i think you're missing something key - adam tooze is using the work of fressoz, barak, not to say that we will use what is most efficient but instead to argue that somethign deeply radical and new is required if we want to break with this historical pattern - and that if something deeply radical or new is to happen it must primarily take place in china. if you read tooze on the energy transition and think that what he is advocating for throwing your hands up then you misunderstand both him and the scale of the planetary emergency
Let me reinforce what I already said…...Its clear that electrical energy systems will move very slowly from coal to natural gas and eventually to nuclear. Its also clear that so called renewables just wont scale and they have unhelpful supply chains to be useful and will remain unreliable and a foolish approach in the long term once the investment feeding frenzy dries up.
Nuclear once focused upon offers the only solution that has on grid merit.
Mobile power sources will be fossil fuels for a long time with the long future chance to localize the use of green hydrogen...... But a long way off.
All of this journey is predicated on lowest cost economics as prosperity will always come first and the notion of a climate emergency is fast subsiding as scientists start to convince each other that they have been subjugated by dangerous panic politics.
Its very clear already that we don’t have a climate emergency, but we need to better manage and adapt to weather patterns and a slowly naturally warming climate.
No idea what you've been reading but solar PV scales very well. That's why there's the whole debate about China 'dumping' cheap capacity on the world market - solar cell manufacturing can achieve massive economies of scale. Even with batteries further behind on the Great Cheapening than cells, the combined cost of PV + storage is already within striking distance of coal, gas and nuclear in multiple regions and expected to keep dropping.
So many other things wrong with the whole renewables plan... anyway its not going to continue with the new western leaderships.... The last thing we need is to be dependent on China.... We need to spend our wealth on far better things.
It’s rather simple. Given our Paleolithic brains, we will hew to the imaginary stories we make up be they economic, political or religious despite any and all disconnect with reality. We are too numerous, too clever and too greedy. But not wise in any sense of the word. Humanity is in deep ecological overshoot. Destabilization of our once salubrious climate is only one symptom of this predicament. Like all societies who destroy their habitats, we are headed for near term civilization collapse. Total extinction might take a bit longer.
Important view which are not popular on the ecological left - which is where I am - but it means that the transition in time - and we are already way too late given this year's "butcher's bill" in just the us of $450 billion and mounting - is going to depend on energy patterns in China, Russia, India, Iran and the Middle East. I'm sorry to say: "we're cooked."
It’s pretty easy to draw the conclusion from this that Western climate policy simply doesn’t matter, we can stick to fossil fuels and let Asia, ie China, do the transitioning. As somebody who believes in climate action in my country (Canada), I would love an explanation of why that view is wrong
Smaller western countries can still lead on innovation and implementation. Germany initiated the global solar revolution. Canada could lean in CCS, or cleaner battery metal mining…
perhaps the transition will come some day, 10-20 years down the road, China leading the way, but in terms of climate disruption if not worse, we're far too late to fend off perhaps catastrophic costs of the disruptions, the bill in just the us for the hurricanes and calif fires so far this year over 450 billion.
Stick with facts.... the cost per GDP of weather related costs continue to fall and its very clear that poor infrastructure management is more to blame than anything to do with climate that drives any need to change the energy supply.
ok, cost of climate disasters to current federal budgets, leaving out money allocated for them...how many prisoners or illegal immigrants does it take to clear the "undergrowth" (infrastructure!) from just LA County? Whole state of CA? Western fire prone West? 100,000 200,000, how many work days? Tools, equipment, food and lodging? OK, it is clear politically that the rising severity and therefore cost of climate disruption will not so far alter the economic regime in any significant way: business leaders and investors are in charge, and they have been since Dr. James Hansen testified in Congress in 1988-89, and had his testimony censored. "All Power to the Private Sector" to be followed by "All Liability" as well?
I see plenty of funds wasted on climate mitigation that can be re-directed at climate adaption including areas with extreme weather events or marginal weather stability. All it needs are better and more common-sense policies.
Hansen is crook… his hockey stick lies should have banned him from practicing in any scientific capacity… any publication with his name on it is questionable.
I strongly suspect, sir that your call for "common sense" will be drowned by the intensity of the dominant business ideology in the West, to oversimplify, since Reagan, to denigrate the state and all its remedial actions (except tax breaks for the already far too wealthy) while ignoring the impact of "All Power to the Private Sector" has had on the working classes and lower middle classes, the constant change having the remedy from your side - "Deal with It" - Migrate to where the jobs are (Oops, forgive me for wading into the contradictions) and finally, the conservative Christian doctrine that the market now is the arbiter of moral merit: if your poor, it's your fault and if you are rich you "earned it"...all aided and abetted by the attack on the humanities which I fully admit the psychologically oriented left and feminism have greatly abetted...with exceptions like Nancy Brown and Ms. Fraser.
