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I’m sure you may have seen a lot of “how to inoculate yourself against climate disinformation” posts, but we’re experiencing a huge amount of content paid for by Fossil Fuel Interest’s to put pressure on the internet. And it’s been really concentrated for a few months.
The funding is pushing for a cultural shift for people who are undecided in the climate conversation and are possibly more easily swayed. And it’s important to remember, fossil fuel interests wouldn’t pay for it if they didn’t need it.
Most of the disinfo looks like “yeah climate change is real but we can’t possibly do anything to fix it” or “these solutions simply don’t work.” about solutions that are tried and true. They look a lot like nuanced takes, but specifically are trying to motivate inaction.
So if you wake up today and ask “what can I do today that makes a difference?” is honestly post a lot to tip the scales regarding the presentation climate solutions. Silly or serious, for example posting about renewables getting you excited, community food forests that are feeding people, cool solutions to targeting methane, etc. Post about a climate book or show you liked, or whatever. Just make sure it’s clear to an onlooker that there are people who believe climate change is anthropogenic, it was mostly caused by extractive practices and fossil fuel use, and that we can still demand rapid action to fix it. And all of this is true, because the science supports it.
I think there’s a semantic difference between ‘approach’ and ‘solution’ that encourages us to talk past each other. Waving a magic wand that transitions fossil fuel sources to solar power and biofuel while removing accumulated carbon from the atmosphere would be a climate change solution. Passing legislation to transition to some combination of biofuel and solar power over the next decade would be an approach - it is not likely on its own to solve climate change, but could be part of a greater solution.
Bringing more nuclear power plants online, building more solar energy arrays, and covering windy lands and coastlines with turbines will not ‘solve’ global warming, it will accelerate it. There’s an obvious analog to the well-documented paradox of adding more traffic lanes increasing rather than reducing traffic congestion. These approaches apply elemental analysis of static systems to dynamic systems that require holistic analysis. An economist will tell you more energy to the grid will reduce the price of energy, which will increase demand. A political scientist can tell you that a capitalist economy will be stimulated to grow until it reaches the limits of its resources, and added economic growth will result in more energy use, not less. We can infer that if at any time renewable energy prices drop to the point they become more economically attractive than fossil fuel, demand for them will rise until the prices are competitive again.
You’re symptomatic of the problem when you mention CO2 capture research as an afterthought. There needs to be a significant decrease in energy use and carbon generation, and a significant increase in carbon sequestration. That is currently the primary obstacle we are facing in solving the problem. Carbon sequestration may be amenable to technological approaches, but decreasing energy use and limiting that use to renewable resources is a deeply social and political problem, and has no technological solution.
Let’s start with the end:
That’s like being blind to the air you are breathing. It is indeed not a technological problem anymore like it was in the 1980 because the technological problems have been solved. And technology has also helped solving the economic problem as well by lowering the cost of these techs. Indeed, there is little more that tech can solve there.
Now the paradox you mention in your first part is called the Jevons paradox, or the rebound effect, and is one of the most misquoted and misunderstood piece of economics in these discussions. It states that if you make a process more efficient, you may increase the total cost of it. Here is what is often misunderstood:
This is false. This is even a lie and you should know better than to spread it. I am tired of ungrowthists shooting down climate solutions and pretending to fight climate change denialists while themselves ignoring the parts of the IPCC reports that they dislike. Renewables and EVs are a crucial part of the transition, and nuclear plays a role, though a smaller one. The easiest way to shut down fossil fuel power plant, by far, when you holistically take into account the economics, the politics, the sociology, the psychology, etc. is to have the ability to switch as painlessly as possible to a renewable mode of production that changes as little habits as possible.
Am I thinking this is the best theoretical way or the most moral one or the most enlightened one? No. But you talk about a holistic approach, this is what it is: the shortest path is the path of lower effort. Waiting for MAGA hats or impoverished people to adopt the enlightened ways of economic growth rejection is as realistic as betting on nuclear fusion to solve all energy problems once and for all. Want a quick transition? Let’s them keep their oversized SUVs and meat-heavy diet while making them CO2 neutral. Put the human in the equation, but put the real human in it, not the humans you would like to exist.
EDIT: Preferred to remove an overly aggressive answer about the CO2 capture part, but too tired at the moment to make a polite retort to the frankly offensive assumptions you make about my position.
I see you’re aware of Jevons Paradox by name. I posted about it 10 days ago.
I don’t appreciate your tone. It’s typical of STEM people who are rigid structural thinkers, and mistake that for rationality. It’s easy to find an engineer who thinks he has a more profound understanding of a specialty he’s considered for five minutes than a non-engineer who has studied it her entire life. Despite rapid technological development, both fossil fuel use and renewable energy use has increased apace (except for a brief dip during the pandemic.) All three of your bullet points are also non-sequiturs. This may be due to a language barrier - I appreciate you holding this dialogue in my native language.
In particular, the Jevon’s paradox is not about the number of lightbulbs consumed, but efficiency and energy use. Lights are part of a larger system so long as fungible energy is used to power them. The electrical power conserved by LEDs results in lowered energy prices, and increased energy use elsewhere. To escape Jevon’s Paradox under capitalism long enough to solve the crisis, you would need everything to suddenly become so efficient that even exponential economic growth would not be fast enough to make up the difference between the transition and the point we reach decarbonization.
