in on becoming dependent on the US and maintaining their own ways of doing things. These past few years, it's been paying off for them. Hopefully other countries will wisen up and not allow their defense and entire economy to be dependent on the US or any other big country. It always comes back to bite them in the ass. The post WW2 decades were unusually stable and assuming it'll be that way forever is not wise.
You can't do everything, and the smaller your country the less you can do. France isn't doing other things because of the opportunity cost.
Of course the EU is bigger than the US and there is value in duplicated/distributed effort. The EU as a whole should be thinking "partner with everyone, but have our fingers in every single pot someplace just in case".
> For a very long time, I have always said France is smarter than what people give them credit for. Spain should take a peek over the mountains at France to see what a sane energy policy looks like.
Incidentally, if I remember correctly, one of the causes (or things that made it worse) of the almost day-long blackout we (Spain) had last year was because France disconnected one of the links to Spain without notifying us properly.
No, we did not. Katharina Reiche and that guy from Bavaria are certainly not "Germany" or the majority of Germans. No atom reactor is going to be built, it's just typical rhetoric from both of them.
Not even the major energy suppliers are interested in building new nuclear reactors.
I was not against prolonging the phase out for a bit, but we don't even have a permanent storage solution after all this time.
Why would you invest in nuclear power, which is several times more expensive per kwh than wind + battery in Denmark, which also has excellent links to reliable hydropower from Norway and Sweden? Especially when your greatest external security threat is Russia which has openly threatened targeting nuclear reactors of a country they are trying to invade?
Not to speak of the inconvenient fact that Uranium is not a resource found in sufficient quantity in Europe and current European nuclear reactors get their fuel from Russia and Niger, not exactly reliable havens of stability.
Nuclear power makes certain sense for nations that want a military nuclear arsenal and are willing to subsidize nuclear reactors to retain the required workforce and research base. For everyone else it is a money sink and a complication when designing their grid for renewable energy.
> Why would you invest in nuclear power, which is several times more expensive per kwh than wind + battery in Denmark
Strategic mix.
I'm not saying its a good or bad idea, but nuclear can be used as a tool with batteries to make wind much more reliable. urianium sourcing can be an issue, but sadly so are batteries. (granted nuclear fuel is changed more often)
Not really - for either system, the transformer substations are the part that's vulnerable to drones. Any munition capable of breaching the outer containment structure of a nuclear power plant (let alone impacting the core, dozens to hundreds of meters further inside) is closer to a bunker buster than a drone.
What I'd really like to see though is heavy subsidies for synthetic e-fuel plants running a carbon negative process during off peak hours. That would work with both solar & nuclear.
No I am not against that. I'm just against any medium-to-large to large nuclear reactor built in within striking distance of a credible foe. Which is to say, at this point in time, all of them.
But if we start producing Fallout style reactors everywhere, sure, why not.
Nuclear doesn't vibe well with a grid that is supposed to be dominated by renewable electricity generation. You can't simply increase or decrease nuclear generation and even if you could, it would make the economics even worse, if you wouldn't keep their utilization at maximum capacity.
So if nuclear is supposed to have a "strategic" effect on your electricity mix, you have a substantial (20-40%) block of your electricity generation that is essentially static. That in turn requires you to have static demand. But static demand is poison for a renewable generation. You actually want demand to be highly dynamic via grid-tied batteries and dynamic loads (i.e. electric car charging, scheduled appliances and heating, cost-dependent production) so that it can be tailored to supply and keep the grid stable.
> I'm not saying its a good or bad idea, but nuclear can be used as a tool with batteries to make wind much more reliable.
I doubt that this is a requirement for Denmark. There is tremendous hydro capacity in northern Scandinavia and the country is tied into the EU and UK grid.
> You can't simply increase or decrease nuclear generation and even if you could, it would make the economics even worse, if you wouldn't keep their utilization at maximum capacity.
you totally can, and for keeping the grid stable, they are absolutely grand.
But to your point, pan continental links are not that practical for making up ~30% of a country's peak demand.
> you have a substantial (20-40%) block of your electricity generation that is essentially static. That in turn requires you to have static demand.
If you look at the grid on aggregate, there is always a static demand. If you look at https://grid.iamkate.com/ you'll see the variance in use is 30% over 24 hours.
For denmark (and the UK) wind is a great source of power, but its not always there, even at grid level. Currently the UK uses gas to bridge that demand. The UK is rolling out batteries, and thats going to help with price in the peaks. (currently most of them are used to stabilise rather than "peaking") But _currently_ battery capacity is only really measured in hours. Ideally we'll be measuring capacity in weeks. The hard part there is pricing reserve capacity, especially as it leaks.
Now, where nuclear comes in, is allowing the grid to arbitrage night time production from nuclear, into peak demand or, when wind is short. (in addition to bridging/stabilising) This gives a country more options to
We will see something like this bridging capacity in spain in the next few years. They have a much less well developed battery grid, but have more sun so the generation is a bit more predictable day to day. The problem spain needs to overcome is the morning and evening peaks. From memory its something like 1-2 gigawatts (but it could be more.)
> The problem spain needs to overcome is the morning and evening peaks. From memory it's something like 1-2 gigawatts (but it could be more.)
The EU has collectively added 27 Gwh of battery capacity in 2025 alone. If Spain only needs anything close to 2 GW of load for around 2 hours in the morning and evening each, this seems to be inherently achievable.
> you totally can, and for keeping the grid stable, they are absolutely grand.
Nuclear plants can load follow at about 5% of their rated capacity per minute. This is glacial in the world of electricity.
At the moment, this would theoretically work, because you have gas peaker plants that can adjust much faster and pick up the slack while nuclear plants come up (or down) to speed.
But countries like Spain and Denmark want to have a 100% renewable grid within two decades (much shorter than the typical lifetime of a nuclear reactor). So gas peaker plants are increasingly not an option.
The reality of the grid at that point will be a lot of wind and PV capacity (because it is dirt cheap). Nuclear is not compatible with those on its own, because a cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop power much quicker than nuclear will be able to follow.
Of course you can build a ton of batteries to act as a buffer. And guess what, that's exactly what we are doing right now. But at that point, why do we need nuclear again? Simply building batteries is already much cheaper than building a substantial nuclear generation capacity and while batteries will continue to become cheaper while nuclear won't.
Also, if you require new nuclear plants to load follow on a regular basis, it completely destroys the already bad economics of the technology. You need to run those at capacity continuously to make even remotely sense.
> Nuclear plants can load follow at about 5% of their rated capacity per minute. This is glacial in the world of electricity.
which is why batteries are really great. We have couple of batteries that are 180 and 300gwh, which can turn on frighteningly quick. The iberian market is really young at the moment for batteries, they have a way to go before batteries make a dent in prices (which is great for us)
The spanish grid has about 16% nuclear: https://www.ree.es/en/datos/todate Now spain's grid usually has a whole bunch of solar sites in curtailment, which means they can turn on power fairly quickly. Which is where batteries come in, as the curtailment could be flowing into batteries, and that sweet sweet energy sold at a stonking profit in the evening.
But!
Denmark isn't the spanish grid. They have less predictability, so need bigger storage to account for the variability of wind.
I am unfortunately not the one empowered to make these decisions, nor do I know the reasoning of those who are, I just noted it seems back on the table based on discussions, maybe because
>Nuclear power makes certain sense for nations that want a military nuclear arsenal and are willing to subsidize nuclear reactors
since also on the table seems to be making a deal with France for Nuclear Weapons access, as I understand what I read.
Wind + Battery doesn't exist. Wind and solar renewables are dependent on natural gas plants at this moment. This is why nuclear is still a consideration, it's more "green" then most "green" energy.
Wind and solar are not "dependent" on natural gas plants. You can observe this quite well by simply building a wind or solar plant, connect a battery and a load. It works and it works well.
Many national grids do not have enough renewable generation capacity to satisfy 100% demand at all times yet. When renewable generation is not sufficient, the difference is made up with generation from fossil-fueled thermal plants. But the existence of thermal power plants shouldn't be confused with any form of technical reliance on them. 100% renewable grids are inherently possible. If only, because you can simply enlarge grids geographically to the point that wind and solar production averages out. In combination with planned overcapacity (you can simply "switch off" wind and solar if you don't need generation), you strictly speaking don't even need batteries. It's just much more economical.
>Many national grids do not have enough renewable generation capacity to satisfy 100% demand at all times yet.
When will it make sense for many countries? Because the difference between peak production and a winter dip for germany in let's say Berlin is enormous.
First of all there is no alternative that makes sense. Climate change is real and its consequences are more expensive and catastrophic than any trade-offs we’ll have to make for a 100% renewable grid.
The good news is that going 100% renewable is probably less onerous than most people expect. If we get our act together politically, we can easily build the grids, generation, storage and intelligent loads required. With the exception of a few industrial processes, the technology is already existing and economically viable, but it also gets better and cheaper every year.
I never get why people are so opposed to renewables. In the past (and apparently present), we have spent multiples of what we’d need for 100% renewables on stupid wars. Now we could transform our economy with dramatic positive consequences even if we ignore climate change completely (think air quality and corresponding public health concerns, as well as political risks associated with fossil fuels).
It will be one of the breakthrough developments of human civilization and unlock tremendous potential, but people are concerned with the aesthetics of windmills and bickering about minor subsidies, while there is literally an economic crisis going on because some ships with liquified dinosaurs on boats can’t get to their destination on time …
I am a bit surprised that a engineer-heavy forum does not think about scaling of batteries.
If everyone in the developed world starts to build batteries massively - in the extent necessary to bridge multiple days of bad weather for millions of people, because that is what happens quite often in northern half of Europe in winter - there will be new strategic dependencies, at least during the buildup phase, and then in a smaller extent for maintenance and modernization. Instead of oil, lithium and other resources not present or not mined in Europe will become worth fighting over and blackmailing over.
When we are already undergoing such a massive transformation, I would like to have a bit more strategic independence, instead of trading Arab/Iranian/Russia pressure for Chinese/Bolivian/Congolese pressure.
Ultimately, we must hope for fusion and/or geothermal to become practical. These are nigh impossible to be subjected to geopolitical constraints.
There are already battery chemistries available that do not rely on lithium and drastically reduce the usage of other suplly-contrained inputs. Especially for stationary storage (where energy density and weight are not much of a concern) there is a wide array of technologies already available and in development.
And as you yourself say: once a battery has been built, it simply exists. There is a very gradual deterioration, but nothing even close to the "just in time" dependency that we are experiencing in this very moment when it comes to fossil fuels.
For a strategic independence point of view, being reliant on a global value chain to replace existing infrastructure every 15 years beats being reliant on a global value chain to replace your tank of gas every day by miles. Don't let perfect become the enemy of good!
These need to be available in enormous quantities, though.
Are they? Who produces them? Please tell me that it is not China and that they don't come with a firmware that may or may not have remotely exploitable rootkits.
The road from a lab discovery through a working prototype to mass-deployable tech usually takes decades, especially in devices which pack a tremendous amount of energy.
The manufacturing of all modern battery chemistries is dominated by Chinese companies because the Chinese government has strategically invested in production capacity and expertise for more than two decades.
But Chinese companies are running and building production facilities around the world. Leaving the production in Chinese hands is a political choice, not an inevitability.
Also, you can't take batteries away once you have delivered them to the customer. I have a 14kwh battery in my basement. It's built by BYD, a Chinese company. But once installed, I can pull the network cable and air gap it from the internet. Communication with my roof-mounted-solar and grid-tied electrical supply works without external network access, if I deem that an unacceptable risk. I could also do the work required to filter all network request from the battery management system at the router to make sure it can only contact servers from a whitelist, if I want to have access to diagnostics while I'm not at home.
These are all known, manageable risks that are completely within the capability of sovereign states to take care of. But there is literally no government (apparently) that can keep Trump and Netanyahu from fucking over the global fossil energy supply on a whim.
Indeed, at least 2 Chinese companies (CATL and BYD) already have in mass production sodium-ion batteries, including a 50 MWh model for stationary storage.
Using lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage is a historical accident, because using lithium makes sense only in mobile applications where weight is essential.
For new installations, sustainable alternatives, like sodium-ion batteries, should be preferred.
In the past there have been many companies in various countries, including Australia, UK and USA, which have claimed that they are able to make very high capacity flow batteries for stationary storage, based on various chemistries, e.g. vanadium-vanadium or bromine-sulfur. A few such batteries have been installed at various customers.
I do not know what went wrong with flow batteries. They have bad weight, similar to the lead-acid batteries, but that is irrelevant for stationary batteries. Otherwise they should be the best batteries for stationary applications, because they have 3 essential advantages over other batteries. Their energy and their power are not coupled as in normal batteries, but they can be scaled independently, i.e. for a given power (which is determined by electrode area) in a flow battery the stored energy can be made arbitrarily large, because it is determined by the volume of a couple of tanks where liquid electrolytes are stored. The second advantage is that the auto-discharge when the battery is not used can be almost null, because the 2 electrolytes can be stored in separate tanks, preventing any reaction between them. The third advantage is that the solid electrodes do not take part in the chemical reaction, so they are not damaged by a charge/discharge cycle, so they can have a very long life.
Despite the advantages, none of the many kinds of flow batteries that have been proposed has been a commercial success and it appears that the companies producing them have lied about the problems that might plague them.
I have not seen any published information about which were their problems, but I assume that a likely cause was the separator membrane that stays between the 2 liquid electrolytes, which must selectively allow the passage of certain ions and not of others. Such membranes are expensive and they might have a short lifetime, requiring frequent maintenance. Another possible problem could be caused by secondary reactions leading to solid precipitates from the liquid electrolytes, another possible cause for expensive maintenance.
Regarding the battery firmware, it does not really matter if the batteries are made in China. The history of the last 3 decades has demonstrated that no firmware can be trusted, regardless whether it comes from a company located in USA, in UK, in China or in any other country, so any firmware must be treated with suspicion.
China actually makes a great number of electronic products that are much more trustworthy than almost anything that comes from USA or other western countries, because those products, like it was the norm several decades ago, but no longer today, are accompanied by full hardware documentation, including schematics and PCB layout, which makes it much easier to verify that a malicious firmware would not be able to do damage.
If the European Union or any other countries would be concerned by the security risk posed by malicious firmware, the solution is simple and it does not consist in banning the products of some arbitrarily chosen countries, but in mandating that any product with an embedded computer, regardless of its origin, must provide complete documentation, i.e. schematics and the source program for the firmware, and it should allow the replacement of the firmware. This would be nothing new, as this is how computers, including the IBM PC, were sold in the old times, before the vendors succeeded step by step to incline the balance of power in their favor and in the detriment of their customers.
And my guess would be that it would be much more expensive for you to build out (and hold in reserve) enough generation capacity to satisfy your theoretical peak demand than it costs to have interconnected grids and a large efficient market, even if you are a net exporter.
You are aware of our different price-markets in sweden right? SE4 is priced at the export prices for Danish wind and German goal - which sucks for Swedes in SE4 (and to some extent SE3). SE4 can eat their own dogfood since they cut the Nuclear Power and are now burning oil instead (Karlshamnsverket).
That is why we need to stop with oil quickly, yes. Nuclear will do that, and people will pick nuclear if the renewables aren't there yet when oil runs out, which it is close to doing today.
No, that is why you made a gross error extrapolating grid battery growth.
> when oil runs out, which it is close to doing today.
Peak oil is a way off yet, and the reason we need to stop using sequestered carbon is because atmospheric insulation is increasing steadily as a direct result of fossil fuel usage. Not because of ground supply shortfall.
The current events highlight the supply chain issue - not a shortage of oil, it's a shortfall in "oil going anywhere".
> Nuclear will do that, and people will pick nuclear if the renewables aren't there
Again, country by country - nuclear makes sense in China, the US to a degree, France, the UK (despite the snails progress) to a degree ... but makes no sense in, say, Australia that has abundant sunlight, fresh air that moves, and near zero prior experience with nuclear power and plant construction (See: the very recent Australian CSIRO report on energy futures for Australia)
Before solar was woke it was a way to power your home for basically free and not be dependant on or in hock to the corporations or government to power your home.
This might make sense on a larger timeframe but stating that your grid isn't stable enough to support AC demand while also pushing for electric car adoption seems counter intuitive. It would likely take years to improve the grid to support accelerating electric vehicle demands.
Years and tens if not hundreds of billions; the Netherlands is experiencing this, after a decade of cheap solar, a rise in EV, and new builds being built fully electric on the consumer side, and many datacenters and green energy generators built on the business side, our grid is at capacity to the point where new businesses can't get connected and new housing projects are put on hold (I think); the grid can't manage any more. The grid manager Tennet spent 15 billion last year, and will need to keep doing that for at least another decade - and that's a relatively small country.
Yeah, sucks they're trying to shut down our nuclear power, I agree. However, we're lucky the country is so sunny, if we could cover the inland deserted areas with solar panels, batteries and what not as an alternative, I'm OK with that as a compromise I suppose.
> One of the issues with our proportional electoral system is that smaller, more extreme parties can become kingmakers and in our current situation the centre-left governing party relies on the support of the far-left party to stay in power, and those guys are rabidly anti-nuclear power.
A side comment but I'm sad to say I don't think that another electoral system (or at least not FPTP) fixes this issue of there being a niche group being kingmakers.
In FPTP the dynamic that occurs is that an enormous amount of seats become "safe" and then the kingmakers end up being the relative handful of seats that are likely to trade hands. This ends up creating distortions where certain regional seats and regional issues rise well above how important they should be.
PR seems like a more fair way to represent a niche group. At least they are a genuinely representative part of the population, and the influence isn't an accident of electoral math distortion.
That would then make sense why Russia's dirty tricks squad likes to back extreme-Left and extreme-Right parties, and is likely behind calls for proportional representation: it would give the geopolitical aggressors an effective veto over national politics and prevent the emergence of a European superpower on land they consider "theirs".
Spain's situation is bad: very high gas prices (now at the same level as Finland, despite much lower purchasing power), poor public transport (train) services, opposition to nuclear energy, electric cars that are only affordable for the wealthy (and even then, the infrastructure makes them difficult to use), high VAT on electricity, etc. All this in a country where many people have to ration their heating or air conditioning because they often can't afford it under normal circumstances. Population seem to not care much about being miserable as the same parties that do nothing about it keep getting elected so good luck I guess.
- Track maintenance is horrendous, and it's public knowledge (not that it wasn't known before, it was just hidden)
- Many high-speed trains are now running much slower after the accident, and will continue to do so. Also, compensation for delays has been significantly reduced
- Some rather important routes (Madrid-Málaga, for example) still have no service after the accident
- The public train company (Renfe) is now setting up a bus company and openly saying that this is going to be very useful for years to come (wink wink)
- Cercanías is absolute garbage in most areas but especially in Madrid, with constant delays, broken trains, etc
- The pricing situation has improved with recent competitors (Ouigo, Iryo, etc) but it's often still laughable - I've been taking flights instead of trains when I travel there since they're much cheaper (and nowadays definitely much faster, given all the issues)
I could continue but I guess that's plenty. I'd say taking a train in Spain nowadays is an exercise of faith for many.
Sorry didn't mean to go off on a tangent, it's just I like trains, and Spain (and have an Interrail trip coming up and I was considering including Spain. They are famously Interrail unfriendly though)
I followed the accident but not much news following, so that's really really interesting. I didn't know Madrid-Malaga still has no service, nor that Renfe had set up a bus company!
I haven't been to Madrid for a few years. Sad to hear the Cercanías is so bad these days
If you ever visit Madrid again, I can say that buses and the metro usually work pretty well (they do get quite crowded at peak hours, but I guess that's the case everywhere) and you probably won't need to rely on Cercanías for typical "tourist" activities. If you're planning to travel between cities though, I'd be a bit wary of long-distance trains!
PS: Roads are becoming worse as well but I've seen worse abroad. Just wanted to point out that infrastructures in the country are decaying quite a bit in general.
> Yeah, I live in Spain and probably once again we'll have restrictions on AC in the summer just like at the start of the Ukraine war. Hopefully, we can avoid actual blackouts.
I live on Spain . What the hell restrictions are you talking about ?
This did happen in summer of 2022, but only in public buildings, private households were not affected, so the OP's point seems a bit overly dramatic. Given that AC usage is highest when solar production is also highest, this seems highly unlikely given the solar build-out of the last 4 years.
The far-left are not the cause of the nuclear close down, nor are they unilaterally holding the government hostage in this area.
The centre-left party made the agreement with the power companies in 2019 when they were not yet in coalition, for economic reasons.
The far-left, now in the coalition, does consider nuclear a red line. It is unknown what the cost of crossing it would be. But I believe it's irrelevant, because if the centre-left party would be governing alone, they wouldn't walk back the agreement now. No matter price of oil, the investment in nuclear has a too large price-tag, and would take way to long to reap any benefits. If any - given the current progression on renewables.
Purely from an engineering standpoint that is an attractive option. But North African countries have often been politically unstable. It's risky to place your energy security in the hands of a region that could erupt in another coup or civil war at any time.
I thought the proposal for a solar link between Morocco and the UK was a great idea. Unfortunately the UK government has decided not to back it with a contract for different guarantee.
what do you think of theory that denuclearisation movement in west europe was funded by CCCP? it makes sense to think CCCP/Putin would finance subversive movements to remove nuclear and coal and make the region dependent on russian energy exports
They fund other stuff that weakens and divides Europe too like the separatist movements in Scotland, Catalonia etc.
That's not to say that all the people in these movements are Russian agents or that these groups don't have some good points and legitimate grievances, but nonetheless they are an easy, cost-effective way for Russia to attack us.
Of all the silly things I’ve seen Europe do over the last 20 years, getting rid of nuclear plants has to be one of the strangest. Sure, we all want solar but it’s not there yet. Hidden forces here would not be a surprise.
That sort of event doesn't fade away quickly and definitely influenced energy policy that persists to this day. Thankfully the tide is turning due to safer designs.
Nuclear power has an LCOE that is 5x the cost of solar and wind. Nobody would build it on cost alone.
The only reason countries build and run nuclear power plants is because it shares supply chain and a skills base with the nuclear military.
Which means they have nukes (France, Russia, US) or they they want to take out an option to one day build a nuke in a hurry just in case for a threat that is usually very obvious (Sweden, Japan, South Korea).
This was clearly recognized when Iran started building nuclear power plants but when Poland suddenly got interested in 2023 ostensibly "because environment" after decades of burning mountains of coal nobody batted an eye.
> when Poland suddenly got interested in 2023 ostensibly "because environment" after decades of burning mountains of coal nobody batted an eye.
Polish discussion about nuclear energy has always been openly tied to national security and energy independence, given its/Europe's reliance on Russian energy exports. Especially given its northern geography, nuclear is better for base load stability. (The environmental is also important, and strides have been made to reduce emissions.)
Of course, there has also been discussion in Poland about nuclear sharing or even seeking to acquire/build nuclear weapons itself, also openly, but I don't think anyone is actually pursuing this in earnest.
Isn't power to gas still ridiculously inneficient?
Last I checked it seemed like something pushed by gas companies since it upholds gas infrastructure and most of the intermittence is currently supported by gas.
It's very costly compared to normal gas but it's still marginally cheaper to use solar and roundtrip p2g to use on a cold, windless night than it is to use nuclear power produced on any day of the year.
There's just zero economic incentive while polluting gas is dirt cheap and maxxed out solar and wind rarely even covers 100% of current electricity demand.
I wonder where the gulf states are going to end up.
They have tried hard to build economies that aren't just fossil fuel exports. Tourism, trade, finance, luxury living for rich foreigners… but everything they have tried is contingent on peace in the region. I doubt foreigners are looking forward to layovers in Dubai now there are Iranian drones heading their way.
Maybe future travelers will not see two trunkless legs in a desert, but empty condo towers and abandoned super cars still loaded with labubus.
They also spent decades sending money to the US to buy influence and protection, which instantly vaporized the second a missile was launched their way.
The big story I think is how handily they took out billions of dollars of US radars and that these air defense systems are not up to the task (we actually already knew this from Ukraine, but media worked overtime to ignore this fact). In a way, all this supposedly "superior" US and Israeli tech (at least on the defense side, offense is a different story) has been exposed. I do think focused engineering efforts could close this gap, that was needed already 4 years ago.
The war in itself? For sure, but if a million dollar rocket saves a billion dollar radar system against a 50.000 drone, it still seems working as intended.
That doesn't say 10+ radars have been destroyed. It says radar sites have been attacked 10 times across 7 locations in 6 countries, with some damaged and some destroyed.
