[slashdev]

I think Europe should resume drilling in the North Sea and Groningen if they have exploitable reserves there. Europe depends on energy imports and that won't change in our lifetimes (I'm in my early forties, so at least in my lifetime.) They should take advantage of whatever resources they have.

I'm guessing you think otherwise? Why? Do you think the energy transition will be faster? What makes you think that?

[Scarblac]

Because the continued survival of civilization depends on leaving fossil fuel in the ground. If the transition isn't fast enough then we will have horrible, lethal shortages, but that's still better than the worst climate scenarios.

[NoLinkToMe]

Closing Groningen didn't leave fossil in the ground. It took LNG from US and gas from Norway out of the ground instead.

The decision to stop using fossil fuels is not tied to the decision to stop one of the sources of fossil fuels. They're divorced.

Stopping fossil fuels requires investments in alternatives, and price mechanisms that disfavour fossils. Absent those mechanisms, closing one source of fossil just shifts demand to another source of fossil, which is exactly what happened.

Meanwhile closing the gas source cost the NL a few hundred billion euros, the amount of money it needs to transition to renewables. Instead it is spending that on US LNG and Norwegian gas.

The field shouldn't have been closed in 2023, it should've remained open until e.g. 2030 and all proceeds earmarked for massive energy transition subsidies. Instead we're just importing expensive fossil now and have insufficient money to meet our green ambitions.

[Scarblac]

> Closing Groningen didn't leave fossil in the ground. It took LNG from US and gas from Norway out of the ground instead.

That was getting out of the ground and burned by someone anyway.

[slashdev]

That may or may not be true. But it won't stay in the ground as long as there is money to be made by extracting and consuming it.

Right now all that's happening is the US is extracting that natural gas, and the middle east extracting that oil, and Europe is importing it. Which pollutes more and costs more. Just develop your domestic supplies.

I don't follow your logic.

[Scarblac]

The only direct thing we (the Netherlands) can do to prevent carastrophic climate change is to leave fossil fuels on our territory in the ground. Everything else is indirect.

[Sabinus]

No, the only direct thing the Netherlands can do is decarbonise the economy.

Shifting sources of carbon to outside the country is just passing the buck.

[Scarblac]

Decarbonising is indirect. Once it gets out of the ground, it will be turned into CO2 by someone, somewhere.

[kyboren]

I know this is an unfathomable concept, but to actually "leave fossil fuels [...] in the ground" you have to stop using fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels someone else refused to leave in the ground means--surprisingly--that fossil fuels weren't left in the ground after all.

And it turns out that we actually live on a shared planet with a common atmosphere; sourcing your fuels from abroad does nothing to prevent climate change. But it does mean that you are unable to secure some of the most fundamental inputs to your economy.

[slashdev]

Plus you have no control over the standards for extractions (e.g. methane leaks), and shipping it causes more pollution.

They're actually worse off, and they pay more for it instead of creating jobs and keeping the money in their own economy. Meaning less money for e.g. green programs to move away from fossil fuels.

It's just a losing proposition in every way.

[Scarblac]

> I know this is an unfathomable concept, but to actually "leave fossil fuels [...] in the ground" you have to stop using fossil fuels.

Obviously not, as we're closing these fields and haven't stopped yet. Someone will have to stop using it, yes.

[Tostino]

That is because that money is allowed to be made by externalizing the cost to future generations.

People hate migrants enough as it is. Climate crisis migrations will make these "little" war migrations seem quaint.

[nandomrumber]

> That is because that money is allowed to be made by externalizing the cost to future generations.

I don’t understand why you wrote this in response to the comment you replied to.

No matter which way you slice it, the UK and Europe using the oil from wells physically closer to them has to be less energy intensive that shipping oil / gas from far away.

What bearing does externalising anything have on that fact.

[Tostino]

Demand isn't static.

Economics 101: if Europe taps new wells, global supply increases. Higher supply drives down prices. Lower prices induce more consumption.

We wouldn't just be cleanly swapping imported fuel for domestic fuel 1:1; we'd be making it cheaper to burn more fossil fuels globally. The marginal emissions saved on shipping are completely wiped out by the net increase in total carbon burned.

The only reason expanding that supply looks like a "win" on a balance sheet today is exactly because the long-term climate cost of burning that newly available fuel is still being passed on to the future.

[nandomrumber]

> long-term climate cost of burning that newly available fuel is still being passed on to the future.

That’s not science.

That’s wishful thinking.

We can’t actually know the long term climate-costs of burning fossil fuels.

It’s unfalsifiable.

We don’t have a second identical Earth we can use as a control.

