My realizations over the years:
Even if we make our cars less carbon-polluting by 25%, if we end up driving more, we could still end up polluting more.
Even if the western nations pollute less, developing nations will still pollute a lot more and will get us to tipping points anyway, albeit perhaps slightly slower.
Global warming effects are scary, but what’s worse is global cooling and Ice Age. Once the ocean’s balance is messed up by diluted salinity due to melted ice caps, who knows where this can go.
Developing nations need electricity and primary energy growth. They need it to pull people out of poverty, and guarantee basic human needs like food, water, shelter as well as basic human desires like education, employment, and transportation. Western countries should be using their immense economic power to make renewable sources of energy the more cost-effective solution. They’re not.
China is on track to hit peak oil (this year) and peak coal (next year). This is due to their EV adoption rate (~40% and growing fast) and their solar panel installation rate (this year, more than the entire sum of all US solar panels). China dominates the supply chain: they make up more than half of all battery exports and more than 80% of all solar panels exports worldwide. In less than a decade, China has drove down the cost of EVs to parity with ICE vehicles ($10000/car) and drove down the cost of solar to be less than that of traditional fossil fuels.
The West could have done the same. Instead, we kept jacking off our O&G producers and giving them billions of dollars in subsidies while solidifying the advantage of established car and solar companies rather than driving innovation from competition.
should
Haha! You believe in morality!
It’s not even a morality problem, it’s a question of growing your economy by developing emerging industries
It’s not that simple to electrify with renewable. We’d need to mine wayyyy more copper for wiring. We’d need to produce wayyy more rubber for insulated coatings of all those wires. We’d need wayyy more transformers. And if every garage in America has a car charging in it, then we’ll need wayyy more batteries and We’d have a lot more load on our electric infrastructure. In the end, we’d still need fossil fuel infrastructure to account for when the sun’s not shining and wind isn’t blowing.
And yet, China this year deployed more solar panels than the US in it’s entire history.
That’s great for them, I hope it was worth it in the end. And that would work great in a desert and southern California, but it won’t work to well in most of the USA due to weather.
Solar panels are so obscenely cheap that their profitability curve works in a ton of weather conditions you wouldn’t expect.
The fact that it’s so expensive in the US is entirely decoupled from their manufacturing cost.
Then why is it over $35k to get them installed on a house’s roof? And still I’d need to be plugged into the grid.
The costs in the US are completely fucked. Partially because of tariffs on imports, partially because of bullshit regulations that protect the large existing players, and partially because American workers are just, frankly, less efficient.