Plus a couple videos of fixed radomes getting hit by drones
Defending against ballistic missiles is well known to not be perfect, even against Iran's lest sophisticated missiles it's very difficult. But the high end missile systems are worth trying. The main problem is the lack of cheap drone interceptors which has been a blaring siren since Ukraine war started that the US neglected by not treating it as an emergency.
C-RAM radars - at least one US embassy was hit with an elcheapo drone as well, rendering it useless. Thats a legit problem and was only possible because they took out most of the important ballistics radars first.
How would a THAAD in Jordan help stop drones in Iraq? That's not the only radar they operate.
The C-RAM was in Baghdad, the high end radars hit were in the other gulf states.
The CWIS is probably the best anti-drone tool the US has but they have far too little of them and can get overwhelmed. They should have listened to Ukraine.
Isn't this a different thing? I tend to assume when someone is talking about ballistic missile defense, they are thinking of ICBMs. A House of Dynamite is an example of that. But that seems substantially different from the regional missile defense that seems much more effective. Mach 5 is pretty fast, but Mach 25 is considerably faster.
The lay public is almost certainly unaware that perfect, nation scale ICBM defense is fucking impossible. At least in the US.
People in Israel are probably more accustomed to what a "High but not perfect" interception rate means.
But people in the US are just really dumb about things. They probably think it just needs "Enough money" or "A breakthrough" as if that's just a magic spell you can cast to get around physics.
However, modern anti-ballistic missile defense systems are effective enough that if you spend enough money you can defeat, with high probability, half to most of the incoming weapons. It involves firing many many interceptors against each incoming threat. It does not scale.
This is why it is generally deployed as a way to blunt, possibly not even defeat a North Korean nuclear attack. Nothing more.
Shorter range ballistic missiles suck. They still have the crazy high velocity terminal phase, but they are way cheaper to produce. I don't think it's possible to defend against them economically.
Cluster munitions that have between 1 and 10 kg of explosives are great against the infantry in the open field, not so much against population with proper level of shelters and an advanced warning to get there.
This is not mostly true: Israel's anti air defense works surprisingly well against Iran's attack, the issue has always been 2 things:
Who has more missiles to throw?
And the Patriot is still top class in it's designed goal: shooting down ballistic and cruise missiles.
The second big thing is that no one has designed air defense to take into account effectively slow moving artillery pieces that have the same maneuverability as a missile.
Because that is what drones are and what has been the biggest glaring problem for but the USA, Israel and Russia (the gulf states both use Russian and US anti air defense).
The aging Patriot in particular was exposed in Ukraine. You can watch video after video of them failing even against older ballistics - they have basically no chance against hypersonic and other fast ballistics, especially ones with active measures (flares, maneuvering - there was a really wild one from a few weeks back). And there's a number out of this conflict as well. The are still great at shooting down jets, however. Top of class is actually S-4/500, this is basically acknowledged fact by even the Pentagon at this point. I think a lot of people are in denial about this due to a combo of Hollywood narrative and ideological reasons, but the Russians math very good - it's reality. But even so, those are not the right systems for fighting drone attacks - nobody really has it together with that. Both of these are solvable problems, it's just a lot of hard math + piles of money.
And that success rate comes after significant improvements to the Russian weapons and finesse. They were much less effective early in the war.
Cat and mouse is always a factor in war. The patriot wasn't very good when it was first introduced and took some refining to become the gold standard, which it still is.
It still works very well against planes too, reaching out and downing EWACS aircraft at the edge of it's range.
They were neither designed nor expected to have 100% defense rate, but 50% is lower than expected. 75% isn't great either.
> aging Patriot in particular was exposed in Ukraine. You can watch video after video of them failing even against older ballistics
Decades-old Patriots shot down Russia's newest "hypersonic" missile.
> Top of class is actually S-4/500, this is basically acknowledged fact by even the Pentagon at this point
What? Source? You're describing the systems that have been getting floored the world over. Why do you think nobody is placing orders for these anymore?
There’s a number of videos of US and Israeli air defense quite literally failing at intercepts. You can see the entire trajectories and stuff. Some from US bases, other in Israel but they are trying to censor them.
"It’s worth pointing out that Hezbollah has managed to get rockets right down to the south of Israel today – and that is unprecedented. Never before has Hezbollah managed to get rockets so far south into Israel."
Ballistics are much harder to shoot down period there is not a single system that has 100% success rate, Ukraine reports around 42-77% success rate[1].
Hence why army folks were so alarmed by Russia/China developing and having ready prototypes that can go hypersonic.
They're done. They export oil/LNG, import food, invest the proceeds in the US companies/treasuries and brand themselves as logistics hubs + safe havens for the global rich. It's all out of the window now.
That puts you in an energy deficit, but you still need and are using energy. Until your body is decomposed it uses energy (after you die your body is energy for the bacteria decomposing it).
Fasting can use previous/saved energy, but it still needs energy.
It's probably also good to have things on hand as an insurance policy anyway. If shit hits the fan regulations don't apply anymore. No one is going to complain about solar on your roof if the grid isn't reliable.
From what I've read, the immediate effect will likely be worse for CO2 emissions, because the alternative to (liquefied) gas is often coal power. Also, the various inputs that are needed for global manufacturing are also affected, so maybe even renewable tech gets more expensive.
I'm not saying that the dependence on the middle east was good, but I think it's good to keep in mind that this was a pretty stable equilibrium even with the various questionable countries involved until the US initiated a global supply shock without a good reason.
There are short term and long term effects. Overall these are good changes.
There are a couple of points to make here. The lead time for new coal/gas plants is years. If it's not planned already, any newly planned plants are unlikely to come online this decade. The supply chains simply can't handle building more turbines and it takes years to fix that. Also, that investment is super risky in it self.
Another point is that the cheapest and fastest way to add new capacity to grids is via renewables. That's why we see record breaking new capacity coming online on a regular basis.
There is indeed a short term increase in emissions from electricity plants because the fastest way to bring more capacity online is to use existing underused plants. A lot of gas and coal plants are no longer running full time because they are too expensive to operate. But they haven't been decommissioned either. Some gas plants actually are used as peaker plants. Most older coal plants take too long to warm up for this. So, yes short term the expensive but quick way to provide extra power is via these plants. But of course, as soon as something more affordable comes online, these things go back to being utilized less. There are many tens/hundreds of GW of renewables and batteries being deployed in the next few years.
Data centers add to all this pressure. That's long term a good thing because these too will want to long term reduce their OpEx by cutting as much dependence on gas/coal as possible.
A final point to make is that despite all these increased emissions, there are also decreased emissions from electrification. Even if the power for an EV comes from an efficient gas/coal plant, it's actually better than the alternative of burning petrol in a combustion engine instead. Less emissions this way. Same for heat pumps. With a COP of 3-4, they outperform burning gas by 3-4x using electricity. Even if that electricity comes from a gas plant operating at 40-50% efficiency. Less gas gets burned.
So these are all good effects even if the reason is a bit sad and unnecessary. This crisis is unnecessary. But I like that it is helping to kill fossil fuel companies faster. This long term erodes confidence in the market as a whole and drives decision makers to do exactly what the article suggests: cutting the dependency on fossil fuels as fast as possible. It's already resulting in measurable reductions in oil/gas imports in some countries.
It feels so slow. I would like to have an electric car or e-bike. I live in a building that is part of a housing company that has many owners (most of them people living here). It is slow to decide and implement renovation, and the pipeline is basically full for a few years.
We might get car charging infrastructure only a few years down the line. Maybe a bike shed for e-bike charging a year after that?
What happened to those optimistic ideas where every lamp post had a charger? I would pay for that. I also see these small transformer huts on the streets. What if at least those had neighborhood high speed chargers, it shouldn't cost much since basically there's a good power source right there?
There's just so much friction. I hope some enterpreneur here makes these things real!
Depending on the public charging infrastructure in your area, it is already quite feasible to own an electric car without your own wall box. Modern BEVs can charge basically to full within 20 minutes. If your supermarket has a public charger and your driving and shopping cycles are matching (or can be aligned depending on your daily driving distance), you can simply plug in while you shop for your groceries.
Also, you can check if there is someone else on your street who has a charger and who might be willing to let you charge in exchange for a little surcharge on the electricity you consume.
I'm unpacking my electric motorbike[1] and its moped sister[2] from winter storage and preparing them both for a summer in a city in a nation which energy supply is mostly renewables.
Of course, it took a lot of gasoline to get them here, but I sure as heck won't be using much gasoline to put them to solid use clocking up the kilometers, 100 at a time.
Got a few deals on solar panels for the backyard that'll get me completely off the grid for the most part, and from then on it'll be maintenance mode and solar powered travel as priority number one ..
I heard somewhere that there is some sort of evangelical Christian sect in Korea that believes the current US president was sent by God. Not as a positive force, but as a force to end the global status quo (which I suppose they consider unjust). I find this fascinating because the US president's actions so far have: exposed decade-old myths about the rule-based international order, caused the EU to seek more self-reliance, caused former enemies in Asia to consider alliances and now accelerate the end to fossil fuel dependence. One could argue that the results of his actions are indistinguishable from that of a double agent's.
I still think Trump has been a net good upon the world.
Trump's actions have actually jumpstarted economic reforms in several countries. For example, just last year Canada made serious moves towards "One Canadian Economy"[1] to rationalize interprovincial trade among other things.
The developed world, but especially NATO countries, need to wean off America's teat for their own good.
And then there's the theory that the man is also the biblical antichrist which I think fits the prophecy reasonably well. Revelations has some pretty specific details that match up which I find quite entertaining.
We should generate our own power on our own land with our own technology - one day it will seem like insanity that we ever outsourced our most precious resource to the other side of the world, and relied on international shipping/markets to deliver it. Solar is a miracle technology. Wind is very good. Hydro and nuclear can supply large base load. Our own oil can supply peakers. What are we doing in the middle east?
It helped on reducing traffic, spending more time with family, favouring local shops... Why we went back still is a mystery for me. Even if it was "working from a coworking space" or anything that was not the downtown open-space.
I remember reading articles about local politicians insisting companies and governments do return to office for no other reason than to have the workers spend money downtown for lunch. Not even implying it, directly stating it.
Because downtown city centers were missing out on office worker revenue and started giving incentives to companies who brought people back into the office. I 100% believe the reason we went back into the office at all was because of this despite all the talk of 'in-person collaboration.'
WFH and the almost 100% shutdown off airline travel at the beginning of the pandemic resulted in nearly 0 change in CO2 emission and levels in the atmosphere.
It's a bit off topic but that didn't sound right to me.
According to the following it was a reduction but yes near zero in the context of total emissions. A few hundred million tonnes reduction ain't nothin none the less.
"plummeted from more than 1 000 Mt CO2 in 2019 to less than 600 Mt CO2 in 2020, in the context of the pandemic.
In 2023, aviation accounted for 2.5% of global energy-related CO2 emissions, "
Of course we shouldn't expect a couple of years of shutdown to significantly reverse 200 years of man-made atmospheric CO2 accumulation, but surely it would help stop the problem to get worse if the widespread WFH effort were sustained after the pandemic.
I don't have data but I was always under the impression that consumer use of fossil fuels (ie gas) was a drop in the bucket compared to enterprise use of fossil fuels (shipping trucks/boats/planes, private jets, etc).
The whole "reduce your carbon footprint PSA" was just a ruse.
Ugh don't get me started on paper straws! At least EVs are a cool way to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, however ineffective it may be at scale. But nobody likes paper straws.
> But the companies have a large carbon foodprint to deliver a product or service for the consumer.
I agree that that's _why_ they have a large carbon footprint, no company is just burning fossil fuels for fun. But it doesn't change a) the fact that they do have a large carbon footprint, and b) entire cities could ban gas cars and everyone could take public transit and it still wouldn't make a dent in the global carbon footprint.
As I think you're alluding to over-consumerism as a cause of companies having a large carbon footprint, that's part of it. But unless everyone just stops consuming, it's not gonna change anything. If it were legislated that big companies needed to reduce their carbon footprint by X% by Y date I think that would be the most effective, short term at least.
> When I buy a large SUV / Truck, and never drive it, is that not counted negative towards my carbon foodprint?
I don't know why it'd be negative. Zero or neutral, at best, but not negative. Negative would entail you're somehow removing CO2 from the environment.
Compared to coal companies fighting tooth and nail to keep their industry relevant and the govt acquiescing instead of focusing on renewables, I don't think any individual can be considered to have a "huge" carbon footprint.
But think of the commercial real estate market?!?! What about the chopped salad slop bowl market?! Dry cleaning?! This would shatter the fabric of our precious society. We need butts in seats. We need to foster open communication and cross functional pollination.
Our company made a 'bet' that energy management, sustainability, clean energy and whatnot would become a big thing. This was around the time of COP26 (2021) where there seemed to be a societal drive for reducing carbon emissions and a general acceptance that climate change was a thing. We employed young and enthusiastic sustainability consultants, we run a successful project to reduce energy consumption in polymer manufacturing, we build product that worked. That part of our business has shut down completely.
Unfortunately governments were reluctant to really get behind regulations that were needed, and the business case for investment in any drive to sustainability did not exist. People lost interest as inflation went up, and other things seemed more important. The market was flagging and Trump's "drill baby drill" was the final nail in the coffin.
The world was _nearly_ there to rapidly accelerate reducing the dependency on fossil fuels on the back of climate change. Instead we went back to fossil fuel cars and built energy-intensive AI data centres. We collectively dropped the ball and one day will look back on it as a missed opportunity.
There have been plenty of inflection points like that throughout history. Famously, Jimmy Carter installed solar heating on the roof of the white house. Reagan took them down shortly after.
It seems like we never quite learn our lesson about energy security...
Interest rates change for all sorts of reasons. People who take out variable rate home mortgages are always gambling. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose.
"The world’s biggest energy consumer nations are now back at the drawing board: Europe last week unveiled new financial guarantees for atomic power after decades of closing nuclear plants. Other major importers are planning to source fuel from a broader array of suppliers to hedge their risk."
I'm not seeing it.
The European plan sounds like another goal to have a proposal in ten years [1]. And hedging imports of fossil fuels doesn't reduce dependence, just dependence on a particular source.
Easier said than done, during this week many German regions are on general strike, thus everyone just switched back to their cars, complaining about unions, their power in infrastructure and so on.
Naturally most of those cars are combustion based, because it is still very expensive to buy a new EV, and even used ones are more expensive than new combustion cars, and there is the whole question of how damaged the battery will be anyway.
If past crisis are any indication this "push" won't last.
We've had crisis with fossil fuels since OPEC's first big price increase in 1973 and the pattern is always the same: first the whole world realizes they need to find alternative sources of energy. Then, after a while, politicians go "drill, baby, drill".
Oil is an addiction and most people don't drop addictions by their own.
Looking and biasing only via population numbers. It's pretty clear that to "save" the world you need most of asia and africa to be run on renewables. This shock will hopefully have better effects long term.
If countries worldwide had to have their reality checked due a WW3 to find solutions for the a fossil fuel alternative, better than pushing lithium everywhere with devasting consequences, tells you everything that is wrong in our society.
Europe and the US need to bring manufacturing of EVs, batteries, solar, and relevant components back locally. Use automation to make it more feasible. We need rooftop solar + regional SMRs for a cheap, stable energy supply.
To do so, we need to adapt regulation & deregulate. This needs to happen now. If we continue on like this, we'll decelerate back to the stone age.
Wonder if Chinese solar involution finally going to end, time to jack up prices, and crank factories to full utilization. PRC can make enough solar to replace global oil / lng and good parts of coal in ~10 years, assuming storage also scales proportionally soon.
Slightly different reasons, of course, but I imagine that right about now the regime in Cuba is wishing they had put more effort into solar. Being heavily reliant on oil when you do not produce it yourself is a vulnerable position to be in.
> China has, however, been relatively insulated from the crisis due to its ample emergency oil reserves and high rate of electrification, with EVs representing more than half of its domestic new car sales and its grid more than 50% powered by renewable energy sources.
In the U.S., by comparison, EVs are less than 10% of the market, while renewable power is around a quarter of the nation's electricity generation.
My favorite quote from "Studio 60 on the Sunset Street" (an antique show from the late 2000s) is from the CEO of a fictional media conglomerates, coming back from a trip to Macau with disbelief:
"Tell you kids to learn Mandarin."
The USA is either handing the future on a plate to the Chinese Empire ; or acting like a "chaos monkey" in an anti fragile system, giving just enough scares to the rest of the world to get their act together.
Maybe climate change could not do that because of the long timescale and unpalpability of the issues.
Maybe the first few oil shocks were not enough because you could hope for better days.
Maybe market pressure was not enough because incumbents fossil fuel industries could always buy the right élections to set up the right incentives ; and also, people don't want to change.
Maybe the perfect storm will nudge it ?
That, or we'll just have to speak Mandarin. They do that in Firefly, after all..
Is it 1973? We could invest in solar instead of kings that might ship their energy to us in peace time (i.e. killings happens only within each states borders)?
Now you see, the only country to have used a nuclear weapon in anger also elected itself as world arbitrator of who gets energy and who doesn't, because reasons.
Every country should be speed running nuclear tech as fast as possible if only to scare the freedom fighters away...
Anyone has any respect left for US Americans after they elected this? This is so ridiculous at so many levels:
Not US hollywood culture or whatever Americans culturally exported in the past all around the world, but this will forever represent US Americans in my mind. That this is how they overall want to be seen and represented as all around the world, seemingly:
“Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran,” President Trump posted on X. “Unfortunately, Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack, and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility.”
“NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar,” the U.S. president also wrote, proceeding then to threaten to “massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.”
What even is this style of communication and thinking behind it from a leader of the richest country in the world? Is he a child? Who can even be impressed by this... unbelievable. Feels like we're like living in a very dumb, very deadly, reality show.
Kamala was always obviously a better option than Trump. Let's not pretend people didn't know who and what Trump was, or that his behavior after 2024 came as a shock to anyone.
Nonetheless all the people in the Democratic party who could obviously see what a disaster Trump would be weren't willing to compromise on any of their insane policy positions or run someone more than a midwit in order to avoid a Trump victory.
All they had to do to avoid this obvious disaster was moderate some of their extreme positions and run someone who could speak coherently and yet they couldn't do it.
So is the conclusion that it wasn't so obvious or something else?
A majority thought differently. They knew who Trump was and who Kamala was, and they voted for Trump. That's how it goes in a democracy...
Anyways, they're getting what they voted for
I'm not so sure that's true. Trump is making very different decisions in this term than his first term. I think a lot of his voters thought, "Everything was fine in his first term while all the liberals were crying all the time, I'd like more of that". This time around, things are not fine and we're seeing the regret show up in the polling numbers.
I think most people expected Trump Two to be a similar shit show to Trump One. I was no fan, but he was generally popular on the issue of the economy during his first term, and I think a lot of people had the economy as their primary consideration in 2024. Flooding the zone works, they tuned out all the rhetoric as partisan noise.
It's like all of this but punched up to 10. We're dumping metric shitloads of money into ICE and basically turning them into a domestic military. We weren't doing that before. The tariffs, too, reached levels never before seen.
The thing is, it was really bad the first time. We got through in spite of the incredibly dogshit fiscal policy and foreign affairs. So, if you do that again but go 10x further... will we make it through? Dunno.
If anything, the first Trump term proved to me the resiliency of the US political and economic structures. Even in the face of an absolute lunatic with an almost religious drive to destroy everything, we prevailed. Of course, little did we know that was just the beginning. Do we have the endurance? We'll see!
> We're dumping metric shitloads of money into ICE and basically turning them into a domestic military. We weren't doing that before.
CBP was already removing protesters and putting them into unmarked vans during 1.0. Pretty famously trump held a bible upside down after CBP removed them.
I think the thing missed is Trump didn't come from nowhere. You don't actually want to go back to the Obama years where he inflated the price of housing so the bubble didn't have to pop. Or where he was drone striking the middle east instead of withdrawing troops. Or sending "Unlawful combatants" to Guantanamo instead of closing it down and following international law. Or where he continued to cover up for Epstein ...
Not a big fan of "you have to have Hoover before FDR" but you don't want to go back to the way things were. You want to go forward to FDR 2.0.
We consume 101 million barrels of oil per day. The amount of oil humans consume per day has doubled since 1980. Is this the way we finally wake up to the urgency of addressing the climate crisis caused by burning fossil fuels?
While it could be good to shift to renewable for other reasons, it's naive to assume that nations won't be dependent on others for critical minerals and metals needed to make solar/wind/batteries/etc.
They are, but unlike fossil fuels, those dependencies go down over time (modulo the utility growth that makes demand for everything go up, of course).
If you buy fossil fuel from a country that may not be an ally forever, your demand remains constant (or goes up over time) because you are changing that fuel into a state that cannot be used again.
If you buy, say, lithium, you put that in a battery and in the future, you can get more lithium from the ground but you can also grind up batteries and re-extract it when they fail. Battery ingredients are, generally, not consumable over even medium and long-term scale if you build out the recycling infrastructure to recapture those ingredients.
Yes, the shocks aren't as immediate if you have the infrastructure set up and you are out of the initial adoption phase. Even things like lithium and silver are limited resources, so getting more out of the ground will eventually face scarcity as energy demand has always increased over the long term.
Lithium is one of the most abundant elements on earth.
Newer battery chemistries don't use lithium.
By the time we use enough energy to run out of all the elements we could make batteries with, we're likely to be at the "cheap asteroid mining" level of technological development.
Abundant doesn't mean unlimited, nor does it mean economical or environmentally friendly to access. The point is that most countries would need to import metals and minerals critical to renewable energy.
The dependencies needed for the replacement of equipment having a lifetime of many decades are infinitely less dangerous than the dependencies for consumables like fuel.
For critical minerals and metals it is easy to stockpile them to have a buffer sufficient for many years of infrastructure replacement.
Such dependencies may remain a problem during a war, when the infrastructure could be destroyed, but in normal times such dependencies would not be sufficient to enable the kind of blackmailing that can be done with consumables, like food and fuel.
I'm not sure the stockpiling you mention will work the way you propose. We already stockpile oil, yet we still see price shocks. Stockpiling metals can still lead to price shocks due to reluctance to release them and the need to eventually replenish them.
We also stockpile foods and medications, and that doesn't provide price stability.
Food is a constant need, and you can't exist for long without it.
Sure we need to increase battery sotrage, but in ~5 years time, it'll be maintainance, assuming the correct adoption rate. So yes we will still _need_ batteries, but we don't need a constant supply of new batteries to keep the lights on.
Honestly, those who attacked Iran should cover the global increase in energy costs for everyone else. Why do I have to pay more for the orange guy? Instead he benefits with his superrich buddies.
Like 1 year ago, wallstreet bros were being interviewed saying they decided all the green pledges and all that was woke from the pre-trump 2 era, and I haven't heard anything at all about climate change really from any world leader in the last few years. I guess once again, people have their coming to jesus moment when it's far too late.
Although the results are very similar, the motivation of energy independence is quite different that of climate change.
America has ample supplies of natural gas, oil etc. and so doesn't need to turn away from fossil fuels to be energy independent. Whereas in Europe we do as there isn't much natural gas or oil and even the coal that remains is difficult to extract and thus less economical.
Even at that, America is rapidly turning away from oil as wind and solar are so much cheaper. The leaders are putting on the brakes, and the change is uneven - but there is a lot of wind and solar going up in the US even now and it has been happening for 15+years.
> America has ample supplies of natural gas, oil etc. and so doesn't need to turn away from fossil fuels to be energy independent.
In the short to medium term. The natural gas, oil etc. are in fact finite resources created over a tremendously long period of time in pre-history and so once they run out you're done.
You could run nuclear power plants much longer, perhaps even indefinitely, and of course wind and sunlight are renewable, Sol doesn't give a shit what we do, it's going to shine on the planet and cause winds here until long after we're dead. But the dinosaur juice runs out, it's a quick burst and then if you didn't transition too fucking bad game over.
Yeah, exactly. We have a relatively short window of a few centuries, perhaps less, to master nuclear power (perhaps even nuclear fusion), photovoltaic panels, efficient wind turbines (including more complex offshore construction) and deploy them all at scale.
And to do it all before we cook ourselves in greenhouse gases.
I'm rather optimistic about it but it does seem that most people don't fully grasp the importance of such a transition.
Ha. I wasn't talking about the cooking. We're well into "I hope we get lucky" territory on that, let alone in "a few centuries". I was talking about literally running out.
The US is a large place with a lot of potential for extraction, so if you ignore the bit where the hostile climate kills them instead they could keep extracting at similar rates for maybe a century or more, but it does run out.
if my country has 0 dependence on fossils, how many fucks would I have given for whatever is happening or will be happening in the future in shithole places like the middle east?
