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Comment by ahelwer | Hacker News Reader

One eye-opening fact I recently learned is that fossil fuel infrastructure being built today is expected to have a three-decade lifespan, after completion of its construction. So every time you hear about a new pipeline, drilling project, or refinery being built you know that the people sitting in the rooms authorizing billions of dollars being allocated to the project all believe it will safely be operating and producing profit 35 years from now; they wouldn't invest otherwise. This is what business as usual looks like. Every new fossil energy project is incompatible with a world that takes climate change seriously. Money talks.

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Do you believe we'll ever stop using fossil fuels in the "near" term? Just about every single product nowadays has some piece of plastic in it, including new EVs, which require fossil fuels to manufacture. There are plenty of lubricants to run the machinery in the factories that manufacture those products, including the renewable energy sources, which (again) require fossil fuels to manufacture.

Getting people to switch cars may be a part of reducing the dependency, but still contributes to the use. It'll be a long road that includes getting down to the minutia, like stopping girls from wearing makeup, before you can entirely remove fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels will not go away for at least a few more generations, because they are far too beneficial and there are no replacements for the myriad of uses they have today.

Plastics, lubricants, and any other hydrocarbon derived products can be synthesized starting from carbon dioxide, water, and electricity. For example, the most common plastic monomers (ethylene and propylene) are readily synthesized from methanol via the so-called "methanol to olefins" process. Methanol itself has been synthesized commercially since the 1920s [1]. The methanol-to-olefins process is already commercialized in China [2], albeit with methanol derived from coal rather than from clean feedstocks.

The vast majority of fossil fuels are used as fuel, not for producing materials/chemicals. Only 16% of oil goes to petrochemical production: https://www.statista.com/statistics/307194/top-oil-consuming...

The other 84% is just burned for energy. "Entirely" removing fossil fuels won't happen for a very long time if ever, but that's not a barrier to slashing CO2 emissions from fossil combustion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol#History

[2] https://www.chemengonline.com/methanol-to-olefins-plant-star...

> Every new fossil energy project is incompatible with a world that takes climate change seriously. Money talks.

This depends on more information. It’s unlikely we’ll be using zero fossil fuels in 35 years. So the goal is to reduce over time, so a new project today could be replacing an old project going offline.

Or perhaps the project has a transition path to do something else.

I don’t think these are pedantic clarifications as things aren’t fatalistic. Investors are rational and while money talks it doesn’t mean that all the billions put into these projects isn’t a waste in climate terms.

Well, here's your more information: https://i.imgur.com/B2QBY6u.png

Fossil fuel investment has been climbing year-over-year. Fossil fuel companies aren't replacing existing infrastructure to taper out usage of fossil fuels. They are introducing and expanding with new infrastructure.

From the Bloomberg NEF 2023 Energy Transition Investment Trends report, which is incredible reading: https://about.bnef.com/energy-transition-investment/

This is just a 5 year graph and it seems to show level funding. Where do you see expansion in this graph?

Of course any investment is new infrastructure. I think the analysis you want to do is a long term trend line of fossil fuel investment and a projection into the future.

What we, hopefully, want to see is that the overall % energy production projected into the future is decreasing.

> One eye-opening fact I recently learned is that fossil fuel infrastructure being built today is expected to have a three-decade lifespan

Same thing goes for innovation. For instance, the first nuclear power plants are from the 50s. 70 years later nuclear energy powers only 10% of electricity in the world (and electricity provides only a fraction of our energy needs).

Net zero means that the over-all result is zero. There will still be fossil fuel operations ongoing after net zero is achieved, until the economics of it don't make sense anymore. For projects that were already in the works, this makes sense. Those are already financed on the order of decades and planned long in advance.

And where are those being built? Overwhelmingly in Asia and Africa

Plenty of projects in North America and Europe.

The number of refineries, etc. in those places are only decreasing. Sure, there might be some additional projects but for the most part: no.

Not true, but don't let facts get in the way of your kneejerk racism.

> The U.S. is leading in global LNG supply growth with an additional 5.9 million tonnes of capacity in 2022, for a total of 80 mtpa.

> Norway saw the second-largest growth in LNG supply, with an additional 2.8 million tonnes of capacity. Malaysia and Qatar were close behind, with 2.4 million tonnes and 2.3 million tonnes of capacity growth in 2022, respectively.

First of all, you are wrong. There are new fossil fuel projects in North America and Europe as well (though Europe is building significantly less than North America).

Second of all, why does that matter? Increased CO2 in the atmosphere will heat the climate everywhere (albeit not evenly). The fossil fuel market is global, meaning these projects are overwhelmingly built and profited by publicly traded international fossil fuel companies. (just like the rising temperature) The money to be made is distributed everywhere on the globe (albeit more in some areas than others), regardless of where these new projects are located.

No, the climate disaster is a global crisis, and needs to be handled globally. If we were serious about minimizing the harm of climate change (and we should be; but we aren’t) than green infrastructure would be paid for by the wealthy countries even when it is rolled out in the poorer, where the rich countries won’t see any of the benefits (other then you know, saving the world from impeding doom).

Reference?

As I said, money talks. I'd like to share a chart I saw a couple months ago that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was in the Bloomberg NEF Energy Transition Investment Trends 2023 report, which you can get emailed to you by filling out a form here: https://about.bnef.com/energy-transition-investment/

Since that's a bit of trouble, I've clipped this incredible chart for you here: https://i.imgur.com/OlMAKVd.png

This single chart completely inverted how I think about this problem and the leadership of western countries in world affairs generally.

And they still burn much less per-capita, so what's your point? Everyone should decarbonize quickly, but especially those wealthy countries that burn the most per-capita today, and who have burned the most historically and therefore benefited the most from the resulting wealth accumulation. And these wealthy countries should be sending truckloads of money to poor countries to help them with their decarbonization efforts, as recompense for their far outsized role in creating this problem to begin with.

There are going to be a lot of "stranded assets" on a dead planet.

How many of those can be repurposed to refine or carry natural gas?

Natural gas is a fossil fuel.

TIL. I don't know why I assumed otherwise. Perhaps I was thinking of "RNGs" (renewable natural gases), but it seems rather propagandish to even group those (repurposed biofuels) together with natural gases extracted from the earth.

can't understand the downvotes, may someone explain?

Any indication that those who control the world's wealth won't voluntarily solve this problem implies that direct action, struggle, and hardship are required of us personally if we want a future worth living in. This is not a nice thought and it is understandable people want to look away.

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