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Comment by durkie | Hacker News Reader

I think your points are important separately, but the crucial missing part is that electric energy production is rapidly becoming decoupled from greenhouse gas production. It is no longer an either/or situation.

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Exactly! Well over 90 percent of new generation coming online is renewables, and the cost decline of renewables shows no signs of stopping [1].

Fancy real time viz: https://www.electricitymap.org/

[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/16/1689559...

Worldwide, most of the energy that comes from wind and solar is a tiny fraction of the primary energy supply mix. Where it's growing it's mostly used for additional energy, not to replace the exisiting fossil-fuel consumption. This does not help one bit for climate change.

First graph at the top left (which is actually energy consumption, close enough): https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...

The important thing in this grap is the absolute values of each source, not their relative importance. You'll note that despite renewable growth (of which solar and wind is only a fraction, there's also biomass and various other stuff), fossil-fuel consumption is still growing faster. Indeed, historically, new energy sources have never really replaced 'older' ones. Each time, the new sources just provide additional power on top of the old ones.

So much for 'decoupling'.

Edit : the US energy article on Wikipedia has an interesting graph that shows something similar (except for a partial switch from coal to NG): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/m...

> Indeed, historically, new energy sources have never really replaced 'older' ones.

We don't use whale oil anymore.

You are constraining your history in a single century, and "older energy sources" in a single set of mostly equivalent ones.

The volume of whale oil used back in the 19th century is laughably anecdotic compared to petroleum.

When we talk about our energy needs, scale matters a lot. So yes, when it comes to climate change and energy use, you can ignore the rest of human history completely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/fossil_fuel?wasredirected=tr...

You mean that whale (and vegetal) oil wasn't replaced?

No, I mean that the scale of whale oil use was very very small compared to the scale of fossil fuels. So small, in fact, that if whale oil was on the graph I've linked above, you would barely see it moving above 0 in the 19th century.

Also, whale oil was not really used as an energy source anyway, except in lamps.

So it's completely irrelevant to my original point, which is that by and large, until now, in the thermo-industrial civilization, new energy sources have not been used to replace exisiting ones. They have been used to 'grow' the economy (more machines, more people, more production).

Maybe this graph can convince you: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/global...

For sure, fossil fuels will still be around for a while. But renewable sources are absolutely going to replace existing fossil-fuel consumption. The economics of it make it an inevitability. Aside from a few niche applications (industrial heating perhaps), there's nothing better about fossil fuels. They've just been the best we had for a long time. Some of this will be sooner (because you decide to buy an EV next month), and some later (because a coal plant gets decommissioned 10 years from now), but the writing is on the wall.

If only HN had a remind-me bot, I'd like to set a notice: oil demand will plateau within 5 years.

> If only HN had a remind-me bot, I'd like to set a notice: oil demand will plateau within 5 years.

http://longbets.org/

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