> “The mere fact that the conference is happening is already a success,” said Claudio Angelo, senior policy adviser at Brazil’s Climate Observatory, a network of environmental, civil society and academic groups
The bar has been set so low that talking about it is seen as success now.
Sometimes I think the only way we'll really make meaningful progress is if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so.
The point of that comment is not that the talking is happening, it's that the hope of action isn't going to be blocked by industry-captured and plain moronic countries like Saudia Arabia and US, respectively.
Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point. They can also help build economies of scale, and take advantage of the myriad economic benefits of renewables that other countries are leaving on the table.
> Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point
China, The US, and India all turned down invites.
If the world's 3 largest polluters (even if two of them are heavily investing in GreenTech) are not in the conversation, it's all for naught.
None of the attendees are in the position to pressure the big 3 polluters. And it doesn't matter - the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change. It's the poorer countries that face the brunt of the impact.
Why is it thankful the US has the power to force everyone to keep wasting money on US-controlled energy sources? What's the difference between this situation and a Mafia protection racket?
Many people don’t realize the IPCC walked back (refined as they put it) some of its most dire scenarios… others may choose to ignore the walkback. Akin to the rocket and feather phenomenon that affects pricing.
Even artificially limiting their availability causing prices to shoot up does not quench the thirst. I am always confused why the conversation seems to be about switching the toggle switch from fossil fuels only to renewables only. It's obvious the best way is more of potentiometer where you slowly change from one by adding renewables to the point of being able to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. We're seeing it happen all across the planet. That should be the low bar.
To "simply run out of fossil fuels" is like that potentiometer you mention, it isn't like you run out all at once but you run out of the cheap ones first and it gets more expensive.
in the early 2000s which was about the coming peak of conventional oil production and it turned out to be wrong in the sense that we knew in the 1970s that there were huge amounts of oil and gas in tight formations that we didn't know how to exploit. People were trying to figure out how to do that economically and had their breakthrough around the time that book came out so now you drive around some parts of Pennsylvania and boy do you see a lot of natural gas infrastructure.
I remember being in my hippie phase in the late 1990s and having a conversation with a roughneck on the Ithaca Commons who was telling me that the oil industry had a lot of technology that was going to lift the supply constraints that I was concerned about... he didn't tell me all the details but looking back now I'm pretty sure he knew about developments in hydrofracking and might even have been personally involved with them.
Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy. We will need to synthesise it (or other synfuels and feedstocks), to fully transition away from fossil sources, and that 10x efficiency factor will be essential, as synthesis is highly energy-lossy.
> Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy.
Am I missing something? Ethanol is hydrophilic and hygroscopic. In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly. In a closed system this ends up with phase separation and the freed water causes engine corrosion.
I'm not sure we want people running a still or molecular sieve in their homes to deal with fixing long-term-stored ethanol.
> In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly
Citation needed. (hint you won't find one because it isn't true). Be careful here - this myth has been repeated enough that a search will find plenty of claims that don't check out.
High concentration alcohol doesn't spoil. Even lower concentrations don't spoil, but they mix with poor quality gas that does spoil. Well when you get very low it will, but alcohol is poison to living things and so it won't spoil. (I'm not sure how ethanol stands up to UV - but we generally keep it in a tank so that isn't an issue)
Ethanol will absorb water, but it doesn't take it out of the air anymore than anything else.
Unfortunately the crisis will get much, much worse before ordinary people go "Wait, so, we're all going to die? How do we prevent that?" and the idea that it's too late isn't compatible with their model of the world so they will reach for increasingly crude "solutions" to what they have belatedly realised is a dire situation.
It might I suppose be fun to catalogue, what are the priorities? Do we kill all the poor people before we decide that maybe we can't afford to keep obligate carnivores as pets? How about the elderly? When do the animals kept for meat go, is that later? At some point I expect there's a backlash, a phase where the populists who insisted that say, if we just murdered everybody with the wrong skin colour, or the wrong religious beliefs or whatever that would fix it - well what if we kill the populists instead? But it won't last, following is in people's nature.
