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by makomk
1855 days ago
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I don't think this is even a remotely plausible scenario. You've got to remember that money is just a convenient way of representing a certain amount of actual, real-world resources, and the big problem with "drop everything and rapidly switched to synthetic fuels and chemicals from solar" is that the real-world resources aren't there. Just the input energy that would be required to build everything would be immense, and I don't think we've got the production capacity for solar cells or the raw materials to do it either. Also, as I understand it the profit margins for fossil fuel production isn't particularly high. The companies have impressive-sounding overall profits, but that's mostly because they sell a lot of fuel thanks to it being used all over society for all kinds of things. In some sense, the benefits of cheap, readily-available fossil fuels are externalized to the rest of society, with competition heavily limiting how much of that benefit goes to the companies making them. |
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The CO2 emissions will be gone by 2050 even if it has to happen on the corpses of Shell, BP or Exxon.
The world needs to shift the production power away from oil into renewables.
> Just the input energy that would be required to build everything would be immense, and I don't think we've got the production capacity for solar cells or the raw materials to do it either.
We can do bigger things than that. We need to create that capacity - grow it exponentially.
I think you are seriously underestimating the capacity of human civilization once we decide to do something collectively.
Vaccines normally were taking 20-30 years to reach market. Due to COVID we started vaccinating the world in less than a year.
If there is a will there is a way.
From MIT report "The Future of Solar Energy"
https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/MITEI-The-...
> There appear to be no major commodity material constraints for terawatt-scale PV deployment through 2050."
> PV modules will become a major driver of flat-glass production at high solar penetration levels, but the availability of commodity materials imposes no fundamental limitations on the scaling of PV deployment for scenarios in which a majority of the world’s electricity is generated by PV installations in 2050.
> Required growth rates for silicon and silver production fall well within the range of historical growth rates, even for 100% silicon PV penetration.