No. There is no honesty anywhere, that is my point.
> the need to displace fossil fuels really is very important.
Why? I don't necessarily disagree. But reality isn't a problem managed through a single variable. The things you list are not singularly caused by fossil fuels.
In fact, a very solid argument could be put forth about just how much uglier things might be without fossil fuels.
Here's the basic math someone would have to do before making the assertion that the elimination of fossil fuels --as a single causally-connected variable-- would make things better:
The simplest (well, not so simple) calculation is that, while we might eliminate fossil fuels we do not eliminate the need for the energy they provide. In other words, in rough terms, you still have to explain how we would generate, harness, create, transport and distribute a certain amount of energy per unit time (hour, day, week, month, year, whatever).
In fact, I think we can, in historical terms, state that energy requirements increase over time, they do not decrease.
The next element of the story is how we are going to replace the massive number of byproducts of fossil fuels that modern life pretty much depends on. We know that making complex hydrocarbons any other way is in a range between highly inefficient (which would increase the aforementioned energy requirement) and impossible.
My point --in stressing that reality is a rather complex multivariate problem-- is that, while it would be nice to think of a desirable reality without fossil fuels, in the real reality (just go with it) this is much more of an aspirational thing than an attainable objective.
The same is the case with electric vehicles. I have yet to see someone do the math on the total daily energy requirement of the installed fossil-fuel based vehicle fleet and explain how on earth (literally) we are going to generate that much energy without causing even more problems. Our current electrical grid is designed for current energy requirements (and power requirement, which is equally important). The current system, in any country I know of, doesn't magically have an extra 100% in power/energy generation capacity to support every vehicle going electric.
Reality: A multivariate problem. You push here and it pulls there. Not so simple.
> For instance, air pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of people every year.
Fair enough. Containerships, as a simple example, burn bunker fuel, one of the nastiest things you can burn. They are singularly responsible for more pollution along certain vectors than the entirety of the ground transportation industry. And yet we do nothing about it.
Why?
I can only guess. Part of it has got to be a case of "well, what we have works". The other issue --which I think is very real-- is that bunker fuel is, quite literally, the bottom of the barrel. It is what is left after you extract everything else from petroleum.
So, next Monday we stop using bunker fuel everywhere in the world. No problem. Right?
Wrong.
You see, all the other oil byproducts are still needed. Which means that the bottom of the barrel...the bunker fuel...would still be produced in absolutely massive quantities. Except now we are not using it, because we want to clean-up the planet.
Wait a minute. What do we do with it?
Well, we likely have to bury the stuff, dump it somewhere, make huge mountain-sized piles out of it. We would now use massive amounts of fuel (yes, everything is "massive") to run the machines that have to haul and manipulate this stuff. We also have to devote massive (sorry) resources, land and ecosystems to burying what we are not using. Where it goes from there I cannot even guess.
Once again, reality isn't a single variable problem. Bunker fuel == bad? Yes, no, maybe, hard to say. Because the alternative could be worse, far worse.
This is precisely what I don't see treated fairly these days. Imagine a politician taking the time and making the effort to fully analyze and understand the bunker fuel ecosystem and also taking the time to present this analysis to the voting public. Good luck. It is far easier to say "bunker fuel == bad", get votes, stay in office and move on. It's easy to show how horrible the stuff is (and it is!). It is impossible to show how much worse things could be if we don't fully understand what reality looks without it.
I'll overstay my welcome and give another example from real life.
A number of years ago a well-intentioned yet mathematically-challenged "science" teacher at my kid's school showed the kids this gut wrenching video animation that pretty much says humans are a pile of shit destroying the planet. The thing is a close as you can get to an ignorant politically-motivated pile of lies.
She was receptive to having a conversation. I asked if we could go through a simple exercise where we would try to understand what our small town would look like if we did not use the products of evil industrialized society. Petroleum is a favorite, of course.
I won't bore you with the details. Before we got done we had destroyed every forest in sight, had piles of human excrement the size of mountains, all possible fields where you could grow something in the region were dead, sources of water were polluted (human waste and other by products of inefficient source for everything) and more. At the extreme we were using horses to get around, etc. A town of a few tens of thousands of people relying on horses has a serious manure problem. We would burn trees for heat and cooking, etc.
As we extrapolated this from a town of tens of thousands to cities with millions and regions with tens to hundreds of millions of people, it became very obvious that modern life (or more accurately, modern population levels) would quickly become unsustainable if we demanded that humanity abandon how we got here and embrace everything "natural" an "sustainable". She was certainly surprised to understand the scale of the problem.
Once you start thinking at scale --planetary scale-- "natural" and "sustainable" quickly end-up with razed forests, depleted marine life, polluted water sources and a sky blackened with thick pollution.
Not to end on a depressing note. Yes, we are doing better, have been so for decades. We just have to be careful that we don't reduce reality to single variable problems, because that isn't reality, it's a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that.
Climate change is one of those. It is hard to find truth that is being discussed with honesty in the mainstream.
> I think all of your points miss one glaring fact: Quality of life doesn't matter in the face of an existential threat.
Existential threat?
Really?
Where is the proof of that?
Not trying to be obtuse at all. I am also not suggesting that things are changing towards a future with potent climate events. I am not challenging any of that.
You see, the dark future everyone is selling is one where we all die. Everything dies. Mass extinction of all kinds of living things. Another two degrees and we are done for.
Hmmm.
In the face of this we are supposed to have the technological prowess TO ACTUALLY TAKE CONTROL OF PLANETARY SCALE PROBLEMS and magically bend the curve to where WE want it to be, not where THE PLANET wants it to be. Upper case for greater emphasis than this which does nothing for me, not yelling at you.
Do you have any idea of the scale of this thing? Planetary. Yes. What does it mean?
In other words, we purport to have the power to change the entire ecological balance of the planet (hence "planetary scale", and, at the same time, we can't deal with the purported effects of global warming?
I applied "purported" because, once again, climate change is being treated as a single variable problem where NOTHING ELSE changes. In other words, "CO2 bad -> CO2 ppm rising -> Existential threat".
What?
The planet has been dealing with this kind of stuff long before humanity was a thing. It adjusts to atmospheric CO2 through weather. Specifically, storm, hurricanes, cyclones, rain, etc. Water. And growing vegetation. Yes, at a planetary scale. We have data on this, reliable data, going back at least 800K years.
