Europe’s energy crisis is about to go global as gas prices soar
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Energy is so important, yet so cheap. I still hear people flying in for a two hour business meeting, or commuting by car tens of kilometers. Only when that ceases to be economically viable we should call the price high. Until then, I'm happy it finally makes economical sense to reduce CO2 output.
You work from home and/or you make much more than an average person your age. Maybe you're a programmer.
Ok let's make energy more expensive. I think it's only fair that the pain is distributed equitably, so let's put a $0.1/Gb tax on bandwidth [1], the cloud being one of the largest growing emitters of CO2.
Frankly, I liked the 90s low bandwidth internet more than today's, everything valuable we can do today the 90s had enough bandwidth for. Everything that is unhealthy about the internet today typically takes bandwidth. So, I think $0.1/Gb is not enough.
Do you agree?
[1] $0.1/Gb for data flowing to the end user and $0.2/Gb for data crossing country borders. So the cloud folks don't syphon off all the personal data of my citizens.
[EDIT] I think only unethical_ban understood the point of this post. That's it's easy to propose a tax for the poor for their poor behavior. Tax yourself first! I disagree with unethical_ban that it's a bad example - its purposely a glib and capricious indirect carbon tax.
Charging for bandwidth doesn't align incentives to solve the problem
You blame the cloud but you want to tax bandwidth. As if I can’t upload a tiny bit of code that uses tons of compute. And again to “protect privacy” - as if exporting personal data takes a non-negligible amount of traffic compared to Netflix/BitTorrent.
The only way that taxing externalities makes sense, is taxing at the source. If cloud “takes too much energy” then tax energy! And make it revenue neutral otherwise you’re just incentivising the government to increase taxes and waste even more money/resources.
Data centers in say south island new zealand powered by hydro will have near-zero carbon cost and thus be cheaper
The biggest issue with a carbon tax and data centre usage is how to charge tax on the 'import' of services.
This is an incorrect mental model that is unfortunately repeated by so many people.
All¹ of the NZ hydro power is currently used by consumers.
If we add some extra load, then the marginal increase in kWh is 100% generated by gas (or maybe even coal at Huntley).
The same problem occurs when you buy “green” energy: unless you are careful to ensure your purchase creates new green generation, then it is just greenwashing (fooling oneself). This is a significant problem with CO2 credits (not saying you shouldn’t try, but don’t be surprised that CO2 production remains the same even if you try to offset).
¹ There may be short periods when the lakes are full, and water is spilled instead of being used for electricity generation, but that certainly isn’t common.
Perhaps the most charitable interpretation given they specify the South Island is they're assuming that we would displace the energy use of the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter. Given that's about 13% of our total energy use, is powered by hydro dams without the grid capacity to transport to population centres, and run by Rio Tinto who keep threatening to throw their toys and go home...
(Of course, the other option would be to build the bloody grid capacity to get energy to where we need it, but that's a different story I guess.)
You tried to make a point, but your example failed.
I see what you're saying: The parent is being glib in your case, not realizing that a blanket increase on energy prices would hit the working class much harder than those with the privilege of staying home or making more money.
Sadly, historically, when society was undergoing large changes, such as industrialization and urbanization, marginalized peoples were never really considered. We can't have fear of change hold back our progress, but we do need to be careful to offer marginalized peoples ways to ease transition into lower-energy regimes.
Aside: I didn't even register the sarcasm in this post when I first wrote it :D
Even if I grant that, I suspect if you're working from home and not business traveling, it's still a net negative of CO2 being emitted. I would think that nearly everything that the "cloud" replaces cost more in CO2 than the "cloud" itself.
But I realize that your point is that it's easy to come up with arbitrary taxes that hurt the poor, and that's a reasonable criticism, but I don't think that that implies that we shouldn't do any kind of externallity tax on carbon. Instead, we could use tax incentives to give a rebate to disproportionately affected poor people for gas, or we could use the extra revenue from the taxes to give rebates for electric cars.
I'm not claiming this is a perfect system, and there will definitely be people who slip through the cracks, and that sucks, but the cost of not doing enough about climate change is substantially worse.
I’m sure it is, but this misses the point. If someone can work from home or have a conference call rather than travel for a meeting, the emissions savings are huge.
However liking a video and clicking an advert generated by a algorithm that tracked habits…
I'd be happy with this too. What concerns me is that some people will look at this and say "It makes economical sense to burn more coal".
Countries are already enacting deadlines for banning combustion vehicle sales [1], it is straightforward to enact fossil combustion electrical generation bans in similar fashion. The communicates to the market to no longer fund or implement combustion generation facilities, and investment will flow away from existing facilities towards renewables and energy storage (whether that's batteries, green hydrogen and/or ammonia, pumped hydro storage, etc). Most new generation is already renewables (due to cost, see Lazard's LCOE [2]) [3] [4] [5], what I discuss in this comment rapidly pulls forward fossil generation retirement (from 2030-2050 to something more reasonable, such as no latter than 2030).
In short, outlaw fossil combustion, and investment will flow into clean alternatives. The planet doesn't care about your fiat and economic system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
[2] https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896
[4] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416
[5] https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2021/Apr/World-...
A huge problem with the current market is that it's not very free, entrance is too difficult for new players, and the entrenched players have excessive political power through regulatory capture. There are far too many players with massive amounts of assets that would be stranded and devalued, if they were allowed to be exposed to competition.
But even if there were a more free market, the speed of capital on these sorts of scales is very slow. So even though it may be more economically efficient to abandon a bunch of bad coal plants and do massive deployments of new technology, the amount of capital necessary makes it difficult to make the transition at the economically most cost effective pace.
Look at all the coal plants that burn coal, despite losing money at it.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
But imagine you're the government of a country that is struggling to provide heating over the winter. It would be very tempting to think "Hmm, we could recommission that coal power plant..."
It is not reasonable to seriously cut energy usage. It will make the lives of the poor unliveable. Also any meaningful decrease will make 90% of people's lives unliveable.
No, we clearly need innovation to make this happen, not force. You cannot expect people to make these sorts of sacrifices, it's not going to happen.
Our economic system has no affordances for making choices based on true costs – only sticker prices. When these are systematically distorted, it causes a huge collective problem.
If we’re going after all the fun stuff I don’t want the parents to get away scott free.
Shall I give you my Venmo?
I can explain my critiques in more detail if you clarify exactly what your argument is.
[1] https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/08/09/the-improbability-of-c... [2] Comical, but fact-based take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8
If we price in the emissions where they happen it will be priced in for all consumers of the products that cause them.
- all the meat and diary your child is going to consume in those 18 years
- all diapers that are going to be produced and disposed.
- all methane and CO2 you child produced on an a daily basis for those 18 years (exhaling, digesting/pooping/farting)
- concrete used for building this extra room for your child
...
just to name a few.
No one here is saying we should all be Amish, but if gasoline is $3 per gallon, but it costs $3 to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere (making both these numbers up, I don't own a car), then there's a good chance that the gas is effectively too cheap, and the rest of us are going to have to pay to clean it up later. If we taxed gas to be its true price (cost of extraction + refining + shipping + profit-margin + environmental cleanup), it would help incentivize cleaner fuels.
This sort of direct air capture will be absolutely necessary in the second half of this century for all of our current oaths to keep warming to 1.5C, according to the IPCC SR1.5 report. And though many parts of the supply chain of CO2 direct air capture might get cheaper with time, the actual sequestration part might get harder and more expensive with time.
Chevron had promised to capture only a small amount of CO2 as part of a LNG project in Australia, but is facing massive fines because they didn't understand the geology enough to actually sequester CO2.
So while I'm fairly confident that we could eventually get the tech for CO2 capture down to maybe $1/gallon of gas, the actual sequestration is only going to get more difficult with time.
Every gallon of gas burned today makes 20 pounds of CO2 that will need to be removed in the future we are burdening future generations with an incredibly difficult debt that we don't yet know how to pay down.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/9/22663597/largest-direct-ai...
> 100 gallons of gas convert to a ton of CO2
https://climatekids.nasa.gov/review/carbon/gasoline.html
Using imperial units is always unfortunate, but when dealing with the typical unit of gasoline in the US, it's inevitable.
Not sure where you are getting your numbers, perhaps you're using a UK gallon or something?
https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...
Your error appears to be using a single significant figure for the density of gasoline, at 700. Other sources place it from 711 to 749 kg/m3.
Hopefully you will reconsider my comment being "not nice," since you started with one sig fig and ended with four, and then did not consider the two different meanings of ton. And on top of this all, this ignores all the upstream emissions to generate the gasoline, which is greater than the 15% which you said was "not nice."
still well short of a ton
However, I already told you that I was using a US ton, 2000 pounds, 907kg:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1+ton+in+kg
Additionally, you are not including the 3-6 pounds per gallon in upstream emissions for gasoline.
Let's recall that this all started from the phrase "about 100 gallons of gas convert to a ton of CO2" and that when you quotes, you omitted the "about" so that you could try to make your incorrect quibble relevant. So at this point I would like to call this a very "not nice scientifically" departure from anything relevant, but I'm all ears if you were going somewhere interesting with this.
Well, no, when dealing with the typical unit of gasoline in the US, Imperial units are irrelevant, and US Customary units are inevitable.
19.64 - http://www.patagoniaalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/...
20 - https://climatekids.nasa.gov/review/carbon/gasoline.html
20 - https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/contentincludes/co2_inc.htm
19.6 (converted from grams) - https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...
“Just over 19” - https://epicenergyblog.com/2013/05/24/how-many-pounds-of-car...
The next hit isn’t about CO2 from burning Gas, but about the upstream emissions that go into producing gasoline, which it pegs at 3.3 to 6.7 per gallon - https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/ask-mr-green/hey-mr-green-...
What sort of estimates are you getting?
Yes, “gasoline” is a family of related fuels of different densities and compositions, and it will also vary based on assumptions about how it is burned. Incomplete combustion will result in more “dirty” pollution and less CO2.
That density seems to be on the low end; different formulations have different densities, and the sources I’ve found give somewhat different ranges, but the ranges given typically seems to be about 750±35 kg/m³.
I do not fear being downvotes at all on this topic. If I'm not getting downvoted by the few persistent anti-climate-change voters here, then IMHO I am not pushing forward the truth enough! People, even here, have a lot more to realize about the technological, economic, and political implications of the transition that we must go through in the coming decades.
IIRC 1 ppm of CO2 is ~1 gigaton of carbon. Roughly the weight of Mt Everest. We're adding ~26 Everests annually.
Thanks.
In essence, we're still burning lots and lots of carbon just to extract energy. Thermodynamics says to reverse the process and get carbon from CO2 we need to put all that energy back, with a hefty bonus due to inefficiencies.
So how can it be feasible to afford enough energy to "unburn" a century's worth of burnt carbon if we can't even get enough energy to avoid burning new carbon in the first place? Like, our energy generation might double in a few decades, but this "unburning" would require so much spare energy that it doesn't seem likely to achieve as soon as the second half of this century.
Perhaps you can avoid "unburning" it by some other chemical process (which is why I was asking this) but simply pumping the CO2 somewhere does not seem a reasonable option, the only place on Earth that can easily hold that much of CO2 gas is the general atmosphere where it already resides.
Climeworks' proposal to pump it into basalt caverns, where it chemically reacts and becomes solid, is one way around that.
Carbon Engineering is doing gas to liquids, and claims that they need ~2.25 kWh of electricity to convert atmospheric CO2 to 1 kWh worth of liquid hydrocarbons. We will see.
We will need gigatons/year of sequestration in 2050. It's going to require a ton of innovation to get there.
It isn't, and it won't be. Carbon capture is a pleasing myth we tell ourselves to avoid the massive and immediate actions that would be necessary to avert catastrophe.
We're addicted to fossil fuels, telling ourselves that when we eventually sober up we can undo the damage we've done to ourselves.
There are several startups trying to come up with ways of sequestering atmospheric carbon in ways that will last for thousands of years. We need something like that to work, and to come up with ways to fund massive deployment in the second half of this century.
IMHO when estimating future, starting with the desired outcome (or even considering it much) is harmful, as it causes you to accept unrealistic assumptions and estimates for the key items driving your predictions, just so the predictions will come out as "acceptable" to you. You need to consider the impact factors as they are, and have realistic expectations of the effect and likelihood of interventions (especially considering the specific motivation factors of the narrow groups who can make each of those interventions, how that aligns with their interests), and see to what prognosis they lead you.
If we "need to come up with ways" then it means that it's plausible that we won't, and we (in this case, not we-as-the-world but we-as-individuals and we-as-smaller-communities) also need to plan on how to protect our interests in that (quite likely) scenario. An aching desire for something to work does not imply that it's possible in the required timeframe. Especially because there's no single "we"; those that need a solution to climate change and those that could fund it are largely separate groups; you can't look at it as a primarily technical problem when the largest impact factors are political.
We'd need to pay back all that energy, but in the coming decades we can't even afford the energy cost of the relatively much simpler solution of "simply" not burning bulk carbon for heat.
