[linkjuice4all]

It's depressing to see companies moving back towards a carbon-burning future. It seemed like electric vehicles, battery technology, and solar power advancement was finally starting to kill the market for ICE engines and 'dirty' thermal power.

Between reversions like this, RTO mandates, and global conflicts that seem to include blowing up oil refineries it seems like there's absolutely no hope or interest from any major governments, businesses, or organizations to do anything to address global warming and climate change or even maintain our carbon outputs.

[bryanlarsen]

It's the standard cycle of progress. "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win". (misattributed to Gandhi).

Moving from one stage to the next is not guaranteed, but EV's, battery & solar and definitely well past the first two stages. I'd argue that solar might even be in column 4 -- China installed 100 GW of it in the first six months of 2024, and the rest of the world a similar amount.

[layoric]

I'd say you are right that solar is at your stage 4.. for countries with particular geographical features. If you have a large land mass to distribute solar utility sites over, the power curve becomes predictable since weather that impacts solar production is also geographically distributed (its highly unlikely to be cloudy everywhere in a large country). With this predictability comes the ability to use the least amount of storage (cheaper) for continual, reliable power. And China being responsible for the continual price drops of production of panels, and storage, it makes sense they will be the first to achieve this, despite other countries (Australia for example) having a more favorable irradiance, and larger land mass.

Countries without a large land mass can't do this, a good example being Singapore. And even then, solar is being a potential large reliable power source by getting Australia to literally cable power thousands of kilometers.[0]

Solar has won IMO, it will just take a while for it to reach stage 4 everywhere.

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/21/australia-greenligh...

[passwordoops]

They also added 1 billion tons of coal. Not all of for energy of course, but still

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...

[kieranmaine]

A counterpoint to your last sentence:

From "Indonesia’s coal producers diversify as money for mining dries up" - https://www.ft.com/content/9546f590-2fb0-4939-a090-8bac7ba6a...

"In recent years, foreign banks have largely stopped financing coal operations, with Indonesian companies primarily securing financing from domestic institutions"

[Spooky23]

Nothing changed. We’re literally in an auto market flooded with EVs. Solar is a ROI positive investment that is gobbling up farmland in a problematic way.

If you’re a geek, you probably got hyped up by Elon when he was saving the world with electric cars. Now that he’s regressed to his effort to offer himself for impregnation services to repopulate and installing fascist dictatorships, the electric car stuff has gone by the wayside.

Cults of personality usually end up toxic.

[delecti]

Based on some back of the envelope math, if the US met 100% of its electricity needs with solar, it'd take about 1.6% as much area as the US currently has farmland (22k sqmi vs 1.4mm sqmi). Considering some solar is on non-arable land, and how much excess corn the US grows (enough that some is turned back into fuel), and that 1.6% ballpark, the idea that it's problematic that we're turning some farmland into solar doesn't pass the sniff test. Do you have any more info about that being a problem?

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Stat...

[Spooky23]

It’s a problem that you don’t see when you look at aggregate numbers and don’t look at the future.

You tend to need commercial solar installations nearish to people - projects in say Nebraska have a lower ROI than say New York or Massachusetts. There’s much more limited amounts of land and farmable land in particular.

With climate change, aquifer depletion and other factors, farmland imo is a strategic resource that should be protected. The corn bounty is not likely to continue forever.

[passwordoops]

1-it's not companies, it's nation-states such as China and all across the "developing" world making the economic decision to use the cheapest, most easily accessible and reliable energy source (still fossil). And anyone providing examples of "yes, but..." should include an verifiable explanation as to why GHG emissions are not only increasing but accelerating

2- Carbon is much more than energy. Take a look at medicine, for example. Remove plastics, the field as we know it stops. Stop the flow of primary feedstock from refineries and no more medicines. Coal is another excellent example. You can replace as many coal plants as you want with renewables, you still need it to make the high-grade steel required to manufacture the renewables. Which is one reason why China is digging up more coal per year than any country ever had since the Industrial Revolution.

[Dylan16807]

2 - The vast majority is being burned. If they want to increase production, it's not because of the other uses.

[bamboozled]

It's not just depressing, it's ruinous. We will be ruined as a species from this.

I'm still pressing a head with my personal contribution by cladding our new house in panels!

[nomel]

This is an unpopular question, where people assume things about me, but by what mechanism would the human species be ruined? It seems that would require that all innovation towards climate mitigations stops, when it hasn't really even started yet. Reversing climate change probably isn't going to happen, but mitigation is still on the table, from routing fresh water from wetter northern climates to desalinization plants [1] to sun shading [2].

[1] Desalinization, where 300 million are currently services: https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...

[2] Block 2% to reduce warming by 1.5C. https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-six-ideas-to-limit-glo...

