[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-start-commerci...
Is it because of the interests of fossil fuel companies and their lobbying, or am I missing some economic factor?
We can switch to hydrogen for lots of stuff that requires carrying your fuel on your back, but some things get tougher because the density is just not the same as a hydrocarbon.
These are all surmountable (biodiesel, carbon capture->fuel cycles, bioreactors, etc), but they take time and money.
In the end, what will push us to get there are economic shocks. We're getting there, it's just painful.
Fuel density is logistically important and the US geographical position means that density is more important to the US than other nations. In other words, if we forecast that we'll be fighting foreign wars, fuel transport is an logistical problem that optimises for density.
Edit: I found them :D
Wars of the future will make heavy use of drones. They don't run on hydrocarbons.
1. https://insideevs.com/news/784805/abrams-m1e3-hybrid-tank-vi...
"It's called Megawatt charging because it delivers 1,000 kilowatts of electrical power at 1,000 volts, which is twice as powerful as the fastest chargers we have here in the United States."
That makes fast, long-range travel quite practical in an electric vehicle.
While this model greatly improves the charging speed, other electric cars introduced this year use sodium-ion batteries, which are heavier than lithium-ion batteries, but they have the advantage that in cold climates they do not lose either capacity or charging speed down to temperatures as low as minus 40 Celsius degrees, removing other limitation of electric cars.
So hydrocarbon fuels are likely to remain non-replaceable only in aircraft and spacecraft, where weight really matters.
However, hydrocarbon fuels can be synthesized from water and carbon dioxide, passing through syngas, by using solar energy, just not at a price competitive with fossil fuel.
The US grid is still 57% coal and gas.
For our use-case, 95% of our trips are to the shops, to various kids sports, to school, to the bus/train station, visiting (local) family, and all are very short trips easily within the relatively short range of the Leaf: ~100km. We still have our existing cars, they just get used less in favour of the cheapest option for the job at hand.
Even with our son being newly able to drive independently (so essentially needing to have three cars, rather than two, on the go at any one time), over the 18 months of owning the Leaf we've saved about 25% of the purchase price of the Leaf in spending less on petrol (including the electricity cost to charge the Leaf - which gets charged using the solar panels during the day, but more commonly using cheaper grid electricity non-peak overnight - yes, likely primarily off fossil fuels but from what I've read is more energy efficient than using petrol to power the car).
My point being, analogous to the "right answer" being to only using energy-dense fuels when necessary, we use the cheaper electric vehicle option when applicable, and only burn the expensive stuff when the better option is unavailable.
P.S. Looking at buying a newer EV with longer range, so there are additional and more flexible "better options", plus coming up to having a daughter who is also able to drive unaccompanied (four cars? :grimacing face:)
Humans really do not like change, the problems you have now are swept under the rug but tiny new problems are made into massive, insurmountable ones.
This is definitely part of it. My personal opinion is that 'mechanical intelligence' is so intertwined with, cough, masculinity that EVs are a threat to these kinds of men at the very core of their being. There's so much 'identity' that people associate with the car they drive, the noise it makes, that they can take it apart and put it back together again despite its complexity.
The simplicity of the electric motor and the minimal servicing required of an electric car is potentially anathema to (toxic) masculinity. As is enforcing 'stopping driving for a rest and (literal) recharge'.
It's a super old school way of thinking, but aren't we in the midst of seeing exactly that bubbling up to the surface as far more entrenched in society than we thought it could be?
(May be overthinking this a bit, but the illogic from otherwise logical family members around EVs really twisted my mind into knots that I had to spend the time undoing)
> tiny new problems are made into massive, insurmountable ones
This is just cope. Clutching at the thinnest branches because that's the only thing on offer. It's the rationalisation of all of what I've mentioned above.
It's definitely not this, since that hasn't been true since ~2010 CAFE standards required ECUs + their array of feeder sensors, all usually factory-locked.
An EV dropped my transportation fuel bills by 90% but even i will admit that an EV is a hassle. On any trip that exceeds the range of the car, we must identify EV chargers, then determine whether they are working and only then can we start counting the additional minutes.
In the winter, seeing the range of you car drop by 26% and not knowing where the next working charger is, is the #1 reason why we still have two cars. If i could eliminate one with access to better transit, it would be the EV, not the combustion car.
