Does it mean that production reached the level where intermittence becomes problematic?

I know. But we know it is “just” an engineering problem which can be solved at a high cost.

Fusion is a field where you can’t have the “statup mindset”: investments are in hundreds of millions and take at best a decade (and most likely two) to pay off. That’s one field where it can’t go anywhere without public funding.

It is very possible that China gets there first, considering how ridiculous western fusion efforts have been.

Your assumptions are far more numerous and offensive than that. From you thinking that I know nothing about discrimination at work or my driving habits, or even assuming that you are more to the left than I am or that I criticize your positions for being leftist rather than being wrong.

The cherry on the top of you laying down a dozen of wrong accusation is you calling my attitude patronizing and belittling.

it unusual for someone to get things this wrong this consistently.

At least we agree on something.

And once again your assumptions about my situation and my work ethics are hilariously wrong. I am cutting down my income in order to work non-profit on issues I do care about and turn down offers by unethical companies routinely. I am a freelance who changes client pretty often. My income does not depend on the acceptance of an ideology, I made sure of that and that was a reason for becoming independent.

I am sure I am not the first person you are antagonizing through your own projections. You should really be more careful about assuming things about the people who contradict you. Sometimes they just do it because you are wrong. Being more open to that possibility would make your life much better.

First time I have someone complaining about me giving sources.

You are mostly arguing on things we agree (there needs to be policy efforts, there needs to be some change, the current transition is too slow) and we mostly disagree on what is a data-backed observation: renewables augment while fossils go down. Within fossils, gas displaces coal but fossils in general go down. If you refuse graphs and numbers about good sources about it, I am at a loss.

So much for not doing personal attacks. Ok, usually when I discuss with someone who does not have the basic graph reading skills I patiently explain their mistakes, but in my experience people who are unable to read data but think they are smart enough to teach it are incurable. Will you be the exception?

a) The total amount of fossil fuel used in energy generation is decreasing

Yes, coal+natural gas has decreased. The fall in coal is bigger than the rise in natural gas. You can check it in the source the article linked.

b) Coal power plants are being shut down and replaced by wind farms

By renewables (which include hydro and solar panels), yes. They are also replaced by natural gas power plant. “Coal plants being replaced by renewables and gas” implies that some coal plants are replaced by renewables.

c) The percentage of the energy generation from Coal has decreased since 2000, and the percentage of energy from renewables has increased, but not as quickly as the energy from natural gas.

Correct again. So do you understand that some of the decrease in coal was from renewables replacing them or have you an alternate explanation?

The graph is scaled based on the total energy generation in the year 2020.

No. It is clearly labelled in billion kWh. However, the total production in the US has more or less plateaued in the last 20 years so that does not make a big difference on the right hand of the graph.

Here is the second graph from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What information is supported by this graph?

I am sure you notice but just to be sure, you saw that this is just over 3 years, right? Including the very unusual covid years.

a) Coal is being phased out for renewable alternatives

It is more visible on the wider graph but indeed you can see the coal slightly decreasing and the renewables slightly increasing. The coal dip in 2020 tells you that when there is a decrease in demand, coal and gas plants are shut down before renewable sources.

b) There has been a major shakeup in how the United States gets its energy during the last five years

This is a 3 years graph of a very unusual time. Please tell me you realized that.

c) Where the United States generates its energy changes over the timescale of months, but from 2019 to 2022 has remained roughly static.

On a month to month basis, coal is sometime the #2 source of energy and sometime #4. That’s something that never happened before 2010. And it will happen less and less often as the big trend shows, coal is going to remain #4 more and more often.

This is text taken from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What can be inferred from this text?

Please tell me you know what “short term” is. Please tell me you are not trying to infer trends from fast noise. Please tell me you are not taking the covid years as the basis for an extrapolation.

Of course it is possible, at least in the simplified model I gave of identical costs. It is also possible that they replace them [like has happened in the US for the past 20 years.

In practice though, renewables only get there because it is actually more cost effective in some areas (areas with more sunlight, more wind=better economic efficiency of renewables). In the case where a tech is cheaper than the other, in a market economy, they are mutually exclusive yes, so the most efficient one is displacing the other.

I usually refrain from answering to personal attacks, I am not here to win internet points or leftist certificates from random people. I prefer to focus the discussion on facts, but between a dozen (hilariously wrong) assumptions about my life and strawman arguments, you don’t leave me with a lot of material.

So let’s talk about the Jevons effect. Not sure why you mention a post you made 10 days ago, if you are interested I made almost the same argument I did in the previous post 5 months ago and had to discuss it in professional settings more than 10 years ago. That’s not a concept I discovered yesterday.

