[maxharris]

The article uses euphemisms and double-talk:

As more countries and states enact market systems that put a price on carbon emissions, clean energy technologies will actually become cheaper than fossil fuel technologies

Translated into plain English:

As more governments raise the price of fossil fuels through increased taxation, solar and wind may cost less than fossil fuels.

What does the author have to gain by obfuscating something so obvious?

What is the impact on people when their energy costs are raised? (Hint: energy - vast amounts of it - goes into everything, from growing food to producing artificial heart valves.)

[trhway]

>Translated into plain English:

>As more governments raise the price of fossil fuels through increased taxation, solar and wind may cost less than fossil fuels.

well, as it stands currently the whole society pays the tax for the fossil fuels use - that tax is the expenses and damages caused by the environment damage and climate change, oil wars, backward countries and people having huge political power due to being rich from oil, etc... It is only fair to shift at least some of the tax burden to the actual producers and consumers of the fossil fuels.

>What is the impact on people when their energy costs are raised?

what are you talking about? 100w solar panel costs less than $100, double that for installation and wires&converter. So $200 loan at 6% for 20 years is $1.5/month or $0.05/day. In CA the panel will produce 1kwh/day. I.e. $0.05/kwh. And no more kissing of Saudi princes' lower backs :)

[osmala]

For society you need reliability, you just don't stop freezers just because sun goes down, or there is period of storms or night. You would need atleast 14 times the hour capacity just to smooth the daily curve. [In winter there is less sunlight hours and maximum sun light is mid-day.] The cost is more than 0.1$ per watt hour of capacity, just for battery, and not for any power electronics going with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechargeable_battery

So this alone would increase your cost estimates by 150$

And for society you probably want a weeks worth of electricity stored in some form or other to deal with weather differences, and not summer winter difference. So minimal goal would be 24*7. Or just more than 150 hours.

Or that another 1500$ of cost not included in your estimations. Now a big thing to realize, in electricity markets where networks are required to take in solar and wind from other players, its not the producer of electricity that bears the cost of that large storage its the utility that buys the electricity from market.

Right now it works somewhere along the lines. Lets make 40% efficient fossil fuel plants instead of 60% efficient slowly starting fossil fuel plants, so that we can turn them on and off for covering the difference between intermitted sources and consumption. So in reality renewable plants end up just becoming fuel saving devices for fossil fuel plants while reducing fuel efficiency of said plants when they actually are turned on . In long run I believe nuclear is way to go if we want to stop global warming. The intermittency problem goes away with it and you can run a grid with 100% nuclear with very little storage because production isn't intermittent, and with modern plants you can vary electricity production between 50 and 100%

Global warming is accumulating effect, the emissions are just rate of change, and not the temperature difference, and we need to aim pretty close to zero emissions to stop it. [Yes nature takes some of it off from circulation but a lot less than people think because naysayers compare our emissions to winter, summer cycle of plants that cancels itself in yearly basis.]

[trhway]

it isn't a car, so the range of technological options is much wider, ie. there is no need for high capacity small batteries. One can hydrolyze the water during low loads and store the resulting hydrogen (hydrolysis equipment and stationary storage is relatively simple and cheap). A generator with gas turbine to burn the hydrogen would cost on the scale like $400/kw - a small addition to the $2K/kw capital cost for solar panels install. The week of reserve storage - 200kwh to be generated - with even low 40% efficiency of turbine generation - would require storing 250m3 of hydrogen to provide a week reserve per 1kw of basic capacity. Lets say that storage is generous $1/m3.

As result, under $3K/kw we'd have a week of reserve and the ability to short-term double power during peaks using the gas turbines. And using the same loan calculations it is $0.075/kwh.

[toomuchtodo]

If that part bothers you, ignore it. Solar and wind are already cheaper without any subsidies. It should bother you though, but I've learned to not bother wasting my time with people about why. It doesn't matter at this point, now that fossil fuels have lost the lead.

"Wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce in both Germany and the U.K., even without government subsidies, according to a new analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). It's the first time that threshold has been crossed by a G7 economy."

I didn't paste the rest in here, its long, but you should read it. Its even better in the US.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-06/solar-wind...

[sbuttgereit]

Hear, hear!

I once read a study from a major state university, commissioned by the state government, that argued that it was more economic to recycle plastic bottles than to landfill them.

BUT... when you dug into the details of the report (something the journalists and general public were unlikely to do), you found the calculations didn't correct for taxation (landfills) and subsidies (recyclers) as regulatory distortion. The report simply treated them as natural economic components; itemized, yes, but not removed from the conclusion.

When I saw that I have to admit I became rather more cynical about the intersection of politics and academics. It just wasn't right.

[Asbostos]

Hilariously, by ignoring such subsidies, they're effectively "discovering" something every street cleaner in some countries already knows - you get paid for collecting plastic bottles and you don't get paid for leaving them in the rubbish bin!