Fossil fuel consumption declines, belatedly, as the human population goes extinct. The mass extinctions eventually settle into a new order. The warm, damp rock is slightly warmer, for a while, and a few non-human niches expand and something else occupies them. And maybe one day an intelligent life eventually wonders why, according to the best available data, in the long depths of pre-history there was a weird climate spike. Huh.
A brazilian "senior policy adviser" patting himself on the back over a conference taking place is always amusing. One could easily get the impression the brazilian government was not actively taxing the crap out of solar panels, solar installations, electrical vehicles, pretty much every good alternative to fossil fuels, literally right now.
Interesting that Colombia is currently powering more than 70% of their electrical consumption on hydropower. They currently have about 65 TWh of hydropower capacity; the total feasible generation potential is around 200 TWh. Makes then an interesting country to host such talks.
Good for them, but for most of the world there are no good hydropower locations left. And even when they exist building them is a local ecological disaster.
Maybe he has been installed by the renewable energy sector actually to get the whole world onto renewables as soon as possible.
Of course, they had to give up on or delay America’s renewable future, but that may be a small
Price to pay, and anyways renewables are growing in the U.S. despite the administration’s frankly insane efforts to block it
There are three main sources of green house gases. Top one which is power is declining. Transportation is still growing and the last one is agriculture which is stable. There is progress if you look at the details.
But the growth of CO2 emissions is slowing, even though the global economy is growing and many more countries are industrialising and becoming wealthier (both proxies of CO2 emissions).
So we're working on it. Not as fast as we need, but progress is being made.
internal consumption engines (ICE), are rapidly becoming niche power sources
sodium batteries and solar pv, will take over most of the worlds grids quite quickly now, there are no bariers left
any country that resists will be left behind
and suffer the consequences of uncompetitive
costs
Treating alternative energy and PHEVs/EVs as a core national security concern should have started in the early 2000s. Yes, the PV revolution hadn't happened yet, but the hybrid auto was released in 1998 or so, and a PHEV is a natural extension to that.
I'm weak on recollection as to when PV and wind started their big price plummet, but it was certainly in the 2010s.
It's still not too late for ... everyone.
In particular, I think PHEVs should be an regulated requirement for all consumer (and probably semis, why aren't they hybrids yet just so they can have better acceleration/torque and regen braking) vehicles in ten years, with a 10-year decreasing subsidy for PHEV and a 10-year increasing penalty for car registration and new car purchases of pure ICE.
PHEVs will maximize available battery supply to the most electrification of transport.
I also think home solar+storage should be heavily subsidized, because you don't need to do nearly as much grid adaptation and, keeping with national security, it makes communities much more disaster resilient if homes are somewhat power independent and they can charge a vehicle for trips.
China is currently implementing this national security strategy. Each addition EV car driving in China a car running on domestic solar+coal electricity and not running on imported oil.
China is also turning coal to synthetic fuels.
"
The sector last year turned 276 million tons of coal - equivalent to almost a year of European coal use - into chemicals, oil and gas, according to the China National Petroleum and Chemical Planning Institute"
The PV revolution has happened. Most countries with significant energy grids get most of their energy from PV during the daytime. Some even get 50% of their yearly energy from PV.
> In particular, I think PHEVs should be an regulated requirement for all consumer (and probably semis, why aren't they hybrids yet just so they can have better acceleration/torque and regen braking) vehicles in ten years, with a 10-year decreasing subsidy for PHEV and a 10-year increasing penalty for car registration and new car purchases of pure ICE.
That's the actual plan for Europe. They are planning to start ICE phase-out by 2035, with only limited exceptions where it's impractical (like long-haul cargo or specialized machinery).
I actually don't think that the hybrid timeline could have been accelerated significantly. A lot of foundational technology, such as compact power electronics became accessible only by the early 2000s. Lithium batteries also became commercially viable by then.
