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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

The only thing this narrative will accomplish is failure. Nobody will support significant sacrifice to combat climate change. Luckily they don't have to.

Of course we won't be able to capture and store 37 gigatonnes of carbon annually. That's ludicrous.

The path is straightforward: electrify everything, and make the grid green. There are only three major industries that are difficult to electrify: cement, steel and air travel. Steel & air travel can use hydrogen. For cement, you use low carbon processes to get carbon emissions down to about 10% of previous, and then store the rest. That's just a hundreds of megatonnes, and that is feasible.

Electrifying (almost) everything will cost a lot of money up front, but will save a ton of money in the long run. And renewable energy is a lot cheaper. And will provide a ton of jobs. So consumption is going to go up, not down.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

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I think we’re going to see a lot of shrinking consumption, but not directly because of climate change, but because of pure economic costs (some of which will be due in part to climate change).

Everything is getting more expensive. More and more people (especially youth) can’t afford a house etc. Some of them will choose to consume less, some will be forced to.

Costs of goods is a real behaviour changer. As externalities like climate change affect costs, behaviour will change. Will it be too late though?

I think this is the only viable path forward.

We simply cannot sustain a society where everyone is a voracious consumer anymore. Some people will have to simply settle for watching others consume things like cars, fancy homes, foreign travel, etc. and fantasize about it, similar to how people in old days would read travel books and fantasize about far away places they’ll never see. That’s basically the direction we’re heading with social media.

As long as you keep people healthy and sufficiently entertained they will have no desire for that excess consumption that harms the planet. They’ll have daydreams, but they will learn to accept that’s as far as they can go. And they’ll feel good about it, because they will know they are not harming the planet.

But how to convince the 1% to dramatically cut back their wasteful ways?

https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-...

> Everything is getting more expensive.

because IP owners are increasing their 'margins' (increasing the extraction of surplus value, and thus increased labor exploitation) by charging more and more economic rents.

> Nobody will support significant sacrifice to combat climate change

I do. Among other reasons, because the damages will far outweigh the sacrifices, if we don't prevent the worst consequences of climate change. But what we also need is a shift in mindset: Optimize for happiness and not for economic growth.

> The path is straightforward: electrify everything, and make the grid green. There are only three major industries that are difficult to electrify: cement, steel and air travel. Steel & air travel can use hydrogen. For cement, you use low carbon processes to get carbon emissions down to about 10% of previous, and then store the rest. That's just a hundreds of megatonnes, and that is feasible.

Did you read the part about hydrogen in the article?

> I do. Among other reasons, because the damages will far outweigh the sacrifices, if we don't prevent the worst consequences of climate change. But what we also need is a shift in mindset: Optimize for happiness and not for economic growth.

I agree you but I agree more with OP, but would rephrase: there’s zero chance that a sufficient majority of people will agree with reducing consumption. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter at all what you and I think would be better. If we really do want to prevent the worst damage of climate change then we’re beyond the point where we can rely on an extremely radical population-wide attitude shift occurring in the next few years.

They're not going to have much choice in the matter, I'd guess.

We need net-zero. You can't efficiency and reduce to zero.

> Did you read the part about hydrogen in the article?

What about it? The solution is electrification, not a hydrogen economy. Except for possibly the small niches of steel and possibly flight.

Totally agree, Carbon taxes will push free economy faster. Reducing consumption will never solve 100% the problem. It will only postpone bad things for few years.

If we started reducing emissions in the 90s it might have worked, but at this stage we need to go down to net zero emissions to succeed. And we can't reduce to zero.

It's all adjustable. Just make Carbon Tax progressive.

Until 2025 anything dirty - tax is 3% for import

2028 tax is 6%

2030 - 12% etc...

Also rollout new target for next Phases. To get rid of coal first, Gas after, ICE cars, inefficient heating, metal production...

You can make it more complex to include coal in formula etc. So if energy production contains 15% of coal then tax this economy. If that doesn't work in few years double the tax. Very simple and efficient.

it make sense to make it social, and invest this tax into low income homes upgrades for electricity(solar), heat production(geotermal).

That basically makes the Carbon/dirty production a luxury.

> That basically makes the Carbon/dirty production a luxury

Unfortunately this is very far from the reality. It's the rich that own Teslas, and the poor that need to use a diesel car to commute to work because they can't afford to live in the city center. Carbon taxes affect the poor more than the rich.

There’s plenty of much cheaper electric cars made in Europe.

Though I agree, this works with incentives added from governments. But then there will be carbon taxes to spend so that works I think.