Is CO2 bad?
Well, yeah, taken as a single variable, sure. Yet, that isn't the entire story, is it?
Have you heard of indoor farming? This is where food is growing in controlled indoor environments rather than outdoors.
Do you know what they do in indoor farms to promote plant growth?
They inject CO2.
Yup. They actually have CO2 tanks delivered to the farm and CO2 is metered by a computerized system in order to raise the level and promote plant growth as well as other characteristics.
When you start leaving the "CO2 bad -> CO2 ppm rising -> Existential threat" myopic view of the universe being pushed and start to consider that reality is a complex multivariate problem, ideas and the potential actual reality start to surface.
Have you ever walked around your home, family and neighbor's homes and your neighborhood with a CO2 meter?
I have.
Levels in my home and my neighbors are in the range of 500 to 600 ppm. No, we don't live right next to a highway. Outside, about the same range. Some of the office environments I frequent, about the same.
In the car? It can reach 1100 ppm. No, that isn't with me breathing directly into the meter. If the ventilation system is set to forcefully ingest outside air it comes down to about 700 in neighborhood streets and spikes back up to 800 to 1000 on the highway (which makes sense).
My point is that this "CO2 bad -> CO2 ppm rising -> Existential threat" scenario is one that, very likely, billions of people have been living in for decades, maybe more. Care to guess what indoor environments looked like 100 to 200 years ago? I have no clue, but I cannot imagine them being better than what we have today.
And cars? How much time do billions of people spend in their cars at 700 to 1100 ppm CO2 every day? Hours.
Has the sky fallen?
No.
WHY ARE WE NOT QUESTIONING WHAT WE ARE BEING TOLD THEN?
C'mon folks. This isn't about denying our influence in increasing atmospheric CO2. However, this is, very much so, about gaining a sense of proportion and putting what we are being told to scrutiny.
Yes, we absolutely managed to increase atmospheric CO2 through the burning of highly dense hydrocarbon fuels. No question about that. Is the inescapable conclusion "CO2 bad -> CO2 ppm rising -> Existential threat"? I don't know. Somehow I don't think so.
For example, increased levels of atmospheric CO2 might promote more efficient growing of food in indoor farms. Controlled environment farming is more efficient that outdoor farming, uses less water, delivers higher quality food and reduces damage to the land. More importantly, controlled environment farming can bring food production to places that could not consider it before, like the desert.
How about all the storms, rain, etc. that are a part of the planet reacting to CO2 levels? Well, this will among othr things, promote vegetation growth everywhere.
So is, "CO2 bad -> CO2 ppm rising -> Existential threat" real? I, for one, after devoting a non trivial amount of time to truly looking at this as a complex multivariate problem rather than that silly statement being pushed around, do not believe so. I think this is a silly and damaging reduction to an absurd conclusion.
Will we have to adapt to potential changes? This is likely. However, we are already living in a 700 to 1100 ppm environment (homes, offices, inside cars) and we haven't all turned into a pile of goo on the ground.
Somehow I don't think the threat is existential as much as it is evolutionary. What I mean by this is that we likely have to evolve how we live, where we live, how we grow food and, yes, of course, how clean we are about our affairs. I am all for reducing CO2 emissions and being clean, just not because of a potentially flawed conclusion but rather due to the fact that, yes, humanity should pollute as little as humanly possible. This is a good goal. Yet we should not be hysterical about it. The sky isn't falling.
> In fact, I think we can, in historical terms, state that energy requirements increase over time, they do not decrease.
They do, and all energy needs can be met with solar, wind and grid energy storage. Or nuclear if you don't want to invest in energy storage for whatever reason.
> The next element of the story is how we are going to replace the massive number of byproducts of fossil fuels that modern life pretty much depends on. We know that making complex hydrocarbons any other way is in a range between highly inefficient (which would increase the aforementioned energy requirement) and impossible.
Burning fossil fuels are the biggest immediate problem. Other fossil fuel products may or may not be a problem. But you don't ignore the heart attack because you just noticed a rash that may be flesh eating bacteria. Triage is key.
> You see, all the other oil byproducts are still needed.
"All" is overselling. Some are arguably useful, but for example, most product packaging is likely superfluous and a product of our current economic incentives. For instance, why do we have disposable containers for each unit of cleaning product we buy rather than reusing containers that you get refilled at the store? These choices are driven by market incentives that prioritize convenience over sustainability.
Some products may never get rid of their plastic packaging, perhaps something like sterilized vacuum packed needles that hospitals use. Those would be the exceptions but not the rule.
> We just have to be careful that we don't reduce reality to single variable problems, because that isn't reality, it's a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that. Climate change is one of those.
Climate change isn't a single variable problem, and I don't think anyone serious is pushing it as such. If you look into the IPCC report on climate change, you'll see all sorts of factors being accounted for including cloud cover, contrails, methane, water vapour, CO2 and more.
We only have so much influence over some of these factors, but the biggest and most obvious factor for which we have alternatives, is CO2 emissions. Do you deny that?
> Once you start thinking at scale --planetary scale-- "natural" and "sustainable" quickly end-up with razed forests, depleted marine life, polluted water sources and a sky blackened with thick pollution.
You and I clearly have different understanding of what "sustainable" means.
> They do, and all energy needs can be met with solar, wind and grid energy storage.
Not true. Not even close. Particularly if you move away from optimal solar regions.
In addition to that, manufacturing the grid energy storage capacity required to service planetary scale requirements will result in unspeakable consumption of natural resources (mining), pollution and environmental challenges. Not to speak of the amount of energy required to produce, ship and install such storage systems.
> Or nuclear
Nuclear is the ONLY viable solution. It makes excellent use of the existing infrastructure and we pretty much know how to do it right.
> if you don't want to invest in energy storage for whatever reason.
You are confusing things here. It isn't about me, or someone like me, not wanting to "invest in energy storage for whatever reason". Such loaded words too, "not wanting to", implying negative intent and "invest", implying a benefit that clearly might not be there. In other words, fabricating a conclusion while, at the same time, attempting to diminish the other persons standing.
I must repeat myself here. Too much of what we discuss these days boils down to the magical waving of a single variable that will solve all of our problems (or cause all the harm). "Energy storage", this case.