Expending the fossil fuel supply today (months) reduces the impact of global oil / gas shocks to people suffering high prices today.

Waiting for your team to invent new battery and storage technology, and littering the countryside with wind turbines and replacing the entire existing vehicle fleet does nothing to help people now.

[slashdev]

I agree, but that's the world we live in.

[nandomrumber]

You’re willing to sacrifice the lives of at least some poor people who exist now, or are likely to exist in the near future, for a theory that is unfalsifiable.

That’s not since.

That’s brainwashing, and it’s not even good brainwashing.

[myrmidon]

> You’re willing to sacrifice the lives of at least some poor people who exist now, or are likely to exist in the near future, for a theory that is unfalsifiable.

What exactly do you mean with "unfalsifiable"? We actually measure atmospheric CO2, sea level and temperature; that's plenty falsifiability to me. And the greenhouse effect itself is not even in question.

Fossil emissions are sacrificing people not just from climate change in the future, but right now from air pollution, too (about 5M deaths per year actually, according to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38030155/).

[nandomrumber]

Climate science wants us to ignore the geological record and ignore geological processes.

A cubic kilometre of lava at 1200 degrees C is enough energy for thirty (30!) hurricanes.

It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.

But climate science wants us to ignore all that and place the blame entirely on human caused CO2 emissions and cow farts, while we are literally living through and ice age.

[myrmidon]

I'm not sure what your position is.

If you think that the greenhouse effect is real (CO2 contributes to warming), why would human emissions not have any effect? we currently emits tons of it per year and person for a substance only in the 400ppm range-- even if you split a single humans emissions over a whole cubic kilometer it makes a substantial concentration difference already.

> It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.

No, this is not remotely plausible, because we have a pretty solid understanding of how much heat is transferred from the earths interior (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget), and this is completely negligible (and off by many orders of magnitude) compared to the oceanic warming that we already observe (for a 0.5K increase in oceanic surface temperature you'd need thousands of times the total heat that we get from the planet itself).

[slashdev]

> It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.

You're mistaking possible for probable. There's no evidence to suggest that's the case, and lot's of evidence that it's from climate change. In science you follow the evidence, not your pet theory.

> But climate science wants us to ignore all that and place the blame entirely on human caused CO2 emissions and cow farts, while we are literally living through and ice age.

I don't think you understand either science or ice ages.

[xorcist]

What exactly is your argument here? That organic chemistry is all wrong and oxidization is unfalsifiable, or that the fossil industry itself is fudging the numbers to make it look life we're oxidizing less organic matter than we think?

[no-name-here]

“Fossil fuel air pollution responsible for 1 in 5 deaths worldwide”: https://hsph.harvard.edu/climate-health-c-change/news/fossil...

[Scarblac]

It means having to make serious decisions on imperfect information, yes. But that's life.

[toomuchtodo]

It would be an inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration considering the deployment rates and cost decline curves of renewables and storage.

Ember Energy: European electricity prices and costs - https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an... (updated daily)

Ember Energy: Wind and solar generated more power than fossil fuels in the EU for the first time in 2025 - https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-gener... - January 22nd, 2026

Bloomberg: How Europe Ditched Russian Fossil Fuels With Spectacular Speed - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/ukraine-n... | https://archive.today/yxGp2 - February 21st, 2023

> But what the past year has shown is that it’s possible to go harder and faster in deploying solar panels and batteries, reducing energy use, and permanently swapping out entrenched sources of fossil fuel. Solar installations across Europe increased by a record 40-gigawatts last year, up 35% compared with 2021, just shy of the most optimistic scenario from researchers at BloombergNEF. That jump was driven primarily by consumers who saw cheap solar panels as a way to cut their own energy bills. It essentially pushed the solar rollout ahead by a few years, hitting a level that will be sustained by EU policies.

(Europe has enough wind potential to power the world, their energy constraints are deployment rate of renewables, battery storage, and transmission)

[slashdev]

You're talking about electricity, so I assume your answer is directed to the natural gas fields at Groningen. The EU imports a lot of natural gas. Don't you think it would be better to have a domestic supply? It's better for the environment too.

Heck right now, Europe is still burning coal (and worse yet - lignite coal) for electricity. Natural gas would be a huge improvement on that.

Note that drilling for oil in the North Sea is a completely different subject, because that's not used for electricity generation, nor is electricity a substitute. EV market share in Europe is still far too low for that to be a conversation for a long time.

Your comment is wishful thinking and ignores the current reality of how Europe imports and uses energy.

But even if your best case scenario were somehow possible (and it really isn't) there's still money to be made exporting fossil fuels to the developing world. So your assertion "inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration" is just flat wrong.