(for the young'uns this is a reference to the also-senseless Iraq War, which had a follow on effect of distracting from this issue in favor of solipsistic entitlement and the adoption of SUVs. but looking back wistfully, at least the government and media didn't insult us by not even manufacturing a casus belli)
Absolutely hilarious to me that the biggest catalyst toward global attention to renewables in the last two decades is Trump's ridiculous adventure in the gulf.
I would argue that subsidized solar panels and batteries from China are the the most important factor. If renewables weren’t economically competitive we’d see approximately zero deployment.
Not to forget storage solutions have become viable as well. Generating renewable power is only part of the equation. It has a large variable that needed to be filled for the equation to fully compute waiting for storage.
Yes I came to say the same thing. It's a truism that people don't care about supply till it stops.
Interruptions of supply cause people to get antsy. They start looking for alternatives. A drought leads to a surge in well-points and bore holes. Rainwater collection goes up. Electricity outages lead to generators, solar and so on, all easily installed at domestic level.
Food shortages lead to more strategic agriculture choices. Oil shortages start to make EVs more attractive. This is the first major interruption in oil supply since the 70s. I start to think the next car I buy will be electric. I already have solar so it makes sense.
The biggest way to change society is to make the perception that supply is precarious or expensive. Long after the drought ends, the lessons remain.
The leading climate-denier voice , who rails against clean energy, has also caused a world-wide understanding of how precarious our oil supply is. That lesson will stick, regardless of your politics.
I dunno. The curve of solar adoption has looked "great" since 2000. There are lots of troubles remaining like:
- storage over the 24 hour cycle
- storage over yearly cycles
- how to fix nitrogen for agriculture
- how to make carbon-free metals
- how to run the chemical industry without fossil fuels
The good news has been the expansion of solar through markets, the diffusion of innovation, competition, and something like Moore's Law. The bad news is we are reaching the saturation point for the grid being able to absorb solar energy in many places and that's going to stop the growth unless those bottlenecks are overcome.
Partially the Ukraine war got at least parts of Europe started, then adding Trumps mess on top but keeps the ball rolling.
I've heard a lot of people being critical of wind turbines, calling them ugly and wanting nothing to do with them. After the Ukraine war started I remember driving into town, seeing the five massive wind turbines at the harbour, providing three time the power the city needs, and thinking "not only do they look great, they're also part of our self sufficiency".
The US is a different place, but the hate parts of the US have towards renewable energy is pretty insane. I know the wind isn't always blow, the sun not always shining, but each installation is still one step closer to not being beholden to the whims of some crazy person in a far of land.
Wind turbines are ugly. But I'll take ugly for free energy. It's such an obvious tradeoff. I can deal with ugly. Energy is much harder to do without. Anyone who would give up free energy just because it's ugly is someone who needs to touch grass.
By the way, wind turbines off the coast of one of Trump's golf properties in Scotland are the reason he keeps trying to ban wind turbines.
I've seen this succintly and accurately described this way: "No One Goes to War Over a Solar Panel" [1].
If you think about it, once you build a solar panel, it just produces power for the next 20-30 years. Then you buy another one and replace it. To get oil or natural gas, you need to drill a well. That well requires constant labor. What many don't seem to know is that oil wells decline in production over time. It's called the "decline rate". For the Permian Basin (source of the US shale revolution), the decline rate is 15-20% per year. So a well producing 1000bpd (barrels per day) will be producing ~500bpd in 3 years. That means you have to constantly be drilling new wells.
Oil wells (and resource extractors like mines in general) are great wealth concentrators. Solar panels are not. So the point of that quote is that a limited resource creates wealth and is limited but also war is profitable (for the weapons manufacturers) so every incentie lays in continued fossil fuel use because it's constantly minting new billionaires.
One thing I'll add here is that there are a lot of energy usages for fossil fuels for which we have no alternative. Aviation is a big one. To some extent, so is truck freight (although China is busy electrifying this too [2]). There are a lot of non-energy uses too eg plastics, industrial, chemicals, construction. So fossil fuels aren't going away anytime soon but we sure could take a leaf out of Chin's commitment to renewable energy [3][4][5].