In particular, the Jevon’s paradox is not about the number of lightbulbs consumed, but efficiency and energy use.

Lightbulbs to LED transition is a textbook effect of a small Jevons effect. It totally applies. You can apply this to lighting, where the effect is smaller than the energy gains. You can apply it to the wider system of energy production where yes, indeed, lower energy costs increase total energy demand.

To escape Jevon’s Paradox under capitalism long enough to solve the crisis, you would need everything to suddenly become so efficient that even exponential economic growth would not be fast enough to make up the difference between the transition and the point we reach decarbonization.

You keep using “efficiency” in different meanings there. Jevons paradox is fed by the economic efficiency (USD/kWh) of energy production. We are interested in its carbon efficiency (CO2/kWh). Replacing a coal power plant by a wind farm of the same capacity and same economic efficiency (aka cost) has no reason to cause a rebound yet would cause a huge change in terms of carbon efficiency.

People have drastically adjusted their society to meet existential threats before.

Yes, and I am sure that they could again. I remind you that I am the one arguing that solving the climate crisis is easy and just a matter of will and I therefore consider that this is now out of my department.

You are the one insisting on a “holistic” approach, which, I am arguing would involve not only taking into account a realistic model of the population to understand why, politically, these easy solutions are not implemented or are implemented too slowly. It means not only to consider the mindset of ecologically minded people (which, obviously, I do consider to exist and to be human, I have a hard time you take that strawman you built seriously) but also the mindset of the majority that blocks these solutions. I don’t like it and you probably don’t like it, but an “holistic” approach would be techno-solutionist: it is harder to make most people change their habits than to make carbon-neutral alternatives to the products they use, so favor that approach if you want a quick transition.

If you would favor a “morally superior” way to lower CO2 emission over a fast and effective pragmatic but “impure” one, it means climate is not your top priority, that you put some ideals over it (which can be fine! Just don’t pretend defending climate when you are defending your preferences)

Let’s start with the end:

decreasing energy use and limiting that use to renewable resources is a deeply social and political problem, and has no technological solution.

That’s like being blind to the air you are breathing. It is indeed not a technological problem anymore like it was in the 1980 because the technological problems have been solved. And technology has also helped solving the economic problem as well by lowering the cost of these techs. Indeed, there is little more that tech can solve there.

Now the paradox you mention in your first part is called the Jevons paradox, or the rebound effect, and is one of the most misquoted and misunderstood piece of economics in these discussions. It states that if you make a process more efficient, you may increase the total cost of it. Here is what is often misunderstood:

1. It is not systematic. You can make processes more efficient without increasing the demand for it.
2. The rebound may be lower than the overall gain. Lighting for instance, when switching from incandescent to LED light, has seen an small increase in usage but still a huge decrease in total energy use. Turns out that 10x more efficient lighting, does not make people want 10x more lights.
3. It is about economic efficiency. A typical market economy does not care about CO2 efficiency. This is usually a problem but in this case, there is no reason that a more carbon-efficient electricity experiences a rebound when priced similarly to a fossil-based electricity.

Bringing more nuclear power plants online, building more solar energy arrays, and covering windy lands and coastlines with turbines will not ‘solve’ global warming, it will accelerate it.

This is false. This is even a lie and you should know better than to spread it. I am tired of ungrowthists shooting down climate solutions and pretending to fight climate change denialists while themselves ignoring the parts of the IPCC reports that they dislike. Renewables and EVs are a crucial part of the transition, and nuclear plays a role, though a smaller one. The easiest way to shut down fossil fuel power plant, by far, when you holistically take into account the economics, the politics, the sociology, the psychology, etc. is to have the ability to switch as painlessly as possible to a renewable mode of production that changes as little habits as possible.

Am I thinking this is the best theoretical way or the most moral one or the most enlightened one? No. But you talk about a holistic approach, this is what it is: the shortest path is the path of lower effort. Waiting for MAGA hats or impoverished people to adopt the enlightened ways of economic growth rejection is as realistic as betting on nuclear fusion to solve all energy problems once and for all. Want a quick transition? Let’s them keep their oversized SUVs and meat-heavy diet while making them CO2 neutral. Put the human in the equation, but put the real human in it, not the humans you would like to exist.

EDIT: Preferred to remove an overly aggressive answer about the CO2 capture part, but too tired at the moment to make a polite retort to the frankly offensive assumptions you make about my position.

It is not the holistic approach that I am criticizing, it is the “there are no technical solution” claim. We have all the tech solutions. We know their efficiency, we know their cost. We know efficiency can only go up, costs can only go down. Governments of the world have these plans on their desks and without GWB’s decision to make climate change denial an acceptable political stance, the world would have started implementing it 20 years ago.

