As someone who's been pushing for renewables for quite a while now it's dismaying that it's taken a war to accelerate this push, but I'm glad to see that it's happening at least.
It's doubly dismaying that my own country (US) is still doubling down on fossil fuels despite everything.
The concern about a new dependency on China is real, but renewables do have the advantage that once you have the infrastructure in place it keeps working without continuously importing fuel. Nonetheless, China has done a good job building up their PV/battery manufacturing capacity (including via subsidies for a while if I'm not mistaken) and to the extent the rest of the world wants to avoid a dependency on them we should do that too.
I've been arguing with Europeans on twitter (including an environmental scientist) who believe this war shows we need to resume drilling in the North Sea and Groningen.
It feels like this collective insanity will never end
The Russian threat in the short term is very real and this is making Russia stronger. And the economic threat to Europe in the super short term is bigger then the one to America ... and will help internal fascist movements that are very much already empowered there (and sponsored and supported by BOTH Russia and America despite being very much homegrown).
So, like, both I guess.
> renewables do have the advantage that once you have the infrastructure in place it keeps working without continuously importing fuel
There are issues if the infrastructure is network accessible and is updatable. The consumer end of it (e.g. home solar) is often dependent on apps etc. and is very vulnerable. I hope (probably optimistically) that critical systems are air gapped.
Its always been obvious to me that we should have a variety or energy sources for security and its complacent to think otherwise. Over-reliance on an unstable region makes it all the worse.
"As someone who's been pushing for renewables for quite a while now it's dismaying that it's taken a war to accelerate this push, but I'm glad to see that it's happening at least."
It takes tremendous hardship and a lot of time to push people to renewables. Give them their cheap oil back and they are hooked on the needle again in no time. Historically we've been there, multiple times.
Sorry for the cynicism. I too hope it is finally happening at least, and maybe it is at last.
I guess the oil industry is laughing their ass off nowadays. They can sell at such a premium. Inflation? YP.
Oil companies love $90 oil, but much higher than that and you start to run into demand destruction issues in the medium term.
It’s just pulling forward future gains while shrinking the time horizon, if the world speeds the transition to renewables and electrification from this. Short term gain for faster irrelevance.
Oil to $200/barrel please, as long as possible, same with LNG.
Businesses are short termist these days. They will be happy to pull forward gains. Shareholder value, right?
It will take longer than the duration of the war to realistically transition to renewables in any quantity that truly matters.
So the oil companies are happy because this temporarily brought forward future demand and thus profit, as well as expend a bunch of money/resources from competitors of oil which predicates a high price per barrel to make financial sense. If/when oil prices drop back down, these renewable investments might not compete.
To truly transition over will mean doing it with the world kicking and screaming imho. It cannot be made smooth.
But why does US need any of that? It's a massive exporter of fossil fuels and will be much richer as a result (but yes just as every other way of getting richer, it will also increase inequality).
Being a net exporter of a global commodity is only relevant in an extremely acute crisis (e.g. WWIII).
Plus one of the reasons why we export so much oil is because it's cheaper to import oil to a refinery in New Jersey from Saudi Arabia than to get it there from Texas due to some very stupid US laws.
The argument that high oil prices are good for America is one of the most ridiculous ideas being pushed right now. Yes, on a trade deficit front, it slightly reduces the net amount of money leaving. But we are also the world’s largest consumer of oil, and it literally powers every part of our economy.
Saying that America is better off with high gas prices is like saying Americans will eat more beef if the price of beef doubles because we make lots of beef. Cattle ranchers will be better off; everyone else eats more potatoes.
Think of it this way: less trade deficit means more imports that come through without causing extra damage. It means more cheap products of all kinds for everyone.
And yes this is exactly how petrostates work. I wonder why is it surprising. Sure their population also pays higher prices for gas at the pump when the oil goes up, but they massively win in every other way.
It's simply a long, embedded stereotype of "high oil price = bad" because of traumatic experience of 1973 and 1979. It's different today. The higher the oil price, the better it is for America.
Also again, US gas prices are by far the cheapest among every halfway developed countries. Everyone else will suffer more. So relatively again, US wins even here.
"Oils ain't Oils" - old motor oil company slogan from the 1980s.
What the US exports isn't "car ready" - most primary oil sources are heavily biased one way or the other (heavy, sweet, light, etc) and the useful end product is blended.