Instead we get nonsense like warnings to Europe of a dangerous dependency on Chinese clean tech [6].
> One thing I'll add here is that there are a lot of energy usages for fossil fuels for which we have no alternative. Aviation is a big one.
The status of "fossil fuels" isn't crucial to these uses, it's just cheaper. You can just make kerosene, but you wouldn't because you already use fossil fuels for power. However if you have abundant energy without fossil fuels and you want kerosene for some reason you can make it for $$$$
Doesn't China have most of the exotic rare earths and stuff that you need in order to build solar panels and systems? I am not anti-solar, but I also don't think China is some guaranteed-friendly party that the whole world can trust not to wield their power once they have it.
I assume anyone who doesn't immediately recognize their planned takeover of Taiwan next year will have a hard time getting any type of raw materials like that.
Doesn't China have most of the exotic rare earths and stuff that you need in order to build solar panels and systems?
No. Solar panels do not require rare earth elements. Some types of high strength magnets require rare earth elements, and some of those magnets are used in wind turbines, which might be where this confusion comes from since wind turbines and solar panels are frequently mentioned together. (Although even most wind turbines do not use rare earth magnets.)
Crystalline silicon solar panels account for more than 95% of the global solar market. The rarest element typically used in these is silver, for metallic pastes used to form cell contacts. China is a major silver producer, but far from dominant. In 2024 it accounted for about 13% of world silver production:
China currently provides a the great majority of that stuff partly because nobody else has bothered to produce much. China doesn't have a majority of world reserves (although the USGS says it's close), just a majority of production.
As another commenter put it, a solar panel is a drill bit not oil. What's the alternative here? Are you arguing we maintaint the dependence on fossil fuels, which can be switched off any day, because of some hypothetical future where China might stop selling "drill bits" (that last 30 years)? That's why this argument is so silly.
As for rare earths, they aren't as rare as the suppliers would seem to suggest. The difference is that China has invested in rare earth extraction and processing and really nobody else has. Likewise, the solar investment was an intentional policy goal. Imagine where the US might be if the $8T+ spent on the so-called Global War on Terror had been spent on renewable infrastructure instead.
As for China behaving in such a belligerent fashion, I'm sorry but let's just compare. Here's a list of US military actions since 1945 [1] and a history of US-led, backed or supplied regime change [2]. The fearmongering around China is just so... manufactured.
> “The mere fact that the conference is happening is already a success,” said Claudio Angelo, senior policy adviser at Brazil’s Climate Observatory, a network of environmental, civil society and academic groups
The bar has been set so low that talking about it is seen as success now.
Sometimes I think the only way we'll really make meaningful progress is if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so.
The point of that comment is not that the talking is happening, it's that the hope of action isn't going to be blocked by industry-captured and plain moronic countries like Saudia Arabia and US, respectively.
Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point. They can also help build economies of scale, and take advantage of the myriad economic benefits of renewables that other countries are leaving on the table.
> Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point
China, The US, and India all turned down invites.
If the world's 3 largest polluters (even if two of them are heavily investing in GreenTech) are not in the conversation, it's all for naught.
None of the attendees are in the position to pressure the big 3 polluters. And it doesn't matter - the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change. It's the poorer countries that face the brunt of the impact.
The US still has enough power to stop it though, thankfully.
We aren’t captured by environmental activists that force the poor to shoulder the compliance burden while the rich get to defer and delay.
Why is it thankful the US has the power to force everyone to keep wasting money on US-controlled energy sources? What's the difference between this situation and a Mafia protection racket?
Many people don’t realize the IPCC walked back (refined as they put it) some of its most dire scenarios… others may choose to ignore the walkback. Akin to the rocket and feather phenomenon that affects pricing.
It was based on co2 emissions doubling by 2050.
Though energy output has doubled, as a share coal has dropped in China and the US.