Re gas heating, I sure could've used some just this past winter during the Texas snowpocalypse. My apartment uses electric power for heating/cooking, so electricity was a single point of failure. Resiliency through diversity is a point I missed above.
The gist is that if you look at the exponential curves of growth of both wind and solar deployments, and assume that we don't back off from those, you get X amount of TWh/year in 2040. Combine that with conversion of heating and transport to electrification, which provides huge efficiency boosts and requires only 1/3 to 1/4 the energy (most fossil fuel energy is just wasted). Then add in all the parts of the developing world which will increase their energy use to EU/China standards, and we are just barely there.
However I think we are likely to see big gains in production capacity as the developing world ups their game. They will be consuming more electricity, but also be immensely more productive.
The key insight is that you don't need to turn carbon dioxide back into carbon. You just need to store those carbon atoms it in a stable form that keeps them out of the atmosphere. The most plausible way of doing that at large scale is to accelerate the reaction of naturally occurring silicates from rocks with atmospheric CO2.
"From a thermodynamic point of view, inorganic carbonates represent a lower energy state than CO2; hence the carbonation reaction is exothermic..."
That's from chapter 7 of the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage, which I recommend reading for more details.
Chapter 7 PDF: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_chapte...
Page 321 has the executive summary with your quote.
Parent page for full book: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/carbon-dioxide-capture-and-storag...
Unless you propose to decide top-down which projects deserve cheap energy and which don't, you cannot avoid the fact that building roads and allowing car ownership is under certain circumstances more economical than building lots of railroads.
On top of that, imagine how commuting 10km by train vs. car work out: By car it's a 10min ride, assuming no congestion. Whereas the door-to-door train trip will take the better part of an hour.
There is a similar advantage for flying. Yes, kerosene is comparatively cheap. But flying has an even more important advantage over trains and that is flexibility. The network of airports multiplies the number of potential connections whereas train stations can only lead you along railroads. In a region with fixed, medium-range traveling routes, say France or Japan, the train wins, otherwise the plane is just more efficient.
A 10 km commute by train typically takes 30-40 minutes door-to-door. For driving, the normal time might be 20-30 minutes, but the variance is often much higher than by train. If driving is consistently faster or slower than that, people tend to switch between train and car or otherwise change their commuting habits until congestion is back to "normal".
For comparison: It takes 25-30 min to ride by bike, depending on effort, weather, etc.
To make matters complicated in practice, gas in the US (since that's where this argument makes sense) has long been considered the holy grail of the economy, and gas taxes have not been raised to account for inflation since 1990. Since the 1980s, the US has politically favored cars and airplanes over trains and buses. Roads are never expected to make a profit, though most transit in the US is. Aviation has had things like the Essential Air Service that offer subsidies for rural air routes and carriers that serve rural airports, whereas the closest thing that transit has to this is Amtrak mandates to service cities; these are hamfisted mandates that Congressmen stuff into spending bills to make their constituents happy but don't actually create the kind of healthy market you would need to offer quality service. Moreover Amtrak track is often leased from freight carriers _because_ America apportions less money to rail than it does to roads and transit, so Amtrak trains often must yield and wait for freight trains to go first. That and the fact that externalities from emissions aren't accounted for mean any alternatives to the plane and the car in the US are at a heavy disadvantage.
That's one angle to look at it. As I said, in a country that has more or less static travel routes, railroads will win over airports for the medium range. Because sooner or later the investment into the many tracks will pay off. But long-range and dynamic routes favors the airport.
But my point was that taxing energy usage heavily will bite back. You cannot build infrastructure if energy is too expensive. So either you have cheap renewable energy, for cars as well as trains, or any mechanized transportation (and much more) will become ridiculously expensive.
> gas taxes have not been raised to account for inflation
Are gas taxes absolute values in the US?
Yes, Global Warming is a problem but the people trying to keep themselves from freezing contribute a much smaller amount than Big-Tech and industry as a whole.
Trying to shift the blame from corporations on to people just trying to survive the winter is a tale of corporate white-washing/green-washing/hand-waving/lobbying.
I can't believe people try to shrug it off as no big deal because the absolute carbon output is small, or postulating that they must have offset it. If there are two things people react badly to, it is injustice / unfairness, and hypocrisy. The ruling class has done more to turn the average person against their climate change proposals than just about anything else, in my opinion. Quite probably by design, such is the blatant audacity of their double standards.
Don't worry, The Smartest Guys In The Room went from 0 to 100 on this issue in 1969 when no major societal changes were going on and for no ulterior reason at all: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf
"The difference [in family size] is important not simply because of the numbers but because it bears vitally upon a fundamental question about the Nation's future: Do we wish to continue to invest even more of our resources and those of much of the rest of the world in meeting demands for more services, more classrooms, more hospitals, and more housing as population continues to grow?"
The distinction in the US is whether you make your money through labor (max 37% tax) or capital gains (max 20% tax). There is a lower tax rate for capitalists (who make money via ownership of capital) vs laborers (who make money through labor income). Furthermore, capital gains can be delayed until you realize your gains (sell your capital). This distinction is what practically gives the rich lower taxes than the poor.
Employers prefer keeping people full time and full time unemployed because it is more efficient per worker and the bargaining power of the unemployed doesn't exist. If everyone were to work according to their own demand for labor then this bargaining power cliff wouldn't exist and a whole lot of welfare programs could be abolished.
Taxation is a road to nowhere as rich people will always either find the way to avoid taxes or find the way to throw the costs of those taxes on the poor. This happens with every kind of tax.
The only solution to decrease CO2 emission is to behave in a rational way and use the only practical, tested and available now clean energy source - nuclear power plants. No amount of eco-talk will change reality that neither solar nor wind energy plants will be able to power modern economy. Europe is learning this the hard way right now.
Maybe Europe will do the suicidal jump with the ideas like "Fit for 55", and will kill its economy to lower global emission by 0.05% but the rest of the World, which emits much more CO2 and will emit even more when all production will be moved from Europe to Asia or USA cannot care less.
It gives the delivery company a big incentive to switch to electric vehicles or ebikes or something more efficient. This harnesses market power to push companies to be more efficient with their resources: the ones who are more innovative at avoiding CO2 usage will see financial benefits.
Delivery emissions should be attached to the person getting the delivery. Otherwise you could just skip most of your emissions by having everything delivered.
Either way, it changes your behavior, because if delivery is more expensive (to factor in the externalities it causes) you will either consume less, or pay more. This ultimately "attaches the emissions to the person getting the delivery" but in a far less complex and less game-able way.
If I order something off Amazon, do I get a say in where the package is shipped from to control "my" emissions.
Yes, you would have to use some of your carbon credits to pay for the delivery and manufacture of the shoe. The product would have both a monetary and a carbon price. If you don't have enough credits, then you can buy some on the spot market from someone who isn't using theirs up.
This would incentivise repair of the shoe, as it may require fewer carbon credits.
Probably yes, because that the whole point of Pigouvian taxes.
After all, the whole point of carbon tax is to reduce usage, not to gain revenue or penalize some people; so it works if and only if it meaningfully changes behavior, i.e. if the tax significantly raises prices of some specific market goods/services and thus drives people to use less of those specific goods/services. A simple income-proportional tax or just "tax the rich" doesn't incentivize reducing emissions, so it's useless for that goal; it's perhaps useful for social equity and wealth redistribution, but that's something not directly linked to climate change goals.
It's not about money, it's about CO2; driving deliveries needs to emit less CO2 so the goal is to either get more efficient deliveries (e.g. electric vehicles) or less deliveries (putting some of those delivery drivers out of jobs), and "who's paying for that" is just choosing the most effective means to achieve these goals.
The entire point of CO2 taxes is that you are supposed to avoid them.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/german-renewables-us...
If there really needs to be a carbon tax for delivery, it makes the most sense to transfer it directly to the consumer who demanded order-delivery. Any other mechanism will just leave a tax loophole.
And yes, emission taxes/standards should be applied to the whole world. Right now, they are adversely affecting the poor and lower middle class of the first world - none of whom are represented on HN. Meanwhile China can keep polluting away to its heart's content producing ~30% of the world's emissions by itself.
Yes, true. Guess what is used to compensate for lack of renewable output? Natural gas fired plants with short ramp up time. This will only drive electricity prices up.
The article is about gas shortages and people at risk of freezing this winter, yet almost everyone here is talking about CO2 taxes and taxing natural gas?
This is reality today under capitalism. What happens to me if I don't choose to work?
I really fail to imagine an unconditional transfer (like the one you are replying to) turning into a monster of untraceable rules.
Increased prices would clearly make it more expensive to raise children. This would lead to more social care towards people with children. How would you recommend solving that?
Reducing capitas will cause a much quicker and effective change than reducing per capita consumption.
I'm sorry, what's the issue? If we need children and need to incentivize it, it's what we'll do. And by definition, you're talking about advantages only to counterbalance new disadvantages. So we need to solve what?
I mean, if on one side we have exponential growth, and on the other we have no children leading to no one to support seniors, surely there is a middle ground where the right number of children are born each year.
On the other hand in Japan and elsewhere in developed countries women postpone having kids until in their in their 30s, because they're involved in the workforce.
So, one either ends up with exponential population growth or with the elderly working until they die and younger people postponing having chindren until mid age (with all the associated health issues, both for the mother and th child) or not having children at all.
It's rather hard if not impossible to keep a middle ground. As a woman one probably has to make a choice between bearing children after you finish college or getting a degree and joining the workforce. Guess what most women's choice is?
I live in a 100 year old, poorly insulated house with my family of 4, and we manage to use half of the average for a family house here. And we are not really trying, only thing we do is limit what parts of the house we heat (not the bedrooms) and set the temperature smartly.
I cycle 30km to my work on an electric bike to exercise and limit car usage.
So yes, I really don't think the price rise will have too much impact on consumers directly. I think most people in the Netherlands can halve their energy consumption here with very limited impact on QoL just by heating less and using their car less. And if the price really gets problematic our gov could just lower the taxation
On the flip side I respect your dedication to bike that much thru Dutch winter!
We do have lots of baby boomers in big houses that they heatup just for themselves. My mom has 4 times my heating bill by herself than I have with a family of four. It would solve a lot of problems if the elderly move to smaller houses and leave the bigger houses for families that need them.
A lot of places make that kind of swap uneconomical. From paying capital gains now instead of later, to loss of property tax increase exemptions to loss of property tax deferrals. Some places exempt gains on housing gains but not other gains (kinda a problem if you downsize and take a windfall)…
Many places ignore housing wealth when it comes to social assistance, but include everything else.
Have you investigated if it is feasible to retrofit proper isolation? It has been fairly common here in Sweden, though I'd expect that by now most of the housing stock has good isolation. Stuff like triple layers of glass in the windows also helps a lot.
I must say though that a properly insulated house can have a better climate in winter as you can keep the humidity much higher.
I was hoping to make my own, but maybe I'll cave in and just use a Swapfiets electric...
It will probably will mean that you get less tired and exercise less, which may be good or bad depending on your opinion.
In most of the US that's a good way to land in the ER.
source: son t-boned on his e-bike 6 months ago
ROTFL. Like fertilizer production?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Sources_of_hydro...
There are no answers given usually, less so convincingly, mostly because the ones demanding scarcity are usually not the ones affected by it.
Just trying to find one member of the working class / blue collar amongst ExtencionRebllion and the like will be a tedious task. Not so much if you look for kids of millionaires, or of bilionaires. Or Millionaires and Billionaires themselves.
As of now I can only see two outcomes:
They either start making these scarcity demands a part of their foreign policy (meaning getting tough on the actual global polluters, not their domestic poor people who barely can afford one cheap vacation to the Balears per year).
Or we just start naming what we would have called it 150 years ago: A top-down class-war.
Meanwhile your "ExtinctionRebellion" phrase seems like a political touchstone that you assume other people know what you're talking about, but I have no clue what it is.
edit: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=13
"We have all heard about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills."
SUBTLE
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion_Youth
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_Strike_for_Climate
Her Holyness [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg
from 1968 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome
and 1972 from that same club [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
and countless dystopian science-fiction literature and movies from that epoch.
If everyone were consuming the same amount/causing the same amount of emissions, this would be a no-op. However, since the rich tend to consume more, this will be a net positive for poorer people, and at the same time it will make decisions about activity that causes emissions more meaningful.
It's also much more palatable than bans or rationing, reasonably easy to implement, and avoids the trap of populist "ban highly visible thing of the day" approaches that tend to lower quality of life without addressing the real issue.
Yes, billionaires with private jets tend to consume more but your average multimillionaire is probably working remote from a cushy white collar job while poor people need to commute to and from work (often long distances because rent is expensive). CO2 taxes are regressive however you try to sell them.
Second, even if it were true, you'd still have control over how you redistribute the revenue, and as a result, you can make the net effect as progressive as you want.
[1] https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
In practice billionaires wouldn't care how much you tax them unless you taxed a substantial portion of income, they'd still consume what they wanted. In order to materially change even middle class peoples' behavior prices need to change by double digit percentage points, and when you factor in that people don't spend all they earn, that's a lot of tax.
If there is a CO2-heavy option that's 10% cheaper than the "green" option, introducing the tax will suddenly make the "green" option the cheaper one.