It's not straightforward for the US to get high on it's own supply and even what it delivers to others is less useful to thse others when other non-US sources aren't readily available to blend in.
Also ... using sequestered carbon has been increasing the insulation factor of our common atmosphere, left unchecked (ie. stopping the use of fossil fuels) is a major problem for the coming century.
Burning fossil fuels also raises the global temperature, reduces air quality, and people still have to pay more at the pump.
But US mostly wins from global warming relatively, right? I mean, it's going to suffer less than others (except EU), for geographical reasons, thus winning. I don't think global warming is a concern for US at all (some places sure, Florida will be royally fucked, but not most places).
In the short to medium term, sure . . . again, left unchecked gets bad for every human when tipping points are passed.
Eg: When surface ice gets very low the trapped heat will go more torward heating water than melting ice.
That's very double plus bad (ask a high school physics teacher about the energy used to melt, say, a kilogram of ice .. then ask them by how many degrees C does that same energy raise the temp. of water).
The big winners from global warming will be Russia, China and Canada - places that will become more habitable.
Its not just Florida. There are multiple problems. Many can be mitigated, but I very much doubt they will be as its easy to put off.
This seems like soft trolling. Global warming is canonically the opposite of a zero sum game. Everyone is losing.
> It's doubly dismaying that my own country (US) is still doubling down on fossil fuels despite everything.
A few get rich. Project2025 (that is, their hardwing agenda is the cover up for theft).
We need to monitor these guys and then take back what they took from all of us globally.
don't worry. the President is a stable genius./s
Thoughtful comment.
Please read hn rules.
The only thing that is dismaying you about this war is the fact that it caused people to push for more renewables?
They didn't say 'only'. Unless there was an edit after your reply
Yeah, I live in Spain and probably once again we'll have restrictions on AC in the summer just like at the start of the Ukraine war. Hopefully, we can avoid actual blackouts.
The bizarre thing is that our government still wants to close down the remaining nuclear power plants. One of the issues with our proportional electoral system is that smaller, more extreme parties can become kingmakers and in our current situation the centre-left governing party relies on the support of the far-left party to stay in power, and those guys are rabidly anti-nuclear power.
But this should be a clear signal that we need renewable power and nuclear power and we need to speed up the adoption of electric vehicles. Ending the tariffs with China that stop us benefiting from their affordable PV panels and electric cars would be a good step towards this.
Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear. In the case of Spain, it is cheaper to build more energy lines with Morocco and battery storage than to use nuclear. Spain already has some of the cheapest energy in Europe thanks to renewables.
In the case of Germany, nuclear makes sense, but it is not clear where you would buy fuel for it, It might still be a supply chain risk since Russia and Kazakhstan are the main players there.
Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today.
It is NOT cheap, it is cheap for sellers, because they account on the basis of a MWh being equally useful all the time. It isn't. There are TWh-scale shortfalls in winter because, and a medieval peasant understood this, a shortage of ambient energy is what winter is, and it's worth paying energy penny you have to avoid its worst effects.
Business is not better. I've worked in the chemicals industry, and conferences in Europe have been like a wake for the last decade. I've overseen large orders go to China because, I could not give a shit how much it cost, the European green alternative - for delivery within Europe - could not guarantee timeframes, due to reliance on renewables. The Chinese shipped product could. That is your "cheap".
You can buy uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, Mali, Canada, US, Australia, or the sea if you really want to, all of those have large reserves, and store multiple years' worth more or less by accident, modern industrial processes actually struggle to make sense at the low volumes nuclear requires. Bringing that up as a problem is just not honest.
Can you please source and explain your claims? They don't match my understanding.
For example:
> Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today.
Do you mean cost per country (not levelized?)? Even then, UK energy is not the most expensive.
Even if it didn't make sense to build new nuclear, that doesn't mean it makes sense to shut of existing nuclear.
It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments. Without them, closing power plants (of any kind) is, IMO, nonsensical.
Ironically, Spain has plenty of Uranium, but there is an environmental law that doesn't allow its mining.
https://alpoma.medium.com/uranium-in-spain-8ef975763257
This country is crazy.
> It's not that easy, and the 2025 blackout good evidence of that. Renewables need a grid that's engineered for them and that require significative investments.
The outage in spain had multiple complex causes.