Fossil-fuel subsidies from governments totalled $7trn in 2022.
Thats about 7% of global GDP.
The world spends 4% of GDP on education.
Source Monocle Magazine no.190 page 88.
There is a lot to unpack here and also an obvious solution.
As someone who's been pushing for renewables for quite a while now it's dismaying that it's taken a war to accelerate this push, but I'm glad to see that it's happening at least.
It's doubly dismaying that my own country (US) is still doubling down on fossil fuels despite everything.
The concern about a new dependency on China is real, but renewables do have the advantage that once you have the infrastructure in place it keeps working without continuously importing fuel. Nonetheless, China has done a good job building up their PV/battery manufacturing capacity (including via subsidies for a while if I'm not mistaken) and to the extent the rest of the world wants to avoid a dependency on them we should do that too.
I've been arguing with Europeans on twitter (including an environmental scientist) who believe this war shows we need to resume drilling in the North Sea and Groningen.
It feels like this collective insanity will never end
I wish there was somewhere I could talk about world affairs and European affairs with reasonable people, the way I can talk about tech on HN. But anywhere I've tried - Twitter, r/europe or any smaller subs I've found are just filled with reactionaries trying to stir up hate for whatever reasons they have. There are reasonable voices there, people who are capable of actual conversation, but they're just drowned out. I used to comfort myself by thinking they must all be 14 year olds, or Russian bots, or whatever, and some probably are, but now I'm convinced the large majority are just hate filled adults who've gotten stuck on Twitter, Facebook, reddit etc. and literally spend all their time there basically shouting as if they were lunatics on a street corner.
I might pass by but I wouldn't stand and listen to an angry man on a street corner, and I definitely wouldn't try and have a conversation nearby (or with) them. So why would I expect that to work on Twitter?
In this regard, the subreddit r/NeutralPolitics is interesting: it aims at evidence-based discussions on political issues. Threads are somehow in-between HN and Wikipedia. It is definitely interesting to read, and at the same time, participating in a discussion is quite daunting.
I agree with the recommendation.
Link: https://reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics
And its sister sub NeutralNews for news article discussion (same rules): https://reddit.com/r/NeutralNews
Both subs allow users to submit new posts and comments (but spend 2 minutes checking out the rules first).
Had a browse around and these look good, although very US focused (standard for Reddit though).
However, on every thread I checked, about 70% of comments are deleted. That means that the noise is still there, but the mods are having to work nonstop to fight it and no doubt introducing their own bias as they do so.
I wish them luck and I'll keep checking these places out but I can't help but feel that by the time you're deleting 70% of all comments (and who knows what percentage of threads), you're fighting a losing battle.
You won’t find much quality in lay discussion boards, but magazines like The Economist and Foreign Affairs are worth a subscription. I’ve cut back my internet time and incorporated these into my routine, would strongly recommend if you want actual knowledgeable opinions on world affairs.
The idea that there's such a thing as neutral politics is highly problematic.
Evidence and science is one thing. What you should do with it is another entirely. Every decision is a tradeoff. Science can't tell you what to value.
Well "Europeans on Twitter" are probably the kind of people who look at the owner of the site posting about a homeland for white people and that kind of thing and aren't bothered too much by it.
[flagged]
> It doesn’t matter how blue you die your hair
If your intention is honest engagement with people you disagree with, you should refrain from ad-hominem attacks like this. Work with their arguments, not with their tastes or appearances.
If your intention is to ridicule them and convince yourself they are not worth discussing with, then ad-hominem is fine, but not engaging at all is better.
And why wouldn't you condemn grandparent post first?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47439266
GP reported on an opinion and called it insane. That's not an ad hominem.
There is a difference between judging an opinion and judging a person. If the response had been something like "what is crazy is to think the world can just switch off its dependence on petrol suddenly", I would not have reacted either.
Is the person in the room with us right now?
> Countries that can be oil independent definitely should do that.
This does not necessarily follow.
Doubling down on becoming oil independent might have a massive price because the required investments into extraction and refining industry could also be spent on renewables.
Furthermore, we already see renewables outcompeting fossils on price/kWh, so ending up in a really inefficient sunk-cost pit is pretty likely, with all the refinery investments not even paying back their cost because a conflict now does not guarantee that fossil prices/demand will stay high.
>It doesn’t matter how blue you die your hair
What is the relevance of this statement?
I think Europe should resume drilling in the North Sea and Groningen if they have exploitable reserves there. Europe depends on energy imports and that won't change in our lifetimes (I'm in my early forties, so at least in my lifetime.) They should take advantage of whatever resources they have.
I'm guessing you think otherwise? Why? Do you think the energy transition will be faster? What makes you think that?
Because the continued survival of civilization depends on leaving fossil fuel in the ground. If the transition isn't fast enough then we will have horrible, lethal shortages, but that's still better than the worst climate scenarios.
Closing Groningen didn't leave fossil in the ground. It took LNG from US and gas from Norway out of the ground instead.
The decision to stop using fossil fuels is not tied to the decision to stop one of the sources of fossil fuels. They're divorced.
Stopping fossil fuels requires investments in alternatives, and price mechanisms that disfavour fossils. Absent those mechanisms, closing one source of fossil just shifts demand to another source of fossil, which is exactly what happened.
Meanwhile closing the gas source cost the NL a few hundred billion euros, the amount of money it needs to transition to renewables. Instead it is spending that on US LNG and Norwegian gas.
The field shouldn't have been closed in 2023, it should've remained open until e.g. 2030 and all proceeds earmarked for massive energy transition subsidies. Instead we're just importing expensive fossil now and have insufficient money to meet our green ambitions.
> Closing Groningen didn't leave fossil in the ground. It took LNG from US and gas from Norway out of the ground instead.
That was getting out of the ground and burned by someone anyway.
That may or may not be true. But it won't stay in the ground as long as there is money to be made by extracting and consuming it.
Right now all that's happening is the US is extracting that natural gas, and the middle east extracting that oil, and Europe is importing it. Which pollutes more and costs more. Just develop your domestic supplies.
I don't follow your logic.
The only direct thing we (the Netherlands) can do to prevent carastrophic climate change is to leave fossil fuels on our territory in the ground. Everything else is indirect.
No, the only direct thing the Netherlands can do is decarbonise the economy.
Shifting sources of carbon to outside the country is just passing the buck.
Decarbonising is indirect. Once it gets out of the ground, it will be turned into CO2 by someone, somewhere.
I know this is an unfathomable concept, but to actually "leave fossil fuels [...] in the ground" you have to stop using fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels someone else refused to leave in the ground means--surprisingly--that fossil fuels weren't left in the ground after all.
And it turns out that we actually live on a shared planet with a common atmosphere; sourcing your fuels from abroad does nothing to prevent climate change. But it does mean that you are unable to secure some of the most fundamental inputs to your economy.
Plus you have no control over the standards for extractions (e.g. methane leaks), and shipping it causes more pollution.
They're actually worse off, and they pay more for it instead of creating jobs and keeping the money in their own economy. Meaning less money for e.g. green programs to move away from fossil fuels.
It's just a losing proposition in every way.
> I know this is an unfathomable concept, but to actually "leave fossil fuels [...] in the ground" you have to stop using fossil fuels.
Obviously not, as we're closing these fields and haven't stopped yet. Someone will have to stop using it, yes.
That is because that money is allowed to be made by externalizing the cost to future generations.
People hate migrants enough as it is. Climate crisis migrations will make these "little" war migrations seem quaint.
> That is because that money is allowed to be made by externalizing the cost to future generations.
I don’t understand why you wrote this in response to the comment you replied to.
No matter which way you slice it, the UK and Europe using the oil from wells physically closer to them has to be less energy intensive that shipping oil / gas from far away.
What bearing does externalising anything have on that fact.
Demand isn't static.
Economics 101: if Europe taps new wells, global supply increases. Higher supply drives down prices. Lower prices induce more consumption.
We wouldn't just be cleanly swapping imported fuel for domestic fuel 1:1; we'd be making it cheaper to burn more fossil fuels globally. The marginal emissions saved on shipping are completely wiped out by the net increase in total carbon burned.
The only reason expanding that supply looks like a "win" on a balance sheet today is exactly because the long-term climate cost of burning that newly available fuel is still being passed on to the future.
> long-term climate cost of burning that newly available fuel is still being passed on to the future.
That’s not science.
That’s wishful thinking.
We can’t actually know the long term climate-costs of burning fossil fuels.
It’s unfalsifiable.
We don’t have a second identical Earth we can use as a control.
Expending the fossil fuel supply today (months) reduces the impact of global oil / gas shocks to people suffering high prices today.
Waiting for your team to invent new battery and storage technology, and littering the countryside with wind turbines and replacing the entire existing vehicle fleet does nothing to help people now.
Your initial claim was that Europe should start opening more wells for domestic production.
If they started right now, that would help with this current oil/ gas shock in the market? They wouldn't come online until far after this is over.
You know you're being disingenuous. This is not a discussion you're having in good faith so I'm going to just going to end it here.
It would be useful against future supply shocks, don't you think?
Months to years vs your plan of doing nothing for decades, with technology that doesn’t exist.
I agree, but that's the world we live in.
You’re willing to sacrifice the lives of at least some poor people who exist now, or are likely to exist in the near future, for a theory that is unfalsifiable.
That’s not since.
That’s brainwashing, and it’s not even good brainwashing.
> You’re willing to sacrifice the lives of at least some poor people who exist now, or are likely to exist in the near future, for a theory that is unfalsifiable.
What exactly do you mean with "unfalsifiable"? We actually measure atmospheric CO2, sea level and temperature; that's plenty falsifiability to me. And the greenhouse effect itself is not even in question.
Fossil emissions are sacrificing people not just from climate change in the future, but right now from air pollution, too (about 5M deaths per year actually, according to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38030155/).
Climate science wants us to ignore the geological record and ignore geological processes.
A cubic kilometre of lava at 1200 degrees C is enough energy for thirty (30!) hurricanes.
It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.
But climate science wants us to ignore all that and place the blame entirely on human caused CO2 emissions and cow farts, while we are literally living through and ice age.
I'm not sure what your position is.
If you think that the greenhouse effect is real (CO2 contributes to warming), why would human emissions not have any effect? we currently emits tons of it per year and person for a substance only in the 400ppm range-- even if you split a single humans emissions over a whole cubic kilometer it makes a substantial concentration difference already.
> It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.
No, this is not remotely plausible, because we have a pretty solid understanding of how much heat is transferred from the earths interior (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget), and this is completely negligible (and off by many orders of magnitude) compared to the oceanic warming that we already observe (for a 0.5K increase in oceanic surface temperature you'd need thousands of times the total heat that we get from the planet itself).
> It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.
You're mistaking possible for probable. There's no evidence to suggest that's the case, and lot's of evidence that it's from climate change. In science you follow the evidence, not your pet theory.
> But climate science wants us to ignore all that and place the blame entirely on human caused CO2 emissions and cow farts, while we are literally living through and ice age.
I don't think you understand either science or ice ages.
What exactly is your argument here? That organic chemistry is all wrong and oxidization is unfalsifiable, or that the fossil industry itself is fudging the numbers to make it look life we're oxidizing less organic matter than we think?
“Fossil fuel air pollution responsible for 1 in 5 deaths worldwide”: https://hsph.harvard.edu/climate-health-c-change/news/fossil...
It means having to make serious decisions on imperfect information, yes. But that's life.
It would be an inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration considering the deployment rates and cost decline curves of renewables and storage.
Ember Energy: European electricity prices and costs - https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an... (updated daily)
Ember Energy: Wind and solar generated more power than fossil fuels in the EU for the first time in 2025 - https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-gener... - January 22nd, 2026
Bloomberg: How Europe Ditched Russian Fossil Fuels With Spectacular Speed - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/ukraine-n... | https://archive.today/yxGp2 - February 21st, 2023
> But what the past year has shown is that it’s possible to go harder and faster in deploying solar panels and batteries, reducing energy use, and permanently swapping out entrenched sources of fossil fuel. Solar installations across Europe increased by a record 40-gigawatts last year, up 35% compared with 2021, just shy of the most optimistic scenario from researchers at BloombergNEF. That jump was driven primarily by consumers who saw cheap solar panels as a way to cut their own energy bills. It essentially pushed the solar rollout ahead by a few years, hitting a level that will be sustained by EU policies.
(Europe has enough wind potential to power the world, their energy constraints are deployment rate of renewables, battery storage, and transmission)
You're talking about electricity, so I assume your answer is directed to the natural gas fields at Groningen. The EU imports a lot of natural gas. Don't you think it would be better to have a domestic supply? It's better for the environment too.
Heck right now, Europe is still burning coal (and worse yet - lignite coal) for electricity. Natural gas would be a huge improvement on that.
Note that drilling for oil in the North Sea is a completely different subject, because that's not used for electricity generation, nor is electricity a substitute. EV market share in Europe is still far too low for that to be a conversation for a long time.
Your comment is wishful thinking and ignores the current reality of how Europe imports and uses energy.
But even if your best case scenario were somehow possible (and it really isn't) there's still money to be made exporting fossil fuels to the developing world. So your assertion "inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration" is just flat wrong.
No, everything can move to electricity, China is doing it, Europe can too. You are free to your opinion, but the facts and evidence are clear. If you would like an hour of time with an expert from Ember Energy to explain this, happy to pay for that hour of time for you to update your priors and mental model on the topic of Europe's energy transition trajectory.
> Note that drilling for oil in the North Sea is a completely different subject, because that's not used for electricity generation, nor is electricity a substitute. EV market share in Europe is still far too low for that to be a conversation for a long time.
Europe's EV uptake will speed based on the price of oil increasing and remaining high for the foreseeable future.
> But even if your best case scenario were somehow possible (and it really isn't) there's still money to be made exporting fossil fuels to the developing world. So your assertion "inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration" is just flat wrong.
The developing world is leapfrogging fossil fuels and going straight to solar, batteries, and EVs. What will expensive LNG do to this market? It will force them to renewables and electric mobility faster. Ethopia's uptake of EVs after they banned combustion vehicles is an example of this. Why did they ban combustion vehicles? Because they have no domestic fossil fuel supplies and the import cost was crushing them; their EVs are powered by domestic hydro electricity production.
Citations:
Surging Gas Prices Reignite EV Interest - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-14/iran-war-... | https://archive.today/BkAfR - March 14th, 2026
Global EV sales hit 1.1 million – Europe surges while the US slides - https://electrek.co/2026/03/12/global-ev-sales-hit-1-1-milli... | https://archive.today/nhIbF - March 12th, 2026
EVs Avoided the Use of 2.3M Barrels of Oil per Day in 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420092 - March 2026
Electric Vehicle Sales Boom as Ethiopia Bans Fossil-Fuel Car Imports - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068567 - February 2026
How we made it: will China be the first electrostate? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44101275 - May 2025
Massive global growth of renewables to 2030 is set to match entire power capacity of major economies today, moving world closer to tripling goal - https://www.iea.org/news/massive-global-growth-of-renewables... - October 9th, 2024
The World Hit ‘Peak’ Gas-Powered Vehicle Sales — in 2017 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-30/world-hit... - January 30th, 2024
I agree that it can. I won't live to see it, and I hope I live 50 years more.
You're living in a fantasy world that doesn't exist.
Global consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas all rose in 2025. We've not even peaked yet.[1]
[1] https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/12/record-fossi...
Doesn't the world only have about 50 years [0] worth of oil remaining in the ground? Climate change and war aside, it seems like that should be a major reason to accelerate the change to renewables.
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/oil/
No I don't think so. The oil industry is very good at discovering and developing resources previously thought to be out of reach.
People have been talking about peak oil for decades, as long as I can remember, and it never happened.
I think we're technologically capable of extracting more oil, coal, and gas than we would ever want to. We would cook ourselves with the damage we'd do to the climate. I think that's the real constraint - and I hope we pay attention to it.
Conventional oil actually peaked around 2005–2006, but the shale oil revolution in the U.S. and technological advances have certainly postponed peak oil itself.
Here comes the kicker, though: we obviously extracted the easy-to-access resources first. While there may be counterexamples, looking at ore grades makes it clear that this is not particular to oil.
What happens next is that the economics of the wells are getting worse, which means we need a higher oil price for them to be viable. This also results in a lower energy return on energy invested (EROI), which reduces the surplus energy available to transform our environment. Consequently, this implies slower growth in the economy. Which I think is pretty obvious in the west and would explain the explosion of debt.
I think your analysis is US-centric. I don't think non-shale oil has peaked yet globally.
What you say about the economics getting worse and lower EROI may be true. It certainly seems like common sense. There are some counter-examples though.
The inflation adjusted cost of extracting oil from the oil sands in Alberta, Canada has actually decreased over time, not increased.
But generally I'd expect increasing cost of extraction to be the norm.
I've done my best to educate with facts and citations. Appreciate the discussion regardless. My offer stands to pay for you to talk to a subject matter expert.
Edit (to respond to your edit):
> Global consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas all rose in 2025. We've not even peaked yet.
Do you think global LNG consumption will peak considering a material amount of production has been taken offline for the next five years as of today? If I am an LNG consumer on the global market, am I re-evaluating my options today for the next half decade of energy needs? And we are not even done yet with additional potential attacks on Middle Eastern fossil infrastructure as long as the conflict continues; there are more targets available, and more capacity that could be diminished for the foreseeable future.
Oil and gas prices jump after Iran and Israel attack gasfields - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47441351 - March 2026
Iran attack wipes out 17% of Qatar’s LNG capacity for up to five years, QatarEnergy CEO says- https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/2026/03/19/iran-attack-... - March 19th, 2026
From your citation:
> Renewable energy continues to expand rapidly, but not fast enough for a total reduction in fossil fuels. Emissions from burning oil are projected to rise by 1% in 2025, while gas emissions are set to increase by 1.3%, and coal by 0.8%.
These increases are not material in a world where 1TW/year of solar PV is being deployed. Global solar capacity doubles every three years [!!] at current rates. If that rate holds, without accounting for increases of that rate as more PV manufacturing capacity comes online, it will replace all fossil energy globally (not just fossil electricity, all fossil energy use) in under twenty years when you consider the efficiency gains of not burning fuel for energy.
Highlights of the global energy transition in 2025 - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/highlights-of-the-g... - December 17th, 2025
> Solar and wind are now expanding fast enough to meet all new electricity demand, a milestone reached in the first three quarters of 2025. Ember’s analysis published in November shows that these technologies are no longer just catching up; they are outpacing demand growth itself. Together, solar and wind supplied 17.6% of global electricity in the first three quarters of 2025, up from 15.2% over the same period last year, pushing the total share of low-carbon sources to 43%.
> For the first time across a sustained period, renewables, including solar, wind, hydro and smaller sources such as geothermal, generated more electricity than coal. At the heart of this shift is solar, whose growth was more than three times larger than any other source of electricity so far in 2025, confirming its role as the dominant force reshaping the global power system. Another analysis showed that the world is set to add 793 GW of renewable capacity in 2025, up 11% from the 717 GW added in 2024. At this pace, only a modest increase in annual additions is needed for the world to stay on track to triple global renewables by 2030.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-installed-wind...
The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746617 - June 2024 (66 comments)
We're making great progress, this is true. But we're also still increasing our consumption of fossil fuels.
Let's put a number on it. When do you think we reach 50% of today's consumption of fossil fuels? IEA seems to think it continues to grow until 2050. https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/iea-energy-outlook-2025-9.69...
If that's true, I don't think we reach 50% of current levels by 2100. That's my very non-scientific WAG. I'll be long dead by then. Europe, if they continued drilling in the North Sea and Groningen would have long since exhausted them - a great capital expenditure and investment to bring things back to the original subject of conversation.
What do you think? That would give me a good window into how realistic your view is.
I think where you're going wrong is perhaps not taking into account continued increases in per-capita energy usage worldwide. But of course that will happen, not just because of population growth, not just because of the rest of the world rising slowly towards Western standards of living, but continued technological progress which depends on energy (or at least it has been that way historically.)
Doomberg (the green chicken) correctly observes that when we add a new energy source to the mix, we don't tend to decrease our consumption of previous energy sources.
For example: global wood consumption for energy is at or near all-time high levels, with approximately 2 billion cubic meters (m³) of wood fuel consumed in 2023, up from 1.5 billion m³ in 1961. While the percentage of global energy provided by wood has plummeted from over 90% in the early 19th century to around 3-6% today, the total volume burned has increased, driven by population growth in developing nations and increasing bioenergy use in developed ones.
Those people, and the world in general, would be better off burning natural gas for heating and cooking, rather than wood.
But environmentalists in the west deny them that option because they don’t give a fuck about poor people, they can just freeze in the dark or choke on the fumes of whatever plant fibres / dung they can scavenge from the local environment.
I don’t know how else to frame it.
I spent, more like wasted, two decades of my live in the cult of environmentalism, and they literally just out and say it: some people are going to die in the transition away from fossil fuels, oh well.
That’s easy to say when it’s not you who’s going to freeze in the dark.
> Why did they ban combustion vehicles? Because they have no domestic fossil fuel supplies and the import cost was crushing them
Your closing argument is that some far away land with no nat gas / oil reserves of their own isn’t convincing anyone with nat gas / oil reserves of their own.
Europeans need inexpensive fuels to power their existing fleet or vehicles now.
Ethiopia’s plan doesn’t generalise.
Europe has no choice but to lean into low carbon generation and EVs now, their hand is forced by geopolitical energy events outside of their control. These options are objectively cheaper than attempting to develop new domestic fossil resources.
China will build every cheap EV Europe will buy if the EU cannot build them fast enough (citations on EU EV sales are in my comment you replied to), so buy them or experience economic pain and ongoing energy inflation from choosing to continue to burn fossil fuels for energy. These are straightforward choices to make. The clean energy path is the cheaper path, based on all available data as of this comment.
(from your profile, "They force us to use extremely expensive renewable energy to run our energy efficient extremely disposable appliances," so I'm unsure how effective facts and data will be in this discussion, but I am trying very hard to share the relevant facts as a shared foundation to discuss from)
Citations:
Germany's Solar Boom Eases Power Costs as Gas Price Jumps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323028 - March 2026
Lazard LCOE+ 2025 [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47184980 - March 2026
Wind power slashed 4.6B euros off electricity bills in Spain last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46622463 - January 2026
France's 2024 Power Grid Was 95% Fossil Free as Nuclear, Renewables Jumped - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42770556 - January 2025
I am 100% bullish on both solar energy and EVs, and I share your optimism around the technology.
But I think you're being too optimistic about what this means for global fossil fuel usage. Definitely over the next decade, but potentially over much longer periods than that.
> Europe has no choice
I’ve been following you for 13 years in this site, and I really expect more intellectually honest comments from you.
You’re trying to tell us that developing new battery technology, new storage technology, deploying more wind / solar and replacing the entire European vehicle fleet, is cheaper than building new oil / gas infrastructure.
I’m not buying it.
Regarding the comment in my profile, I’ve done warranty repair work on home appliances. Some manufacturers have moved to assembly methods that render appliances uneconomical to repair, or impractical. Also, in Australia, electricity price increases have been double or triple that of general inflation.
The comment in my profile is an objective assessment of the facts, not an ideological screed.
> I’ve been following you for 13 years in this site, and I really expect more intellectually honest comments from you.
I believe the failure is on your part, not my part, as I am simply providing facts. Whether you agree with facts is beyond my control. They remain facts. You keep stating, inaccurately, that renewables and batteries are expensive, when they are the cheapest combined generation technology. This is widely proven, and again, I am sorry if for whatever reason you are ignoring that fact.
> Also, in Australia, electricity price increases have been double or triple that of general inflation.
The facts do not align with your assertion. I have provided citations below to assist you in updating your mental model on the price and carbon intensity trajectory of the Australian power markets.
Power prices expected to fall by up to 10% from July, bringing ‘welcome relief’ to Australia’s east coast - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/19/power... - March 19th, 2026
> Power prices on Australia’s east coast are predicted to fall from July because of increased output from wind generation and batteries, and falling electricity contract prices, with potential savings up to $1,320 for some small businesses. In a draft decision on Thursday, the Australia Energy Regulator (AER) proposed a price reduction for customers on standing electricity plans – known as the “default market offer” – of between 1.3% to 10.1% for residential customers, and between 8.5% and 21.2% for small businesses, depending on the region. Savage said reduced wholesale prices were the “biggest driver” behind the draft decision for 2026-27. “We’ve had lots more renewables come into the market. We’ve had good wind, solar and battery performance.” The draft determination also introduces the “solar sharer” offer, an opt-in plan that includes three hours of free power in the middle of the day to take advantage of abundant solar energy. The energy minister, Chris Bowen, said the idea was designed to share the benefits of Australia’s solar success. “For households that can shift some of their usage into the free power period, this can mean real savings on bills, whether that is running the dishwasher, doing the washing, or heating hot water during the day.”