Most poor people rarely have new cars; until you can buy a used but functional 400€ EV, carbon taxes will be harder on the working poor.

Public transport is nice, and it could cover some of that, but it will never be available everywhere and at all times.

I quite like the idea of progressive carbon taxes btw. Everyone has an annual allowance for basic living necessities-this may include eg driving their old car to work or hearing their house.

Anything on top - air travel, second homes, big cars etc - you pay for the carbon.

Maybe doesn’t sound like it’s converting to 0, but at least it differentiates between optional and essential fossil fuel use (or socialises the cost of carbon removal if you prefer).

The basic idea isn't bad, assuming it's implemented in a sensible way.

However, the most likely result will be higher fuel prices -- until the lack of income starts hurting governments and "carbon taxes" are added on top of electricity prices instead, regardlessif the energy is green or not.

Try googling [carbon tax rebate], it might be interesting.

that's why it's better to do it in phases. In 2023 there are several projects of $20-25k EV car with mileage good to go to any suburbs. With EV been a cheaper source compares to Disel it's no brainer. Timing is a king in this transition.

What opens such a lucrative pricing for car manufactures? battery production improvements on a scale created by the demand. By applying import tax in 2025 you can set a clear target for companies that yet doesn't have such plans despite tech enabling advancements.

I used "progressive" to use same principle. You have same brakets, but instead of money tax payer/importer checks emission points. If you are within average, you're good, no taxes, slightly higher - some taxes, dirty economy, very high tax.

And with phases we can just change what is normal. So that government put the automatic pressure on most dirty economies, but also will show the path to the rest.

Tangential, but is that a conventional use of 'progressive?' I'm more familiar with seeing it used to describe the idea of having a tax rate that increases with higher, well, income most often.

I like the idea of smoothly ramping up taxes over time, in general. It seems to be the most obvious solution to the objection "this will shock the market," and that sort of thing. But due to the lack of a better term, I always want to call it "adiabatic taxation" (stealing the word from physics), but I think this is just a me thing.

You are right, in tax policy "progressive" has a specific meaning, which is to increase with increasing income or consumption. Starting a tax low and increasing it over time would be considered a "phase-in".

It should be possible to reduce emissions by 90% and capture the rest by 2050. After that we may be able to go net negative.

Exponential growth is coming to an end, one way or another. Our consumption of the biosphere and drastic impact on the carrying capacity of this planet cannot be fixed by simply changing energy sources. Problems are way deeper than that.

How did you arrive at the 'carrying capacity' of the planet?

The same way doomsday preachers arrive at the date of Armageddon.

Never before has humanity been planetary scale. This presents obvious new problems that could previously have been mitigated by migration. No longer, it's a global system operating under unified logic. The defects in that logic cannot be escaped.

And you'd think people understood exponential growth after covid. But then I remembered that a sizeable part of the US electorate doesn't think it's real

It's probably less than where infinite growth takes us.

Do you have a peer reviewed scientific paper that shows any of it?

Do you even know what Growth is?

Since you are in HN, I'm guessing you also know the 2nd law of Thermodynamics?

"Earth Overshoot Day" [0] is as good a place to start as any if you're serious about answering the question.

They try to calculate, in some detail, at what point in the year the current civilization has used the earth's annual "ability to regenerate" across a range of areas, and convert it into a calendar date. So if we're using twice the earth's annual regeneration, overshoot day would be about July 1. Etc.

Spider off that and you can find some good resources on how it's calculated. Needless to say, it's not a pretty picture at the moment.

[0]: https://www.overshootday.org/

Earth shoot day depends on the life style of people.

Thus, I don't think it can be used to describe a maximum capacity earth could sustain

That's like saying that the tendency of wolves to eat prey can't be used to describe a maximum capacity of wolves given an amount of prey. Maybe we could support more wolves if they starved a little? Or if they started eating pets in addition to wild prey? Or if they expanded their range?

Knowing the maximum capacity that our Earth seems to be capable of sustaining based on current utilization is an important number, and isn't worthy of such a short-sighted dismissal. If lifestyles do change such that the maximum capacity increases, that's a huge win to be able to track.

It's an important number. I am not dismissing it in general. We don't need to starve more than we have to starve now if we live less wasteful.

That said, when it comes to looking at the maximum capacity earth could sustain, it rather seems short sighted to not consider life style changes while even the article being commented is about shrinking consumption.

So, the Earth Overshoot Day people know exactly the model of the Universe that they can accurately measure (let alone predict) all these things?

Where is your 'scientific thinking' in questioning all these things?

