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Originally Posted by Brian Swartz
I appreciate the charity of this statement, but I also need to note that you didn't actually answer the question. It's not just a case of fundamental disagreement; I've had highly productive discussions with people I disagree with, and others that aren't so much.
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Unproductive is a word I'd use here, yes. It's hard to read tone on the internet, but every time you go down this road, I read heavy condescension on your part. I try to ignore it, because it's not productive to respond in kind.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Swartz
- You refer to this level of investment as massive. I would call it transparently not even really trying, perhaps tokenism is the best word. 5 trillion is well under a tenth of a percent of the global GDP over that period. If you invested at minimum 50-100 trillion, I might begin to think you were actually considering getting serious.
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Serious about what? You're advocating replacing the global energy system. This is what has powered improvements in quality and length of life around the world.
We are already, 3% of the way there, experiencing serious reliability issues. That's because wind power doesn't work when the wind isn't blowing and solar power doesn't work when the sun isn't overhead.
Every single kilowatt hour from those sources must be backed up 100%, as a result. So every single kilowatt hour you depend upon during this transition either has a replacement, or it doesn't. Connector lines are very expensive and aren't completely efficient, and only mitigate the problem by a small amount anyway.
So they talk about battery farms. But the technology to do this on a large enough scale to cover need has yet to be invented. The battery farms in production now are well under 1% of what's needed.
In 2021, the subsidy alone amounted to about 1% of global GDP. Ballpark, within your range of serious, you're talking about maybe 10%. So we could go back and forth about what that would do to world economies. Arguments about socialism and inflation and printing money. Who would be hurt most, etc.
But the bottom line is that you'd be replacing a working technology with a failed technology. So you'd be destroying a significant percentage of the world's economy, reducing the quality of life for billions of people, to do something that would further reduce their quality of life.
As a result, if there is an impending deadline of no more fossil fuels (we agree it's somewhere, we don't agree on when), we are sacrificing our ability to meet that crisis.
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Originally Posted by Brian Swartz
I don't have a problem with the headline. I do have a problem with the bad arguments and bad use of data contained within it - I don't think dishonest is too strong of a term here. I can unpack that more if you don't think it would be a complete waste of time, but I will say that probably the central point of what they are arguing is not in dispute; energy transition is very difficult and will be very expensive & disruptive to the global economy. The problem is they explictly only deal with that side of the equation, present some of the data/arguments in a selective/slanted way, and don't deal with the reality that it's still a fantastic bargain at 10x the price, making the usual flawed assumption that we have the option of continuing on our current path indefinitely without paying a catastrophic price for it.
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You think it's dishonest and you can unpack that. Fine. I think it's honest and have provided some sources and those sources contain lots and lots of footnotes. So unpack away - get at those footnotes if you like.
You keep saying you've proven all this is dishonest, over and over again. But it's more that you've written, over and over again, that these sources are dishonest and slanted, as if the conclusion is enough on its own. There's a lot of disagreement out there and that's how the opponent is painted. Maybe you'll find that an energy company was the source of one piece of one argument - I'm sure some of it was, and it wouldn't be surprising, since they'd be fools not to invest time and money learning about the entire energy market.
In the end, I'm sure, we agree to disagree. You think there's an immediate crisis and I don't. You think wind and solar are the answer and I don't.