Solar is so cheap and plentiful (as there is not yet enough battery storage on the network to time shift this power), they plan to give it away for free for ~3 hours/day in parts of the Australian NEM system.
Australia's renewables boom delivers coveted power price payoff - https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/australias-renew... - February 10th, 2026 ("Australia's wholesale electricity prices fell to the lowest in four years in 2025, bucking the rising price trends seen elsewhere and validating claims that renewables-heavy power system overhauls can help lower consumer power costs.")
Near 100 pct renewable electricity for Australia’s main grid is achievable and affordable: Year 4 update - https://reneweconomy.com.au/near-100-pct-renewable-electrici... - January 29th, 2026
Big batteries oust gas in ‘transformational’ grid overhaul - https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/big-batteries-... - January 26th, 2026
Australia becomes world’s third-largest utility battery market - https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/10/21/australia-becomes-wor... - October 21st, 2025
Further data can confirm this at https://openelectricity.org.au/ (which has both carbon intensity and price data for all Australian electrical grids except the Northern Territory)
I’m an Australian living in Australia connected to the eastern grid.
I have the invoices from my electricity bills to prove my assertion.
I used to pay 12 cents per kilowatt hour, now I pay 36 cents or more. That’s a 300% increase for electricity prices vs, if I recall correctly, 26% for general inflation over the same 25 year period.
And you’re trying to tell me I’m wrong.
Why?
I’ll believe a drop in electricity prices when I see it.
Renewables do not reduce the need for grid investment costs between generators and you, that revenue and capital would be required regardless if you are unable or unwilling to produce all of the electricity to meet your domestic consumption requirements from rooftop solar and on site battery storage.
Wholesale generation costs + distribution costs + taxes = your bill.
> It feels like this collective insanity will never end
They simply do not believe that the consequences will be as bad as the models predict. And a lot of trust and good will has been expended on social issues, for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose, or to promote childhood reassignment surgery, etc. As a strategic decision, we have taken our eye off the ball, climate change is actually an existential threat, bathroom choice never was. You can argue that we can do two things at once, but there is a cost for dividing our focus and effort; even if it didn't raise the hackles of those already less predisposed to worry about the environment.
> And a lot of trust and good will has been expended on social issues, for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose, or to promote childhood reassignment surgery, etc.
I think a lot of people miss this: each time you take up the good fight, you spend some trust/goodwill. If you're going to expend the public's goodwill, make sure that there is nothing more important to you than what you are expending it on, or expend less of it to save some trust and goodwill for this.
> for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose
Ugh, I'm going to regret commenting here, but it really seems like this obsession is almost entirely on the right wing. In the US, the centrist Dems have been banging the appeasement drum for my entire political life, and it's gotten us nowhere.
Like... the right isn't going to wake up and start caring about climate change if everyone just shuts up and lets them discriminate against the hate group of the moment. The bathroom thing is also such a bait and switch, same as sports. In my state, we removed protections for housing and employment discrimination against trans people because... one trans athlete existed?
The real question we need to answer is why the right is so obsessed with other peoples' genitals, to the point that they have to make up stories and generate AI videos to get mad at.
I for one am sick of people focusing on a tiny fraction of the population and making them a scapegoat for everything. You're absolutely right that climate change is a bigger issue - so why can't we focus on it?
We can't focus on it because the anti-reality reactionaries are using trans people as a distraction. It's all one big malignant tumor on society, not a collection of unrelated issues.
The reality is that the US is divided on gender issues. Full stop.
It is a distraction and a useful one for MAGA. Among the Democrats, we keep getting tripped up by it and nominate candidates who don't realize the political land mine that it is. I am for gender equality, for racial equality, for renewables, for nuclear energy. But please win the election by prioritizing talking about jobs, jobs, jobs, economic disopportunity, and naked corruption. After winning the election, then you can address gender issues along with the full slate of Democratic platform priorities.
How are you supposed to know which Democrat secretly supports trans rights?
Dems are supposed to be able to talk frankly about their beliefs without the left wing of the party destroying them. There shouldn't be political consequences from within the Dem coalition for saying "I don't think we should have trans people in professional women's sports". Since the Dems can't talk about the policies, the right wing gets to take up all the attention on them.
Some Democrats do. Kara Dansky of Women's Declaration International, for instance.
Democrats were NOT talking about transgender issues. Conservatives were.
Democrats talking about jobs, economic disopportunity, and naked corruption gets no votes, because republican voters are not motivated by those. They are using those as talking point against democrats, but that is about it.
It's all about propaganda. Rightwing media is incredibly well funded and a big portion of that reason is because rich people have been using propaganda to boost their industries since almost forever.
Republicans in the late 60s were the party of the EPA. What changed? People like the Koch brothers dumped literal millions into rightwing outlets big and small to talk about how awesome it is to burn oil.
A similar thing happened with smoking. Rush Limbaugh, even as he had lung cancer, was talking about what a myth it was that smoking caused lung cancer almost right up until his death.
Whenever you find highly monied interests, you can find a right wing propagandist that will tell you black is white.
And the insidious thing is that they don't spend their entire broadcast talking about the glories of oil or smoking. No, the best ones just insert it in as little throw away lines while talking about feminazis, gay people, trans people, black people, mexicans, etc.
That's effectively how the propaganda works. Get people highly tuned up on an emotional topic and then just slip in here and there lies that you don't even think about.
As a kid, I listened to probably a thousand hours of rightwing talkshow hosts because of my parents. Once I started viewing things with a more critical mind it became beyond obvious what game they are playing. Unfortunately, not everyone picks up on this game.
The propaganda machine is powerful, precisely because the ultra-wealthy who fund it want the people to fight a culture war instead of a class war. The wealthy have been successfully astroturfing right-wing anti-democratic movements for decades, to the point that fascism is making a comeback. Climate-change denial was one of their earlier experiments, and anti-trans psyop is their most recent. The result is the same, creating false divisions among the masses who have more in common than they realize.
The world is burning before our eyes. It is unconscionable to use the rights and the bodies of the marginalized to put out the fire. What would be the point of making a better society if it requires leaving the most vulnerable behind? How would that even be a better society? We must be cognizant of who the real enemy is and never do the oppressor's work for them. Billionaires have class solidarity; for our planet’s survival, we must build solidarity as well. Fight the class war, and you fight climate change, transphobia, and all threats to life and liberty.
> the ultra-wealthy who fund it want the people to fight a culture war instead of a class war
We're capable of fighting more than one political war at a time. All evidence points to the donor class actually being vested in these culture war issues. Democrat donors prioritise Gaza and trans issues. MAGA donors prioritise Israel and Bible thumping. The Adelsons aren't donating to GOP candidates to distract anyome class issues, they're donating because they have non-economic policy preferences to push.
> the right isn't going to wake up and start caring about climate change if everyone just shuts up and lets them discriminate against the hate group of the moment
No. But a lot of people in the center will listen to academics again if they don't think they're being lectured on a new definition of bigotry every fifteen minutes.
Also, from what I can tell, the issue of trans rights caused issues in the centre when it lept to kids' sports. Even the bathrooms were mostly the edges of the political spectrum screaming at each other. But when it touched kids' sports, a lot of folks got off their couches, and that was–given the stakes–a sort of needless battle.
> No. But a lot of people in the center will listen to academics again if they don't think they're being lectured on a new definition of bigotry every fifteen minutes.
I get annoyed by some performative language games too, but I just don't see any evidence that your broader claim here is true.
> Also, from what I can tell, the issue of trans rights caused issues in the centre when it lept to kids' sports.
Most people are willing to acknowledge that the sports issue is a bit complicated, but it's also such an incredibly niche issue and so much lower stakes than everything else. People got off their couches for the sports thing because it's a "safe" environment in which to express hatred towards an out group. You can tell that it was never about sports by the actions taken by the loudest complainers on the issue (enshrining housing and employment discrimination, weird laws about forcing teachers to report violations of religious principles to parents, creepy nonsense like the bill to make lists of all trans people or mass cancel all of their drivers licenses etc.)
> climate change is a bigger issue - so why can't we focus on it?
What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction. To claim loud and proudly that transgender issues were not important when compared to climate change. To refocus the public on climate change and take the wind out of the fringe issue.
Instead, we took to the street for BLM, when it wasn't an important issue, when compared to climate change. You can't blame the right-wing for the number of people who filled the streets for BLM... during a pandemic where we were supposed to socially distance. It cost us doubly. And not one important left-wing voice stood up and said so.
> What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction
Here's the reality: very few people actually believe climate change is an existential problem. As you say, this is abundantly signalled by very few folks being willing to compromise on other beliefs to advance it.
Want to build infrastructure? Cut taxes? Suddenly, people can put their differences aside. Want to do anything on the climate? Everyone has a policy bogeyman to attach, whether it be union requirements and gender issues or immigration and religious tests.
There's a Guante lyric I really like about this topic that I think highlights how I feel about your argument:
"Those who turn hoses on water protеctors
Are those who cage "Stop Cop City" protеstors
And enforce the brutality of the border
Same ones who enforce bans on drag performers
Same ones who enforce bans
On crossing state lines for abortions
Some of those that work forces
Are the same that burn crosses
Are the same that burn everything
For the bosses"
I don't think we totally disagree, but I come down differently on where to point the blame.
> What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction.
I mean, that did happen.
> To claim loud and proudly that transgender issues were not important when compared to climate change.
That was said, along with housing prices/inflation/corruption.
> Instead, we took to the street for BLM, when it wasn't an important issue
Here's where you're really, really losing me. You're:
1. Pivoting to a totally different issue
2. Ignoring the role of the media in promoting the most controversial takes and presentation of both issues. It sucks to blame people for having values when the real problem is for-profit engagement-based media.
3. Ick - it really rubs me the wrong way to see people say "BLM wasn't an important issue when compared to climate change". That seems really easy to say if you're not under routine threat of state violence, but BLM was a reaction to a very real epidemic of state violence against black people. To those people, that kind of immediate threat IS as big a deal as climate change. If anything, criticize the branding of "defund the police" (which was so bad I half wonder if it was a psyop).
Moreover, part of my original point was that climate change isn't a separate thing - it's a problem because the same systems that use wedge issues to divide us all benefit from the unsustainable status-quo.
The realpolitik take on this seems so short sighted - it takes for granted that some progress can be made on climate change by ignoring our values, while also ignoring that alienating the affected groups makes it harder to change our society enough to do anything about climate change.
> 1. Pivoting to a totally different issue
No, i am not. It's the exact same issue. If you honestly believe that climate change is an existential crisis, then ALL other issues are by definition less important. That might be difficult to accept, because it feels like saying other issues aren't important. But that's not what i'm saying at all.
What i'm saying is, if something is about to destroy the entire world, then every other concern is a distraction. What does it matter what bathrooms we use, or if the police are using violence too much, etc?
Our actions speak to people who don't believe that climate change is real. Every time we take to the streets for ANY OTHER ISSUE, we re-affirm their belief that climate change isn't something to worry about.
You are showing exactly why we have been less effective at convincing people than we could have been. Because even you are diminishing the importance of climate change. Why should "they" give up any freedom, or luxury, in the name of climate change, if we give ourselves permission to assemble in public during a pandemic for a BLM protest, that let's face it, accomplished little.
> No, i am not. It's the exact same issue. If you honestly believe that climate change is an existential crisis, then ALL other issues are by definition less important.
You're using a very superficial argument and ignoring several of my points. If your literal home is on fire, is putting it out or running to safety less important than climate change? If you need to change an entire economic system to solve climate change, can you cavalierly ignore inconvenient members of that system that might be needed for a sufficiently motivated coalition? If you're worried about distractions, how can you blame the victims instead of the people committing the distraction?
> What does it matter what bathrooms we use
It ISNT about the bathrooms - that's the propaganda framing that you seem to have uncritically accepted. It's about random people trying to live their lives, and being denied housing and employment because of who they are. It's about the fact that we're talking about these people ONLY because of the propaganda machine.
> if the police are using violence too much
Must be nice that you apparently don't face the sharp end of this. To avoid triggering you with the "P" word, I'd suggest that your life experience is not universal and you should consider trying to understand a little bit about other peoples' lives.
> Our actions speak to people who don't believe that climate change is real.
And ignoring our values isn't going to convince those people, and those people will still think we're a bunch of woke idiots because their media has captured their minds.
> Every time we take to the streets for ANY OTHER ISSUE, we re-affirm their belief that climate change isn't something to worry about.
[all sorts of citations needed for unsupported reasoning]
I didn't ignore any of your points. If your house is on fire, then put it out. But DON'T start a social movement that distracts from climate change. Don't distract everyone by claiming that fire is the most important thing, worthy of gathering during a pandemic about.
This isn't about propaganda, well not in the sense you're using it. The argument, which you seem to disagree with, is the importance of focusing on a single existential issue, and ignoring everything else. To actually prove to people that are doubters, that WE actually BELIEVE what we're saying. That this really is the key thing to be worried about.
Everything else you're saying all amounts to the same argument, that climate change isn't important enough to take focus away from these other important issues. We just fundamentally disagree. And I contend your attitude is exactly why we have had so much trouble convincing the doubters that we're serious about climate change... when we're so willing to give just as much (if not more) energy to these other "distractions"
Your argument basically boils down to "Climate change is the most important thing, so action on any other issue is bad."
I don't see you responding anywhere to the general categories of criticisms I raised:
1. Climate change isn't one thing - it's a systemic problem in a system with lots of problems. 2. It seems ludicrous to assume that suddenly people will listen to us about climate change if we ignore other issues, ESPECIALLY because doing so would make us (or at least, me) moral hypocrites. We haven't even discussed direct causal issues, like political corruption. I honestly think no meaningful action is possible in the US on climate change until we have major reforms of our electoral and media systems - where does that put me in your oversimplified schema? 3. You're completely ignoring my argument about immediate needs. This is actually kind of funny:
> If your house is on fire, then put it out. But DON'T start a social movement that distracts from climate change.
The fire in this metaphor IS a social problem! Putting the fire out IS a social movement!!
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree, but either way - here's hoping we can do something meaningful about climate change. Have a good day.
Social action has a price, both in effort, attention, and goodwill; there is no free lunch. If you are blind to the COST of social action you will fail to realize how you are hurting our chances of fighting climate change.
If you honestly believe that it is an existential crisis, then you must accept that NOTHING WILL EXIST if we fail to address climate change. So any social gain we make fighting fires will be wiped out anyway if we fail to deal with climate change. That you don't see this, and that you are willing for all these other issues to share the stage with climate change, is a big problem. You want to blame the media, and the right-wing, and perhaps other things for the lack of progress, without fully comprehending your own part.
> In my state, we removed protections for housing and employment discrimination against trans people because... one trans athlete existed?
I think you're sort of proving the parent's point - when you're in an existential fight, is it really that important that you use the limited attention of the public to fight for the rights of a single person?
Trans rights ain't even that popular; most people are okay with "you think you're someone else? Well, fine, no skin off my nose". OTOH, the majority of people globally aren't okay with "It must be a crime if you don't treat me as a member of the opposite sex".
The identity politics, of all forms, sucked out much of the air from the room leaving precious little left for discussing things like climate change.
Whether we like it or not, human attention is a limited resource. If you're going to allow a few vocal nutters to direct the course of your discussion, then you can't very well complain, now can you?
I mean, that's what leaders are supposed to do - direct the discussion. When the opposition says "They want to let men into women's changing rooms", then you say "No, we don't support that at all".
I mean, voters find some things distasteful - you have to choose which of those things you are going to argue for, and which you are going to back down from.
Diluting your message so that you mention a little bit of everything is just dumb politics, because human attention is a limited resource!
I made my position clear in other comments, so I'll leave it at that. I do not find your arguments persuasive.
> when you're in an existential fight, is it really that important that you use the limited attention of the public to fight for the rights of a single person?
Yes. That's what rights are. If we don't support them for one person, we don't have them for any person.
> Yes. That's what rights are. If we don't support them for one person, we don't have them for any person.
That's not the question that was asked. The question is whether it is wise to dilute your message when the message is warning of existential threat?
The binary question of fighting for a rights was never contended. The question was weighting that specific right against an existential threat.
There's more nuance here than you're willing to admit (hence the resounding loss of the left).
> "It must be a crime if you don't treat me as a member of the opposite sex".
This is a thing that basically does not exist. This is, again, more right-wing culture war bullshit that was cooked up in a meth lab. It's not real.
Can you get fired if you purposefully antagonize your boss at work? Yes. That's always been the case. Guess what, if I call my boss a jackass I'm probably getting shown the door, and that's not even a pronoun.
Can you get in trouble for discriminating based on gender and sexual orientation? Yes, and that's been the case for a while.
Nobody is getting into legal trouble because they don't personally believe trans women aren't "real" women, whatever "real" might mean to them. Nobody, not a soul. It's just a non-issue.
What's going on is there is a set of people who are basically just doing nothing who are under constant new and innovative threats from the right. And, when they say, "hey, don't do that", we somehow have the gall to point at them and yell "Culture war! Culture war!"
It's not that people's goodwill is being burnt on trans people. It's that the right has been playing to the populist messaging they have in order to continue their crusade.
While the economy is burning down, and the climate is worsening, and we are entering wars, they are trying to convince you the problem is some set of people who are doing nothing. And, that the solution is simple: beat down this set of people.
This includes immigrants, trans people, gay people. Of course, it's just not true. But humans are stupid. We're already pre-wired to be uneasy around people we don't understand who are different from us, especially visibly different. And, humans understand and have high confidence in simple solutions.
I mean, God, look at the border wall. Will that work? Did that work? Of course not. But it's such a simple, almost child-like understanding of the problem that people had very high confidence in it.
> What's going on is there is a set of people who are basically just doing nothing who are under constant new and innovative threats from the right
Trans people haven't done nothing, there are many reforms that have moved the trans issue a lot that were pushed by trans people, that is not nothing. The right isn't innovating anything by rolling back those, they are just being conservative which is in their name.
You could argue those reforms are good, but you can't argue it is the right that is changing things here, the right just undo change they don't do the changing on these issues.
And you can't fault the right for trying to win the election. You have to try to win the election as well, throwing it away by sticking to unpopular policies such as trans in sports is just ignorant. It isn't just the right that doesn't want trans in sports, it is a large majority of the entire population that doesn't want that.
> I think you're sort of proving the parent's point - when you're in an existential fight, is it really that important that you use the limited attention of the public to fight for the rights of a single person?
Literally conservatives did that. THEY made this focus of the debate. Democrats reaction do not even matter here. It is ultimately irrelevant, because people like you then obsess over imaginary democrats positions democratic party never really had.
> Democrats reaction do not even matter here.
It does indeed matter - they were the ones who were insufficiently convinced of their nominees messages. Not convinced enough to vote for them, at any rate.
The opposition does not matter when your "supporters" don't vote for you because the message they received is different from the message you think you transmitted.
Conservatives focus on the points that splinters the liberals, and vice versa the liberals try to focus on points that splinters the conservatives. Liberals are very split on the trans issue, so it makes sense to focus on that.
It was a bad move to put themselves in such a position that they can't defend when conservatives attacks it, that was moving too fast and therefore we ended up with a conservative government.
You can say it was conservative that is to blame since they used this vulnerability of the liberals position, but you can also say that it was the liberals fault for doing things that is unpopular with a large part of their supporters so they are now in a vulnerable spot.
> Conservatives focus on the points that splinters the liberals, and vice versa the liberals try to focus on points that splinters the conservatives. Liberals are very split on the trans issue, so it makes sense to focus on that.
Not true. Conservatives are creating this point, because it makes their base afraid and more radical. It has nothing to do with what liberals do or don't do. It is not about splintering liberals, it is about creating a weak enemy so you can beat him. Liberals have two choices: join trans hate and gain no votes or do not join trans hate.
> it was conservative that is to blame since they used this vulnerability
I think conservatives are to blame, because they picked someone weak to bully him and use as political cudgel. Also because they lie.
> liberals fault for doing things that is unpopular
Except that it did not happened. There was no comparable democratic pro-trans campaign. You are just doing that funny thing where if there is a single person opposed to conservative agenda, then conservatives are absolved of everything.
> we ended up with a conservative government.
Conservative movement becoming fascists personality cult is the issue. In an alternative universe, there could have been pro-democratic lawful conservative government. Conservative did not had to imply what it does today. And conservative movement turning into what it is now is fully fault of conservatives.
In the US, it was the left who decided to push gender identity into law and policy, with no regard to the adverse consequences of doing so. That the right decided to capitalize on this for political reasons is just them taking an opportunity that was basically handed to them on a plate.
Interestingly it's a bit different in the UK. Both the main left and right parties had been promoting gender identity based policy for years, and it was only though the dedicated efforts of feminists who pointed out all the problems with this, and particularly the negative impacts on women and girls, that it recently started to be reversed.
I don't think you and I live in the same information universe, since I disagree with literally every thing you've said here. Unfortunately I don't have the energy to productively try to disabuse you of (what I believe are) delusions, misinformation and ignorance, so... have a nice day I guess.
Perhaps we have received different information on this topic. I am curious why you disagree though, as I consider my perspective to based in verifiable fact.
For example, in the UK, it was Theresa May's right-wing Conservative government who planned to reform the law to make it easier, and with fewer medical requirements, for people to acquire a Gender Recognition Certificate. They had a public consultation too. This move was supported by the left-wing Labour Party.
And in recent years, legal action and advocacy by feminist groups has been a highly significant factor in policy changes around this area, most notably For Women Scotland who took their legal challenge all the way to the UK's Supreme Court, winning the case with a statutory reinterpretation of the Equality Act.
The attention to those fringe issues is brought by those conservatives and lobbyists etc who explicitly want to distract and divide attention from climate change and renewables.
It's strongly my opinion that there are far fewer people championing 'wokeness' than there are 'getting outraged by it's pervasiveness'. Mainly for the fact that all media like to seize upon controversy, thus turning minor fringe issues into multiple days in a row of front page headline items.
Blech. I've done the same thing...
Address climate change, accelerate the shift towards renewables. It's something that actually fucking matters!
> It's strongly my opinion that there are far fewer people championing 'wokeness' than there are 'getting outraged by it's pervasiveness'. Mainly for the fact that all media like to seize upon controversy, thus turning minor fringe issues into multiple days in a row of front page headline items.
You fight this by keeping your own ranks in check. The right condemns nazis and racists, so you wont find any open racists and nazis in their ranks. The left doesn't do the same, so they leave themselves open to attacks based on having bad apples in their ranks.
You could argue the right is still worse, but you don't decide that the voters decide, so you have to clean up the ranks until the voters are happy with what you present, otherwise you leave yourself open to attack like this.
> The right condemns nazis and racists, so you wont find any open racists and nazis in their ranks.
This is flagrantly inaccurate.
You can't discuss any longer with someone who believes that. You're in "the sky is green" territory.
IMO, "wokeness" is usually a reaction to the reactionary.
Being transgender wasn't some sort of political football 10 years ago even though 10 years ago basically everything that was happening WRT trans individuals that made the pearl clutchers clutch pearls was happening then and earlier.
The only reason "the left" started caring about trans individuals is because right wing reactionaries decided that it was the source of all the ills of the world. It was a pretty natural "no it's not, you guys are being insane". Especially because as a result to the right losing it's mind over trans individuals, we are seeing all sorts of insane over reactions in the law (In idaho, they are passing a law with a 5 year prison sentence for a trans individual taking a shit in a public bathroom).
This is basically how the cycle goes. The right targets a minority, the left defends the minority, the media capitalizes on the "both sides" of it all at the exclusion of talking about things like taxing rich people, funding public services, or addressing climate change.
The only time I've seen the reverse was BLM, but it's pretty much the same outcome.
Dismissing all of this as some sort of right-wing moral panic avoids engaging with legitimate feminist objections.
It's not "insane" to question whether males should be allowed to access female-only spaces, or to resist the erosion of sex categories in law. Many women on the left have done exactly that, and have been vilified and harassed for it.
Kamala Harris started out with a surge of popularity. Talking about corporate price gouging and selecting Tim Walz as her running mate who had clear populist messaging.
Then the strategists who think like you got in her ear. Told her to stop attacking corporations to protect donations. Had her campaign with Cheney and talk about shooting home invaders. Then of course she refused to take a strong stand on the genocide in Gaza.
Her momentum faded and she lost. In the aftermath some braindead analysts tried to blame words like Latinx and transgender rights.
