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Comment by jarpschope | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you have an updated view of energy production.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/07/20/how-globa...

In the chart for section 3, how many countries have seen their share of electricity being generated by fossil fuels increase in the last 5 years? Only Canada.

Take a look at the charts for Pakistan, Australia, Nigeria, and China for the last few years. Pretty dramatic drops for fossil fuels generation.

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Oof. What's going on here in Canada with that recent uptick? Last I checked it seemed like all the trends were good.

They cherrypicked 15 countries. And still, some of those still had renewables decrease since 2000 like Nigeria, others saw an increase but it's still way less than fossil, and others like China are heavily subsidizing solar. I don't doubt that it's economical for individuals when the govt is subsidizing it.

Look at Australia then. Millions of homes already using solar yo basically power their homes for free most of the time. Yes it was subsidized, like oil was and still is. Solar without subsidies is already miles better than oil and gas.

Australia is a rich country that subsidizes solar, and they're still 90% fossil according to their Wikipedia article, so idk why the mismatch with this article.

Sounds like a perfect opportunity to put in an edit with the Wikipedia page then :)

> They cherrypicked 15 countries.

The "world" chart shows an increase from 19% renewal to 34%. Did they cherry-pick that? (Also, "European Union" is more than one country.)

> I don't doubt that it's economical for individuals when the govt is subsidizing it.

Does that distinguish renewables from fossil fuels? Haven't governments been essentially subsidizing fossil fuels (not least by allowing environmental externalities to be ignored) for as long as they've been in use?

Because a lot of countries in the world, especially the EU, are subsidizing solar. That doesn't make it economical.

Externalities ignored from fossil fuels, yes. That's not a subsidy though. I'm not saying they should ignore it, but if they do, they aren't the ones who pay for it.

That's not a good point though, a lot of countries, including the EU, also subsidize fossil fuels.

Solar is cheaper, but requires more room and time to spin up (think datacenters, where you can put a turbine within a month) and storage or backups for windless nights.

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