While the grid had a rather routine instability/oscillation on-going during time of the incident, the actual point-of-no-return was completely non-technical: Prices crossed into the negatives, which caused generation to drop by hundreds of megawatts and load to increase likewise within a minute (!) because the price acted as a non-technical synchronized drop-off signal for the grid.
In grids where the price action is not forwarded directly to the generators and consumers there would be no incentive to suddenly drop off decentralized generation. So for example in Germany a black-out would not happen like this.
You can download the full ENTSO-E report here: https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/blackout/28-april-2025-ib... (See page 10 for a broad incident timeline)
Unfortunately, to have an informed opinion, you pretty much have to read all these pages, because the situation is just so complex. Otherwise, you just fall for agenda pushing from all sides.
Yup, its interesting that a community supposedly of "engineers" are happy to claim expert knowledge of domains in which they have no experience.
That being said, I was apparently also under the impression of outdated or just plain wrong information.
While the report I listed mentions the sudden loss of decentralized generation as starting point of the blackout, and also specifically mentions small-scale rooftop PV, it says that the cause for that sudden synchronized drop-off is actually unknown.
But doesn't nuclear power present a complication when designing a power grid for renewable energy? It is basically very expensive caseload energy that needs permanent demand, when the entire proposition of a renewable-focused grid is that you manage a non-certain production with dynamic demand (via batteries and price-sensitive usage).
No it's not. Nuclear plants are not compatible with climate change. Spain and it's rivers will be too warm to cool them down: https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
That may require retrofitting the plants to use open loop cooling instead of closed loop. That would increase water consumption.
Well only to certain point. When the rivers will naturally be too hot. You can start making them even hotter and it does not matter anymore.
Please tell me how renewables cause a lack of reactive power. Which was the source of the Iberian blackout.
All reasonable grids already force renewables to handle reactive power if they want to connect, like they do for all electricity generation.
It is a trivial expense, but still an expense so no one does it unless forced.
Existing nuclear power is acceptably cheap. For France the longterm LCOE for running their fleet to EOL is €60 per MWh.
The problem is new built nuclear power which costs €180-240 per MWh excluding insurance, backup, final waste disposal etc.
It also won't be online until the 2040s meaning it is entirely irrelevant as as solution to anything on a time scope not on the level of decades.
Yeah, but that reminds me of Nick Clegg in the UK in 2010 saying:
> By the most optimistic scenarios... there's no way they are going to have new nuclear come on stream until 2021, 2022. So it's just not even an answer
Well, now we are in 2026, and we still have the same problem.
The UK has had complete political unity on building new nuclear power since 2006. That tells you the timelines.
For Hinkley Point C with the latest estimate being the first reactor online in 2030 that gives a "planning to operation" time of 24 years.
For Sizewell C EDF are refusing to take on any semblence of a fixed price contract and they are instead going with a guaranteed profit pay as you go model. Where ratepayers handout enormous sums today to hopefully get something in return in the 2040s.
This might make sense on a larger timeframe but stating that your grid isn't stable enough to support AC demand while also pushing for electric car adoption seems counter intuitive. It would likely take years to improve the grid to support accelerating electric vehicle demands.
Years and tens if not hundreds of billions; the Netherlands is experiencing this, after a decade of cheap solar, a rise in EV, and new builds being built fully electric on the consumer side, and many datacenters and green energy generators built on the business side, our grid is at capacity to the point where new businesses can't get connected and new housing projects are put on hold (I think); the grid can't manage any more. The grid manager Tennet spent 15 billion last year, and will need to keep doing that for at least another decade - and that's a relatively small country.
in the election that is running in Denmark right now it looks like nuclear power is back on the table.
Why would you invest in nuclear power, which is several times more expensive per kwh than wind + battery in Denmark, which also has excellent links to reliable hydropower from Norway and Sweden? Especially when your greatest external security threat is Russia which has openly threatened targeting nuclear reactors of a country they are trying to invade?
Not to speak of the inconvenient fact that Uranium is not a resource found in sufficient quantity in Europe and current European nuclear reactors get their fuel from Russia and Niger, not exactly reliable havens of stability.
Nuclear power makes certain sense for nations that want a military nuclear arsenal and are willing to subsidize nuclear reactors to retain the required workforce and research base. For everyone else it is a money sink and a complication when designing their grid for renewable energy.
