You underestimate the staying power of tyrants. China killed tens of millions of people in the 20th century without the government falling. It may just become more oppressive.
China is facing huge problems everywhere, though. Their economy is in big trouble. But with autocracies, sometimes that just makes them more dangerous. I think there is a decent chance that China goes to war in the next few years. Maybe as an ally of Russia, maybe an invasion of Taiwan. Tyrants love wars - they are a great distraction from and excuse for domestic failure.
I have to agree with @Sage_Rat on this one, after years of discussions I have found out that engineers are the “experts” that most contrarians rely on, many times it happens that their expertise will be accurate depending on the subject they had training about. And recently there was a big ado about moving to a solar economy in a recent thread.
To change a state like California the price alone was described to be a huge amount by a populist engineering source in Youtube, making a case that applying that to the whole of the USA was going to be a dumb thing to do… only for me to notice later that researchers at MIT found that a very similar big amount was the cost for actually the whole of the USA.
What happens is that engineers sometimes miss about the economics and progress in manufacturing.
No they don’t. They look at entire system costs. Everyone agrees that solar panels have gotten cheaper. That’s not news. They went from inefficient, special use devices made in small quantities to mass-produced, somewhat more efficient devices for a large market. It’s not surprising to anyone that panel prices came down.
But panel prices do not equal the cost of solar. It doesn’t matter how cheap the panels are if solar cannot provide the energy you need when you need it. Because in that case whatever the cost of solar is, it is an ADDITIONAL cost over and above the fossil grid power you are going to have to maintain anyway.
Do you know of any jurisdictions that have lowered the cost of energy to consumers without subsidy by going to renewables? Germany sure didn’t - their ‘green shift’ resulted in the highest energy prices in Europe and an increase in CO2 emissions and their abandonment of climate targets.
The best case for solar is probably Australia. They get huge amounts of solar flux. Solar might actually work in Australia, if they can solve the storage problem.
Speaking of storage - no renewable cost analysis is complete until it factors in the cost of grid storage, because without grid storage the best you will ever get in the northern populous countries is ~30% of your power from renewables, and that’s pushing it.
The fact is, even overnight storage is beyond our ability right now, and overnight storage isn’t nearly enough. For a reliable grid powered entirely by renewables, we need at least 2-4 weeks of storage capacity. We currently have no ideas how to achieve that. Not even close. Storage is the elephant in the room. Until we have it, you could give away solar panels for free and it wouldn’t make a huge difference.
As for lithium… I put my money where my mouth is. When I heard about the electric car mandates and did the math for how much lithium would be required, I went out and bought some lithium ETF shares. So far, so good. I’m up about 20% even in a down market. And the only reason lithium hasn’t gone up more is because of fears of recession and the plan for electric cars only being sold by 2030 failing. If we actually stuck to that plan, we would need massive amounts of new lithium, and a lithium mine takes 5-10 years to open. Expect either the electric car mandate to fail, or lithium prices to skyrocket. And if we expect to build grid storage with batteries, well… good luck.
Another argument in favor of Putin, really, that is getting old. One should not make underwhelming arguments by ignoring that the actions of a mad man in Russia are causing a lot of the temporary reversals seen now.
Wow. I have been saying for YEARS, including on this board, that the green movement in Germany is Putin’s best friend. Russia likely helped fund it. I was warning that Putin would hold Germany hostage over this back when Nordstream 1 was being built.
These are not temporary reversals, and they aren’t the fault of Putin. Putin’s ability to shut off the power in Germany is entirely the fault of Germany’s insane push for solar and wind, and their shutting down of their nuclear power plants. To spin my argument as ‘pro-Putin’ is bizarre. And Germany’s high energy prices happened long before Putin started interfering. Germany is a case study in how NOT to go ‘green’.
I feel lucky, specially when a lot of what the conservative sources told us about what was going to take place depends on fallacies and grossly missing options.
You just argued that lithium is getting cheaper as a refutation of my claim that lithium production was a big problem. Then you link to an article to refute another point which admits that lithium production IS a problem and is not sustainable.
Could we replace lithium with something else? Sure. But that something else won’t be as good as lithium, or as easy to implement, or we would have already done it. As your article admits, salt-ion batteries are three times heavier than lithium, and provide less power. That makes them a non-starter for cars. Iron based batteries are possible, but have much lower energy density so they are much larger and can’t be used in cars or small devices.
Maybe one of these technologies will lead to cheaper grid storage. If so, it’s a LONG way in the future. It is a long, long way from getting something to work in a lab and creating finished products using it.
The first commercial lithium-ion batteries were developed in 1991. based on research from the 1960’s. They had all kinds of problems, including the tendency to catch fire, early degredation of cathodes, etc. We have been developing them heavily for 30 years, and they still have problems but are usable. Exotic battery types under investigation now are at about the same state that lithium-ion was in the 1980s.
Here I thought we were in such an urgent crisis mode that we had to be net zero by 2035. We are shutting down critical energy sources NOW. Handwaving away the critical lack of grid storage by pointing at early research into possible solutions in 30 years is not reasonable if you also believe we have to accelerate shutting down fossil grid power now.
