So, the devil comes to Davos and says: "You can enjoy cheap energy, but some poor people in the global south will suffer and die" And after a long silence the US president says: "I feel like there is a catch there, but I just can't figure out what it is"
Except it's not cheaper. 70% of the world import fossil fuels. Many changes are happening because it is cheaper to not do that and use renewables instead. US Presidents are getting involved to stop cheaper energy getting built.
Offshore wind, which is more expensive than onshore wind, is cheaper than new coal in China. New solar and onshore wind competes with fuel costs for existing coal plants.
I think the difference is that the renewable infrastructure requires new capital investment, whereas the fossil fuel infrastructure is already in place and amortized, even for importing countries (distribution networks, electricity generation plants, etc.) And so you've got to get someone to pay for the up-front costs which on the short term are greater than the long term costs.
I guess the fossil fuel infrastructure is actually more expensive? (Drilling, refining, shipping of the fuel: all not needed for wind and solar.) But this infrastructure has already been built and paid for, and now someone with a lot of money wants a return on their investment over the next 25 years. Which is not going to happen in a world where we prevent the worst climate change.
(Also, investment to decarbonize things like cement are not going to happen if fossils stay cheap.)
In a long run - maybe but in a short run high oil/gas/diesel prices push CPI up, as a reaction central banks are rising rates, bonds yields are rising even faster in anticipation of future rate hikes - this makes credit expensive and most green energy project depend on credit so investments into green energy going down too AFAIK. At least clean energy stock indexes are falling for the last few months because of high credit interest rates. So paradoxically Iran war is slowing energy transition.
Like Putin in Ukraine. But decoupling from Russian gas is still slow going and controversial in Europe, and the "moderate" right is more and more inclined to collaborate with Putin’s little fringe-right helper parties, likely partly because they’re massively bleeding votes and partly out of real sympathies for fringe policies that just used to be unmentionable in polite company.
It's controversial because it's not just about changing gas provider, but paying way more for gas as well.
Americans keep strong arming us into buying their LNG, but we also pay 5 times as much for it as we paid for Russian gas.
And Norway, Algeria, etc and all the other providers know very well that our biggest provider has been cut off, so they can all ask much more.
So it's very easy and convenient to say "why don't you do differently Europeans", but it has a terrible effect on our manufacturing and export bound economies.
The point is, obviously, that we should be decoupling from all gas. The past four years have made it very clear how risky it is to depend on foreign fossil fuels, economically and geopolitically.
Cause and effect though; the fires are natural / annual reoccurrences, but more intense this year due to climate change.
This is one reason why they tried to limit emissions and climate change, because it triggers runaway effects like in this case forest fires, droughts, floods, melting of glaciers, polar caps and permafrost, ocean flows, etc. These are all climate change effects.
I'm a pessimist and think it was already too late when the Paris Agreement was put in place. Already too late when Al Gore did his thing in the 2000s.
If global climate change is a problem, you can't just have some countries deindustrializing and reducing CO2 while others go full bore on scale manufacturing with any form of cheap energy including coal being used.
Plus ironically all of the batteries and solar panels for the West's climate mission will be made in China who didn't deindustrialize, has far lower energy prices, and less aggressive local rules around things like air pollution that let them be manufactured at all.
Meanwhile they are also rapidly going green by adopting this tech domestically since it's highly price competitive due to their manufacturing investments. They also invested heavily in Nuclear (which the government there openly welcomed).
Yes you can. China has barely emitted half the lifetimes emissions of the US because it didn't go through decades of inefficent and polluting technologies. The ozone hole wasn't caused by China.
Same thing applies to those up and coming countries: they immediately have more efficient technologies.
> you can't just have some countries deindustrializing and reducing CO2 while others go full bore on scale manufacturing with any form of cheap energy including coal being used.
Well... that's what we did in the Industrial Revolution too. Only the countries were reversed.
I don't see why not. It's obviously not as good as getting all countries working together, but it's certainly not practical to wait until all countries are united before starting.
Be a tech maximalist- use tech and will power to pull ahead with green energy. Go hard on batteries and energy storage. I do not even care that I may sound delusional - the contrary doomer viewpoint is deluded in a far worse manner. The things we need either are or are not within our abilities- you will never know unless you try. Resigning with *it’s too hard* ensures we will know that we cannot.
Is it viable as anything but subscription service? I mean if you want technical staff with expertise to continue working on it they need to continue getting paid. It's a gamble that your one time payment (however large) will be responsibly managed by the company owners once the flow of new clients dries up.
And once you are on the hook what's stopping the company from playing some ads for users tiers platinum and lower?
Given that MED-EL, the company mentioned in the article, has been around since 1990 and is constantly expanding, I would assume that this is indeed viable.
I live in Innsbruck, Austria, where MED-EL is headquartered. Like most people I know, I too have briefly worked there in 2008. I currently live 5 minutes on foot from where the entrance used to be back then, before it was walled off, they massively expanded the building and added another building behind it, where in 2008 a bunch of office containers with clean rooms used to be. There is now a raised walk way to the other side where they used to rent just a few units back then and now co-opted the building, plus a patch work of smaller rental spaces all around.
The implants themselves are not cheap and (at least at the time?) eventually needed to replaced. From what I recall, some of the technology involved was also licensed out or sold for other applications. Ultimately, I would also guess that all the licensing, approval and red-tape involved in actually making implants for humans also kind of limits competition quite a bit.
> Given that MED-EL, the company mentioned in the article, has been around since 1990 and is constantly expanding, I would assume that this is indeed viable.
I think currently it is viable because MED-EL is not a publicly traded company or in the hands of some private equity or some MBA. I know that there are serious concerns how MED-EL will develop when the Hochmaiers are not in charge anymore.
> and (at least at the time?) eventually needed to replaced.
All cochlear implants from any of the cochlear implant companies have a % chance of needing to be replaced. Failure rate is something like 4% in the first 10 years, and 10% in the first 20 years.
And yes, we currently have quite a few sane ones, especially in the EU. None of them is perfect, but it's definitely the most humane it has ever been by a long shot.
No, the ads played by medical devices will be entirely self-interest: they will whisper in your ear that it’s time already for your next colonoscopy, and that 988 is available for your crisis, and your 2FA login code is as follows… and remember that flu/COVID vaccines are now available, and don’t forget your PCP appointment that is coming in 23.5 hours! Also you have an outstanding balance of $300,000 so please blink thrice to debit your checking account.
You could share the same concern about any cochlear implant, I suppose. There are three (Med-El, Advanced Bionics, and Cochlear) and all are quite stable and provide great support.
I thought C++ is unnecessarily complex, and then I see Rust following the same pattern... I've just thought of a complexity metric that would calculate the ratio of alphanumeric characters to punctuation.
Look, C is so simple, you can implement a compiler in under 10K lines of code on a new platform. And then spend the your life dodging bugs and come up with a zoo of bizarre macros to keep you safe.
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