> Why would you invest in nuclear power, which is several times more expensive per kwh than wind + battery in Denmark
Strategic mix.
I'm not saying its a good or bad idea, but nuclear can be used as a tool with batteries to make wind much more reliable. urianium sourcing can be an issue, but sadly so are batteries. (granted nuclear fuel is changed more often)
Nuclear is a strategic drone target first and foremost. It's harder to take out renewables and batteries because they are more distributed.
>Why would you
I am unfortunately not the one empowered to make these decisions, nor do I know the reasoning of those who are, I just noted it seems back on the table based on discussions, maybe because
>Nuclear power makes certain sense for nations that want a military nuclear arsenal and are willing to subsidize nuclear reactors
since also on the table seems to be making a deal with France for Nuclear Weapons access, as I understand what I read.
>Why would you invest in nuclear power, which is several times more expensive per kwh
Because the related lobby pays well and a huge power station project (which runs well into the tens of billions) has much larger space for bribes
Alternatively, because nuclear power still works at night.
Wind + Battery doesn't exist. Wind and solar renewables are dependent on natural gas plants at this moment. This is why nuclear is still a consideration, it's more "green" then most "green" energy.
As a Swede i'd like to cut the cord to Denmark/Germany. That would greatly reduce our electricity costs in south/mid Sweden.
Let them enjoy their "cheap" wind and battery solution.
Same as Sweden. Creating divisive issues from nothing decades after the possibility passed.
At least the MAGA Hard right is staring to come around. Who could have guessed that they like extremely cheap distributed energy generation!?!?
> Why MAGA suddenly loves solar power
> The Trump-led attack on solar eases as the right reckons with its crucial role in powering AI and keeping utility bills in check.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/03/02/katie-mil...
Yeah, sucks they're trying to shut down our nuclear power, I agree. However, we're lucky the country is so sunny, if we could cover the inland deserted areas with solar panels, batteries and what not as an alternative, I'm OK with that as a compromise I suppose.
Spain's situation is bad: very high gas prices (now at the same level as Finland, despite much lower purchasing power), poor public transport (train) services, opposition to nuclear energy, electric cars that are only affordable for the wealthy (and even then, the infrastructure makes them difficult to use), high VAT on electricity, etc. All this in a country where many people have to ration their heating or air conditioning because they often can't afford it under normal circumstances. Population seem to not care much about being miserable as the same parties that do nothing about it keep getting elected so good luck I guess.
Seems Europe also has the option of using Northern Africa as a solar energy hub as well. Is that a viable option?
Purely from an engineering standpoint that is an attractive option. But North African countries have often been politically unstable. It's risky to place your energy security in the hands of a region that could erupt in another coup or civil war at any time.
That would then make sense why Russia's dirty tricks squad likes to back extreme-Left and extreme-Right parties, and is likely behind calls for proportional representation: it would give the geopolitical aggressors an effective veto over national politics and prevent the emergence of a European superpower on land they consider "theirs".
> The bizarre thing is that our government still wants to close down the remaining nuclear power plants.
That is very weird, even Germany stated recently that closing down their Nuclear Plants was a big mistake.
For a very long time, I have always said France is smarter than what people give them credit for. Spain should take a peek over the mountains at France to see what a sane energy policy looks like.
Even France shut down the Superphénix. It was just built too! A waste of ten billion dollars because the government gave in to these extremist environmental groups. One of them even fired an RPG at it while it was being built.
... it was shut down in 1998, relevant section from German Wikipedia as the English version is lacking details:
In June 1997, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announced the closure of the power plant as one of his first official acts. He justified this step by pointing to the enormous costs the plant incurred. In the preceding ten years, it had produced no electricity for most of the time due to malfunctions. It even consumed considerable amounts of electricity to keep the sodium in the cooling system above its melting temperature. Each pipe carrying sodium and every tank was equipped with heaters and thermal insulation for this purpose.
... so it used a lot of energy while being shut down because of malfunctions for most of those 10 years. Seems like shutting it down was the best course of action.
It had problems but it was new technology. That’s always the case. Now only China, Russia and India have Fast Breeder Reactors.
Plus there was the pressure from Les Verts and Sortir du nucléaire, the Molotov cocktail attacks by the Fédération Anarchiste, the RPG attack by the Cellules Communistes Combattantes etc.
