Submitted 4 days ago by bluemoon@piefed.social to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
i’ll wager, from an armchair mind you, that this is because decrepeit Scrooges see it as a plus that the people from the regions most affected as “lesser people”, while also holding on to money and ensuring states militarize to defend that money from increasingly pissed of people.
so TLDR ig racist old dudes appreciating what fascism does for ‘em.
this is just an armchair assessment fron me though. why is fossil fuel still being used?
Fun fact: Shell patented tons of alternatives to fossil fuel and then shelved them.
Sauce: worked there.
Just so we're clear, that's Royal Dutch Shell industries, of very progressive, social democracy Netherlands, right?
fuck i wanna hear abt ‘em
two big reasons:
we don’t have replacement energy sources at scale (this is of course party caused by inflated demand eg. data centers, always-on electronics)
energy production is heavily subsidized in that so-called external costs are paid by the public instead of the companies
Until we can both reduce demand and increase supply, while also making corporations pay the cost of the pollution they produce, we’re stuck with this shit.
Because it’s cheap and easy to produce. Biofuels compete with food and forests. Not sure how much waste products can cover. Either way the biodiesel is about twice the price of the regular stuff here and has a lower tax rate than regular diesel (~43% tax rate)
It has a very high energy density. First Google result approx 10x that of batteries in EVs.
All the infrastructure is already built. EVs are becoming better and better options but the grid needs to be upgraded and the generation capacity increased.
Cheap , fairly-easy, portable, storable source of energy, and the current supply chains are very high capacity.
Lots of well understood methods and machines to use it. An oil tanker on sea or land moves a hell of a lot of energy to wherever people want it.
Population keeps growing. No way are all of those people going to leave that stuff in the ground, if "we" don't take the cheap stuff, "they" will. So it becomes like a race to find and extract it all.
Even if you don't want it personally, someone in your economy or military will be better off for it. Some people will go looking for it - and someone'll get rich if they find it.
Because the fossil fuel companies are breathtakingly rich and willing to share that wealth with politicians in return for policy decisions that favour fossil fuel companies.
See also “lobbying”, “bribery”, and “corruption”.
I get why you would say this, but it’s an oversimplification to the point of being completely wrong.
Fossil fuels have an absurd energy density. They’re just really hard to beat. Modern batteries and liquid hydrogen don’t even come close. Pair that with the fact that we’ve spent a couple hundred years optimising the steam- and internal combustion engines, compared to some decades (in practice) for electric-based stuff, and you start seeing why fossil fuels are so hard to push of the top of the hill.
Until very recently all alternatives were pretty much worse under every conceivable performance metric. There’s a reason electric planes are still in the prototype phase. It’s just technically really really hard to even get close to jet fuel and combustion engines.
Completely wrong? Let me test my understanding. You’re claiming that fossil fuel companies are not breathtakingly rich and willing to share that wealth with politicians in return for policy decisions that favour fossil fuel companies?
There are so many factors playing into this. Also, I don’t want you to think this post is suggesting we should give up on alternatives, because that is not my belief. We need to transition to something, and really we should have started this process much earlier. This is more to illustrate why it is a slow process.
Our habits need to drastically change as a society. Fossil Fuels are not the only problem we need to change, as an example, industrial farming is also pretty catastrophically bad for the environment (as we are currently doing it). We need to consume less (both power and stuff), we need to travel less, we need to eat less meat, and we need world governments on board for these changes in a meaningful and peaceful way. Or we need someone to invent a way for us all to survive the problem or reverse it without us changing a damn thing, but that sounds like magic.
I believe two reasons: first, political will. Fossil fuel companies are large and entrenched, and have lots of experience lobbying governments. They block things like carbon taxes.
Second, a strange sort of game theory where each player (each country) thinks “My individual contributions to greenhouse gasses are just a small part of the total. They won’t cause global catastrophe. Just an incremental increase in the existing catastrophe. The incremental harm won’t fall directly on me; it will be divided among many countries. If continuing to use fossil fuels provides some small economic advantage, it outweighs the portion of the harms that will land on me. As for the harms I experience from other countries’ carbon emissions, there’s nothing I can do to prevent them.”