Wouldn’t you expect estimates based on difficult to predict human behavior to change based on new data?
Even artificially limiting their availability causing prices to shoot up does not quench the thirst. I am always confused why the conversation seems to be about switching the toggle switch from fossil fuels only to renewables only. It's obvious the best way is more of potentiometer where you slowly change from one by adding renewables to the point of being able to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. We're seeing it happen all across the planet. That should be the low bar.
To "simply run out of fossil fuels" is like that potentiometer you mention, it isn't like you run out all at once but you run out of the cheap ones first and it gets more expensive.
I remember reading
https://www.amazon.com/Hubberts-Peak-Impending-Shortage-Revi...
in the early 2000s which was about the coming peak of conventional oil production and it turned out to be wrong in the sense that we knew in the 1970s that there were huge amounts of oil and gas in tight formations that we didn't know how to exploit. People were trying to figure out how to do that economically and had their breakthrough around the time that book came out so now you drive around some parts of Pennsylvania and boy do you see a lot of natural gas infrastructure.
I remember being in my hippie phase in the late 1990s and having a conversation with a roughneck on the Ithaca Commons who was telling me that the oil industry had a lot of technology that was going to lift the supply constraints that I was concerned about... he didn't tell me all the details but looking back now I'm pretty sure he knew about developments in hydrofracking and might even have been personally involved with them.
We have still lot of known fossil fuel reserves. More than we should put into atmosfere in form of CO2.
Coal for 139 years
Oil for 56 years
Gas for 49 years
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-rese...
This is a bit simplified because high fossil fuel prices also drive inovations in mining, exploration and could increase known reserves.
Brazil has had a pretty active program of converting cane sugar to ethanol for a while now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
Sugar cane doesn't require replanting every year either, like corn does.
Plants are actually not a good converter of solar energy to chemical energy though. They capture a few percent of it.
Solar cells are able to capture about 10 times that, a much smaller footprint.
Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy. We will need to synthesise it (or other synfuels and feedstocks), to fully transition away from fossil sources, and that 10x efficiency factor will be essential, as synthesis is highly energy-lossy.
> Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy.
Am I missing something? Ethanol is hydrophilic and hygroscopic. In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly. In a closed system this ends up with phase separation and the freed water causes engine corrosion.
I'm not sure we want people running a still or molecular sieve in their homes to deal with fixing long-term-stored ethanol.
> In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly
Citation needed. (hint you won't find one because it isn't true). Be careful here - this myth has been repeated enough that a search will find plenty of claims that don't check out.
High concentration alcohol doesn't spoil. Even lower concentrations don't spoil, but they mix with poor quality gas that does spoil. Well when you get very low it will, but alcohol is poison to living things and so it won't spoil. (I'm not sure how ethanol stands up to UV - but we generally keep it in a tank so that isn't an issue)
Ethanol will absorb water, but it doesn't take it out of the air anymore than anything else.
Unfortunately the crisis will get much, much worse before ordinary people go "Wait, so, we're all going to die? How do we prevent that?" and the idea that it's too late isn't compatible with their model of the world so they will reach for increasingly crude "solutions" to what they have belatedly realised is a dire situation.
It might I suppose be fun to catalogue, what are the priorities? Do we kill all the poor people before we decide that maybe we can't afford to keep obligate carnivores as pets? How about the elderly? When do the animals kept for meat go, is that later? At some point I expect there's a backlash, a phase where the populists who insisted that say, if we just murdered everybody with the wrong skin colour, or the wrong religious beliefs or whatever that would fix it - well what if we kill the populists instead? But it won't last, following is in people's nature.
Fossil fuel consumption declines, belatedly, as the human population goes extinct. The mass extinctions eventually settle into a new order. The warm, damp rock is slightly warmer, for a while, and a few non-human niches expand and something else occupies them. And maybe one day an intelligent life eventually wonders why, according to the best available data, in the long depths of pre-history there was a weird climate spike. Huh.