It was a highly political decision.
No, we did not. Katharina Reiche and that guy from Bavaria are certainly not "Germany" or the majority of Germans. No atom reactor is going to be built, it's just typical rhetoric from both of them.
Not even the major energy suppliers are interested in building new nuclear reactors.
I was not against prolonging the phase out for a bit, but we don't even have a permanent storage solution after all this time.
They aren't even compatible with climate change: https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
A lot of people thought France was just being arrogant for not going all in on becoming dependent on the US and maintaining their own ways of doing things. These past few years, it's been paying off for them. Hopefully other countries will wisen up and not allow their defense and entire economy to be dependent on the US or any other big country. It always comes back to bite them in the ass. The post WW2 decades were unusually stable and assuming it'll be that way forever is not wise.
You can't do everything, and the smaller your country the less you can do. France isn't doing other things because of the opportunity cost.
Of course the EU is bigger than the US and there is value in duplicated/distributed effort. The EU as a whole should be thinking "partner with everyone, but have our fingers in every single pot someplace just in case".
> For a very long time, I have always said France is smarter than what people give them credit for. Spain should take a peek over the mountains at France to see what a sane energy policy looks like.
Incidentally, if I remember correctly, one of the causes (or things that made it worse) of the almost day-long blackout we (Spain) had last year was because France disconnected one of the links to Spain without notifying us properly.
> Yeah, I live in Spain and probably once again we'll have restrictions on AC in the summer just like at the start of the Ukraine war. Hopefully, we can avoid actual blackouts.
I live on Spain . What the hell restrictions are you talking about ?
This did happen in summer of 2022, but only in public buildings, private households were not affected, so the OP's point seems a bit overly dramatic. Given that AC usage is highest when solar production is also highest, this seems highly unlikely given the solar build-out of the last 4 years.
That included offices though so work was difficult.
I guess private homes weren’t included because of the difficulty of enforcement.
It was in 2022 and 2023: https://cerneasesores.es/real-decreto-ley-14-2022-obligacion...
what do you think of theory that denuclearisation movement in west europe was funded by CCCP? it makes sense to think CCCP/Putin would finance subversive movements to remove nuclear and coal and make the region dependent on russian energy exports
I think some of them are definitely funded by them, there was an article about it I saw: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russia-funding-europe...
They fund other stuff that weakens and divides Europe too like the separatist movements in Scotland, Catalonia etc.
That's not to say that all the people in these movements are Russian agents or that these groups don't have some good points and legitimate grievances, but nonetheless they are an easy, cost-effective way for Russia to attack us.
Related the children book from Germany https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221101-the-cloud-the-n...
Of all the silly things I’ve seen Europe do over the last 20 years, getting rid of nuclear plants has to be one of the strangest. Sure, we all want solar but it’s not there yet. Hidden forces here would not be a surprise.
Well, lets not forget that Europe was downwind of the worst nuclear accident in world history. https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/nuclearenergy/chernoby...
That sort of event doesn't fade away quickly and definitely influenced energy policy that persists to this day. Thankfully the tide is turning due to safer designs.
An absurd conspiracy theory.
Nuclear power has an LCOE that is 5x the cost of solar and wind. Nobody would build it on cost alone.
The only reason countries build and run nuclear power plants is because it shares supply chain and a skills base with the nuclear military.
Which means they have nukes (France, Russia, US) or they they want to take out an option to one day build a nuke in a hurry just in case for a threat that is usually very obvious (Sweden, Japan, South Korea).
This was clearly recognized when Iran started building nuclear power plants but when Poland suddenly got interested in 2023 ostensibly "because environment" after decades of burning mountains of coal nobody batted an eye.
Solar and wind are intermittent. Grid scale energy storage is not even a thing yet.
That's not much. Projects listed there can't store energy for winter needs.
Ahhhhhhh . . . it's Australia.
Winters here have more sunshine than UK summers.
This data is a year old now: https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/
I wonder where the gulf states are going to end up.
They have tried hard to build economies that aren't just fossil fuel exports. Tourism, trade, finance, luxury living for rich foreigners… but everything they have tried is contingent on peace in the region. I doubt foreigners are looking forward to layovers in Dubai now there are Iranian drones heading their way.
