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by tuatoru 1344 days ago
I don't know about "enough". There are a lot of things we need to do: fertilizer, iron smelting, off-road machinery fuel production, plastics, lubricants, shipping and airplane fuel, ...

I do know that when energy is produced domestically, then your energy can't be held hostage by OPEC or the Russian Federation.

That is the promise of renewables: freedom from geopolitics.

1 comments

The big question with renewables is how much would they cost if their whole production chain were using only renewables: cheap mining, cheap trucking, cheap maintenance, cheap money, all courtesy of cheap hydrocarbons to burn...
Those factors matter, but from that perspective you can treat renewables as "stored cheap hydrocarbons" - because for actual hydrocarbons you're vulnerable to short-term fluctuations (e.g. you may have gas now, and some gas stored, but in the case of a supply shock you need a fix within a year) but if you've got some renewables which were made with cheap hydrocarbons now, then you can be sure that you'll have that energy for many years in the future even if hydrocarbons get expensive or unavailable due to supply disruptions.