The year is 2300. The iPhone 279 is released, which is better than the iPhone 278. It's also smaller, and both the 278 and 279 are perfectly recyclable. Even more importantly, the apps available for both have improved over the past year.

Voila, continuing exponential growth.

We can't have exponential population growth, but infinite exponential economic growth? Dollars are just numbers in a computer. Increased economic growth can mean better resource usage rather than more resource usage.

Steel I wouldn't even consider particularly hard to electrify. Most steel, at least in the US, is from scrap metal sources melted in an electric arc furnace, and all of the iron ore smelting furnaces built in the last few decades actually use a mix of hydrogen (and carbon monoxide) already, usually with natural gas as the feedstock. The same technique works well even with >90% hydrogen (steel only contains a small amount of carbon).

And I'd say most airline travel could also be electrified directly, although it'll take cleansheet designs. Cement might be the hardest because it will produce CO2 even if you produce the clinker electrically with clean electricity.

Could steel become a carbon sink if we use atmospheric carbon in the smelting?

There are (at least) four potential solutions for air travel: batteries, hydrogen or using fuels synthesized using either atmospheric carbon directly or indirectly via plants. I dislike the massive arable land requirements of bio-fuels, so I hope one of the other three wins. I'd bet on synthetic fuels but all three are fine.

Air travel is at the stage cars were in the 90s. We had prototype EV's and prototype Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and didn't know which would win. Both were crazy expensive, and both had too many compromises to seem acceptable.

The really interesting thing about electrification is that it’s going to lead to more choice and economic freedom for people, which ironically goes against political narratives on climate change. To make the grid renewable will require early retirement of stranded fossil fuel generating assets. This will be resisted by utilities because they’ve already financed these assets and are paying off loans based on them. The key to accomplishing more renewables is to open up generation to more market competition. Because photovoltaics are now the cheapest way to generate electricity, and storage costs are dropping at a rate similar to solar ten years ago, most new generation will be renewable. We see this with states that allow municipalities to directly purchase electricity. For example, Marin county CA allows residents to purchase 60% renewable energy at competitive rates, or 100% for $0.01 more per kWh, or residents can opt-out and buy power from PG&E. The more we can decouple utilities from generation, the faster we’ll see grid scale renewables, and the more electrification will make sense.

All good points. I think we will have to contend with either paying for peaker plants to mostly sit idle, or an increase in blackouts that will coincide with a cloudy windless week.

“Of course we won’t be able to capture and store 37 gigatons”

A lot of current figures across many industries would have seemed ludicrous 100 years ago. I’m not sure anything is impossible anymore.

The article states it(technological advance) wouldn't be fast enough to save us.

To your point about "Electrifying everything will cost a lot of money ...", solar cells are at about $0.30 / W (used) and it's either possible or will be possible soon to get LiFePO4 batteries at $0.05 / Wh.

For a 30KWh home (the US average), that system will cost the consumer under $3k (assuming 8 hour days of sun, just in hardware, neglecting incidentals and labor, etc.). The average consumer in the US spends about $1-$1.5k per year on electricity. So building a solar battery system, in theory, would make its money back in 2-3 years.

There might be more savings depending on the area and incentives.

> The only thing this narrative will accomplish is failure. Nobody will support significant sacrifice to combat climate change. Luckily they don't have to.

This gets even more true when you start talking about the developing world. I'm sure Africans are going to stay poor to help deal with a problem largely created by the Europeans and Americans that have been abusing that continent for centuries. There is not a "fuck you" big enough.

I call the approach in this article "abstinence-based environmental solutions" by analogy with "abstinence-based" sex education, and it will be about as successful as trying to shame teenagers into not having sex.

This approach to sex education results teens hiding their sexuality, not using condoms or birth control, and getting more STDs and teen pregnancies. The analogous approach to fixing environmental problems will get us a lot of fake "greenwashing" and a continuation of the current CO2 growth trajectory.

Attempting to force austerity on us will result in a massive populist backlash and the election (or installation) of explicitly anti-environmental quasi-fascist or economic libertarian leaders.

Or ecofascist movements, which acknowledge that we humans have shit the bed, but whose ecofascist solution to climate change is just to mobilize the military to enforce our ownership and exclusive control over our temperate lands, in the face of ecomigrants, who we'll just shut out. We'll strengthen border enforcement and lock out the ecomigrants fleeing droughts and floods from the Global South. Much of the world population will find themselves faced with inhospitable climate, lack of opportunity, no future in the temperate zones.

Yeah, that is definitely a possibility and I've already heard rumblings of it in the alt-right orbit. Bannon is a little bit there.

