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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Decarbonization needs to happen anyway and is pretty much automatic energy independence. If the current US administration provides an extra motivation that’s gerast news for the climate.

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Yeah, but if you deindustrialize by the time you decarbonize, because your industry left or went bust from expensive energy and environmental regulations, you now have an even bigger problem.

And decarbonisation means nuclearisation. Which Europe has been moving in the opposite direction on, and instead got drunk on Russian gas.

That’s one way to do it, but not the only one.

" And decarbonisation means nuclearisation. Which Europe has been moving in the opposite direction on " source? And I mean, more than "Germany phase out nuclear stations."

We might be able to bring back some nuclear reactors, but building new one's: that's not on a feasible timeline.

That's Germany, not Europe (and most certainly not France)

How is renewable in any way independent if we don’t mine the necessary things nor manufacture the things.

My understanding is that wind turbine + PV + battery storage has a cycle where you buy once every twenty years, or more. So you buy once, and have twenty years to figure out the next buy cycle, geopolitical cycles and all.

On the fossil fuel side, you need to buy many times per year, every year. Each one of those buy events is an opportunity for an external party for stop your economy.

The renewable buy cycle is harder for an external party to interrupt.

edit: This is vastly over-simplified, but I hope my understanding reflects reality at least somewhat.

Yeah. I've been wondering to what extent this is keeping the global geopolitics stable. Rich countries are keeping many other countries stable-ish that would otherwise rapidly devolve into disaster (obviously the middle east being the huge example). Even going so far as keeping countries stable-ish at the request of those countries (Egypt and Jordan being examples) despite those countries not really being oil countries.

When that incentive disappears, as it will, what then? There is no way in hell the middle east can defend against Iranian aggression without other people doing it for them. And it's not just the middle east. The consequences of isolationism will lower enormously. Why won't rich countries just lock the border and dig in?

We're not even that far removed from finding out what will happen, it's only about 7 years away. I'd love some early warning though.

I think you have it a bit backwards.

The reason we have Iran with an insane government and all the princes and total lack of democracy is BECAUSE of all the interference due to oil.

America and before it Britain and the colonial powers just walked in there and stole everything and so now the region is divided into countries that were soccuessfully captured (Qatar etc) and countries that threw us out (Iran).

If oil wasn’t as important it might be chaos for a while though because this dictatorships are propped up expressly so they can sell us cheap oil.

No. Iraq did not attack Iran due to oil. Iran did not counterattack Iraq because of oil. It was merely dictatorships wanting to conquer and seeing a chance to do so. Sorry.

I also worry about the "stop the economy" problem. To me, it's analogous to the AI employment problem. If you cannibalize how a country makes money and generates tax revenue, what do you do instead? For example, Nigeria makes a lot of money from oil sales. Take away the oil industry and how do they make money? Nobody can pretend to be a Nigerian prince or a businessman trying to reclaim millions of dollars.

Now that I think of it, maybe the economic fallout from AI and the oil economic devastation will be widespread fraud, just so people can survive.

There is only degrees of independence in the global economy. No country can be completely self sufficient. Having an energy infrastructure that runs for a decade or two before it starts crumpling without trade is a lot better than having an energy infrastructure that is in dire straits after a few weeks or months of embargo.

Ideally one also manufactures them. But when you buy solar panels, one get's 30+ years of lifetime out of it. So once installed. It's tricky for China (or whoever makes time) to use them as leverage. If you cut off oil or gas there is only a few months of reserves.

You can't install them at once, as result at any point in time you'll still need to buy to cover increased demand or replace old units

Huh? What prevents you from installing them "all at once"? The downside is obviously a long stretch of no sun, and for Europe winter being both low solar production and high energy demand due to heating which the soon-to-be-cheap grid scale batteries don’t really fix. The logistics of PV don’t seem difficult though - it seems by far the easiest of the power generation methods, even if the synchronization can get a bit tricky in a large grid.

Because manufacturing isn't there to do everything at once. You install say 50gw per year, each year. In 30y you need to replace first 50gw batch and so on

Any real system will also have backups and emergency reserves.