This could be using an electric truck to get food to the store, it could be using a heat pump instead of an oil furnace, it could be the locally grown potatoes instead of potatoes that were trucked over a long distance from a place with cheaper labor, etc.
Most of the savings won't happen because the millionaire flies less, they will be made because someone, somewhere along the supply chain makes a different decision because the environmentally friendlier thing is now cheaper. That's the beauty of it - it's about fixing the emissions where the best effect can be achieved with the smallest investment, not about taking away people's ability to consume and live an enjoyable life.
Of course there is the question about people that simply _store_ carbon, e.g. what if there's a coal mine where the buyers of the coal don't actually use the coal for its energy purposes but instead for, say, makeup creation, or wood for building? We would probably have to work out special licensing for non-usage purposes and that's where it would probably get tricky.
Smaller processes that produce CO2 through actual emissions will probably fall through the gaps, but they're not critical in the big picture. Most will be covered through taxes on the fuel or energy. I'd expect most of the electric truck battery emissions to come from energy, either during the assembly of the cells or production of the ingredients.
> If you tax only direct emissions you motivate companies to amortize emissions by concentrating them during manufacture.
I do not understand. Indirect emissions are direct emissions at some point, and that's where they get taxed. The cost then gets passed along, creating an incentive to either buy from a supplier that can produce the same thing more cheaply by reducing emissions, or finding a substitute product that's cheaper because it's less emissions-intensive to make.
The real problem is imports from countries that do not follow an equivalent tax regime. I suppose here approximations will be necessary, and by making them overly generous, other countries have an incentive to join the scheme.
That electric car battery might be manufactured in China using coal power and shipped over the ocean in a diesel fueled ship and yet pay no tax, making an American-manufactured battery even less competitive.
What if it's a giant shipping boat with thousands of containers?
The diesel fuel that the train company will buy has already been taxed at the refinery (if it's a diesel train). The gas that the power company will burn to generate power for an electric train has been taxed at import. The train company will simply pay the price of these goods, tax included, and pass this cost on to the owners of the goods being shipped. How is up to them.
Likewise, the "hidden" emissions from the production of the train are likewise "hidden" in its price: The steel that the train was made from was already taxed when it left the steel mill (not 100% familiar with steelmaking, but this may be one of the cases where it's insufficient to just tax the inputs since the steel mill might emit GHG that don't just come from fuel). The cost of the energy used in processing that steel already contained the cost of the emissions tax that was initially levied on the fuel. etc.
Firstly, what kind of excuse is this - imagine the same argument applied to social networks, should they just leave child porn on their websites because it too difficult to keep track of? What if a social network has billions of photos? Business has to follow the law, just like I do.
Secondly, we have armies of people collecting data on these containers and doing data science to manage and optimise supply chains, and they have the containers, their weights and contents documented for customs, to make sure they are safe and not overloaded, for insurance purposes, so they can be delivered to the right customer, many containers are independently GPS tagged, etc.
All this data already exists for every major carrier, haulage, etc. The hard part is like one guy delivering donuts part-time, but we don't need to go after that.
Adding a tax on the carbon content of fuels will push that even harder.
However, people's health would probably be increased if we could provide people electric heat.
Also, like you said, cooking and heating with wood is terrible for the lungs and this has become much more very evident with COVID.
For example: No one should be choosing between heating and eating, from a thermodynamic perspective. It's trivial to drastically cut heating energy through very low-tech methods: increasing insulation in the walls, and add extra layers of glass to your windows. The reason it's not done is because real estate developers have no incentive to increase their construction costs by some marginal amount since they know that natural gas cost is so cheap no customer is going to care about heating energy reduction. Not only that, most customers strongly prefer the cheaper construction once they're shown how many decades it would take for the better building envelope to pay for itself via energy bill reductions. Same reason there isn't a incentive to switch from (dirty) gas to electric, install solar panels, switch to heat pumps etc etc.
Now consider how building related carbon emissions make up about 40% of the total emissions, and you'll see how much of an infuriating obstacle cheap energy is in cutting carbon emissions.
Yes, there will be low-income people for who this will be a crisis, but that can be dealt with separately: government subsidies, or government subsidies of envelope retrofits (great stimulus idea). There is no reason frame this issue in a us versus them manner.
For me gas prices in the UK, what really messed me up was the standing charges (daily charge for infrastructure) circa 2006 they doubled that but lowered the unit price which for the average family of 4 usage, worked out as a saving of £100 a year. Though as a single person, that change cost me near on £100 a year in extra standing charge and a saving of unit cost of £20 a year. I just find it annoying how most fuel usage pricing can and does actually penalise responsible low-usage users. Sure the more you buy the cheaper things get but when you get to climate, wear and tear upon the infrastructure - those users who don't have to worry about the money or have any care are reward by a fixed impact cost upon infrastructure - even if they use 10x more than somebody else - they both pay the same. Then the more they use - then costs become cheaper for them.
Pro-tip - slow baking a baked potatoes in the oven is a good meal that also warms the home so double usage of that fuel.
What would I change - well I'd quota people - additional quota's for medical conditions and other variable but the gist would be - fuel you use up to that quota then you pay X price per unit and the standing charge is dropped and worked into the price. Now, after you use your quota - you pay extra per unit of fuel. That way those who do the most impact are more fairly paying for it. Sadly it won't happen, but then - some serious action is needed upon climate change.
FWIW when I was more fiscally able (energy usage less than 1% of income)- my fuel usage was the same heating wise - always been a jumper if needed and going for a brisk walk does wonders for feeling warm.
Personal choice is meaningless wrt climate change. It's a topic that cannot be addressed without structural/societal changes, likely by legislation.
Industrial CO2 output doesn't just happen in a vacuum. It's a by-product for manufacturing things that consumers want/need.
Kurzgesagt's recent video (sponsored by bill gates notes)e xpressed the issue much better then I ever could, so i'll only link to it here.
It's a bit like most changes, they take time and sure my impact akin to a grain of sand in a desert, but then I feel comfortable with my choices and eventually over time, such choices will become less open as there will get a time in which government will act.
I'm mindful that many when it comes to change that is impaction can be a case of they don't so why should I and well I don't have too so I can do what I like and the pandemic as been most insightful into such mindsets. Hence we saw laws to enforces common sense in situations that had the people all been responsible, would not of been needed or come to pass. Hence I do expect the whole fossil/fuel/resource aspect of human consumption to become more and more regulated in years to come. Will it be done right is the question or will we just see those who can afford to be feckless, just as enabled as currently.
That's why I agree with you upon this and do foresee that legislation may well be the only way - alas the issue is global and that is a real cruz as when as countries tend to act as individuals and cases of - well they're not so why should we and other unfair arguments play out. So as always the politics becomes more an issue than the issue the politics is trying to solve.
What my mother gets for old age pension is the same as the cost as a tank of heating oil for her house. Thankfully she doesn't need a full tank of oil each month and summer means less fuel burned except for hot water for the oil fired water heater. I do help my mom monetarily as much as I can but yes it is a huge burden for low income people to heat their homes.
There are countless policy choices that can help the less fortunate, the great majority of which are not incompatible with gas or energy being more expensive.
For example, I'm not a huge fan of agricultural subsidies, not because I want food to be more expensive, but because of the negative environmental and health effects they've had. But the money the government pays to farmer giants could instead be redistributed to poor people and (IMHO) help them a great deal more.
Likewise, revenue from taxes on things like gasoline could mitigate the effects of higher cost for low income families, which still encourage upper classes to invest in clean energy.
There's something to be said for taxing fossil fuels and paying that money back equally to everybody. People who polute will lose money, and people who don't will receive it.
Remember that it was cheap energy that allowed people to migrate and settle in the city of their choice and thus free themselves from the landowning class.
With housing costs the way they are in certain cities, this is still relevant today.
The solution isn’t to make energy more expensive, but to make things more efficient, and to change where we get our energy from.
LED lights, battery power tools, laptops, these are very efficient compared to just 20 years ago.
Don't really need expensive Li-Ion when you have the space for big and heavy, but cheap SLA batteries.
Oh and if you’re thinking I’m talking about Texas, I’m not.
My point is why do people think these issues are just California?
Global warming and extreme weather is causing power issues in your backyard too.
Why do people love bashing california over issues in their own back yard?
The other reply mentioned TX, I was actually in the heart of the snowstorm last winter. We were saved from days of outage only because we were in a hospital block. So I also think it is not just California.
For me the best/worst part of the winter storm happened a while later when I went to an IEEE webinar on the incident. We asked the panel whether they should concentrate more on the robustness of the grid and infrastructure given extreme weather events are going to be more common. The BiG oIl ExeC in the panel replied "ask me in 1000 years, the scientists are divided on that one." But not all of the panelists were as heartless.. towards the end one of them mentioned that when designing infrastructure we should keep in mind the weak and the vulnerable- those in the hospitals and such, not just the ones with backup generators and firewood stocks.
Mass air travel will resume now that the pandemic is subsiding. Saw plenty of airplanes on sunday already... That's a massive fuel sink, and as far as I understand, with very low tax rate and fuel cost.
If you want a good economy you have to make the inputs flow unimpeded. People need food, and everything else runs on energy. It has to be a commodity.
No revolution was ever made with silk gloves kind of mentality right here.
If something is important, it is a good that it is also cheap. Every form energy production has some disadvantages, but we must improve here if we want to reduce our influence on climate.
Your proposal to increase prices will not make people drive or heat less, it will just put another burden on their shoulders. The well off would not change anything, poorer people will have trouble. This is not an idea I would support.
1. The causes seem to vary depending on who you ask. There seems to be a combination of CO2 taxes going up, a hard winter last year that diminished the strategic reserves, incompetent (corrupt?) gov't institutions that didn't replenish them in summer this year, combined with a general trend of relying more on gas and less on coal (and nuclear to some extent).
2. The EU came down with a heavy hand on coal producing countries... which does make sense, climate change is an issue. However, this is going to disproportionately hit the poorer countries in the block, those that still relied on antiquated coal burning power plants. Germany has Nord Stream + some investment in renewables, so they don't care much, France is mostly nuclear, so again, they don't care, Italy and Spain are warmer countries that could get fine through winter. Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia etc. where coal plants were closed will be hit the worst by this.
3. The EU doesn't negotiate as a block on gas prices. Each country deals with Russia individually – e.g. Nord Stream being built between Germany and Russia. That also means that the smaller countries are at the biggest disadvantage, or are reliant on either Germany's or Russia's benevolence in dictating gas prices.
Who is building them and for how long are there planned to run ? How much did it cost ?
> power plant consisting of four VVER 440/V-213 pressurized water reactors [Russian]
> Construction of Units 3 and 4 restarted in November 2008. They were planned initially to be completed in 2012 and 2013,[2] but the completion date was shifted to 2016 and 2017.[3] More recently the completion date has slipped to 2020 and 2022.
> [Reactor 1 & 2 have a 60 year commercial lifetime]
https://www.reuters.com/article/slovakia-nuclear/update-1-sl...
> Estimates from 2019 put the cost at nearly 5.7 billion euros ($6.89 billion).
You're missing the fact that all German nuclear power plants are already beyond their initial lifespan and that there simply has been no renewal of operation licenses.
No new reactors have been built since the mid-1980s so this isn't exactly a recent trend. The same applies to France, btw. The newest reactor in France started construction in 2007(!) and is expected to become operational in 2023(!).
The next newest French reactor started construction in 1991...
So much for the state of nuclear power in the world's posterchild of nuclear power.
Per capita calculations are therefore flawed from the very start and not a useful metric.
Looking at actual data reveals a clear trend: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/a1i2y40rtyg7s3p/AAAjxiD5DhvWmcyK2...
France's electricity production from nuclear shrinks similarly year-on-year to Germany's reduction in electricity production from coal.
Also no new reactors have been built in France in over a decade. Make of that what you will.
Of course, if you freeze an industry for 20 years, there is going to be some loss of knowledge and know-how.
[1]: https://www.bva-group.com/sondages/francais-nucleaire-sondag...
https://tmi2kml.inl.gov/Documents/2a-Kemeny/Presidents%20Com...
"Deliberate valve mispositioning cannot be confirmed or completely dismissed. In regard to the last point, the Commission chairman requested that the FBI reexamine this possibility. The FBI response indicates that they have not found sufficient grounds for further investigation. SUMMARY: The findings from this analysis are as follows: There has been no positive identification of an explanation for the valves being in the closed position."
