I am always (plesantly) suprised to see just how high the amount of renewables are. It really is quite contrary to the naratives - on both sides of the debate.
Huge progress has been made over not that long a timeline, if nothing more than diversifying the sources of power. More can be done but it is impressive all the same.
It's still too little too late. In Spain we still burn a lot of gas. In the last 12m gas was the main source of electricity.
And then it's everything which isn't electricity. For a more clear picture, look for sankey diagrams like this one [1], which shows how electricity is actually a small part of the equation.
Thats what the activist blockading my commuter train was hysterically screaming too.
When you are packed 3 deep and 3 high on an electic train being screamed at that you are personally destroying the planet (by taking this train to work?) it brings the climate wars home.
> When you are packed 3 deep and 3 high on an electic train being screamed at that you are personally destroying the planet (by taking this train to work?) it brings the climate wars home.
Had the displeasure of meeting some of those activists as well. While I don't support their means of protest (in Germany the constantly glue themselves onto the street) I understand their message. However, considering the activists blocked a packed tram line that is powered exclusively by renewables, I'm not sure if they themselves understand the issues completely.
Gluing yourself to a tram or the street in 2022 is having zero (positive) effect. The transition from fossil fuel to electrictiy and clean forms of electricity has been happening for a decade plus now - maybe the greenpeacer of the late 90's can legitimately claim credit. No policy maker is seeing these activists at work and changing their mind about anything.
The offshore wind farm opening in 2023 is not a product of that activist gluing themselves to something, and the one planned for 10 years from now is not either. The train, towards clean electricity and near zero oil is in motion, has been for quite some time, and the only question is how fast it is travelling.
I would love to see it move faster, and certainly anyone actually pulling the strings of investment are looking at a coventional power plant vs renewables and throwing their money at renewables faster than people can take it. It is only amongst the chattering masses and everyone having their voice heard on twitter that there is much debate.
Hm, I'm not on the side of those annoying activists, but I think your assertions have no ground.
Existence of "extremists" usually helps "moderates" make things change. Without the "extremists", the "moderates" ARE the "extremists" and will not be taken seriously. It reminds me of how without the Black Panther Party, some white moderates would have not accepted propositions from Martin Luther King.
I think that wind farms and renewables would not be there if there was no pressure from extremists that helped deciders realize that wind farms and renewables are not just a whim from few ecologists.
> the greenpeacer of the late 90's can legitimately claim credit
They were swiming against the tide - today they are swiming with a pretty rapidly moving current.
> wind farms and renewables would not be there if there was no pressure from extremists
Wind farms and renewables that exist today because someone in June 2022 glued their hand to a road. They are the product of research and development and planning under corporations and governments 3/4/5 leaders ago. In the context of the UK - 2014 for consent to build Hornsea which started delivering power in 2020. With each successful phase they keep asking to build more, it is the success of the project that had them proposing part 2 and now in 2022 part 3. The person glued to the pavement can claim Hornsea 3 is their doing but personally I dont think they are moving the needle at all.
If you could build a wind farm, and sell off 50% of the interest in the project for what it cost to build - you would be planning the next one as well.
Nobody is pretending that today's wind farms are the result of someone gluing their hand to a road in June 2022 (the fact that you are framing the discussion as if it is the case is not a good start).
But it is incorrect to say that it's obvious wind farms would have happened without people doing similar things in their time.
Maybe you are too young, but people doing similar things as people gluing their hands today existed way before 2014.
You take Hornsea, it is a good example: projects from industry in UK existed for a long time, but were unlocked only due to European Union promotion and subsidies for renewable energy, which itself would not have existed without the need for Germany to boost renewable because they decided to go out of nuclear, because of the ecologist protests in 1980-1990.
Hornsea is the result of the 2010 European Union push for 20% renewable, and would not have existed (at least not as early) otherwise, because EU funding was, obviously, a really good incentive. Before that, there were wind power industry pushing for projects in UK (such wind power industry groups exists since 1970), but they were not very often taken on board by the UK government. Also, Hornsea has deemed economically profitable because it used efficient technology created due to the push for renewable that was in general a political move due to pressure of ecologist protests.
Having annoying activists is unavoidable, especially as long as we also have climate change deniers or climate emergency underestimaters, and therefore, we should learn to not be deterred to still do the right thing.
People opinions on what actions are probably similar to Gaussian curves, with two consequences:
1) you may be situated on the mean value, but you may not, and you have almost no way to know (personal assessments are so biased they are worth nothing)
2) it is unrealistic to expect that no one will exist on the left or on the right of you. There will always be annoying people that will go too far. As long as those are agreeing on the climate emergency problem, considering that they are a problem that need to be solved is just a waste of time. Just live with it.
If it makes you feel better, you may even consider that the existence of those annoying activists is the consequence of the lack of action of people who are downplaying the climate change emergency. If the second ones don't exist, the first ones would not exist too.
I'm highly skeptical of your story. I'm 99.9% even the most tone-deaf activist would not block an electric train, if the objective of their campaign is to replace cars with trains and bikes. I find this hard to believe.
You jump on the roof while your fellow activist glue their hand to the side. 14% of those activists polled were down with it, not 0.01%.
"A poll on the Extinction Rebellion Telegram chat showed 86 per cent of members were against action targeting the London Underground. Just 4 per cent approved of the action, while 7 per cent approved if they could be sure trains wouldn't get blocked underground."
