German government agrees to ban fracking indefinitely
reuters.com
reuters.com
The US state of Wyoming produces more than 200,000 barrels per day. [2]
The US as a whole produces more than 7,400,000 barrels per day. [3]
[1] http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=de&product=oil... [2] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M... [3] http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=us&product=oil...
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=33&t=6
Germany consumes 2.403 million barrels per day.
http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=de&product=oil...
Germany has also created a 1 billion Euro subsidy program for electric cars:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/28/germany-subsid...
# Removed information about Germany EV mandate #
It is not a matter of technology, it is a matter of will.
Norway, where more than 25% of new vehicles are already electric (and the electricity grid is 100% renewable) is likely to be the first country to achieve a ban on new combustion vehicles.
Germany does have impressive carbon reduction goals, and will need to switch a large portion of their vehicle fleet to zero-emission in order to achieve them.
But also, aren't they huge on solar even though they get a fraction of the sun that the USA does?
Yes. Still have to move cars, heating, and plastics to alternatives.
They've put a ton of money into solar and wind, but these are extremely variable and there are days of the year that solar and wind produce practically 0% of Germany's energy, and usage keeps growing.
Note that it tends to be more windy when it's less sunny, so the monthly variability of solar and wind energy production combined yields a factor of less than two. You're right than on a daily basis, there likely will be issues, but I don't know the statistics off-hand (besides the news stories that electricity tariffs can go negative on sunny days).
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/downloads-englisch/pdf-file...
You can see that during 2014 the minimal combined solar and wind production for a day was just 0.022 TWh (just 4% of maximum combined wind and solar). While generally it was around 0.2TWh, the risk of dropping to almost no production means that Germany still can't really rely on wind and solar and still has to significantly rely on coal and gas (especially gas, since it is most flexible).
You will always need crude oil, not for burning, but for the synthetics, plastics, and materials of the future in our electric cars. Fracking in the USA has allowed us to use our own ethically sourced resources, rather than fueling wars in the middle east.
cheap crude oil just temporarily reduces the demand for renewable energy sources while accelerating the decline of the planet. fracking is just an attempt to delay the inevitable and make oil cheaper than it should be. bioplastics will eventually be able to do the things you mention.
And where can I buy so much as a christmas tree ornament made from bioplastic?
How much oil is needed to manufacture 1 billion tires?
Christmas decorations are the least of our problems.
Tires are really the least of our problems.
Lets assume the energy is produced by alternative means, that leaves us with 5 gallons of oil per car tire.
That's 5 billion gallons of oil for 1 billion tires.
There's around 35 gallons of oil per barrel. That's 142,857,143 barrels of oil.
The US produces roughly 9.5 million barrels of crude per day. It would take around 15 days to make 1 billion new tires if 100% of US oil was dedicated to the cause.
Now that I've done the maths, it doesn't seem like such a huge problem. So I concede to your point.
Huh. I didn't know that gasoline-car-tires are incompatible with electric-car-tires. That's too bad, because if they weren't, you could continue using the tires from your previous car on your new car.
Long gone are the days when most vehicles on the road had 15" rims.
Thinking about the ornaments I'm familiar with, there are a couple glass ones, which need special care. Mostly they're wood / cloth / metal. Plastic is rare, mostly cheap souvenirs of elementary school.
The energy might come from renewables, not necessarily oil.
It's similar to nuclear power. Nice on paper but if you add all real-life risks and costs and let the managers make the decisions that the engineers won't support or have scepticism about, bad things will happen.
Germany does not really need the technology and it's highly unpopular here so risking potential environmental harm is probably not worth it. The results from the USA are also rather mixed in regards to being harmless.
Here is some data that is rather sceptical: http://www.mweimh.nrw.de/energie/_pdf_container/gutachten_ub... (german only, sorry)
Fracking depends on the geology and certain assumptions about what's going on while fracking and that everything is going according to a plan. Might be harmless in certain regions might be a problem in others. There is little data on fracking as it's recent technology - results on earthquakes are just in and don't look particular harmless.