A brazilian "senior policy adviser" patting himself on the back over a conference taking place is always amusing. One could easily get the impression the brazilian government was not actively taxing the crap out of solar panels, solar installations, electrical vehicles, pretty much every good alternative to fossil fuels, literally right now.
"if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so."
Less oil, more wars about it.
The only way we make meaningful progress has never changed, for a scale that matters: have a cheaper alternative.
Interesting that Colombia is currently powering more than 70% of their electrical consumption on hydropower. They currently have about 65 TWh of hydropower capacity; the total feasible generation potential is around 200 TWh. Makes then an interesting country to host such talks.
Good for them, but for most of the world there are no good hydropower locations left. And even when they exist building them is a local ecological disaster.
This kind of talk frightens me. Not because I don't think its what we need to do, but because then US will find an excuse to invade or interfere.
Maybe Trump isn’t a Putin Manchurian candidate.
Maybe he has been installed by the renewable energy sector actually to get the whole world onto renewables as soon as possible.
Of course, they had to give up on or delay America’s renewable future, but that may be a small Price to pay, and anyways renewables are growing in the U.S. despite the administration’s frankly insane efforts to block it
Ha! I came here to say something similar. Anyhow, I'm happy that US has found a combative way to combat climate change. I'm also disappointed.
We‘ve had talks about this topic decades before I was born, but progress is a bit underwhelming.
There is no progress in CO2 reduction, we are still emiting more CO2 each year.
" Global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes increased by +0.7% within 2025."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-026-00780-4
There are three main sources of green house gases. Top one which is power is declining. Transportation is still growing and the last one is agriculture which is stable. There is progress if you look at the details.
But the growth of CO2 emissions is slowing, even though the global economy is growing and many more countries are industrialising and becoming wealthier (both proxies of CO2 emissions).
So we're working on it. Not as fast as we need, but progress is being made.
Reminds me of this onion bit: https://theonion.com/scientists-politely-remind-world-that-c...
internal consumption engines (ICE), are rapidly becoming niche power sources sodium batteries and solar pv, will take over most of the worlds grids quite quickly now, there are no bariers left any country that resists will be left behind and suffer the consequences of uncompetitive costs
Treating alternative energy and PHEVs/EVs as a core national security concern should have started in the early 2000s. Yes, the PV revolution hadn't happened yet, but the hybrid auto was released in 1998 or so, and a PHEV is a natural extension to that.
I'm weak on recollection as to when PV and wind started their big price plummet, but it was certainly in the 2010s.
It's still not too late for ... everyone.
In particular, I think PHEVs should be an regulated requirement for all consumer (and probably semis, why aren't they hybrids yet just so they can have better acceleration/torque and regen braking) vehicles in ten years, with a 10-year decreasing subsidy for PHEV and a 10-year increasing penalty for car registration and new car purchases of pure ICE.
PHEVs will maximize available battery supply to the most electrification of transport.
I also think home solar+storage should be heavily subsidized, because you don't need to do nearly as much grid adaptation and, keeping with national security, it makes communities much more disaster resilient if homes are somewhat power independent and they can charge a vehicle for trips.
China is currently implementing this national security strategy. Each addition EV car driving in China a car running on domestic solar+coal electricity and not running on imported oil.
China is also turning coal to synthetic fuels.
" The sector last year turned 276 million tons of coal - equivalent to almost a year of European coal use - into chemicals, oil and gas, according to the China National Petroleum and Chemical Planning Institute"
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chines...
You can imagine the CO2 result of this strategy.
The PV revolution has happened. Most countries with significant energy grids get most of their energy from PV during the daytime. Some even get 50% of their yearly energy from PV.
Cars are a very unimportant part of changing to clean energy.
The most important part is the generation. Making specific types of cars required right now is VERY premature, and will just cause backlash.
Let's focus on just one (main) thing: Clean generation of electricity. The rest will come in due course.