The reality is that operating an EV is a hassle unless you can deal with the hassle or have sufficient privilege (e.g. live in a detached home) to be able to offset some of the hassle.
How that gets turned into "yeah but EVs can't drive for 500km on one charge, so they're a hassle", I don't know.
Would it be cheaper to keep the EV and rent a car for when you need to do longer trips? (also taking into account the additional hassle of renting a petrol/diesel car)
Only speaking for myself, I'd seriously consider renting a (combustion) car for an interstate driving holiday if it's a rare occurrence, like once a year or once every two years. It will become an exercise in accounting[0].
My silly-ish analogy is: I don't own a plane because I fly rarely enough that it's not worth buying a plane to allow me to fly wherever, whenever I want.
I did the maths on my situation and it did not work out. It is currently cheaper to pay the $120 / month or so on insurance and maintenance for the second car as opposed to renting a car for the once a month that we actually use the second car.
The trouble is that renting a car is expensive and public transit is an even bigger hassle.
We had an emissions trading scheme[0] in 2012 meant to help in a transition to clean energy sources that was aggressively lobbied against by Australia's largest polluters and lasted only 2 years before being repealed by the incoming government by labeling it a "tax" that citizens would pay for. This led to a decade of policy stagnation[1] where we could've been transitioning away from fossil fuels.
So while energy density is definitely a factor, political lobbying is absolutely a factor.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Pollution_Reduction_Sch...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/0a453f5c-e859-4300-9355-46822c451...
Are the quotes here implying there wasn't a cost imposed on the public to artificially speed up a transition to green energy? Might as well be honest about it and say it's a "temporary sacrifice for the greater good" or something. Otherwise it's just another form of political spin.
The "tax" was to be paid by the largest polluters, hence their lobbying against it. It wasn't something the citizens had to pay for unless the largest polluters decided to raise their prices as a result of this "tax".
Asking polluters to decrease their profits, as it becomes increasingly obvious that their profits are based on making life worse for the entire planet for the future, I think, is not too grand an ask. "That's how it has always been" is not a reason not to act to improve "how it could be".
The only reason a politician would come up with a complex carbon scheme like that is if they knew a tax would be unpopular with the public. Which mostly translates to a lack of good communication or a disregard for the public's intelligence.
And the way the events unfolded show that indeed, a tax would be unpopular with the public.
The political opposition continuously spun it as a "tax", in an attempt to stir outrage and win the next election, which they succeeded in[1]. The incoming government was and still is largely funded by fossil fuel companies, so they repealed the scheme.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Australian_federal_electi...
It’s probably the hardest thing to replace but if we can’t we will be okay.
Long haul trucking and shipping and remote site power are probably the next hardest things, and maybe coal for metallurgy, but these are also small compared to emissions from electricity generation and routine car transit. The big sources can be completely converted.
I mean, you could probably almost run a jet turbine on bacon grease if you kept it warm to keep it from solidifying. Some military stuff is intentionally made to be as “flex fuel” as possible in case you are cut off from official supply lines and have to do something like gas up a plane with road diesel of unknown quality.
You wouldn’t just do things like that with a million dollar plane since it might be bad for the engine but if the engine were tuned for it it’d be fine.
And in the U.S., Republicans have done everything they can to hamstring the transition and destroy the billions of dollars invested by automakers into EVs prior to 2025. But even that can only postpone the transition.
The bureaucracy was moving the right direction - towards renewables - until the conservatives in this country deliberately changed strategy to emphasize fossil fuels again.
You can draw your own conclusions about motive, but this isn’t an accident.
The west does not yet understand just how much was lost through financialization of our economies and the loss of our manufacturing industries, we are no longer competitive and cannot remain competitive long term. Not only can we not take on solar production but we can’t even maintain vehicle manufacturing in Germany. The US is about to lose its edge in military manufacturing and in many ways already has. We still maintain an edge in aerospace and software but we’re likely to eventually lose that battle as well.
Also ignores how captured government funding is, I was offered many millions in research grants so long as I kicked back 80% to the big 4 firm that administered the scheme. Their pitch, sure they get 80% but I still get 20% of free money. I think people really underestimate how much corruption has rotted out the west and how much of our perceived wealth is lie I am highly confident I will outlive.
