Over the last 20 years world governments have spent north of $5 trillion on "green" energy. That has taken fossil fuels share of primary energy from 86% to 84% and world oil consumption increased from 77 million barrels per day to 100 million barrels per day.
Do you get it?
To manufacture each EV battery, you must process
25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium
30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt
5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, 25,000 pounds of ore for copper
Diging up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust
For just - one - battery.
"Nuclear power and fossil fuels brought us here. They caused this crisis, they are not the solution."
Strong and at times emotional speech by Robert Habeck, after weeks under pressure. Defending his actions in government, but standing by Green values. He got a standing ovation.
amazing that U.S. environmentalists are pretending like Energiewende is still a model worth pursuing
Energiewende had minimal impact on overall CO2 emissions while bankrupting Germany's industrial base and making German citizens citizens permanently poorer 🥴
Tomorrow the European Parliament will decide whether fossil gas and nuclear will be considered "sustainable" in the EU taxonomy. But no amount of lobbyism and greenwashing will ever make it "green".
We desperately need real renewable energy, not false solutions.
#NotMyTaxonomy
Shiba Inu coin still has a $6.25B market cap
Polkadot coin still has a $8.7B market cap
Dogecoin still has a $10.9B market cap
soooooo much more crypto pain to come
when you prioritize electrons from intermittent wind & solar via egregious market distorting subsidies it destroys the efficiency of the grid by forcing the rest of the supply stack (dispatchable) to dance around wind & solar's intermittency
still pretty blown away that the Biden admin used the Defense Production Act to push through solar projects using imported solar panels made from thermal coal in China while floating a windfall oil profits tax on U.S. oil producers...in the middle of global molecules shortages
if i was a Western uranium fuel buyer i'd be freaking the F out right now...between Kazakhstan now being cemented as a quasi-Russian proxy and Rosatom potentially getting sanctioned a sizable chunk of the uranium fuel cycle could soon be untouchable.
relying on intermittent wind & solar to provide anything other than ancillary contributions to electric grids is what happens when economic and energy illiteracy meets energy policy
took a brief glance at the Tesla shareholders page on FB and my goodness, a lot of them bot the dip on margin, on top of having ~ 100% of their portfolio in TSLA, it's going to be a bloodbath
Latest Vaclav Smil essay via JP Morgan
These annual energy papers have probably made me more money over the past 5 years than any other piece of Wall St. research.
Halfway between Kyoto and 2050: Zero carbon is a highly unlikely outcome.
The last remaining German nuclear power stations finally shut down two days ago.
Germany's nuclear phaseout has made the remarkable growth of renewables possible.
There's work to do, but a 100% renewable energy system is within reach.
Coal consumption has hit new all time highs despite being a smaller % of the primary energy pie and natural gas consumption continuously hits new highs almost every year.
Europe is a caricature at this point because they have listened to "experts" like Lion here...this is a multidisciplinary real world problem not a theoretical classroom exercise.
There is really only one way out of the European energy crisis: investing hundreds of billions of € into wind and solar.
Any policy that makes such investments less attractive will prolong the crisis.
"I am a dinosaur, but I have never seen these things. The world needs to wake up to an existing reality. The world is running out of energy capacity at all levels." Saudi minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman
for the oil & gas folks
in rough oil terminology
Kazakhstan is ~ 40% of upstream
Rosatom is ~ 40% of downstream
oh, and inventories are drawing about 12 million barrels per day in oil terms right now
if i was a Western uranium fuel buyer i'd be freaking the F out right now...between Kazakhstan now being cemented as a quasi-Russian proxy and Rosatom potentially getting sanctioned a sizable chunk of the uranium fuel cycle could soon be untouchable.
Personally, i find the bloviating about nuclear fusion interesting from a science project perspective but un-interesting from a practical perspective *especially* when nuclear fission is just right there waiting to be capitalized on.
the villainization of fossil fuels (which provide 83% of the world's primary energy) is going to make the word GREEN politically toxic for the next decade
more pain required
amazing with 1yr forward baseload electricity trading at 430 euros per MWh German greens want to move forward with shutting even more CARBON-FREE baseload capacity
i hope German voters are paying attention
In 2 years Germany will have spent $500 billion euros for a wind & solar system that in the aggregate doesn't work 80% of the time. Because the wind & solar capacity factors are so low and the electricity is not dispatchable Germany still keeps ~ 90% of it's fossil fuel capacity.
amazing
same dude that cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office
we need Canada's higher API barrels to blend w/ super light U.S. shale oil...pipelines are much safer and environmentally friendly than crude by rail
Energy ignorance has consequences.
Still so much energy ignorance.
Solar, wind, and even nuclear make electricity. They are not substitutes for oil.