I believe the idea was that the commuters were going to jobs that destroyed the planet. I can only assume that philosophically they were ok with people taking public transport to work, but they disapproved of the jobs they were going to.
To add context, in greta’s climate book there’s a whole narrative on how the climate and sustainability crisis is a consequence of the current global economic model that incentivizes consumption and growth, so people that are on their way to the financial district and therefore probably work to support that model would be considered enemies of the planet by those activists. Their mode of transportation would be immaterial to that.
They’re not in favor of communism either by the way, they want the global economic system reformed to become sustainable and they consider the job of doing that a responsibility of the powers that be.
That diagram only shows waste heat when converting to electricity.
So if fossil fuels get converted to electricity it shows the roughly 50% loss, but if they're used in cars it doesn't show the 80% loss.
Electrifying everything makes a big difference, so much so that people quoting primary energy figures rather than final energy (the stuff we actually use to do stuff) are liars.
And this diagram, which is misrepresenting transport fuel as if it was final energy is also misleading for similar reasons.
> But I agree with you that generally too much panic is being created.
Unfortunately without the panic we wouldn't have even gotten where we are. The last decade's progress has been excellent, but there was 20 years of stagnation before that. The latest nuclear plant that was opened in the UK was in 1995, and we've not successfully built another since. Meanwhile gas plants have served their entire lifecycle and been decommissioned in that time frame, and are still actively being built (but thankfully no longer planned).
> However, the full picture isn't so glamorous once you take all energy types into account
Why not? Electricity is one of the biggest of energy, and is growing as transport (which is the second largest source of energy usage) is electrifying. Cleaning our electricity sources and moving our largest polluters to electricity is a great path forward. Theres no silver bullet here but what we're doing is pretty much the biggest impact we can make. We should have done it 20 years ago, and we should be doing it quicker now though.
The next biggest source of emissions is from agriculture, mostly from deforestation and oversimplifying for the sake of an internet comment, if the EU, China and the US just ate less beef, that problem would mostly solve itself.
Many people are saying, "but it is only electricity".
Of course, however, is there anything where the conversion has been from electic to petrol / gas / coal? My car is going electic, my bolier is going electric. This isnt new, it has been the path of travel for a while now.
Unless Nvidia has really f'd up their calculations my 5090 graphics card isnt going to be coal powered.
I think the point of "But it is only electricity" means that _currently_ the situation is not as good as one might think based on electricity production.
“Coal-fired power stations emit over 10 Gt of carbon dioxide each year,[4] about one fifth of world greenhouse gas emissions, so are the single largest cause of climate change”
The counter factual; if the 60% of electricity coming form wind or sunshine at this instant was from coal, then 10 Gt of carbon dioxide each year becomes 20/30/40/50 Gt of carbon dioxide each year and global emmisions are significantly more than what they are now.
There are only 8500 coal power plants in the world generating 20% of all emissions.
“Coal-fired power stations emit over 10 Gt of carbon dioxide each year,[4] about one fifth of world greenhouse gas emissions, so are the single largest cause of climate change”
Take a look at global coal consumption (almost entirely driven by China, the world's leading manufacturer of solar panels and a leading adopter of wind power) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Coal_Consumption.sv... - and it's at record highs again this year.
Look at what happened in last ~20-30 years during which time the "green" movement was insisting that nuclear is too late, too costly, and renewables are the better solution to climate change, and that coal can not possibly compete with renewables and coal is dead and coal infrastructure are stranded assets.
The reality of the situation is that renewables can't even keep up, let alone reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, that coal is still one of the cheapest ways to generate power. And after China we still have half the world's population hasn't even started its energy consumption S-curve.
The people who thought fossil fuels were done for and renewables would just magically kill them and solve the problem -- with no need to look at serious investment in nuclear and hydro and real carbon pricing -- were lied to by fossil-fuel backed "green" propaganda.
With wind and solar we apparently only need 3 days of storage. For median household thats about 3x29kwh. It costs 87kwh*150$/kwh=13,050$ to produce such battery (tho sell it at about 5x markup). Given property prices and how much it costs to upgrade grid, small residential batteries is no brainer.
> Coal is also quite polluting and no one wants to live near a coal energy plant.
With modern filters and high enough smokestacks, the effect on air quality doesn't seem to be that bad. In my region, every city has its own coal plant (mostly used to provide heat for the city in the winter) and I don't notice the effects on air quality. It's definitely a small fraction of the pollution brought by people burning coal at home (in old boilers, obviously without any filters and with low chimneys).
Hard to imagine how far Germany could have been today if they weren't trapped for 16 years by a party which did everything it could to stop renewable expansion. Crippling the national industry and selling it out to China this way.
Time didn't stop in the pandemic. The 2007 election was fought on the topic of a carbon transition. It's at least a decade and a half, and the anti-transition side hasn't given up yet so it's still ongoing. If the Andrews government is returned it may be the beginning of the end with their proposal for a renewables oriented renewed SEC, but it won't be the end for the country as a whole.
I'm sure it is and it will continue to be since renewable energy has become some "evil tool" of the eco/leftist-conspiracy for the international-anti-intellectual bubble.
They look bad, but certainly the rate of badness is nowhere close to what it once was - if post pandemic emissions are not horrific, then you can make the case that the upward trend is broken.
Huge progress has been made over not that long a timeline, if nothing more than diversifying the sources of power. More can be done but it is impressive all the same.