281–290 of 322 posts
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Price in the carbon footprint of these products and see if they're still so attractive.
They will be because they save/extend the lives tens of millions of people.
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Still not negligible.
but not enough to make a impactful dent in carbon emissions, especially if the electricity used charge them is produced by fossil.
The calculation wasn't straightforward though. And varies widely by locale.
EV mileage is reported in eMPG. Which means, "The miles you get when you charge the battery with the same energy as is in a mile of gasoline." The problem is that to deliver that much to the battery, you have losses at the charger, losses in the grid, and losses during power generation. None of which are counted in that figure. If your electric car is running off of a coal power plant, that 120 eMPG Tesla can easily perform about like a 30 MPG Camry. But as soon as you have a significant fraction of your grid being generated by renewables, now the electric car is running on a fraction of the CO2 emissions of the gas car.
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Insert "buying from" before the last word This is entirely within people's own hands. Not all of those people are you and me, it also includes our boss who decides to buy combustion vehicles for employees still (what year is it?), but in the end it's individual humans that decide for themselves whether to continue paying for oil products when there are alternatives available such as with personal vehicles. Maybe a ma…
Of course, if we can just wish businesses into making climate-friendly choices (like moving fleets to EV instead of ICE, per your example), then we can just wish Shell into getting out of oil and gas altogether. And the corollary is that if we can't wish Shell into getting out of oil and gas altogether, then we can't wish other businesses into making climate-friendly choices, so we're left with politics: penalizing (…
I'm saying we have a choice, a place in this world, and it's not abstract evil bigcorps that you can fully push the problem onto. If we'd sweep in front of our own doors first, Shell wouldn't find it as lucrative to continue to mostly invest in oil. Since they do, apparently there are bigger issues than Shell.
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Insert "buying from" before the last word This is entirely within people's own hands. Not all of those people are you and me, it also includes our boss who decides to buy combustion vehicles for employees still (what year is it?), but in the end it's individual humans that decide for themselves whether to continue paying for oil products when there are alternatives available such as with personal vehicles. Maybe a ma…
If you leave it to that, most people don't care. They'll take whatever's cheapest, and what damage it does to the environment or other people is not a consideration. All of that stuff is happening far away, over long periods of time, but the nickel saved is right here and right now. If you want to leave it up to all 8 billion people in the world to take individual responsibility to end climate change, extinction, sla…
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Even if it's mostly a sham, that's better than nothing
No, it’s worse. It takes money and focus away from things that work.
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> The rising BRICS dominate hydrocarbons and they aren't giving them up, selling or using. Surely you’re looking at the wrong statistics. Brazil is a leader in renewable energy, with fossil fuel use already on the decline for the last decade. China is the world’s largest producer of solar and wind power products, and their renewable energy ramp up has only been slowed down by the rest of the world buying up half thei…
Brazil is making ethanol from its vast sugar plantations. They are a special case, and ethanol isn't great on a full lifecycle basis. It doesn't make sense without agricultural surpluses or subsidies, as there are in the USA. China is the world's mass manufacturer. They will happily make whatever they can sell. If the West is demanding solar panels and windmills due to top down energy policy directives China will hap…
The high price of oil is a huge drag on economy, with every spike causing inflation and reducing economic growth.
The USA has already developed technology needed, and renewables are now the cheapest energy source. The countries that scale them up quickly will enjoy smooth economic growth and cheaper energy than ever in history, and the countries that keep using oil will stagnate.
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They will be because they save/extend the lives tens of millions of people.
They may save lives but their price will be based on supply and demand and the demand will be based on the price of alternatives. If pricing in the negative externalities causes their price to exceed that of alternatives demand will plummet.
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It's what I wondered at the headline as well. Sounded ambitious, but with how much profit they make it's not immediately obvious whether it's infeasible, especially if you can convince a government to then be exempt from a part of the fuel taxes because you don't have to pay for the pollution aspect
It sounds not just infeasible, but comically infeasible. For the sake of argument, let's assume that it's easy to improve ICEs in general by 5%. You still have to apply that upgrade to all the existing engine designs, ideally as drop-in replacements, and then swap all those engines in the wild.
Just look at the greenhouse gas compensation airliners offer for an example of what Shell could reasonably have been up to.
I may also have had a classmate that worked at Shell and put on a really good show of how they're not all evil but also spending on good things. The last strand of that is severed now at least...
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You can’t seriously believe that we’re in that grave of danger
I seriously believe it. Climate change will almost certainly lead to food insecurity and political upheavals, leading mass migration and war, not to mention potential knock-on effects where, for example, photosynthesis reductions due to extreme heat at the equator, rapid rates of methane release as permafrost melts, mass death in a heating and acidifying sea... . really there are just so many things that could go wro…
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-023-03518-z
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Brazil is making ethanol from its vast sugar plantations. They are a special case, and ethanol isn't great on a full lifecycle basis. It doesn't make sense without agricultural surpluses or subsidies, as there are in the USA. China is the world's mass manufacturer. They will happily make whatever they can sell. If the West is demanding solar panels and windmills due to top down energy policy directives China will hap…
There isn’t plenty of cheap fossil fuel available, it’s becoming more expensive to extract what’s left with each decade that goes by. The high price of oil is a huge drag on economy, with every spike causing inflation and reducing economic growth. The USA has already developed technology needed, and renewables are now the cheapest energy source. The countries that scale them up quickly will enjoy smooth economic grow…