| The very simple thermodynamics of green technology are this: You set a PV panel out in the sun, you get free electricity as long as the sun shines. For ever. You set up an otto cycle engine to burn something and generate power: you get nice power. As long as you keep digging up and procuring fuel, and dealing with (or forcing someone else to deal with) the waste products. Good luck with that. This has been the physics of renewables since I first learned about them, since I was a child, about 45-ish years ago. The politics of it have also been: "we can't switch to renewables now, we've got too much invested in burnables now - so lets transition gradually." And, in fact - we haven't transitioned gradually. It's not that it's not ready. It's that the people who don't want change - aren't ready. And frankly - I'm tired of them already. And their enablers and apologists. |
The (real) arguments about transitioning gradually have very little to do with past investments in fossil fuel production and much more to do with whether we yet have the ability to manufacture and deploy better alternatives efficiently at scale.
Once upon a time, those PV panels you mentioned cost more in resources to develop, manufacture and install than they were likely to save over their working lifetime. Of course, the technology has come on a long way since then, but if we'd all gone out and stuck panels all over our roofs in those early days, it would have been counterproductive.
Today we face some similar questions with the lithium batteries currently used in popular EVs. It's all very well looking at Tesla aiming to manufacture a few hundred thousand vehicles per year, but total global car supplies (and remember, cars aren't the only vehicles on the road) are approaching one hundred million per year. Even assuming we could magic up 100 Gigafactories to produce that many batteries -- and keep in mind that Tesla's first Gigafactory is on a five-year build programme that hasn't finished yet -- we'd need about a million tonnes of lithium per year to sustain production using the technology and processes we have today. That's an order of magnitude more than the current annual global supply, and at that burn rate we'd deplete the entire known global reserves in 1-2 decades. There are analogous concerns over the availability of other essential elements for the production of current technology EV batteries, such as cobalt.
So if you think we are ready and anyone who says otherwise is some sort of apologist, I invite you to explain how we're going to scale up battery production, gather enough raw materials to go into those batteries, and presumably develop a suitable recycling programme, so everyone can be switching to EVs within the kinds of timescales that environmental lobby groups are currently calling for. Otherwise, you're really just arguing for changing our infrastructure to use a different set of natural resources that still has a finite supply that we'd be in danger of exhausting.