Past oil crises forced countries to cut fuel use and pay high prices, but now falling prices of clean tech offer another solution.
For context, China just stopped exporting gasoline and diesel
How Fossil Fuel Disruptions Lead to Booms in Solar and Batteries
Submitted 1 day ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to energy@slrpnk.net
eleitl@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
News flash: you need fossil fuels to create and maintain renewable infrastructure.
JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 17 hours ago
Much like how when automobiles were new, you could prove they weren’t actually viable because you still needed horse carts to haul the iron ore, and the coal to smelt it from the mines. The idea that someday the entire fleet of mining and transportation equipment would use internal combustion engines seemed quite impossible.
Probably there’s no way to transition to electric mining equipment, electric smelters, electric battery recycling facilities, and electric transport fleets.
Some would call it a bootstrap problem but it’s possible you’re right and there’s no way to transition from one suite of existing technologies to a new, cheaper one.
eleitl@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
We know if fundamentally feasible, photosynthetic organisms can do it with just local resources, with reasonable replication rate and some excess sufficient to sustain the global ecosystem.
However, we don’t know how to do that, and, worse, we have stopped pursuing that development route. Some dream that we’ll get general artificial intelligence Real Soon Now which can bootstrap molecular nanotechnology in a short time frame that we have left.
Could happen, but that probability is pretty damn low.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
Only because we choose to do that.
eleitl@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
No, while biology (self-rep ISRU with mostly CHNOPS) shows it’s feasible, it’s a hard engineering problem – which is not even on our radars yet. And the hour is very, very late indeed.
silence7@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
That’s changing as broader electrification takes hold, and even today, it takes a lot less fossil fuels than just running directly on burning stuff
eleitl@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
It’s not changing, look at the industrial fabrication and supply chain for solar PV and wind. None of that is powered by renewable electricity.
Renewable infra are a fossil multiplier (but not by much), but the total fraction of fossil in primary energy use is effectively constant, because use of fossil fuels is also increasing.