The way I see it, there is one and only one climate change solution: develop alternative sources of energy that are cheaper than coal, oil, and gas, and can scale more easily. Nothing else will work. If we can't do that we should prepare for much higher CO2 levels and all that comes with it.

The good news is that solar/wind plus batteries could actually get us there if those costs keep falling rapidly as they have over the last decade. In the longer term I would not totally count out nuclear fission or fusion, though in the short term I think it would take too long to scale up the former and the latter is simply still R&D.

> making the grid green

In my understanding, greening grids undergo multiple transitions simultaneously

* from centralized to decentralized

* from stable base load to hard-to-predict intermittent generation

* from unidirectional to bi-directional (prosumers)

Instead of having big nuclear (1.5GW+) or coal plants that produce 90% of the time, we'll have countless small renewable generation sites - a solar park with 200MW capacity already takes up a massive amount of space - but on average only produces 25% of the time, some biogas, a 300 MW windfarm, lots of batteries. Consumers and some businesses will produce electricity themselves using solar and might want to sell excess power back to the grid. Building out the physical infrastructure, software and financial system that make such a system run smoothly is an absolutely astounding challenge. We are simultaneously ripping out base load (in the coastal US and in western Europe nuclear is under threat, coal is being fought everywhere) while also demanding much more from the grid by switching all street mobility to electricity.

In the end, the goal is to have a cleaner and more reliable system that provides power at competitive prices - this is an absolutely massive and extremely complex undertaking with technical challenges, political backlash ("don't build wind farms in my backyard!") and geopolitical problems (where do all the solar panels come from? How do ye compete with countries that use cheaper power?) along the way.

I'm not buying that renewable electricity is necessarily cheaper (just looking at solar panels during sunny summer days does not count, we care about edge cases) and I think what you are proposing is very hard.

Here's an excellent talk about grid-scale storage and a comparison between conventional batteries and Hydrogen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ykv_0N-bRc

I recommend Daemon (by Daniel Suarez). An AI starts making this kinds of decisions. Including: designing builds/communities around expected weather to minimize heating cooling, capping the size of businesses to ensure decentralization, providing incentives for souring 95% of what you need within 100 miles, state of the art water treatment, incentives for local power and food, etc.

One thing always bothered me: how can something be cheap (after initial investments) and create lots of jobs in the long run at the same time? I mean what is the money for fossil energy spent on, if not either raw materials or people part of the supply chain?

I agree. When individual projects promise to be cheap AND make a lot of jobs, I'm distrustful.

However, low cost energy will enable more jobs than it costs. That's not a per-project thing, though.

Labor is a significant portion of the cost of green energy. For example putting solar on your roof is more than 50% installation costs.

Fossil fuels are mostly capital costs.

The book goes into this, along with everything else.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

Jevon's Paradox, as mentioned in the article, has a corollary: if you have decreased the cost of using a resource so much that new products are created to exploit it... then you have new products, which create job demand in different sectors.

For example, graphene production is gradually exiting the lab these days. Graphene is still really expensive. But in small quantities it can be blended to add strength to concrete, which already makes new kinds of concrete products possible - a small transitional step, improving existing construction methods. But as it gets cheaper, we might start to see all-graphene objects with completely new applications, which then transform entire categories of goods and services - a light, strong material using a plentiful resource. If graphene lives up to the ballyhoo, it'd be Plastics 2, Greener This Time.

The question of "enough jobs to go around" is something that can be expressed through capital deployment. When there is a hot new sector, capital rushes into it. So the profits in one sector can end up being harnessed by the others to finance their development, given functioning capital markets providing appropriate liquidity(hardly a constant throughout history). There are a lot of things we could be financing that don't have the right time horizons or paths to investment for our financial system, and we can't change our workforce allocations instantly.

Edit: I consistently misspelled "graphene"

There's certain things in life, that it makes sense to 'consume' or 'own' outright... cellphones, tv, computers.

Then there's things that dumbfound me why we 'own' them... Power drills, tools, and a plethora of other things that take up space in our homes.

Imagine if every street in America had a warehouse w/ an employeed caretaker in charge of basically renting out power tools, ATVs, Jetski's, camping supplies, and they were networked w/ other warehouses to find items that are needed when they're out of stock locally.

Houses could be built smaller because you don't need to store so much wasteful shit.

i'd like to build this myself on a homestead-like intentional community/eco-village near Zion National Park someday when have the $$ for the land. (if anyone wants to donate - emails' in profile).