She didn't campaign on that shit. She campaigned as Republican lite and it fucked her.
The fascists aren't going to rewards you with good environmental policy just because you throw trans people under the bus. They'll just demand another sacrifice. Meanwhile gender affirming surgery on minors is so fleetingly rare that it basically only exists in right wing propaganda and here you are repeating it like it's a valid concern.
The funny thing is I don't think Kamala needed to be woke to win. She just needed to adopt policies the base liked.
Had she not campaigned towards conservative voters, I think she could have won. Really strong campaign positions like medicare for all or taxing the rich have pretty broad appeal. Heck, she even could have campaigned on abortion access and rights and that would have been pretty decent. She didn't need to touch or address immigration. And her "no tax on tips, me too" thing was just embarrassing.
Gaza was a major issue, and a major misstep of hers was to say that none of her policies would be different from Biden's. Even if that were true, she had a whole lot of popular policies and positions from Biden's cabinet she could have ran on (like breaking up monopolies).
She ditched all of that to run like you said and it absolutely crushed the giant boost she got from Biden stepping down and Walz calling Vance a weirdo.
> the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose, or to promote childhood reassignment surgery, etc.
This is entirely made up right wing hysteria. Complain to them for beating that drum constantly, because the more people hate the more they vote for them.
They're wrong.
A couple of years ago the last of the exploration rigs in Norway left Norwegian waters. Because nothing that could be drilled (and hasn't already) can compete on price with solar etc.
Lots of people think someone should do this or that. They don't invest their own money though, they just think someone else should do, etc.
How did 40 wells get drilled in the Norwegian shelf last year, and 42 the year before? You can't just make things up.
This appears to directly contradict you, with exploration activity increasing in 2025 (compared to 2024) to 49 wells:
https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/exploration/exploration-act...
You're right. There must be something more to it.
I notice that all the recent finds on sodir.no are close to existing fields, like 5km, or even in existing fields. My friend who told me this works in strange places, far from existing infrastructure. I assume there are different kinds of equipment, and he was talking about his kind, and I understood it to be more general.
If it's anything like the situation in the UK's part of the North Sea then it'll be development of new wells in existing fields rather than entirely new exploration.
The majors have effectively abandoned new drilling, leaving a bunch of smaller or independent players - but even they are mostly doing limited appraisal & development operations rather than exploration in the traditional sense.
If the Iran situation drags on for more than a year then there'll likely be a temporary increase in activity, but the declining trend will almost certainly continue in the longer term even without further regulatory intervention.
That's not so strange is it?
With respect to Groningen: 1. zero deaths reported ever 2. quakes in Groningen maxed out at 3.6 which is considered light. By comparison NL's worst earthquake wasn't in Groningen (North) but in the south of the country unrelated to the gas, a scale of 6. Again no people died. 3. the 450 billion m3 of gas left is worth 170 billion last month ('normal'), 345 billion at today's prices, and 1.6 trillion at 2022 peak prices. 4. Field used to supply 10% of EU gas, this shifted EU/Worldwide demand to Russian gas, helping them fund the cold-war against the EU and hot-war against EU's ally Ukraine.
Governments routinely put a price on a human life. The Dutch government puts a price of about 3-4m on a human life. i.e. if a policy measure costs 500m and is estimated to save 100 lives, it's deemed financially irresponsible because the 5m cost per life is more than the value set by the government. Whereas if a measure costs 100m (e.g. implementing an anti drunk-driving program) and it is estimated to save 500 lives, it's financially OK'd because the cost of 200k to prevent a death is less than the value of a life.
The estimates for the Groningen gas field are completely off. Even if you take another €50 billion out of the ground, experts don't expect an earthquake to kill any people. While on the contrary, if you don't, numerous people will die from alternatives (dirty coal and in russian war).
Should be move as fast as possible to renewables? Yes. But green advocates severely overestimate how fast we can do that. We have broken renewable records for 10 years in a row, yet we use about 80% of the fossil energy that we used 35 years ago. We didn't replace Groningen with renewables, we replaced it with Norwegian gas and US LNG imports, and Russia picked up the slack elsewhere because we dropped Dutch supply. So yes in the long-term renewables will make Groningen unnecessary, in the short-term we continue to use gas and keeping Groningen open longer seems to be supported by an objective analysis. Of course politics aren't just objective, they're emotional, which is why Groningen was closed, not because it was the best idea.
twitter is a self-selected group these days, even assuming these are real people and not some kind of propaganda op.
It's like going on stormfront and wondering why there's so many white nationalists on the internet.
Yes, this is correct, Europe energy policy is catastrophically behind and needs to pursue all paths simultaneously, because the future is very murky, Europe needs a LOT of power, and it's not clear which will work best:
- Continue building out solar + battery storage
- Resume drilling in domestic accessible offshore locations safe from trade disruptions
- Recommission and build new nuclear plants
- Build LNG import terminals to eliminate dependence on Russian gas
> we need to resume drilling in the North Sea and Groningen
Well, there's also the simple reality that the US doesn't actually need fossil fuels from the Middle East or Russia in the same way Europe does. It affects prices here, obviously, and an increase in energy prices can do severe damage to the economy, but it's not a potentially existential crisis in the same way.
Funny part about oil is that it’s in everything. US is energy independent, but its supply chain is not. AI chips, for example, which prop up the entire economy need oil for the various materials needed to produce it.
The other funny part about oil is that it has an inelastic demand. A 20% reduction in global supply doesn’t mean a 20% increase in prices. It means increase in prices until 20% demand collapses (which could theoretically mean orders of magnitude of increase in pricing). Which means expensive fertilizers, medicines and pretty every other bare necessity.
With these two facts, pretty much every country needs the oil from the Middle East.
Oh, I know, but "we are going to freeze to death in a month" is a far stronger motivator than "the economy is going to go into a tailspin".
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> It feels like this collective insanity will never end
You’re referring to Twitter, right? ;)
The Russian threat in the short term is very real and this is making Russia stronger. And the economic threat to Europe in the super short term is bigger then the one to America ... and will help internal fascist movements that are very much already empowered there (and sponsored and supported by BOTH Russia and America despite being very much homegrown).
So, like, both I guess.
"As someone who's been pushing for renewables for quite a while now it's dismaying that it's taken a war to accelerate this push, but I'm glad to see that it's happening at least."
It takes tremendous hardship and a lot of time to push people to renewables. Give them their cheap oil back and they are hooked on the needle again in no time. Historically we've been there, multiple times.
Sorry for the cynicism. I too hope it is finally happening at least, and maybe it is at last.
Resilience against geopolitical disruption has always been a nice characteristic of renewables (of course, centralizing the production in China is a mistake from that point of view, if for no other reason than the general danger of centralization). It is unfortunate though, if we needed an actual event to see this advantage.
Nobody wants to sacrifice growth today for stability tomorrow and there are good reasons why this stance makes sense.
That said I’m all for it, too bad the supply chain disruption that this mess will cause will make it twice as hard as it could’ve been.
"The concern about a new dependency on China is real,"
The dependency is latent, is only become a problem when you (USA) does something to dick with China's dependency on you.
If you don't do that, no problems. The rest of us live just fine depending on things from China.
Well, but in case you have already infra & ecosystem, you could then affort maybe to produce a little bit mor expensive in your own country, if supply from china will be under threat like oil today?
I would rather have solar everywhere and the risk depending on china (and the risk of producing something over market price) than the current ongoing forever riskof fossil dependency, because solar manufacturing you could resolve in theory in every country (at some scale), while fossil production is limited to a handful with no chance for anyone else to do it?
> renewables do have the advantage that once you have the infrastructure in place it keeps working without continuously importing fuel
There are issues if the infrastructure is network accessible and is updatable. The consumer end of it (e.g. home solar) is often dependent on apps etc. and is very vulnerable. I hope (probably optimistically) that critical systems are air gapped.
Its always been obvious to me that we should have a variety or energy sources for security and its complacent to think otherwise. Over-reliance on an unstable region makes it all the worse.
Germany is very slowly starting to understand, exiting nuclear power and installing a lot of intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar power, does not make your country independent of fossil fuels.
China builds a lot of renewables, but they don't build them to replace fossil fuels, they build them in addition to fossil fuels. We should absolutely not follow this way.
Germany has plenty of coal (and gas) plants for when the dunkelflaute happen: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
But even if it didn't, not only grid-scale but also large-residential-scale batteries+PV is cheaper in Germany than industrially priced nuclear, and even "small" batteries+PV are cheaper than residential electricity: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...
But electrification of transport and heating is more critical at this point than the inevitable short-term changes to electricity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Yes, Germany has plenty of coal reserves. Germany has about as much subbituminous coal & lignite reserves as U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_reserves (But neither should Germany, U.S., China, India or any other country burn fossil fuels if possible).
The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) are pure generation costs, you take total cost of generation (building power plant, operating costs, fuel, decommissioning) over expected life time and divide it total produced energy produced over expected life time. You don't take into account electric network as physical and economical system. For example you disregard transmission, demand for electricity, costs of stabilization of the energy grid, costs of backup - dunkelflaute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCOE
The main problem of German electrification (and in general the whole Europe) are too high prices of electricity.
The problem of too high CO2 emissions are too low CO2 prices (zero in U.S., low in China).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
> Yes, Germany has plenty of coal reserves.
I don't care, I was talking about power stations. Look at charts linked in previous comment.
> For example you disregard transmission, demand for electricity, costs of stabilization of the energy grid, costs of backup - dunkelflaute.
I literally said the word "dunkelflaute" on the first line; and I have absolutely accounted for that, that's why I said what I said about batteries, and why even with those renewables are cheaper.
Transmission and demand are approximately identical for all power sources, modulo only where the specific power lines go. Well, that and that in principle one can be off-grid for PV+batteries at a reasonable cost (especially for new builds given how much a grid connection costs in the first place), which is itself rather novel, but IMO will only be worth accounting for when almost all vehicles are EVs and/or literally all new houses come with PV and it's no longer optional (last I checked this was not yet the case).
If you want to go off-grid I would recommend in addition to PV+batteries also a passive house. In the long-term costs nothing beats good thermal insulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
The grid connection cost are so high because the high electric system costs, which are distributed to the market participants using grid connection cost: the transmission costs (upgrade costs of electric lines - digging earth is surprisingly costly, overhead power lines are cheaper but they are not for free, upgrade costs of transformers), costs of backup - Germany plans to build new gas power plants, which will have a very low utilization.
The only thing that is dismaying you about this war is the fact that it caused people to push for more renewables?
They didn't say 'only'. Unless there was an edit after your reply
I guess the oil industry is laughing their ass off nowadays. They can sell at such a premium. Inflation? YP.
It’s just pulling forward future gains while shrinking the time horizon, if the world speeds the transition to renewables and electrification from this. Short term gain for faster irrelevance.
Oil to $200/barrel please, as long as possible, same with LNG.
Edit: Iran attack wipes out 17% of Qatar’s LNG capacity for up to five years, QatarEnergy CEO says - https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/2026/03/19/iran-attack-... - March 19th, 2026
Looks like the global clean energy transition will be getting back up to speed.
Businesses are short termist these days. They will be happy to pull forward gains. Shareholder value, right?
Certainly, but you can solve for that with windfall taxes or nationalizing the oil industry in your jurisdiction, if there is the will. Based on all available evidence, the will does not exist.
Broadly speaking, the overall system dependent on energy must adapt or die. The capital exists to decarbonize rapidly. How hard the arm must be twisted is the natural experiment to observe. In the meantime, all critical fossil assets are legitimate targets in the operating environment.
These are all choices. If you are unhappy with the outcomes of choices you have the authority to make, make better choices.
Heh, depends on who's nationalizing the oil industry. Isn't that the common thread for the present-day situations of Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba?
If you tell me I can make 10 million bucks this year, with the penalty of not making anything for the rest of my life, I guess I don’t mind?
Would you have made it anyway? Can we stop you? Does it cause a negative externality that will be more rapidly diminished if you pull forward this gain? Consider it a premium paid by fossil fuel consumers to encourage a more rapid transition from fossil fuels by pushing pain into the energy market for the next half decade.
Congrats to those who won the lotto, enjoy your luck.
Eh, definitely not me, still a salary slave. But yeah kudos to whoever won the oil lottery.
It will take longer than the duration of the war to realistically transition to renewables in any quantity that truly matters.
So the oil companies are happy because this temporarily brought forward future demand and thus profit, as well as expend a bunch of money/resources from competitors of oil which predicates a high price per barrel to make financial sense. If/when oil prices drop back down, these renewable investments might not compete.
To truly transition over will mean doing it with the world kicking and screaming imho. It cannot be made smooth.
Oil companies love $90 oil, but much higher than that and you start to run into demand destruction issues in the medium term.
> It's doubly dismaying that my own country (US) is still doubling down on fossil fuels despite everything.
A few get rich. Project2025 (that is, their hardwing agenda is the cover up for theft).
We need to monitor these guys and then take back what they took from all of us globally.
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Thoughtful comment.
Please read hn rules.
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But why does US need any of that? It's a massive exporter of fossil fuels and will be much richer as a result (but yes just as every other way of getting richer, it will also increase inequality).
The argument that high oil prices are good for America is one of the most ridiculous ideas being pushed right now. Yes, on a trade deficit front, it slightly reduces the net amount of money leaving. But we are also the world’s largest consumer of oil, and it literally powers every part of our economy.
Saying that America is better off with high gas prices is like saying Americans will eat more beef if the price of beef doubles because we make lots of beef. Cattle ranchers will be better off; everyone else eats more potatoes.
Think of it this way: less trade deficit means more imports that come through without causing extra damage. It means more cheap products of all kinds for everyone.
And yes this is exactly how petrostates work. I wonder why is it surprising. Sure their population also pays higher prices for gas at the pump when the oil goes up, but they massively win in every other way.
It's simply a long, embedded stereotype of "high oil price = bad" because of traumatic experience of 1973 and 1979. It's different today. The higher the oil price, the better it is for America.
Also again, US gas prices are by far the cheapest among every halfway developed countries. Everyone else will suffer more. So relatively again, US wins even here.
It causes massive inflation of goods and food prices, as farming and supply chains are heavily dependent on fuel prices. How is runaway inflation “massively winning in every other way” for regular americans?
The price of oil isn't just about the "cost of gas at the pump". It's about how much it costs to transport anything. There aren't many products that don't need to be transported or that don't depend at least partially on something that does.
So yeah, when the price of oil goes up, oil companies make more money, and prices go up for pretty much everyone.
The difference between the US and a petrostate is that the US is rich because we use gas, not because we make gas. Put differently, petrostate economies rely upon on oil revenues; we rely on the actual product at every stage in our economy.
There is a segment of our economy that does benefit from oil revenues, but the vast majority of our economic output involves oil consumption.
> US gas prices are by far the cheapest among every halfway developed countries
Most of the retail pump price difference is self-inflicted, though. If those other countries wanted to suffer less in that regard, they know how.
"Oils ain't Oils" - old motor oil company slogan from the 1980s.
What the US exports isn't "car ready" - most primary oil sources are heavily biased one way or the other (heavy, sweet, light, etc) and the useful end product is blended.
It's not straightforward for the US to get high on it's own supply and even what it delivers to others is less useful to thse others when other non-US sources aren't readily available to blend in.
Also ... using sequestered carbon has been increasing the insulation factor of our common atmosphere, left unchecked (ie. stopping the use of fossil fuels) is a major problem for the coming century.
Burning fossil fuels also raises the global temperature, reduces air quality, and people still have to pay more at the pump.
But US mostly wins from global warming relatively, right? I mean, it's going to suffer less than others (except EU), for geographical reasons, thus winning. I don't think global warming is a concern for US at all (some places sure, Florida will be royally fucked, but not most places).
The big winners from global warming will be Russia, China and Canada - places that will become more habitable.
Its not just Florida. There are multiple problems. Many can be mitigated, but I very much doubt they will be as its easy to put off.
This seems like soft trolling. Global warming is canonically the opposite of a zero sum game. Everyone is losing.
Everyone is suffering sure, but what matters is relative degree of it. Side that suffers less, wins against others and that's the only thing that matters.
And no, in China global warming means worsening desertification, in Russia it means melting permafrost that covers 60% of the country, same in Canada. Europe and the US are uniquely positioned to suffer the least from it and many industries will win outright. For example, there will be year-round tourist season within continental EU: all summer on the Baltics and the North Sea and all winter in the Mediterranean; winemaking in Spain and southern France will suffer badly and in some places may become commercially non-viable, but will expand to great lot more territory in northern Germany, low countries, Poland, UK, thus enabling a lot richer wines due to great variety of soils.
> Everyone is suffering sure, but what matters is relative degree of it.
Is that what matters?
> This seems like soft trolling. Global warming is canonically the opposite of a zero sum game. Everyone is losing.
No not everyone loses, people in colder climates win a lot from global warming, especially Russia and Canada. There is so much land there that is currently not viable due to being too cold that will open up from global warming.
Don't forget all the states in the middle that are experiencing the worst drought in a millenium, with snowpack and river flows at record lows, all while each state is adding more people (and thus more water demand), and interstate river compacts expire, and years-long negotiations on a renewal have been fruitless.
In the short to medium term, sure . . . again, left unchecked gets bad for every human when tipping points are passed.
Eg: When surface ice gets very low the trapped heat will go more torward heating water than melting ice.
That's very double plus bad (ask a high school physics teacher about the energy used to melt, say, a kilogram of ice .. then ask them by how many degrees C does that same energy raise the temp. of water).
Being a net exporter of a global commodity is only relevant in an extremely acute crisis (e.g. WWIII).
Plus one of the reasons why we export so much oil is because it's cheaper to import oil to a refinery in New Jersey from Saudi Arabia than to get it there from Texas due to some very stupid US laws.
Assuming you mean the Jones Act?
Hello, could you please elaborate about those laws?
The Jones Act requires that all goods transported by water between US ports be carried on ships that were built in the US, fly the US flag, and crewed by US citizens. That effectively makes it impossible to ship oil between US states at scale without a direct pipeline.
Though to be clear I believe we would still be a net exporter without the Jones Act, it's just one of those weird things about the US oil industry.
Unfortunately much of China’s perverse tactics (they’ve done this in a wide array of industries) is to steal patented tech and trade secrets from companies outside China, subsidize the manufacturing and development etc, then sell their product at an artificially low price which kills the original company and good faith competitors as they cannot compete with the artificially lower prices.
Then once the dust settles they’re the only company which can handle large order sizes required for supply chains to build downstream products, and the world becomes further reliant on them.
Security concerns and national defense aside, a prime example pre-ban was Huawei layer 1 infrastructure products which far exceeded feature density, and cost effectiveness than competitors due to the subsidies. They’ve done similar tactics with solar panels.
This doesn’t imply China or their state sponsored companies never create novel tech, but there’s a hugely perverse system whose purpose is to illegally undercut competition overseas with no real recourse from the victim countries outside of total company bans. And even then, people find a way around the bans and the damage is already done to the original companies.
Solar panels: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2021/12/09/chinas-state-sp...
Huawai: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/chinas-huawei-threat-us-na...
At this point, I guess I don't really care.
The reason china was able to do this is because of the free trade movement that started with Reagan to undercut US unions. US companies outsourced all the manufacturing as much as possible and china capitalized on the market opportunity.
Am I supposed to be mad that jobs shipped to china who steals a tech weren't shipped to Vietnam who hasn't stolen tech?
China is hardly the only country that has used internal policies and loose intellectual copyrights to get ahead (Famously, the US did the same thing in the late 1800s, stealing factory designs from england). And part of the reason US companies still do business with them is because they are cheaper.
Ideas are cheap and execution is what matters. Any attempt to "own" an idea is an exercise in futility and a sign that you probably suck at execution. Sorry, but we should be encouraging competition and reducing barriers, not sitting here crying that the Chinese are running laps around us because of intellectual property "theft"
Really? How did anywhere get started?
Germany ripped off British engineering texts because they had no copyright laws there.
America got started taking what was started elsewhere, the same can be said for any country except for Scotland.
I think those lovely Chinese people would laugh at your sinophobic 'thinking'. Maybe stay off the corporate media and do your own research.
Huawei are an amazing company, all of their kit is highly innovative, but too good for you and your slave masters. Hence the lies. In fact, if you want a computer that isn't 'NSA Inside', go with Huawei. You won't look back, although they won't sell you a PC with Nvidia in it or a phone with Google in it because of your government.
Solar panels? Germany did the work on that, China bought the IP and did the production engineering. All is legit.
Besides, that screen you are looking at, was that made in America? Nah, it is going to be China, outside chance, Korea.
> the same can be said for any country except for Scotland.
Found the Scottish shill. Big whiskey won't rule the world forever, you know!
It's whisky, not whiskey!!!
I am an English person exiled in Scotland, and you would be amazed at the industrial heritage here. Scotland was once used by England to outsource manufacturing, much like how China fills that role now. Shipbuilding got too expensive in England, so the folks on the Clyde provided a better deal. It was how globalisation got started.
I have heard it said that Scottish people invented 'everything', and, after a tour of the museum full of ships, trains, trams, bicycles, cars and much else, I am not going to object to the wild claim, particularly since I am outnumbered up here. Scotland is a very friendly place, but I tell people I am from this little country that can be found south of the border, asking them not to judge me!
subsidize ?
no all that shit just not worth that much;
The profit marginsof these industries are ridiculously high, to the point that if you’re willing, you can manufacture many useful, high‑quality products.
only when China could build them, there are real "free" market
And the US subsidizes corn and attacks other oil producers. And Korea puts tariffs to benefit their local technology industry.
Welcome to the real world. Whoever isn't cheating is losing.
Yeah, I live in Spain and probably once again we'll have restrictions on AC in the summer just like at the start of the Ukraine war. Hopefully, we can avoid actual blackouts.
The bizarre thing is that our government still wants to close down the remaining nuclear power plants. One of the issues with our proportional electoral system is that smaller, more extreme parties can become kingmakers and in our current situation the centre-left governing party relies on the support of the far-left party to stay in power, and those guys are rabidly anti-nuclear power.
But this should be a clear signal that we need renewable power and nuclear power and we need to speed up the adoption of electric vehicles. Ending the tariffs with China that stop us benefiting from their affordable PV panels and electric cars would be a good step towards this.
Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear. In the case of Spain, it is cheaper to build more energy lines with Morocco and battery storage than to use nuclear. Spain already has some of the cheapest energy in Europe thanks to renewables.
In the case of Germany, nuclear makes sense, but it is not clear where you would buy fuel for it, It might still be a supply chain risk since Russia and Kazakhstan are the main players there.
It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments. Without them, closing power plants (of any kind) is, IMO, nonsensical.
Ironically, Spain has plenty of Uranium, but there is an environmental law that doesn't allow its mining.
https://alpoma.medium.com/uranium-in-spain-8ef975763257
This country is crazy.
> It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments.
The outage in spain had multiple complex causes.
While the grid had a rather routine instability/oscillation on-going during time of the incident, the actual point-of-no-return was completely non-technical: Prices crossed into the negatives, which caused generation to drop by hundreds of megawatts and load to increase likewise within a minute (!) because the price acted as a non-technical synchronized drop-off signal for the grid.
In grids where the price action is not forwarded directly to the generators and consumers there would be no incentive to suddenly drop off decentralized generation. So for example in Germany a black-out would not happen like this.
You can download the full ENTSO-E report here: https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/blackout/28-april-2025-ib... (See page 10 for a broad incident timeline)
Unfortunately, to have an informed opinion, you pretty much have to read all these pages, because the situation is just so complex. Otherwise, you just fall for agenda pushing from all sides.
Yup, its interesting that a community supposedly of "engineers" are happy to claim expert knowledge of domains in which they have no experience.
That being said, I was apparently also under the impression of outdated or just plain wrong information.
While the report I listed mentions the sudden loss of decentralized generation as starting point of the blackout, and also specifically mentions small-scale rooftop PV, it says that the cause for that sudden synchronized drop-off is actually unknown.
You can't get an "informed opinion" by reading crap like that report.
The Spanish systems have systematic design failures for stability and electricity market design. Working out the political failures that led to the design failures is much harder.
Consultancies like https://www.nera.com/capabilities/power--utilities--and-rene... specialize in advising about electricity networks and market design.
Only those working closely in that profession have any knowledge of the underlying causes.
Most everyone else (including this comment) is different levels of ignorance and cluelessness.
Edit E.g. Crap quote from the report "but no significant oscillations with amplitudes above 20 mHz". The rest of it is about that level from what I could tell.
> crap like that report
> Only those working closely in that profession have any knowledge of the underlying causes.
This report is literally from the ENTSO-E which is the main regulatory body for the grid in Europe.