Maybe future travelers will not see two trunkless legs in a desert, but empty condo towers and abandoned super cars still loaded with labubus.
They're done. They export oil/LNG, import food, invest the proceeds in the US companies/treasuries and brand themselves as logistics hubs + safe havens for the global rich. It's all out of the window now.
They also spent decades sending money to the US to buy influence and protection, which instantly vaporized the second a missile was launched their way.
The big story I think is how handily they took out billions of dollars of US radars and that these air defense systems are not up to the task (we actually already knew this from Ukraine, but media worked overtime to ignore this fact). In a way, all this supposedly "superior" US and Israeli tech (at least on the defense side, offense is a different story) has been exposed. I do think focused engineering efforts could close this gap, that was needed already 4 years ago.
It actually works pretty well, considering how much they do shoot down, but if there is enough incoming, some will get through.
> It actually works pretty well
As long as you don't look at the receipts yes, technically it works very well, in every other aspect it's a massive waste of resource and money.
The war in itself? For sure, but if a million dollar rocket saves a billion dollar radar system against a 50.000 drone, it still seems working as intended.
The Israeli missile defense systems have worked amazingly well considering the scale of the threat.
> Maybe future travelers will not see two trunkless legs in a desert, but empty condo towers and abandoned super cars still loaded with labubus.
Maybe they actually will gaze upon it and despair (just not for the reason the original poem said :-))
Presume the reference to trunkless legs is to the Shelly's famous poem Ozymandias (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias)
Well at least they will have much less money to meddle in Africa, I guess.
Yes, what's happening in the Sahel absolutely barbaric and is shamefully swept under the rug in Western media because of the countries sponsoring it.
Some of them will not exist at all in their current form by summer
Ah, it feels so good to sit on the front seat watching WW3 unwrapping slowly, elegantly, deadly.
I might reach my dream life (no work just binge hacking kernels) sooner than I expected. Now I just need to pretend I don’t need money as well.
You might need to pretend that you don’t need energy either!
I’m fasting! No need for energy at all.
That puts you in an energy deficit, but you still need and are using energy. Until your body is decomposed it uses energy (after you die your body is energy for the bacteria decomposing it).
Fasting can use previous/saved energy, but it still needs energy.
Got a wind-up computer, have you?
(Maybe that OLTP project was onto something, after all)
Seriously, might consider buying a few solar panels, but just for camping needs. It’s impossible to setup locally due to regulation and such.
The US about to discover you can't just blindly follow fanatics in religious wars without any consequences.
I mean given that our secretary of defense has a Deus Vult tattoo... and this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran...
I think we might be the fanatics starting a religious war.
I think the parent comment was referring to the same fanatics you are
Pretty sure he was talking about Israel.
Also a gigantic Jerusalem cross tattoo.
Easier said than done, during this week many German regions are on general strike, thus everyone just switched back to their cars, complaining about unions, their power in infrastructure and so on.
Naturally most of those cars are combustion based, because it is still very expensive to buy a new EV, and even used ones are more expensive than new combustion cars, and there is the whole question of how damaged the battery will be anyway.
From what I've read, the immediate effect will likely be worse for CO2 emissions, because the alternative to (liquefied) gas is often coal power. Also, the various inputs that are needed for global manufacturing are also affected, so maybe even renewable tech gets more expensive.
I'm not saying that the dependence on the middle east was good, but I think it's good to keep in mind that this was a pretty stable equilibrium even with the various questionable countries involved until the US initiated a global supply shock without a good reason.
Wonder how much WFH could help. Seems like during covid demand went way down.
WFH and the almost 100% shutdown off airline travel at the beginning of the pandemic resulted in nearly 0 change in CO2 emission and levels in the atmosphere.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
It helped on reducing traffic, spending more time with family, favouring local shops... Why we went back still is a mystery for me. Even if it was "working from a coworking space" or anything that was not the downtown open-space.
I remember reading articles about local politicians insisting companies and governments do return to office for no other reason than to have the workers spend money downtown for lunch. Not even implying it, directly stating it.
Exactly, put AI in the office instead.
Because downtown city centers were missing out on office worker revenue and started giving incentives to companies who brought people back into the office. I 100% believe the reason we went back into the office at all was because of this despite all the talk of 'in-person collaboration.'