We definitely can tackle some consumerism, a lot we can't. People are greedy, not everyone is gonna sacrifice - making it easier TO sacrifice though can definitely help. Easier to share, recycle, etc...

Think of all the things in storage facilities across America that are things that people use infrequently that could be rented out, or loaned out, and actually utilized so somebody else doesn't need to buy it and require additional manufacturing of a product thus wasting resources...

> The path is straightforward: electrify everything, and make the grid green.

Do solutions to deal with solar panels and wind turbine blades after they've reached their lifetime? Otherwise it feels like we're solving one problem by creating another, to me.

1. Replacing a massive problem with a much smaller problem is significant forward progress. We're replacing gigatonnes of annual CO2 causing an existential crisis with kilotonnes of inert industrial waste.

2. Why do you insist that panels and blades have to be recycled when approximately nothing else is?

3. The recyclability of turbine blades and solar panels is a problem being worked on. They are recyclable, just not economically so. If or when somebody solves the economics problem of recycling, then it'll be solved for blades and panels. If we insist on requiring recycling for blades and panels but nothing else then you are perpetuating obstructionism.

4. https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/end-wi...

In general I realized that most clean tech is difficult to recycle at this point, from this site[1]. I'm just trying to get the big picture, and hoping that we don't solve one problem by creating the next. In the end our waste ends up in the environment and in our food.

1. You are quite possibly right. Do you have a source supporting that the expected industrial waste is in the kilotonnes range? I'm not arguing it is not, I don't know.

2. It's just something that occured to me recently. It's not that just these things have to be recycled. It would be best if we did something about waste too.

3. and 4. Thanks for the link!

[1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbin...

Making hydrogen work for intercontinental air travel is an absolutely massive engineering challenge with (as of now) horrible economics. Pure hydrogen is hard to store as it corrodes metal, bringing enough of it on a plane to be able to cross the Pacific in a reliable and cost effective manner stretches the limits of physics. Making the unit economics work with green hydrogen is again several times more difficult. We should not be handwavy about replacing global-scale, cheap and reliable systems like long-distance air travel. This is a multi-decade undertaking if we are pushing hard and get lucky.

> The only thing this narrative will accomplish is failure. Nobody will support significant sacrifice to combat climate change. Luckily they don't have to.

What makes you so sure about that? The Covid pandemic indicates to me that people will indeed accept significant sacrifices if the goal is seen as worthwhile. In fact, thinking about it makes me angry. The younger generations have dutifully gotten vaccinated and suffered through closures to the benefit of the older generations who are the ones most at risk of getting sick or dying from Covid. Yet the older generations, to which most politicians belong, won't lift a finger to help avert the ongoing climate change disaster. In many countries today, you are a Bad Person (TM) for being in public without wearing a face mask. Why can't the same be true for being seen driving SUVs? Surely, if we can fine people for not wearing masks, we can fine them for driving ridiculously large vehicles too.

I don’t think those pushing this line are asking for our voluntary sacrifice. They’re just preparing us to swallow what’s going to be done to us – If they can’t maintain high growth anymore, they’ll settle for lower growth and compensate by taking more from everyone else.

The people holding most of the wealth control all the levers needed to make this happen. They don’t need permission, just submission.

Carbon austerity is a political and human-nature non-starter. Kelp forests and phytoplankton blooms across expanses of the ocean are the only viable alternative to capture and sequester (by sinking) enormous quantities of carbon to get us to net carbon negative faster than anything else. This will require robots to help us seed and farm huge areas of the ocean.

Electrification saves money over the long term. So any solution which costs money is less feasible than electrification.

> There are only three major industries that are difficult to electrify: cement, steel and air travel.

Why isn’t agriculture difficult to electrify?

Because companies like John Deer can make a ton of money electrifying it

Assuming farmers are able to pay for new equipment. It'll take many decades before diesel tractors are completely gone.

It also assumes someone will pay for massive infrastructure upgrades on the countryside. The grids out here wouldn't be able to handle EV's with current levels of traffic. Charging tractors on top of that? Electric grain dryers? Harvesters? Chainsaws? Lawn mowers?

Synthetic fuels is the way forward until the power grids have been modernized -- or built at all; it's not like everyone using fossil fuels all live in electrified homes.

Yes, it'll take many decades to replace all of the ICE's, but those 70 year old tractors that are still used on small farms, but those tractors are only used for dozens of hours each year. It's the big tractors and combines on the big farms and in the big custom operations that are used for thousands of hours each year that do most of the emissions, and they're all less than 10 years old.

