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.
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.
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?
If you can, adding a lvl 2 charger is 100% a worthwhile investment. If you can’t I understand though
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.
I’ll gladly scrap mine and revert to walking and a wheelbarrow if it gets us out of this mess.
IMO you shouldn’t decrease your quality of life for the idea. It’s better to push politicians into spending your tax money on green infrastructure
Not owning a car increases my quality of life, by leaving money for goods and services that I actually enjoy (and not being quite as crushed by the cost of living). But I get that it’s not viable everywhere.
If public transport was more reliable I wouldn’t need a car. But since it isn’t I’d be stranded and not able to really get to any large towns. If you live in a city it’s probably much more practical to not own a vehicle.
Unfortunately if you live in a city everything else is probably much more expensive anyway, especially housing, so you may not get any benefit from not owning a vehicle.
I mean, things like eating less beef are important too.
It will, but the hard part’s getting everyone else to go along with it
I have. Hope to pass my GTI to the kids when they’re old enough in a few years. Replace it with the EV GTI coming.
If for some reason I have to replace sooner, I’m going with a Hyundai Ioniq 5. I’m a sucker for hatchbacks. Cracks people up because I’m 6’4".
Woah woah woah…ev gti? I must go do some research
VW claiming it will be real by 2026. I bet US doesn’t see it until 2027.
As a former GTI, GTI, and Jetta GLX owner, I was extremely disappointed with the E-Golf. My wife and I have been wanting a better EV Golf variant and hoping the GTI platform pushes VW to do it right. Until then I watching the EV truck market actually put out stuff out that could actually be a week in the woods vechile.
The E-Golf is gone, luckily. ID.3 is the one now. For a sportier version, look at Cupra Born. We picked one up for the missus and it’s a lot of fun!
I’ve got a manual GTI and I’m planning on keeping it forever, too. And I’m also 6’4" and love hatchbacks. Are you me?
I believe I have already. I just bought my first EV last fall and it’s going great so far. Charging at home is a real game changer. Certainly they’ll be the rule, before I need another
…. This is my first summer with it, so we’ll see if I still say that after more road trips
Then there’s my kids. I have two teens, new to driving. So far they have my old Subaru, but we’ll see what happens when they want their own vehicles. ICE vehicles are cheaper, especially used ones
I’m glad that I made it this far in life without having to buy one. And that my children might not even have the option.
I keep thinking that the second hand market for electric cars is going to become reasonable. But it never does
Leafs are reasonable now. Some older Teslas. That’s about it.
The problem is that electric cars are so awesome, they hold their value for EVER.
I’ve been able to make do without a car for over 30 years of my life and i just bought my first car, an EV. With a home charger it’s awesome and off-peak charging I often get a full charge (77kWh) for 1€.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
It’s interesting. If you look at the IEA report here: https://origin.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023/executive-summary
Gas, oil and coal demand is reducing globally; however global investment in fossil fuels is increasing, albeit at a far lower rate than renewables. I suspect this is driven by third world countries, where the initial cost can put off investment in renewable infrastructure; however this is also something that is being looked at: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/iea-working-cut-renewable-energy-costs-developing-world-2023-12-22/
Also this report suggests that energy production from coal, gas, oil, hydro and nuclear have starting to plateau from 2021, with solar still showing an marginal increase alongside wind, bio energy and ‘other’: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked
Gas, oil and coal demand is reducing globally; however global investment in fossil fuels is increasing, albeit at a far lower rate than renewables.
For coal the summary definitely seems to support the reduction in themand, but at least for the next few years gas and oil still seem quite stable to me.
I suspect this is driven by third world countries, where the initial cost can put off investment in renewable infrastructure;
Shouldn’t it be the other way around, particularly for solar? Easy to set up, cheaper, flexible to scale, and the more decentralized setup might even help with poor electricity grid, since you can just set them up whereever needed and even have them work insular without connection the the network.
Also this report suggests that energy production from coal, gas, oil, hydro and nuclear have starting to plateau from 2021, with solar still showing an marginal increase alongside wind, bio energy and ‘other’: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked
Imo the recent events have made it a bit hard to judge trends just from a few years. 2021 you are right in the middle of covid screwing over global trade, following that you have russia invading ukraine and the subsequent shift in europe (will be interesting how that plays out once the conflict ends), and as the main article of this thread suggests hydro was heavily affected by recent droughts (although those might become the norm). Only nuclear might be somewhat easier to extrapolate, since new capacity doesn’t just magically appear, but involves long term planning.
