I wasn’t aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.
We need to get our politicians to do a lot more, a lot faster.
So we’re still doomed, then? I’m sorry, I’m sure lots of this is meant to be incredibly uplifting, but it reads an awful lot like “green is cheaper, trust the market! Numbers go up, up, up!” when you consider that:
- Climate change is impacting countless people in horrible ways
- Climate change is still getting worse
The important thing to note here being that, even if a brighter future awaits beyond, the worst is yet to come. I’ll get back to this in a moment.
Yes, that the science to save the human race exists is nice. Really nice. There was a period in which I genuinely wondered if there was any chance humans wouldn’t extinct themselves. But that was years ago. I’ve since learned that “saving the human species” is a terrible, disgusting metric. The future of what I consider humanity remains grim.
Now, if the worst is yet to come, and we can’t yet even accurately predict how much worse the worst really will be, take a moment to reflect on this: which part of humanity is better prepared to weather the incoming changes, and which part is more likely to be labeled “climate change refugees?”
Humanity isn’t only the richest. It’s not merely the wealthiest and most developed nations. Humanity is also a lot of people who will suffer, people who I’m unconvinced will receive the aid and support they need and deserve.
Because the root cause of these issues, the systems that govern our society, have led us here and are unlikely to go away anytime soon. Because these systems have shown incredible prowess at protecting select groups of people from certain issues, while failing at completely fixing them, despite not struggling due to a lack of resources and continuous technological advances. If the pattern holds…
Then humans will survive. Many will live well.
Humanity is still pretty screwed.
TL;DR:
“The tools are here, we’ll be alright, just need political will!”
Who’s we? And if getting politicians to do what’s right was that simple, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
P.S. I’m not advocating for doom here, I just wish more people understood that Americans buying cheap Chinese electric cars won’t save the people living nearby the mine in Africa where the cobalt for those batteries was extracted.
With respect, I think you’re projecting a discussion with a different person onto this article.
You’re right, the climate is going to get worse before it gets better. You’re right, the impacts of climate change will disproportionately affect poor and underdeveloped areas. We can’t make that go away with positive thinking, and it’s not enough for humans as a species to survive, we need to focus on reducing suffering while we’re turning the ship.
What I took away from this article is that the market forces for cheap renewable power and the means to store it are now stronger than the forces for CO2 emitting power. And those forces are moving faster than predicted. That’s good, and it’s ok to talk about something good when it’s true!
People who have been paying attention and care about others have good reason to be wary about the narrative “oh, everything is going to be fine” because that’s what industry and politicians have been saying for a long time instead of taking needed action.
We’re at a point where most people recognize climate change is real, and they can see it’s effects. We’re also at a point where many people don’t have hope for the situation. It’s dangerous to tell people “shit’s fucked and there’s nothing you can do about it” because they might believe you and do nothing.
It’s nice that you’re hopeful, but green energy in capitalism isn’t enough. We need degrowth or a revolution to actually save not just humanity, but the planet as well.
Degrowth is coming. Birth rate is below replacement in essentially all developed countries and is steeply dropping in less developed ones as well. We’re on track for population to level off and start dropping in only a few decades, as current larger generations die off.
We just need to hope that “natural” depopulation isn’t too late for addressing climate change.
But I’d argue it’s likely to drop too steeply, further destabilizing societies. Think of it like climate change in the 1970’s: we can fix it now with minimal impact, or we could wait until it’s a crisis. We need to take steps now to make having more children a more attractive choice
More and better renewable energy is great. The problem is that we’re not getting rid of the other stuff
The problem is that we’re not getting rid of the other stuff
We are, though. Coal use in the United States has cut in half in the last 15 years, and it’s still on a steep downward slope. Even as natural gas (which emits roughly half the CO2 per unit energy as coal) increased over the same time period, our total emissions from energy consumption has dropped from about 6 billion tons to 4.8 billion tons.
The progress we’re making might be slower than many of us would like, but we’re also at a tipping point where we’re making many fossil fuels simply uneconomical. And that’s the key: to make polluting costly enough that big businesses won’t want to.