Trump has done a great job of directing public ire for about 51% and change of the public to those people and forces who, which, don't control private investment, the real driver, for better or worse for the things we like and don't like. And who could not, would not organize a successful movement to stabilize the climate. They will have to call on all their marketing skills (and power) to direct attention not from the root causes of the intensified climate disruptions (fires, floods, hurricanes) but to the secondary and tertiary clumsiness in dealing with what they have "authorized."
I would think that on the basis of the oil tar sands alone Canada is a huge carbon contributor; add in the forests and destruction of the boreal forests, and Naomi Klein notwithstanding, and I admire her, Canada is a hugely destructive climate disruptor, salved only by its moderate scale compared to China/India/Indonesia.
The IEA one is better as adopts the "substitution method".
Correctly adjusting for primary energy losses revises non-fossil generation up by 2.5x. This shows the US and China both growing solar + wind from 0-1% in 2010 to 7-8% of total energy consumption in 2023. That's clearly not enough but more than "barely made a dent".
As described in many previous chartbooks, China will hit 1TW installed solar this year and should scale to multiple TWs in the next few decades using their even faster expanding solar manuacturing capacity. Then we'll see the real dent!
You could argue that China has reached "peak" manufacturing as export driven growth is being punished (or will be punished) by world tariff restructuring. The surplus production being exported will need to be transitioned to domestic consumption to avoid a manufacturing slump. The financing of this shift to domestic will affect currency values in China further adding pressure on the Chinese to consume more.
Can the Chinese consumer earn enough to replicate the US consumer economy? So has the peak has been reached in manufacturing and energy use?
The US was able to shift from coal due to huge natural gas supply from fracking but the Chinese cannot do this (I think) as exported LNG is prohibitively expensive vis-a-vis coal and I don't think the Chinese have huge energy resources (it imports huge amounts of coal from Australia).
So will there be a transition to renewables and storage in China and hope for climate action?
High coal prices mean that most coal plants in China are operating at a loss. In 2018, almost 50% had a net financial loss.² Things have only gotten worse: data from the China Electricity Council suggests that more than half of its large coal firms made a loss in the first half of 2022.
The economics of coal plants are only set to get harder. China is building huge quantities of solar and wind, which are essentially free to run once they’re installed. As renewables push down the cost of energy, coal will become less and less profitable.
China is offering ‘capacity payments’ to power plants to keep them online. This provides plants with a source of income even when they’re not being used. Some project that by the end of the decade many coal plants will be making more money from not running than actually producing power. This seems credible if we look at the tumbling capacity factors expected from S&P over the next few decades.
This is quite enlightening. 19th century thermodynamics is too clumsy to explain the dilemma of 21st century political systems which now must be made to switch energy sources all at once but do not have anything like the CCP to lead them.
The tone of this article seems overly pessimistic. Adding demand trajectories across countries in very different stages of development hides more than it clarifies. The combined fact of 1. China’s unrivaled capital mobilization capability and 2. Some smaller countries substantial renewable-driven decarbonization (e.g., danmark -43% from 1990) shows that it is possible. China in particular is ahead of its stated 2060 zero emission target and could certainly achieve this irrespective of economic development. Unless a Trump induced climate defeatism takes hold….
For the first time I am deeply unimpressed by the choice of charts and comparisons of different types of display (one per capita, another aggregated and a third unrelated to renewables at all). Above all it doesn’t do what it claims (falsifying the two-step transition scenario). Very disappointed by this.
Thanks for clarifying how complex the energy transition will be. We have such a great distance to go for renewables to greatly reduce CO2 emissions.
Not to be picayune, but as a physicist I must point out that energy is not a universal force but can produce the ability to do work. Energy can produce a force that by acting through a distance can accomplish work.
Heat energy can cause a gas pressure to increase to produce a force that can do work if it pushes a piston. Etc.
E = F x d = W
Energy need not produce a force, however. The chemical energy in coal only produces a force when combusted to expand a gas or boil water in closed container. And so on.
we're cooked
Bottom line.... we will use what is most effective and least cost without much constraints.
i think you're missing something key - adam tooze is using the work of fressoz, barak, not to say that we will use what is most efficient but instead to argue that somethign deeply radical and new is required if we want to break with this historical pattern - and that if something deeply radical or new is to happen it must primarily take place in china. if you read tooze on the energy transition and think that what he is advocating for throwing your hands up then you misunderstand both him and the scale of the planetary emergency
Let me reinforce what I already said…...Its clear that electrical energy systems will move very slowly from coal to natural gas and eventually to nuclear. Its also clear that so called renewables just wont scale and they have unhelpful supply chains to be useful and will remain unreliable and a foolish approach in the long term once the investment feeding frenzy dries up.
Nuclear once focused upon offers the only solution that has on grid merit.