I don't have data but I was always under the impression that consumer use of fossil fuels (ie gas) was a drop in the bucket compared to enterprise use of fossil fuels (shipping trucks/boats/planes, private jets, etc).
The whole "reduce your carbon footprint PSA" was just a ruse.
Heavens no! How could we ever afford to be more productive overall? Just think of the effect on corporate real estate prices.
That's true. I wonder if the government might force companies to allow WFH if there are petrol shortages.
They did it during covid so I wouldn't rule it out.
But think of the commercial real estate market?!?! What about the chopped salad slop bowl market?! Dry cleaning?! This would shatter the fabric of our precious society. We need butts in seats. We need to foster open communication and cross functional pollination.
While it could be good to shift to renewable for other reasons, it's naive to assume that nations won't be dependent on others for critical minerals and metals needed to make solar/wind/batteries/etc.
The dependencies needed for the replacement of equipment having a lifetime of many decades are infinitely less dangerous than the dependencies for consumables like fuel.
For critical minerals and metals it is easy to stockpile them to have a buffer sufficient for many years of infrastructure replacement.
Such dependencies may remain a problem during a war, when the infrastructure could be destroyed, but in normal times such dependencies would not be sufficient to enable the kind of blackmailing that can be done with consumables, like food and fuel.
I'm not sure the stockpiling you mention will work the way you propose. We already stockpile oil, yet we still see price shocks. Stockpiling metals can still lead to price shocks due to reluctance to release them and the need to eventually replenish them.
We also stockpile foods and medications, and that doesn't provide price stability.
Yes, but you are missing the critical bit.
Food is a constant need, and you can't exist for long without it.
Sure we need to increase battery sotrage, but in ~5 years time, it'll be maintainance, assuming the correct adoption rate. So yes we will still _need_ batteries, but we don't need a constant supply of new batteries to keep the lights on.
They are, but unlike fossil fuels, those dependencies go down over time (modulo the utility growth that makes demand for everything go up, of course).
If you buy fossil fuel from a country that may not be an ally forever, your demand remains constant (or goes up over time) because you are changing that fuel into a state that cannot be used again.
If you buy, say, lithium, you put that in a battery and in the future, you can get more lithium from the ground but you can also grind up batteries and re-extract it when they fail. Battery ingredients are, generally, not consumable over even medium and long-term scale if you build out the recycling infrastructure to recapture those ingredients.
Yes, the shocks aren't as immediate if you have the infrastructure set up and you are out of the initial adoption phase. Even things like lithium and silver are limited resources, so getting more out of the ground will eventually face scarcity as energy demand has always increased over the long term.
Our company made a 'bet' that energy management, sustainability, clean energy and whatnot would become a big thing. This was around the time of COP26 (2021) where there seemed to be a societal drive for reducing carbon emissions and a general acceptance that climate change was a thing. We employed young and enthusiastic sustainability consultants, we run a successful project to reduce energy consumption in polymer manufacturing, we build product that worked. That part of our business has shut down completely.
Unfortunately governments were reluctant to really get behind regulations that were needed, and the business case for investment in any drive to sustainability did not exist. People lost interest as inflation went up, and other things seemed more important. The market was flagging and Trump's "drill baby drill" was the final nail in the coffin.
The world was _nearly_ there to rapidly accelerate reducing the dependency on fossil fuels on the back of climate change. Instead we went back to fossil fuel cars and built energy-intensive AI data centres. We collectively dropped the ball and one day will look back on it as a missed opportunity.
In a world where peoples home might be taken away because interest go up because oil prices is nuts.
Interest rates change for all sorts of reasons. People who take out variable rate home mortgages are always gambling. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose.
> China has, however, been relatively insulated from the crisis due to its ample emergency oil reserves and high rate of electrification, with EVs representing more than half of its domestic new car sales and its grid more than 50% powered by renewable energy sources. In the U.S., by comparison, EVs are less than 10% of the market, while renewable power is around a quarter of the nation's electricity generation.
My favorite quote from "Studio 60 on the Sunset Street" (an antique show from the late 2000s) is from the CEO of a fictional media conglomerates, coming back from a trip to Macau with disbelief:
"Tell you kids to learn Mandarin."
The USA is either handing the future on a plate to the Chinese Empire ; or acting like a "chaos monkey" in an anti fragile system, giving just enough scares to the rest of the world to get their act together.