The really sad part about the TMI accident is that the entire thing could have been avoided if TMI had modified its cooling system with the lessons learned from a literally-identical series of events that happened two years earlier at an also-identical Babcock&Wilcox BWR in Ohio. Davis-Besse was luckily operating at 9% power instead of at 100% like TMI in Pennsylvania in 1979: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1920/ML19208C067.pdf#page=4
"On September 24, 1977, Davis Besse Nuclear Power Station Unit No. 1 experienced a depressurization when a pressurizer power relief valve failed in the open position. The Reactor Coolant System (RCS) pressure was reduced from 2255 psig to 875 psig in approximately twenty-one (21) minutes. At the beginning of this event, steam was being bypassed to the condenser and the reactor thermal power was at 263 MW, or 9.5%. Electricity was not being generated. The following systems malfunctioned during the transient:
a. Steam and Feedwater Rupture Control System (SFRCS).
b. Pressurizer Pilot Actuated Relief Valve.
c. No. 2 Steam Generator Auxiliary Feed Pump Turbine Governor"
"At approximately 21 minutes into the transient, the operators discovered that the pressurizer power relief valve was stuck open. Blowdown via this valve was stopped by closing the block valve, thus terminating the reactor vessel depressurization. The RCS pressure recovered to normal and cooldown of the system followed."
"The reason for the spurious 'half-trip' of the SFRCS has not yet been determined. An extensive investigation revealed several loose connections at terminal boards, but nothing conclusive. Investigation into the failure of the pressurizer pilot actuated relief valve revealed that a 'close' relay was missing from the control circuit. This missing relay would normally provide a 'seal-in' circuit which would hold the valve open until the pressure dropped to 2205 psig. Without the relay the power relief valve cycled open and closed each time the pressure of the RCS went above or below 2255 psig. The rapid cycling of the valve caused a failure of the pilot valve stem, and this failure caused the power relief valve to remain open."
Some engineers-turned-Hollywood-consultants even went public trying to warn us about these problems in the industry. At least we got an actually really good movie out of it which in a singularity of the universe's ultimate irony came out two weeks before the TMI accident and actually contains a line that says "an area the size of Pennsylvania" could be left radioactive and uninhabitable. I have it on LaserDisc and it's one of my favs :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nemYBeT4aQY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergius_process
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_liquefaction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_campaign_of_World_War_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_to_liquids
Also the reason why France occupied that region of Germany after World War 1, and then hilariously also again after World War 2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saarland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territory_of_the_Saar_Basin
In France, my parents last 3 houses (i.e. since 1986) have been all 100% electric. The one from 1986 had a gas stove though, but based on gas bottle. Beside that all electric including the oven and washer/dryer.
In big cities like Paris I believe it is discouraged even when available due to the risks and housing density.
I guess my parents living in suburbs, residential area basically meant to use electricity over gas.
It would be interesting to see if this current shortage, is going to accelerate the transition to electricity. Although retrofitting older building might be very expansive. But if gas price continues to increase like it did in the past few months, it would change the equation for some.
Brexit seems like a good guess, and indeed it's what many are pointing to.
Companies also blame Brexit, pointing out that 15,000 European truck drivers left the UK in the last year. [...] Willmotts had a steady supply of drivers from eastern Europe over the last two decades. But last year, that all changed. When the pandemic struck and European trade slowed down, drivers were furloughed. Many went back to their home countries, to be with family. "Since the effects of Brexit, they haven't wanted to come back," explained Mr Gray. "They can earn just as much in Germany, France or Poland, so there's no real need to be in the UK." [1]
More concretely brexit makes the job more tedious. Truck drivers don't want to fill out endless paperwork and sit in a queue at customs, but that's exactly what brexit has generously provided.
--
[0]: https://freewestmedia.com/2020/07/06/us-intensifies-pressure...
Edit: And I think the EU is capable of putting pressure on Russia by itself, as they/we did. The US pressure is purely self serving and for their own economic wins. Which is fine I guess, I just would like it if we were not so sensitive to it here in the EU. It would save us citizens a lot of money right now.
Edit 2: the Russians would like it too: https://www.rt.com/business/476844-eu-russia-us-sanctions/
Many wars turned out to not be economic in the short term, but one can argue that the US has benefited from the rubblization of the middle east (like the shenanigans pulled in Iran among others, as described in "confessions of an Economic Hitman.")
> They don't need to, because they have the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantik-Br%C3%BCcke and other similary undemocratic institutions influencing the shit out of anything via side-channel attacks.
Which clearly says that the US has "undemocratic institutions" influencing Europe, but the link doesn't support the idea that the A-B is antidemocratic (there's nothing inherently "antidemocratic" about fostering international partnership and cooperation).
edit: Of course this is not exclusive to the US, let's just say they lead the market of political BS, k?
There's nothing in your article that suggested that the organization in question was some sort of propaganda arm of the US government, and there's nothing undemocratic about advocating for one's interests. You might not agree with the advocacy, but "democracy" doesn't demand agreement.
> Of course this is not exclusive to the US, let's just say they lead the market of political BS, k?
I don't buy this at all. There are nations with actual propaganda departments, state-run censorship, bot nets, etc who actually directly attempt to influence elections.
Like all other countries, the US does advocate for its own interests abroad--this is called "diplomacy" and it's generally the least-bad kind of advocacy. However, unlike other countries, the US does possess a lot of clout (the world depends on America in large part for security and prosperity, however loath we are to admit that America or Americans serve a useful purpose).
I'm not here to spoon feed, mentor, or lecture you on every single point you question. Furthermore it would be disrespectful to disturb your blissful ignorance.
Dream in peace.
Yeah besides the name I guess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanticism
Try [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantiker#Kritik and use some translation like
[2] https://www.deepl.com/translator
[3] https://translate.google.com
[4] https://translate.yandex.com
They all suffice.
Got the gist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Nuland
Take a note the date of the leaked phone conversation.
Still, if it is perceived that the US is active in a European country right on the border of Russia, you have to think about the possibility that it might be seen as a threat.
edit: Not saying the reaction is justified, just saying that it wasn't some random expansionist impulse.
But we're going down a rabbit hole. The point is that Russia now has more economic leverage over eastern Europe, and for what?
(Anything else? Would you like to have fries with that?)
Democracy support is not meddling. RF has done a lot of harm to Ukraine even before 2014. Euromaidan was a response against RF puppet Yanukovych. RF has used gas prices to influence election results. Leonid Kuchma who has built oligarchy regime elected with the help of Kremlin. His opponent, Viacheslav Chornovil, was killed.
It is mafia. And in RF mafia has got its own state.
I think it would be good to have good relations with Russia, "where goods cross borders, armies do not."
There are probably a lot of nice people living in Russia, and I bet they love their children too.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...
I think that 600,000 Iraqis killed in that war (lower bound) would have different opinion.
Besides, does population of Iraq live better now? I seriously doubt that.
Can't have that, bringing some Sheiks with a very special relationship to the U.S.A. back into to empire, tsk, tsk!
Building case for chase supported by fake
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
Slapping of hands follows:
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War
Dust settles(mostly) until:
[4] http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,9985...
Uh Oh! Grave error! Threatening the
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar
That means terror! Have to be clever here, let's see and play some curve ball out of nowhere:
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)
The rest is history, as they say.
And they have the gall to call Russia a gas station with nukes run by mafia.
Yah, sure, whatever...
YOU ASS AYE! YOU ASS AYE! YOU ASS AYE!
Specifically against the Soviet Union, a communistic totalitarian regime that does not exist anymore.
Specifically it never included Ukraine as member, and specifically the US promised that NATO will never expand to more than the original members.
The only countries in Europe that are against the NS2 are those that have already pipelines or interests and are economically harmed by more competence.
>Claiming that the US is acting purely in self serving motives is wildly disingenuous.
Claiming that the US is acting purely in self serving motives is telling the truth. The US can mind its own business.
Specifically after signing Budapest Memorandum (Ukraine's nuclear disarming).
Specifically after signing Russian–Ukrainian Friendship Treaty.
Specifically without even admitting invasion!
This totally invalidates all the claims regarding NATO. That's defense alliance, everyone who has missed opportunity to join is a total fool.
Russian Federation is autocratic regime, just look at the last "elections".
East Europe countries were under USSR occupation for 40 years. Poland is going to switch to LNG to break dependency on RF gas.
Specifically after Ukraine made speaking Russian illegal and started treating Russian speaking population as second class citizens.
Specifically after Ukraine made plans to give Crimea to US to build a US military base.
I've recently switched to Ukrainian because of your kind. Fascists.
Half of my family lives in Ukraine. I speak with them several times a year. Before 2014 I visited them at least once a year.
They all want to move to Russia because of the rise of nazism. Some of them already moved and they're very happy that they did it.
Fascists.
Actually, fascists and Hitler are honored in Ukraine on the government level. There's no way to deny it.
People freely speak Russian language, though Russian language popularity greatly tanked because people like you. It is eights year of war, so many facts that confirm RF has occupied Ukraine, destroyed cities, killed thousands.
ctrl-f color revolutions
Where is the problem with that? Cry me a river!
Russia is openly an economic adversary of Europe and the United States, and is openly hostile to several countries in the east. Germany "went it alone", as far as I know, in order to get better prices.
My understanding of this topic is limited, so I admit my ignorance here. It simply doesn't make sense to give geopolitical strength to a rival by handicapping your nearer neighbors.
Germany sold these to them. Goes against my guts, but that's how it is. But theirs is not the only, and not even the largest storage.
So in principle them not owning that storage wouldn't change a thing.
So there are contracts. Which go by volume, and not continous uninterrupted flow. They delivered the volume and some more.
And now it isn't gone, burnt, and 'gone with the wind', but bought by others in anticipation of rising prices,
either still residing in that storage, just owned by someone else, or pumped to other storage, anticipating good sales opportunity.
How would you call that? Clever business? While lobotomizing Gazprom, Russia, whomever?
What's so hard to get about this? They are not the bad actors here.
However, if the US invaded Italy with little warning and took over Florence because it felt it needed warm water port in Europe, or access to a better wine supply then Western Europe would rightly panic and wonder how they can disentangle themselves from US influence.
The reason the US is allowed so much influence in the first place is because its stays out of territorial disputes in Europe---heck even if one occurs, it historically drags its feet for years.
Oh wait.
Why and how US will invade its colonies? Italy and Germany cannot resist any decision made by US. They have US military bases on their soil and their own army is deliberately made smaller and weaker than personnel of US military bases.
However comparing it to a superpower is nonsensical. The US has the 3rd largest military in the world, beaten only by India and China who have populations in the billions.
But just below the US is Russia with the 4h largest military in the world, and the largest (by a huge margin) on the European continent.
Now the era of colonialism was only possible due to vast technological differences between the two parties, and the good luck of the Europeans finding empires in turmoil (Songhai, Benin, Aztecs, China, etc.). It’s extremely difficult to subjugate much less rule a far off colony. The US couldn’t even manage it with Afghanistan so I doubt they’d have much luck with Germany.
On the other hand, it’s much easier to conquer your neighbor, push them back and simply put your own people in place. Russia did that for about 50 years and ruled half of Europe. I would wager Germans have more to fear from a revived Russia run by an KGB agent who grew up during the time of Empire, than a US who was most recently run by a television reality show host.
Apart from that which parts of it have more power is more interesting, but also debatable.
Anyways, apart from some exceptions (for show) the german military is mostly a very expensive army of clowns,
which can't even manage to transport its own troops reliably, or politicians for that matter.
Been there, done that in the 90ies. Meanwhile I haven't heard or read anything which would change my mind about that.
Rather the opposite.
Germany simply wants to have both options. America doesn't want that, because in "good times" Russian gas is much cheaper.
The US doesn't even register, so it's lumped in with "others".
All the infrastructure for the ships and further distribution is being built right now.
Anerica is under "others", because it's too expensive.
Also, even if there was sufficient capacity to import an equal volume of LNG there's still the problem of distributing it. Pipelines and other infrastructure have to be built to take care of new chokepoints.
We can import gas which is delivered as CLNG via Rotterdam, Zeebrugge, maybe even Dunkerque. The infrastructure is there since years, and has enough capacity. What is happening at the moment is just caused by speculation, hoarders, and politics.
All this crying is from the uninformed, multiplied by the presstitutes.
Economic sanctions and legal threats towards executives of any companies working on the project go a bit further than diplomatic pressure. It's probably the closest things to an act of war you can do without doing one.
Interfering in the international dealing of a foreign country can definitely be seen as sabotage. I personally stoped viewing the USA as an ally of the EU after this intervention. But to be fair I already had serious doubt after they crippled our diplomatic efforts in Iran.
What does this mean?
What parent comment is pointing out is that Russia has invaded sovereign nations (cultural and economic allies) in the 21st century. In one instance of such it would go on to vehemently deny its involvement.
> Hegemony is the political, economic, or military predominance of one state over other states.
You might want to learn your history if you think Russia has never been kicked out by "someone like the Taliban". Mind you, Afghanistan was a much more peaceful country before the USSR invaded, but I won't fault a country too harshly for the impossible-to-predict consequences of meddling; however, I will fault a country for the motives of their meddling in the first place. E.g., does a country meddle to support or overthrow a violent regime? Do they aspire to liberate or oppress?
Really? Where did you get that notion? As far as I know, it was under military junta rule
> E.g., does a country meddle to support or overthrow a violent regime?
And? Daud regime in Afghanistan was violent, isn't it?
I get that horrible things have happened, and nations did horrible things to each other. But we are citizens and I wish nothing but the best for citizens of other countries. I don't want war or influencing. I would like my gas to be a bit cheaper and preferably cleaner.