1. Experiment. https://youtu.be/kwtt51gvaJQ?t=36
2. Measure. http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/
3. Extrapolate (from rate of change).
You can't do that with the weather from a hundred years ago (Well actually you can, examining the geological record).
The real proof that was how many places in the world do you just see toxic crude oil squirting out of the ground? Almost nowhere. There is a reason why the rock layers are called impermeable.
Again, you should look up what actually happens in the fracking process. The substances initially injected are hydrocarbon derivatives (when you're drilling for hydrocarbons that's not a big deal) and then sand is injected to keep the rock layers from relapsing. Most of the chemicals now injected flow back out of the formation and can be recaptured.
How do we know this is true long-term? We don't even know what fluids get pumped down since they are a trade secret.
Surely these two are mutually exclusive? The US oil lobby has even more powerful propaganda than I thought if people really believe fracking is ethical!
I don't have the numbers on hand, but I can tell you in the midwest there are a lot of small independent oil and gas firms. Most of the money is exchanged for the other small companies to handle things like, Oilfield Services, transport, testing, OSHA requirements, environmental assurance, abd site cleanup. Local economies are so strong actually that the big players have trouble breaking in because prices are so low and efficiently handled by the small companies competing with each other.
GMOs will kill all oil products
The only reason we see so many bad cases of fracking effects like earthquakes and so on is because the states that allow fracking also don't bother to regulate it. So it's just a matter of extra cost and engineering, which can decrease that relative cost over time.
Besides, if anyone can engineer themselves out of a problem, it's the Germans.
That said, it's nice kit when it's well-maintained and regularly serviced.
If you want to sell a car at decent value or you're leasing it, you're practically required to also perform the inspections offered by manufacturers.
When well-maintained and regularly serviced is the norm, it's inevitably going to influence your design.
Is this a German thing or an EU thing?
Because in Spain you have to pass the ITV every to years until the car has 10 years and then, every year.
And almost any modification has to pass that inspection
It's a cultural thing, when we see a problem it must be fixed no matter how much complexity.
It's like when I'm making an app and there's a 5 fps drop when the a new table view cell is rendered, everyone I show can barely notice it, but I see it, and it bothers me until it's fixed. 60 FPS or GTFO.
> but I see it, and it bothers me until it's fixed.
This is where my love of Germany comes from.
Given fracking in the US as an example, it's no surprise at all that you'd find broad support for heavy regulation or a ban of fracking.
What's surprising about this is that it took so long.
All of the nuclear waste Germany generates would fit in a single football stadium. Technically you'd pick something below the water table and geographically stable, like say, a salt mine.
Burning coal produces more nuclear waste, it just dumps it all into the atmosphere.
https://antinuclearinfo.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/wastes-g...
"Just dump it in a salt mine" and leave it there for a million years doesn't work. It can't work, be realistic.
Most of the more dangerous fission products will have decayed sufficiently to be "safe" after hundreds, or thousands of years. Nowhere near a million!
Anything that lasts longer than that emits so little radioactivity that it's pretty much background noise.
There are plenty of naturally occurring sources of radiation that are strong enough to be dangerous - like Radon in Cornwall, UK. Even if a future civilisation accidentally digs up one of our waste sites in a few thousand years time, it wouldn't really be any worse for them than digging up some natural radioactive source.
Really? That would be mostly oxidized uranium - white not really harmless it's something different than highly toxic plutonium - besides that you have extremly toxic decay products that e.g. pose a problem for the chernobyl area.
Besides that there are more than enough isotopes used in nuclear energy that have a half-life of millions of years.
If you look at the history of Europe in the past 2000 years it's not exactly been peaceful - also something to consider - especially as we have the knowledge to use nuclear reactors to weaponize this waste.
Chernobyl (and Fukushima) are entirely different (and much worse) because you do have the nuclear fuel itself being exposed to the environment. But waste fission products in a modern reactor are far less dangerous compared to the fuel that goes in, especially once they have been properly reprocessed and then stored for while.
Isotopes with half lives in the millions of years, as opposed to years or decades, really aren't all that dangerous in terms of radioactivity. Longer half life generally means less radiation.