Well, this single variable solution to all of our problems isn't, in fact, a solution to all of our problems. At all. Start digging into what "investing" in this stuff actually means and you might come out of it thinking that coal and natural gas look pretty good in the comparison.
If we are going to invest in anything it should be nuclear plants. Manufacturing batteries with ten to twenty year useful lifespan at a global scale is bound to cause more harm than good. Of course, some prefer to look the other way and think it is "green" because it seems clean at the application level.
Here's an example of how not "green" these things can be. Do you know what you'd have to do to grid scale battery-based storage in the winter in Nebraska or Alaska in order not to lose capacity like crazy (or, even worse, have the plant shut down)? Heat up the batteries and keep them warm. If you think this is going to happen with solar energy...in the dead of winter...with snow and blizzards. Well.
> Burning fossil fuels are the biggest immediate problem. Other fossil fuel products may or may not be a problem. But you don't ignore the heart attack because you just noticed a rash that may be flesh eating bacteria. Triage is key.
Well, the analogy is nonsensical to begin with. Setting that aside, you don't get the petroleum byproducts without making fuel. This is a highly optimized production system. Every layer of it, almost literally, extracts a different useful substance. So, you can't say let's stop producing diesel and gasoline and keep producing the myriad industrial and commercial products that share that manufacturing pipeline.
I mean, if you want plastic tubing, syringes, equipment and almost everything you find in a modern hospital, you have to start with oil and derive everything else. A modern hospital would be reduced to medieval times without the outputs of this process. Manufacturing a modern home, car, food, clothing would also be impossible.
It is critical to understand this fact before continuing to push this fantastical idea that we can magically stop using petroleum. We cannot. It isn't that simple.
Here's a review of how fuels and lubricants are made:
If you don't understand this, you are missing a key element of the perspective you have to have in order to have this discussion. Facts do matter.
From the article:
"By pulling the condensing liquid from the column at different heights, you can essentially separate the crude oil based on molecular size. The smallest of the hydrocarbons (5 to 10 carbon atoms) will rise to the very top of the column. They will be processed into products like gasoline.
Condensing just before reaching the top, the compounds containing 11 to 13 carbon atoms will be processed into kerosene and jet fuel. Larger still at 14 to 25 carbon atoms in the molecular chain, diesel and gas oils are pulled out.
Those compounds with 26 to 40 carbon atoms are a tribologist’s main concern. This is the material used for the creation of lubricating oil. At the bottom of the column, the heaviest and largest of the hydrocarbons (40-plus carbon atoms) are taken and used in asphaltic-based products."
Translation: You don't make lubricants and a bunch of other critically-needed oil byproducts without making gasoline and the lighter hydrocarbons first. Or, put a different way: You can stop using the lighter hydrocarbons but you still need the other stuff, which means that you are going to fill entire lakes with gasoline-type hydrocarbons that you are going to choose not to use, which makes no sense at all.
> "All" is overselling. Some are arguably useful, but for example, most product packaging is likely superfluous and a product of our current economic incentives.
I am sorry, it is clear you don't know much about the industrial production of, well, anything. Plastic bags is the last thing anyone with this knowledge would even remotely mention. Factories would come to a grinding halt (in some cases literally) without oil byproducts. To continue with my medical example, none of the equipment, drugs and supplies a hospital needs to save lives can be made without myriad oil byproducts.
> Climate change isn't a single variable problem, and I don't think anyone serious is pushing it as such. If you look into the IPCC report on climate change, you'll see all sorts of factors being accounted for including cloud cover, contrails, methane, water vapour, CO2 and more.
That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about things like us "saving the planet" by reducing CO2 emissions. Single variable. Complete bullshit.
And when I say that, it isn't an opinion. This is supported by 800K years of atmospheric data. If you have an honest interest in truly understanding what's going on I'll point you in the direction of the data. This assumes you have a modicum of scientific training, high school science and math is enough. No need to have a PhD at all. This is actually very simple and easy to understand, but you have have to be willing to leave the bullshit you've been told behind and honestly consider the data and nothing else. When you do that it is very difficult to find support for what we are being told.
This isn't about what I say. This is about what the data says.
I know of only one paper --reputable paper, by a major organization-- that finally admitted the unavoidable conclusion, that, in effect, we are being sold a pile of bullshit. Again, if you are honestly interested in digging deeper and are able to leave preconceived notions behind, I'd be happy to provide you with a link to this paper.
> You and I clearly have different understanding of what "sustainable" means.
Of course, you are thinking "sustainable" at the utopic local level. I have taken the time to have a look at these problems at a planetary scale. You can make "sustainable" work at a local level in selected areas with very careful design and management. It almost never pays off, but we still do it. The reasons are sometimes good, we should clean-up our act, no question about that.
Once you look at this as a "solution" that must address the needs of over seven billion people at a planetary scale it is hard to impossible for "sustainable" to actually be sustainable. In a lot of cases you create more damage than benefits in order to create the illusion of being "green". One example of this is that case of not using fuels, such as gasoline, while still having a need for the massive number of heavier hydrocarbons that come out of the distillation process. Great, no gasoline. Now, where to you put that shit while you only, literally, use the bottom of the barrel? Ah, you destroy the planet. Got it.
BTW, I don't have the answers other than to warn that we really need to start reducing reality to single variables for each problem. That is simply not the way we are going to solve anything at all.
A lot to parse here, so I just feel like picking a couple of points.
There exist lubricants for which non-fossil crude oil production sources are possible such as PAG and others. Likewise, there exist many plastics and synthetic rubber that are not petro based, however ethylene, which is a petrochemical byproduct, is still required for a lot of plastic uses. This doesn't matter much, it is totally possible to produce these things without vast ghg production.
The production of lubricants which are not burned do not contribute in large part to greenhouse gas emissions. It is fully possible to produce industrial petrochemicals such as plastics and lubricants that do not produce large ghg emissions from burning. Most lubricants are recycled, lots are done so by burning, these can instead become industrial stock for production of lubricants and plastics given research.