Lean more on them as you solve the supply chain issue.

No need to make a mountain out of a molehill.

Solar panel materials are extremely toxic (current tech), or are toxic unless properly processed (hopefully, but likely, future tech).

So they won't be made in the EU, since nobody wants to make concessions here. Solar panels have the same problem as oil and mining: they will destroy nature somewhere, otherwise it doesn't work.

They don't have the same problem. They have approximately one tenth of the problem until reprocessing reduces that even further.

Which materials do you mean?

https://blog.ucs.org/charlie-hoffs/how-are-solar-panels-made...

Crystalline silicon solar panels have about 95% market share, and "By weight, the typical crystalline silicon solar panel is made of about 76% glass, 10% plastic polymer, 8% aluminum, 5% silicon, 1% copper, and less than 0.1% silver and other metals."

Everything that is manufactured is made out of atoms, and you can say that any manufacturing requires some nature destruction in the aggregate. But solar electricity requires far less mining and natural despoilation than fossil-fueled electricity.

Solar panels contain quite a bit of lead, and small amounts of cadmium. Lead can be taken out if you're willing to pay a bit more, in other words it never is. Cadmium is required. Other metals are sometimes present.

So solar panels are classified as hazardous waste.

Cadmium is only required in cadmium telluride solar panels, which have less than 5% global market share. Lead solder is still common in crystalline silicon panels, though not universal; modules built with heterojunction cells typically avoid solder because the cells can't tolerate temperatures that high:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pip.3688

"is pretty much automatic energy independence"

Not if most of the necessary resources are mined elsewhere and most of the actual devices (such as solar panels) are manufactured elsewhere too.

The best you can say is that in such situation, no one can cause you a problem overnight, but on a longer time horizon, they absolutely can.

That reasoning from your parent was like the child logic of "we don't need to kill animals for food, we can just buy chicken at the supermarket".

That’s majorly moving the goalposts. Other than Saudi Arabia, I can’t think of any country in the world today that has more energy independence that you would get if you ran on renewables + battery + nuclear. You’d have years and years of buffer, compared to the US strategic oil reserve which has maybe a few months of buffer.

Czechia is quite nuclear-friendly and yet we ran into a problem with nuclear fuel supply; you don't feed raw uranium into the reactor, you need specially designed fuel rods. Switching from Russian to American ones for our nuclear power plants took several years. We just finished doing so, and now there is a conflict between the US and the rest of the world as well. Lovely.

All solvable, all better than just running out of oil, but I wouldn't call the situation "independence", just "having a better buffer".

Didn't framatome started producing vver fuel elements?

The US is currently a net oil exporter, and has been for a few years.

Now of course that's not the whole picture, but if push came to shove, the US could achieve energy independence (at least technologically, if not poitically).

True, the US could supply all of its energy needs through great effort and by making its population pay much higher energy prices. In contrast, if a country were to build around e.g. solar, and then all countries that made the panels embargoed them, the price of electricity would merely stop falling.

Why would it necessarily be more expensive?

The oil can be sold today profitably at today’s market rate.

If there stopped being from the outside competition for the oil, wouldn’t that roughly balance out stopping the supply of oil from the outside?

> If there stopped being from the outside competition for the oil, wouldn’t that roughly balance out stopping the supply of oil from the outside?

In the short run, yes. In the long run you’d fuck up the economies of scale and profit incentives.

I think whether the economies of scale and profit incentives get fucked up depends on the size of the before and after markets we are talking about.

For these to collapse, I believe we would need the international market for US oil specifically to be substantially larger than the entire domestic market for any oil. Is that true?

> we would need the international market for US oil specifically to be substantially larger than the entire domestic market for any oil

You just need U.S. producers to be insulated from international competition.

Isn't that always the case though? No country is ever completely independent.

That is true, but I would say that transnational units of, say, 1 billion people and more, should at least strive to be as resilient to blackmail as possible.

The current situation is such that if China and the US decide to sanction any third party at the same time (be it India or the EU or Russia or Saudi or whoever), the targeted party will suffer like hell.