> Crap quote from the report "but no significant oscillations with amplitudes above 20 mHz".
What is the "crap" about that? An amplitude can still be measured in Hz, if you are looking at oscillating frequency deviations, if that is what you mean.
Very timely, the final report has been released today.
I hadn't read the document you referenced, and I admit don't have the prior knowledge, nor the time, to fully understand all the implications of what it says. My opinion is then the result of reading and listening a variety of experts and news sources, and it will have some biases, for sure.
Still, I have skimmed the final report to see if there was something that I could understand from first hand (and to support my original point, not gonna lie), and I found this:
_The increasing penetration of variable renewable and distributed generation, further market integration, broader electrification, and evolving environmental and geopolitical risks place the European electricity system under increasingly challenging operational conditions, requiring higher levels of resilience._
Do you really think that my original point (as uniformed as it might be), namely, that the levels renewable energy currently present in the spanish grid require significative investments, was wrong?
Yes, I think it's wrong, or at least way over-exaggerated.
You can run a grid to supply approximately 80% renewables (long-term average) without significant technical changes.
Only if you want to get the last 20% to renewables, you get technical challenges, e.g. related to synchronization and load-matching. But that is also not unsolvable problems, e.g. instead of relying on the inertia of steam turbines you can "just" build specific-purpose fly-wheels to do the same thing. It's just less elegant.
Source: Volker Quaschning "Understanding Renewable Energy Systems", too lazy right now to look up the exact page.
This is also consistent with the section they quoted. Generally, the load matching in grids is done by the system itself. If you add more wind and solar, which depends on the weather and location, you have to more large-scale intervention, e.g. allow generation re-dispatch. But that doesn't immediately imply that this is a dangerous process.
I have not read the report yet, but in another thread someone gave a very plausible explanation of what happened.
The high levels of renewable energy happened to contribute to this incident, but not because of something inherent in renewable energy. All renewable energy sources are connected to the grid through inverters, and in Spain most of these inverters do not use an adequate control policy, i.e. they do not compensate the phase fluctuations of the grid, like the synchronous electromechanical generators do (i.e. they do not generate an appropriate amount of reactive power for compensation).
Technically it is easy to implement such control policies in all solid-state inverters, but it was not done in Spain because there were no incentives, i.e. there were no regulations specifying how the inverters connected to the grid should behave, otherwise than disconnecting when the frequency went outside a permissible range.
Yes, that is plausible indeed, but the problem is that there are many explanations which are plausible, but there doesn't seem to be a smoking gun.
Strange about that explanation for example is that the time correlation is backwards. First the solar generation started to drop out and only then central generator stations tripped. Also the on-going frequency oscillations had already stabilized. If it was related to frequency issues, the solar inverters would either have shut down 15 minutes earlier (while the frequency oscillations were at the peak) OR 1-2 minutes later (when power stations tripped and frequency would have dipped)
But doesn't nuclear power present a complication when designing a power grid for renewable energy? It is basically very expensive caseload energy that needs permanent demand, when the entire proposition of a renewable-focused grid is that you manage a non-certain production with dynamic demand (via batteries and price-sensitive usage).
Nuclear production doesn't react in seconds but it doesn't need permanent demand as far as I know? What makes you think that?
A nuclear reactor can load-follow (increase or decrease their output) by up to 5% of their rated capacity per minute in normal operation: https://snetp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/SNETP-Factsheet-...
For power plants, this is glacial. A power grid has to balanced perfectly on a sub-second level. Also, you can only do this down to about 50% of rated capacity. Below that you have to switch it off completely.
If you combine this with renewable generation, it all falls apart. A cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop generation much faster than nuclear plants will ever be able to follow (by increasing generation). So if you want to have a substantial share of renewable generation (which, remember, is the cheap stuff), you can't have more than a token nuclear capacity, because you need to invest the money you might want to spend on nuclear on battery and hydro storage.
The other aspect is the economics of nuclear itself. Nuclear power plants are the most capital intensive generation capacity you can build. Even when driving them at the maximum of their rated capacity, the have a levelized cost of electricity several times that of PV and Wind per kwh. Requiring routine load following for nuclear would basically guarantee that no one ever builds a nuclear reactor again.
There are reasons to build new nuclear, but it's not cheap/reliable power generation. You build it to have access to a nuclear industrial base, as well as the research and professional community to run a military nuclear program. Or you actually succeed in creating a Small Modular Reactor, which might be suitable for niche applications (i.e. power isolated communities in extreme remote locations). Or you are simply fascinated by the technology and want to invest a ton of money on the off chance that it will produce some unforeseen technological breakthrough (though arguably you'd do better with investing in nuclear fusion from my limited understanding of the research).
> If you combine this with renewable generation, it all falls apart
Rubbish. Only true if the renewable generation is poorly integrated. Solar plus batteries can provide synthetic inertia if the incentives/regulations are correctly designed.
Australia has been adding oodles of solar, and they have been doing it surprisingly well.
Nuclear can load follow, within limitations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254716
> Solar plus batteries can provide synthetic inertia if the incentives/regulations are correctly designed.
Yes, but why build nuclear at all, if you are already building PV + batteries? Nuclear is much more expensive than that combination. And if you add nuclear capacity on a level that actually matters (i.e. 30%+ of peak load), you run into real integration problems.
As I've written elsewhere, a toke nuclear program can make sense if you want to keep the industrial base, institutional knowledge and expertise around, i.e. to guarantee independent access to nuclear weapons. But it is ludicrous to make nuclear a cornerstone of your energy policy. Not even China is expanding its share of nuclear in total energy generation. They keep it around as a strategic asset, but a subsidized one.
For countries like Denmark and Spain I'd be pulling my hair out if my government would start throwing money into the money pit that is nuclear power (and it is inevitably is government money, because no nuclear power plant has ever been built without government subsidies and/or price guarantees).
> Nuclear can load follow, within limitations
Yes, but it makes zero economic sense to do so. Nuclear is multiple times more expensive per kwh than PV + batteries, even if you run it at max capacity continuously. If you require nuclear to load follow on a regular basis, not a single reactor will ever be built again.
> Yes, but why build nuclear at all
I wasn't suggesting that. Why did you assume that and then argue against something I didn't say?
For reference: nuclear power plants can do load following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#Nuc...
It's more cost efficient to keep them running all the time since most of the cost of nuclear is building the power plant, but power output can be adjusted if needed.
Please tell me how renewables cause a lack of reactive power. Which was the source of the Iberian blackout.
All reasonable grids already force renewables to handle reactive power if they want to connect, like they do for all electricity generation.
It is a trivial expense, but still an expense so no one does it unless forced.
In another thread that comments the report it was said that most inverters used in Spain for the renewable energy sources do not implement a control policy to generate an adequate reactive power to compensate the phase fluctuations of the grid, like a synchronous electromechanical generator would do. The inverters only disconnected from the grid when the frequency went outside the permitted range.
Ensuring that the inverters produce compensating reactive power would have been easy to do, but it was not done simply because there were no regulations that requested this. Obviously, as a consequence of the report, this is likely to change.
Yeah, been trivial forever. In the US it became a requirement for new all utility scale non-synchronous generators a decade ago. And then a bunch of statewide rules for rooftop solar as well.
https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/ferc-moves-implement-f...
No it's not. Nuclear plants are not compatible with climate change. Spain and it's rivers will be too warm to cool them down: https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
That may require retrofitting the plants to use open loop cooling instead of closed loop. That would increase water consumption.
Well only to certain point. When the rivers will naturally be too hot. You can start making them even hotter and it does not matter anymore.
Even if it didn't make sense to build new nuclear, that doesn't mean it makes sense to shut of existing nuclear.
Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today.
It is NOT cheap, it is cheap for sellers, because they account on the basis of a MWh being equally useful all the time. It isn't. There are TWh-scale shortfalls in winter because, and a medieval peasant understood this, a shortage of ambient energy is what winter is, and it's worth paying energy penny you have to avoid its worst effects.
Business is not better. I've worked in the chemicals industry, and conferences in Europe have been like a wake for the last decade. I've overseen large orders go to China because, I could not give a shit how much it cost, the European green alternative - for delivery within Europe - could not guarantee timeframes, due to reliance on renewables. The Chinese shipped product could. That is your "cheap".
You can buy uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, Mali, Canada, US, Australia, or the sea if you really want to, all of those have large reserves, and store multiple years' worth more or less by accident, modern industrial processes actually struggle to make sense at the low volumes nuclear requires. Bringing that up as a problem is just not honest.
Can you please source and explain your claims? They don't match my understanding.
For example:
> Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today.
Do you mean cost per country (not levelized?)? Even then, UK energy is not the most expensive.
They can't (because LCoE is a per-project or per-technology measure, not a grid-wide measure, for a start).
UK energy is expensive because we have gas-linked wholesale pricing. That's nothing to do with the true cost of renewables. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're being disingenuous.
(Gas-linked pricing was implemented for sensible reasons, but I don't see how it continues to be tenable today).
Yes, that's what I thought, but wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt.
>Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear.
With the storage for shitty winter weeks? What's the source on that one? Mind you I love solar since i'd like to go relatively off grid one day but i've heard too much bullshit around this.
>but it is not clear where you would buy fuel for it, It might still be a supply chain risk since Russia and Kazakhstan are the main players there.
There's a lot of locations from my understanding and a lot more that don't produce anything simply because Russia and Kazakhstan and such don't make it worthwile. It's a tiny share of the cost of production in the end.
Russia and Kazakhstan control almost 50% of global production and enrichment of uranium. Even today 17% EU supply come from Russia.
Uranium mining is not pretty, read about "in situ leaching" mining.
Kazakhstan does uranium mining but doesn't do uranium enrichment. Other big uranium mining countries, which don't do uranium enrichment, are: Namibia, Canada, Australia, Uzbekistan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Uranium_Mining_Prod...
"The following countries are known to operate enrichment facilities: Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium#Global_enrich...
Uranium enrichment is military and therefor politically very sensitive process.
I believe the standard is 4h of storage.
> Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear. In the case of Spain, it is cheaper to build more energy lines with Morocco and battery storage than to use nuclear.
But keeping nuclear open is an entirely different thing than building out more nuclear. OP was talking about the former, you about the latter.
Otherwise agreed on your point.
Existing nuclear power is acceptably cheap. For France the longterm LCOE for running their fleet to EOL is €60 per MWh.
The problem is new built nuclear power which costs €180-240 per MWh excluding insurance, backup, final waste disposal etc.
It also won't be online until the 2040s meaning it is entirely irrelevant as as solution to anything on a time scope not on the level of decades.
Yeah, but that reminds me of Nick Clegg in the UK in 2010 saying:
> By the most optimistic scenarios... there's no way they are going to have new nuclear come on stream until 2021, 2022. So it's just not even an answer
Well, now we are in 2026, and we still have the same problem.
The UK has had complete political unity on building new nuclear power since 2006. That tells you the timelines.
For Hinkley Point C with the latest estimate being the first reactor online (not commercially operational) in 2030 that gives a "planning to operation" time of 24 years.
For Sizewell C EDF are refusing to take on any semblence of a fixed price contract and they are instead going with a guaranteed profit pay as you go model. Where ratepayers handout enormous sums today to hopefully get something in return in the 2040s.
LCOE for 24/7 reliable solar electricity is a LOT higher than $60
The Americans can give Germany all the fuel they’d ever need. If you go solar, you are trading one supply chain dependency for another. France’s strategy is, once again, completely and totally vindicated.
> The bizarre thing is that our government still wants to close down the remaining nuclear power plants.
That is very weird, even Germany stated recently that closing down their Nuclear Plants was a big mistake.
For a very long time, I have always said France is smarter than what people give them credit for. Spain should take a peek over the mountains at France to see what a sane energy policy looks like.
Even France shut down the Superphénix. It was just built too! A waste of ten billion dollars because the government gave in to these extremist environmental groups. One of them even fired an RPG at it while it was being built.
Strange how there are so many progressive radical groups and somehow the anti-nuclear activists are the only ones that manage to change the energy agenda in favour of the very powerful lobby of the fossil fuels. The animal activists never changed the subsidies to animal agriculture, the activists for international causes like Palestine haven't managed much either.
... it was shut down in 1998, relevant section from German Wikipedia as the English version is lacking details:
In June 1997, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announced the closure of the power plant as one of his first official acts. He justified this step by pointing to the enormous costs the plant incurred. In the preceding ten years, it had produced no electricity for most of the time due to malfunctions. It even consumed considerable amounts of electricity to keep the sodium in the cooling system above its melting temperature. Each pipe carrying sodium and every tank was equipped with heaters and thermal insulation for this purpose.
... so it used a lot of energy while being shut down because of malfunctions for most of those 10 years. Seems like shutting it down was the best course of action.
It had problems but it was new technology. That’s always the case. Now only China, Russia and India have Fast Breeder Reactors.
Plus there was the pressure from Les Verts and Sortir du nucléaire, the Molotov cocktail attacks by the Fédération Anarchiste, the RPG attack by the Cellules Communistes Combattantes etc.
It was a highly political decision.
A lot of people thought France was just being arrogant for not going all in on becoming dependent on the US and maintaining their own ways of doing things. These past few years, it's been paying off for them. Hopefully other countries will wisen up and not allow their defense and entire economy to be dependent on the US or any other big country. It always comes back to bite them in the ass. The post WW2 decades were unusually stable and assuming it'll be that way forever is not wise.
You can't do everything, and the smaller your country the less you can do. France isn't doing other things because of the opportunity cost.
Of course the EU is bigger than the US and there is value in duplicated/distributed effort. The EU as a whole should be thinking "partner with everyone, but have our fingers in every single pot someplace just in case".
> even Germany stated recently that closing down their Nuclear Plants was a big mistake
Well that's because we have a new government, CDU was always in favor of nuclear power.
> For a very long time, I have always said France is smarter than what people give them credit for. Spain should take a peek over the mountains at France to see what a sane energy policy looks like.
Incidentally, if I remember correctly, one of the causes (or things that made it worse) of the almost day-long blackout we (Spain) had last year was because France disconnected one of the links to Spain without notifying us properly.
No, we did not. Katharina Reiche and that guy from Bavaria are certainly not "Germany" or the majority of Germans. No atom reactor is going to be built, it's just typical rhetoric from both of them.
Not even the major energy suppliers are interested in building new nuclear reactors.
I was not against prolonging the phase out for a bit, but we don't even have a permanent storage solution after all this time.
They aren't even compatible with climate change: https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
You don't need rivers for nuclear reactor cooling, they are just very convenient.
in the election that is running in Denmark right now it looks like nuclear power is back on the table.
Why would you invest in nuclear power, which is several times more expensive per kwh than wind + battery in Denmark, which also has excellent links to reliable hydropower from Norway and Sweden? Especially when your greatest external security threat is Russia which has openly threatened targeting nuclear reactors of a country they are trying to invade?
Not to speak of the inconvenient fact that Uranium is not a resource found in sufficient quantity in Europe and current European nuclear reactors get their fuel from Russia and Niger, not exactly reliable havens of stability.
Nuclear power makes certain sense for nations that want a military nuclear arsenal and are willing to subsidize nuclear reactors to retain the required workforce and research base. For everyone else it is a money sink and a complication when designing their grid for renewable energy.
> Why would you invest in nuclear power, which is several times more expensive per kwh than wind + battery in Denmark
Strategic mix.
I'm not saying its a good or bad idea, but nuclear can be used as a tool with batteries to make wind much more reliable. urianium sourcing can be an issue, but sadly so are batteries. (granted nuclear fuel is changed more often)
Nuclear is a strategic drone target first and foremost. It's harder to take out renewables and batteries because they are more distributed.
Not really - for either system, the transformer substations are the part that's vulnerable to drones. Any munition capable of breaching the outer containment structure of a nuclear power plant (let alone impacting the core, dozens to hundreds of meters further inside) is closer to a bunker buster than a drone.
What I'd really like to see though is heavy subsidies for synthetic e-fuel plants running a carbon negative process during off peak hours. That would work with both solar & nuclear.
Ok, nuclear is a strategic missile target. It's harder to take out renewables and batteries because they are more distributed.
Nuclear could be more distributed too.
The obstacles for small nuclear reactors have not been technical, but the fear that they may be more easily misused.
There are good arguments against nuclear, but not being more distributed is not one of them.
No I am not against that. I'm just against any medium-to-large to large nuclear reactor built in within striking distance of a credible foe. Which is to say, at this point in time, all of them.
But if we start producing Fallout style reactors everywhere, sure, why not.
> Strategic mix
Nuclear doesn't vibe well with a grid that is supposed to be dominated by renewable electricity generation. You can't simply increase or decrease nuclear generation and even if you could, it would make the economics even worse, if you wouldn't keep their utilization at maximum capacity.
So if nuclear is supposed to have a "strategic" effect on your electricity mix, you have a substantial (20-40%) block of your electricity generation that is essentially static. That in turn requires you to have static demand. But static demand is poison for a renewable generation. You actually want demand to be highly dynamic via grid-tied batteries and dynamic loads (i.e. electric car charging, scheduled appliances and heating, cost-dependent production) so that it can be tailored to supply and keep the grid stable.
> I'm not saying its a good or bad idea, but nuclear can be used as a tool with batteries to make wind much more reliable.
I doubt that this is a requirement for Denmark. There is tremendous hydro capacity in northern Scandinavia and the country is tied into the EU and UK grid.
> You can't simply increase or decrease nuclear generation and even if you could, it would make the economics even worse, if you wouldn't keep their utilization at maximum capacity.
you totally can, and for keeping the grid stable, they are absolutely grand.
But to your point, pan continental links are not that practical for making up ~30% of a country's peak demand.
> you have a substantial (20-40%) block of your electricity generation that is essentially static. That in turn requires you to have static demand.
If you look at the grid on aggregate, there is always a static demand. If you look at https://grid.iamkate.com/ you'll see the variance in use is 30% over 24 hours.
For denmark (and the UK) wind is a great source of power, but its not always there, even at grid level. Currently the UK uses gas to bridge that demand. The UK is rolling out batteries, and thats going to help with price in the peaks. (currently most of them are used to stabilise rather than "peaking") But _currently_ battery capacity is only really measured in hours. Ideally we'll be measuring capacity in weeks. The hard part there is pricing reserve capacity, especially as it leaks.
Now, where nuclear comes in, is allowing the grid to arbitrage night time production from nuclear, into peak demand or, when wind is short. (in addition to bridging/stabilising) This gives a country more options to
We will see something like this bridging capacity in spain in the next few years. They have a much less well developed battery grid, but have more sun so the generation is a bit more predictable day to day. The problem spain needs to overcome is the morning and evening peaks. From memory its something like 1-2 gigawatts (but it could be more.)
> The problem spain needs to overcome is the morning and evening peaks. From memory it's something like 1-2 gigawatts (but it could be more.)
The EU has collectively added 27 Gwh of battery capacity in 2025 alone. If Spain only needs anything close to 2 GW of load for around 2 hours in the morning and evening each, this seems to be inherently achievable.
> you totally can, and for keeping the grid stable, they are absolutely grand.
Nuclear plants can load follow at about 5% of their rated capacity per minute. This is glacial in the world of electricity.
At the moment, this would theoretically work, because you have gas peaker plants that can adjust much faster and pick up the slack while nuclear plants come up (or down) to speed.
But countries like Spain and Denmark want to have a 100% renewable grid within two decades (much shorter than the typical lifetime of a nuclear reactor). So gas peaker plants are increasingly not an option.
The reality of the grid at that point will be a lot of wind and PV capacity (because it is dirt cheap). Nuclear is not compatible with those on its own, because a cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop power much quicker than nuclear will be able to follow.
Of course you can build a ton of batteries to act as a buffer. And guess what, that's exactly what we are doing right now. But at that point, why do we need nuclear again? Simply building batteries is already much cheaper than building a substantial nuclear generation capacity and while batteries will continue to become cheaper while nuclear won't.
Also, if you require new nuclear plants to load follow on a regular basis, it completely destroys the already bad economics of the technology. You need to run those at capacity continuously to make even remotely sense.
> Nuclear plants can load follow at about 5% of their rated capacity per minute. This is glacial in the world of electricity.
which is why batteries are really great. We have couple of batteries that are 180 and 300gwh, which can turn on frighteningly quick. The iberian market is really young at the moment for batteries, they have a way to go before batteries make a dent in prices (which is great for us)
The spanish grid has about 16% nuclear: https://www.ree.es/en/datos/todate Now spain's grid usually has a whole bunch of solar sites in curtailment, which means they can turn on power fairly quickly. Which is where batteries come in, as the curtailment could be flowing into batteries, and that sweet sweet energy sold at a stonking profit in the evening.
But!
Denmark isn't the spanish grid. They have less predictability, so need bigger storage to account for the variability of wind.
>Why would you
I am unfortunately not the one empowered to make these decisions, nor do I know the reasoning of those who are, I just noted it seems back on the table based on discussions, maybe because
>Nuclear power makes certain sense for nations that want a military nuclear arsenal and are willing to subsidize nuclear reactors
since also on the table seems to be making a deal with France for Nuclear Weapons access, as I understand what I read.
Wind + Battery doesn't exist. Wind and solar renewables are dependent on natural gas plants at this moment. This is why nuclear is still a consideration, it's more "green" then most "green" energy.
Wind and solar are not "dependent" on natural gas plants. You can observe this quite well by simply building a wind or solar plant, connect a battery and a load. It works and it works well.
Many national grids do not have enough renewable generation capacity to satisfy 100% demand at all times yet. When renewable generation is not sufficient, the difference is made up with generation from fossil-fueled thermal plants. But the existence of thermal power plants shouldn't be confused with any form of technical reliance on them. 100% renewable grids are inherently possible. If only, because you can simply enlarge grids geographically to the point that wind and solar production averages out. In combination with planned overcapacity (you can simply "switch off" wind and solar if you don't need generation), you strictly speaking don't even need batteries. It's just much more economical.
>Many national grids do not have enough renewable generation capacity to satisfy 100% demand at all times yet.
When will it make sense for many countries? Because the difference between peak production and a winter dip for germany in let's say Berlin is enormous.
First of all there is no alternative that makes sense. Climate change is real and its consequences are more expensive and catastrophic than any trade-offs we’ll have to make for a 100% renewable grid.
The good news is that going 100% renewable is probably less onerous than most people expect. If we get our act together politically, we can easily build the grids, generation, storage and intelligent loads required. With the exception of a few industrial processes, the technology is already existing and economically viable, but it also gets better and cheaper every year.
I never get why people are so opposed to renewables. In the past (and apparently present), we have spent multiples of what we’d need for 100% renewables on stupid wars. Now we could transform our economy with dramatic positive consequences even if we ignore climate change completely (think air quality and corresponding public health concerns, as well as political risks associated with fossil fuels).
It will be one of the breakthrough developments of human civilization and unlock tremendous potential, but people are concerned with the aesthetics of windmills and bickering about minor subsidies, while there is literally an economic crisis going on because some ships with liquified dinosaurs on boats can’t get to their destination on time …
By that definition, nuclear is also “dependent on natural gas” because it’s a baseload power source that can’t dynamically follow demand.
I am a bit surprised that a engineer-heavy forum does not think about scaling of batteries.
If everyone in the developed world starts to build batteries massively - in the extent necessary to bridge multiple days of bad weather for millions of people, because that is what happens quite often in northern half of Europe in winter - there will be new strategic dependencies, at least during the buildup phase, and then in a smaller extent for maintenance and modernization. Instead of oil, lithium and other resources not present or not mined in Europe will become worth fighting over and blackmailing over.
When we are already undergoing such a massive transformation, I would like to have a bit more strategic independence, instead of trading Arab/Iranian/Russia pressure for Chinese/Bolivian/Congolese pressure.
Ultimately, we must hope for fusion and/or geothermal to become practical. These are nigh impossible to be subjected to geopolitical constraints.
There are already battery chemistries available that do not rely on lithium and drastically reduce the usage of other suplly-contrained inputs. Especially for stationary storage (where energy density and weight are not much of a concern) there is a wide array of technologies already available and in development.
And as you yourself say: once a battery has been built, it simply exists. There is a very gradual deterioration, but nothing even close to the "just in time" dependency that we are experiencing in this very moment when it comes to fossil fuels.
For a strategic independence point of view, being reliant on a global value chain to replace existing infrastructure every 15 years beats being reliant on a global value chain to replace your tank of gas every day by miles. Don't let perfect become the enemy of good!
> There are already battery chemistries available that do not rely on lithium
Not being mass produced. Betting on multiple horses makes sense. It's perhaps the singular lesson from the present problem.
These need to be available in enormous quantities, though.
