ZeroGravitas

Grad students outnumber coalminers 70:1, if they're roughly half international which another comment claims, that's still a big difference.

Same person being quoted in the same article:

> New Chinese government guidelines on fossil fuels released on April 22 support the view that the country is willing to move away from finite fossil fuels, strengthen energy independence and still achieve its climate targets, says Qin.

> "The new central guideline talks about strictly controlling fossil fuel consumption, reducing coal and controlling oil. It still leaves room for flexibility, but these are concrete policy levers," Qin said of the document, which also indicated a desire to increase clean energy consumption.

Elsewhere Climate Action Tracker on the USA:

> The Trump Administration is pursuing an executive and legislative agenda to systematically repeal targets, policies, and funding for climate change mitigation and science. The administration is actively obstructing the buildout of renewable energy, while encouraging the production and consumption of fossil fuels, completely reversing the Biden Administration’s course on climate action. This is the most aggressive, comprehensive, and consequential climate policy rollback that the Climate Action Tracker has ever analysed.

They have a worse score than China:

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa/

All of which, even the bits quoted to claim "no transition is happening", support my original contention that all the things mentioned in the cartoon were being strongly pushed by China in 2009. They have only gained momentum since and they've profited from doing so.

What an embarrassingly ill-informed thing to say. But when the guy wrote a book in 2023 about the fall of China, he kind of has to say that doesn't he, even as he lives through the fall of the USA.

He's called out in the sub-head as an "expert" but what is he an expert in? Renewables? Energy policy? No, he's an expert in saying that China is too state-led. Why would an expert in that want to downplay their success, apart from all the obvious reasons?

Since late last year (and so not shown on these graphs) they started moving some cheaper off-peak hours to align with solar output.

Previously they were aiming to shift demand to the nighttime to flatten the demand curve and maximize nuclear. Now they want to shift demand to both nighttime and around solar noon in the summer to match the combined production curve of nuclear and solar.

Seems a better plan than modulating nuclear for predictable solar production.

That cartoon was drawn at the very end of 2009.

BYD had release the first plug in hybrid the year before.

The Beijing Olynpics had made air pollution a hot topic in China in 2007-8.

Wind power had accelerated after their 2005 Renewable Energy Law.

Solar panel production rose around this time, taking over the market from European manufacturers when the Financial Crisis hit and they pulled back investments.

So China at that time, was doing all the things on the cartoon's presentation list, and has benefitted greatly from them.

The Chinese electric truck market is already bigger than the entire US trucking market, so this is unlikely to be a big deal.

billion kilowatthours (BkWh)?

What happened to Terawatt-hours?

They're not.

Both have a reducing share of nuclear in their electricity mix as they're not building enough to keep up with their demand growth.

Luckily both are deploying wind and solar at a rate that outpaces their demand growth.

The specific German who "admitted it was a mistake" doesn't like wind turbines and thinks they'll be replaced by fusion in 10 years.

https://www.rechargenews.com/policy/merz-says-wind-power-is-...

> By then, Germany should "bring the world's first fusion reactor online." Its electricity would be so cheap "that no other generation methods will be needed,” Merz was quoted as saying.

The recent marathon world records are apparently due to improved nutrition.

Here's the producer of the hydrogels talking about the exact process of getting the maximum carbohydrates into the runner:

https://maurten.no/blogs/m-magazine/how-sabastian-sawe-fuele...

> At the elite level, marathon performance is defined by energy availability as much as physiology.

> Maintaining a pace of 2:50 per kilometer requires a constant supply of fuel. Even small disruptions in energy delivery can result in significant time loss.

AI psychosis but with Actual Indians doing the sycophancy manually.

What a beautiful metaphor but what a horrible reality.

So their 2060 target is a lower percentage than the EU has today? Which is itself 50% lower than the EU had 20 years ago.

I think that's a pretty good support for the notion that nuclear is past its prime.

Musk claimed that USAID was a CIA front as part of his rationale to gut it. A very strange thing for a defense contractor to say out loud.

The very first time I thought "That's it, Trump is done, it's over" is when he complained wages were too high in the US.

Clearly he thought it was a gaffe as he denied saying it shortly after saying it twice in two videotaped appearances. But he sailed on through that and many other misteps.

That actually traces back further to, appositley, the White Russians and their Protocols of Zion to smear democracy as a Jewish plot.

From there it spread to Henry Ford, Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler amongst others.

Let me rephrase your comment:

When there is sun and/or wind we burn less gas.

Gas current and futures price for just the gas that needs burned (nothing about plant maintenance or carbon price to compensate for pollution or cost for building the plant or paying loans taken to build it etc.) is at 100, 90 and 80 pounds per MWh over the next 3 years.

That is more than the cost to build entirely new solar and wind, about double the cost of the best current projects, maybe 50% more than the average.

So even if you waved a magic wand and instantly solved several major world crisis affecting the price of gas, it still would be cheaper to build renewables in the UK than to buy just the gas alone.

