[tappio]

We are so dependent on fossil fuels that I'm slightly more sceptical. Over 90% of global energy is created with fossil fuels. We often get fooled about the electricity sector which is something like 1/3 renewables. But electricity is only 30% of fossil fuel consumption. Even if the share of electricity increases to 40% because of ev's and we produce 80% with renewables, we still have ~70% that requires fossil fuel production. That 70% is not that easy to replace -- we are talking about manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, mining, etc. Getting rid of coal only increases oil and gas demand.

I'm not sure what is the percentage of consumer sales for any if those companies mentioned, but I suspect that even if it was 0 it would not drastically affect anything but profits. Oil will be less profitable -- yes, but it will be widely used as long as energy required to mine it is less than what is produced. It is unfortunate, but these companies are on a very good long term business (hard to say really because I don't know what are the global untapped oil reserves).

Manufacturing components to produce renewables require a lot of fossil fuels as well. We are not yet at the point where we can create new renewables without using fossil fuels.

I'm not saying the floor will not fall, but I'm afraid that if the floor falls we are in quite big trouble, and it is not because if the EV market.

[ZeroGravitas]

That 90% is much easier to replace than you think because its mostly wasted as heat and inefficiency.

Once you factor in the fossil fuels used to extract fossil fuels it all topples pretty quickly.

The main source of trouble will be people ignoring the issue until it becomes urgent and not planning a smooth transition, global procrastination rather than the actual task itself.

[tappio]

I like your optimism. I just don't see how we can produce and transport food, electronics, and specifically windturbines, solar panels and batteries on a global scale without using massive amounts of fossil fuels.

Actually, I would love to see a the real "energy footprint" of a solar panel. Like, how much mining, transporting, manufacturing and installing the panels consumed energy, and how many days it takes for a panel to produce more energy than the entire operation used. If anyone has such a breakdown I would be really happy to see it. If the numbers are good, maybe the future is still bright.

[ZeroGravitas]

You can find these online, they've been doing them for years. Though maybe note that "energy" isn't really the problem, it's the greenhouse gasses that have sparked this changeover. "Carbon payback time" is a common phrase. It's now getting into the "this is both cheaper and better regardless of carbon" phase, but it wouldn't have been pushed this hard if the numbers didn't stack up in theory.

[fragmede]

Zooming out to a global level, geopolitics becomes important to consider as well. As soon as renewables are able to change the power dynamics between eg Russia and Ukraine (Ukraine is dependant on Russia for oil for heating in the winter) things get very interesting indeed. We are still decades away from that imo.

[throwaway210222]

Surely Ukraine just needs to allow EDF to build few nuclear power stations on long term agreements to end their dependence on Russian heating oil?

[vineyardmike]

Its surely just that easy... for a small and relatively powerless nation to product nuclear power under the watchful eye of a very powerful nation that doesn't want it.

[throwaway210222]

Ukraine already has 15 reactors generating about half of its electricity. (Including one famous one).

Ukraine receives most of its nuclear services and nuclear fuel from Russia, but is reducing this dependence by buying fuel from Westinghouse in the USA.

Just do more of this. I doubt Russia will attack a US concession that's building a nuclear plant.

[AtlasBarfed]

Oh yes! We won't care about the middle east, so none of that bizarre cowtowing to the Saudi king that the US Presidents always do (I think largely to get on the post-term massive slush money that flows from the Saudis to former presidents, which I have no direct knowledge up, but seems obvious)

The Navy will lose a huge reason for its existence: securing the seas for supertankers. There are so many countries we won't care about anymore. Iran. Iraq. Venezuela. Nigeria. Really, by extension, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, etc. Then again they'll just keep building up the China boogeyman to keep their money, regardless of its validity.

As you pointed out, Russia will face an existential crisis, I think oil revenue basically keeps Putin afloat. A total collapse of Russia is pretty risky due to the nukes, but we'll see.

[nebula8804]

I think you are too optimistic about Israel. These other countries can be dropped easily but Israel is a huge liability that I don't know how the US will get rid of. I do feel confident that the winds are starting to fly against them slowly but I don't have my hopes up. It will likely be a generational shift that finally does them in but IDK. What do you think?

[mjh2539]

If the US drops Israel someone else will pick them up (like Russia or China or India). The country is developed, produces tons of IP, and is armed to the teeth (and has nuclear weapons).

But this is lala-land thinking. As long as the United States remains on the UN Security Council (which is equivalent to saying as long as the UN continues to exist in any practical form), both Taiwan and Israel will remain our client states.

[dragonwriter]

Israel is not a US client. The directive influence is the opposite of the direction that it would be were that the case, and the reason for that is exactly the thinking you articulate: “If the US drops Israel someone else will pick them up”.

[nebula8804]

If the US drops Israel, it paves the way for economic sanctions against the country for their dealings of Palestinians. This is why they got really triggered over BDS. They cannot be swayed militarily or via protest but economic is a whole different ballgame.

A lot of European/Asian countries would like to distance themselves from Israel but cannot due to US influence. Furthermore losing the US support loosens their investments into the country and siding with China or Russia would cut a lot of economic ties to the US for sure.

