[cal5k]

> Reaching net-zero-carbon emissions by 2050, as many international organizations now insist is necessary to stave off dire climate consequences, will require a rapid and massive shift in electricity-generating infrastructures.

Vaclav Smil's excellent analysis on this is worth reading: https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-wm-aem/glob...

The tl;dr is that net zero by 2050 would require all major economies to spend 15-20% of GDP for the next 26 years uninterrupted. For reference, the entire US federal budget was around 23.7% of GDP in 2023.

It simply is not going to happen, and pretending it will greatly undermines the pragmatic conversations we should be having about adaptation.

I think there's a strong optimistic case that the private sector can get us there by 2100 or so - lots of fundamental advancements can happen in that timeframe - but hamfisted government policy in the EU and America that blunts economic growth will mean there's less money to spend on solving these problems in the future.

[thelastgallon]

> Vaclav Smil's excellent analysis on this is worth reading: https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-wm-aem/glob...

While a good read, I'm not sure how anyone can take this seriously. He says " Efficiency gains from the electrification of industrial processes would vary widely, and not all of them could be electrified. And there will be negligible gains for space heating , with 100% efficiency for electric resistance heating compared to as much as 93-99% for modern gas furnaces (Lennox 2023)."

Heat pumps have a COP of 1.5 - 4, which are eventually going to replace all heating/cooling. He does not consider efficiency from heat pumps at all.

Two thirds of fossil fuel energy is wasted: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...

Electrification is efficient and the transition won't need as much: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-en...

[olau]

Here are some things Smil gets wrong:

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/11/13/what-does-bill-gates-fa...

IEA has historically been bad at forecasting renewables.

The GDP numbers you mention are very far from the studies I've seen over the years.

I've been following debates about renewables for probably 15 years. Most common objections are: It's too expensive, it's impossible, it's not worth doing anything about, we should wait until later to do anything about it.

The truth is that the transition is happening, we have most of the things in place we need, and the rest we'll develop as we go along - they are mostly not developed much because their big market opportunity hasn't happened yet.

[specialist]

> The truth is that the transition is happening

Emphatic agreement. Now it's a choice between faster (more Bidenomics) or slower (rear-guard obstruction by the loyal opposition).

> the rest we'll develop as we go along

Yes and:

Per Saul Griffith and others, we have the tools today to achieve net zero. The primary hurdles are legal, capacity, and financing. Not technology.

For example, there's a huge backlog of renewable energy just waiting to join the power grid. But the utilities remain loyal to natural gas, refuse to upgrade or expand.

IIRC, the 4 major categories of (human) CO2 pollution are transportation, manufacturing, buildings, and agriculture.

We now have the tech to achieve net zero for all but agricultural.

Successor legislation (BBB/IRA 2, 3, 4, etc) must address agricultural. And the stubbornly carbon-based industry segments, like "fast fashion", which alone accounts for > 2% of CO2 pollution (and growing).

[cal5k]

> The primary hurdles are legal, capacity, and financing.

Incredibly hand-wavy. Finance is a way to allocate scarce resources - you can't claim the "technology" is solved if you haven't figured out a way to do it cost-effectively at scale.

No such cost-effective technology yet exists for nitrogen fixation and steelmaking at scale, regardless of what small pilot projects might have been attempted thus far.

"We solved the equations, now it's up to the eggheads to figure out how to finance it" is something only an incredibly naive engineer could possibly think.

[specialist]

What measure of proof do you require?

[cal5k]

From that article:

> Primary energy demand is going to shrink, not grow.

What? Absolutely nobody is predicting a shrinking primary energy demand. You can hand-wave and say "yeah but electrification", but nobody is predicting a decline in global demand before 2050, if at all this century. I'd argue that demand will more than make up for the efficiency gains as we've seen in the past - look at the growth in deployment of electricity-hungry GPUs as one example of robust demand growth.

It also doesn't matter if US demand shrinks if China and India more than make up the difference. The planet doesn't care what country CO2 emissions come from.

> The truth is that the transition is happening

Who said otherwise? Nobody is arguing that renewables aren't growing.

Vaclav Smil's argument is that historical evidence strongly suggests that primary energy transitions take a lot longer than people want to think, and even as the renewable share of energy is growing the absolute demand for fossil fuels is still increasing. Again, the planet doesn't care about relative share.

People who believe the future will somehow be different from the past (like you) need to provide extraordinary evidence for why they believe this will be the case, and there is none. Installing solar panels, or wind turbines, or upgrading distribution lines, or selling electric vehicles all do not follow any kind of Moores law-like curve, so what factors would drive future results to be different?

Maybe robots will install solar panels faster than humans? Like what's the thesis here?

You can live in a fantasy world and cling to wishful thinking, but it will be a great recipe for mass disillusionment when activists are selling a vision of the future that is at odds with reality.

[titzer]

> I think there's a strong optimistic case that the private sector can get us there by 2100 or so

So, never. The private sector has been dragged kicking and screaming to where we are now; Oil CEOs today are still resisting calls to decarbonize (https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ceraweek-big-oil-exe...) like it's the 1990s. Trillions in corporate sharedholder value are diametrically opposed to transitioning. They have vested interests, and a massive sunk cost with the current fossil fuel economy. We are so utterly screwed.

> that blunts economic growth

While economies have somewhat decoupled carbon from economic growth, putting economic growth as a master priority above all others is exactly what got us here and looking increasingly like a bad move.

[bluGill]

There is more than oilin the private sector. No surprise oil is resisting, but others are not.

[stetrain]

What would motivate the private sector to solve the problem?

