World passes 30% renewables milestone for the first time, decline of fossil inevitable

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.

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

It will, but the hard part’s getting everyone else to go along with it

Woah woah woah...ev gti? I must go do some research

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.

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?

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.

Saudis could turn their country into an industrial power house with dirt cheap energy, but they're spending their wealth on skyscrappers instead...

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.

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

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.

I wonder how low oil price needs to fall before extraction isn't feasible anymore?

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2oL4SFwkkw

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.