Diesel and fuels can also be produced from non-petro sources, this has been done in people's garages. Diesel engines can burn corn, peanut, canola, waste vegetable, some of them can run on Dexron III (this is petrol) and diesel created in a garage reactor from plant sources. Biofuels are not fossil fuels. Electrification of vehicles removes vast sums of ghg from vehicle emissions, the production source can be any other non-fossil source.
The thesis of your comment, I gather, is essentially:
>that case of not using fuels, such as gasoline, while still having a need for the massive number of heavier hydrocarbons that come out of the distillation process. Great, no gasoline. Now, where to you put that shit while you only, literally, use the bottom of the barrel? Ah, you destroy the planet. Got it.
The economics of gasoline and diesel as a byproduct of petrochemical production makes rather favorable economic rationale for fossil fuel uses, but it does not follow that the byproduct must therfore be burned or drank. CO2 reduction will be required to prevent greenhouse heating and climate destabilization. Once energy production has transitioned away from fossil sources, smaller amounts can be used without the full scale ghg emissions we are currently creating.
Not using gasoline does not mean you "you destroy the planet", you could for example, return it to the fossil fuel reservoir from which it came. Seems pretty stable.
> There exist lubricants for which non-fossil crude oil production sources are possible such as PAG and others. Likewise, there exist many plastics and synthetic rubber that are not petro based, however ethylene, which is a petrochemical byproduct, is still required for a lot of plastic uses. This doesn't matter much, it is totally possible to produce these things without vast ghg production.
Sure. However, the problem with this idea is that it is easy to pick a few things here and there that can be done without petroleum. However, once you take in the entirety of industry, the range and scale of products we derive from petroleum or products that very much directly depend on petroleum and derivatives it truly massive. The world would come to a grinding halt if we stopped using petroleum.
This stands to reason. In an effort to extract more and more value out of the stuff we have become very creative and efficient at using as much of that black goo as possible for all kinds of things. We are talking about hundreds of years of research and technological evolution. It is only reasonable that, given that, humanity is as dependent as can be on the oil ecosystem.
This is what I talk about when I say that we need to stop this business of reducing reality to single variables. The consequences of reacting to a single variable while ignoring the dependency tree could result in far worse outcomes than anyone could possibly imagine.
What you mentioned here is for sure true, but mainly the pertinent data revolves around burning the stuff. All the petrochemicals aren't doing this, its the ghg, mostly from combustion.
Sorry to quote in this way, it isn't meant to editorialize, only to organize my response:
> [...]the problem with this idea is that it is easy to pick a few things here and there that can be done without petroleum. [...] The world would come to a grinding halt if we stopped using petroleum.
Its super useful and there's no reason to quit using it entirely. We don't even have to, there are many other means of doing what we need to do without it releasing ancient carbon stores into the atmosphere.
Everything bound up in the petro supply chain is clearly beyond the scope of my comment here and education in general, but the only way to approach reasoning about this issue is with single examples. Its too easy for somebody to gish gallop about the huge scale of industry involved, and quickly lose the fact that CO2 has to be the target. NMOG and Methane and nitrogen oxides as well, but mainly CO2.
Nobody will clear the table with a single "we can just X" or "we can't because we'll lose X". Its definitely much more involved, just as you say. One thing I strongly agree with you about is that nuclear energy is likely a critical help to this endeavor.
The largest global sources are, unsurprisingly, electricity/energy, transportation, and manufacturing, but also consider the global hegemony that for the most part turns on controlling and using this strategic resource, ever since WWI. That is all about burning it in large part.
Maybe we need a "Breton Woods" for carbon, as triggering and possibly unpopular as that may be. I'm certainly not betting on that turn of events, but we may just end up resorting to a different type of nuclear power if we just keep the blinders on ...
> Its definitely much more involved, just as you say.
That's all I am trying to convey. I am mostly sick and tired of the reduction of reality to a single variable or culprit and then pounding on that ad-nauseum as if that is actually how we are going to solve anything. This is how one gets to stupid ideas like seeding the ocean with chemicals to promote CO2 capture. What? I don't care what anyone says, that's far more likely to kill all life on earth than save it.
Our history is full of unintended consequences of sure "solutions", like that island in Australia, where they introduced one species to get rid of another. The end result is that they swapped one plague for another that might actually be worse. We can't even do something like that successfully --because reality isn't a single variable problem-- and we actually dare to suggest we can modify climate at a planetary scale? The hubris in this kind of thinking is thick and dangerous.
The single variable reduction is how we get idiot politicians like AOC pushing absolute nonsense day after day. Because it is simple they are successful at linking <variable> to "bad" and, after that, position their hairbrained idea as the savior. This kind of thing should inspire projectile vomiting, not a following.
> One thing I strongly agree with you about is that nuclear energy is likely a critical help to this endeavor.
Nuclear has been the elephant in the room for decades. OK, I get it, plants build in the 1960's might not have been optimal. We can say that about cars, planes and even ballpoint pens. That's the history of humanity. Well, I think we can build them to be very safe these days. Don't build them where a tsunami can hit them, etc. To paraphrase, there's a list for that (or there should be).
What's interesting about nuclear is that you can simply (OK, not so simple) connect them to the grid and your energy and power delivery capacity instantly increased, 24/7/365. Build a 1 GW class plant and you have 1 GW, rain or shine.
Nuclear, from my perspective, is the ONLY way we can support the conversion of the entire ground transportation fleet to electric power.
Here are the results of a simple model I threw together trying to answer a simple question:
How much power do we need to support the entire US fleet of cars going electric?
The simplest assumption is one where 100% of the fleet uses 8 hour long charge cycles:
daily charge energy 50,000 Wh
cars 300,000,000 cars
long charge 8 hours
fast charge 0.5 hours
Portion charging long 100%
Portion charging fast 0%
% of long-chargers charging simultaneously 100%
% of short-chargers charging simultaneously 0%
Total daily energy requirement 15,000 GWh
Cars long-charging simultaneously 100,000,000 cars
Cars short-charging simultaneously 0 cars
Power for simultaneous long charging 1,875 GW
Power for simultaneous short charging 0 GW
Total power requirement 1,875 GW
This isn't realistic, you are not going to have 300 million cars charging simultaneously during the same eight hours. Or, are we?
If every hour we have, say, 1/8 of the entire fleet plug in for eight hours to charge, what's the maximum number of vehicles that will be charging simultaneously at any point in the day? The assumption is that car will charge for eight hours and be off charge for 16.