Mobile power sources will be fossil fuels for a long time with the long future chance to localize the use of green hydrogen...... But a long way off.
All of this journey is predicated on lowest cost economics as prosperity will always come first and the notion of a climate emergency is fast subsiding as scientists start to convince each other that they have been subjugated by dangerous panic politics.
Its very clear already that we don’t have a climate emergency, but we need to better manage and adapt to weather patterns and a slowly naturally warming climate.
why do you even read tooze? lol
Do you seriously only read people who you agree with?
Have you no curiosity about other opinions?
for a good laugh at the unreality.
No idea what you've been reading but solar PV scales very well. That's why there's the whole debate about China 'dumping' cheap capacity on the world market - solar cell manufacturing can achieve massive economies of scale. Even with batteries further behind on the Great Cheapening than cells, the combined cost of PV + storage is already within striking distance of coal, gas and nuclear in multiple regions and expected to keep dropping.
Nonsense.. you are in dream land.. the mining supply chain along will not scale... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrNdJAZ75h4
So many other things wrong with the whole renewables plan... anyway its not going to continue with the new western leaderships.... The last thing we need is to be dependent on China.... We need to spend our wealth on far better things.
Obviously, he is disagreeing with Tooze.
And there are far better alternatives to either the Green Energy transition and “throwing your hands up.”
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/there-is-a-better-alternative-to
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/a-simple-and-cost-effective-plan
Forget it. There are way too many human beings. It’s not going to work out.
It’s rather simple. Given our Paleolithic brains, we will hew to the imaginary stories we make up be they economic, political or religious despite any and all disconnect with reality. We are too numerous, too clever and too greedy. But not wise in any sense of the word. Humanity is in deep ecological overshoot. Destabilization of our once salubrious climate is only one symptom of this predicament. Like all societies who destroy their habitats, we are headed for near term civilization collapse. Total extinction might take a bit longer.
Important view which are not popular on the ecological left - which is where I am - but it means that the transition in time - and we are already way too late given this year's "butcher's bill" in just the us of $450 billion and mounting - is going to depend on energy patterns in China, Russia, India, Iran and the Middle East. I'm sorry to say: "we're cooked."
It’s pretty easy to draw the conclusion from this that Western climate policy simply doesn’t matter, we can stick to fossil fuels and let Asia, ie China, do the transitioning. As somebody who believes in climate action in my country (Canada), I would love an explanation of why that view is wrong
Smaller western countries can still lead on innovation and implementation. Germany initiated the global solar revolution. Canada could lean in CCS, or cleaner battery metal mining…
perhaps the transition will come some day, 10-20 years down the road, China leading the way, but in terms of climate disruption if not worse, we're far too late to fend off perhaps catastrophic costs of the disruptions, the bill in just the us for the hurricanes and calif fires so far this year over 450 billion.
Stick with facts.... the cost per GDP of weather related costs continue to fall and its very clear that poor infrastructure management is more to blame than anything to do with climate that drives any need to change the energy supply.
ok, cost of climate disasters to current federal budgets, leaving out money allocated for them...how many prisoners or illegal immigrants does it take to clear the "undergrowth" (infrastructure!) from just LA County? Whole state of CA? Western fire prone West? 100,000 200,000, how many work days? Tools, equipment, food and lodging? OK, it is clear politically that the rising severity and therefore cost of climate disruption will not so far alter the economic regime in any significant way: business leaders and investors are in charge, and they have been since Dr. James Hansen testified in Congress in 1988-89, and had his testimony censored. "All Power to the Private Sector" to be followed by "All Liability" as well?
I see plenty of funds wasted on climate mitigation that can be re-directed at climate adaption including areas with extreme weather events or marginal weather stability. All it needs are better and more common-sense policies.
Hansen is crook… his hockey stick lies should have banned him from practicing in any scientific capacity… any publication with his name on it is questionable.
I strongly suspect, sir that your call for "common sense" will be drowned by the intensity of the dominant business ideology in the West, to oversimplify, since Reagan, to denigrate the state and all its remedial actions (except tax breaks for the already far too wealthy) while ignoring the impact of "All Power to the Private Sector" has had on the working classes and lower middle classes, the constant change having the remedy from your side - "Deal with It" - Migrate to where the jobs are (Oops, forgive me for wading into the contradictions) and finally, the conservative Christian doctrine that the market now is the arbiter of moral merit: if your poor, it's your fault and if you are rich you "earned it"...all aided and abetted by the attack on the humanities which I fully admit the psychologically oriented left and feminism have greatly abetted...with exceptions like Nancy Brown and Ms. Fraser.
Trump has done a great job of directing public ire for about 51% and change of the public to those people and forces who, which, don't control private investment, the real driver, for better or worse for the things we like and don't like. And who could not, would not organize a successful movement to stabilize the climate. They will have to call on all their marketing skills (and power) to direct attention not from the root causes of the intensified climate disruptions (fires, floods, hurricanes) but to the secondary and tertiary clumsiness in dealing with what they have "authorized."