The grid is sized in kilowatts, not kilowatt-hours. With time-of-use pricing that cost-conscious farmers will definitely take use of to charge batteries while the price is cheap, the grid can handle a lot more energy than most think.

And local solar is a lot cheaper than grid expansion. Pretty much every farmer I know is putting up solar already. And they need the energy in the spring/summer/fall while the sun is shining, they need much less in the winter or while it is raining, so it's a good fit.

I agree with you about synthetic fuels. I predict that in 10 years time or so they will be price competitive with fossil fuels, but massively more expensive than electricity.

It's not just tractors. Looking around the area where I live, there are a large amount of lorries, escavators forklifts, grain dryers and other veichles, with 20+ expected years in them. Electrifying all that will require massive upgrades of the grid -- remember we're also assumibg we're electrifying heating of houses and personal transport etc. Sure solar will help a bit, but without synthetic fuels, agriculture is not going carbon neutral anytime soon.

Luckily, there's been a lot of progress within that area. Green petrol and diesel would give more maneuvering room, and not just for farmers, but society as a whole.

Haber-Bosch requires hydrogen not hydrocarbons.

It is true electryifying everything and going green on the grid is important, but do you think that when there’s oil available, no one’s going to use it? You can put laws in the big countries but what about the shady ones?

AFAIK, there is only a single country that isn't part of the global economy and thus isn't vulnerable to sanctions, and North Korea doesn't have any oil.

Carbon tariffs are one of those brilliantly awesome ideas that would solve a lot of issues like these.

Great point! We replied at the same time and I think we’re thinking the same way. :)

They still use, and export coal though.

Once the big countries seriously start to transition, they’ll need the shady countries to stop benefiting from oil as well. We’ll all end up paying poor countries to not use oil, and embargoing them if they keep it up - and that’ll be a worthy thing to pay for.

I've got one word for you: China.

The US can't just cut off China without serious second order effects rippling through the economy. Therefore, it won't happen. And, if you can't get China to cooperate, none of it matters. They're currently the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, have publicly said they'll be increasing their emissions for some time, and have not committed to net zero before 2060.

China's emissions per capita are half that of the US, and it seems very reasonable that they would see an increase in carbon emissions as the average standard of living goes up. The US is only aiming for carbon neutral by 2050, and we have less work to do and more money to do it with. I'm no fan of China, but I think we're on the same page regarding renewables.

That's all well and good, but your real problem is that both of those pages fall well after the book is closed on being able to make a real difference. I also forgot to note that India has only committed to net zero emissions by 2070, and that's far too late to avoid serious issues.

Per capita emissions don't matter for the atmosphere, aggregate emissions do. Yes this makes big population a liability, but it is what it is.

They matter if we're asking whether China is on the US' side on this.

China's people shouldn't be forced to live in worse conditions because they live in more populous nation. You could split China into two countries with US-level emissions, and we'd be in exactly the same place globally.

> China's people shouldn't be forced to live in worse conditions because they live in more populous nation

According to the logic of degrowth, they should be forced to live in conditions that allow for net zero total emissions of the country they live in. If anything, it should be easier for them because they're a unitary dictatorship, so can degrow by edict. I can't see how not focusing on China in that regard can make sense, they're emitting more currently, they are rapidly increasing their emissions (unlike the US), and they have a great potential to increase it much higher because they have lots more people. Therefore any degrowth strategy should be first and foremost applied to curb their emissions, yet somehow the conversation is always derailed into useless per-capita emissions that do nothing to the planet.

> You could split China into two countries with US-level emissions

Well first of all, two wouldn't suffice. It's at least three, and I think it might even be four. And with a bunch of mini-Chinas, there'd be more competition for where manufacturing happens, and it could drive emissions down the same way that breaking up a monopoly drives price down.

By Wikipedia's 2019 numbers (14 Gt China/6.6 Gt US) you'd need 2.12 mini-Chinas.

The article I was remembering was https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57018837 in which case the result of the division is 2.45. But in any case, since you can't have a fraction of a country in this context, you would indeed need 3 for each one to have lower emissions than the US.

As Oil loses economies of scale it’s only going to get more expensive not less. Meanwhile batteries, solar, and wind just keep getting cheaper. Future EV sales are going to come down to technology not subsides.

Also biofuels aren’t significant at current consumption levels, but could become so if we get close to net zero emissions.

