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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

for the record, Norway has had something like 98% of it's energy from renewables for a long time.

If this is said about Europe's largest oil producer (between Nigeria and Kuwait in world stats), there's something wrong with energy production accounting.

Why do you say that? Shouldn't the burden go on the consumer?

No, placing the burden on the individual consumers doesn't work. "Tragedy of the commons" type problems are generally solvable only by organized collective decisionmaking.

Irrespective of that, discounting oil production from "share of renewables in energy production" is just nonsensical.

So do we have to tally Saudi oil pollution on the exporting country instead of those that actually use it?

I'm not sure which point you're responding to.

Regarding accounting re. renewables share in energy production, yes, I think their oil exports should be taken into account, and we should say that Saudis aren't model citizens of renewable energy production.

Regarding political responsibility, I think we should definitely hold producers responsible as well. We can't burn all the oil that's still in the ground without devastating climate effects, and it's in every nation's interest to reduce oil production and consumption in an orderly but swift fashion.

EDIT: responding here as I can't reply below anymore. This discussion was about energy PRODUCTION, you are below talking about energy CONSUMPTION. US oil imports should indeed count as energy production in the exporting country. Re electricty production - this subthread was about general energy production, not electricity!

Let's see, the US imports 30-40% of the oil it consumes. Should that oil be accounted as used by the exporters?

Norway uses no fossil fuels for its electricity production. Norway happens to export a lot of oil. How does the second statement negate the first one?

Last year that was only 27 %, btw.

(If "oil" means "crude oil and petroleum products").

About your edit: fair enough, if you are talking about primary energy production. I understood what the figure provided in the first comment was referring to (electricity production/consumption) and was addressing that.

In the end, I think the fact that they produce all of their electricity from hydro is a fantastic achievement. That you (and many others, including a lot of people in Norway) would like them to stop pumping oil from the North Sea is (for me) a different issue.

I don't think Norway producing less oil would reduce global oil consumption.

FWIW, they produce about half of what they did in the early '00s.

Tragedy of the commons can happen no matter who you blame. It takes a government-level mandate to pay for cleanup.

I think it's simplest to force the consumer to pay.

> Irrespective of that, discounting oil production from "share of renewables in energy production" is just nonsensical.

I disagree. There are other things you can do with oil, and it doesn't pollute anything sitting in a tank. It's the energy production that matters.

If you're fortunate to have a ton of renewables and petros, the renewables typically don't travel well so you use those domestically and sell the petros on the global market.

Actually Norway is a big exporter of hydro electricity too.

And then imports it again when autumn is "unsusually" dry...

That figure (98%) is about electricity production, not total energy used by the country.

Not necessarily. Norway has lots of hydro power. As energy producers go, Norway is not comparable to other oil producers from internal economic point of view as they've extensively rigged their economy not to implode from the "resource curse" .

Might Norwegian hydro be less polluting than Costa Rican? I am thinking of lower CO2 sequestration in northern versus (sub)tropical climate forests.

Flood a forest for a dam, and you have less sequestration...

I believe Norway produces 140TWatt-Hr per year vs Costa Rica 9 GWatt-Hr per year. Norway produces a lot of aluminum that takes a lot of power to produce. Is this right 14 thousand times as much power generated by hydro in Norway than Costa Rica? National statistics can be very misleading.

I was actually wondering about CO2 sequestration per flooded unit of surface of forest...

And Costa Rica doesn't have a nearly trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund. It's not a very fair comparison.

Most of the renewables was built before the oil.

France has around 94%, largely form nuclear, but with around 15% hydro and up to 10% wind at times. Coal and gas are a few percent.

In what way would you regard nuclear as renewable? It is fuelled by finite stocks, the extraction and refining of which are completely dependent on fossil fuels as a base.

Uranium is available in seawater in virtually limitless quantity (for all practical intents and purposes), so nuclear power should be considered renewable.

Actually, nuclear is not generally regarded as renewable energy by definition [0].

I can somewhat see the reason (of course, it's arguable) in the fact that there is some identification of renewable sources of energy with their "cleanness".

[0] Quick google search! And wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_proposed_as_rene...

But how can you call solar power 'renewable'? It's powered by fusion reactions in the sun, which are finite; it's going to run out.

Only partly tongue-in-cheek. Fission power will also last hundreds of millions of years, so although it is "non-renewable", it shouldn't carry the same connotations of "will therefore run out".

One of the non-renewable aspects of Nuclear power is the storage of nuclear waste, which has specific geological requirements which are not easy to satisfy in many parts of the world.

I expect that's a more limiting factor than the availability of nuclear fuel, but I could be wrong.

It has specific political requirements that are not easy to satisfy in many parts of the world. We can do it technically, it's just that no one is happy about having a nuclear waste dump in their backyard.

> We can do it technically

My understanding is that this is a difficult technical challenge and an active area of research. It is difficult to predict which geological structures on Earth will be stable and inaccessible by life forms or geologic volatility on timescales > 10,000 years.

I'm not an expert in this area, just that we spent considerable time discussing the challenges in some earth science courses I took, but that was several years ago. So if you have some good review sources to suggest, that would be helpful.

My starting point is merely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_ma...

Uranium is available in seawater in virtually limitless quantity...

So is gold, which is back up over US$1200/oz, while the spot price on U3O8 is US$39.50/pound. If it isn't economically viable to extract Au from seawater, it's certainly not for U.

While nuclear is finite, we have enough for tens of thousands of years if we use breeder reactors: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glob...

And it is also true that the extraction and refining is completely dependent on fossil fuels, but so are renewables.

Except that breeder reactors are one of those things that you may not want to hand out willy nilly...

I don't see how it could be classified as "renewable," but I'd argue the more relevant terms would be "clean" or "sustainable."

"Renewable" makes you think of "some of this stuff is going to run out!" which is all wrong. Sure, oil and coal and gas are finite, but if we actually burn through a good chunk of the reserves, the emissions will totally screw us long before we actually run out of stuff to burn. The problem with fossil fuels isn't their finiteness, it's the long-term effects of their use on the planet. If there were an infinite supply they would still be just as bad.

Alternatives are clean, in that they don't emit nearly as much harmful stuff, and they're sustainable, in that they can keep being used for centuries without massive ill effects. Nuclear fits into that just fine, even though it's not really renewable.

France has around 94%, largely form nuclear

This is about renewable energy, which nuclear isn't considered to be?

Well the article was largely about non CO2 emitting, although it was somewhat ambigious.

You mean electricity. Electricity is only a fraction of energy use. Heating and transportation are the other big two contributors.

Electricity here is so cheap we use it to heat our porches. Other means of heating are very very unusual.

And iceland (which the article points out is a leader in geothermal energy production)

IIRC, it is somewhere between 80-90% of houses using geothermal energy to heat up their houses.

Yes, people, especially Scandinavian journalists, tend to forget that when they copy-paste stories on the internet, that this is nothing new.

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