Well, eight hours into the day we will, in fact, have 300 million cars charging simultaneously. After a full 24 hours from the start of this approach, the minimum number of cars charging simultaneously will be 187.5 million and the maximum 300 million.
So, yes, at peak utilization we will will have 300 million cars, requiring that we deliver 50 kWh in 8 hours, which means a peak requirement of 1,875 GW.
This means we need nearly two thousand giga-watt class nuclear power plants to support a fleet where 100% of the vehicles will slow charge.
What happens when some percentage of the fleet needs to fast charge? I am defining fast charging as delivering 50 kWh in 30 minutes:
daily charge energy 50,000 Wh
cars 300,000,000 cars
long charge 8 hours
fast charge 0.5 hours
Portion charging long 80%
Portion charging fast 20%
% of long-chargers charging simultaneously 100%
% of short-chargers charging simultaneously 20%
Total daily energy requirement 15,000 GWh
Cars long-charging simultaneously 240,000,000 cars
Cars short-charging simultaneously 12,000,000 cars
Power for simultaneous long charging 1,500 GW
Power for simultaneous short charging 1,200 GW
Total power requirement 2,700 GW
Now we need 2,700 giga-watt class nuclear power plants in order to be able to deliver the power needed to support the bulk of the fleet slow-charging and the remainder fast-charging spread across the day.
TWO THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED nuclear power plants.
Even if I am off by a factor of ten (I threw this together and it is very simplistic), that means nearly 300 nuclear power plants to be built in, say, 30 years. We have to build ten per year and we had to get started yesterday.
This is the kind of thing I look at when I talk about not reducing reality to single variables. The amount of energy we delivery by using petroleum is of a scale that is hard to imagine. To go electric we have to find alternative means to deliver some percentage of that energy (because electric cars are more energy-efficient than IC vehicles) to every car on the road every day. This task is far from being simple. Beyond that, the unmitigated mess that US politics has become over the last few decades virtually guarantees we cannot build a single nuclear power plant, much less ten, fifty or a hundred.
Frankly, I have no clue how this could even be possible. I think we are going to have some number of people driving electrics and, in the hubris of it all, we are going to ignore the fact that we are going have to burn twice or three times more coal to charge those cars every day. It has all the potential to be a larger mess than what we currently have.
I would love for someone to take the time to develop and publish a better model than my mindlessly-simple quick calculation. I know a lot of subtlety could be introduced. That said, I somehow don't think we can escape physics.
You may very well be correct, we haven't moved nearly at all on this problem in 50 years, and we are really far behind.
On the plus side, moving combustion from vehicles to centralized sources does a lot for much better efficiency. There is a lot of variation in the efficiency of vehicles that is nearly impossible to control for. Centralized sources can be much more easily managed than aging ICE all over the place.
That definitely doesn't address your main point that we are unprepared to convert.
Thanks for the work you've done preparing your analysis, I've read it entirely. I can sense your frustration with the general ignorance of more or less everybody wrt what we actually need to do. It's something I also feel. When examining the problem the conclusion I have immediately is that the entire industrialized world and probably the rest of the world, basically all of human society, is very tangled in the business of burning petroleum.
You've mentioned a lot of things that ring very true to me, such as the scale of the problem, the political boondoggle (I don't know of another way to say clusterfuck, but that doesn't really capture either) and the nearly complete lack of functional solutions as well as a tendency for incumbent forces to prevent implementing what solutions we do have available.
There are also a lot of vested interests who frankly make a lot of money doing what we do now. The US has also benefited greatly from the status quo of fossil fuel in a geopolitical sense, It's pretty much been the center of global foreign policy since WWI. "Developing" nations such as China (they are definitely developED) are using it too, they're on the same page of the usage story, I don't see anything at all different there.
The only thing that is really gonna do the heavy lifting are economic needs, because as much as I hate to admit it, it's the only language that is useful or understandable at all anymore.
Our conversation is really about nuclear power it seems. I recognize that, but I don't have any solutions to that impasse that we are experiencing. The one thing that I see helping that cause is, weirdly enough, alternative energy like solar, geothermal and hydro electric. Don't lose it on me yet please, I'm not trying to change the subject.
If we do end up taking seriously the prospect of implementing as much non-nuclear, non-fossil electrical generation as we can, it will have a positive economic effect on the usage of electrical power vs fossil power. This doesn't melt the enormous capacity iceberg that you have very well pointed out, but providing additional economies of scale for this kind of electric power will allow economic forces to begin to favor it vs fossil fuel.
If electrical storage becomes more necessary, we might be in a position to create a demand for additional electric resources including nuclear power. Additional development of alternative sources will drive more innovation, dollars, research and political interest into the usage and creation of this kind of energy.
When everybody wants to have solar panels which are looking more and more economically desirable, they may also invest in storage technologies that allow them to use it more effectively. This kind of thing can augment baseline electrical demand in a variety of dimensions: Politically, it will be much more desirable to create electrical sources, economically it will be easier to achieve because of greater scaling, and the technology will improve as investment increases with the demand. I suspect nuclear energy will be a better sell in a world where there is more understanding of electrical needs.
I don't know how to give nuclear energy a better PR campaign... people just don't understand why its desirable, but its easy to imagine how it could be undesirable. By the same token, people just live their lives with whatever is there, and that's gasoline and whatever makes electricity for them now or whatever they feel culturally comfortable with. As well, there is a clear fact that oil producing corporations have a lot of power, politically and economically, with which to do their own PR, but nuclear energy does not have giant multinationals pushing for its development and use.
It doesn't look good, that's for sure.
I appreciate the effort you have expended making your point, it has benefited my thought process.
This is a very difficult problem to tackle, this idea of a transition to a cleaner and more sustainable way for humanity to live. Like it or not, we had in the order of one to many centuries of optimizing the use of oil to either directly provide or support just-about everything we do and need. It is going to be very difficult to unplug from that.
What we need more than anything else are honest conversations about all of this. Sadly the mixing of political forces (which only exist for the benefit of the political class) and industrial/business/financial forces (which, of course, exist in support of their goals) makes this nearly impossible to address, at least on the time scale of one or a couple of human generations. I think this is a multi-generation problem, meaning, somewhere in the one to two century range.