It's a really, really bad idea to extrapolate price reductions in solar/wind into carbon free grids. Unfortunately there's a ridiculous wall of increasing overprovision required as you go deeper and deeper into renewables. Have a look at [0] if you can make the paper fall from the back of a truck, especially at Fig. 3. Assuming absolutely perfect grid able to transmit arbitrary amount of electricity and disregarding any real constraints, going purely by geophysical constraints on the amount of wind and sun available, continental US would need at least x7 as much wind+solar capacity as it does consume on average to have no more than one day of blackouts per year, assuming 12hrs of full consumption stored and immediately dispatchable. The only scenario in which that number goes to about x1 requires 32 days of full storage, which is just impossible with our current tech. And as you can imagine, in any real scenario that number would need to be several times higher. It's an absolutely ridiculous cost barrier that is not talked about enough and that effectively guarantees that we will be burning fossils for the foreseeable future.

[0]: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/ee/c7ee0...

Not sure why you are downvoted you have a valid point with regards to over provisioning and storage.

I wonder how much dispatchable generation has to be kept around to only have two 12 hour blackouts per year due to lack of generation.

3 hours, some overbuilding and a good grid to get to 99.99% reliability (under an hour of blackouts).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

I don't see where that number comes from.

Also, "good grid" means "perfect national transmission", which is a wildly optimistic assumption. The US is currently split into multiple grids, with ties being able to handle less than 1% of their generation capacity.

Moreover, that's just the US. Here is what the link has to say about countries less blessed with landmass and latitude:

> Indeed, in smaller countries, substantial gaps (>30% of demand for >20 h per year; pale orange curves in Fig. 4) remain in systems even with 12 h of energy storage and annual generation that is 3x annual demand.

Or this, directly referring to extensive overbuilding required to meet demand:

> For instance, historical solar and wind resources data in Germany reveal that there were nearly 2 weeks in which dispatchable generation had to cover practically all of the demand because of a period with very low solar and wind power availability (called “dark doldrums”)27. Although with vast enough wind and solar capacity it might still be possible to meet demand in all hours, the required capacity increases exponentially after a point that depends on the renewable resources of that country, and it is this geophysically-dependent point that will largely determine the cost-effectiveness of highly-reliable, renewables-based electricity systems.

Those numbers are wildly off because among other things the use US generates 6% hydroelectric, and they didn’t try to minimize a cost function via location selection etc. Further large hydroelectric dams store months worth of their average output.

Also, demand and generation are positively correlated as people use less power on cloudy days and less AC in the winter. You can look at how much oversupply and storage people need to live off grid and realize that’s a worst case situation isn’t 7x oversupply or 30 days of storage it’s roughly 3x oversupply of solar and 3 days of storage. At grid scale that’s roughly 6c/kWh for solar plus batteries which last longer the less their used though that’s also a high when you add other energy sources and grid transmission.

The good news is markets are great at minimizing cost functions. In the near term lots of natural gas makes up the difference, but the cost breakdown is such that offsetting 1kWh of natural gas works out even if 50% of solar generation is wasted. Aka 2x oversupply of solar shows up from market forces it’s that cheap. Bring on storage and things start to look very solar heavy even with zero subsidy or price reductions.

Hydroelectric can't ramp up to a large fraction of national demand, for multiple unsurmountable reasons (like, you can't dump the water fast enough for one). Location selection doesn't matter that much as they don't try to optimise cost, they just look at aggregate output.

People living off grid still continue to consume the products of grid-enabled industries, from manufacturing to farming to logistics to infrastructure. Heating/cooling and lighting a cabin is much more trivial than paving a road coming to that cabin, feeding its inhabitants, building solar panels for them, or ensuring dense enough population to make research and manufacturing viable. In fact, we don't need to extrapolate minor part of personal consumption to the whole society, we have aggregate energy consumption numbers.

"Market forces" can't generate electricity on their own. Instead of taking the bottom-up view, fraught with wishful thinking and unstated assumptions, why not take the top down, working from the potential generation capacity under ideal assumptions? That's exactly what the paper I linked did, and the results are… not great for 100% renewable

> can’t ramp up

6% is already a large fraction of grid demand and that’s an average. It’s critical for finding anything that’s even vaguely accurate.

“Why no take the top down” because we want to minimize costs. It doesn’t matter how much over production happens vs how much energy storage happens, what matters is how much each costs.

If you really want to do a high level analysis you need to cover a wide range of major inputs. Hydro flexibility and the costs to increase that flexibility, as in how much can it ramp up and how much can it average over a year. Next is the actual cost of Wind in each location for various turbines and the time of day for production this varies quite a bit and becomes a massive optimization problem. Next is solar production at each location as well as how panels are aimed in various wealthier conditions, again a major optimization problem. Next actual energy output vs demand, Aka actually modeling what happens to both for various weather events. Next is cost of grid storage capacity, as in how much capital needs to sit around. Next is how much to utilize grid storage as in a charge vs discharge cycle, the first vs second are different for each technology and a mix of several is likely. Next grid interconnect costs as in how much does flexibility cost both in dollars and resistive losses. Next optimized Solar and wind capacity vs grid demand as in at each set of seasonal and weather conditions to minimize costs. Finally changes to costs over time or based on deployment.