Because money obviously, but not the way you seem to think.
For the last 150 years, there’s been loads of the stuff more or less lying around. It doesn’t require much effort to bring to a usable state, and a cup full can move you, your wife and kids, your dog, and your car to the top of that hill in the distance.
Until very, very recently that’s been a pretty unbeatable deal.
Now we’re just building out the infrastructure and developing the maintenance skills. We’re in the midst of a transition.
Now that you mention it, why don’t we farm whales for oil
And now I wish for somebody to include this into their fictional universe. If any proffesional writer reads this, pay attention!
The mix of actual reasonable answers and "everyone here despises capitalism, so I'll just blame it on conspiracies involving the rich" answers is quite interesting.
The simplest answer is that almost everyone is motivated by what they can get out of a thing, and petroleum is cheaper than the alternatives. The infrastructure is already in place, and the downsides (including climate change) are paid for by everyone, not just the producers and biggest consumers.
Another factor, albeit a smaller one, is that not everyone wants to move away from them. I have a friend who loves his classic cars and feels threatened by the thought that alternative methods would take away his biggest joy in life. There is also the practicality aspect - I don’t drive but if I were to buy an electric car I have no idea where I would charge it, there’s not that much of an infrastructure for it that I’ve seen near me.
Because we don’t need to generate the energy, therefore it’s got a cost advantage, even though the true cost of it is that it contributes massively to climate problems.
That is: batteries must be charged, the plants to make biofuels must absorb solar energy for at least half a year to have energy present, the solar panels to power the grid must sit and soak up that energy, generators must be physically turned for hydro.
the only things that have pre-existing energy that we just “tap for free” are oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
the best track for us to go on is to go for 3rd or 4th gen nuclear, and sodium ion batteries, imo. Solar is a close second. Hydro would be up there, but it’s too disruptive ecologically.
I wouldn’t attach myself to any particular battery tech - the field is innovating too rapidly.
Solar and nuclear can go hand in hand. Solar is great because the amout of potential harvestable power is massive - the trick is producing panels, connecting them to the grid, transmission, load balancing, and storage.
Wind is nice right now, as it is a relatively untapped resource. But we’ll run out of windy places far faster than sunny places.
Hydro is ecologically destructive, but has an even bigger problem, which is that we have already picked a lot of the low hanging fruit. Good locations for dams are difficult to find, and we’ve already found most of them and dammed many of them. We would rapidly face diminishing returns. Plus, silt is always a looming problem.
Though, the real solution is to simply tax carbon.
Agreed all around, with one caveat.
On chemistry - Sodium Ion is a pretty solid bet for many reasons - material availability, energy density by weight, longevity (for some chemistries - others are only comparable to lithium), low-temperature operation for charge and discharge, cost, power (charge and discharge speed)… Also, it’s ecologically sound, in comparison with any other battery tech out there currently, and it’s at the beginning of it’s innovation arc. Also, it’s a tech heavily invested in by China, which has already spurred competition in other countries.
I’ll be attaching myself to that chemistry here in the next couple years to the tune of what I expect to be about ~$8k for about 50kwh of battery, as I’ll need a bank of them for my place soon that can handle quite a few days without sunlight while running a modest workshop and basic home needs. I might need to go larger than that, but… …energy storage isn’t cheap, and I can add to at at any time, unlike with lead acid storage.
These are misconceptions, or rather a bit out of date.
Wind and solar are much cheaper than fossil fuels now. Significantly cheaper.
And is an old school investment bank presenting this information.
Even for running a car, using solar-produced electricity is a fraction of the cost of gasoline; gas is 3-5x more expensive.
And nuclear is not anywhere near as cheap as wind or solar unfortunately, although we haven’t put much effort into making it more efficient for a few decades now so that might change.
Solar is, on a consumer level, possibly more cheap than gas for a car now, in many areas. But more is actually done with oil->gasoline framework, including plastics and chemicals which would all need to be developed into new processes. I don’t disagree that we need to replace these, but oil is literally free energy, and it’s a substance with a lot of uses.