People have drastically adjusted their society to meet existential threats before. You assert that the people who tightened their belts and grew victory gardens to defeat the nazis are not real humans. Your assertion that people like me and many of the other members of this server are less real humans than meat-heavy oversized SUV driving MAGA hats is revealing. I consider this cynicism towards human nature alarmingly inconsistent with reality and a form of climate change doomerism.
I encourage to you reflect on what you’re implying here. I appreciate that you consider yourself anti-capitalist, and I would advise you to conserve your venom for people to the right of you, rather than lecturing the left on how to be more respectable. Many of us have taken moral stances that prevent us from easily prospering in a capitalist system, but in so doing we’ve shifted the discourse left enough that your toothless anti-capitalism is considered part of the mainstream, and you face no discrimination in employment. We culture-jam, ride bikes, and occupy so that you can ride your EV to a cushy white-collar job and daydream about “changing the system from the inside” in your copious leisure time.
Maybe take that gift in gratitude, and if you’d like to give us something back, let it not be more half-baked essays on how those on the left are irresponsible, irrational, and inferior to you. If you truly want this exchange to end, you can concede my points. I regret that this discussion has become personal, but I feel your statements about facts deserved a rebuttal.
I usually refrain from answering to personal attacks, I am not here to win internet points or leftist certificates from random people. I prefer to focus the discussion on facts, but between a dozen (hilariously wrong) assumptions about my life and strawman arguments, you don’t leave me with a lot of material.
So let’s talk about the Jevons effect. Not sure why you mention a post you made 10 days ago, if you are interested I made almost the same argument I did in the previous post 5 months ago and had to discuss it in professional settings more than 10 years ago. That’s not a concept I discovered yesterday.
Lightbulbs to LED transition is a textbook effect of a small Jevons effect. It totally applies. You can apply this to lighting, where the effect is smaller than the energy gains. You can apply it to the wider system of energy production where yes, indeed, lower energy costs increase total energy demand.
You keep using “efficiency” in different meanings there. Jevons paradox is fed by the economic efficiency (USD/kWh) of energy production. We are interested in its carbon efficiency (CO2/kWh). Replacing a coal power plant by a wind farm of the same capacity and same economic efficiency (aka cost) has no reason to cause a rebound yet would cause a huge change in terms of carbon efficiency.
Yes, and I am sure that they could again. I remind you that I am the one arguing that solving the climate crisis is easy and just a matter of will and I therefore consider that this is now out of my department.
You are the one insisting on a “holistic” approach, which, I am arguing would involve not only taking into account a realistic model of the population to understand why, politically, these easy solutions are not implemented or are implemented too slowly. It means not only to consider the mindset of ecologically minded people (which, obviously, I do consider to exist and to be human, I have a hard time you take that strawman you built seriously) but also the mindset of the majority that blocks these solutions. I don’t like it and you probably don’t like it, but an “holistic” approach would be techno-solutionist: it is harder to make most people change their habits than to make carbon-neutral alternatives to the products they use, so favor that approach if you want a quick transition.
If you would favor a “morally superior” way to lower CO2 emission over a fast and effective pragmatic but “impure” one, it means climate is not your top priority, that you put some ideals over it (which can be fine! Just don’t pretend defending climate when you are defending your preferences)
Let’s disregard all of the other misapprehensions you’ve made and focus on one thing. This is the second time you’ve repeated it:
Are coal power plants and wind farms mutually exclusive? Does one existing prevent the other from existing simultaneously? Is it possible to run both at the same time?
Of course it is possible, at least in the simplified model I gave of identical costs. It is also possible that they replace them [like has happened in the US for the past 20 years.
In practice though, renewables only get there because it is actually more cost effective in some areas (areas with more sunlight, more wind=better economic efficiency of renewables). In the case where a tech is cheaper than the other, in a market economy, they are mutually exclusive yes, so the most efficient one is displacing the other.
Pop Media Literacy Quiz!
Here is a graph from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What information is supported by this graph?
a) The total amount of fossil fuel used in energy generation is decreasing
b) Coal power plants are being shut down and replaced by wind farms
c) The percentage of the energy generation from Coal has decreased since 2000, and the percentage of energy from renewables has increased, but not as quickly as the energy from natural gas.
The graph is scaled based on the total energy generation in the year 2020.Here is the second graph from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What information is supported by this graph?
a) Coal is being phased out for renewable alternatives
b) There has been a major shakeup in how the United States gets its energy during the last five years
c) Where the United States generates its energy changes over the timescale of months, but from 2019 to 2022 has remained roughly static.
This is text taken from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What can be inferred from this text?
a) Coal is being phased out, never to return as a source of energy generation in the United States
b) Desire for clean energy overwhelms market forces when it comes to using coal as fuel
c) Coal use is projected to increase more than it decreases, and will rise to be the second most prevalent energy source behind natural gas in 2021.