It’s possible to model all of that, but in turns out that’s what markets do. The bottom up approach isn’t wishful thinking it’s what actually happens as people build A due to A being profitable up to point X when building B is more profitable etc etc.

The book I linked includes a realistic model incorporating existing hydro, significant rooftop solar, et cetera. It requires a 20% overbuild.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify

Hydroelectricity is very limited in its maximum instantaneous output, you can't feed half a grid with it, there is just nowhere to put all that water to without massive flooding, so it's a bit of a moot point. Rooftop solar doesn't matter for the top down approach in that paper, they don't make any assumptions about PV location and assume perfect grid, so rooftop PV won't make it any better. So seeing a top down, intentionally optimistic approach arriving at a number much higher than that book's author's, I am very sceptical of the book's results.

> And renewable energy is a lot cheaper.

Add nuclear to the mix and you will get a lot more people onboard. "Renewables" consume a ridiculous amount of land with poor energy density.

Existing nuclear has its place. Shutting down existing plants is incredibly stupid. Building new plants is way too slow and way too expensive. Unless we get some magic new tech. I'm glad Bill Gates is putting money into researching that, but in the mean time we have to work with what we have. The book I linked (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify) has a good road map including nuclear.

To solar-ify the US, we'd need 40,000 square miles of land for panels, and one square mile for batteries. In a country with 3.6M square miles, that's not a ridiculous amount of land. We use far more than that for parking lots. And of course we'd use a mix rather than just solar, so we'll need even less land.

And work remotely to reduce oil consumption, and reduce the power requirements for lighting and computing, and increase population density for greater efficiency.

You can't efficiency to net-zero. It helps, but it can't be the primary mechanism.

The perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good. And net-zero won't be the same as zero. With newer technologies like synthetic fuel based on renewables, efficiency can get us to net zero.

That's a pretty funny definition of efficiency. Synthetic fuel based on renewables is about 10% efficient grid-to-wheel vs 90%+ efficiency for battery electric.

Synthetic fuels will be a crucial part of net zero, but aren't efficient or cheap.

> travel

Would electric train be feasible? Could even have entire train cars dedicated to solar panels and batteries.

Solar panels that you can fit on a train won't provide a fraction of the energy required for the train. Luckily, we have a solution since 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_system

Solar panels on trains (or, really, just about anything that moves) is pointless. You can do it, but as a general guideline, you shouldn't - solar panels don't like moving. They're quite brittle in the efficient forms (silicon and glass), and while they can be made quite strong, that doesn't extend to "regular flexing and motion." Plus, anything that moves is likely to have terrible pointing of panels on a regular basis.

Just electrify the rail lines. There are strict sizing requirements for train cars such that they can fit through tunnels, so putting wires up just outside this and retracting the pickups for tunnels is perfectly doable. Most locomotives are diesel electric already, so they're not a big shift to convert to battery/electric, with some battery cars for the stretches that can't be electrified. Or just run the diesels for that chunk. It's still a huge win to electrify rail.

> It's still a huge win to electrify rail.

Alternatively, just ignore rail for now. It's ridiculously efficient (about 3-4x the efficiency of truck freight). If you phase-in a tax on carbon, more freight will immediately shift from truck to rail because of this comparative advantage... and it will provide incentive for small energy wins on rail, too.

Later, after we shift more cargo away from trucks and remaining trucks become more efficient, we can worry about fully making rail carbon neutral.

(And even then-- can ignore batteries for awhile in favor of just electrification of high-traffic segments).

Wow. I wasn't aware that so little rail is electrified in some countries. I was especially surprised about my own country Poland that has barely over 60% rail electrified, with European average being roughly similar. USA is below 2% vs China with over 60% electrification of the network of nearly exactly same length. I have no idea why almost nobody talks about that. I know rail is superbly efficient, but it still would be a huge win if USA could bring up their electrification to at least first world countries average.

Mexico and Canada have even more abysmal rates. I guess entire continent of North America was sleeping when the world started doing electric trains.

I always thought that nearly all rail was electrified and have trouble even imagining rails without wiring.

I thought it was possible to make cement that could absorb CO2?

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