It's not the cleanest, but on par with wind. And only if you ignore the not insignificant nuclear waste disposal problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...
Shutting down nuclear reactors, like the Energiewende, is a great example for the kind of power these groups have in German politics. That's why I mentioned it, to illustrate the power they have and that it's therefore not surprising that fracking would be banned.
The natural next response is to move the goal posts and start talking about carbon dioxide or something, but I suggest resisting that and actually thinking about the real issues for a moment. True as that may be, it's a separate issue.
Contrast this with helium, which we really are running out of in a way that, if not necessarily "irrevocable", is certainly going to be much harder to get around if we use it all up.
Interestingly, some renewable resources like whales are far easier to "finish" then the traditional onse.
Or is their some specific thing about helium that im not seeing? We should really have some helium left for space flight.
In that respect fusion would be far more permanent.
Fracking is below the water table and and water used will be effectively lost to the water cycle. If it does leak back up, it will be polluted.
It could take millennia (or longer) for the water to slowly push through various kinds of bedrock, to finally get above ground again. By that time whatever contaminants were in it will have been filtered away.
It's an incredibly slow process, but it's not as if we could somehow drain the oceans by fracking at full speed for several millennia.
The price of water woild still be very low and it would not impact standards of living in any siginificant way.
Their are tons of easy ways to save water, pertocularly in farming but that will not happen.
Its a classical tragety of the commens. They had to solve the same problem when tjey were moving west, frontier society had very soffisticated systems of water managment.
(I can't say if I should put a /s on the end or not. If the alternative is drowning Venice, is it a good idea to throw water out of the hydrosphere entirely? ... But if nothing else, look at the scale differences; there's no way that hydraulic fracturing uses as much water as snowpack melting generates...)
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/fracking-was-steht...
It is a compromise, not a ban. Certain tests will be allowed, until those are concluded there will be a moratorium (halt) on full-scale commercial fracking.
What's with the BS being reported about Germany lately? First the misreporting on the electric vehicles, now this.
"Indefinitely" means "for an indefinite amount of time". It does not mean the same as "infinitely", even though many seem to think it does.
But as I understand the comment the point is more that by burning more fossile fuels we would trade a benefit now for more issues in the future. Sure, it would be nice to have more energy at our disposal right now, but we know that burning fossile fuels causes problems in the future. Doing it anyway and hoping that future generations will find a way to deal with the consequences of our actions seems to me shortsighted and reckless at the very least.
If you are conserned that their are to many people, then faster growth is the best solution.
The question is one of degree. We know it can be bad, but its highly variable. For some it is good as well. The longer timeframe you are talking about the more unknowns their are. So a moderate policy of supporting alternatives and restricting the most harful stuff is not a bad strategy.
I assume you mean less children, right? More wealth means less children but only up to a certain point, after that the trend reverses and even more wealth means more children again. [1] I did not check the numbers but I will give the author the benefit of doubt. It certainly makes intuitive sense that more wealth gives you the opportunity to have the luxury of more children.
It is actually harder to understand the initial decline because it is not obvious that having more children when you are less wealthy is a good thing. Maybe it is just a indirect effect because of less education and human development in general but I discussed this before and am not sure of the best way to think about it, especially because of arguments like having many children is a substitute for other social security system in less wealthy societies which implies that it is not really an indirect effect.
But setting this aside and assuming that the observed pattern does not radically change in the future, then more wealth will not stop population growth but at best slow it down somewhat and the extend of that depends on where the countries finally end up. But it gets worse, not only does increasing wealth not reduce population growth in the long term, it also increases energy consumption per capita. [2]
So increasing wealth gives us more people, which is not good, and higher energy consumption, which is also not good unless it is clean energy. And there is another aspect - India adds 5 times as many people to the world population per year as the USA. But the energy consumption per capita in the USA is so large that the USA nonetheless adds more than twice the additional energy consumption of India per year. [3]
While population growth is a serious problem - a constant 1 % population growth per year will definitely kill every human on Earth within 1400 years - it just won't happen. If there are to many people, they will just die, either starve or get killed in resource wars. The problem will solve itself although I would much prefer that we proactively ensured that population growth will not be stopped by some disaster.