So… They just wanted Germans to freeze in the dark? Those pipelines are the only thing that will keep Germany from disaster this winter. Opposing fossil and nuclear power and also oposing the ability to import energy is not a great argument for the Greens.
Yeah, who wants to listen to the IEEE when you can listen to green activists with an agenda?
That was your arguments running into that contradiction. That there are options was the point.
Nope, that was again your arguments being contradictory, or in this case moving the goalposts. The point was that you were missing a lot to claim that the Greens were friends of Putin.
The point I made stands, listening to right wing media, or engineers with a lot missing, will led to ignorant solutions based on misplaced hatred of the ones proposing change.
Why do you keep insistng that I read ‘right wing media’? When it comes to engineering, I read engineering sources. Right wing blatherers on tech who don’t understand tech are just as stupid as left-wing people who do the same.
You are the one constantly posting links to Mother Jones, The Nation, Salon, etc. I think you are projecting.
BTW, the only ‘right wing’ news I read is National Review, and I disagree with them a lot. I don’t have a sucbscription or even an account at any other ‘right wing’ source. My primary source for climate change is the IPCC, and I have quoted from them many times.
Also, trying to discredit an argument by accusing me of reading bad, unnamed sources is ad-hominem. Stick to the arguments themselves. In this thread I provided source material for my energy claims, and provided the math. That should be refutable without referencing my character or reading habits.
Something I haven’t checked yet is how these countries’ sovereign wealth funds have fared. Norway’s was on an upswing ~5 years ago while SA’s was decreasing. I also don’t know how far a trillion $ goes.
FEE is the Foundation for Economic Education - so not an engineering website. The guy you were hustling for was working in politics in Reagans time, seems to have moved from there into being an author and professional talking head, so to the extent that he might have had an engineering degree in the 70s, he immediately abandoned that career and has probably never engineered anything outside of a classroom. (Or at least he doesn’t look 150 years old, so I don’t see where he would have snuck the engineering career in.) The math in his arguments are clear and obvious nonsense to anyone who can do plain arithmetic.
The ratio of how long it takes for thing A to achieve a 90 fold increase compared to thing B achieving a 10 fold increase can be any positive number if you aren’t given the starting points - and that’s before even getting to how the technology scales, what amount of R&D there is, how available the components are, etc. So even before getting to all of that, you’re still looking at an equation where you could have literally any number that you want it to be. It can take a million times longer or a billion times quicker, however you want it to be and that’s obvious to anyone who can math even a little bit.
The main reason for someone to bail on an engineering career and not touch it with a 10 foot pole for 50 years is because he can’t do math. If you find his numbers, math, and history compelling and count what he presents as a solid display of engineering prowess then you should know that I have a space elevator business that I and others are developing. We’ve been in stealth mode but, any day now, we’re going to start announcing our backers and, boy, when we do the money is going to be flowing in and our valuation will be through the roof! Invest now, while the potential is still at peak! The sky is the limit and the more you give, the more you will make!
Something I read (before the oil price yo-yo of the last few years) was the budget problem in Saudi Arabia. The government was running a consistent deficit despite all the oil revenue. The main problem was that the government provides a lot of payments and employment to Saudi citizens and that wasn’t cheap. It’s pretty much an indication of things that the crown prince basically arrested and shook down all the super-rich people in the kingdom on the pretext that they had obtained their money through corruption.
This is something that bothers me too in Canada. I can drive an electric car. (I do). But I heat my house with natural gas. I use maybe 3,000m^3 a year. The electricity grid is nowhere near capable of replacing that - not for generating, let alone distribution line carrying; plus I’d have to upgrade my current 100A service, and replace my furnace with some fancy heat pump. Just myself, I’m looking at serious dollars if I want to go green. For all of Canada - it will take a while.
Another impediment is generating power. The most obvious green source of reliable power is hydroelectric. However, any dam is ecologically disruptive; you think green types screamed about a gas pipeline from Russia (and they screamed about pipelines all over Canada and the USA too) watch greens scream about a carbon-neutral option like a big dam. Not to mention nuclear power.
Yeah that makes me wonder if looking at these 2020 data makes sense vs earlier years. Regardless, I think it points out which economies are worth looking at per the OP:
This is straying outside of the bounds of FQ. Given the topic, I think the thread has been addressed fairly well factually and will be better served by moving to IMHO to allow more speculation. Any factual information is of course still welcome.
I’m not vouching for everything he says, and it’s not a primary source. I linked it because it seemed like a good summary of the issues involved, and in the areas where I already knew the numbers they seemed about right.
Once again, grid storage is the key to making wind and solar work, and we just don’t have it. Until we do, fossil fuels are not going away. In fact, more wind and solar can increase the need for natural gas for load following, because you are trying to manage variable demand with variable power. We are shrinking baseload power by closing coal and nuclear plants, and intermittent power is an unacceptable substitute.
The scale of energy storage we need is immense if we want to replace baseload power with intermittents.