[toomuchtodo]

No, everything can move to electricity, China is doing it, Europe can too. You are free to your opinion, but the facts and evidence are clear. If you would like an hour of time with an expert from Ember Energy to explain this, happy to pay for that hour of time for you to update your priors and mental model on the topic of Europe's energy transition trajectory.

> Note that drilling for oil in the North Sea is a completely different subject, because that's not used for electricity generation, nor is electricity a substitute. EV market share in Europe is still far too low for that to be a conversation for a long time.

Europe's EV uptake will speed based on the price of oil increasing and remaining high for the foreseeable future.

> But even if your best case scenario were somehow possible (and it really isn't) there's still money to be made exporting fossil fuels to the developing world. So your assertion "inefficient use of capital to support more fossil exploration" is just flat wrong.

The developing world is leapfrogging fossil fuels and going straight to solar, batteries, and EVs. What will expensive LNG do to this market? It will force them to renewables and electric mobility faster. Ethopia's uptake of EVs after they banned combustion vehicles is an example of this. Why did they ban combustion vehicles? Because they have no domestic fossil fuel supplies and the import cost was crushing them; their EVs are powered by domestic hydro electricity production.

Citations:

Surging Gas Prices Reignite EV Interest - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-14/iran-war-... | https://archive.today/BkAfR - March 14th, 2026

Global EV sales hit 1.1 million – Europe surges while the US slides - https://electrek.co/2026/03/12/global-ev-sales-hit-1-1-milli... | https://archive.today/nhIbF - March 12th, 2026

EVs Avoided the Use of 2.3M Barrels of Oil per Day in 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420092 - March 2026

Electric Vehicle Sales Boom as Ethiopia Bans Fossil-Fuel Car Imports - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068567 - February 2026

How we made it: will China be the first electrostate? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44101275 - May 2025

Massive global growth of renewables to 2030 is set to match entire power capacity of major economies today, moving world closer to tripling goal - https://www.iea.org/news/massive-global-growth-of-renewables... - October 9th, 2024

The World Hit ‘Peak’ Gas-Powered Vehicle Sales — in 2017 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-30/world-hit... - January 30th, 2024

[slashdev]

I agree that it can. I won't live to see it, and I hope I live 50 years more.

You're living in a fantasy world that doesn't exist.

Global consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas all rose in 2025. We've not even peaked yet.[1]

[1] https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/12/record-fossi...

[randerson]

Doesn't the world only have about 50 years [0] worth of oil remaining in the ground? Climate change and war aside, it seems like that should be a major reason to accelerate the change to renewables.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/oil/

[slashdev]

No I don't think so. The oil industry is very good at discovering and developing resources previously thought to be out of reach.

People have been talking about peak oil for decades, as long as I can remember, and it never happened.

I think we're technologically capable of extracting more oil, coal, and gas than we would ever want to. We would cook ourselves with the damage we'd do to the climate. I think that's the real constraint - and I hope we pay attention to it.

[toomuchtodo]

I've done my best to educate with facts and citations. Appreciate the discussion regardless. My offer stands to pay for you to talk to a subject matter expert.

Edit (to respond to your edit):

> Global consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas all rose in 2025. We've not even peaked yet.

Do you think global LNG consumption will peak considering a material amount of production has been taken offline for the next five years as of today? If I am an LNG consumer on the global market, am I re-evaluating my options today for the next half decade of energy needs? And we are not even done yet with additional potential attacks on Middle Eastern fossil infrastructure as long as the conflict continues; there are more targets available, and more capacity that could be diminished for the foreseeable future.

Oil and gas prices jump after Iran and Israel attack gasfields - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47441351 - March 2026

Iran attack wipes out 17% of Qatar’s LNG capacity for up to five years, QatarEnergy CEO says- https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/2026/03/19/iran-attack-... - March 19th, 2026

From your citation:

> Renewable energy continues to expand rapidly, but not fast enough for a total reduction in fossil fuels. Emissions from burning oil are projected to rise by 1% in 2025, while gas emissions are set to increase by 1.3%, and coal by 0.8%.

These increases are not material in a world where 1TW/year of solar PV is being deployed. Global solar capacity doubles every three years [!!] at current rates. If that rate holds, without accounting for increases of that rate as more PV manufacturing capacity comes online, it will replace all fossil energy globally (not just fossil electricity, all fossil energy use) in under twenty years when you consider the efficiency gains of not burning fuel for energy.