[foobarian]

Perhaps once all the easy obtainable fossil resources are gone, and climate change settles down on a new equilibrium, humanity will also settle on a long-term sustainable way of living. Perhaps that will even be a civilized way, but it may also well end up a hunter-gatherer existence akin to what Europeans found in North America a few centuries ago.

[nomel]

> but it may also well end up a hunter-gatherer existence akin to what Europeans found in North America a few centuries ago.

How could finding naturally growing plants eventually be more successful than technological innovations around agriculture, in a drier climate (our future)? This doesn't seem logical/rational, since every desert civilization moved away from a hunter-gather existence. Irrigation has existed for millennia, invented by people that lived in dry places [1], because it wasn't optional.

[1] https://eprints.nwisrl.ars.usda.gov/id/eprint/815/1/1070.pdf

[jimbob45]

Does it not seem like electric vehicles will eventually swallow the world? It feels like it's 1900 and you're fighting tooth-and-nail to combat horse maltreatment while the rest of the world is surging toward a car-laden future. Would it not make more sense to simply focus efforts on EV adoption?

[stonogo]

I think EVs are the 80% solution. They're great in cities and in suburbs. If you regularly make longer trips, they're a massive pain in the ass, primarily due to the poor-quality charging infrastructure. There are vast swaths of America where someone is already trucking gasoline and diesel to fuel stations but there's no reliable expectation of charging infrastructure of any kind, much less high-quality charging. It's really frustrating to run into, for instance, trying to drive from Bozeman to Seattle. It's currently fashionable to ignore this problem, but it's one we're going to have to solve.

[nomel]

> 80% of the solution

In the US, only 39% of emissions are from fossil fuels used for transportation [1]. Where I am, around 60% of my EV power comes from natural gas plants that run at night, where electricity is 3.5x cheaper (electricity costs more than gas during peak hours where I am).

With the lack of new nuclear, and the required 25-50% increase in our power grid, a quick (as in 20 year) change in EV adoption would almost certainly mean that more of these natural plants come online when charging happens, negating at least some of the CO2 savings.

80% seems fictitious.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=307&t=10#:~:text=C....

[stonogo]

I apologize for being insufficiently specific. I wasn't talking about a solution to climate change in general, but a 'solution' to getting rid of internal-combustion personal transport. What I was trying to say that current EVs are suitable replacements for personally-owned internal combustion vehicles for about 80% of use cases.

[tcfhgj]

EVs aren't great in cities. Cycling and public transportation is

[numpad0]

Does, but also does seem to me that a lot of parties were in for potential to disrupt top of the food chain of car industry, and now that it became clear that it does the opposite of that, they're not interested in it anymore.

[bamboozled]

I'm not trying to blame this on "Elon" but that guy basically kicked off the revolution and is kind of destroying it. His cult following, toxic views and enthusiasm for conspiracies are starting to make EV ownership something for "weirdos" at a time when owning an EV was already contentious. At least in the US.

There was a time when I dreamed of owning a Tesla, there is absolutely no way I'd drive one now.

I think China is going to steam ahead towards Solar, Nuclear and EVs, so maybe there is hope there!

[nomel]

No, this should/can be based on data. Data says [1]:

1. Range

2. Cost (correlated with range)

3. Lack of charging infrastructure

Where I am, unless you own a home, charging an EV is more expensive than gas.

[1] https://www.supplychainconnect.com/news-trends/article/55137...

[bamboozled]

From experience, a lot of car purchases are ultimately based on emotion.

[Supermancho]

> Does it not seem like electric vehicles will eventually swallow the world?

I don't believe so. As I understand it, there are not enough rare metals available, with the known battery technologies. I don't think will ever be the production capacity to construct and maintain (replace) electric-based equivalents to the solutions fossil fuels fit. Fossil fuels came to dominance because of a number of maximal equations. eg The energy demand to move goods, on the scale of trains, is impractical. Operating electronics in extreme temperatures, is impractical.

[kieranmaine]

From "Most electric-car batteries could soon be made by recycling old ones" - https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/09/19/...

Apologies for the paywalled article. The following quote sums up the article:

"Globally, the mining of raw ingredients for battery manufacturing could peak by the mid 2030s, reckons RMI, an American think-tank. This will be caused by a combination of better recycling and continuing advances in battery chemistry, which boosts the energy density of cells so that batteries can be made with fewer raw materials. This, RMI believes, might see mineral extraction for batteries being avoided altogether by 2050."

[Supermancho]

> This will be caused by a combination of better recycling and continuing advances in battery chemistry, which boosts the energy density of cells so that batteries can be made with fewer raw materials

This is a hope, at best. For better or worse, I wouldn't bet on it. I don't think electric vehicles will "eat the world" in the foreseeable (or farther) future.

[Caius-Cosades]

Expecting in magical science to magically break laws of physics wasn't the winning strategy. The energy exchange rate was never there despite all the virtue signalling.