Power to Iranian, Ukranian, Russian, EU and US (and all) citizens. I hope we can one day untangle our leaders from the companies in our countries and just make them do what is best for us.
Incorrect, it completely exonerates them if you are going to merrily let the the other wrongdoer carry on with the offending behaviour.
If you disagree, ask what's the moral case for not dealing the other wrongdoer tomorrow morning?
No? Why not?
See?
In so many words I am essentially saying that whataboutism does not add to the discourse and in fact derails and detracts.
Very different from choosing to watch American movies or cooking French food.
AFAIK they do not have a history of doing this, only when terms of actual gas deals are not met. Which is common business sense.
edit: you are downplaying US influence. Are you aware The Netherlands is a host for US nuclear weapons?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis...
Besides, they're used as an enemy, as cannon fodder against Russia. Why would Russia feed them using our natural resources? What's our obligation? It's not their gas, it's not their pipeline (it was built by "soviet occupants").
Futhermore, the US has been involved or started numerous conflicts in the EU backyard, which we are forced to cooperate in, and have no choice to take care of the refugees.
Russia is absolutely a dictatorship. They just rigged their most recent election (jailed the leading rival politician and banned apps that informed people on how to use their vote strategically to minimize Putin’s party’s power).
As for "rigged elections" all the US elections in the last 50 years were rigged as well - think about gerrymandering and deliberately blocking black and Latino minorities from voting (by making it hard for them to obtain proof of identity, or making them wait hours in line at the polling stations).
"Dissident" is just a critic of a policy or regime. It doesn't improve Russia's hand at all to say that it only assassinates critics, and it certainly isn't an exclusively US-held position that Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Nemtsov, Alexei Navalny, etc were critics (as opposed to bonafide violent terrorists).
As for "America labels its critics as 'terrorists'": can you name any critics that the US labeled "terrorists" and consequently assassinated, especially on EU soil?
There's no evidence that Putin is related to death of these persons. BTW, Navalny is alive and well and all the evidence shows that he was probably "poisoned" by the CIA to create another "victim" of Putin's regime.
Besides, Navalny is a terrorist on CIA payroll. He's working on destroying Russia from within. He was recruited and trained abroad and most of his "donations" are coming from western governments and spy agencies. Nobody trusts him here.
Also, Germany had provided him with studio and equipment to film his last propaganda movie and YouTube promoted it very aggressively (no other YouTube clip was ever promoted this aggressively - it was starting automatically for almost any person in Russia that opened YouTube).
Yeah, that's a conspiracy...
Think cheer leaders.
And we are the best cheer leaders ever, or fanbois, ankle-biters.
Things which come to my mind are [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky ,
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Weiwei
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulia_Tymoshenko
(Miraculously healed from her excruciating back pains
due to rough handling by the magicians of the
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charit%C3%A9
does this ring a bell, Nawalny, Charité, yes?)
All greeted by politicians at the Airport when they arrived here, by whichever diplomatic means.
And now that Nawalny thing. Which somehow stinks.
The same way the Skripal thing stinks.
Though I don't know what to make of Litvinenko, that stinks different.
One could even go further back to
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Hale &
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_Tibetan_program in the context of
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...
and wonder why we have so many buddhist organisations here?
I'm not saying that there aren't any other parties playing similar games here and elsewhere, that would be unlikely.
It's just the endlessly repeated and obvious BS, which is so ridiculous.
Most recent example is some nobody who suddenly popped up as 'the hope' of the german green party,
pushed by media, talking empty phrases in interviews, lied about credentials/qualifications, got caught,
didn't matter, media pushed harder.
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annalena_Baerbock
Media said boo! Fake-news! Uhhh... why?
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttenberg_plagiarism_scandal
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annette_Schavan
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvana_Koch-Mehrin
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franziska_Giffey
and so many more.
We (traditionally) don't like fake it till you make it. That goes against our (percieved) sense of order! :-)
Anyways, back to that Gazprom vs. Germany topic. This is all non-news, noise, pushed by either brain-washed,
or at least uninformed people, or outright liars, having an agenda.
Do you have proofs? Anything comparable to killing 4 millions in Vietnam, 600,000 in Iraq (probably more), etc, etc.
a) picked the "high estimates" - really bad choice for the sake of an Internet discussion
b) you rounded it up!
c) you presented that number as civilians killed while it is total deaths on both sides
d) you tried to present that number in the context of children killed
e) you assume these were all killed by US, which they weren't
Considering grossness of the misrepresentation in your comment, I don't think it makes sense to argue with you. However, there's plenty of proofs for Russia not minding killing children in its war efforts as recent as 2014, including MH17 which had 80 children on board.
[x] https://fair.org/extra/we-think-the-price-is-worth-it/
I'd also like to add
[1] https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/weapons-mass-migrat... &
[2] https://www.covertbookreport.com/weapons-of-mass-migration/
(Would you like to have fries with that?)
That said, the US should absolutely work to reduce its collateral damage, but let's not pretend that accidentally killing a civilian and bombing a city (because they are disproportionately critical of your dictatorship) are morally equivalent.
I would also expand this to known supporters and voters, but that can be next step.
So you would massacre tens or hundreds of millions of civilians because accidentally killing civilians is bad? This is the most heinous thing I've ever read on HN.
> Or at least judged by peers of their victims. Like for latest case I say ship everyone in chain of command and involved in manufacturing to Afghanistan and have the local government there deliver the justice they deserve.
Ironically Afghanistan no longer does trial by peers, they do door to door executions without any kind of trial (certainly not trial by jury of peers).
And of course, you're notably silent on deliberately targeting civilians in their thousands, which is what Assad has been doing and the Kremlin implicitly supports.
> So you would massacre tens or hundreds of millions of civilians because accidentally killing civilians is bad?
When you are killing children using rocket propelled explosives deliberately launched into crowded urban areas, from high-altitude unmanned vehicles, operated by professional soldiers an ocean away, on intelligence only you have, you are as far away from an accidental killing as is possible.
It you hadn't passed another law threatening the Netherlands with an invasion, you might finds yourself having to answer for it.
Julian Assange? Edward Snowden? If they could 'the US' would very much like to disappear them, by whatever means.
Furthermore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio seem just like the tip of an iceberg.
I think you're confusing "extradition and trial by jury" with "assassination" or "disappearing".
kthxbye
This is absolutely not true. US is assassinating dissidents all over the world all the time.
US is installing puppet governments and staging revolutions all the time to pursue its economical interests.
BTW, none of the alleged Russian assassinations were proven. There're only "highly likely" arguments without a single piece of evidence. And when there're counter arguments, they are not printed in the western press. E.g. how Germany was preparing for investigation of "poisoning" of Navalny, before it was known that he was "poisoned".
Otherwise you’ve shown you are either consuming Russian state TV for breakfast, lunch and dinner or you’re doing this for money.
“Highly likely”, no single piece of evidence, Germany/Navalny… these are the most trashy arguments that are spread 24/7 by state paid actors.
It never cease to amaze me how hard US population believes that it has some kind of monopoly on truth. That no other nation or person can know the truth, but US is always right.
That's the main difference between us and the "collective West".
Also, West is amazingly ignorant. E.g. when people from the West discuss history of Russia, USSR, Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine, Crimea, it is clear that you don't know a single bit about these places or history or relationships between countries and people here. You just regurgitate typical stereotypes and media lies.
The level of ignorance is so high that there're cases where it is beyond facepalm. E.g. utterances of Jane Psaki about shores of Belarus, or recent declaration in French newspaper that Ukraine invaded Crimea in 2014.
You guys know nothing, absolutely nothing. You live in a bubble created by ignorance, not knowing a single foreign language, inability to consume any information but lies fabricated by your media that belong to 5-6 rich persons that push a single agenda in unison.
Yet you're ready to kill millions based on that misinformation.
1. The US doesn't do this.
2. This is an apt description of USSR history, which is of course Russian history.
> Also, West is amazingly ignorant. E.g. when people from the West discuss history of Russia, USSR, Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine, Crimea, it is clear that you don't know a single bit about these places or history or relationships between countries and people here. You just regurgitate typical stereotypes and media lies.
Yes, I'm sure the free media all over the world (including those of the countries you've mentioned) is wrong and the Russian state media outlets are telling the truth. (:
US killed tens, maybe hundreds of millions directly and indirectly. Starting from the very beginning of its existence (genocide of natives). Ending with Libya, which is a failed state now, with slaves and anarchy, thanks to the help of US and NATO.
> 2. This is an apt description of USSR history, which is of course Russian history.
Russia (and USSR) was not always right. But it never genocided whole populations, there was never colonies of Russia that were exploited like African or Asian colonies. USSR, for example, pumped a lot of its income not into the Russian population but in the limitrophe republics (Estonia, Latvia, Uzbekistan, etc). It is not the same.
> es, I'm sure the free media all over the world
Free media, LOL. People need to live somewhere, you know buy or rent an apartment or house. Buy food, pay for electricity and heat. Nobody is free from that.
So journalist, you know, usually work for some organization that pays them salary. That organization determines what they should write about and how, where to put accents in the articles.
There're not many such organizations. They all belong to some mega-corporations, holdings, etc, that in turn belong to a very limited circle (no more than 10 persons worldwide).
Where would the truth appear in this scheme of things?
Are you really that naive?
I can open BBC news or CNN and read something about Russia and make facepalm 1000th time when I read about some fact about the place where I live or some event I witnessed.
You, people on the West, don't know what we know about you. What we read in our news about you, what we think about you.
So even if you suppose we're brainwashed, you can't have any evidence of it.
b) Using "West" gives away you're from Russia or the neighbouring countries
c) Your "truth" of “highly likely", no single piece of evidence, Germany/Navalny, etc are cheap arguments that are exaggerated and repeated non-stop by Solovyov/Simonyan and other state actors that instil fear and hatred into Russian people every day.
Each of your arguments is easily debunked within a few minutes of Googling around, including looking at investigations from within Russia (e.g. by The Insider) that used corrupt sources to buy passport copies, geolocation, flight history and phone metadata from the internal police databases. These investigations are never mentioned or even rejected by the state or the media. The reason? Because you can buy the same data and come to the same conclusions and confirm the investigation yourself.
That's all. But that Nawalny thing stinks.
It has the typical pattern of getting some useful idiot somewhere, build him/her up,
have some ankle-biters who don't know any better bark for him, and try to stir up dissent where it is useful for you.
If it works? Good! If not? Poor bastard.
Next!
They aren't anymore dangerous for Europe. The main difference is our existing trade deals with the US are more embedded into the European economy than any of the other countries. We like the US now, they are our friends, but because they are more connected, we are more reliant on them than others, which is dangerous in and of itself.
Now that demand has eased considerably, the US is now donating more doses of vaccine than all of the other countries on the planet combined.
Just like the US donates as much food to the rest of the world as all other nations combined and has been doing it for a century now.
US bad.
In whichever case, a few Internet Points is a small price to pay. :)
Same trick as people proudly touting that US is the #1 philantropy country, ignoring that other countries actually run efficient mutualized welfare services.
It doesn't mean the current vaccine donation program isn't a great thing, or that the US policy has been wrong. But it's annoying for people explaining a problem to see it reframed so that it shows feel-good results from the US pov.
(as for the numbers, [1] shows about >400M doses exported for China as of July 9th and ~350M from Europe as of May 6th, while [2] claims the US donated 160M doses as of now.)
[1]: https://dukeghic.org/2021/07/09/taking-a-closer-look-at-vacc... [2]: https://www.state.gov/covid-19-recovery/vaccine-deliveries/
"Canadian issues" was never the topic at hand. We were all responding to this comment[0]:
> The same issues apply to American control over European power supplies or Norwegian control over European power supplies. They aren't anymore dangerous for Europe. The main difference is our existing trade deals with the US are more embedded into the European economy than any of the other countries. We like the US now, they are our friends, but because they are more connected, we are more reliant on them than others, which is dangerous in and of itself.
user smnrchrds made his "US shutting off the tap" as an example of the perils of being economically entrenched with the US, but I pointed out that this was a bad example because there was no actual "flow" of vaccine for the US to cut off in the first place.
user TMWNN left the even better rebuttal[1] that the US wasn't even responsible for Canada's vaccine shortage--the US never restricted vaccine flow to Canada, but rather the Canadians failed to diversify their vaccine order until after their original vaccine deal fell through, and by the time they placed orders with US suppliers, those suppliers had long since made other commitments.
Moreover, you were the one who brought up the US philanthropic narrative--I mentioned donations in that context.
> But it's annoying for people explaining a problem to see it reframed so that it shows feel-good results from the US pov.
I'm sure it's very annoying when you're trying to pile-on another country and some buzzkill ruins the fun by setting the record straight. :) However, per the previous paragraph, the "problem" is that the Canadian government failed to make appropriate provisions. The US vaccine rollout actually appears to be even more of an unmitigated success story than I originally understood, and I'm (not really) sorry if that offends.
> as for the numbers, [1] shows about >400M doses exported for China as of July 9th and ~350M from Europe as of May 6th, while [2] claims the US donated 160M doses as of now
You're comparing all exports for China and Europe with donations from the US. When the US uses its economy to do good, everyone piles on about how evil it is that corporations are charging for something. When the US government gives away hundreds of millions of dollars worth of life saving vaccine, you pile on about how it should be selling that vaccine and that "giving vaccines away" is cheating. There's no way to win.