Are they? Who produces them? Please tell me that it is not China and that they don't come with a firmware that may or may not have remotely exploitable rootkits.
The road from a lab discovery through a working prototype to mass-deployable tech usually takes decades, especially in devices which pack a tremendous amount of energy.
The manufacturing of all modern battery chemistries is dominated by Chinese companies because the Chinese government has strategically invested in production capacity and expertise for more than two decades.
But Chinese companies are running and building production facilities around the world. Leaving the production in Chinese hands is a political choice, not an inevitability.
Also, you can't take batteries away once you have delivered them to the customer. I have a 14kwh battery in my basement. It's built by BYD, a Chinese company. But once installed, I can pull the network cable and air gap it from the internet. Communication with my roof-mounted-solar and grid-tied electrical supply works without external network access, if I deem that an unacceptable risk. I could also do the work required to filter all network request from the battery management system at the router to make sure it can only contact servers from a whitelist, if I want to have access to diagnostics while I'm not at home.
These are all known, manageable risks that are completely within the capability of sovereign states to take care of. But there is literally no government (apparently) that can keep Trump and Netanyahu from fucking over the global fossil energy supply on a whim.
Indeed, at least 2 Chinese companies (CATL and BYD) already have in mass production sodium-ion batteries, including a 50 MWh model for stationary storage.
Using lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage is a historical accident, because using lithium makes sense only in mobile applications where weight is essential.
For new installations, sustainable alternatives, like sodium-ion batteries, should be preferred.
In the past there have been many companies in various countries, including Australia, UK and USA, which have claimed that they are able to make very high capacity flow batteries for stationary storage, based on various chemistries, e.g. vanadium-vanadium or bromine-sulfur. A few such batteries have been installed at various customers.
I do not know what went wrong with flow batteries. They have bad weight, similar to the lead-acid batteries, but that is irrelevant for stationary batteries. Otherwise they should be the best batteries for stationary applications, because they have 3 essential advantages over other batteries. Their energy and their power are not coupled as in normal batteries, but they can be scaled independently, i.e. for a given power (which is determined by electrode area) in a flow battery the stored energy can be made arbitrarily large, because it is determined by the volume of a couple of tanks where liquid electrolytes are stored. The second advantage is that the auto-discharge when the battery is not used can be almost null, because the 2 electrolytes can be stored in separate tanks, preventing any reaction between them. The third advantage is that the solid electrodes do not take part in the chemical reaction, so they are not damaged by a charge/discharge cycle, so they can have a very long life.
Despite the advantages, none of the many kinds of flow batteries that have been proposed has been a commercial success and it appears that the companies producing them have lied about the problems that might plague them.
I have not seen any published information about which were their problems, but I assume that a likely cause was the separator membrane that stays between the 2 liquid electrolytes, which must selectively allow the passage of certain ions and not of others. Such membranes are expensive and they might have a short lifetime, requiring frequent maintenance. Another possible problem could be caused by secondary reactions leading to solid precipitates from the liquid electrolytes, another possible cause for expensive maintenance.
Regarding the battery firmware, it does not really matter if the batteries are made in China. The history of the last 3 decades has demonstrated that no firmware can be trusted, regardless whether it comes from a company located in USA, in UK, in China or in any other country, so any firmware must be treated with suspicion.
China actually makes a great number of electronic products that are much more trustworthy than almost anything that comes from USA or other western countries, because those products, like it was the norm several decades ago, but no longer today, are accompanied by full hardware documentation, including schematics and PCB layout, which makes it much easier to verify that a malicious firmware would not be able to do damage.
If the European Union or any other countries would be concerned by the security risk posed by malicious firmware, the solution is simple and it does not consist in banning the products of some arbitrarily chosen countries, but in mandating that any product with an embedded computer, regardless of its origin, must provide complete documentation, i.e. schematics and the source program for the firmware, and it should allow the replacement of the firmware. This would be nothing new, as this is how computers, including the IBM PC, were sold in the old times, before the vendors succeeded step by step to incline the balance of power in their favor and in the detriment of their customers.
As a Swede i'd like to cut the cord to Denmark/Germany. That would greatly reduce our electricity costs in south/mid Sweden.
Let them enjoy their "cheap" wind and battery solution.
You export more to Norway + Finnland than to Denmark + Germany: https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...
And my guess would be that it would be much more expensive for you to build out (and hold in reserve) enough generation capacity to satisfy your theoretical peak demand than it costs to have interconnected grids and a large efficient market, even if you are a net exporter.
You are aware of our different price-markets in sweden right? SE4 is priced at the export prices for Danish wind and German goal - which sucks for Swedes in SE4 (and to some extent SE3). SE4 can eat their own dogfood since they cut the Nuclear Power and are now burning oil instead (Karlshamnsverket).
>Why would you invest in nuclear power, which is several times more expensive per kwh
Because the related lobby pays well and a huge power station project (which runs well into the tens of billions) has much larger space for bribes
Alternatively, because nuclear power still works at night.
If only we had some way to store energy
At scale.
You mean like 27 Gwh of yearly installed capacity kind of scale? https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-e...
Nice, that gets us enough battery to survive winters in 10 000 years.
Now linearly extropolate oil supply numbers from just prior to Ford's Model-T.
How many thousands of years pass before we can meet current 2096 oil demand?
That is why we need to stop with oil quickly, yes. Nuclear will do that, and people will pick nuclear if the renewables aren't there yet when oil runs out, which it is close to doing today.
No, that is why you made a gross error extrapolating grid battery growth.
> when oil runs out, which it is close to doing today.
Peak oil is a way off yet, and the reason we need to stop using sequestered carbon is because atmospheric insulation is increasing steadily as a direct result of fossil fuel usage. Not because of ground supply shortfall.
The current events highlight the supply chain issue - not a shortage of oil, it's a shortfall in "oil going anywhere".
> Nuclear will do that, and people will pick nuclear if the renewables aren't there
Again, country by country - nuclear makes sense in China, the US to a degree, France, the UK (despite the snails progress) to a degree ... but makes no sense in, say, Australia that has abundant sunlight, fresh air that moves, and near zero prior experience with nuclear power and plant construction (See: the very recent Australian CSIRO report on energy futures for Australia)
Same as Sweden. Creating divisive issues from nothing decades after the possibility passed.
At least the MAGA Hard right is staring to come around. Who could have guessed that they like extremely cheap distributed energy generation!?!?
> Why MAGA suddenly loves solar power
> The Trump-led attack on solar eases as the right reckons with its crucial role in powering AI and keeping utility bills in check.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/03/02/katie-mil...
Before solar was woke it was a way to power your home for basically free and not be dependant on or in hock to the corporations or government to power your home.
This might make sense on a larger timeframe but stating that your grid isn't stable enough to support AC demand while also pushing for electric car adoption seems counter intuitive. It would likely take years to improve the grid to support accelerating electric vehicle demands.
Years and tens if not hundreds of billions; the Netherlands is experiencing this, after a decade of cheap solar, a rise in EV, and new builds being built fully electric on the consumer side, and many datacenters and green energy generators built on the business side, our grid is at capacity to the point where new businesses can't get connected and new housing projects are put on hold (I think); the grid can't manage any more. The grid manager Tennet spent 15 billion last year, and will need to keep doing that for at least another decade - and that's a relatively small country.
Yeah, sucks they're trying to shut down our nuclear power, I agree. However, we're lucky the country is so sunny, if we could cover the inland deserted areas with solar panels, batteries and what not as an alternative, I'm OK with that as a compromise I suppose.
> One of the issues with our proportional electoral system is that smaller, more extreme parties can become kingmakers and in our current situation the centre-left governing party relies on the support of the far-left party to stay in power, and those guys are rabidly anti-nuclear power.
A side comment but I'm sad to say I don't think that another electoral system (or at least not FPTP) fixes this issue of there being a niche group being kingmakers.
In FPTP the dynamic that occurs is that an enormous amount of seats become "safe" and then the kingmakers end up being the relative handful of seats that are likely to trade hands. This ends up creating distortions where certain regional seats and regional issues rise well above how important they should be.
PR seems like a more fair way to represent a niche group. At least they are a genuinely representative part of the population, and the influence isn't an accident of electoral math distortion.
That would then make sense why Russia's dirty tricks squad likes to back extreme-Left and extreme-Right parties, and is likely behind calls for proportional representation: it would give the geopolitical aggressors an effective veto over national politics and prevent the emergence of a European superpower on land they consider "theirs".
Spain's situation is bad: very high gas prices (now at the same level as Finland, despite much lower purchasing power), poor public transport (train) services, opposition to nuclear energy, electric cars that are only affordable for the wealthy (and even then, the infrastructure makes them difficult to use), high VAT on electricity, etc. All this in a country where many people have to ration their heating or air conditioning because they often can't afford it under normal circumstances. Population seem to not care much about being miserable as the same parties that do nothing about it keep getting elected so good luck I guess.
Poor train service? (Recent accidents aside)
Any areas in particular?
Here in Catalunya the Rodalies (commuter rail) is absolutely abysmal.
Yeah, the high speed AVE trains are nice if you want to go to Madrid, but if you just want to get to work it's a disaster.
Well, I think that's a bit of an aside but sure:
- Track maintenance is horrendous, and it's public knowledge (not that it wasn't known before, it was just hidden)
- Many high-speed trains are now running much slower after the accident, and will continue to do so. Also, compensation for delays has been significantly reduced
- Some rather important routes (Madrid-Málaga, for example) still have no service after the accident
- The public train company (Renfe) is now setting up a bus company and openly saying that this is going to be very useful for years to come (wink wink)
- Cercanías is absolute garbage in most areas but especially in Madrid, with constant delays, broken trains, etc
- The pricing situation has improved with recent competitors (Ouigo, Iryo, etc) but it's often still laughable - I've been taking flights instead of trains when I travel there since they're much cheaper (and nowadays definitely much faster, given all the issues)
I could continue but I guess that's plenty. I'd say taking a train in Spain nowadays is an exercise of faith for many.
Sorry didn't mean to go off on a tangent, it's just I like trains, and Spain (and have an Interrail trip coming up and I was considering including Spain. They are famously Interrail unfriendly though)
I followed the accident but not much news following, so that's really really interesting. I didn't know Madrid-Malaga still has no service, nor that Renfe had set up a bus company!
I haven't been to Madrid for a few years. Sad to hear the Cercanías is so bad these days
If you ever visit Madrid again, I can say that buses and the metro usually work pretty well (they do get quite crowded at peak hours, but I guess that's the case everywhere) and you probably won't need to rely on Cercanías for typical "tourist" activities. If you're planning to travel between cities though, I'd be a bit wary of long-distance trains!
PS: Roads are becoming worse as well but I've seen worse abroad. Just wanted to point out that infrastructures in the country are decaying quite a bit in general.
> Yeah, I live in Spain and probably once again we'll have restrictions on AC in the summer just like at the start of the Ukraine war. Hopefully, we can avoid actual blackouts.
I live on Spain . What the hell restrictions are you talking about ?
This did happen in summer of 2022, but only in public buildings, private households were not affected, so the OP's point seems a bit overly dramatic. Given that AC usage is highest when solar production is also highest, this seems highly unlikely given the solar build-out of the last 4 years.
That included offices though so work was difficult.
I guess private homes weren’t included because of the difficulty of enforcement.
It was in 2022 and 2023: https://cerneasesores.es/real-decreto-ley-14-2022-obligacion...
The far-left are not the cause of the nuclear close down, nor are they unilaterally holding the government hostage in this area.
The centre-left party made the agreement with the power companies in 2019 when they were not yet in coalition, for economic reasons.
The far-left, now in the coalition, does consider nuclear a red line. It is unknown what the cost of crossing it would be. But I believe it's irrelevant, because if the centre-left party would be governing alone, they wouldn't walk back the agreement now. No matter price of oil, the investment in nuclear has a too large price-tag, and would take way to long to reap any benefits. If any - given the current progression on renewables.
Seems Europe also has the option of using Northern Africa as a solar energy hub as well. Is that a viable option?
There's plenty of land in Spain that would be suitable too. Outside of the major cities, Spain is very sparsly populated:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fe...
It could actually be beneficial in a lot of places to have agrovoltaics.
Purely from an engineering standpoint that is an attractive option. But North African countries have often been politically unstable. It's risky to place your energy security in the hands of a region that could erupt in another coup or civil war at any time.
I thought the proposal for a solar link between Morocco and the UK was a great idea. Unfortunately the UK government has decided not to back it with a contract for different guarantee.
https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
what do you think of theory that denuclearisation movement in west europe was funded by CCCP? it makes sense to think CCCP/Putin would finance subversive movements to remove nuclear and coal and make the region dependent on russian energy exports
I think some of them are definitely funded by them, there was an article about it I saw: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russia-funding-europe...
They fund other stuff that weakens and divides Europe too like the separatist movements in Scotland, Catalonia etc.
That's not to say that all the people in these movements are Russian agents or that these groups don't have some good points and legitimate grievances, but nonetheless they are an easy, cost-effective way for Russia to attack us.
Of all the silly things I’ve seen Europe do over the last 20 years, getting rid of nuclear plants has to be one of the strangest. Sure, we all want solar but it’s not there yet. Hidden forces here would not be a surprise.
Well, lets not forget that Europe was downwind of the worst nuclear accident in world history. https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/nuclearenergy/chernoby...
That sort of event doesn't fade away quickly and definitely influenced energy policy that persists to this day. Thankfully the tide is turning due to safer designs.
Related the children book from Germany https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221101-the-cloud-the-n...
An absurd conspiracy theory.
Nuclear power has an LCOE that is 5x the cost of solar and wind. Nobody would build it on cost alone.
The only reason countries build and run nuclear power plants is because it shares supply chain and a skills base with the nuclear military.
Which means they have nukes (France, Russia, US) or they they want to take out an option to one day build a nuke in a hurry just in case for a threat that is usually very obvious (Sweden, Japan, South Korea).
This was clearly recognized when Iran started building nuclear power plants but when Poland suddenly got interested in 2023 ostensibly "because environment" after decades of burning mountains of coal nobody batted an eye.
> when Poland suddenly got interested in 2023 ostensibly "because environment" after decades of burning mountains of coal nobody batted an eye.
Polish discussion about nuclear energy has always been openly tied to national security and energy independence, given its/Europe's reliance on Russian energy exports. Especially given its northern geography, nuclear is better for base load stability. (The environmental is also important, and strides have been made to reduce emissions.)
Of course, there has also been discussion in Poland about nuclear sharing or even seeking to acquire/build nuclear weapons itself, also openly, but I don't think anyone is actually pursuing this in earnest.
Solar and wind are intermittent. Grid scale energy storage is not even a thing yet.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/big-battery-storage-map-of-austr...
That's not much. Projects listed there can't store energy for winter needs.
Neither could French nuclear plants when they were turned off for weeks at a time for emergency maintenance.
So, France fired up the gas.
5x cheaper electricity, on the other hand, makes power-to-gas economic, which can smooth out seasonal variations in a carbon neutral way.
Isn't power to gas still ridiculously inneficient?
Last I checked it seemed like something pushed by gas companies since it upholds gas infrastructure and most of the intermittence is currently supported by gas.
It's very costly compared to normal gas but it's still marginally cheaper to use solar and roundtrip p2g to use on a cold, windless night than it is to use nuclear power produced on any day of the year.
There's just zero economic incentive while polluting gas is dirt cheap and maxxed out solar and wind rarely even covers 100% of current electricity demand.
It's windy and sunny in the winter too.
Ahhhhhhh . . . it's Australia.
Winters here have more sunshine than UK summers.
This data is a year old now: https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/
I wonder where the gulf states are going to end up.
They have tried hard to build economies that aren't just fossil fuel exports. Tourism, trade, finance, luxury living for rich foreigners… but everything they have tried is contingent on peace in the region. I doubt foreigners are looking forward to layovers in Dubai now there are Iranian drones heading their way.
Maybe future travelers will not see two trunkless legs in a desert, but empty condo towers and abandoned super cars still loaded with labubus.
Presume the reference to trunkless legs is to the Shelly's famous poem Ozymandias (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias)
They also spent decades sending money to the US to buy influence and protection, which instantly vaporized the second a missile was launched their way.
The big story I think is how handily they took out billions of dollars of US radars and that these air defense systems are not up to the task (we actually already knew this from Ukraine, but media worked overtime to ignore this fact). In a way, all this supposedly "superior" US and Israeli tech (at least on the defense side, offense is a different story) has been exposed. I do think focused engineering efforts could close this gap, that was needed already 4 years ago.
It actually works pretty well, considering how much they do shoot down, but if there is enough incoming, some will get through.
> It actually works pretty well
As long as you don't look at the receipts yes, technically it works very well, in every other aspect it's a massive waste of resource and money.
The war in itself? For sure, but if a million dollar rocket saves a billion dollar radar system against a 50.000 drone, it still seems working as intended.
10+ radars have been destroyed, I'm not sure which ones were "saved"
https://abcnews.com/International/us-allied-radar-sites-midd...
That doesn't say 10+ radars have been destroyed. It says radar sites have been attacked 10 times across 7 locations in 6 countries, with some damaged and some destroyed.
This biggest loss was the mobile THAAD radar in Jordan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/TPY-2_transportable_radar There's also evidence they hit a building in Saudi Arabia containing a AN/TPY-2 but it's not clear if it was damaged
Plus a couple videos of fixed radomes getting hit by drones
Defending against ballistic missiles is well known to not be perfect, even against Iran's lest sophisticated missiles it's very difficult. But the high end missile systems are worth trying. The main problem is the lack of cheap drone interceptors which has been a blaring siren since Ukraine war started that the US neglected by not treating it as an emergency.
C-RAM radars - at least one US embassy was hit with an elcheapo drone as well, rendering it useless. Thats a legit problem and was only possible because they took out most of the important ballistics radars first.
How would a THAAD in Jordan help stop drones in Iraq? That's not the only radar they operate.
The C-RAM was in Baghdad, the high end radars hit were in the other gulf states.
The CWIS is probably the best anti-drone tool the US has but they have far too little of them and can get overwhelmed. They should have listened to Ukraine.
No serious person believes ballistic missile defense works. This isn't a fringe belief. There was a major movie with this theme released last year.
Isn't this a different thing? I tend to assume when someone is talking about ballistic missile defense, they are thinking of ICBMs. A House of Dynamite is an example of that. But that seems substantially different from the regional missile defense that seems much more effective. Mach 5 is pretty fast, but Mach 25 is considerably faster.
The lay public is almost certainly unaware that perfect, nation scale ICBM defense is fucking impossible. At least in the US.
People in Israel are probably more accustomed to what a "High but not perfect" interception rate means.
But people in the US are just really dumb about things. They probably think it just needs "Enough money" or "A breakthrough" as if that's just a magic spell you can cast to get around physics.
However, modern anti-ballistic missile defense systems are effective enough that if you spend enough money you can defeat, with high probability, half to most of the incoming weapons. It involves firing many many interceptors against each incoming threat. It does not scale.
This is why it is generally deployed as a way to blunt, possibly not even defeat a North Korean nuclear attack. Nothing more.
Shorter range ballistic missiles suck. They still have the crazy high velocity terminal phase, but they are way cheaper to produce. I don't think it's possible to defend against them economically.
And now Iran is deploying ballistic missiles with cluster munitions separating in flight.
Good luck countering that, especially if they steer to be able to steer them.
Cluster munitions that have between 1 and 10 kg of explosives are great against the infantry in the open field, not so much against population with proper level of shelters and an advanced warning to get there.
This is not mostly true: Israel's anti air defense works surprisingly well against Iran's attack, the issue has always been 2 things:
Who has more missiles to throw?
And the Patriot is still top class in it's designed goal: shooting down ballistic and cruise missiles.
The second big thing is that no one has designed air defense to take into account effectively slow moving artillery pieces that have the same maneuverability as a missile.
Because that is what drones are and what has been the biggest glaring problem for but the USA, Israel and Russia (the gulf states both use Russian and US anti air defense).
The aging Patriot in particular was exposed in Ukraine. You can watch video after video of them failing even against older ballistics - they have basically no chance against hypersonic and other fast ballistics, especially ones with active measures (flares, maneuvering - there was a really wild one from a few weeks back). And there's a number out of this conflict as well. The are still great at shooting down jets, however. Top of class is actually S-4/500, this is basically acknowledged fact by even the Pentagon at this point. I think a lot of people are in denial about this due to a combo of Hollywood narrative and ideological reasons, but the Russians math very good - it's reality. But even so, those are not the right systems for fighting drone attacks - nobody really has it together with that. Both of these are solvable problems, it's just a lot of hard math + piles of money.
It has around 42-77% success rate according to Ukraine themselves against specifically Iskander 9M723 and KN-23.
And your comment makes 0 sense considering S-400 was more designed against aircrafts and cruise missiles than ballistic missiles.
And that success rate comes after significant improvements to the Russian weapons and finesse. They were much less effective early in the war.
Cat and mouse is always a factor in war. The patriot wasn't very good when it was first introduced and took some refining to become the gold standard, which it still is.
It still works very well against planes too, reaching out and downing EWACS aircraft at the edge of it's range.
They were neither designed nor expected to have 100% defense rate, but 50% is lower than expected. 75% isn't great either.
> aging Patriot in particular was exposed in Ukraine. You can watch video after video of them failing even against older ballistics
Decades-old Patriots shot down Russia's newest "hypersonic" missile.
> Top of class is actually S-4/500, this is basically acknowledged fact by even the Pentagon at this point
What? Source? You're describing the systems that have been getting floored the world over. Why do you think nobody is placing orders for these anymore?
This is completely contrary to reality. Iran is a missile and rocketry superpower. They've launched a lot of stuff, some of which got through.
There’s a number of videos of US and Israeli air defense quite literally failing at intercepts. You can see the entire trajectories and stuff. Some from US bases, other in Israel but they are trying to censor them.
When you launch 5000 missiles and 1% are missed - that's still 50 hits.
For intercepts - there are absolute tons of AI videos out there. I wouldn't trust anything unless it's from reputable OSINT channel.
The Israeli missile defense systems have worked amazingly well considering the scale of the threat.
Just last night:
"It’s worth pointing out that Hezbollah has managed to get rockets right down to the south of Israel today – and that is unprecedented. Never before has Hezbollah managed to get rockets so far south into Israel."
https://aje.news/b8762y?update=4414645
Sending is easy, but hitting something... They are shooting at an open desert and Gaza while exposing their launch teams.
Is this why they're silencing anyone talking about damages and arresting anyone taking videos/photos ?
Not against the fast ballistics.
Ballistics are much harder to shoot down period there is not a single system that has 100% success rate, Ukraine reports around 42-77% success rate[1].
Hence why army folks were so alarmed by Russia/China developing and having ready prototypes that can go hypersonic.
[1]https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme...
> Maybe future travelers will not see two trunkless legs in a desert, but empty condo towers and abandoned super cars still loaded with labubus.
Maybe they actually will gaze upon it and despair (just not for the reason the original poem said :-))
Well at least they will have much less money to meddle in Africa, I guess.
Yes, what's happening in the Sahel absolutely barbaric and is shamefully swept under the rug in Western media because of the countries sponsoring it.
They're done. They export oil/LNG, import food, invest the proceeds in the US companies/treasuries and brand themselves as logistics hubs + safe havens for the global rich. It's all out of the window now.
Some of them will not exist at all in their current form by summer
Ah, it feels so good to sit on the front seat watching WW3 unwrapping slowly, elegantly, deadly.
I might reach my dream life (no work just binge hacking kernels) sooner than I expected. Now I just need to pretend I don’t need money as well.
You might need to pretend that you don’t need energy either!
I’m fasting! No need for energy at all.
That puts you in an energy deficit, but you still need and are using energy. Until your body is decomposed it uses energy (after you die your body is energy for the bacteria decomposing it).
Fasting can use previous/saved energy, but it still needs energy.
Yeah, that was half of a joke.
Got a wind-up computer, have you?
(Maybe that OLTP project was onto something, after all)
Seriously, might consider buying a few solar panels, but just for camping needs. It’s impossible to setup locally due to regulation and such.
It's probably also good to have things on hand as an insurance policy anyway. If shit hits the fan regulations don't apply anymore. No one is going to complain about solar on your roof if the grid isn't reliable.
The US about to discover you can't just blindly follow fanatics in religious wars without any consequences.
I mean given that our secretary of defense has a Deus Vult tattoo... and this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran...
I think we might be the fanatics starting a religious war.
the crusaders wanted the holy land to belong to christians, not to jews
Also a gigantic Jerusalem cross tattoo.
I think the parent comment was referring to the same fanatics you are
Pretty sure he was talking about Israel.