Corruption is of course deplorable, but a tiny quantum of solace is that it also allows adversaries to underestimate a nation state or block: when push comes to shove, a controlled level of corruption can be suspended and suddenly true productivity is observable...
There is the anti-fragility idea that when something is attacked it becomes stronger - the attack creates a true signal for information which is now capable of aligning internal interests. The problem is if the adversary is intelligent and avoids attacking for this very reason. This is what I believe China is doing, they keep threatening to attack to promote the various grifters, without actually attacking which would inspire effective collaboration. It was a trap and we are firmly caught in it and I know of no way out of it.
We might always need some for various materials and industrial process, but wasting it on ground transportation is beyond absurd at this point.
There are other storage options, but they require even more space than batteries.
Oil and gasoline require very little space, have easy to handle failure modes, and aren’t that expensive to operate. Not expensive enough to justify changing nationwide logistics and support.
It’s also far cheaper to keep using fossil fuels for a year than build out entirely new infrastructure.
It's always far cheaper to keep status quo X than move to new thing Y. Until it isn't. Especially if you don't take into account externalities. Increased instances of flooding, cyclones, and wildfires gets pretty expensive pretty quickly. Losing ground to competitors can be fatally expensive in the long term.
Such things require the ability and will to think and prepare long-term, and it feels as if humanity has been migrating in the opposite direction since the 70's.
Yes, there are mitigations, but that doesn’t change how fundamentally dangerous they are. Gas tanks do not spontaneously ignite if punctured. Gas is easily cleaned up. Batteries become permanently unsafe and can catastrophically fail at any time with no warning.
$150/barrel, much higher prices everywhere, less fertilizer, and less oil available could spur a faster turnover.
I ordered some plumbing parts from a well known German manufacturer in February and am still waiting, the retailer can't give me an exact date yet.
Same thing happened a few months ago when I tried to order a network switch, after a month and a half I cancelled the order.
I've just ordered appliances, that I won't need for a few months, just because I don't know how long they will actually take, and maybe on a month the price will have shot up.
I would encourage anyone to look into what fossil fuels are actually used for because energy is only part of it. Some energy is for fuel (eg ships, planes) for which we currently have no substitute. A big chunk is electricity generation but there are so many other non-energy uses of fossil fuels eg fertilizers, construction, roads, plastics and other industrial uses.
China has undergone a decades long project to get to the point where they are the world leader (and almost sole supplier) of renewable energy tech. The plunging cost of solar happened because of China. This is a national project for them and no other country that I can think of has the willpower, organization and commitment for the deacdes-long quest to wean oneself off of fossil fuels.
Just between the rollout of EVs and power generation, you need a massive amount of infrastructure associated with it. Upgraded power lines, chargers, etc. Plus all the vehicles. Plus all the materials for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc. Those supply chains are completely dominated by China.
Just look at the LA to SF HSR project. This will likely take 20+ years and cost $100-200B, if it ever even happens. 20 years ago, China had a single HSR line in Shanghai to the airport. Now it has a 30,000+ mile network that carries 4M+ passengers a day and I've seen estimates that the entire network cost less than $1T. California HSR is 10-20% of that budget. For one line.
They reformed every level of government for this project. There is no expensive and corrupt procurement process for every city, every region, every line. They use the same rolling stock everywhere. Permitting for building the tracks and stations is streamlined. They make their own trains.
My point with this example is twofold:
1. EVs and electricity are only a fraction of the fossil fuel picture; and
2. Weaning ourselves off of that is a decades-long project in countries that have no track record or political will to pull that off.
Plastic ain't going anywhere, anytime soon (although many people wish it would).
If we stop burning fossil fuels and get energy from renewable sources, the remaining hydrocarbons will probably be used for plastics, chemicals and so on. If they aren't burnt this is fine.
It also probably makes more sense to use fossil fuels for applications where density is critical such as aviation, offset with carbon capture, rather than to leave oil in the ground and synthesize jet fuel using renewable energy.
"We shouldn't want to use the energy in that way" doesn't really seem like anything.
Something like skin in the game. US (low), EU(moderate), China (high), Global South (high with caveats to leapfrog but financing crunch always there)
Renewables need front loaded funding compared to Oil & Gas which are the incumbents that make them sticky.
