[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.