cross-posted from: https://kbin.run/m/technology@lemmy.ml/t/553659
A decline in fossil fuel power is now ‘inevitable’, the report’s authors say.
Additinal bonus: Since both EU and China are shifting away from fossil fuels, this will fuck Russia forever
And Saudi Arabia, Iran and any number of disgusting fascist regimes that the West has coddled far too long just for cheap gas.
If they’re smart they will have diversified by then. Otherwise it’s going to lead to a lot of civil wars as the established order breaks down. That will be unfortunate.
Do they strike you as smart?
Saudis could turn their country into an industrial power house with dirt cheap energy, but they’re spending their wealth on skyscrappers instead…
The moment they would heavily invest in solar they signal their cash cow is ready for slaughter.
And the fact that they haven’t tells you all you need to know about their motives.
China are shifting away from fossil fuels,
China’s coal use has gone up every year since 2000 and is now 5 times what it was back then. They aren’t “shifting away”, they are steadily increasing its use.
Not for long - China has the fastst growing solar sector by far world wide.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
Around half of global new PV instalations is deployed in China.
Article also says that 2023 had particularly nasty drought resulting in less hydro power, which they compensated by burning more coal
This lemmy community is a thing? Saw it on the front page, got me excited.
As for the actual article, makes you wonder what the next 10-20 years will look like. We very well might be moving towards finally having the renewable-powered world we need.
I sometimes wonder if I’ve already bought my last gas powered car. Glad to see things moving in this direction.
Honestly I bought an EV, and I don’t think I’ll go back at all. I haven’t had any downsides, it’s been all around a more convenient car
Me too. And i don’t even have a home charger. Charging has been slightly inconvenient occasionally but never a real problem. I’m never going back to a stinker.
People also never think about how inconvenient it is to go to gas stations. Especially if they shop around for better prices. With EV charging (besides road trips), you never think about it.
Home charging is a lifestyle game changer. I hope you get it available to you at some point.
Can I ask, is the reason you don’t have Level 1 (120v outlet) charging available because you’re renting where you don’t have a garage or dedicated outlet available to you?
I wonder how the world would look like without fossil fuel below ground.Would we had less cars?
We would still be at a pre-industrial level of technology. Without having an easily accessible and highly energy dense fuel (coal) to kick us off, none of modern society, including renewables, would be possible.
That’s largely ahistorical.
The invention of the dynamo, combined with early industrial wind and water wheels, would have changed where and how we were able to efficiently industrialize. But we had the capacity even without discovering large coal fields in the American coal belt, Russia, and Australia. Hydroelectric dams and heavy investment in wind turbine engineering would have yielded steady surpluses in domestic electricity across a different distribution of domestic real estate.
What large cheap surplus deposits of coal gave us was an opportunity to put off investing in nuclear energy for the better part of a century. Nuclear power is generally cheaper, cleaner, and more abundant than coal. And we had industrial scale nuclear powered electricity plants by the 1950s, with nuclear shipping made possible through the prototype NS Savannah in 1961.
Coal’s biggest benefit wasn’t its energy density nearly so much as its portability. Unlike with wind and hydro, you weren’t geographically constrained in where you could build. And unlike with nuclear, you didn’t have these huge upfront engineering and R&D costs.
Coal boosted the efficiency of early industrial mass transit and allowed a rapid colonization of the frontier regions. But it required the same continual westward expansion to tap cheap labor markets and access new coal fields. Hydro was far more energy dense. Nuclear was late to the party. Wind was temperamental and needed significantly more engineering prowess to harness efficiently. But all of these were solvable problems within the span of decades.
One thing to keep mind is that while the percentage share of renewables is growing, in absolute terms electricity production from coal and gas still increased. Looking at this data, which I assume to be the base of this article.
That’s not surprising. The amount of technologies that have come out recently that use up huge amounts of power are fucking us over. Especially Bitcoin and AI.
Hah. Batteries shall be our death.