Otherwise is a lot of US consumers were rational and only price minded they would've run TCO calculators on EV vs ICE for day to day use even without subsidies
Global politics.
Switching to renewables is seen as capitulation to China because of their lead in tech in this area, especially when you consider that renewables generally introduce battery dependence.
They don't even try to hide this anymore. Watch US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick at the WEF:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY0t0h1gXzk
Explicitly stated: Don't be subservient to China.
Not vocalized, but the obvious alternative: Instead be subservient to the USA and various allied Persian Gulf (and hijacked Latin American) countries who will keep pushing the petrol alternative until it literally runs dry, even if they have to do it at gunpoint.
It will take a long time before the fossil fuel capacity we've already built gets phased out, and of course certain developing nations are still adding dirtier fuel sources, but renewables getting cheap is working.
I'd look at this from a more nuanced viewpoint of certain nations still adding sovereign fuel sources.
Read: India / China and coal
India is further behind but improving rapidly. Its entire grid is still on track to be 42% renewable by 2030. The US is 42% today and expected to be 58% by the same time.
Developing countries use the cheapest source of energy, period. Today that's solar.
These fit an energy niche that can't be replaced with any one thing. China is just now investing in an electric military, for instance. Shipping will remain difficult to electrify entirely (which is surmountable, but certainly not in production). Coal and natural gas plants provide on-demand power that is not straightforward to guarantee with renewable sources. And there are many (likely almost all) grids that are simply not up to the task of transmitting energy that used to be transmitted by physically moving fossil fuels. Air flight has no renewable alternative as of today—though, I suppose we technically do have renewable forms of jet fuel, it's extremely expensive.
& of course we will need byproducts for the forseeable future for fertilizer, materials, chip production, etc etc.
It'll take a couple generations. Of course we should be paying poor countries to not use fossil fuels, but instead we're trying to force switching back to fossil fuels ourselves for no explicable reason (as an american obv).
That's the big mystery. We're told wind+solar are super cheap. Cheaper than everything. Cheap, cheap, cheap. You'd think, renewables being so cheap, it would rapidly displace all the expensive stuff.
But it does not. All sources of energy grow simultaneously, despite the plentiful anecdotes about limited regional shifts in specific markets.
So that creates doubt about the "cheap" claims. Such doubts, however, aren't generally welcome, and it's best to keep these thoughts to yourself, should they emerge. Carefully asking questions, as you've done, is the least damaging approach to coping with this apparent contradiction. I don't recommend ascribing it to nefarious conspiracies: that creates poor mental habits that don't end well.
In the meantime, there are concepts such as LCOE+ that deal with the real economics of energy supply and demand that can inform you on the matter. You'll want to be careful here, however. You'll encounter ideas that don't align well with preferred narratives and, if you're not careful with such knowledge, you might inadvertently peg yourself as being aligned with counter-narrative forces. And that's never good for kudos.
Do you have a source for that? What I can find points to the opposite:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67005
And globally:
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/breakdown-of-...
Electricity is only a subset of the matter. The energy issues created by the most recent Iran drama, for example, are mostly about oil: not a primary electricity generation fuel.
Here is a broader view. Global consumption, not limited to electricity. Everything, with the exception of biomass which has merely leveled off (for now,) is growing:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
Because it's in the corporate interests of many multi-billion dollar companies that lobby politicians
It would take a while to retool the plastics industry to use organic sources, but it's not at all impossible.
So you can’t.
Arguably plastics are a stable, cheap and useful carbon sink and if climate is the overriding ecological priority we should be making as many as we can and recycling as few as possible.
It's probably one of the last things to be created that way because it's one of the places where methane is used more efficiently than burning it... But fundamentally there's no issue here except energy availability and a short term supply shock.
You can theoretically get it from water instead, but the energy cost is something like 3-4 times as high. It may be feasible at some point.
What I would consider different this time is that I think the US is in the looting stages of collapse and will be unable to credibly fight such a war even if a minority wanted to.
I have a bit of a conspiracy theory about Trump starting the Iran war as a grift to get $200B appropriated only to abandon the region and have the money disappear.
It was something at least. Now we have a lot of people who choose to drive far less efficient behemoths than the much more efficient ICE (or hybrid) passenger cars currently available.
