Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 474 posts

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#411

Post by blitzar »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #42
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in the election that is running in Denmark right now it looks like nuclear power is back on the table.

Same as Sweden. Creating divisive issues from nothing decades after the possibility passed. At least the MAGA Hard right is staring to come around. Who could have guessed that they like extremely cheap distributed energy generation!?!? > Why MAGA suddenly loves solar power > The Trump-led attack on solar eases as the right reckons with its crucial role in powering AI and keeping utility bills in check. https://www.wa…

Before solar was woke it was a way to power your home for basically free and not be dependant on or in hock to the corporations or government to power your home.

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#412

Post by Omniusaspirer »

esperent wrote: post #388
no-name-here wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the recommendation. Link: https://reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics And its sister sub NeutralNews for news article discussion (same rules): https://reddit.com/r/NeutralNews Both subs allow users to submit new posts and comments (but spend 2 minutes checking out the rules first).

Had a browse around and these look good, although very US focused (standard for Reddit though). However, on every thread I checked, about 70% of comments are deleted. That means that the noise is still there, but the mods are having to work nonstop to fight it and no doubt introducing their own bias as they do so. I wish them luck and I'll keep checking these places out but I can't help but feel that by the time you'…

You won’t find much quality in lay discussion boards, but magazines like The Economist and Foreign Affairs are worth a subscription. I’ve cut back my internet time and incorporated these into my routine, would strongly recommend if you want actual knowledgeable opinions on world affairs.

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#413

Post by mrmlz »

tfourb wrote: post #279
mrmlz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Swede i'd like to cut the cord to Denmark/Germany. That would greatly reduce our electricity costs in south/mid Sweden. Let them enjoy their "cheap" wind and battery solution.

You export more to Norway + Finnland than to Denmark + Germany: https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje... And my guess would be that it would be much more expensive for you to build out (and hold in reserve) enough generation capacity to satisfy your theoretical peak demand than it costs to have interconnected grids and a large efficient market, even if you are a net exporter.

You are aware of our different price-markets in sweden right? SE4 is priced at the export prices for Danish wind and German goal - which sucks for Swedes in SE4 (and to some extent SE3). SE4 can eat their own dogfood since they cut the Nuclear Power and are now burning oil instead (Karlshamnsverket).

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#415

Post by fsterneder »

slashdev wrote: post #286
randerson wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the world only have about 50 years [0] worth of oil remaining in the ground? Climate change and war aside, it seems like that should be a major reason to accelerate the change to renewables. [0] https://www.worldometers.info/oil/

No I don't think so. The oil industry is very good at discovering and developing resources previously thought to be out of reach. People have been talking about peak oil for decades, as long as I can remember, and it never happened. I think we're technologically capable of extracting more oil, coal, and gas than we would ever want to. We would cook ourselves with the damage we'd do to the climate. I think that's the…

Conventional oil actually peaked around 2005–2006, but the shale oil revolution in the U.S. and technological advances have certainly postponed peak oil itself.

Here comes the kicker, though: we obviously extracted the easy-to-access resources first. While there may be counterexamples, looking at ore grades makes it clear that this is not particular to oil.

What happens next is that the economics of the wells are getting worse, which means we need a higher oil price for them to be viable. This also results in a lower energy return on energy invested (EROI), which reduces the surplus energy available to transform our environment. Consequently, this implies slower growth in the economy. Which I think is pretty obvious in the west and would explain the explosion of debt.

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#416

Post by myrmidon »

nandomrumber wrote: post #337
myrmidon wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’re willing to sacrifice the lives of at least some poor people who exist now, or are likely to exist in the near future, for a theory that is unfalsifiable. What exactly do you mean with "unfalsifiable"? We actually measure atmospheric CO2, sea level and temperature; that's plenty falsifiability to me. And the greenhouse effect itself is not even in question. Fossil emissions are sacrificing people not just fro…

Climate science wants us to ignore the geological record and ignore geological processes. A cubic kilometre of lava at 1200 degrees C is enough energy for thirty (30!) hurricanes. It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated. But climate science wants us to ignore all that and place the blame entire…

I'm not sure what your position is.

If you think that the greenhouse effect is real (CO2 contributes to warming), why would human emissions not have any effect? we currently emits tons of it per year and person for a substance only in the 400ppm range-- even if you split a single humans emissions over a whole cubic kilometer it makes a substantial concentration difference already.

