Some climate scientists call for immediate phase out of fossil fuels in virtually all forms

Professional Mariner Forum
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There are big profits in renewables because most governments legally compel their use and subsidise them by increasing power prices. Renewables in some schemes can make money without even generating electricity.

But they keep selling oil and gas because the world still needs them to generate power. No nation or state is capable of generating anywhere near their requirements for power from renewables alone without a near-100% backup from other sources.

So no mystery. Big companies react to big subsidies in big ways. And all companies naturally work to reduce input costs by improving things such as fuel efficiency.

Once again the poor unfortunates who cannot afford the more expensive power that results from such collective loss of minds are the ones who suffer the most. But who cares about them when the planet is in desperate need of getting couple of poofteenths of a degree cooler according to someone’s unvalidated computer model?

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Equinor is a Norwegian company and Norway is near 100% covered by hydro electric and wind power as far as electricity is concerned.
The days when wind and solar energy needed subsidies to break even, let alone be profitable, is coming to an end. Even offshore wind is now able to generate power and profit without subsidies:

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Oh how I wish it were true. I’ve happily installed solar panels on my roof and they make me money because they are subsidised (for years to come) and power companies are obliged to buy the renewable energy which they pay for simply by bumping up the cost of electricity to all the poor people (please give them a mention) who couldn’t afford to install panels. The really poor people in India and Africa don’t want unreliable solar panels and wind turbines. They want what we have.

And can you point out any renewables company that’s volunteered to go without subsidy or other government compulsion?

I congratulate Norway for exploiting its natural advantages. Luckily Norway must have built all its dams before the environmentalists found hitherto unknown endangered species unique to those exact sites and other excuses to bar such progress. In Australia we have more coal, gas and uranium than we can use so we should exploit our natural wealth too. Can’t build any more dams.

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Here is a list of the cars with the highest deprecation in order:

71.7 Percent: Nissan Leaf
71.2 Percent: Chevrolet Volt
71.1 Percent: BMW 7-Series
69.9 Percent: Mercedes-Benz S-Class
69.4 Percent: Ford Fusion Energi
68.3 Percent: BMW 6-Series
67.3 Percent: BMW 5-Series
67.2 Percent: Mercedes-Benz E-Class
66.4 Percent: Jaguar XJL
66.2 Percent: Chevrolet Impala

Indeed, the Nissan Leaf in particular became rapidly obsolete with the introduction of more practical mass-market EVs. An EV with a 107-mile range was a novelty when the Leaf arrived in 2010, but within 18 months, the Tesla Model S blew the Leaf out of the water with its 210-mile range. Nissan debuted a second-generation Leaf in 2018, but with only 150 miles of range, Nissan hasn’t yet addressed customers’ biggest bellyache about the Leaf. With EV technology maturing, first-generation Leafs are on track to become further obsolete, and continue to lose value in coming years.

If you don’t need the range, and we don’t, a Nissan Leaf is very cheap transportation.

Kelley Blue Book Says Nissan LEAF Has Lowest 5 Year Cost Of Ownership

Here’s another article, pros and cons of buying used from Edmunds

Pros

They’re a bargain: The EV’s diminished resale value is a con for the person who bought one and is trying to sell it. But it’s a pro for you as a used-car shopper. The savings will vary by model, but on average, used EVs cost 43 to 72 percent less than new ones.

If you search the classified listings for EV models that have been out for at least three years, such as the Fiat 500e or the Nissan Leaf, you’ll find a number of them for less than $10,000. You would be hard-pressed to find a 3-year-old gas-powered vehicle for the same price. And if you did find one, it is sure to have double or triple the miles on the odometer.

You’ll get a smoother driving experience: Since an EV does not have an internal combustion engine, it’s smoother and quieter and it vibrates less than a gas-powered vehicle. Affordable conventional cars in this less than $10K price range are likely to be older, smaller four-cylinder cars that are, in the words of Dan Edmunds, our director of vehicle testing, “coarse and lack refinement.” Further, the added weight of the EV’s battery will make the car feel more planted to the road.

It’s true about driving experience, quick acceleration and smooth ride. Our other cars are old beaters, seem primitive and crude in comparison.

Like the article says, we paid under $10,000 for a low-mileage, three year old car in excellent condition.

One caveat however, do not take the range claims at face value. For the LEAF the claim when new was 107 miles. We work a 10 - 15 miles radius from home which is more reasonable.

Cold weather really reduces range, it’s 2 F (-17C) here right now. To preserve battery life Nissan recommends to limit the number of charges over 80% capacity and not go below 20%. Which we don’t but it reduces the range by almost half.

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Yes I can:

Stay tune, the world is going renewable, no matter what the Doubting Thomas’s may want to believe.

