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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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/).
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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).
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?
"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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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"
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
>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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
> 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..
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...
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 ..
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Thank god for Elon musk, the only guy actually doing anything with solar, batteries, and affordable electric cars.
Everyone else is just talking advantage of the situation for their own profit.
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?
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.
It doesn’t matter how blue you die your hair, we are going to need oil for transport fuels for at least many years to come.
Countries that can be oil independent definitely should do that.
> 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.
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...
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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/).
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.
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
> 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 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.
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.
> 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".
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.
> It feels like this collective insanity will never end
You’re referring to Twitter, right? ;)
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
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.
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.
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?
"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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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?
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
don't worry. the President is a stable genius./s
Thoughtful comment.
Please read hn rules.
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.
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.
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"
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
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!
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.)
Nuclear is a strategic drone target first and foremost. It's harder to take out renewables and batteries because they are more distributed.
>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.
By that definition, nuclear is also “dependent on natural gas” because it’s a baseload power source that can’t dynamically follow demand.
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.
>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...
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
Seems Europe also has the option of using Northern Africa as a solar energy hub as well. Is that a viable option?
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.
It's windy and sunny in the winter too.
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.
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/
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".
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
Some of them will not exist at all in their current form by summer
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.
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.
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.
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.
this is more nuanced than the title suggests. worth reading the whole thing
Wonder how much WFH could help. Seems like during covid demand went way down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 were many sliding doors moments for action on climate change. The 2000 US presidential election was the first significant one.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
Paradoxically it could also have the opposite effect if high energy prices lead governments to cut green energy plans.
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.
> 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..
Iran tried to ditch fossil fuel for atomic but cIA said no.
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…!
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...
Really looks like the spark was there before so that Iran could get attacked at all.
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/
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.
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.
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.
surprised this isn't talked about more
How will this affect datacenters? Could AI become expensive?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
>energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence
That would be the stupidest takeaway
How so?
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 no such?
Thank god for Elon musk, the only guy actually doing anything with solar, batteries, and affordable electric cars. Everyone else is just talking advantage of the situation for their own profit.