If we're talking about renewables, one has to talk about China [1]:
> In 2024 alone, China installed 360 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar capacity. That’s more than half of global additions that year, and it brings total installed capacity to 1.4 terawatts (TW) – that’s roughly a third of the entire world’s 4.5 TW
And in 2025 [2]:
> Clean-energy sectors contributed a record 15.4tn yuan ($2.1tn) in 2025, some 11.4% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) – comparable to the economies of Brazil or Canada.
and
> In 2025, China achieved another new record of wind and solar capacity additions. The country installed a total of 315GW solar and 119GW wind capacity, adding more solar and two times as much wind as the rest of the world combined.
China has decided long ago that this was of national security interest and it has become a national project to move to renewable energy in a way that I don't think any other country is capable of and on a scale that's hard to conceptualize.
Europe and the US have shown themselves to be completely incapable of planning long term and acting in national interest with regards for fossil fuels. There's no poliitical will. Both are captured by the interests of enriching the billionaire class in the short term. When it all goes to shit, which it will, they'll all leave and/or the rest of us will pay for this lack of foresight.
[1]: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/12/china-adding-more-re...
[2]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-drove-more...
The problem isn't conservatism per se. It's neoliberalism (IMHO). Even more broadly, it's capitalism. There's a meme in this space that basically goes something like "when you learn about capitalism, you become either a communist or a liar".
I read something recently about how people fetishize the 1950s, particularly on the political right. A big part of what made that possible was exploitation. Obviously we had a permanent underclass since segregation was still alive and well. A lot of these "middle class" families had "help" or "a girl". But another form of exploitation was oil. We were basically stealing oil from the Middle East for pennies on the dollar.
And then Iran came out and said "maybe we don't want you to steal our oil", we couped their government, we installed our own puppet government, we continued stealing oil and this all ultimately lead to the 1970s oil crisis and the Iranian Revolution. And here we are.
Back to the US political landscape, just look at the "opposition" to this war. It's either nonexistent or it's process-based ("Congress should've approved it"), not substantive. No mainstream political force is saying what we should be saying, which is that our Middle East policy is a crime, the sanctions on Iran were and are a crime and that continued exploitation of this region is unsustainable.
Both unchecked conservatism and unchecked socialism are toxic. Unchecked anything is toxic. That’s human nature, yet (to simplify massively) we still need both conservative and socialist elements in a balanced society.
If the big powers of the world had any competence a country with 0.5% of the worlds population would not be 3rd in total of grid connected battery storage and 8th in solar (note in total, not per capita). https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country for links.
Because of what Australia has done consumer power prices keep falling, even with the Iran war and datacenter build outs https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-19/power-prices-fall-but...
It's all based on governance led by research (in particular the CSIRO, the Australian government's politically isolated research department) where the CSIRO wrote a peer reviewed report mathematically demonstrating the cheapest way to improve grid reliability and lower prices. This indicated various ways to encourage solar and battery build outs. The Australian senate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate) which is made up of many many parties due to preferential voting passed laws enabling this and here we are.
I think that it's true that China's beating the USA in government competence but they are far far from the ideal. In fact China looks really bad compared to any competant government of the world. It just looks good compared to the USA.
We spent an estimated $8 trillion on so-called "War on Terror". The Taliban were in charge of Afghanistan before we started. They're in charge now. For $8T. 1% of that would end homelessness. 1% of that annually would be free college. I would mention universal healthcare but that would actually save money vs what we now spend so I'm not sure how you count that.
The kind of transformation China has seen in recent decades is what you're talking about with $8 trillion.
A despite the 20 year quagmire that was Iraq and Afghanistan, IMHO this war on Iran is an even bigger geopolitical clown show and will be more consequential to the end of American Empire.
The US torpedoed its system of alliances which it has spent decades building and maintaining. It through the global economy and its own into turmoil repeatedly in an attempt to extort its friends as much as its adversaries. It betrayed Ukraine for the sake of Russia. It threatened military action against its allies to conquer territory. It rejected the concept of international law which underpinned its position as global hegemon.
Honestly the Iran war isn't even that bad. While it displays the absolute absence of forethought that this administration applied to the situation, that's at least something America can get back with new leadership. The previous blunders which laid bare the unreliability of the US as a partner on the other hand have done irreparable harm.