And that fact is one of the big reasons that oil is so hard to compete with - it is literally energy we do not have to generate. All other forms of energy we must actually capture the natural energy flow. In oil, it has already been captured - we’re burning biomatter from years long gone. That’s what makes it hard to compete with. Although, the competition is getting better, and that’s good.
as far as the costs for a vehicle go - I actually live on solar, with a very cost effective system at $25k, 14kw.
If I had an electric car and drove 15k miles per year, I’d need up that system by 11kw at least. That’s adding about $20k to that system.
Where I am, gas is cheaper tha than $3/gallon, but let’s say it’s $3/gallon.
at 30mpg gasoline, that’s about $1500. At 30mpge, with my lower-than-average system costs, that’s $2000. …and that’s not including maintenance and repair to that system.
Sure, there are a ton of other factors to take into account, both for and against. But electric is no clear winner from a personal-benefit perspective - particularly when you take cold weather into account for lithium batteries, and the inability to resolve an out-of-fuel situation easily. Sure, there are services. …maybe. depending where you are. But, it’s far from ideal for a lot of people.
anyways - no, nuclear is definitely not as cheap, but it provides baseline power, which is critical. only alternatives there are fossil fuels, geothermal, and hydro. But the main draw for 3rd and 4th gen nuclear is how low-impact and environmentally friendly it can be, while still providing base load power.
Downvoted for ageism.
sorry. there’s youngsters indulging in burning fossil fuel rn too
More importantly, the evil people running the petroleum industry are in fact old, but that is not why they are evil.
Evil people in positions of power tend to be old because a) it takes time to accumulate power, and b) folks with power tend to keep it till they’re dead. It’s just statistics - it doesn’t mean oldness causes evil.
I tried to parse what you wrote, but I honestly can’t make any sense of it.
Switching to something new usually inherently costs money. (Capital expense) If you are scraping by, you can’t afford another $500-$1000 a month car payment for a new car.
The option to convert an older already paid for internal combustion vehicle basically requires another $10k minimum, not including any regulatory stuff and that would be parts cost alone, no labor. Add to that regulatory/local registration issues with the diy route and you basically bake continued demand for fossil fuels into the system.
You can mitigate some of that by doing public transportation but you have to have a functional system AND an public that wants to use it.
This basically means that a large portion of the population who won’t/can’t buy new EVs. Is stuck using gas vehicles until you get lower cost used EVs. The problem there is that they are expensive to repair and NOT diy friendly. Add to that battery deg and lower reliability (in general see used teslas) and people are scared to buy used EVs.
Its a pricing problem that we have not gotten around yet. The subsidies helped but weren’t enough to get more people in. Couple that with a bad economic situation where people are holding onto their older stuff for longer and you basically get only progress on the higher income side while lower income brackets have to still use their gas vehicles which means the producers keep producing and supplying to a captive market.
Because Standard Oil, Firestone and General Motors lobbied against public transportation, in the USA, so they could sell more cars.
Yeah, I was mostly addressing the immediate reason. The historical ones are way more complex as you mentioned. Now, you have to overcome suburban sprawl and hostile urban development where everything is spread out, requiring a car to use as a direct result of our past shitty choices/lobbying efforts.
We can’t replace it fully.
We can replace it with cars. We can replace it with trains as well, but electrified track is more expensive than just plopping a diesel engine there and filling her up. Track for that is just steel+concrete and rocks and stuff.
We can not replace it with air planes, helicopters, rockets. At all. We could reduce air travel and stuff like fighter jets.
We can also not replace it for cargo ships. And that’s pretty bad news. Luckily ships are crazy efficient, so the actual CO2 and other pollution per ton and kilometer is very very low. If you get a delivery, that delivery comes in a fossil fuel truck to your doorstep, that truck will emit more CO2 than the ship will, going either from china to Rotterdam or the US westcoast. And also global transportation is probably more than necessary.