> It’s entirely possible that sea temperature rise is a result of geologic processes at or near the sea bed, and when you warm a liquid dissolved gasses are liberated.

No, this is not remotely plausible, because we have a pretty solid understanding of how much heat is transferred from the earths interior (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget), and this is completely negligible (and off by many orders of magnitude) compared to the oceanic warming that we already observe (for a 0.5K increase in oceanic surface temperature you'd need thousands of times the total heat that we get from the planet itself).

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#418

Post by blitzar »

bdangubic wrote: post #374
blitzar wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't someone think of the children, how are their schools going to get bombed if we dont do it?

we don’t care about all children, just selective children, yes?

other way around, we care about children, just not a select group of them.

if they are being bombed in a foreign country or shot in a us school, no problem

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#419

Post by NoLinkToMe »

davedx wrote: post #109
ryukafalz wrote: post #44

As someone who's been pushing for renewables for quite a while now it's dismaying that it's taken a war to accelerate this push, but I'm glad to see that it's happening at least. It's doubly dismaying that my own country (US) is still doubling down on fossil fuels despite everything. The concern about a new dependency on China is real, but renewables do have the advantage that once you have the infrastructure in plac…

I've been arguing with Europeans on twitter (including an environmental scientist) who believe this war shows we need to resume drilling in the North Sea and Groningen. It feels like this collective insanity will never end

That's not so strange is it?

With respect to Groningen: 1. zero deaths reported ever 2. quakes in Groningen maxed out at 3.6 which is considered light. By comparison NL's worst earthquake wasn't in Groningen (North) but in the south of the country unrelated to the gas, a scale of 6. Again no people died. 3. the 450 billion m3 of gas left is worth 170 billion last month ('normal'), 345 billion at today's prices, and 1.6 trillion at 2022 peak prices. 4. Field used to supply 10% of EU gas, this shifted EU/Worldwide demand to Russian gas, helping them fund the cold-war against the EU and hot-war against EU's ally Ukraine.

Governments routinely put a price on a human life. The Dutch government puts a price of about 3-4m on a human life. i.e. if a policy measure costs 500m and is estimated to save 100 lives, it's deemed financially irresponsible because the 5m cost per life is more than the value set by the government. Whereas if a measure costs 100m (e.g. implementing an anti drunk-driving program) and it is estimated to save 500 lives, it's financially OK'd because the cost of 200k to prevent a death is less than the value of a life.

The estimates for the Groningen gas field are completely off. Even if you take another €50 billion out of the ground, experts don't expect an earthquake to kill any people. While on the contrary, if you don't, numerous people will die from alternatives (dirty coal and in russian war).

Should be move as fast as possible to renewables? Yes. But green advocates severely overestimate how fast we can do that. We have broken renewable records for 10 years in a row, yet we use about 80% of the fossil energy that we used 35 years ago. We didn't replace Groningen with renewables, we replaced it with Norwegian gas and US LNG imports, and Russia picked up the slack elsewhere because we dropped Dutch supply. So yes in the long-term renewables will make Groningen unnecessary, in the short-term we continue to use gas and keeping Groningen open longer seems to be supported by an objective analysis. Of course politics aren't just objective, they're emotional, which is why Groningen was closed, not because it was the best idea.

Re: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

#420

Post by inglor_cz »

tfourb wrote: post #404
inglor_cz wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a bit surprised that a engineer-heavy forum does not think about scaling of batteries. If everyone in the developed world starts to build batteries massively - in the extent necessary to bridge multiple days of bad weather for millions of people , because that is what happens quite often in northern half of Europe in winter - there will be new strategic dependencies, at least during the buildup phase, and then i…

There are already battery chemistries available that do not rely on lithium and drastically reduce the usage of other suplly-contrained inputs. Especially for stationary storage (where energy density and weight are not much of a concern) there is a wide array of technologies already available and in development. And as you yourself say: once a battery has been built, it simply exists. There is a very gradual deterior…

These need to be available in enormous quantities, though.

Are they? Who produces them? Please tell me that it is not China and that they don't come with a firmware that may or may not have remotely exploitable rootkits.

The road from a lab discovery through a working prototype to mass-deployable tech usually takes decades, especially in devices which pack a tremendous amount of energy.

Post reply on HN