I've got to say, anti-Americanism is a really strange thing for me, as an American. I understand having criticism for the American government or various elements of American culture--I certainly have these criticisms myself, but I work hard to do what little I can to improve my country. I want America to be a force for good in the world. But I don't understand the impulse to interpret every event solely through the lens of "how can this be distorted to make America look bad?".
When I see another country that's struggling, I feel compassion for them. I want their country to improve. But most of the time when people see the US struggling, they seem to feel smugness and schadenfreude, and when the US isn't struggling it angers and annoys them. And it's not just Europeans and Canadians, but also progressive Americans.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28671688 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28677797
This compares to the EU which allowed vaccine exports. Thousands of Canadians are alive today that wouldn't have been if the EU acted like the US.
Yes, the early days of COVID vaccination were predictably rocky. What's the excuse today for not working together to vaccinate the world?
https://www.wjtv.com/health/coronavirus/canadian-government-...
Also, the decision to bar people from getting vaccinated on the other side of the border was not solely a Canadian decision. US disallowed Canadians going there to get vaccinated too. There was a very short period of time between the time Canadians started going to the US for vaccines and the time US banned this practice.
Also, your link is from July. That was right around the time vaccines became abundant in Canada and vaccination was opened to all regardless of age and health status. The disappointment was in early 2021, when Canada was still vaccinating 80+ people and US decided to vaccinate all 16+ people before allowing vaccine exports here so we can at least vaccinate people in elderly care homes.
> Canadians hoping to cross the border for the sole purpose of getting a COVID-19 vaccine will be turned away, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/confusion-abounds-...
There is and has never been a US vaccine export ban, and the US has not seized vaccines meant for other countries. If I purchase an item before others, purchase by far the most quantities of that item, pay by far the most overall, and pay a considerable amount of money toward funding its development, I should expect that item before others. Any Kickstarter backer knows this; it's what the US and UK did, and what Canada and the EU did not.
The Trump administration last year signed gigantic contracts for every planned vaccine, because no one knew which ones would work. Like, enough for every American from one manufacturer, let alone the current four major available ones. More importantly, the contracts guaranteed the US the earliest deliveries.
By early June 2020 (<https://web.archive.org/web/20200603171013/https://www.nytim...>) the Trump administration had already identified and was planning to sign the aforementioned huge contracts with Moderna, AstraZeneca, J&J, Merck, and Pfizer. (An 80% success rate is fantastic in drug discovery.) By that time the US had already paid $2.2 billion to three of the companies. (Also note the skepticism throughout the article that any vaccines could be delivered anywhere within the timeframe the administration was promising.)
The UK signed a similar contract for the AstraZeneca vaccine. The EU and Canada did not assure themselves of such quantities. Canada also bet on CanSino because it was afraid that the US would ban vaccine exports (which, again, never happened). Of course, the Chinese did not live up to the contract.
Before you say "But what about—", the Trump executive order from December 2020 merely sets up the legal framework to prohibit exports if desired. But that does not mean that the framework is invoked. Let me repeat: The US signed contracts that were a) huge in size/scope and b) from every pharmaceutical company working on a vaccine, which c) got the country the largest and among the first deliveries. The UK did the same thing with the AstraZeneca vaccine, and spent a lot of money to retool domestic plants to produce it in addition to the non-UK doses it bought.
By contrast, look at Canada as counterexample. Consider Maclean's desperate attempt to spin its procurement difficulties (<https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/where-did-canadas-vaccin...>). If you look past the predictable false eliding of the US's firstest-with-the-mostest contracts as an "export ban", the best the magazine can do is admit that
* all Canadian contracts with vaccine providers that actually delivered were signed between late July and late September
* all contracts were signed after the collapse of the CanSino deal, which Canada had loudly bragged about as proof of its savviness at obtaining vaccines ASAP and circumvent any perfidious US vaccine export ban (which, again, never happened), and which it has done its best since the collapse to pretend that said contract never existed
* the other contracts that the magazine cites as proof that CanSino wasn't the only basket Ottawa was putting all its eggs in are with VBI (Who?) and USask. They may or may not yet deliver effective vaccines, but it's all now a bit beside the point, eh?
(I don't disagree that to country B waiting on doses, the outcome is the same whether or not the cause is country A implementing an export ban or country A having bought up all the doses by having signed the contract first. But there is a difference.)
If the situation were different, might the US have implemented a ban on exporting doses already designated for another country, similar to what the EU did implement toward Australia? Perhaps. But, fortunately, the US never faced this issue, because of the huge amounts of money it invested a year ago and the contracts it signed with said money.
They know that they need to maintain spotless business reputation, precisely because Europe is already on the fence re doing any business with Russia at all and because gas exports are the most reliable source of hard currency for Russia.
Turning gas off is a nuclear option for Kremlin. Not unthinkable, but very extreme.
Why would Russia attack anyone? What would be the point of such an attack?
Why US is allowed to attack anyone, destroys whole countries and kill millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of civilians and everybody is ok with it (recent examples: Libya, Afghanistan, Syria)?
I was responding to the GP's hypothetical.
> Why US is allowed to attack anyone, destroys whole countries and kill millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of civilians and everybody is ok with it (recent examples: Libya, Afghanistan, Syria)?
If you can rephrase this so it doesn't sound like overt flame bait, I might respond. Otherwise we risk a flame war and I don't have energy for that.
Well they're doing it right now.
Natural gas flows at the westernmost point of the Yamal pipeline — a strategically important 2,000-kilometer pipeline that runs across four countries: Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany — dropped to 20 million cubic meters per day in mid-August, [...] a sharp fall from its typical rate of 81 mcm per day.
What’s more, European piped natural gas supply from Russia is expected to slip even further in September. [1]
--
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/24/russia-is-pumping-less-natur...
The Kremlin is as dependent on that $$$ as Germany is on gas, perhaps even more so. They won't dream of screwing their largest client, and one of the most important trading partners. If Germany was desperate for energy it wouldn't be engaging in super expensive "green" energy boondoggles and it'd be building up baseline nuclear capacity. They _easily_ have the engineering to do it, and the operational capability to run it safely. The fact that they are not doing this is quite telling - they too do not believe the Kremlin would be prepared to blow off its feet with a Gatling gun like that. If anything a trade partnership like that only makes Europe more stable, and any political or military shenanigans would be less likely to occur. Crucially it'd also strengthen the ties between the two countries, which is something the US does not want to see, because then the US sanctions would be only good for wiping one's ass with. Can't have that.
Full disclosure: Russian-American, but not a fan of Putin.
Because of that I'd rather count on small modular reactors from whomever, or even fusion by some startup, not via ITER, or Wendelstein-X.
If natural gas prices in the US keep soaring, you can expect the Biden Administration to look into turning off exports via whatever justification they can come up with to make it happen.
Gas would be a huge ecological improvement to coal. Nuclear power is too expensive and much of the costs are externalized. It will only be able to compete if you weight co2 beyond any other influence.
I think this is mainly US propaganda to be honest. The pipeline isn't needed for a long time to meet demands.
Normally I don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, but we need to ramp down emissions quickly and natural gas doesn’t get us near enough to the goal line. This seems like we need to be going for bust on clean energy, but it will be expensive.
> I think this is mainly US propaganda to be honest.
How do you figure? My post didn’t have anything positive to say about the US (because for some reason it reduces one’s credibility to acknowledge anything positive that happens in the US), but only that the result seems to be desirable.
We cannot ramp down co2 emission to zero. The co2 balance of building nuclear power plants will only amortize when we already hit 1,5°C warming and it is questionable if it helps at all considering the unknowns about operating periods and other influences.
Overall if we just look at Germany it wouldn't even matter, the nation is too small, it wouldn't even make a dent. It is still necessary to reduce emissions, but if you zero them all, it would be less than 2% of overall world wide emissions, even if it is on place 6. Not for long though and it will be completely dwarfed by the US, China and India.
This is why it’s sad to decommission existing plants, but I don’t think there’s any legitimate question as to whether nuclear is harmful. It’s a pretty well-understood quantity, but I’m not sure which “factors” you’re describing.
> Overall if we just look at Germany it wouldn't even matter, the nation is too small, it wouldn't even make a dent. It is still necessary to reduce emissions, but if you zero them all, it would be less than 2% of overall world wide emissions, even if it is on place 6. Not for long though and it will be completely dwarfed by the US, China and India.
No Germany alone won’t make a dent directly, but it can model leadership. It’s a lot easier for other countries to get on board when someone has paved the way.
Nuclear has some advantages for base loads in some scenarios, but it cannot really compete with renewables down the road.
Sadly, I assume you're correct.
> Nuclear has some advantages for base loads in some scenarios, but it cannot really compete with renewables down the road.
To be clear, I would love it if we could power everything off of solar and wind, but we still don't have any scalable technology for storing weeks worth of energy which means that solar and wind cannot be used for base load generation. Hydro simply doesn't have the capacity. Nuclear is the only clean energy option for base load for the foreseeable future. Hoping for a storage tech breakthrough in the coming decades isn't a plan; we should really be investing in nuclear and storage in case one of those two don't pan out.
Even today, there are some interesting Small Modular Reactor (SMRs) which allow nuclear plants to be built more quickly, safely, compactly, and efficiently than traditional nuclear plants. We should build some of these and iterate on them while simultaneously investing in solving the storage problem.
Why would we need to store weeks worth of energy? Wouldn't a more realistic amount be just a couple of days, or even less?
Every nation is saying this, including US pointing to China. China is then saying they use less per capita and started producing CO2 decades after western nations.
Congratulations, we're not doing anything collectively. I'm sure that'll excuse us to the inhabitants of earth in 50-100 years.
China's emissions are skyrocketing, while already being drastically greater than the US or EU. While the US and EU emissions have been declining gradually.
If you have 1.4 billion people, you don't get to have the same (high) per capita emissions output as a nation 1/4 your population size. The world didn't force China to have 1.4b people, it's their responsibility. The fair target isn't parity per capita with the US, it's China being allowed to have no more than 1/4 the per capita emissions of the US. And that's still a terrible number, the US is the drop dead line for where we don't want other large countries going beyond. The problem is China is already double that and heading a lot higher yet.
We don't have to urgently care if Estonia were to have the highest per capita output of emissions, they can't destroy the planet with their emissions no matter what they do. China can due to their population. It would be a different context if China's emissions were declining.
With regards to China's CO2 emissions for example, how much more dire can it get?
The relevant metric is the rate of change of emission--are we putting more or less carbon into the atmosphere year over year, and by how much? China is continuing to increase its emissions year over year, while the US emissions are falling (though not quickly enough).
Another interesting metric is the consumptive emissions--how much emissions are generated from trade (e.g., when an American buys something produced in China, the carbon involved in manufacturing that item is emitted in China, but the American benefits from the pollution as well). I actually expected the US to have much higher consumptive emissions relative to China, but it looks like the consumptive emissions pretty closely track the productive emissions while being just a bit higher at 5.77 billion t/yr (falling gradually since 2005), while China's are at 9.86 billion t/yr and climbing.
On the note of consumptive emissions, the United States should not only implement its own carbon pricing scheme, but it (along with other rich countries) should also implement a border adjustment so countries like China don't enjoy unfair competitive advantages because they pollute. This would incentivize China to reduce its Co2 or suffer heavy economic losses. It would also increase manufacturing in countries that are more responsible.
That said, to your point, the Democratic Party pays lip service to environmental concerns (the current $3.5 T budget bill is making expensive token gestures to the environment which will cost polluters virtually nothing) and the Republican Party isn't even doing that. So yes, America has a lot of room for improvement (but at least America isn't arguing that we should be allowed to increase our emissions, contrary to Chinese arguments).
You guys just signed the Paris Agreement this year.
>cumulative contributions isn't useful for anything
It's the reason we're in the predicament we're in.
>long before climate science existed or before technology existed anywhere to reduce emissions.
You've known about it since the 80s. You haven't reduced emissions since then. Technology has existed for a long time to reduce emissions.
I said this twice up thread but you were unsatisfied and continued your anti-American rant. Whatever, I'm glad that we agree now.
You're back-pedaling. I was explicitly critical of US climate policy. My two claims have consistently been: "The US isn't doing enough" and "the US is still doing better than China, which continues to increase its emission rate". You brought up cumulative numbers as a rebuttal to those claims.
Nuclear plant construction is too expensive, sure. Running existing nuclear plants instead of shutting them down before EoL is not too expensive. What we are talking about in Germany is the latter.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-ge...
> Even today, there are some interesting Small Modular Reactor (SMRs) which allow nuclear plants to be built more quickly, safely, compactly, and efficiently than traditional nuclear plants. We should build some of these and iterate on them while simultaneously investing in solving the storage problem.
Also the environmental and economical cost and waste management.
I'm assuming from your phrasing that you're using nuclear to refer exclusively to nuclear fission.