Sure, as of 2026, this sort of coordinated action between current Chinese and American leaders seems unlikely. But leaders change. Sometimes in the most unlikely way.

Try moving a tank on batteries

Looking at the Russo-Ukrainian war, battery-powered drones seem to be more important than tanks right now. Russia, famously, had a lot of tanks; now, Oryx has a lot of their metal carcasses. Gone are the days of mass T-34 attacks that decided entire wars.

I will concede your point on heavier aircraft, though.

Between zero fossil and full fossil there's a world of nuances, too often ignored. How much oil are those heavier aircraft using, as percentage of the whole country usage? The difference is the answer needed.

It is not just oil, but the necessity to keep up the entire separate infrastructure for its refining, processing, storage and distribution.

Imagine a world where the railroad, for some reason, is still stuck with steam engines and black coal. Everything else moved on, but they cannot, thus keeping the mines open etc. Very uncomfortable and far from optimal.

We still have coal mines open, what do you mean? For less and less uses, yes, but they still have their uses, and we are not (nor should be) judging them for that.

The last coal mine in my country just closed a few days ago, 244 years after mining started. I am a bit influenced by this, because I live in that region.

> Looking at the Russo-Ukrainian war, battery-powered drones seem to be more important than tanks right now.

I kinda wonder if that's temporary, until defensive countermeasures catch up (like something like a CIWS for a tank, but smaller and with a shotgun).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS

Nothing is ever permanent in war... only the suffering.

Everyone with any military training has been laughing at how bad Russia was using their tanks, thus allowing them to be destroyed. Losing some tanks in battle is a given, but it is generally believed that if Russia was using tanks according to the Soviet doctrine they knew well they would not have lost near as many - as proof of that Thesis, Ukraine has been using the Soviet doctrine and not lost nearly as many tanks. (Ukraine lacks enough artillery to apply the Soviet doctrine of war which is why they are using drones - they have now developed new styles of fighting that uses the drones they have, but tanks are still an important part of war)

They have a decent amount of artillery now, and Germany are in the middle of ramping up production to make up for the lack of US supply: https://www.thedefensenews.com/news-details/Germanys-Rheinme...

Tanks are the heavy cavalry of the modern era, their main use is to break defensive lines.

Or rather, was. Neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians, operating diverse tanks on the bases of different doctrines, managed to do much breaking with them. The battlefield of today is just too different and much more hostile to anything that moves in the open and is big and slow enough to get hit.

Just run the tank on E-fuel.

Valid-sounding argument, but ultimately irrelevant in the medium term. In fact, converting civilian traffic to EVs makes it a lot easier to ration fuel for military uses in emergencies.

It's been an issue since WW2 that there's very little oil on the European continent. That's why Germany planned to seize Azerbaijan in the first place.

This M1E3 Abrams tank prototype is a hybrid: https://insideevs.com/news/784805/abrams-m1e3-hybrid-tank-vi...

It turns out that if you aren't deluded by culture war superficialities, energy efficiency is an advantage on the battlefield. Presumably this Prius on treads is confusing to chickenhawks who conflate "Likes" on Facebook and Instagram with military supremacy.

Decarbonization needs to happen anyway - that statement is issued as if its fact. A realist would would posit that energy independence, or energy security and its underlying national security implications should be arrived at by any means necessary, carbon or non-carbon based.

Sure, but there are really great reasons to get rid of fossil fuels and energy independence is a nice bonus. Countries tend to have multiple goals at the same time. It's nice if multiple problems have the same solution.

Europe has little hydrocarbon reserves, so decarbonization is required for energy independence.

Yes, apart from small fracking possibilities, and the North Sea, which is shared between two non-EU European countries, UK and Norway.

(as posted elsewhere, this was a critical problem for Nazi Germany!)

North sea can be explored. Black sea is already explored through Neptune deep

Carbon based energy contributes to what amounts to be a multi-trillion dollar disaster and may even contribute to the destruction of a nation using it.

Not to mention that such an investment is wasted capital. Change is accelerating and that energy infrastructure would need to be realistically dismantled in fairly short order.

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