BTW, I designed and built a 13 kW ground-mounted solar array three years ago. By this I mean, I purchased all the components and physically built the structure and wired it all. I have about three years of minute-by-minute data on solar production. No batteries yet, they just don't make sense in terms of ROI, at all. Eventually, maybe.
I'll just say the solar experience has been "interesting". Homes around mine don't have nearly this size system and they likely spent two to three times the money to install them. I have spoken to a few neighbors who are actually sorry they put money into solar because the size of their systems were calculated based on rates at that time. As rates have gone up they find themselves paying to lease their solar system as well as paying a bundle for electricity.
Going back to honesty in discussing some of the issues of our time. Climate change and the issues regarding atmospheric CO2 concentration often lead to the idea that we have to act immediately to "save the planet" or we are all going to die in twenty years (or whatever nonsense politicians are pushing). This is objectively false and it is amazing to me that the scientific community does not riot against such dishonesty.
Furthermore, understanding the idea that we just can't do anything about atmospheric CO2 accumulation can be verified while armed with very basic high school math and critical thinking.
The first thing you do is look at the graphs we have from reliable and accurate atmospheric CO2 concentration data from the past 800,000 years. Here's that graph:
You then fit straight lines to the graph in order to determine the rate of change of both atmospheric CO2 accumulation and decline. Here are my lines for the decline portion of the data:
Looking at it in rough strokes, it looks like it took, on average, somewhere around 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and, say, 50,000 years for a corresponding 100 ppm decrease. In some cases it took twice that time, I am just trying to generalize.
The planet did this entirely on its own...because we were not around or we were insignificant during this time period.
This is extremely valuable data and an equally valuable conclusion because it establishes an important baseline:
If humanity LEFT THE PLANET tomorrow, it would take about 50,000 years for a reduction of about 100 ppm in atmospheric CO2.
I'll repeat that: If we left the planet and all of our technology was shut down, you are looking at a minimum of 50,000 years for a meaningful "save the planet" change in CO2 concentration.
At this point the question becomes glaringly obvious:
How does anything LESS than leaving the planet even make a dent on CO2 at a human time scale?
This is important. 50K-years for 100 ppm is not a human time scale. We could very well be extinct by that time due to a virus or collective stupidity. I am going to define "human time scale" to mean a century or less. In other words, something we can wrap our brains around. That also means making plans and taking action today for something that will not deliver results for, say, 50 to 100 years. Imagine the world making decisions in the 1920's for us to benefit from today. That's pretty much ridiculous on the face of it.
And yet, that isn't the problem, is it?
Because of the baseline revealed by this data we know, without any doubt, that anything less than leaving the planet cannot possibly delivery a faster rate of change, a faster decline than 100 ppm in 50,000 years.
Solar panels all over the planet? How is that MORE than leaving the planet?
A billion electric vehicles? Same question.
No more fossil fuels? Nope.
In fact, Google Research boldly set out to show the world that a full migration to renewable energy sources could address the issue. To their credit, when they discovered just how wrong they were, they published the data. In this charged environment these researchers deserve a ton of respect. They went in --and say so themselves-- with a position of believing that renewables could save the planet. What they discovered instead was precisely what I understood through the simple exercise on this graph, that this is an impossibility. Their methodology was different from mine, the result was the same.
"we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope"
"Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work"
"if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take centuries for atmospheric levels to return to normal"
"<snip> to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that 350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use."
"Suppose for a moment that <snip> we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that
could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants <snip> Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking"
Well worth reading. Like I said, these guys deserve a ton of respect for effectively saying "we were wrong, and here's why".
Why aren't we talking about this AT ALL. This is reality. Not what we are being told by politicians and zealots. Climate change has become a religion or a cult and science has been left far behind. Here are two ways to come to the same general conclusion. One uses a super-simple look at 800,000 years of atmospheric CO2 data. The other took a detailed look at mathematical climate and other models. The conclusion was the same: We can cover the planet with renewable energy sources and do NOTHING to atmospheric CO2, or worse.
I've been trying to elevate this to some level of consciousness here on HN any time the topic comes-up. It is often met with a pile of downvotes and attacks. Because, of course, they "know", even though none of the detractors bothered to devote even 1% of the time I have trying to understand actual reality in a sea of nonsense.
Frankly, I am not sure what else to do. In this charged political climate it is actually dangerous to stick your neck out too far. I think you understand now that this is not --I am not-- denying climate change, I am simply saying "the emperor has no clothes" to all the nonsense we seem to be told to focus on.
I think we need to learn to live with whatever is coming. We can't do a thing about it. New industries will sprout to help us manage it. The planet will deal (and is dealing) with CO2 as it has for millions of years.
And that's the other set of questions that the graphs and some research can answer:
How did CO2 increase when humanity was not around to muck it up?
Continental scale forest fires burning for 25,000 years as well as other sources of CO2.
How did the planet bring it down?
Rain, storms, cyclones, hurricanes, and the regrowth of vegetation over 50,000+ years.
So, we have to learn to deal with changing weather patterns and perhaps start helping the planet a tiny bit by planting trees. Judiciously though, because more trees could also mean more fuel to burn. In other words, we could, if not careful, actually increase CO2 if we plant a billion trees and create the conditions for the mother of all forest fires.
Like I keep saying, not a single variable problem. Is it?
> Not true. Not even close. Particularly if you move away from optimal solar regions.
Convenient that you just skipped over one of the options that doesn't require "optimal" solar regions.
> In addition to that, manufacturing the grid energy storage capacity required to service planetary scale requirements will result in unspeakable consumption of natural resources (mining), pollution and environmental challenges. Not to speak of the amount of energy required to produce, ship and install such storage systems.
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions that grid storage would be some kind of electrochemical battery. That's unwarranted. There are in fact many storage options available.
> You are confusing things here. It isn't about me, or someone like me, not wanting to "invest in energy storage for whatever reason". Such loaded words too, "not wanting to", implying negative intent and "invest", implying a benefit that clearly might not be there.
No, what I'm doing is telling you that there is a benefit there. Our current grid design is frankly terrible, speaking as an electrical engineer. Grid storage would solve so many problems, make the grid far more robust and simplify the overall design, even if we still burned fossil fuels. You have no idea how much cost, overhead and difficulties there are in actively managing the grid that would just disappear with grid storage. Australia benefitted immensely from the Tesla storage, for example.