> In particular, I think PHEVs should be an regulated requirement for all consumer (and probably semis, why aren't they hybrids yet just so they can have better acceleration/torque and regen braking) vehicles in ten years, with a 10-year decreasing subsidy for PHEV and a 10-year increasing penalty for car registration and new car purchases of pure ICE.
That's the actual plan for Europe. They are planning to start ICE phase-out by 2035, with only limited exceptions where it's impractical (like long-haul cargo or specialized machinery).
I actually don't think that the hybrid timeline could have been accelerated significantly. A lot of foundational technology, such as compact power electronics became accessible only by the early 2000s. Lithium batteries also became commercially viable by then.
"Support our Troops!"
(for the young'uns this is a reference to the also-senseless Iraq War, which had a follow on effect of distracting from this issue in favor of solipsistic entitlement and the adoption of SUVs. but looking back wistfully, at least the government and media didn't insult us by not even manufacturing a casus belli)
Absolutely hilarious to me that the biggest catalyst toward global attention to renewables in the last two decades is Trump's ridiculous adventure in the gulf.
I would argue that subsidized solar panels and batteries from China are the the most important factor. If renewables weren’t economically competitive we’d see approximately zero deployment.
Not to forget storage solutions have become viable as well. Generating renewable power is only part of the equation. It has a large variable that needed to be filled for the equation to fully compute waiting for storage.
The availability of cheap alternatives to oil is completely part of the solution.
Convincing Joe Public to understand yesterday switching to those is in their best interest is also necessary and very hard to do.
Mission Acomplished.
Yes I came to say the same thing. It's a truism that people don't care about supply till it stops.
Interruptions of supply cause people to get antsy. They start looking for alternatives. A drought leads to a surge in well-points and bore holes. Rainwater collection goes up. Electricity outages lead to generators, solar and so on, all easily installed at domestic level.
Food shortages lead to more strategic agriculture choices. Oil shortages start to make EVs more attractive. This is the first major interruption in oil supply since the 70s. I start to think the next car I buy will be electric. I already have solar so it makes sense.
The biggest way to change society is to make the perception that supply is precarious or expensive. Long after the drought ends, the lessons remain.
The leading climate-denier voice , who rails against clean energy, has also caused a world-wide understanding of how precarious our oil supply is. That lesson will stick, regardless of your politics.
I dunno. The curve of solar adoption has looked "great" since 2000. There are lots of troubles remaining like:
- storage over the 24 hour cycle - storage over yearly cycles - how to fix nitrogen for agriculture - how to make carbon-free metals - how to run the chemical industry without fossil fuels
The good news has been the expansion of solar through markets, the diffusion of innovation, competition, and something like Moore's Law. The bad news is we are reaching the saturation point for the grid being able to absorb solar energy in many places and that's going to stop the growth unless those bottlenecks are overcome.
Partially the Ukraine war got at least parts of Europe started, then adding Trumps mess on top but keeps the ball rolling.
I've heard a lot of people being critical of wind turbines, calling them ugly and wanting nothing to do with them. After the Ukraine war started I remember driving into town, seeing the five massive wind turbines at the harbour, providing three time the power the city needs, and thinking "not only do they look great, they're also part of our self sufficiency".
The US is a different place, but the hate parts of the US have towards renewable energy is pretty insane. I know the wind isn't always blow, the sun not always shining, but each installation is still one step closer to not being beholden to the whims of some crazy person in a far of land.
Wind turbines are ugly. But I'll take ugly for free energy. It's such an obvious tradeoff. I can deal with ugly. Energy is much harder to do without. Anyone who would give up free energy just because it's ugly is someone who needs to touch grass.
By the way, wind turbines off the coast of one of Trump's golf properties in Scotland are the reason he keeps trying to ban wind turbines.
Yes, obviously this gas price spike is what climate change activists wanted all along, only not nearly as much as they'd like.
I've seen this succintly and accurately described this way: "No One Goes to War Over a Solar Panel" [1].