>But this is lala-land thinking. As long as the United States remains on the UN Security Council (which is equivalent to saying as long as the UN continues to exist in any practical form), both Taiwan and Israel will remain our client states.

Thats my point, if US leadership decides that Israel is no longer worth the liability, then that entails allowing the UN and its member states to start putting real pressure on Israel. Again, you might think this is lala-land but we are seeing small changes starting to happen as the internet has helped to expose Israel and act as a counterbalance to mainstream talking points.

With Millennials and Gen-Z starting to come into power we are seeing even more pushback. I don't realistically see meaningful reform until Boomers are pushed out. While all this is happening in the West, Israel has made a turn towards hard right wing and I feel this will be a strategic error long term as the pendulum is swinging back to hard left in the western countries.

[philistine]

The incredible thing is a calcified Russian system with access to way too many nukes collapsed within our lifetimes and the West adequately prevented nuclear disaster. We ended up with the current farce of a government as a byproduct, unfortunately.

[riversflow]

Yeah I'm not a domain expert on decarbonization or anything, but from what I've seen on the industrial manufacturing side of things in the US, electricity prices would have to be consistently very low for the cost of re-outfitting existing natural gas heating systems with electrical ones to make sense without fairly punitive carbon taxes, and even if you pass carbon taxes in first world countries to make it "worth it" to retrofit with electric heating, most of the domestic manufacturing will just go belly up without tariffs--good luck getting developing economies to enforce the environmental standards most of us would like to see on their own, and good luck getting the ruling body politik to think tariffs are a good idea. I ran the number on our facility and moving from natural gas boiler heating to electric would have been iirc something like 8-12x more expensive, even before buying the very expensive heaters, and I'm fairly certain that for higher temp operation(our steam system was low pressure) it would be even more expensive.

There are a couple other stand out problems I see with getting the industrial/manufacturing sector off fossil fuels. First, I don't think that we have the grid infrastructure to replace natural gas with electrification at the same time we do cars[1][2]. From what I understand its something of a problem already for electric car charging, and industrial use of gas for heat (and saying nothing of trying to replace the petrochemical industry, interesting read on all-electric ammonia production [4]) is pretty staggering as well; electric transmission is some substantial multiple less efficient then direct heating with Gas. I think this is kind of the opposite of electric cars which tend to be more efficient than ICE, but again I'm not an expert and am not at all sure that is true of cars, just my impression which seems reasonable intuitively, as turning fuel directly into heat has essentially 100% efficiency while turning fuel into motion can only be some fraction.

Second, super cheap electricity is extremely fungible, so it becomes a prime candidate for Jevon's Paradox[3]. I feel that there would have to be some "unfair" power rates for heating for electricity to supplant natural gas unless we implemented massive carbon taxes, in which case return to my first point about off-shoring.

I can see how it would theoretically make sense to put industry right next to large power generation sources, like dams, solar array/ battery installations, or nuclear power plants(lol), but a lot of these operations aren't exactly trivial to move, and our current climate of Environmental regulation makes moving these sorts of things that much more difficult. Also manufacturing requires a not insignificant amount of logistics/shipping so transplanting them to power generation sites has its own set of drawbacks.

All in all, I try to be a techno-optimist, but seriously worry that humanity's ad-hoc system of organization (that's rife with corruption) will be our downfall in this global climate crisis we've created. So far I can't see a way out of this without a breakthrough in power generation and a breakthrough in carbon capture or some other unforseen-by-me break through. Really I just don't see our current tech stack as being capable of getting us out of this mess. So here's hoping that high-temp super conductors bare fusion fruit, and this gallium catalyzed CO2 splitting is the real deal.

[1]https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/climate/gm-electric-cars-... (has additional good links as well)

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox (fun fact, I've used duckduckgo for many years now, and this required the rare !g to find without knowing what the paradox was called off the top of my head. my query was: "the cheaper something gets the more it is used", top hit on big G, nowhere to be seen in the DDG results)

[4]https://www.cleantech.com/green-ammonia-potential-as-an-ener...

[kieranmaine]

Air source heat pumps are more efficient than gas boilers so total energy usage would decrease [1]. Running costs are also lower, but installations cost are currently higher.

You would need to generate more electricity, although this could be mitigated through improved insulation and smart control of heating systems (for example turning off the heating for 30 minutes during spikes in usage, assuming the temperature is above a certain level).

[1] https://www.edfenergy.com/heating/advice/air-source-heat-pum...

[riversflow]

I'm not particularly thinking of domestic heat production, I agree that heat pumps (ground source, or a pool if you have it, works even better!) are the future of domestic HVAC. I'm thinking about heating for industrial processes, turning off the factory for 30+ minutes during a useage spike is a minor catastrophe if unplanned, you'd either have to design your shift around it (we had time-of-use power pricing and did this) or just close down. I won't rule out heat pumps as being part of the solution out of hand, but from your source:

>Lower output temperature than conventional boilers – you may need to update your insulation and invest in bigger radiators too

is a pretty big problem when you are trying to heat industrial quantities of things up to industrial process temps at industrial rates.