Now there is also the blockade of Cuba that intercepts their imports of oil and has created serious problems there with food and services. This cannot be considered as anything else as an act of war, even if a war is not declared.
Besides the blockade, USA has also threatened with an attack. With the harm done indiscriminately to most Cuban citizens by the blockade, it is even harder for USA to pretend that they are the good guys, while they use their might to attack without any justification a country too weak to present any kind of danger for USA.
First, it's been exposed that the US cannot defend Israel despite spending $1 trillion a year on "defense", billions if not trillions on missile defence and the presence of multiple carrier groups in the region. This alone rewrites regional geopolitics in the coming decades.
Second, the US has exerted influence on the region with a security guarantee that's like NATO on steroids. It's a protection racket (like NATO). We give despotic regimes weapons and we dictate policy, get bases in the region and get the use of terriotiral waters and airspace for whatever we want, basically. But by starting this war of choice, we've shown that there's no security guarantee at all for the Gulf states.
Now, these states will continue to align with the US for purely selfish reasons. For example, Saudi Arabia will do so to maintain the House of Saud, the royal family's control of the country. Many Saudis would prefer this not to be the case but were Saudi Arabia to break from the US, the regime would inevitably fall (IMHO). So they can't abandon the US. But this will only go so far as some of these regimes may fall anyway in a prolonged conflict (eg Bahrain).
Third, the military options here are dire. Militarily, the Strait cannot be reopened. The only military options are retreat or escalation. Trump has threatened to blow up power plants. If he does that, Iran will blow up desalination plants. Or the pipeline that supplies 30-40% of Israel's energy (from Azerbijan through Turkey). The escalation ladder inevitably leads to the use of nuclear weapons by Israel and/or the US, which is untenable.
Fourth, we haven't even begun to feel the impacts yet. Yes, gas prices are higher. That's only the beginning. Utility and food prices are going to spike. Higher diesel costs mean higher transportation. Higher bunkers costs will hit shipping costs. We're likely to see a repeat of 2021-2022 era inflation, if not worse.
If the Strait opened tomorrow, most of those things are already baked in for the next few years.
Fifth, countries are undergoing a sort of "energy nationalism". China, for eample, has stockpiled huge amounts of oil and stopped exported refined petroleum products. Other countries have done similar. This is going to have an outsized impact on countries completely dependent on energy imports, which includes most of Asia.
Sixth, the downstream effects go well beyond secondary products like fertilizer. For example, helium and other materials for chipmaking in Taiwan.
Lastly, this has massively strengthened Russia's position. You will likely see the lifting of sanctions and conceding of territory in Ukraine as an almost -inevitable consequence of an oil supply shock, particularly as LNG prices go up and we hit a heating crisis in Europe.
You are correct that the US has been destroying alliances but it's this war of choice that's going to make that really bite. Iran negotiated in good faith to end the 12 day war, which only ended because of missile interceptor shortages, a problem that's going to take years to address.
This time around Iran has had no choice but to make the consequences of a war of aggression so dire that the US and Israel never think about doing this again.
Also, North Korea demonstrated that the only way to get the US to leave you alone is to have nuclear weapons. The previous Ayatollah had a fatwa against nuclear weapons. Well, the US and Israel killed that guy in his house with his family. Iran now really has no choice but to develop nuclear weapons to guarantee their security. And I can't blame them.
> First, it's been exposed that the US cannot defend Israel despite spending $1 trillion a year on "defense", billions if not trillions on missile defence and the presence of multiple carrier groups in the region.
The US never has and has no reason to claim that it would or could stop all missile attacks on Israel from Iran. The US has long claimed that it's interceptors have a better than 50% interception rate against ballistic missiles. This has been shown to be if anything a dramatically conservative estimate in recent conflicts. But the math of interception has always been obvious - if you throw more missiles at a missile defense system than it has interceptors, some will get through. For years the main grievance the US has had with Iran has been its massive stockpile of long range missiles and, more recently, drones. That's the whole reason the nuclear agreement reached under Obama was not considered good enough by the subsequent administration (domestic politics aside).
Israel knew when it launched the war that it was going to get hit back. They are certainly not unhappy with the US' conduct of the war.