We are still in the first phase (trying to decarbonize the electricity grid) the second phase...
@eleutheriaim
False, renewable energy locks in the need for (especially) natural gas back up. Wind & solar have very low capacity factors that require nearly 100% of their capacity to be backed up by fossil fuels. Nuclear has high capacity factors and no carbon emissions. Nuclear is superior.
Future humans are going to laugh at how idiotic we were in thinking wind and solar and batteries would be the bedrock of an energy transition.
The only question is, how much capital do we squander before we realize our folly?
We make this
#Monet
the stage and the public the audience.
If it takes a painting – with
#MashedPotatoes
or
#TomatoSoup
thrown at it – to make society remember that the fossil fuel course is killing us all:
Then we'll give you
#MashedPotatoes
on a painting!
Governments are realizing too late that there has to be a source of power that can be relied on when the wind drops and clouds cover the sun. Some are scrambling to build a new generation of nuclear reactors. But that takes time. And winter is coming.
Solar panels and wind turbines require lots of fossil fuels to build and they wear out and have to be replaced every 20 years or so, that’s not renewable. They also require lots of mined minerals that take a toll on land and water ecosystems, plus massive land use footprints.
as opposed to being released wantonly into the atmosphere
waste containment is one of nuclear energy's greatest strengths and yet unscientific idiots in the "environmental" groups like
@Greenpeace
would rather the world get poorer eating up more land/wildlife via wind/solar
I hate to be *that guy* but...
We are headed for/are in a major default cycle. The growth in low quality debt during 2009-2019 was off the charts. There's over $3 trillion in BBB rated debt.
Big gaps between the bonds the Fed is buying (quality) and fiscal help from congress.
If you own idled industrial capacity in Europe watching this, you aren’t wondering when you can re-open you are wondering where else in the world you can move too.
The Belgian government will not be extending the lifetime of two nuclear reactors, as originally promised. They’ve made this decision in the middle of an energy crisis. 👎🏽
You could 10x the amount of wind & solar in the U.S. grid (including spending massive amounts on transmission and distribution) and still not replace the need to keep *all* of the country’s current thermal generation capacity. The economics would be terrible, but you’d need to
If we’re going to solve climate change in the next 100 years it’s going to come from harnessing and deploying the energy inside atoms and breakthroughs in materials sciences, not harnessing pitifully diffuse and material intensive wind and solar energy.
Every rich world climate envoy should be required to live a year in abject energy poverty, the way much of the world does every day, before being allowed to preach the climate alarmism gospel to the world on behalf of developed nations.
STARVE THE BEAST | NO MORE SPENDING ON FOSSIL FUELS
More than 1,500 pension funds, universities and other organizations around the world plan to divest from fossil fuel assets.
The spending globally on wind & solar is one of the largest misallocations of capital in human history. The consequences will be dire for human well being.
#Timestamp
i don't think people really understand how bad Germany has screwed up here...it doesn't matter how much wind/solar capacity you add the decarbonization benefits will be capped by their pitifully low capacity factors (especially in Germany)
this speaks to just how difficult it is to disentangle anthropogenic climate change from natural variability...we're trying to disentangle causality from noisy data sets measuring tiny average shifts over very long time periods
Statistics Norway published a taboo-breaking paper whose conclusion states “the results imply that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be sufficiently strong to cause systematic changes in the pattern of the temperature fluctuations.”
Maybe going backwards on the energy density ladder and building an energy grid that prioritizes high entropy wind and solar is a massively wealth destroy misallocation of capital unrivaled in human history outside of war.
It would be one thing if this energy crisis was coinciding with some freak cold snap or something but it's f-ing SEPTEMBER.
Can we stop listening to the people that have caused this gd mess yet?
Gains in energy stocks are testing climate-conscious investors who long avoided shares of fossil-fuel producers but are now missing out on the year’s top trade via
@WSJ
Good graphic here. Nuclear actually provided almost 30% of total energy needs in the 90s in Germany; has now been reduced to zero.
If that share were maintained, you could basically eliminate coal today.
An important, and often overlooked, comment from ECB President Christine Lagarde: the eurozone "cannot fully recover" the wealth loss (aka terms-of-trade) due to the energy crisis. Cannot. Period.
Full speech:
"As reality will soon demonstrate, if a country can't afford to keep its citizens warm during the winter, then that country is poor, not rich."
@DoombergT
There is widespread consensus that the runup of energy prices since January was caused by the building of Putin’s troops at Ukraine’s border. Russia is the world’s 3rd largest oil producer, and energy supply disruptions and market volatility are a result of Putin’s aggression.
A friend of ours ex-husband committed suicide today. It’s easy to view Covid social restrictions as just a matter of preventing the disease, but please consider second order effects before getting on your soapbox about the “science”