askchapo

For solar PV especially, it was a dream from decades ago that finally seems to be coming true, getting progressively better at power generation as the technology improves on itself.

In the bigger picture, it still has its limitations, though. We still need to mine for PV and battery ingredients, and that traps us in a paradigm where no matter how good it gets at the point of use, the embodied energy of production is going to escalate as mineral resources increase in scarcity.

What's worse is that instead of displacing fossil fuel consumption, we end up having a layer of renewables on top of the same amount of fossil fuels. Part of this is because of the requirements to maintain a base level of grid electricity generation, and part of this is simply the perpetual incentive to consume more. Sure, we'll see the fall of the petrodollar in the next 20 years, but then what? We'll still be trying to squeeze modern life out of a burning and increasingly polluted world.

It's possible, especially now, to imagine a world (or at least a lot of small replicable parts of a world) where there is an adequate quality of life that includes computers and modern medicine, but does not meet the needs of the present at the expense of the needs of the future by exhausting finite resources. Unfortunately, our civilizational trajectory has been resolutely pointed in the opposite direction for at least 400 years, since the advent of capitalism or possibly even earlier.

An adaptive approach would be to redesign our society to reduce all waste to a point where our new consumption is trivial. That means doing away with the arbitrary distancing we put between everything (mandatory minimum density), it means preventing some of the redundancy of private ownership, it means going most places on a bike and riding a train a couple times a year for travel, it means getting most of our heat energy from wood/biomass, it means building with clastic and/or organic materials in a way that will last centuries, it means eating less than 50 kg of animal products per person per year (or ideally 0), it means only manufacturing things that can be composted or recycled, it means maybe 100W of residential electricity consumption per person. In other words, it means making everything labor-intensive and localized again, annihilating most global markets and de-alienating virtually all labor. We could use our high-tech green energy resources within the scope of our mineral resources, in a way that resource depletion happens on a scale of geologic eons, instead of decades.

The material technology is not going to save us from problems that require social technology to solve. Not just capitalism, but our very civilization is on its last legs. Our challenge is to create an alternative before it implodes.

Very on-brand take for Hexbear, but I think that as the barriers with fossil fuels get more and more pronounced, America is gonna get caught flat-footed here. There’s been a denial of the importance of building out renewable and battery infrastructure, so when the shit hits the fan America is gonna be stuck between a rock and a hard place where either they buy whatever China is willing to sell them, which I’m sure will be pricey, or be reliant on the Western tech that’s scrambling to catch up and ergo will be less plentiful and reliant. The former also means the profits aren’t staying with the US tech kleptocracy. That’s obviously not a problem for most Americans, but it does set up a class conflict between the majority that want the good Chinese battery and renewable tech and the oligarchs that want to kneecap the country to protect their revenue flows.

Thinking more globally, whenever there’s a big tech advancement we always see certain regions experiencing a “leap frog” effect where they adopt the new tech despite the prior iteration of that tech never having reached critical mass there. The classic example is landline phone infrastructure in subsaharan Africa never getting built out much, so cell phones with their relatively simple tower array infrastructure leap frogged landlines. So we may see areas that never had much in the way of personal internal combustion engine vehicles getting both dispersed renewable energy sources and EV’s to plug into those sources bypassing expensive gasoline, thus those EV’s become their first widely adopted automobiles.

10 years or so ago I often saw chuds arguing that decarbonizing the west is pointless because Africa and Asia would become hungry for fossils and due to the higher population overshadow any possible CO2 savings. Now large parts of Africa and Asia are going to have their energy revolution on the back of solar and the west is still burning coal.

it's a stern rebuke to the degrowth crowd which i love. it's proof that standards of living can continue to rise while de carbonizing.

What if, instead of prices continually going up because oil resources are declining (the "peak oil" scenario), prices collapse below the point where unconventional oil resources remain profitable? The US became an oil exporter only because prices were high enough for shale, and that's basically doomed in an environment where oil prices don't keep up with inflation.

Unless oil production is actively subsidized we might end up with kinks in the oil supply chain.

The concern I have is that China has over-optimized the renewables industry that they will dominate any export market. I don't think EVs and co. will do anything to prevent climate change I do think it will be an important tool for imperial periphery countries to strategically utilize such as the solar boom in Pakistan.

I still think we are a ways away from the fossil fuel industry being made redundant. Oil imports as shown with chinas pattern of moving imports to countries like Canada after US sabotage efforts in venezeula will still be a tool of geopolitical advantage.