> Well, this single variable solution to all of our problems isn't, in fact, a solution to all of our problems. At all. Start digging into what "investing" in this stuff actually means and you might come out of it thinking that coal and natural gas look pretty good in the comparison.
I disagree 100%. I'm aware of the costs and benefits here.
> Setting that aside, you don't get the petroleum byproducts without making fuel.
Even if that were the case, making fuel does not entail burning fuel.
> That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about things like us "saving the planet" by reducing CO2 emissions. Single variable. Complete bullshit.
Not complete, but I agree it's not the full story of the problems we have. The error bars on what problems climate change will cause are wide, but the worst case is truly horrible. All indications are that we're doing worse than we should be, so it's not looking promising.
> Here's an example of how not "green" these things can be. Do you know what you'd have to do to grid scale battery-based storage in the winter in Nebraska or Alaska in order not to lose capacity like crazy (or, even worse, have the plant shut down)? Heat up the batteries and keep them warm. If you think this is going to happen with solar energy...in the dead of winter...with snow and blizzards. Well.
There are plenty of options for using batteries in cold climates that avoid most of the problems you describe, but I'll steelman your position and suppose that any kind of grid storage is completely unusable in Alaska and that it requires fossil fuels.
Are you really saying that because Alaska requires fossil fuels, therefore we should continue to use fossil fuels everywhere else? Because I've already acknowledged that displacing them 100% is probably not an option, but we almost certainly could get to >95%.
> No, what I'm doing is telling you that there is a benefit there. Our current grid design is frankly terrible, speaking as an electrical engineer.
Then please, pretty please, with sugar on top: You have the scientific and mathematical training to actually understand that what you are being told is complete bullshit. However, you have to be willing to apply some of that critical thinking, engage in some simple research, do a little math and try to understand. However, you have to be willing to leave this single variable view of the world behind during the process.
Grid storage = good?
Current grid design = terrible?
Well, grid storage today means batteries. It does not mean Star Trek dilithium crystals, hydroelectric plants, compressed underground air, spinning masses or the myriad interesting-but-unrealizable ideas people have floated. In the US, in particular, it would take a hundred years to build just one new hydroelectric plant, much less a couple of hundred of them.
Everything sounds great until you start considering scale. A town of 30K people, in an optimal solar region, full solar with batteries at every home? Sure.
I have a 13 kW system at my home that I built myself. I might add batteries at some point in the future, when and if it makes sense. Would I recommend everyone in my neighborhood do the same? No. It's crazy. This was likely the single worse investment I have ever made.
Scale IS a problem. Most definitely.
Scale means that for everyone to have what I have (or will have, if I ever install batteries) you have to be willing to do things like destroy thousands of miles of marine ecosystem to mine the very materials we need to make something like this happen at scale.
Scale is the problem. You have the background to be able to explore and understand this.
Electric vehicles. Calculate the energy we deliver into gas tanks every day through gasoline. Now calculate what that means in terms of total energy delivery EVERY DAY across the US. Make an accounting of our current energy generation capacity. Which, BTW, does not happen to have been built to support a 100% or 200% demand increase. Now translate the total energy delta demanded by a fleet of, say, 300 million electric vehicles, into, say, 1 GW nuclear power plants. The conclusion, if I remember correctly, is that we need somewhere in the order of 100 new 1 GW class nuclear power plants spread across the nation in order to support a full shift into electric vehicles.
The other problem is POWER rather than energy. In other words, you have to be able to deliver a certain amount of energy per unit time simultaneously across geographic areas. If you have 100K or a million cars charging simultaneously you are going to have to build additional POWER delivery capacity in order to service that demand, something that today (in terms of energy) we deliver using a liquid fuel.
When you start considering scale and get beyond single variable reduction of reality, things look very different. Coincidentally, the Los Angeles Times published an article about the mess we are walking into due to our drive to move into electric cars:
"A mining permit pushed through in the last week of the Trump administration allows the Canadian company Lithium Americas Corp. to produce enough lithium carbonate annually to supply nearly a million electric car batteries. The mine pit alone would disrupt more than 1,100 acres, and the whole operation — on land leased from the federal government — would cover roughly six times that. Up to 5,800 tons of sulfuric acid would be used daily to leach lithium from the earth dug out of a 300-foot deep mine pit."
Seriously?
And this is for JUST a million batteries per year. I assume they mean cells rather than the full car battery. Whatever the case may be, at scale, this is horrific. Yes, I said "at scale" because a million per year is not scale. We need many times that, thousands of times that amount if we are going to electrify the global transportation fleet. If we also want to use the same materials for grid energy storage the problem, again, at scale, quickly reaches apocalyptic proportions.
All I am asking you to do is to invest the time to really get into the details of the issue and use the math and science you understand to develop a true sense of proportion.
My guess is that the current path to electric energy storage is, at scale, a seriously flawed idea. I am not a chemist, so I can't propose an alternative that would be more benign at scale other than to say two things:
First, we need to be very careful and not allow politicians and various interests to lead us by the nose into causing a global disaster of unimaginable proportions.
Second, I have a sense --and the hope-- that a bright young scientist might just discover a path to store and deliver energy in liquid form in a way that will not have us resort to such things as strip mining the oceans and dumping millions of tons of sulfuric acid into mines to leach lithium out of them.
I don't have the answers. I just know we are probably being led down a path that could be far uglier than pumping petroleum out of the ground. We are making dumb decisions, like cancelling the XL pipeline...which means oil will have to be trucked...which will burn millions of gallons of refined diesel fuel to move petroleum at a horrific loss in efficiency. In the meantime, we have no problem dumping thousands of tons of sulfuric acid into mines to get lithium for "clean" electric cars and storage.
I agree scale is the big obstacle, but I think you're kind of doing the same thing you're accusing others of doing: reducing solutions to single variables, like thinking lithium batteries manufactured using dirty methods are the only or primary grid storage solution.
A mixed energy economy with a variety of energy storage solutions can address the various needs, and you must also take into account the evolution of technologies and economic incentives.