From what I've read, the immediate effect will likely be worse for CO2 emissions, because the alternative to (liquefied) gas is often coal power. Also, the various inputs that are needed for global manufacturing are also affected, so maybe even renewable tech gets more expensive.
I'm not saying that the dependence on the middle east was good, but I think it's good to keep in mind that this was a pretty stable equilibrium even with the various questionable countries involved until the US initiated a global supply shock without a good reason.
There are short term and long term effects. Overall these are good changes.
There are a couple of points to make here. The lead time for new coal/gas plants is years. If it's not planned already, any newly planned plants are unlikely to come online this decade. The supply chains simply can't handle building more turbines and it takes years to fix that. Also, that investment is super risky in it self.
Another point is that the cheapest and fastest way to add new capacity to grids is via renewables. That's why we see record breaking new capacity coming online on a regular basis.
There is indeed a short term increase in emissions from electricity plants because the fastest way to bring more capacity online is to use existing underused plants. A lot of gas and coal plants are no longer running full time because they are too expensive to operate. But they haven't been decommissioned either. Some gas plants actually are used as peaker plants. Most older coal plants take too long to warm up for this. So, yes short term the expensive but quick way to provide extra power is via these plants. But of course, as soon as something more affordable comes online, these things go back to being utilized less. There are many tens/hundreds of GW of renewables and batteries being deployed in the next few years.
Data centers add to all this pressure. That's long term a good thing because these too will want to long term reduce their OpEx by cutting as much dependence on gas/coal as possible.
A final point to make is that despite all these increased emissions, there are also decreased emissions from electrification. Even if the power for an EV comes from an efficient gas/coal plant, it's actually better than the alternative of burning petrol in a combustion engine instead. Less emissions this way. Same for heat pumps. With a COP of 3-4, they outperform burning gas by 3-4x using electricity. Even if that electricity comes from a gas plant operating at 40-50% efficiency. Less gas gets burned.
So these are all good effects even if the reason is a bit sad and unnecessary. This crisis is unnecessary. But I like that it is helping to kill fossil fuel companies faster. This long term erodes confidence in the market as a whole and drives decision makers to do exactly what the article suggests: cutting the dependency on fossil fuels as fast as possible. It's already resulting in measurable reductions in oil/gas imports in some countries.
It feels so slow. I would like to have an electric car or e-bike. I live in a building that is part of a housing company that has many owners (most of them people living here). It is slow to decide and implement renovation, and the pipeline is basically full for a few years.
We might get car charging infrastructure only a few years down the line. Maybe a bike shed for e-bike charging a year after that?
What happened to those optimistic ideas where every lamp post had a charger? I would pay for that. I also see these small transformer huts on the streets. What if at least those had neighborhood high speed chargers, it shouldn't cost much since basically there's a good power source right there?
There's just so much friction. I hope some enterpreneur here makes these things real!
Depending on the public charging infrastructure in your area, it is already quite feasible to own an electric car without your own wall box. Modern BEVs can charge basically to full within 20 minutes. If your supermarket has a public charger and your driving and shopping cycles are matching (or can be aligned depending on your daily driving distance), you can simply plug in while you shop for your groceries.
Also, you can check if there is someone else on your street who has a charger and who might be willing to let you charge in exchange for a little surcharge on the electricity you consume.
With e bikes you can charge the battery in your home.
Then we need regulation to make sure every ebike and scooter sold is safe to charge without exploding. No cheap batteries.
I'm unpacking my electric motorbike[1] and its moped sister[2] from winter storage and preparing them both for a summer in a city in a nation which energy supply is mostly renewables.
Of course, it took a lot of gasoline to get them here, but I sure as heck won't be using much gasoline to put them to solid use clocking up the kilometers, 100 at a time.
Got a few deals on solar panels for the backyard that'll get me completely off the grid for the most part, and from then on it'll be maintenance mode and solar powered travel as priority number one ..
[1] - https://www.blackteamotorbikes.com/
[2] - https://unumotors.com/
I heard somewhere that there is some sort of evangelical Christian sect in Korea that believes the current US president was sent by God. Not as a positive force, but as a force to end the global status quo (which I suppose they consider unjust). I find this fascinating because the US president's actions so far have: exposed decade-old myths about the rule-based international order, caused the EU to seek more self-reliance, caused former enemies in Asia to consider alliances and now accelerate the end to fossil fuel dependence. One could argue that the results of his actions are indistinguishable from that of a double agent's.
I still think Trump has been a net good upon the world.
Trump's actions have actually jumpstarted economic reforms in several countries. For example, just last year Canada made serious moves towards "One Canadian Economy"[1] to rationalize interprovincial trade among other things.
The developed world, but especially NATO countries, need to wean off America's teat for their own good.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/one-canadian-economy/services/build...
And then there's the theory that the man is also the biblical antichrist which I think fits the prophecy reasonably well. Revelations has some pretty specific details that match up which I find quite entertaining.
We should generate our own power on our own land with our own technology - one day it will seem like insanity that we ever outsourced our most precious resource to the other side of the world, and relied on international shipping/markets to deliver it. Solar is a miracle technology. Wind is very good. Hydro and nuclear can supply large base load. Our own oil can supply peakers. What are we doing in the middle east?
Wonder how much WFH could help. Seems like during covid demand went way down.
It helped on reducing traffic, spending more time with family, favouring local shops... Why we went back still is a mystery for me. Even if it was "working from a coworking space" or anything that was not the downtown open-space.
I remember reading articles about local politicians insisting companies and governments do return to office for no other reason than to have the workers spend money downtown for lunch. Not even implying it, directly stating it.
...and increasing valuation of office real state.
Because downtown city centers were missing out on office worker revenue and started giving incentives to companies who brought people back into the office. I 100% believe the reason we went back into the office at all was because of this despite all the talk of 'in-person collaboration.'
Exactly, put AI in the office instead.
WFH and the almost 100% shutdown off airline travel at the beginning of the pandemic resulted in nearly 0 change in CO2 emission and levels in the atmosphere.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
It's a bit off topic but that didn't sound right to me.
According to the following it was a reduction but yes near zero in the context of total emissions. A few hundred million tonnes reduction ain't nothin none the less.
"plummeted from more than 1 000 Mt CO2 in 2019 to less than 600 Mt CO2 in 2020, in the context of the pandemic.
In 2023, aviation accounted for 2.5% of global energy-related CO2 emissions, "
https://www.iea.org/energy-system/transport/aviation
Of course we shouldn't expect a couple of years of shutdown to significantly reverse 200 years of man-made atmospheric CO2 accumulation, but surely it would help stop the problem to get worse if the widespread WFH effort were sustained after the pandemic.
Heavens no! How could we ever afford to be more productive overall? Just think of the effect on corporate real estate prices.
That's true. I wonder if the government might force companies to allow WFH if there are petrol shortages.
They did it during covid so I wouldn't rule it out.
I don't have data but I was always under the impression that consumer use of fossil fuels (ie gas) was a drop in the bucket compared to enterprise use of fossil fuels (shipping trucks/boats/planes, private jets, etc).
The whole "reduce your carbon footprint PSA" was just a ruse.
> The whole "reduce your carbon footprint PSA" was just a ruse.
It is especially true in the context of this war when the US is attacking oil infrastructure which is causing catastrophic environmental damage: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/10/world/middleeast/iran-oil...
Similarly related to the paper straw meme that has been circulating the last while.
Ugh don't get me started on paper straws! At least EVs are a cool way to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, however ineffective it may be at scale. But nobody likes paper straws.
Also: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/30/carbon-footpri...
Yikes. I never really thought about the environmental impacts of war mainly because no one seems to talk about it.
Now that I know about it, it just infuriates me that anyone could even criticize any individual person's usage of fossil fuels.
But the companies have a large carbon foodprint to deliver a product or service for the consumer.
When I buy a large SUV / Truck, and never drive it, is that not counted negative towards my carbon foodprint?
> But the companies have a large carbon foodprint to deliver a product or service for the consumer.
I agree that that's _why_ they have a large carbon footprint, no company is just burning fossil fuels for fun. But it doesn't change a) the fact that they do have a large carbon footprint, and b) entire cities could ban gas cars and everyone could take public transit and it still wouldn't make a dent in the global carbon footprint.
As I think you're alluding to over-consumerism as a cause of companies having a large carbon footprint, that's part of it. But unless everyone just stops consuming, it's not gonna change anything. If it were legislated that big companies needed to reduce their carbon footprint by X% by Y date I think that would be the most effective, short term at least.
> When I buy a large SUV / Truck, and never drive it, is that not counted negative towards my carbon foodprint?
I don't know why it'd be negative. Zero or neutral, at best, but not negative. Negative would entail you're somehow removing CO2 from the environment.
Oh my bad, I used negative wrong.
I mean if I buy a car (and never drive it) and have a phone, ipad and computer that I never use. Is it not ME who has a huge carbon footprint?
Compared to coal companies fighting tooth and nail to keep their industry relevant and the govt acquiescing instead of focusing on renewables, I don't think any individual can be considered to have a "huge" carbon footprint.
But think of the commercial real estate market?!?! What about the chopped salad slop bowl market?! Dry cleaning?! This would shatter the fabric of our precious society. We need butts in seats. We need to foster open communication and cross functional pollination.
Our company made a 'bet' that energy management, sustainability, clean energy and whatnot would become a big thing. This was around the time of COP26 (2021) where there seemed to be a societal drive for reducing carbon emissions and a general acceptance that climate change was a thing. We employed young and enthusiastic sustainability consultants, we run a successful project to reduce energy consumption in polymer manufacturing, we build product that worked. That part of our business has shut down completely.
Unfortunately governments were reluctant to really get behind regulations that were needed, and the business case for investment in any drive to sustainability did not exist. People lost interest as inflation went up, and other things seemed more important. The market was flagging and Trump's "drill baby drill" was the final nail in the coffin.
The world was _nearly_ there to rapidly accelerate reducing the dependency on fossil fuels on the back of climate change. Instead we went back to fossil fuel cars and built energy-intensive AI data centres. We collectively dropped the ball and one day will look back on it as a missed opportunity.
There have been plenty of inflection points like that throughout history. Famously, Jimmy Carter installed solar heating on the roof of the white house. Reagan took them down shortly after.
It seems like we never quite learn our lesson about energy security...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_at_the_White_House...
There were many sliding doors moments for action on climate change. The 2000 US presidential election was the first significant one.
In a world where peoples home might be taken away because interest go up because oil prices is nuts.
Interest rates change for all sorts of reasons. People who take out variable rate home mortgages are always gambling. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose.
It would be very hard for me to take a variable rate mortgages, while not having the money to pay for it.
Feels like stressful living.
"The world’s biggest energy consumer nations are now back at the drawing board: Europe last week unveiled new financial guarantees for atomic power after decades of closing nuclear plants. Other major importers are planning to source fuel from a broader array of suppliers to hedge their risk."
I'm not seeing it.
The European plan sounds like another goal to have a proposal in ten years [1]. And hedging imports of fossil fuels doesn't reduce dependence, just dependence on a particular source.
[1] https://www.nucnet.org/news/von-der-leyen-sets-out-eu-smr-st...
Easier said than done, during this week many German regions are on general strike, thus everyone just switched back to their cars, complaining about unions, their power in infrastructure and so on.
Naturally most of those cars are combustion based, because it is still very expensive to buy a new EV, and even used ones are more expensive than new combustion cars, and there is the whole question of how damaged the battery will be anyway.
That's not true, you can get a cheap new EV, pricing for electric Dacia without subsidy starts from €16k. And used Zoe or i3 are really cheap.
That is still expensive versus traditional cars.
Is it? You can't even find a German car in the same price range.
Not everyone buys German cars, rather something that simplifies their daily lives, with a motor and some amenities.
That looks like a bit Apple mentality applied to cars.
If past crisis are any indication this "push" won't last.
We've had crisis with fossil fuels since OPEC's first big price increase in 1973 and the pattern is always the same: first the whole world realizes they need to find alternative sources of energy. Then, after a while, politicians go "drill, baby, drill".
Oil is an addiction and most people don't drop addictions by their own.
Looking and biasing only via population numbers. It's pretty clear that to "save" the world you need most of asia and africa to be run on renewables. This shock will hopefully have better effects long term.
Nothing will happen!!
If countries worldwide had to have their reality checked due a WW3 to find solutions for the a fossil fuel alternative, better than pushing lithium everywhere with devasting consequences, tells you everything that is wrong in our society.
Europe and the US need to bring manufacturing of EVs, batteries, solar, and relevant components back locally. Use automation to make it more feasible. We need rooftop solar + regional SMRs for a cheap, stable energy supply.
To do so, we need to adapt regulation & deregulate. This needs to happen now. If we continue on like this, we'll decelerate back to the stone age.
Paradoxically it could also have the opposite effect if high energy prices lead governments to cut green energy plans.
Wonder if Chinese solar involution finally going to end, time to jack up prices, and crank factories to full utilization. PRC can make enough solar to replace global oil / lng and good parts of coal in ~10 years, assuming storage also scales proportionally soon.
Slightly different reasons, of course, but I imagine that right about now the regime in Cuba is wishing they had put more effort into solar. Being heavily reliant on oil when you do not produce it yourself is a vulnerable position to be in.
> China has, however, been relatively insulated from the crisis due to its ample emergency oil reserves and high rate of electrification, with EVs representing more than half of its domestic new car sales and its grid more than 50% powered by renewable energy sources. In the U.S., by comparison, EVs are less than 10% of the market, while renewable power is around a quarter of the nation's electricity generation.
My favorite quote from "Studio 60 on the Sunset Street" (an antique show from the late 2000s) is from the CEO of a fictional media conglomerates, coming back from a trip to Macau with disbelief:
"Tell you kids to learn Mandarin."
The USA is either handing the future on a plate to the Chinese Empire ; or acting like a "chaos monkey" in an anti fragile system, giving just enough scares to the rest of the world to get their act together.
Maybe climate change could not do that because of the long timescale and unpalpability of the issues.
Maybe the first few oil shocks were not enough because you could hope for better days.
Maybe market pressure was not enough because incumbents fossil fuel industries could always buy the right élections to set up the right incentives ; and also, people don't want to change.
Maybe the perfect storm will nudge it ?
That, or we'll just have to speak Mandarin. They do that in Firefly, after all..
Is it 1973? We could invest in solar instead of kings that might ship their energy to us in peace time (i.e. killings happens only within each states borders)?
Iran tried to ditch fossil fuel for atomic but cIA said no.
Now you see, the only country to have used a nuclear weapon in anger also elected itself as world arbitrator of who gets energy and who doesn't, because reasons.
Every country should be speed running nuclear tech as fast as possible if only to scare the freedom fighters away...
Not to say that the three letter agency is not sinister, but I’m pretty sure the problem was enrichment not use. Good old days…!
Anyone has any respect left for US Americans after they elected this? This is so ridiculous at so many levels:
Not US hollywood culture or whatever Americans culturally exported in the past all around the world, but this will forever represent US Americans in my mind. That this is how they overall want to be seen and represented as all around the world, seemingly:
“Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran,” President Trump posted on X. “Unfortunately, Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack, and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility.”
“NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar,” the U.S. president also wrote, proceeding then to threaten to “massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.”
What even is this style of communication and thinking behind it from a leader of the richest country in the world? Is he a child? Who can even be impressed by this... unbelievable. Feels like we're like living in a very dumb, very deadly, reality show.
The thing is that back in 2024 Kamala didn't exactly come across as a much better option, although in hindsight she likely would have been.
> in hindsight she likely would have been
It took you hindsight? I could've told you that in 2024 with regular sight.
You don't have primaries to pick sensible candidates to begin with? In either party, of course.
Kamala was always obviously a better option than Trump. Let's not pretend people didn't know who and what Trump was, or that his behavior after 2024 came as a shock to anyone.
Nonetheless all the people in the Democratic party who could obviously see what a disaster Trump would be weren't willing to compromise on any of their insane policy positions or run someone more than a midwit in order to avoid a Trump victory.
All they had to do to avoid this obvious disaster was moderate some of their extreme positions and run someone who could speak coherently and yet they couldn't do it.
So is the conclusion that it wasn't so obvious or something else?
A majority thought differently. They knew who Trump was and who Kamala was, and they voted for Trump. That's how it goes in a democracy... Anyways, they're getting what they voted for
Nit: a plurality, not a majority.
I'm not so sure that's true. Trump is making very different decisions in this term than his first term. I think a lot of his voters thought, "Everything was fine in his first term while all the liberals were crying all the time, I'd like more of that". This time around, things are not fine and we're seeing the regret show up in the polling numbers.
I think most people expected Trump Two to be a similar shit show to Trump One. I was no fan, but he was generally popular on the issue of the economy during his first term, and I think a lot of people had the economy as their primary consideration in 2024. Flooding the zone works, they tuned out all the rhetoric as partisan noise.
> I think most people expected Trump Two to be a similar shit show to Trump One
While they were being warned that his team spent 4 years planning on how to get rid of anyone who pushed back, and he wouldn't be hamstrung this time.
The people who thought 2.0 would be like 1.0 were simply choosing to beleive it despite all of the evidence suggesting otherwise.
How is 2.0 not like 1.0?
Impounding government funds, check.
Using CBP (ICE) against US citizens, check.
Assassinating Iranian officials, check.
Tariffs, check.
It's like all of this but punched up to 10. We're dumping metric shitloads of money into ICE and basically turning them into a domestic military. We weren't doing that before. The tariffs, too, reached levels never before seen.
The thing is, it was really bad the first time. We got through in spite of the incredibly dogshit fiscal policy and foreign affairs. So, if you do that again but go 10x further... will we make it through? Dunno.
If anything, the first Trump term proved to me the resiliency of the US political and economic structures. Even in the face of an absolute lunatic with an almost religious drive to destroy everything, we prevailed. Of course, little did we know that was just the beginning. Do we have the endurance? We'll see!
> We're dumping metric shitloads of money into ICE and basically turning them into a domestic military. We weren't doing that before.
CBP was already removing protesters and putting them into unmarked vans during 1.0. Pretty famously trump held a bible upside down after CBP removed them.
I think the thing missed is Trump didn't come from nowhere. You don't actually want to go back to the Obama years where he inflated the price of housing so the bubble didn't have to pop. Or where he was drone striking the middle east instead of withdrawing troops. Or sending "Unlawful combatants" to Guantanamo instead of closing it down and following international law. Or where he continued to cover up for Epstein ...
Not a big fan of "you have to have Hoover before FDR" but you don't want to go back to the way things were. You want to go forward to FDR 2.0.
Environmentalists are behind the war, follow the money!
Really looks like the spark was there before so that Iran could get attacked at all.
We consume 101 million barrels of oil per day. The amount of oil humans consume per day has doubled since 1980. Is this the way we finally wake up to the urgency of addressing the climate crisis caused by burning fossil fuels?
How will this affect datacenters? Could AI become expensive?
While it could be good to shift to renewable for other reasons, it's naive to assume that nations won't be dependent on others for critical minerals and metals needed to make solar/wind/batteries/etc.
They are, but unlike fossil fuels, those dependencies go down over time (modulo the utility growth that makes demand for everything go up, of course).
If you buy fossil fuel from a country that may not be an ally forever, your demand remains constant (or goes up over time) because you are changing that fuel into a state that cannot be used again.
If you buy, say, lithium, you put that in a battery and in the future, you can get more lithium from the ground but you can also grind up batteries and re-extract it when they fail. Battery ingredients are, generally, not consumable over even medium and long-term scale if you build out the recycling infrastructure to recapture those ingredients.
Yes, the shocks aren't as immediate if you have the infrastructure set up and you are out of the initial adoption phase. Even things like lithium and silver are limited resources, so getting more out of the ground will eventually face scarcity as energy demand has always increased over the long term.
Lithium is one of the most abundant elements on earth.
Newer battery chemistries don't use lithium.
By the time we use enough energy to run out of all the elements we could make batteries with, we're likely to be at the "cheap asteroid mining" level of technological development.
Abundant doesn't mean unlimited, nor does it mean economical or environmentally friendly to access. The point is that most countries would need to import metals and minerals critical to renewable energy.
Batteries aren't burned to produce energy. They can be recycled. They can use elements besides lithium.
We're talking about a trickle of imports if recycling doesn't cover growing needs.
If you have growth in demand and population, recycling is unlikely to cover it.
The dependencies needed for the replacement of equipment having a lifetime of many decades are infinitely less dangerous than the dependencies for consumables like fuel.
For critical minerals and metals it is easy to stockpile them to have a buffer sufficient for many years of infrastructure replacement.
Such dependencies may remain a problem during a war, when the infrastructure could be destroyed, but in normal times such dependencies would not be sufficient to enable the kind of blackmailing that can be done with consumables, like food and fuel.
I'm not sure the stockpiling you mention will work the way you propose. We already stockpile oil, yet we still see price shocks. Stockpiling metals can still lead to price shocks due to reluctance to release them and the need to eventually replenish them.
We also stockpile foods and medications, and that doesn't provide price stability.
Yes, but you are missing the critical bit.
Food is a constant need, and you can't exist for long without it.
Sure we need to increase battery sotrage, but in ~5 years time, it'll be maintainance, assuming the correct adoption rate. So yes we will still _need_ batteries, but we don't need a constant supply of new batteries to keep the lights on.
A 5 year full adoption rate is not even close to possible.
Once you reach maintenance phase you still have to replace stuff, so just like food you will need a constant supply.
Right, but you realise that even if we manage to buy everything all at once, we are looking at at least a 15 year operating lifespan.
Yes, there will need replacement, but not all at once and not the same volume
Honestly, those who attacked Iran should cover the global increase in energy costs for everyone else. Why do I have to pay more for the orange guy? Instead he benefits with his superrich buddies.
lmao seriously this is how leaders lead?
oh, surprise! blowing up oil infrastructure increases oil prices.
shocking news.
meanwhile.. didn't china start selling cars with sodium sulfur batteries?
Like 1 year ago, wallstreet bros were being interviewed saying they decided all the green pledges and all that was woke from the pre-trump 2 era, and I haven't heard anything at all about climate change really from any world leader in the last few years. I guess once again, people have their coming to jesus moment when it's far too late.
Although the results are very similar, the motivation of energy independence is quite different that of climate change.
America has ample supplies of natural gas, oil etc. and so doesn't need to turn away from fossil fuels to be energy independent. Whereas in Europe we do as there isn't much natural gas or oil and even the coal that remains is difficult to extract and thus less economical.
Even at that, America is rapidly turning away from oil as wind and solar are so much cheaper. The leaders are putting on the brakes, and the change is uneven - but there is a lot of wind and solar going up in the US even now and it has been happening for 15+years.
> America has ample supplies of natural gas, oil etc. and so doesn't need to turn away from fossil fuels to be energy independent.
In the short to medium term. The natural gas, oil etc. are in fact finite resources created over a tremendously long period of time in pre-history and so once they run out you're done.
You could run nuclear power plants much longer, perhaps even indefinitely, and of course wind and sunlight are renewable, Sol doesn't give a shit what we do, it's going to shine on the planet and cause winds here until long after we're dead. But the dinosaur juice runs out, it's a quick burst and then if you didn't transition too fucking bad game over.
Yeah, exactly. We have a relatively short window of a few centuries, perhaps less, to master nuclear power (perhaps even nuclear fusion), photovoltaic panels, efficient wind turbines (including more complex offshore construction) and deploy them all at scale.
And to do it all before we cook ourselves in greenhouse gases.
I'm rather optimistic about it but it does seem that most people don't fully grasp the importance of such a transition.
Ha. I wasn't talking about the cooking. We're well into "I hope we get lucky" territory on that, let alone in "a few centuries". I was talking about literally running out.
The US is a large place with a lot of potential for extraction, so if you ignore the bit where the hostile climate kills them instead they could keep extracting at similar rates for maybe a century or more, but it does run out.
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>energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence
That would be the stupidest takeaway
if my country has 0 dependence on fossils, how many fucks would I have given for whatever is happening or will be happening in the future in shithole places like the middle east?
Won't someone think of the children, how are their schools going to get bombed if we dont do it?
Children in Sudan? Myanmar? Sahel/Nigeria? Ethiopia? Or we care about just specific children and others not so much?
we don’t care about all children, just selective children, yes?
other way around, we care about children, just not a select group of them.
if they are being bombed in a foreign country or shot in a us school, no problem
How so?
Fossil-fuel subsidies from governments totalled $7trn in 2022. Thats about 7% of global GDP. The world spends 4% of GDP on education. Source Monocle Magazine no.190 page 88.
There is a lot to unpack here and also an obvious solution.