this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Fossil fuels could become cheaper and more abundant, says IEA (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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This is why cheaply rolling out renewables isn't enough — it's going to take having a supply constraint of some sort on fossil fuels as well

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Fossil fuel has actually pretty high fixed production costs. The best example was Texan oil going negative during covid. So with a fast deployment of renewables replacing fossil fuels, we will see periods of fossil fuels being cheap, as renewables replaced enough of them to see oversupply. However low prices also force production to be cut, partly by companies going bankrupt. Once enough has been cut prices are going up again.

Right now we see a number of OPEC+ countries breaking production limits. Namely Russia, Iraq and Kazakhstan. The Saudis see Iran heading towards a war with Israel and the Saudis want to hurt Iran. So the Saudis threaten increased oil production to hurt Iran's economy. That would also hurt fracking producers in the US, which would also benefit the Saudis.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

remove the subsidies and this should fix itself.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It probably takes more than that; for example, when whale oil become uncompetitive for lighting because kerosene was cheaper, the whalers started turning it into margarine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

That could be fine in the sense that if its not burning it that is better. Although we don't need more plastics for sure.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

This is a catastrophe

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

It's a nightmare. No amount of good can unmake this economic demon

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

This is expected. Oil prize has been on the decline for some time. I didn't expect demand to erode this fast, though. which I guess is kinda a good thing.

The only way forward is for renewables to become even cheaper that fossils. Which can be done. The EUs fit-for-55 will bring down energy prizes. Summertime we will see really low electricity prizes the comming decade in Europe because of this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Such is the nature of market prices, if nobody uses it then the lack of demand drops the price. Eventually it gets low enough to make it not worth extracting and either someone stockpiles it for 'reasons' or it just goes away. Chances are though the vested interests will find some other way to push their product onto the public though.