But the more pressing issue is the climate change due to our energy consumption and the way we produce it. We probably can not solve that problem by simply killing enough people. Therefore population growth is at least currently only an issue insofar as it contributes to the increase in energy consumption and trying to reduce population growth by increasing wealth and energy consumption is pretty likely counterproductive for both issues.
But admittedly the exact outcome is not so easy to predict. If countries would stay at the point where the trend in [1] reverses for a long time, then we could get reduced population growth or even a population decline without further increase in energy consumption per capita and the former might offset the later depending on the pace of the increase in wealth. But I do not see what kind of policy could keep countries there, one would essentially have to stop the further development of countries when the trend reverses.
And here is the blog [4] I took the graphs from.
[1] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/wp-content/uploads/2013/...
[2] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/wp-content/uploads/2013/...
[3] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/wp-content/uploads/2013/...
[4] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-real-populat...
But I think it's safe to say that he's been proven wrong. Alternative energy technologies, mainly PV solar, really are tracking along Kurzweil's exponential growth curve, such that energy supply will not be appreciably impacted by the restriction of fossil fuels. (Not to mention he was also wrong about those constraints as well, given fracking of source rocks).
Being in the doomer echo chamber is fun, for a while. But at some point, we all have to leave, as Ran Prieur did, and recognize that the cornucopians are right.
But that is really besides my point in the comments here, I am just arguing that it is probably a bad idea to throw more fossil fuels at the problem then absolutely necessary. Especially I am doubtful that using more fossil fuels to overcome fossil fuel usage as quick as possible would yield a net positive outcome. I mean it could work if the boost in development would overcompensate a longer period of fossil fuel usage at lower levels and if that boost would not push us over some bad phase transition or what ever else might go wrong. But are there facts that would support such a decision, I am currently not aware of such.
With regard to Kurzweil's exponential growth curve and Ran Prieur, I will have to have look at that, I am not familiar with what they have to say about the topic.
Whats the evidence that people will increase the amount of children again? I really dont see such trends, the hole first world is flattening out or shrinking.
As for energy, I think that with continuing growth of population, you will have even more urbanisation and that means less energy per person. A New Yorker uses less energy then somebody in a small rual town.
The total energy output of the sun can be massivly harvested for energy. We also have nuclear that we could use far more of. We have lots of proven Gas left, and neither coal nor oil is used up. Their are of course a hole bunch of other viable option. Thats before even considering more futuristic tech.
Even should the price go up, the market can massivly react to it. Their are so many simple ways to save lots of energy that people just dont bother with right now.
As for Climat change, I think the economic predictions on it, are not all that bad. Because of the long time scale we have time to do a hige amount of adoption. Living near the equator will be less habitable, but loving in Canada might be improved. The economic models I have seen trying to account for the cost of adjustment are not actually that high.
Admitatly, if you are right that population growth will rise in the rich countries, we might have a problem in the long term bit their are many other problems that are far more worrying.
There are some rays of hope in the form of population stabilization. But whether we're screwed or not depends quite a bit on what the number is: Is it 9 billion, or 15 billion? Are we already so far past long term sustainability ? Are we screwed due to climate change?
Maybe we'll be eating and burning stuff made in vats by CRISPR-ized algae and 15 billion will be OK, if by "OK" you mean everyone eats, just don't look to hard at the environmental degradation. But without some breakthroughs things could get rather tight.
Yes consumtion is still growing but the alternatives are there and could easly be scaled up. Sure price of energy would increase somewhat and that might lead to a small stagnation in living standerds. Nothing to worrying.
Food production can also be scaled, their is tons of potential land, changes in mode of production and thats even before we get into the more extrem options.
Such a small part of the global economy is food production, and I see very little reason why it cpuld not triple without living standerds going down. Even if the go down, because of general development, they should still rise on avg.
In what worldview is Germany among "the world's emerging populations"?
Oh FRACKing...never mind.