A surprise solar boom reveals a fatal flaw in our climate change projections
vox.com
vox.com
First, even though we’ve known we have to transition off fossil fuels since the 1980’s, governments and individual investors bet we’d keep using them through the 2030’s.
Second, solar panels are now so cheap, they’re fueling economic growth and quality of life improvements in places that developed regions think shouldn’t have those things.
I’m having a really hard time seeing the downside here.
For what it’s worth, these problems aren’t limited to developing regions: In California, we’re seeing exactly the same effects: PG&E’s cost structure is insane, and they thought they could just pass the burden to consumers indefinitely.
I guess I should feel guilty that my solar panels cover the electricity demand of our vehicles, so now we’ll have fewer oil / natural gas wars and that’ll put a bunch of human rights violators out of a job?
> When oil got cheap and plentiful after World War II, humans didn’t enjoy the savings. They built more cars.
In the same way cheap solar will induce massive demand for all kinds of stuff, which is still made by emitting CO2. Like, yes, your car has lower carbon footprint than ICE car. But it has some, and far from negligible. And when billions of newly minted middle class buy their own first car, it will add up, even if these are all solar powered BEVs.
Maybe it will turn into a nonproblem, idk(that happens rarely)...but our predictions and projections ough to be fixed in any case.
For right now housing improvements and household appliances deliver a lot more value. They, too, will use power, but they can also save power through efficiency advances.
You would know this of course if you had travelled so I can only really assume that you haven't. Drop a pin randomly on a point in Europe and it's overwhelmingly likely that you can't even get to that spot without a car.
Really makes you wonder how the Europeans coped for several millennia prior to the car.
Cutting to the chase; train, bus, bicycle, walking can get people pretty much every where in modern Europe, save those few places that require serious climbing skills.
The point remains. People buy cars as soon as they can unless the built environment forces most of them not to (e.g. London, NYC, Tokyo).
Even in London most people buy cars as soon as they have a family unless they're skint.
Already, for a few decades now, more humans live in urban settings rather those that live outside city bounds - the rising trend is for more energy efficient urban transport, in non US setiings that leads to improved mass transit and cheaper rates for lighter vehicles.
> Of course you can technically walk to anywhere that a car can go and more places besides.
Some of us actually do, no technicality required.
If you think rising nations can skip cars, then I am afraid that you don't really know such societies.
I recognize my heterodox perspective is uncommon, but I exhibit it here only to demonstrate that the counter-meme exists already in the wild.
Where are these supposed billions?
Because populations are either already contracting or on the verge of contracting nearly everywhere: China, India, Nigeria, even Pakistan, etc.
The first things people do when they get richer is that they stop having so many kids.
Anyway, there are no billions of new middle class people ready to buy a car there. You are far, far overestimating the growth potential and at the same time underestimating the current rate of vehicles ownership (mostly two wheeled).
Electrification, certainly, more A/C definitely, more cars, sure a bit but infrastructures are already under heavy load which limits the interest. Billions of cars, never.
it's a lame balancing act by the elites who based all their livelihood off masses of people to explore, and the need to be sensible with resources to keep the status quo a little longer.
china, when they were briefly communists, put a population limit as it was sensible when the plan was to make everyone enjoy the benefits of society. ...then they jumped to capitalism as usual and changed gears.
" If you believe the myths of science, the Tolowa lived in this region for at least 12,500 years. If you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they lived here since the beginning of time." --Derrick Jensen
Oh, and uh, forget about going to space.
In return anyone leaving the island stays gone and can never publicly talk about degrowth and their dreams of ending civilization. Also, you must tell your children the truth about all the accomplishments of industrial society.
I agree that our prehistoric ancestors were the most stable populations when looking at them from very far away. You seem to actually want to return to their brutal and ignorant lives. Well go ahead, put some skin in the game before publicly advocating for the death of billions.
Aside from the complete practical and moral wrongness of all the nonsense you just said, there's the hypocrisy.
You state the above while using either a desktop device or phone to comment on a site like HN (and presumably interact with many other sites on the web), with all of these and your device being pinnacle product results of a mass industrial modern society. Not to mention your lament that billions don't die to have "far fewer numbers", while obviously keeping yourself alive despite this regret about all those others.
This worked great in the past, and we already have proven out the technology that we need for the next 50-100 years.
The main problem I see is political corruption, and greed / laziness from vested interests.
Edit: Concretely, we know how to make gasoline carbon negative for $1/gallon. Permaculture sounds good, but the yield per acre (and man hour) is way worse than comparably good conventional techniques like no-till, which we should have moved to 30 years ago.
This strikes me as both extremely cynical and missing the point
Even if you celebrate the rising quality of life across the world, you have to acknowledge that a knock-on effect of rising quality of life is going to be that those regions that are catching up to the first world are going to be polluting more, just like the first world currently does
If climate models were not including this source of increased pollution from rising living standards then the models are probably wrong and increased cheap solar may inadvertently be resulting in a net increase in overall pollution and worsening climate change. It is worth analyzing if this is the case or not, and if it is the case then we probably need to adjust climate plans somehow
It seems like a similar situation to how introducing western medical care and pharmaceuticals led to population explosions in many countries as they started to live longer and more children survived to adulthood, without adjusting the number of children families were having
Similarly it is not surprising that increasing the available power in a country could similarly create a consumption explosion as their standard of living suddenly skyrockets
No probably not, but it's reasonable to look a bit sideways at actions that are causing growth in some places, while other places are being told that we desperately need to embrace degrowth
It mixes together different agencies doing forecasting for different purposes and widely fail to actually go where it should. I’m starting to wonder if it’s not a puff piece from a company with an interest in pretending that the target for emissions should be higher (it probably is actually).
As it doesn’t at all address how the IPCC scenarios which are the main tools for political discussion nowadays use energy consumption forecasting, it’s kind of completely useless.
Spoiler alerts, the IPCC does scenarios based modelling using five broadly different scenarios called SSP which take into account economic development and its impact (with varying levels depending of the SSP). The point is that this covers a broad range of possibilities. Plus, these SSP are reviewed for each reports while trying to take into account what was misestimated (speed of development of renewable was one thing which was underestimated before). The problem pointed in the Vox article basically doesn’t exist.
I think the future is inherently a bit unpredictable. We probably need policies that can deal with a wide range of outcomes more than better models.
It's a good thing that solar panel production is cracking away on exponential growth and hopefully batteries will pick up as well.
There's even some good news recently on carbon absorbtion tech https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/29/covalent...