[harigov]

I don't think what the author mentioned and what you implied are one and the same. From author's perspective, when you look at the actual price of fuel including the carbon emissions that they are causing, which cause expenses in other ways like health/environment, clean energy technologies are actually getting cheaper than fossil fuel technologies.

[maxharris]

During the 20th century, deaths due to temperature extremes dropped by over 70% (mostly due to the advent of air-conditioning): http://www.econ.yale.edu/~js2755/Climate_Adaptation_BCDGS.pd...

I also found these statistics helpful: http://www.moralcaseforfossilfuels.com/data/

[sinxoveretothex]

I don't know why I couldn't reply to your comment 4 children down but oh well.

I don't understand how what you say is somehow a case for fossil fuel more so than a case for energy use. That is: why is the rise of a country's wealth metrics tied to fossil fuel? Wouldn't it be the same even if it were using say solar?

Also, I quickly browsed through your second link and I was very surprised about the figure 1.6 (which claims that there is less pollution as time goes by). I checked the source and although there isn't much context, it seems that what the EPA data is saying is that less pollutants are emitted year over year… that's a negative second order derivative of the amount of pollutant, not a negative first order derivative as the title seems to suggest (to me anyway).

It bothers me greatly that such a superficial analysis reveals bothersome details like this. I am inclined to believe that this source is not very good.

[trhway]

man, there is no argument about importance of industrial civilization and fossil fuels that brought us here. There is a reason why the term "weaning of fossil fuels" is used as the time of fossil fuels has passed, and now their usage only slows down the development of our civilization.

[simplexion]

I also found these statistics helpful: http://www.pd.infn.it/~dorigo/autism_organic_foods.jpg

[maxharris]

My argument is that fossil fuels and industrial civilization yields positive externalities, including longer lifespan and resilience against the impacts of a changing climate.

If you followed the link, you'd see that the raw data for many of the figures, including figure 1.9/5.1, comes from EM-DAT (http://www.emdat.be), as well as other sources including the World Bank's World Development Indicators (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator), and even Scripps! (http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/data/merged_ice_core/merged_ice_c...)

Your response to this is to make silly jokes. Nice.

[simplexion]

I agree. Fossil fuels have definitely had benefits in the past but now we have to ability to continue with those benefits, increase them and remove the negatives.

[maxharris]

By raising energy prices, which will soak the poor? Not everyone can afford to shop at Whole Foods, drive $100k electric cars, and live in LEED-certified houses (not cheap here in Seattle!)

[chjohasbrouck]

Pollution has a cost associated with it. Is regulation that makes the polluter liable for those costs a pro-human thing to do? Isn't that more equitable?

[crdoconnor]

>What is the impact on people when their energy costs are raised? (Hint: energy - vast amounts of it - goes into everything, from growing food to producing artificial heart valves.)

There ought to be minimal impact on overall energy costs since renewable energy is capable of filling in the demand at the same cost these days.

Renewable energy is also perfectly capable of ramping up supply to match demand (unlike oil or gas there isn't a hard resource limit to manufacturing capacity).

[deciplex]

Do you know what an externality is? Do you know that ignoring them distorts the market?

[yongjik]

> What is the impact on people when their energy costs are raised?

Less than the impact on people when the land they own doesn't stay land.

[maxharris]

I live in Ballard, a neighborhood of Seattle, which is right on the ocean. If and as sea levels rise, every single person here would be better off running away from their homes, abandoning everything they own and starting from scratch somewhere inland.

For each of us, even this would be better than abandoning industrial civilization, which is the thing that gives us hospitals, abundant food, clothing, shelter, clean/hot/cold water, and everything else needed for a good human life.

[yongjik]

Holy strawman. Taxing fossil fuel now equals abandoning industrial civilization?

But I agree on one point. When (not IF) the sea level rises, some people are bound to end up better off, by taking opportunities and exploiting all the other people who have to find new place to live.

Some people will do absolutely anything to make money, and don't care how their action will affect people living now or a generation from now. Human nature.

[maxharris]

Holy strawman. Taxing fossil fuel now equals abandoning industrial civilization?

As of 2007, Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, leading opponent of the Keystone XL pipeline, wants taxes that will prohibit 80% of fossil fuel use. Since then, he has called for outlawing 90-95% if fossil fuel use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_McKibben

If you don't believe this, there is a very famous article of his that Rolling Stone published in 2012.

There are few voices standing in his way, and if he accomplishes his stated goals, that is an abandonment of industrial civilization.

[ZeroGravitas]

I thought basically all nations had signed on to completely decarbonize by the end of this century?

That will effectively mean leaving a lot of fossil fuels in the ground.

You'll have to pencil in the details for how this equals "abandoning industrial civilisation". Is this because of that EROI numerology thing?