For instance, the energy delivered each day to cars by chemical means is indeed huge, so you naturally conclude that we can't possibly deliver that much energy using known batteries and renewable technologies. Let's suppose that's true, there are some factors that will affect how this actually plays out:
a) ICE are very inefficient while electric vehicles are much more efficient, and so the total energy to deliver is significantly lower than that delivered by fossil fuels now,
b) vehicle utilization is also inefficient, in the sense that there's no real need for everyone to have their own cars and drive point to point; improved public transit is one solution, but so is something like Uber pool, thus improving the utilization of the delivered energy and thus reducing demand further
c) as for storage alternatives, solid state batteries are very close, and numerous other storage options already exist and are deployed, with improved variants being tested around the world already; I think the wikipedia page on this is decent, in particular if you pay attention to the tech that's already deployed and running [1,2].
I agree that this is a huge problem because fossil fuels are so heavily embedded in our economy in so many ways, but I don't think it's insurmountable. If enough of us can get on the same page that some outcome needs to happen, we can get pretty far pretty fast. We need a Manhattan project level commitment to this, and the country that does this well will have a huge first mover advantage to sell this to other countries. Vested fossil fuel interests are preventing this though.
10 years ago I would have been 100% with you that nuclear power was the option we should be investing in, but given the precipitous fall in the cost of renewables, I don't think nuclear is a slam dunk anymore. Nuclear still has its place in the move away from fossil fuels, and the renewed interest and new reactor designs seem promising.
> the need to displace fossil fuels really is very important.
Why? I don't necessarily disagree. But reality isn't a problem managed through a single variable. The things you list are not singularly caused by fossil fuels.
In fact, a very solid argument could be put forth about just how much uglier things might be without fossil fuels.
Here's the basic math someone would have to do before making the assertion that the elimination of fossil fuels --as a single causally-connected variable-- would make things better:
The simplest (well, not so simple) calculation is that, while we might eliminate fossil fuels we do not eliminate the need for the energy they provide. In other words, in rough terms, you still have to explain how we would generate, harness, create, transport and distribute a certain amount of energy per unit time (hour, day, week, month, year, whatever).
In fact, I think we can, in historical terms, state that energy requirements increase over time, they do not decrease.
The next element of the story is how we are going to replace the massive number of byproducts of fossil fuels that modern life pretty much depends on. We know that making complex hydrocarbons any other way is in a range between highly inefficient (which would increase the aforementioned energy requirement) and impossible.
My point --in stressing that reality is a rather complex multivariate problem-- is that, while it would be nice to think of a desirable reality without fossil fuels, in the real reality (just go with it) this is much more of an aspirational thing than an attainable objective.
The same is the case with electric vehicles. I have yet to see someone do the math on the total daily energy requirement of the installed fossil-fuel based vehicle fleet and explain how on earth (literally) we are going to generate that much energy without causing even more problems. Our current electrical grid is designed for current energy requirements (and power requirement, which is equally important). The current system, in any country I know of, doesn't magically have an extra 100% in power/energy generation capacity to support every vehicle going electric.
Reality: A multivariate problem. You push here and it pulls there. Not so simple.
> For instance, air pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of people every year.
Fair enough. Containerships, as a simple example, burn bunker fuel, one of the nastiest things you can burn. They are singularly responsible for more pollution along certain vectors than the entirety of the ground transportation industry. And yet we do nothing about it.
Why?
I can only guess. Part of it has got to be a case of "well, what we have works". The other issue --which I think is very real-- is that bunker fuel is, quite literally, the bottom of the barrel. It is what is left after you extract everything else from petroleum.
So, next Monday we stop using bunker fuel everywhere in the world. No problem. Right?
Wrong.
You see, all the other oil byproducts are still needed. Which means that the bottom of the barrel...the bunker fuel...would still be produced in absolutely massive quantities. Except now we are not using it, because we want to clean-up the planet.
Wait a minute. What do we do with it?
Well, we likely have to bury the stuff, dump it somewhere, make huge mountain-sized piles out of it. We would now use massive amounts of fuel (yes, everything is "massive") to run the machines that have to haul and manipulate this stuff. We also have to devote massive (sorry) resources, land and ecosystems to burying what we are not using. Where it goes from there I cannot even guess.
Once again, reality isn't a single variable problem. Bunker fuel == bad? Yes, no, maybe, hard to say. Because the alternative could be worse, far worse.
This is precisely what I don't see treated fairly these days. Imagine a politician taking the time and making the effort to fully analyze and understand the bunker fuel ecosystem and also taking the time to present this analysis to the voting public. Good luck. It is far easier to say "bunker fuel == bad", get votes, stay in office and move on. It's easy to show how horrible the stuff is (and it is!). It is impossible to show how much worse things could be if we don't fully understand what reality looks without it.
I'll overstay my welcome and give another example from real life.
A number of years ago a well-intentioned yet mathematically-challenged "science" teacher at my kid's school showed the kids this gut wrenching video animation that pretty much says humans are a pile of shit destroying the planet. The thing is a close as you can get to an ignorant politically-motivated pile of lies.
She was receptive to having a conversation. I asked if we could go through a simple exercise where we would try to understand what our small town would look like if we did not use the products of evil industrialized society. Petroleum is a favorite, of course.
I won't bore you with the details. Before we got done we had destroyed every forest in sight, had piles of human excrement the size of mountains, all possible fields where you could grow something in the region were dead, sources of water were polluted (human waste and other by products of inefficient source for everything) and more. At the extreme we were using horses to get around, etc. A town of a few tens of thousands of people relying on horses has a serious manure problem. We would burn trees for heat and cooking, etc.
As we extrapolated this from a town of tens of thousands to cities with millions and regions with tens to hundreds of millions of people, it became very obvious that modern life (or more accurately, modern population levels) would quickly become unsustainable if we demanded that humanity abandon how we got here and embrace everything "natural" an "sustainable". She was certainly surprised to understand the scale of the problem.
Once you start thinking at scale --planetary scale-- "natural" and "sustainable" quickly end-up with razed forests, depleted marine life, polluted water sources and a sky blackened with thick pollution.
Not to end on a depressing note. Yes, we are doing better, have been so for decades. We just have to be careful that we don't reduce reality to single variable problems, because that isn't reality, it's a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that.
Climate change is one of those. It is hard to find truth that is being discussed with honesty in the mainstream.