You’re right, we’ve got to get rid of fossil fuel. As one example, the article talks about how energy storage has reduced the need for gas peaker plants. In California in April the power required from those plants was half what it’s been in April the prior three years.
Still plenty of progress that needs to be made, but what’s notable is that it’s now cheaper for a business to turn to green energy and storage to solve a problem. There’s not an incentive to build new polluting tech. So while the impact of climate change is going to get worse (because those emissions and warming are already baked in) the business argument for fossil fuel is no longer viable.
And yet 2023 was the new all time high for carbon emissions, at least until 2024 is in the book. We will not cut emissions until we run out of easily extractable carbon to emit. We’ll be building solar powered pumps for oil wells at some point for the otherwise negative EROI. As a species, we deserve the consequences of our behavior. Too bad they will be most severe for some of the least responsible first.
We’re doomed.
Storage is nowhere near enough if we want self sustainable green energy. And author should compare winter moths when it comes to solar panels production - worst case. Yes, there is development and each day a breaking new battery tech is announced but until these get produced for real in mass quantities, they are vaporware. Mind that we need storage for like at least a week, better a month of energy worth. And that’s a lot of batteries.
Yes, we need more storage and generation. The author didn’t say we’re all good and nothing more needs to be done. What’s noteworthy is that renewable energy is cheaper than CO2 emitting, and battery storage is cheaper than peaker plants. (And grid battery can come from things like salt, sand, brick along with better known components like hydro storage, doesn’t have to be rare earth elements)
It’s ok to acknowledge when good things happen while also recognizing bad things.
True.
And while we wait we keep our factories running, our cars on the street, our planes in the air, our meat on the tables, our plastic wrapped around everything and keep believing that we will be just fine.
It doesn’t have to be storage, another option is building over capacity so it’s winter output is sufficient then using the excess in summer months to perform useful work.
For example a desalination and pumping station at the mouth of the Arizona River, you can scale the pumping from a storage lake by the desalination plant to one or more of the upriver lakes raising their water levels to replace the water used for industry and agricultural.
Carbon capture and manufacture of e-fuels or similar is another great possibility, it can be scaled with energy production vastly reducing the cost of the process and allowing further transition from oil in areas which might otherwise be difficult.
E-chems are important because there’s a few things which are vitally important to modern industry but currently produced fairly cheep as an oil by-product, if demand for oil derived fuel declines as we hope and production falls dramatically then the price of those chemicals would skyrocket - being able to transition into using sequestered carbon would save a lot of difficulty, and if it helps create a market for sequestered carbon it could help us start bring atmospheric co2 ppm down slowly.
Grid scale storage has come a long way. There are saltwater batteries and flow batteries in use now, those technologies are here, they’re just still being iterated on and improved. And as the renewables get increasingly affordable, the demand for storage will rise with it. Now we’re still mostly deploying expensive lithium batteries, but as more of that gets installed, the demand for cheaper storage will skyrocket. And production generally follows demand.
Do you have any data how much of those batteries are in fact in use? For example, Slovenia needs something north of 1.5 * 24 GWh energy for a day. And we are 2 mills population. Plus during winter you need to charge them. With short days of like 5 hours of less than ideal sun if no clouds or fog … good luck. Perhaps eventually we’ll get there, but it’s really far far away.
Well if there’s not enough sun, wind could be a better option. I don’t know much about the climate in slovenia, so either could make more sense.
As for these new kinds of batteries, I don’t have the hard numbers on hand, but I know the current installed capacity is really small. So as a product, they’re still really new.
until these get produced for real in mass quantities, they are vaporware
The world is already seeing exponential growth in annual completion of grid scale battery storage. Here’s some recent data in the US, as products and projects mature from theoretical to small scale prototypes to full scale pilot projects to full production.
And author should compare winter moths
There’s also significant developments being made in geothermal, which is actually dispatchable. Plus we actually still produce more grid-connected wind than solar right now, it’s just that solar is so damn cheap it makes sense to install capacity well beyond matching peak demand.
Some combination of overcapacity, demand-shifting, and storage will go a long way in reducing the amount of dispatchable fossil fuel capacity that is necessary.