Vote for people who care about the environment and you solve the crisis in a decade. No need for new fancy techs for the transition.

The only field where new tech may help is for the repair/rewilding post-transition, but to be honest, I am tired of people saying “Oh you just want to greenwash harmful practices” when I mention CO2 capture research. We will need these eventually, I would probably work on that as an engineer if I had made climate change my personal priority but then, there are so many low-tech-hanging fruits that we are not engaging with that I am not sure we need more solutions when most of the good ones are not being deployed.

With pleasure!

I am working on 2 things:

• Professionally (but switched to part time this year) I am helping a typical startup create an AI tool to help medical researchers. We are a lot on that niche but I am frankly afraid at how many companies do not seem to understand how crucial accuracy is in the medical field and just slap together models and vector DBs without understanding what they are doing. I think and hope there is potential to actually have an impact on life expectancy there so I will work on that project for as long as the company pays me for and probably would do something similar in open source if it kills the project.

• Half professionally (technically doing it on free time but still getting minimum wage compensation for that) at a non-profit I am assembling and programming an automated fleet of 3 robots to explore the feasibility to automate the assembly of mechanical machines. We are receiving public funding to explore that in the field of “alternate vehicles”. Here is a post I made on a show event organized by the effort (I recommend trying to translate the post in French if you are interested in the thing, it has more info in it). My goal is to automate small scale production of open hardware projects. There are tons of useful machines publishing their plans out there but few of them are duplicated. It often takes a week of work to make it happen and I aim at lowering that cost. Hopefully eventually all you will have to do is to buy components, put them on a shelf and let the machine assemble the project, only asking for help on very specific actions.

About fights my general philosophy is that one ought to focus on one big subject to fight for but remain an ally (or at least not an obstacle) in all the other fights they deem worthy. It can happen that people who can’t devote all the time they would love to a cause rationalize it by belittling the cause (I guess it is a kind of cognitive dissonance. I wish I could help ecologists, feminists, antifa, antiracists, educators, social workers, medical practitioners, worldwide anarchists, but there is only so many time for these things. However when I stumble upon low hanging fruits that can help them or barriers that are easy for me to remove, I’ll do. Also remember: giving time to a cause is good, but unless you can devote a good percentage of your free time to it, sending money is usually preferable and even $5 helps.

You are disagreeing with the IPCC then. It provides strategies to fight the climate change using only today’s technologies. We have the tech for clean electricity production and alternative for almost every fossil fuel use out there: electricity for most, biofuel for a few remaining ones.

I do many things but the impact is limited. I switched to heat pump and soon to EV but I can’t change my country’s electric mix by myself. Indeed, the others don’t want. Because it would be easy if they would. I’ll continue vote and support people who want to solve this and to be fair, we are getting there, just too slowly.

That’s fine: I am working on other changes as an engineer, trying to make AI and robotics veer away from a dystopian timeline. There are other fights where I am more useful

What is weird to me is that the technical solutions are there. They are known, they are old. And they are opposed.

As an engineer I would like to help, but after being asked to sign a petition against nuclear power, against a solar power plant, against electric vehicles, and hearing environmentalists complain about wind turbines, stating batteries will never be a solution, inventing resources depletion problems (for non-fossil materials there is zero depletion problem) I am really wondering if we do want to solve the problems.

There are many scenarios towards a renewable future that are totally doable. From the “business as usual, just replace fossils with renewable electricity” to an ungrowth scenario, a whole spectrum in between and for all a nuclear option depending on your preferences, it is only a matter of political will.

Anti-capitalism doesn’t necessarily means communism. Note that both decentralization and anti-statism also score pretty high.

I hate tankies too but they do not represent the entirety of the anticapitalist movement.

Oh ok then!

You can absolutely do these other things yes.

I would not bother with a small lens from a projector, you can buy an A4 fresnel lens for less than 10 USD in amazon and much cheaper in bigger quantities. That’s already going to be a challenge to do something interesting with that size.

I like it! I think you prefer this style instead of a solar panel + laser installation so I won’t bother you with efficiency calculation. On the use of the beam however, the unreliable power of the source is going to make the direct use difficult. I think that most CNC tools (cutter, printer, etc) will prefer to use this source to heat a heatmass and add an electronically controllable way to transfer the heat and PID-control it.

So it’s possible a larger lens could concentrate even more heat

Yes! One square meter of sun gives 1000W at noon in perfect conditions. A 1000W laser cuts through several centimeters of metal. Of course, the challenge is in the focus (and boy will you have trouble there!) but if you achieve a good concentration over a large lens, you can reach pretty high power.

Exactly. And the punk attitude of instinctive opposition to almost any organized effort becomes detrimental to that at one point.