I don t see any problem in halting funding on Climate mitigation and realigning with focused adaption... do you?
The people have voted.. get over it.
Wait until you find out that climate adaptation means lots of people like me killing lots of people like you in the climate wars ...
A Vivid imagination for sure :-)
I would think that on the basis of the oil tar sands alone Canada is a huge carbon contributor; add in the forests and destruction of the boreal forests, and Naomi Klein notwithstanding, and I admire her, Canada is a hugely destructive climate disruptor, salved only by its moderate scale compared to China/India/Indonesia.
I think some of this is "transitions can be seen on a country level but not global".
Unfortunately the US graphs from Suits, Matteson, Moyer 2020 aren't helpful as they show primary energy, which falls for the "primary energy fallacy" (https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-net-zero-will-be-harder-than-you-think-and-easier-part-ii-easier/).
The IEA one is better as adopts the "substitution method".
Correctly adjusting for primary energy losses revises non-fossil generation up by 2.5x. This shows the US and China both growing solar + wind from 0-1% in 2010 to 7-8% of total energy consumption in 2023. That's clearly not enough but more than "barely made a dent".
As described in many previous chartbooks, China will hit 1TW installed solar this year and should scale to multiple TWs in the next few decades using their even faster expanding solar manuacturing capacity. Then we'll see the real dent!
Yes, solar and wind is growing, but the the absolute growth of fossil fuels is far bigger.
Between 2010 and 2023 all fossil fuels combined added 18,595 TWh of energy, which was four times all Green energy sources combined (4615 TWh).
Netzero by 2050 gets further away with each passing year.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/now-greens-want-to-spend-6-8-trillion
You could argue that China has reached "peak" manufacturing as export driven growth is being punished (or will be punished) by world tariff restructuring. The surplus production being exported will need to be transitioned to domestic consumption to avoid a manufacturing slump. The financing of this shift to domestic will affect currency values in China further adding pressure on the Chinese to consume more.
Can the Chinese consumer earn enough to replicate the US consumer economy? So has the peak has been reached in manufacturing and energy use?
The US was able to shift from coal due to huge natural gas supply from fracking but the Chinese cannot do this (I think) as exported LNG is prohibitively expensive vis-a-vis coal and I don't think the Chinese have huge energy resources (it imports huge amounts of coal from Australia).
So will there be a transition to renewables and storage in China and hope for climate action?
Russian and Mongolian natural gas are a thing. Might take a while, but the pipelines to China will be built.
From Hannah Ritchie:
High coal prices mean that most coal plants in China are operating at a loss. In 2018, almost 50% had a net financial loss.² Things have only gotten worse: data from the China Electricity Council suggests that more than half of its large coal firms made a loss in the first half of 2022.
The economics of coal plants are only set to get harder. China is building huge quantities of solar and wind, which are essentially free to run once they’re installed. As renewables push down the cost of energy, coal will become less and less profitable.
China is offering ‘capacity payments’ to power plants to keep them online. This provides plants with a source of income even when they’re not being used. Some project that by the end of the decade many coal plants will be making more money from not running than actually producing power. This seems credible if we look at the tumbling capacity factors expected from S&P over the next few decades.
Could you address this counter perspective? https://knowledge.energyinst.org/new-energy-world/article?id=139309
This is quite enlightening. 19th century thermodynamics is too clumsy to explain the dilemma of 21st century political systems which now must be made to switch energy sources all at once but do not have anything like the CCP to lead them.
The tone of this article seems overly pessimistic. Adding demand trajectories across countries in very different stages of development hides more than it clarifies. The combined fact of 1. China’s unrivaled capital mobilization capability and 2. Some smaller countries substantial renewable-driven decarbonization (e.g., danmark -43% from 1990) shows that it is possible. China in particular is ahead of its stated 2060 zero emission target and could certainly achieve this irrespective of economic development. Unless a Trump induced climate defeatism takes hold….
For the first time I am deeply unimpressed by the choice of charts and comparisons of different types of display (one per capita, another aggregated and a third unrelated to renewables at all). Above all it doesn’t do what it claims (falsifying the two-step transition scenario). Very disappointed by this.
Thanks for clarifying how complex the energy transition will be. We have such a great distance to go for renewables to greatly reduce CO2 emissions.
Not to be picayune, but as a physicist I must point out that energy is not a universal force but can produce the ability to do work. Energy can produce a force that by acting through a distance can accomplish work.
Heat energy can cause a gas pressure to increase to produce a force that can do work if it pushes a piston. Etc.
E = F x d = W
Energy need not produce a force, however. The chemical energy in coal only produces a force when combusted to expand a gas or boil water in closed container. And so on.