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An interesting article here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/uhenergy/2018/03/23/renewable-energy-subsidies-yes-or-no/#119b37646e23

For the general public I think we usually follow our wallets. When something costs less and saves us money, that is the path we will usually take.

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Good to see. I note some financial incentives (probably not available to traditional energy) still exist in getting this project started. What the article doesn’t say is what if any special arrangements are still in place for the sale of the electricity. Are transmission companies obliged to take wind power whenever it is available? I’m suspicious. Unless it is a true free market it isn’t easy to say it’s cheaper. But we’ll see.

At the moment the world is going renewable because they are responding to subsidies imposed on the basis (I submit) of faulty science. There is an inescapable truth at the moment; that nations with higher proportions of solar and wind energy eg Denmark in their mix pay higher prices than those with lower proportions. Inevitably the poor get hit by higher prices.

Here’s a useful link, noting we can link and counterlink forever without solving anything.

https://principia-scientific.org/the-excess-costs-of-weather-dependent-renewables/

Please tell me your opinion of imposing unnecessary higher prices on the poorest people, many of whom in developing nations have no electricity. How does it help them? Do you want them to escape poverty the same way your nation did?

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Sad fact the oil and gas industry is flaring enough gas to power Africa’s current need for electricity.

Flaring is a ugly wasteful business and one of the reasons I hate crossing from Norwegian to British sector. So much wasted resources on display.

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when your renewable is hydro, its all stored, no other renewable can do this so what happens on a windless night?

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Interesting but not economic - look at the costs. I can see carbon offsetting as one way for shipping to become carbon neutral, shipowners have the money, they now need the will.

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Making main line power supply available to every remote village in India or Africa would cost a lot and take a long time to accomplish. Spending money on subsidising solar panel and battery banks and/or windmills to supply individual villages could make power supplies available to everybody much cheaper and faster. Operating an maintenance cost once installed would be negligible compared to gas or coal fired power stations and long supply lines.
I don’t know how it is in OZ or the US, but in Norway the network fee is as high as the cost of the power supplied.

Many different methods of storage is used, or being debated.
One of which is pumping water back to the reservoir when there are excess wind or solar power available. To be used when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine:

Not everybody agrees:

But this is only one of many methods under study or development:

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Pumped storage at Electric Mountain

http://electricmountain.co.uk/About-Pumped-Storage

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You simply cannot see that traditional fossil fuels are able to be used cheaply to provide reliable base load power to poor people just as western nations have.

One of the reasons poor people don’t have such power is that the environmentalist afflicted institutions such as the IMF have banned lending for coal plants. How can the market work when the comfortable bankers of the IMF in their office towers dictate squishy environmentalism to nations whose villagers die from cooking over open, fetid, smoking dung fires in their mud huts? These condescending do-gooders would tell these suffering people they are far better off with a world a poofteenth of a degree cooler in some lifetime or two (for them) from now than for their children to be able to read a schoolbook at night from a single light globe now.

It’s despicable.

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What Would An Effective Solution To Climate Change Look Like? - Forbes

We need climate solutions that will:

  1. Generate energy from clean sources that don’t produce carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases - because fossil fuel extraction and combustion is the number one cause of climate change, responsible for about two-thirds of the problem (see figure below).
  2. Reduce heat-trapping gas emissions from other important sectors, like agriculture, land use change, industrial processes, wastewater treatment and more - because these are responsible for the remaining third of the problem.
  3. Help us use our resources more efficiently - because did you know that the average US household wastes $165 per year for a total of $19B on “vampire” power, and one-third of all the food grown world-wide is wasted?
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In Victoria, my old state in OZ has been reversing the hydro water flow for 50 years to allow steady operation of the coal powered powerstations.
The country has the same problem as others, they privatized the power then raised emission standards and have price caps so the owners turned the coal off and replaced them with nothing

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We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN

The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.

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Pretty soon there will not be any water flow to reverse in Oz (or for anything else for that matter)
But who cares as long as we get cheap power today. The next generation will just have to live with the result of the greed and stupidity of this one.

Don’t blame earlier generation, they didn’t have the knowledge or the computing power available to us to predict the future.

To try to convince the climate change deniers of anything is useless. It doesn’t matter that 95% of the Scientists in the world say the same, they don’t believe them anyhow.

If it is the truth it is an inconvenient truth and China and India will have to solve it, they are the biggest polluters, not us in the rich world.

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Humans are unwilling to control overpopulation and over urbanization, so eventually natural events, like climate change, will do it for us.

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Plenty of water up north in oz, where there are no people, getting dryer down south.
Since that has been obvious, there have been gas pipelines run many thousands of miles from the north to the south but not water pipes.

Rubbish becoming a bigger issue I think

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What is needed is wholesale big thinking. The need to reforest the deserts, re-ordering the tradewinds and go for industrial solar and hydrogen.

Elon Musk showed the way in S Australia:

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