This is true in the UK and basically everywhere in the world except maybe Russia, some parts of the middle east and the US Shale regions, but even there it's a close thing!

This has led to these being nearly 100% of all new electricity capacity built globally. Which only drives prices lower, and displaces gas and so makes gas cheaper than it otherwise would be too.

Didn't you start this thread by complaining about expensive energy?

We have the solution and you don't like it because you read news from magazines owned by people who pretend climate change isn't real.

They fell for the propaganda themselves in the second paragraph by claiming America was traditionally against renewables.

Not America, the fossil fuel industry and their employees in politics and media are against it.

Polling has continually showed strong support for it by actual Americans. Only recently have Republican voters started fading in support for wind the peak roughly coinciding with Trump's first election.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/708620/less-support-solar-wind-...

But even then it beats nuclear which has tepid support from both sides, while most of the others now show massive partisan differences and net out to strong support for renewables, then nuclear then low support for more fossil fuels.

See, this is where logic and experience would have helped.

Would burning more expensive gas during a gas price crisis have helped?

No, UCL research suggests that wind power saved over 100 billion (this is net of 45 billion in subsidies) from 2010 to 2023! And it continues to do so.

And that's after it got effectively banned from being built onshore for a decade in England, costing many billions more.

(Though, the world got lucky here as the CfD mechanism helped prove offshore wind was feasible, another British success story).

No, I'm hereby banning you from reading obviously biased sources of partisan information that has been repeatedly proven false by logic, reason and experience.

You said this wasn't true:

> you happen to know when the demand for power is the highest? It happens to be.... gasp.... when the sun is highest in the sky.

But it mostly is.

But yeah if everyone has solar then it's all producing at this time and the very high production can exceed the high demand.

Oh I see where you've gone wrong then:

https://www.desmog.com/2026/04/28/reform-donor-jeremy-hoskin...

> A major right-wing political funder has dramatically increased his fossil fuel investments this year, DeSmog can reveal.

> Jeremy Hosking, who owns the hedge fund Hosking Partners, donated £1.7 million to Reform UK between 2019 and 2024. The party, led by Nigel Farage, campaigns to scrap the UK’s flagship 2050 net zero emissions target, remove environmental protections, and turbocharge new fossil fuel extraction.

> Hosking also owns The Critic magazine, which frequently attacks climate policies and supports new North Sea oil and gas exploration. Its current edition carries a cover story titled “The Green Myth: Fossil Fuels are Britain’s Real Energy Source”.

...

> Its current cover story is written by contributing editor Chris Bayliss, who argues that renewable energy is unreliable and expensive. In a follow-up piece online, he blames “elite” support for net zero on “climate hysteria”.

> Bayliss is a former civil servant who works in the energy sector in Iraq. He’s the Iraq Country Lead for IM Power, which runs liquefied natural gas (LNG), oil and coal power plants, offers “oil and gas refining, storage and pipeline solutions”, and works to “maximise value from hydrocarbon resources

An interesting question now is whether he had standard mental health issues, or if he was an early example of AI psychosis or whatever we call people who are falling in love with their AI chatbots because they tell them how smart they are.

The negative price can also be thought of as paying people to use the productive solar panels rather than turn them off, it's a two sided market that drives demand to times of clean and cheap energy, which lowers costs for everyone.

Unless the graph explicitly states that it includes distributed behind-the-meter solar, then any dip in demand that looks like the inverse of solar is probably grid demand being replaced with local generation on homes and factory roofs or industrial land.

People regularly use the demand being supplied by solar to argue that solar isn't delivering when people need electricity.

The yearly peak grid demand in California is moving later in the day and later in the year due to this effect.

Why are you hearing it discussed critically? It's a great British innovation that has demostrably made the world a better place and provided the UK (and others who have copied it) with big investments in cheaper and cleaner energy.

It's a good thing and you explain why in your second paragraph.

What gives people the right incentives to increase or reduce curtailment? The market price being negative or positive.

No, batteries do that better too.

Variously called "synthetic inertia", "virtual inertia" or "grid-forming inverters".

Some people treat the spinning metal like vinyl records and think you can't get that "warmth" with the new tech but on objective measures, including cost, they win.

People install them because they were the old tech for this, and there's lead times and caution, it's just slowly changing legacy not something batteries can't physically do better.

Economists would say that the money coming in outweighs the higher costs and therefore you could redistribute that money and everyone comes out ahead.

Whether that happens in real life is a different question.

Trading across borders seems to be a part of this story.

If your local price is high you can import, if it's low you can export.

If you're at the end of a grid and/or your transmission capacity is limited your price has the possibility to go higher or lower without that damping mechanism.

Electricitymaps has a pricing layer which seems to show central Europe moving in sync when I randomly check it:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes?sig...

Batteries are sweeping stability markets wherever they are set up. They're simply cheaper and better at it.