Are you really suggesting that it's 'clean' in the sense of no greenhouse gas emissions, or radioactive (negative health impacts) from the acquisition of the necessary fuel, the building of fission power stations, or the operations of same?
Per GW/h, a fossil fueled power plant is producing a lot of pollution that goes into the air and poison the people and land around it. The outcome from this can be plainly seen in the death per GW/h produced.
The only "100%" clean base load generation we have is actually hydro, but there are a few problems with it. We have already maxed out, and even if we tried to build more it would cause significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions from topsoil decomposition. It also happens to have one of the highest deaths per GW/h, although thankfully we tend to attribute that to the weather rather than the technology itself.
Nuclear fission isn't "perfect" due to the potential risks involved, but it's one of the best things we have going for us right now. The climate crisis is here, and we have to do something pretty much immediately. We don't have time to argue over what's best anymore. Build things we know work and replace those with something else when something better comes along.
It's not the most efficiant way to heat your homes (fission -> heat -> water -> steam engine -> electricity -> heater), but it brings autonomy to each country (so global issues don't affect your country), and with heat pumps, it's not even that bad at heating.
Meanwhile, the most efficient coal fired plants are like 700 grams of CO2 per kW/h and most are at 1000-1200 grams per kW/h...
But yes, "per hour" is necessary because you can't instantaneously emit a certain mass of co2. You emit over time, just like you generate power over time.
The SI unit for some absolute quantity of energy is the "Joule".
1 watt = 1 joule per second (1 J/s)
Watts can sort of be thought of as the rate at which some absolute quantity of energy is available or able to be consumed.
Since energy sources are usually rated in terms of their ability to supply an instantaneous amount of power, in order to get back to the absolute amount of energy, you need to multiply by the time in order to get back to just some multiple of joules.
1 watt-second = 1 J/s * s = 1 J.
So the concept holds that if we are going to measure some amount of something (other than power) produced by a power plant, it should be measured against the absolute amount of power produced. Obviously this doesn't take into account the fact that pollution generated by some forms of power aren't linearly correlated with the power produced - e.g. fossil fuel plants produce less particulate pollution the hotter the fire burns, meaning they get dirtier vs the power output the lower the output power is set. Hence why gas turbines burn cleaner that gas-fired steam generators (hand waving over the efficiency differences of direct fired turbines versus steam generation).
Another data point is that natural gas turbines (again, averages from the US) produce 550 grams per kWh, and combined cycle (adding a second turbine that runs off the exhaust heat of the first) are 435 grams CO2 per kWh.
But the numbers I posted are what I meant. In the US, an average of one kilogram of CO2 is emitted per kilowatt-hour of energy (3.6 * 10^6 Joules) generated. Nuclear is two orders of magnitude less carbon emission (versus coal), wind and solar are comparable if deployed under ideal conditions. Even under non-ideal conditions, they still offer an order of magnitude improvement.
Trillions of years is the wrong timescale. The earth is only a few billion years old, and anyway the nuclear waste won't be radiotoxic in 1-10 thousand years much less 1 trillion. I'm pretty sure the Earth won't be habitable (as we understand 'habitable', anyway) in 1 trillion years. Anyway, climate change poses an existential threat in decades or centuries.
And while the earth has long forgotten about humans other species will still be endangered by it.
Anyway, far more species are far more endangered by climate change right now than any future species will be by nuclear waste.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the...
and from there on under The Sun and planetary environments we're toast in about 600 million years.
Shrug
The search for waste storage that lasts forever feels like the search for data storage that last forever. In the latter case, no storage medium is reliable enough in the long run, and the better strategy is continuous active management, moving from one storage medium to another as technology evolves and as old media expire.
Compared to the result of having billions over billions of over wastes in the atmosphere, I can't even understand how people pretend it's not a no-brainer question.
That is, frankly, moronic. All you will end up with is your groundwater leeching out the waste. We have exactly this problem in Gorleben, and now have to spend a boatload of money in recovering all the waste from the former mine.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...
There is still the issue of how to communicate “Danger: Nuclear Waste” to the people who will encounter the waste storage facility over the next 10,000-100,000 years, but for now we can safely store waste.
> The radioactivity of nuclear waste naturally decays, and has a finite radiotoxic lifetime. Within a period of 1,000-10,000 years, the radioactivity of HLW decays to that of the originally mined ore. Its hazard then depends on how concentrated it is. By comparison, other industrial wastes (e.g. heavy metals, such as cadmium and mercury) remain hazardous indefinitely.
- https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
The above is probably some nuclear power lobby (vested interest and all that), but I think the point is a good one.
An example I'd like to cite is how one of the Sultan's of Egypt tried to dismantle the pyramids and failed horribly because of all the manpower involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Menkaure
This way if something happens to external core, you can cheaply fix it, instead of recover them from deep mines.
No yo won't, because you will think just a bit before drilling the mine shaft over an aquifer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository)
> We have exactly this problem in Gorleben
Looks like the only problems you have in Gorleben are a handful of medical-grade wastes badly conditioned and a very vocal populace.
I'm very pro-renewables, but nuclear power's problems are organizational rather than waste-related, at least in much of the developed world.
We have solutions right now to get rid of coal, atom etc completely in a couple of years, new inventions take too much time to be ready for the market when we need them by 2030.
By the time it's still bad for carbon based lifeforms it's as old as todays archaeology!
No we do not. Renewable energy is unreliable and unsuitable for base load generation. Until we can figure out how to store weeks worth of energy, nuclear is the only clean option for base load.
> You don't know if that place on earth will still be there or in the middle of an ocean in the time the waste is till toxic.
We do have a pretty good idea, and to the extent that we don't, it's climate change. Pretty ironic to use climate change as a reason to forestall nuclear considering it's our best shot at mitigating climate change pending a renewable energy storage miracle.
We tried to make nuclear energy a thing for over 50 years, it only shows we aren't able to a) make safe use of it and b) get a solution for the waste.
No, we didn't. Nuclear was and is unpopular for reasons that aren't justified by the evidence.
> we aren't able to make safe use of it
This is entirely untrue. Nuclear is the safest energy source by far, even more so than wind or solar:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
> we couldn't get a solution for the waste.
We know the solution for the waste, we just have to act on it. And anyway, we have to solve for the existing waste and once you have to dig a big hole for a little bit of waste you can use that existing hole for a whole lot of waste with virtually no economic impact.
Nuclear power was one of the safest energy source in the last century. Even hydroelectrical power, which is quite safe, has been much deadlier than nuclear accidents, and don't get me started on the consequences of carbon-heavy production methods.
> b) get a solution for the waste.
There is a solution for the waste: deep burial in stable geological conditions. The only people saying there are no solution do not have any other argument better “dangerous green-glowing slime makes me afraid, Greenpeace plz help”.
I think you're looking at this the right way. We aren't "on the verge" of climate catastrophe, or "at the edge": we are already over the cliff, and the rocks are getting closer by the second.
Our only chance is to de-carbonize energy now, and the only technology that gets us there is nuclear.
To be fair, this is a possibility, but not established fact. Assuming “the cliff” in question is runaway global warming.
Yes
>Perhaps the US ought not to have interfered, but it seems like a desirable outcome nonetheless.
No, freezing in an European winter isn't an desirable outcome.
Yes, gas bad and Russia evil, but shooting of your arm because your fingers are broken isn't a smart thing to do. Gas is already expensive in Europe and there aren't any viable cheap alternatives, both green and non-green. Curently at least.
This is surely theatrics. Europeans will pay more for heating than they usually do, and that will be the extent of it.
Yeah, drama helps makes a point which brings us to:
>Europeans will pay more for heating than they usually do,
That is the problem, many feel that heating and fuel are already expensive. Do you think this will make the poorer part of the population vote more for green and sustainable ideas? Or is it just gonna push them more towards politicians that don't support these ideeas?
Isn’t the obvious answer to redistribute wealth? Anyway, this is the whole deal with curbing climate change—it’s going to be an economic burden by definition. You’re going from externalizing a cost to internalizing it, so someone is going to have to pay a little more than normal. We need to work to make people understand that this transition won’t be easy precisely because we kicked the can so far down the road.
I am very against nuclear power, on both the economic aspect, and the health and hazards side of things, specially nuclear waste for which there are no cold long term repositories which inspire much trust in me
This said, I am fully on board on keeping existing nuclear reactors working, BUT I learned recently that radiation itself damages/corrodes/degrades the containment vessels of nuclear reactors over time, to the point where what was once strong steel or titanium becomes as fragile as glass or sugar glass (!!!)... Which is just not something that you can repair as the damage happens at the molecular level so then the entire reactor building needs to be basically scrapped for the most part and the vessel rebuilt
So, when nuclear scientists and engineers say that x reactor has a y lifespan, they are being very serious about it
I am despite all of that fully on board with extending the lifespan of nuclear reactors as long as possible
Nord Stream 2 and the cementing of European dependence on Russian gas it represents seems like a terrible idea geopolitically. The thing is, the more powerful European countries like Germany which pushed for it didn't think they'd be the ones it'd hurt.
Why? Central Europe isn't that dependent on that gas, because Russia isn't the only source. OTOH Russia now has an incentive to keep the gas and thus the Euros flowing.
This magical euro-thinking just boggles my mind. Do you really think if some euro-fokks somewhere in Straussburg make a wish for cheap NG, billions of cubic meter, then gas should immediately appears and be available for a penny per cm? Really?
It does exist and could be produced. But it requires discussions, contract(s), signatures, obligations, CAPEX (and quite a lot of it), bank loans, development in the field etc.
Not a magic wish by someone.
Right now Gazprom is quite busy filling up storage in the Russia in preparation for the winter.
> "the problem would just go away if Europe approved Nord Stream 2"
Really? Care to provide Putin/Miller statements?
Export plan is already known and published. And problem won't go away, they are much more serious that this bs about gazprom and Russia
Gray's law applies to political corruption: http://wikidumper.blogspot.com/2007/07/greys-law.html
The crisis, if it really is one, is mostly caused by blinkered politicians and short term business thinking.
But you are right in a sense; Russia is just making it clear that they can turn off, or change the price of, the gas supply whenever they feel like it which makes the idea of being even more reliant on it rather scary to me.
Annual average kWh/m^2 in the UK ranges from 50%-75% of what you'd get in Spain or Italy. That's enough even for domestic solar panels to pay for themselves.
And I don't understand how more wind will improve things. More unpredictable capacity means these episodes where the country finds itself short will be more frequent.
Might want to be careful with that source. It looks like it's run by a "Swedish nationalist politician" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1vra_Suk) and appears to be running stories based on the Russian government-owned TASS newswire (e.g. https://freewestmedia.com/2021/09/24/unionists-rise-up-again...).
Also this article shows a pretty bizarre misunderstanding to push an Ivermectin angle:
https://freewestmedia.com/2021/09/26/french-doctor-violently...
> The Associated Press has meanwhile tried to claim that the doctor was not arrested for prescribing Ivermectin and that this was “fake news” but patients treated by the physician confirmed that Théron had been prescribing the alternative life-saving treatment.
The AP article says he was arrested for assault, after throwing things at someone who was delivering documents to him about an investigation into problems with his medical practice. "Free West Media" seems to be trying to imply his Ivermectin prescriptions are proof he was arrested for doing that, but that doesn't follow at all. The Ivermectin prescriptions and assault seem like they'd be legally independent events, and it's quite plausible he'd never have been arrested if he hadn't been so unreasonable as to throw things at people.
Also, here are some of their most recent editorials:
The Covid Lie grows like Pinocchio’s nose (https://freewestmedia.com/2021/09/27/the-covid-lie-grows-lik...)
Vetting Afghan immigrants for a religious comorbidity (Islam) (https://freewestmedia.com/2021/09/23/vetting-afghan-immigran...)
Terrorists in Daraa, Syria hoarding large amounts of cash (https://freewestmedia.com/2021/09/16/terrorists-in-daraa-syr...)
Daraa appears to be city that was recently captured by the Syrian government from the rebels. Calling the rebels "terrorists" seems to indicate a strong pro-Assad orientation.
The EU may commit the fewest atrocities but they sure do love putting money in the coffers of those who commit them.
Here's what we can try doing instead: build more nuclear reactors, stop funding our democratic oases by throwing money at autocratic regimes, and stop pissing in each other's milk so we can become a real global power that doesn't have to kowtow to the awful to make ends meet.
The EU needs to build both independent energy infrastructure and independent electronics infrastructure. When dependence makes economic sense, it should at least be done with allies or compatible world view regimes.
This on a continent with a proven track record of managing construction projects taking over a century for solely religious purposes.
At some point going cold whilst simultaneously cooking the planet is a choice. Fine, make it, but it was a choice. We're not a victim of circumstance.
Just a week ago there was some article arguing that renewables unreliability was causing an energy crisis in the UK, and that the mature, reliable option was fossil fuels. And yet here we are.
* Whoops. Thanks for the correction.
People arguing against this setup usually lift nuclear as the contender, as it is not effected by changing weather nor release poisonous emissions into the air. In EU there is also the usual argument of being less dependent on Russia and the middle east for energy. It thus sounds odd that someone would argue in favor of a grid with only fossil fuels, as that would just be more expensive compared to one that combines fossil fuel with renewable with no gained benefits.