What economic incentive does a specific company have to make decisions that may negatively impact its short term earnings to address a global issue that will manifest slowly over the course of a century?

What if the "economically sustainable" path to net zero by 2100 results in existential issues for large parts of the human population, food supply, etc? There is an economic cost to allowing the climate to continue on its current path and actually net zero doesn't necessarily reverse that change, it just prevents its continued acceleration. If the "economically sustainable" path results in the destruction of the economy, then it's no longer sustainable.

[prewett]

> What would motivate the private sector to solve the problem?

Money.

Cost of grid-solar is somewhere between 50% - 70% of coal and the trend is decreasing renewable cost. [1] If you are a utility, what is the next plant you are going to install? If you can get solar for a fraction of the cost of a coal plant, it's a pretty easy decision. Plus, you can probably keep the rates the same and pass on that savings to your shareholders.

Every time I visit family in Oklahoma I see more and more wind farms. Texas is has one of the highest level of renewable energy. These are states that have a knee-jerk opposition to "the liberal agenda", and yet Texas the largest producer of renewable energy (solar + wind handily beats California), and the most "anti-liberal" red states are generating the most renewable energy: Oklahoma (42%), Kansas (47%), Iowa (60%), S. Dakota (57%).

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...

[2] https://www.fool.com/research/renewable-energy-by-state/ (switch to the second tab for percentages)

[titzer]

> Money.

Sure, but please also recognize that the only reason we've gotten to renewables being cheaper is through massive subsidies. Solar has gotten there from economies of scale and technological innovation, which has been driven by government R&D, grants, and also massive subsidies.

But also keep in mind that money as the sole motivator for the market is a sword that cuts both ways. If two competitors A and B are in the same market or are producing the same product, and company A uses any one of a number of environmental cheats, like fossil-fuels, then company A is going to out-compete B, make more profit, and eventually crowd out B.

The private sector will go for maximum profit and socialize the losses wherever it can. The role of the rest of society is to hold the line and not ruin the planet so that company A can make 5 extra cents a share.

[stetrain]

But would renewables be cheaper today without the "hamfisted government policy" referenced above?

Government policy that creates or increases the economic incentive to move in the "desired" direction is an effective tool.

[prewett]

I'm not saying anything one way or the other what we "should" do, just answering the question "what would make private parties adopt renewable energy". My answer ("money"), in fact, agrees with you: whether it is artificially cheaper or naturally cheaper doesn't matter.

However, I think renewables would be cheaper even without government subsidies. Texas had large wind farms over even 15 years ago. I don't have any information about subsidies on solar panels, but given that the cost trend is halving the price every <n years>, that's pretty powerful. I think you could remove the subsidy and solar panels would still be competitive, and even if not now, than in one more halving period.

[stetrain]

It’s also hard to detangle the effects of local subsidies vs those in say China which are also driving down costs of solar.

Really in context my question was “What would motivate the private sector in the absence of government intervention”. The comment I was replying to was clearly setting up a contrast between letting the “private sector” solve it instead of “hamfisted government policy.”

Really those two aren’t separate. The government even when it “overreaches” in the eyes of some rarely tackles large projects on its own. Most of what it does is regulate, tax, and inventive the private sector to attempt to achieve some desired outcome.

[silverquiet]

I'm beginning to believe that the continued existence of humanity (let alone human civilization) requires net zero by way sooner than 2050. Kurt Vonnegut may be proved right after all that we'll go extinct because of economics.

[hackerlight]

I'll save you all a click. Vaclav Smil doesn't do any analysis around costings. He pulls the figure from a Mckinsey report[1] (now 2 years old) and multiplies it by 2. To have a meaningful discussion about this, you would have to read the Mckinsey report and understand the input assumptions. In particular, what are the assumptions around cost curves?

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functio...

[Denvercoder9]

> hamfisted government policy in the EU and America that blunts economic growth will mean there's less money to spend on solving these problems in the future.

Disasters brought on by climate change that blunt economic growth will also mean there's less money to spend on solving these problems in the future.

[idiotsecant]

Yes, private industry is famously very good at solving existential threats to the species when solving those problems also results in a loss in the quarterly earnings.

[stetrain]

Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

[zackmorris]

Nonsense. And also I find it rather amusing that technologists so passionately predict exponential innovation in all areas of science except for sustainability. If you want to find the truth, it's best to discount propaganda from banks like JPMorgan Chase. Blaming the government for slowing economic growth instead of corporations, in this age of unrestrained late stage crony capitalism and neoliberalism, is not a great look either.

What I see coming is that the powers that be will crash the global economy and ignite more proxy wars in the next 6 months before the US presidential election to throw it and cement minority rule for as many more years as possible. That looks like sewing suspicion around such basic American values as democracy. Because we're all struggling so hard just to survive that we turn on each other instead of the owner class which funds most tech companies and even HN itself.

I can't really blame them, as they have the power. This is all just a big game to them, as they dip into our money supply to ratchet up their fortunes at perhaps 1% per day whenever they need money, through stock market algorithmic trading which we don't have access to.

So it makes little sense to talk about societal investment when over 50% of Americans no longer have any disposable income to speak of. Regulatory capture has sunk what was once our retirement and social safety net into a $30+ trillion national debt paid as treasury yield to the same wealthy financiers who are buying up over 40% of US homes through private equity groups to convert us to a renter society.

It would cost next to nothing to convert to a solar grid-tie infrastructure amortized over a decade, with positive dividends paid back to all of us after that. But they won't even give us nothing to spend, they just keep us perpetually in debt so we can't improve our situation at even the most basic level.

https://www.tiktok.com/@r4ultra/video/7350811129926536478

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/how-wall-street-bought-singl...