Anyway, the big problem we can solve are cars and planes.
Cargo ships could be replaced with nuclear. It would also be a significant gain as they are a significant source of pollution beyond CO2.
Theoretically yes, but in practice nuclear is very complicated technology that requires a lot training, expertise, care, maintenance and oversight.
Putting it into military ships and ice breaking ships makes sense because of their unique circumstances.
With cargo ships there are a lot of additional complicating factors: cargo ships regularly break and sink. Not a lot, but frequently enough that it is a legitimate concern. We already have trouble regulating regular cargo ships sea-worthiness and issues like environmental pollution through ship breaking, notably in india. That’s another issue btw…
The biggest problem is the sheer number of cargo ships. Any risk of an accident gets multiplied by that.
You can browse the wiki page on nuclear propulsion. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion (btw, if it was economic to do it they would have done it already) It’s “obvious” that the number of ships with nuclear propulsion are in the low hundreds. Meanwhile we have more than 100.000 merchant ships in operation at the moment. www.ener8.com/merchant-fleet-infographic-2023/
Operating “a few” ships safely is one thing, doing it with literally hundreds of thousands is something completely different.
I don’t think that’s feasible. Imagine for-profit corporations being responsible for nuclear reactors floating around in international waters. I don’t trust them with diesel certainly not nuclear.
It’s easy to underestimate the maintenance requirements. Australia, UK, and US just signed a treaty to develop and produce nuclear subs. It’s a big deal. It’s going to take many decades and 100s of billions of dollars before UK and Aus have the capability to build and maintain nuclear subs.
You are correct.
Agriculture, shipping, and power generation together dwarf the petroleum used by road vehicles.
What is the alternative? In France electric cars are expensive, and I don’t see chargers around me.
To be fair, that’s because the fossil fuel lobby does everything to prevent alternatives.
And it takes time for people to transition. Think about a major corporation. If they want to roll out a new piece of software, that is a three-year commitment, minimum, just to get people to spend most of their water cooler time talking about how much they hate the new software.
That is extra IT hours spent on training users over and over and over again on how to use the new software.
And after three years, somebody will step in and say, “Hey, why don’t we try software Y, It’s better than the software that we just rolled out”, which queues a new three-year software rollout cycle.
Extrapolate that out to 8 billion human beings, well over 2 billion of which drive vehicles or utilize personal transport systems that are internal combustion engine powered, and you’ll begin to get an idea of how difficult it is to transition everyone away from fossil fuels.
The good news is that it is happening, and barring major accidents, we will probably get most of the way there during our lifetimes.
Because it is somewhat competitive economically in certain use cases and a ton of existing infrastructure was already built to use various fossil fuels.
The switch to non-fossil fuels was going to take at least a generation in most developed countries since you need to build out electricity generation and storage.
besides cars mass energy storage isnt available for all countries yet, so you need a way to balance grids. green energy resources doesnt have the ramp up required when energy usage spikes(e.g people get back from work). we dont suddenly put out more sun, make faster rivers or purposely make stronger winds for power. you balance the spike with the dirtier energy. so you often run into a situation where once green, a majority of your energy can be green, but you always have to reserve space for spike usage.
MantisToboggon@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It has a higher energy density than most other substances. I think it’s like double lithium ion batteries.
Limonene@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Renewable liquid fuels have the same energy density.
db2@lemmy.world 4 days ago
But a higher cost to produce at volume.
If you mean corn ethanol it doesn’t have the same kick.
We should just make everyone use hydrazine and let nature do its thing. 😆
Rhaedas@fedia.io 4 days ago
Than gasoline or diesel? No, they don't. Wikipedia has a large chart on their article for energy density of various sources. Some things are harder to directly compare with each other, but diesel has 38 MJ/L, with jet fuel/kerosene and gasoline at 36/35. Adding ethanol dilutes the energy output some, while pure ethanol is 24. It's still a potent source (but with its own costs and effects that need to be included in the net equation). Chemically petroleum simply has more bonds to break and get energy from.
MantisToboggon@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Like what?