Shouldn’t it be the other way around, particularly for solar? Easy to set up, cheaper, flexible to scale, and the more decentralized setup might even help with poor electricity grid, since you can just set them up whereever needed and even have them work insular without connection the the network.
Yeah, I would’ve thought that to, but according to the following report apparently not: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/renewables-are-the-key-to-green-secure-affordable-energy/
But in developing countries, lack of access to finance under reasonable terms makes the costly upfront investments in renewable energy unaffordable. In addition, macroeconomic and political uncertainties discourage private sector investors from supporting renewable energy.
Interesting. Now that you mention it, i remember listening to a podcast that mentioned financing being a big obstacle for wind turbines, particularly the offshore projects, due to exactly that upfront cost. And i can imagine that for developing countries that is even worse.
Still i’d have thought that solar wouldn’t quite have this same kind of problem, but i guess as the article suggests fossil fuels were cheaper, there’s a political angle, and things are slowly improving.
Yes and no. Yes there were big issues blamed on financing but I understood it as contracts that were profitable at low interest rates suddenly weren’t when interest rates rose quickly.
If the customer won’t re-negotiate when conditions change, since that’s the point of a contract, at some point it’s cheaper to just break the contract and take whatever the hit is.
Yeah, without strong global cooperation (good luck on that), I would think reducing demand of fossil fuels (or, I guess we’re only reducing growth of demand right now), will just make fossil fuels cheaper, and some countries won’t hesitate to take advantage of that. I think “The Green Paradox” talks about this.
I wonder how low oil price needs to fall before extraction isn’t feasible anymore?
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.
I skimmed the article but didn’t see if they were including LNG in their renewables numbers, which certain publications sometimes do - assuming that’s not the case, this is great news
people include fossil methane among “renewables”??
There was a UK politician who famously said that he thinks personally that coal is a renewable resource, because eventually trees would turn back into coal. Fortunately everyone thinks he’s an idiot so no one really listens to him.
Super common with american media
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.
It definitely is a thing! I hope to see renewables to over more and more. Even financially now it makes more sense, they’re cheaper and their price is more stable than fossil fuels. I’m lucky to be in an area where 100% of my electricity comes from renewables too. Hope it catches on more and more!
I know I’m being played, but when oil companies finally switched to renewables I’ll be so happy.
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.
In my country we have about 40% hydroelectric plant. They are reliable. Water mills and tide might be something that started the industry.
Keep in mind that many big cites are located near the ocean. Many benefits from water.
Today many companies throw as much money as they can at renewables. They are simply cheaper but limited the amount of opportunities. Example Google could not find enough clean energy to cover their own footprint. Google have a lot of many that they don’t know what to do and want to be climate neutral for their data centers. It is much faster to put in new energy hungry graphic cards the getting a new power source running.
We would certainly have valued hydrothermal and other clean sources a lot more. Iceland could have been a superpower.
We would have come up with lots of ways to make Steam. Electricity still would have happened. So I am guessing a lot of steam generating electricity. Hydro power would still be a thing as would thermal.
Wind power seems like the real candidate for early supremacy though. It can be purely mechanical ( eg. Grinding or running pumps ), it could store energy in the form of water pressure, and it could be used to generate electricity.
If we had a reliable electrical grid and no fossil fuels, things like batteries and electric cars would have gotten a lot further ahead sooner.
A smaller Industrial Revolution was totally possible on wind and water power. The next step would be electricity. Once we had electricity, a lot of the road we went down would be possible. Nuclear power would probably have been added to the mix more or less on the same schedule.
Perhaps the biggest deference would not be energy but rather plastics. It is hard to say what the materials side of history would have looked like without oil.
Fuel would be extremely expensive because we’d drive either on plant oil or alcohol. Possibly at the expense of the food supply
Edit: Probably industrial revolution would be slowed into a crawl, and the high performance economies wouldn’t develop until the discovery of nuclear power
Possibly at the expense of the food supply
To some degree sure, but not in all cases. If you have a tractor that burns wood gas for power but it helps you harvest more crops quicker, it may outweigh the cost of the land used for the trees.