So much for not doing personal attacks. Ok, usually when I discuss with someone who does not have the basic graph reading skills I patiently explain their mistakes, but in my experience people who are unable to read data but think they are smart enough to teach it are incurable. Will you be the exception?
Yes, coal+natural gas has decreased. The fall in coal is bigger than the rise in natural gas. You can check it in the source the article linked.
By renewables (which include hydro and solar panels), yes. They are also replaced by natural gas power plant. “Coal plants being replaced by renewables and gas” implies that some coal plants are replaced by renewables.
Correct again. So do you understand that some of the decrease in coal was from renewables replacing them or have you an alternate explanation?
No. It is clearly labelled in billion kWh. However, the total production in the US has more or less plateaued in the last 20 years so that does not make a big difference on the right hand of the graph.
I am sure you notice but just to be sure, you saw that this is just over 3 years, right? Including the very unusual covid years.
It is more visible on the wider graph but indeed you can see the coal slightly decreasing and the renewables slightly increasing. The coal dip in 2020 tells you that when there is a decrease in demand, coal and gas plants are shut down before renewable sources.
This is a 3 years graph of a very unusual time. Please tell me you realized that.
On a month to month basis, coal is sometime the #2 source of energy and sometime #4. That’s something that never happened before 2010. And it will happen less and less often as the big trend shows, coal is going to remain #4 more and more often.
Please tell me you know what “short term” is. Please tell me you are not trying to infer trends from fast noise. Please tell me you are not taking the covid years as the basis for an extrapolation.
I’d love it if you could teach me someting, but your strategy of throwing sources at me that don’t back up your statements undermines your authority as a media literacy educator. The total fossil fuel use peaks in 2005, but saying the graph conclusively shows a decreasing trend in Fossil Fuel use is evidence of wishful thinking; the slopes are so small that if you drew a line from that peak to the COVID minimum in 2020 and extrapolate from that slope, the zero fossil fuel use point would still be in 2090. There is a local maximum in 2018, and an increase in fossil use at the end of the data set in 2021, suggesting a return to pre-COVID growth. Covid has nothing to do with 2018, and while it explains the increase in fossil fuel use in 2021, it doesn’t explain why fossil fuel use increased faster than alternative energy use in the same year. If there was an unambiguous downward trend in fossil fuel use, you would not expect ‘noise’ large enough to poke holes in that hypothesis.
The standard explanation I’m aware of is that with the discovery of new fracking techniques, natural gas has become economically cheaper than coal, causing some of the less profitable coal plants to shut down. This is also the simplest explanation from the explosion of natural gas on graph #1. Wikipedia lists ~30 decommissioned US-based coal power plants with +200 still firing.
You can’t claim ‘coal has been replaced’ when a percentage of its total capacity is simply being furlowed for when it becomes competitive with other energy sources again, like your source projected it to in 2021. May I remind you that the alternative name for Jevons Paradox is the ‘Bounce-Back’ effect?
Furthermore, the hypothesis that manufacturing new alternative energy sources will replace fossil fuel energy use without any need for social or political pressure would predict that with each increase in alternative energy growth, there would be a corresponding decrease in fossil fuel use. This is soundly contradicted by the data you’ve provided.
Only the year 2010 from 1955-2010 showed negative fossil energy growth from the previous five years, and in that year the amount of energy provided by alternative sources grew much more than the amount that fossil fuel use shrank. This not only contradicts the ‘replacement’ hypothesis, but also supports my hypothesis, which predicts that without significant political or social resistance, market forces will cause alternative energy to complement fossil fuel rather than replace it. Using both renewable energy and fossil fuel creates lower energy prices than either one individually, and lower energy prices stimulate economic growth. Economic growth results in more demand for energy, and thus more sources of fossil fuel and renewable energy in a ‘virtuous’ cycle.
The more granular recent data also contradicts the ‘replacement’ hypothesis.
From 2010-2020, total energy used in the United States has shown little growth and been roughly static. If fossil fuel was being replaced by alternative energy, you would expect to see fossil fuel energy use decrease with each renewable energy increase. That behavior does not appear in the data. Instead it looks like the kind of bouncy data you expect from market behavior between competing goods.
I didn’t expect to see the energy use stagnation in the United States from 2010-2020, which was interesting. My guess is that this coincides with a change in US trade patterns where energy-intensive domestic manufacturing was shifted to Asia.
Based on this trade graph, I would predict a boom in both new fossil fuel plants and renewable energy plants in China from 2010 to at least 2017, and similar paired growth in other Asian countries the United States traded with. I suspect the United States’ stagnation is due to energy - from coal, renewables, or otherwise - being cheaper abroad than from any domestic source. Once that is no longer the case, I predict the United States will ‘bounce-back’ and begin producing significantly more fossil-fuel-based energy if there is no significant political or social force to stop it.
If China built no new fossil fuel plants during those years, or if manufacturing returns from abroad to a politically and socially stagnant US and there is a decrease in fossil fuel energy generation, that would be a significant blow to my hypothesis. If I haven’t convinced you that the ‘replacement’ hypothesis is wrong, please tell me what prediction would have to be false in order for you to abandon that hypothesis?