Highlights of the global energy transition in 2025 - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/highlights-of-the-g... - December 17th, 2025

> Solar and wind are now expanding fast enough to meet all new electricity demand, a milestone reached in the first three quarters of 2025. Ember’s analysis published in November shows that these technologies are no longer just catching up; they are outpacing demand growth itself. Together, solar and wind supplied 17.6% of global electricity in the first three quarters of 2025, up from 15.2% over the same period last year, pushing the total share of low-carbon sources to 43%.

> For the first time across a sustained period, renewables, including solar, wind, hydro and smaller sources such as geothermal, generated more electricity than coal. At the heart of this shift is solar, whose growth was more than three times larger than any other source of electricity so far in 2025, confirming its role as the dominant force reshaping the global power system. Another analysis showed that the world is set to add 793 GW of renewable capacity in 2025, up 11% from the 717 GW added in 2024. At this pace, only a modest increase in annual additions is needed for the world to stay on track to triple global renewables by 2030.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-installed-wind...

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746617 - June 2024 (66 comments)

[slashdev]

We're making great progress, this is true. But we're also still increasing our consumption of fossil fuels.

Let's put a number on it. When do you think we reach 50% of today's consumption of fossil fuels? IEA seems to think it continues to grow until 2050. https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/iea-energy-outlook-2025-9.69...

If that's true, I don't think we reach 50% of current levels by 2100. That's my very non-scientific WAG. I'll be long dead by then. Europe, if they continued drilling in the North Sea and Groningen would have long since exhausted them - a great capital expenditure and investment to bring things back to the original subject of conversation.

What do you think? That would give me a good window into how realistic your view is.

I think where you're going wrong is perhaps not taking into account continued increases in per-capita energy usage worldwide. But of course that will happen, not just because of population growth, not just because of the rest of the world rising slowly towards Western standards of living, but continued technological progress which depends on energy (or at least it has been that way historically.)

Doomberg (the green chicken) correctly observes that when we add a new energy source to the mix, we don't tend to decrease our consumption of previous energy sources.

For example: global wood consumption for energy is at or near all-time high levels, with approximately 2 billion cubic meters (m³) of wood fuel consumed in 2023, up from 1.5 billion m³ in 1961. While the percentage of global energy provided by wood has plummeted from over 90% in the early 19th century to around 3-6% today, the total volume burned has increased, driven by population growth in developing nations and increasing bioenergy use in developed ones.

[nandomrumber]

> Why did they ban combustion vehicles? Because they have no domestic fossil fuel supplies and the import cost was crushing them

Your closing argument is that some far away land with no nat gas / oil reserves of their own isn’t convincing anyone with nat gas / oil reserves of their own.

Europeans need inexpensive fuels to power their existing fleet or vehicles now.

Ethiopia’s plan doesn’t generalise.

[toomuchtodo]

Europe has no choice but to lean into low carbon generation and EVs now, their hand is forced by geopolitical energy events outside of their control. These options are objectively cheaper than attempting to develop new domestic fossil resources.

China will build every cheap EV Europe will buy if the EU cannot build them fast enough (citations on EU EV sales are in my comment you replied to), so buy them or experience economic pain and ongoing energy inflation from choosing to continue to burn fossil fuels for energy. These are straightforward choices to make. The clean energy path is the cheaper path, based on all available data as of this comment.

(from your profile, "They force us to use extremely expensive renewable energy to run our energy efficient extremely disposable appliances," so I'm unsure how effective facts and data will be in this discussion, but I am trying very hard to share the relevant facts as a shared foundation to discuss from)

Citations:

Germany's Solar Boom Eases Power Costs as Gas Price Jumps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323028 - March 2026

Lazard LCOE+ 2025 [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47184980 - March 2026

Wind power slashed 4.6B euros off electricity bills in Spain last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46622463 - January 2026

France's 2024 Power Grid Was 95% Fossil Free as Nuclear, Renewables Jumped - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42770556 - January 2025

[slashdev]

I am 100% bullish on both solar energy and EVs, and I share your optimism around the technology.

But I think you're being too optimistic about what this means for global fossil fuel usage. Definitely over the next decade, but potentially over much longer periods than that.

[nandomrumber]

> Europe has no choice

I’ve been following you for 13 years in this site, and I really expect more intellectually honest comments from you.

You’re trying to tell us that developing new battery technology, new storage technology, deploying more wind / solar and replacing the entire European vehicle fleet, is cheaper than building new oil / gas infrastructure.

I’m not buying it.

Regarding the comment in my profile, I’ve done warranty repair work on home appliances. Some manufacturers have moved to assembly methods that render appliances uneconomical to repair, or impractical. Also, in Australia, electricity price increases have been double or triple that of general inflation.

The comment in my profile is an objective assessment of the facts, not an ideological screed.