If you think about it, once you build a solar panel, it just produces power for the next 20-30 years. Then you buy another one and replace it. To get oil or natural gas, you need to drill a well. That well requires constant labor. What many don't seem to know is that oil wells decline in production over time. It's called the "decline rate". For the Permian Basin (source of the US shale revolution), the decline rate is 15-20% per year. So a well producing 1000bpd (barrels per day) will be producing ~500bpd in 3 years. That means you have to constantly be drilling new wells.
Oil wells (and resource extractors like mines in general) are great wealth concentrators. Solar panels are not. So the point of that quote is that a limited resource creates wealth and is limited but also war is profitable (for the weapons manufacturers) so every incentie lays in continued fossil fuel use because it's constantly minting new billionaires.
One thing I'll add here is that there are a lot of energy usages for fossil fuels for which we have no alternative. Aviation is a big one. To some extent, so is truck freight (although China is busy electrifying this too [2]). There are a lot of non-energy uses too eg plastics, industrial, chemicals, construction. So fossil fuels aren't going away anytime soon but we sure could take a leaf out of Chin's commitment to renewable energy [3][4][5].
Instead we get nonsense like warnings to Europe of a dangerous dependency on Chinese clean tech [6].
[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
[2]: https://prospect.org/2026/04/29/aftermath-china-electrifying...
[3]: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/12/china-adding-more-re...
[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks-m...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping_Thought_on_Ecologic...
[6]: https://renewablesnow.com/news/europe-getting-dangerously-re...
> One thing I'll add here is that there are a lot of energy usages for fossil fuels for which we have no alternative. Aviation is a big one.
The status of "fossil fuels" isn't crucial to these uses, it's just cheaper. You can just make kerosene, but you wouldn't because you already use fossil fuels for power. However if you have abundant energy without fossil fuels and you want kerosene for some reason you can make it for $$$$
> "No One Goes to War Over a Solar Panel"
Doesn't China have most of the exotic rare earths and stuff that you need in order to build solar panels and systems? I am not anti-solar, but I also don't think China is some guaranteed-friendly party that the whole world can trust not to wield their power once they have it.
I assume anyone who doesn't immediately recognize their planned takeover of Taiwan next year will have a hard time getting any type of raw materials like that.
Doesn't China have most of the exotic rare earths and stuff that you need in order to build solar panels and systems?
No. Solar panels do not require rare earth elements. Some types of high strength magnets require rare earth elements, and some of those magnets are used in wind turbines, which might be where this confusion comes from since wind turbines and solar panels are frequently mentioned together. (Although even most wind turbines do not use rare earth magnets.)
Crystalline silicon solar panels account for more than 95% of the global solar market. The rarest element typically used in these is silver, for metallic pastes used to form cell contacts. China is a major silver producer, but far from dominant. In 2024 it accounted for about 13% of world silver production:
https://silverinstitute.org/silver-supply-demand/
China currently provides a the great majority of that stuff partly because nobody else has bothered to produce much. China doesn't have a majority of world reserves (although the USGS says it's close), just a majority of production.
As another commenter put it, a solar panel is a drill bit not oil. What's the alternative here? Are you arguing we maintaint the dependence on fossil fuels, which can be switched off any day, because of some hypothetical future where China might stop selling "drill bits" (that last 30 years)? That's why this argument is so silly.
As for rare earths, they aren't as rare as the suppliers would seem to suggest. The difference is that China has invested in rare earth extraction and processing and really nobody else has. Likewise, the solar investment was an intentional policy goal. Imagine where the US might be if the $8T+ spent on the so-called Global War on Terror had been spent on renewable infrastructure instead.
As for China behaving in such a belligerent fashion, I'm sorry but let's just compare. Here's a list of US military actions since 1945 [1] and a history of US-led, backed or supplied regime change [2]. The fearmongering around China is just so... manufactured.
[1]: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2023/04/timeline-of-united-sta...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
FWIW, a number of the panels I've looked at are rated for 50 years
If importing solar panels is a dependency on a foreign power then so is importing oil drills and coal mining equipment.
Panels are oil drills, not oil.