This chart is helpful for understanding emissions in China. Basically, coal dominates the question of growth or decline. Oil emissions have been declining, but clearly not enough to overcome whatever coal is doing.
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This chart is helpful for understanding emissions in China. Basically, coal dominates the question of growth or decline. Oil emissions have been declining, but clearly not enough to overcome whatever coal is doing.
Clean energy job creation is outpacing fossil jobs. 36 million clean energy workers to 32 million fossil, a 9:8 ratio. Compare this to the investment ratio, $1.8 clean to $1 fossil. So clean job creation is driven by much stronger capital flows than fosll job creation.
General advice for young people is to follow the money. IEA analysis also notes that clean energy investment needs higher educational skill sets and is facing an education gap.
Net job creation (in energy) is boosted by following a more aggressive path to confronting climate change. Net job creation by 2030 is about 6 million on the basis of current policies, but jumps to 17 million if we accelerate to a 1.5C path.
In many countries there is a strong connection between jobs and politics. Countries that are not primarily based on exported fossil fuels will tend to have more workers in clean energy than fossils. Politicians do well to accept the idea that 2 clean jobs can be created for every fossil job lost. Slowing down the transition to renewables just to save dwindling fossil jobs is not a good posture in the coming election cycles. Workers in clean tech will want to know that politicians do support aggressive job creation in their industries.
adiggs
Well-Known Member
Doggydogworld
Active Member
I think most of China's 1.8m "growth" was recovery from the 2022 COVID shutdowns. Their annual oil consumption growth trend was in the 0.5m bpd range prior to COVID. The trend has flattened, but not necessarily turned negative. For many years the global trend has been declines in Europe and Japan, flattish in the US and growth in China, India and ROW.
Requiring more jobs to get the same amount of energy is a losing proposition. Similar to requiring more jobs to grow our food, e.g. by going back to mule plows. I think these numbers are distorted by clean energy's heavy upfront component, however. Fossil is also heavy on upfront cost, but IMHO has a higher ongoing labor component. The actual numbers escape me, though.
Yeah, it make sense that the 2.4 increase is largely Covid-19 recovery. It's been frustrating how it confuses the structural issues. I would like to think that 0.9 is a more normative level of growth for a while.
In the long run, I think that clean energy will be higher productivity than fossil. Certainly, it's heavily front loaded as you observe. But we are still at a stage of innovation and scale up. Put another way, there are still ways to cut cost per unit of energy delivered. Most of cost cutting will include reduction in labor specifically. Little things like redesigning equipment for quicker installation make a difference, and big things like improving the efficiency of a solar module reduces labor per MWh accross the board. By comparison, much of fossil energy work has been scaled up and highly mature for quite a while. Think about how labor intensive coal mining was 100 years ago.
mspohr
Well-Known Member
Ring, ring. It's the 2010s, they want their capital back.
This is a little off-topic, but achieving peak-meat bears a lot in common with other peaks we discuss here. Let's have respectful discussion here. But where we disagree, we may discover the sorts of challenges many have with transitioning to a renewable and EV future.
mspohr
Well-Known Member
May be a problem with Twitter but I don't see the "10 charts"... just one.
I think getting people to give up meat will be a harder transition than EVs. Probably will need to just sneak "non-meat" into processed foods over time. As for steak... some people will (literally) die on that hill.
Hmm, the link works for me.
I agree. It's a hard ask.
It may take more than a generation to transition. Gen Z is more receptive than older generations. Perhaps their children and grandchildren will continue in this trajectory.
Dr. J
Active Member
mspohr
Well-Known Member
That explains it.
Not going to login to Elons trash pile.
Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants
Giant batteries that ensure stable power supply by offsetting intermittent renewable supplies are becoming cheap enough to make developers abandon scores of projects for gas-fired generation world-wide. The long-term economics of gas-fired plants, used in Europe and some parts of the United...
This should not be much of a surprise. I think the pushback of financiers is key to substantial change. There is enough traction with batteries that it disrupts the certainty of payoff for new gas plants.
It's not necessary for batteries, at this point in time, to totally replace gas plants. Rather, it is sufficient to disrupt the financing of new gas plants.
We've been anticipating this for quite some time.
Rystad Energy: Fossil Fuel Emissions Will Peak Within Two Years | OilPrice.com
Rystad Energy concluded that global CO2 emissions are poised to hit about 39 gigatonnes per year in 2025 before settling into a steady annual decline.
oilprice.com
So Rystad is predicting a 2025 peak for fossil fuel emissions.
This is very interesting. I'd to know what portion of China's exports are EVs. My hunch is that this dramatic rise is driven by EV. Even Tesla is exporting from China.
Doggydogworld
Active Member
Tesla averages ~30k per month. BYD is the only other real EV exporter, they maybe average 15-20k. I recall reading Wuling planned to export the ultra-cheap Hongguang Mini, but don't know if they do. EDIT: I forgot about Volvo/Polestar and SAIC which sells "MGs" in Europe. Don't know those volumes, could add up to 20k/month.
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