Why? Cars will go away when cities are redesigned to make them unnecessary/inconvenient. Otherwise electric cars don’t care where energy comes from.
I think the point they’re making is electric technology / batteries haven’t been very good until recently, so we’d have a lot fewer cars out there if we didn’t have fossils fuels in the first place since they can store more energy than batteries.
The counter argument, and I’m not saying this is correct, is that we had electric cars over a hundred years ago:
“Over the next few years, electric vehicles from different automakers began popping up across the U.S. New York City even had a fleet of more than 60 electric taxis. By 1900, electric cars were at their heyday, accounting for around a third of all vehicles on the road. During the next 10 years, they continued to show strong sales.”
https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-electric-car
If we had pursued the electric car at the same rate we pursued advances in ICE engines, perhaps they would have been better by now. They made resurgences in the 70s and 80s during the energy crisis in the west.
Clearly burning hyrdo-carbon rich fuels was easier, but it’s hard to say how much the pursuit of fossil fuel driven vehicles and machinery was influenced by both momentum, and the manipulation and interference of the fossil fuel industry. It’s possible that we could have had electric cars and still all the of the traffic, infrastructure and urban societal issues that we do today.
We had the opportunity. Remember the EV1?
Big oil got scared and convinced GM to scrap the entire EV line and set EV innovations back by a fucking decade
Yep, I agree! Just saying I think that’s what the original question was about. Seems like an interesting question to ask.
What you mean from the beginning there were no fossil fuels?
For the case we likely would be quite technologically hamstrung. I can’t see how something like the industrial revolution could have happened without coal, I suppose they would burn wood but I’m not sure the global forests would supply them enough.
I suspect we would be in a far worse position as practically all the forests would have vanished.
It would certainly be rough, but not impossible to do things. The we were pretty close to having an early industrial revolution, we even had the steam engine invented really early on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
If inventions like that had been further developed, things could have gone somewhere.
The Romans didn’t even have basic numeracy they were never going to invent the steam engine.
The link I posted literally is a steam engine. Not a particularly good one, but a steam engine regardless. They just said “oh wow this is neat. Anyways…”
When they could have said “oh wow this is neat, let’s make this better and use this to automate production of things”.
They just didn’t develop this invention further. A bit more tinkering and they would have had it.
At the beginning there were only horses. Then came bicycle and cars. Both with fossil fuels and electric ones. I think even hydrogen was on the table. What won? the cheapest and easiest one.
Industry revolution might have been look differently. Water mills, tie water etc can be helpful. Energy cost nothing.
We also use more energy total, namely more gas cars on the roads.
yeah and shift them to EV, and renewale elec gen share will go back down. It has fairly steadfastly been in the region of 25-30% for about 30-40 years.
It’s almost like more cheap energy induces demand . . .
TBF efficiency has made massive strides, despite poor regulatory standards and lack of enforcement, but then shit like Crypto mining and LLMs keep coming about to make more power sinks.
Been driving Synthetic Fuels for a year now. Doesn’t have to be EV - there are more ways to curb Fossile Fuels. Funny enough, the Synthetic Fuels are going to be cheaper in 1-2 years, because of CO2 Taxes…maybe, just maybe, things turn out okay-ish.
Some cars only exist as ICE versions. Closest I can get in a wheelchair accessible minivan is Toyota Sienna Hybrid.
I hadn’t considered how you would modify EVs for wheelchair access. Adding lifts and other stuff can involve a lot of modification and I bet that gets harder when there’s large battery packs.
I know the Chrysler Pacifica has a PHEV version, but I haven’t seen one of those converted for wheelchair access.
Yup, they don’t convert the PHEV because nobody wants the extra hassle for a niche market. I also reached out to Canoo and received no response. VW basically said they’ll let other companies take care of conversions - same as the rest of manufacturers.
And these aren’t cars people change often so since I don’t have any options now that means I’m stuck driving ICE for ~15 years. Sienna with conversion is around $100k.
Some of the oldest cars I see on the road are accessible vans. My ex-BIL is still being hauled around in a late 90s Dodge Caravan. It sucks that electric van makers don’t seem to have considered this.
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Hah. Batteries shall be our death.