We will have to remove CO2 too so maybe the kerosene is another viable pathway.
High energy intensive operations are already somewhat dynamic to changes in the energy grid, but there is a cross point where the cost of shutting down operation in order to wait for better weather is not viable. Large scale water desalination is not that big to my knowledge in EU/UK.
At the same time, over production is a hard sell for wind farms operators. It reduces profitability since you then have periods where competition makes the prices goes close or even beyond zero. When Denmark hit 100% capacity we saw a very distinct change in the market where the interest to invest into more wind went drastically down. Wind is still the cheapest way to produce energy but overproduction cuts into that cost advantage, making alternative energy production better investment in comparison.
Nuclear is a great option; unfortunately renewables need a high amount of storage capacity AND expensive other minerals AND space AND particular environments.
That being said, renewables are great if you can set them up. For instance, I'm building a hydroelectric & solar system on my farm. That does not mean I think it's for everywhere.
Nuclear, Coal and Natural Gas are going to be necessary for northern climates and many regions due to environmental factors.
It's not, for a multitude of reasons:
- New ordinary reactor projects (EPR) are ridiculously overrunning timelines and budgets, they are putting Berlin's infamous BER airport to shame
- New revolutionary concepts (MSR) are at the moment vaporware, not to mention the unsolved proliferation issues
- Europe (unlike the US, Australia and Russia) doesn't have remote places to safely dump all the nuclear garbage
- Most of Africa and South America are politically too unstable to do anything involving nuclear. Last thing unstable narco countries or war zones need is to worry about terrorists snatching up nuclear material and building dirty bombs
- Most of the world's uranium production comes from dictatorships and has intense environmental concerns surrounding it, making it an ethically questionable fuel source
- Even our existing nuclear plants are plagued with mismanagement, cost-cutting and accidents (see e.g. the infamous Sellafield plant in UK), not to mention they are extremely old. Many have been placed in geologically questionable areas, further increasing the risk of a repeat of a Fukushima-style incident.
You mean if you exclude places like northern Scandinavia, Greenland and Svalbard?
And Svalbard - sure! - let's dump our garbage in one of the few remaining somewhat pristine Arctic islands. Brilliant!
As for other places in northern Scandinavia, ask the natives whether they're cool (pun not intended) with becoming the dumping ground for the rest of the continent.
A modern reactor block has a net capacity of about 1.3 GW. Last year, 1.4 GW net have been installed in just wind power in Germany. Sure that's not a good comparison, since both over-provisioning and storage have to be accounted for, but it just goes to show how quickly alternatives can be scaled up (side note, the newly installed capacity in 2017 was 5.3 GW).
The problem with nuclear power is logistics and time. There's only so many specialists for planning and building nuclear facilities plus most countries simply cannot afford to have more than dozen or so under construction at any given time.
The countries that'd benefit the most from cheap and reliable electricity ae incidentally countries that can neither afford nor operate nuclear power for various reasons. That's not just political instability and lack of expertise, but also geography. You need stable ground and cooling, so dry regions with seasonal flooding are off the table.
Not to mention the enormous amount of additional infrastructure, from substations to stable grids. Oh, and nuclear reactors are crap at load following so unless you have substantial baseload (e.g. heavy industry), you'd need somewhere to dump excess electricity.
That's not true. Modern nuclear power plants can move at 5% of full load per minute up and down. France is doing load following country wide with its nuclear reactors.
In fact the French must be laughing at this energy debacle with their 75% share of nuclear energy.
Capable of doesn't equal safe and economical, though, which is why France's reactors are capped at 2.3%. This still doesn't affect the minimum load of about 45% either (the safe range is ~37% to 83%).
> France is doing load following country wide with its nuclear reactors.
No it isn't. Some reactors are being operated in load following mode. Not all and not most.
> In fact the French must be laughing at this energy debacle with their 75% share of nuclear energy.
This "energy debacle" affects France just as well because it's not about electricity (except for very few countries like Romania) and primarily about heating and industry.
The amount of natural gas consumed by France amounted to about 1743512 TJ compared to 1436443 TJ in gross electricity production using nuclear power in 2019 [1].
So France is using more natural gas (in terms of energy) than electricity generated from nuclear power, so much for that misinformed bit.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3217494/11099022/KS-... pg.96ff
I wonder if this type of event will presage a shift back to nuclear for Europe. Nuclear and renewable are basically Europe's only options for energy independence. A price rise like this might make them rethink their current fuel mix.
What drives energy prices in central Europe are investments in changing the infrastructure to renewable. Yes, that isn't cheap. But not really a crisis in the common sense. Some people would like to see the gas prices inflated perhaps.
well, then, it is priced in, maybe just not that gradually
It was all a long term plan, but poorly executed.
Nuclear would be great. I’m not sure how many reactors are gen 2 or gen 3. Gen 2 reactors are still risky.
Coal is actually pretty important to smooth out energy. There was something fascinating I learned during the Texas outage last year. At the time I was privy to private exchange emails among power engineers.
One engineer explained that one of the problems they were having is that, with the closing of coal plants, the reliability of the grid goes down. And with a very good reason: You can store a massive pile of coal next to the plant for (basically) free [1].
oil, by comparison, is expensive to store, natgas more expensive still. What happens is, in the winter, the pressure of the natgas lines goes down as consumers drive up their thermostats. Therefore, natgas plants can't deliver the power required beacuse the gas isn't there. So, in the N. East of the USA where there are nasty cold snaps, power operators have piles of coal ready to be burned in coal plants.
Most of the power is still from natgas throughout the year, but coal bails you out when it gets super cold (note, the midwest doesn't need this because it's always nastily cold there -> the natgas lines are built accordingly).
[1] Some, having read the popular press explanations of the outage, will complain that renewables delivered 90% of what was requested. That's true, but only half of the story. The 90% figure was a de-rated amount of energy [2]. Basically dispatchers knew that renewables weren't going to deliver and adjusted their predictions accordingly. The blackout happened, therefore, because the power source that was expected to show up and deliver in this situation tripped over itself. There's no doubt natgas can deliver - it does every winter in the North - but it can't if it's not implemented properly, or if there's not enough gas pressure in the lines to deal with a massive sure.
[2] None of this is meant to be a dismissal of renewable energy. Texas leads in renewables, and why shouldn't they? It's a resource that (can) cleans up our environment. But i power we can't treat things like panaceas and have to be realistic about where we stand.
Month August,September
2021: 52%,40%
2020: 48%,44%
2019: 46%,48%
2018: 38%,41%
The thing about gas is that you can store it. If August produces too much you can use less gas in August and use it in September. If you take both months they average to 46% which is the same as 2020. 10% less renewables in this specific month isn't enough to cause price explosions especially when the previous month had been at an all time high.
Data: https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?...
The amount of gas usage for electricity production isn't actually increasing that much either because coal capacity is actually mostly being replaced with renewable energy instead. There are maybe a few new gas plants coming online recently but overall the proportion of gas is barely growing in the European electricity market (unlike renewables). E.g. Germany has actually seen a slight decrease in the overall amount of gas consumed over the last 20 years or so: https://www.statista.com/statistics/703657/natural-gas-consu...
However, the problem is not shortages or blackouts but high prices of gas specifically. There are no blackouts in Europe right now. Just people getting frustrated with having to pay more for their energy.
Partially the high prices are because of a global shift in demand and partially this is because of e.g. CO2 emission pricing, which is a thing in Europe. But a big part is also that Covid lockdown restrictions have been lifted in the last few months and economic activity and associated energy consumption is a lot higher all over the world. Large parts of Europe use gas for heating much more than for electricity. Gas shortages would be a problem for that reason specifically. So, I expect Russia will have a great year for gas exports as they will be able to charge a premium.
This report has a nice summary of the energy market in Europe last month: https://aleasoft.com/beyond-price-records-august-good-month-...
Wind in Germany was actually improving during August. Solar was pretty decent too though July was a bit off compared to previous years. It's autumn now so that usually means more wind and less solar. Lots of rain too. Good news for wind and hydro in other words. I'm not aware of any seasonally unusual drought or low wind predictions for the next few months.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/5ec6b18d-c855-408d-acad-cb5779d10...
[2] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/us-blame-russia...
They want Germany to fire up Nord Stream 2, from which point onwards they can say "as seen in 2021, we can't meet your needs without it" and it never turns off again
How Germany could be pressured (with NS-2 or without it)? With what?
"Gazprom Germania is keeping a low profile when asked about the reasons for the largely empty Rehden storage facility. Injection and withdrawal volumes were carried out by customers, a spokesman said in response to a query. "Therefore, we also cannot forecast how the development will look in the future."
And winter is coming, which means more demand for energy in general and less supply from solar specially.
RF has built NS2, purely political project, and now wants to certify it.
Also gas tankers have waited for years on the sea without entering port because of COVID. Lots of companies have gone under and the supply has been disrupted.
It takes months for a gas tanker to move and global transport right now is chaos.
So through gas market liberalisation it got very difficult to keep reserves against the will of entrepreneurs, who decided that their profit is more important than freezing EU citizens. Now they want to distract from that by blaming Exporters and mainly Russia, who delivered on time and the agreed upon amount, for not offering more cheap gas under market value... Peak Capitalism ftw
Under every other system, people just came to expect shortages of basic essentials like food and fuel.
It may not be perfect, but it’s the least worst system we have.
Details:
https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_628372108fa37c6495a97d...
As ever, the cornucopians will win and the Malthusians will lose !
Russia is now the second largest supplier at 844,000 (May 2021).
The USA imports ~0% of its natural gas from Russia, >98% from Canada, all dwarfed by its exports though making it one of the LNG sellers Asia and Europe are turning to, as described in the article.
That’s assuming the DoE doesn’t at some point need to prioritize domestic needs over exports like Russia did however, as described in the article.
My comment was also about North America, which includes Mexico and critically Canada. But if you’d like more about the US, here’s a nice recent overview of its natural gas trade: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49156
Be that as it may, natural gas is a globally priced commodity [1], so US consumers won't be shielded from prices increases, unless the government decides to subsidize it.
Gas has almost hit that pinnacle $5 a gallon in some parts of California.
How about we start by putting a $1000/flight tax? Seems only fair that the rich, mobile class start reducing their emissions. After all, it's actually the upper classes that consume (by far) energy in gross terms.
It'd be hard to tax private jets, so much like the EU has just done with fuel duty, they end up exempting the super-rich and hammering the working class with more taxes.
"The average US citizen still consumes more than ten times the energy of the average Indian, 4-5 times that of a Brazilian, and three times more than China"
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access#per-capita-energy-c...
Almost all the wealthy footprint is discretionary: air travel, luxury purchase, package holidays... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0579-8
Your "statistical anomaly" is not anecdotal, it's the very symbol of a broken system that was designed not to care.
In this situation, I cannot expect the non-wealthy to make big efforts to reduce their consumption while the ultra rich continues to casually destroy the environment. We're letting the rich take almost all the profit but we ask the poor to work harder only because they're more numerous. This can only end with violence or a catastrophe, IMHO.
Climate change.
Only if you ignore its externalities and let someone else pay for them. Coal is wickedly expensive if you consider its costs beyond mining/transportation/storage/combustion.
But the problem Europe is hitting right now is not unexpectedly high prices, but actually running out. Blackouts, fuel pumps running dry, empty inventories, maybe a lack of natural gas. Such shortages can happen in one or another place because someone gambled and lost, but when they happen systemically, it's because of price controls; I wonder why those aren't mentioned in the article? The international LNG market isn't subject to price controls, but retail utility markets are typically heavily regulated, to the point of routinely forcing electricity distributors into unprofitability from time to time, usually temporarily.
Climate change is likely to cause a lot of hydroelectric disruption over the next century as rainfall patterns move the rainfall from where hydroelectric dams have been built to where they haven't.
As for EVs: they require a tiny fraction of the maintenance of ICE cars and so they will eventually be far cheaper. Used EVs are already an incredible deal in many areas. Where I live you can get a used Leaf with 60-80 miles range (enough for daily commute) that requires basically zero maintenance for <$8000. Charge it at home or at work and the fuel cost is tiny too.
There seems to be a large push to force America on to the same "green" plan. If the choice is between not having enough energy and being able to get fossil fuels from your own nation's land, being mostly self-sustaining. I know what I'm choosing.
Putting all your eggs in one basket just seems like a bad idea. Yes invest in green/renewable energy but this idea that we can just cut out fossil fuels doesn't seem to hold up.
Right, renewables don't cut it, and they won't without magnitudes more investment. However, notice that France doesn't have these problems.
We cannot keep planning to use weather-dependent energy sources when our climate is rapidly changing in unpredictable ways.
Yes
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/02/16/tex...
Europe is way more robust since the net is extremely well connected between countries, and I don't think that factories can buy up all available electricity like they did in Texas causing power outages for homes. Rather Europe would shut down the factories and let people have electricity in their homes. Homes losing power for a few days is a huge problem, factories shutting down for a few days isn't a big deal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/08/snowstorm-...