Maybe climate change could not do that because of the long timescale and unpalpability of the issues.
Maybe the first few oil shocks were not enough because you could hope for better days.
Maybe market pressure was not enough because incumbents fossil fuel industries could always buy the right élections to set up the right incentives ; and also, people don't want to change.
Maybe the perfect storm will nudge it ?
That, or we'll just have to speak Mandarin. They do that in Firefly, after all..
Paradoxically it could also have the opposite effect if high energy prices lead governments to cut green energy plans.
Europe and the US need to bring manufacturing of EVs, batteries, solar, and relevant components back locally. Use automation to make it more feasible. We need rooftop solar + regional SMRs for a cheap, stable energy supply.
To do so, we need to adapt regulation & deregulate. This needs to happen now. If we continue on like this, we'll decelerate back to the stone age.
Really looks like the spark was there before so that Iran could get attacked at all.
I'm unpacking my electric motorbike[1] and its moped sister[2] from winter storage and preparing them both for a summer in a city in a nation which energy supply is mostly renewables.
Of course, it took a lot of gasoline to get them here, but I sure as heck won't be using much gasoline to put them to solid use clocking up the kilometers, 100 at a time.
Got a few deals on solar panels for the backyard that'll get me completely off the grid for the most part, and from then on it'll be maintenance mode and solar powered travel as priority number one ..
[1] - https://www.blackteamotorbikes.com/
[2] - https://unumotors.com/
Honestly, those who attacked Iran should cover the global increase in energy costs for everyone else. Why do I have to pay more for the orange guy? Instead he benefits with his superrich buddies.
>energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence
That would be the stupidest takeaway
Like 1 year ago, wallstreet bros were being interviewed saying they decided all the green pledges and all that was woke from the pre-trump 2 era, and I haven't heard anything at all about climate change really from any world leader in the last few years. I guess once again, people have their coming to jesus moment when it's far too late.
Although the results are very similar, the motivation of energy independence is quite different that of climate change.
America has ample supplies of natural gas, oil etc. and so doesn't need to turn away from fossil fuels to be energy independent. Whereas in Europe we do as there isn't much natural gas or oil and even the coal that remains is difficult to extract and thus less economical.
Even at that, America is rapidly turning away from oil as wind and solar are so much cheaper. The leaders are putting on the brakes, and the change is uneven - but there is a lot of wind and solar going up in the US even now and it has been happening for 15+years.
> America has ample supplies of natural gas, oil etc. and so doesn't need to turn away from fossil fuels to be energy independent.
In the short to medium term. The natural gas, oil etc. are in fact finite resources created over a tremendously long period of time in pre-history and so once they run out you're done.
You could run nuclear power plants much longer, perhaps even indefinitely, and of course wind and sunlight are renewable, Sol doesn't give a shit what we do, it's going to shine on the planet and cause winds here until long after we're dead. But the dinosaur juice runs out, it's a quick burst and then if you didn't transition too fucking bad game over.
Yeah, exactly. We have a relatively short window of a few centuries, perhaps less, to master nuclear power (perhaps even nuclear fusion), photovoltaic panels, efficient wind turbines (including more complex offshore construction) and deploy them all at scale.
And to do it all before we cook ourselves in greenhouse gases.
I'm rather optimistic about it but it does seem that most people don't fully grasp the importance of such a transition.
lmao seriously this is how leaders lead?
oh, surprise! blowing up oil infrastructure increases oil prices.
shocking news.
meanwhile.. didn't china start selling cars with sodium sulfur batteries?
Anyone has any respect left for US Americans after they elected this? This is so ridiculous at so many levels:
Not US hollywood culture or whatever Americans culturally exported in the past all around the world, but this will forever represent US Americans in my mind. That this is how they overall want to be seen and represented as all around the world, seemingly:
“Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran,” President Trump posted on X. “Unfortunately, Iran did not know this, or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack, and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar’s LNG Gas facility.”
“NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar,” the U.S. president also wrote, proceeding then to threaten to “massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.”
What even is this style of communication and thinking behind it from a leader of the richest country in the world? Is he a child? Who can even be impressed by this... unbelievable. Feels like we're like living in a very dumb, very deadly, reality show.
The thing is that back in 2024 Kamala didn't exactly come across as a much better option, although in hindsight she likely would have been.