> Second, the US has exerted influence on the region with a security guarantee that's like NATO on steroids. It's a protection racket (like NATO). We give despotic regimes weapons and we dictate policy, get bases in the region and get the use of terriotiral waters and airspace for whatever we want, basically. But by starting this war of choice, we've shown that there's no security guarantee at all for the Gulf states.
This conflict most certainly does not mean that the security guarantee doesn't exist. The gulf states didn't start a war and find their ally reluctant to come to their aid. They instead found that they didn't have the option to sit out a war if the coalition they have been a part of for years goes to war. They may be rightfully very upset about a lack of communication and coordination before the conflict broke out, but this is again an issue with the current administration, not their long term strategy of alignment with the US.
> Now, these states will continue to align with the US for purely selfish reasons.
That's not a change to the status quo.
> Third, the military options here are dire. Militarily, the Strait cannot be reopened. The only military options are retreat or escalation. Trump has threatened to blow up power plants. If he does that, Iran will blow up desalination plants. Or the pipeline that supplies 30-40% of Israel's energy (from Azerbijan through Turkey). The escalation ladder inevitably leads to the use of nuclear weapons by Israel and/or the US, which is untenable.
That's a rather absurd line of reasoning. While not easy, militarily reopening the strait is very much still a possibility. Even if it remains closed for a period of time, that doesn't really hurt the US directly. Iran does not have the means to escalate to nuclear war, and the US has no motive.
> Fourth, we haven't even begun to feel the impacts yet. Yes, gas prices are higher. That's only the beginning. Utility and food prices are going to spike. Higher diesel costs mean higher transportation. Higher bunkers costs will hit shipping costs. We're likely to see a repeat of 2021-2022 era inflation, if not worse.
Sure if the war goes on for an extended period of time it will be bad for the economy, but this is a temporary pain. Once the war ends, oil prices will go back down. The previous blunders have done irreparable harm that will be felt for decades.
> If the Strait opened tomorrow, most of those things are already baked in for the next few years.
Nothing has been baked in for years. 100% of the concern right now is speculation that the strait might be closed for an extended period of time.
> Fifth, countries are undergoing a sort of "energy nationalism". China, for eample, has stockpiled huge amounts of oil and stopped exported refined petroleum products. Other countries have done similar. This is going to have an outsized impact on countries completely dependent on energy imports, which includes most of Asia.
This is not a change to the status quo.
> Lastly, this has massively strengthened Russia's position. You will likely see the lifting of sanctions and conceding of territory in Ukraine as an almost -inevitable consequence of an oil supply shock, particularly as LNG prices go up and we hit a heating crisis in Europe.
The adminsitration already massively strengthened Russia's position, putting pressure on Ukraine to concede territory and reducing pressure with regards to sanctions. While stepping further in that direction is a further blunder, the previous was far more catastrophic. They already set the house ablaze, this is just pouring gas on the flames.
> Also, North Korea demonstrated that the only way to get the US to leave you alone is to have nuclear weapons.
This is not a change to the status quo.
If we had a war with China, it’d go much worse given their much greater resources and knowledge of how to hit those import routes for maximum impact.
(That’s ignoring the larger economic impact of all of the other shipping which originates in China)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47437516 Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence (reuters.com)
~3 days prior, 447+ commments
Think about that. Falling power prices during high inflation with an energy crisis at a time when datacenters are being built out everywhere. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-19/power-prices-fall-but...
You'll note on that link in 1 year prices have gone from $87 to $50. Pretty much all attributable to the massive grid connected battery installations and renewable rollouts which had minimal subsidies. They were merely encouraged by policy which created a shorter time for grid price changes and arbitration allowing high response batteries to drive grid efficiencies. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...
It's straightforward economics at this point. Want cheaper prices? Demand what Australia has.
And yes, solar energy is not only greener (less CO2, less PM2.5), but also frees us from dependency on other countries. The future can be less centralized.
Some countries (Russia included) will lose their bargaining chip. Other countries (USA included) will lose the incentive to 'democratize' the Middle East.
Please - tell us.
No need of sarcasm here. Or going the route of a false dichotomy.
Again, not all dependencies can be eliminated. But it is better to have less dependencies.
Closing nuclear plants in Germany was a disaster, and here we agree.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335083312_Why_do_we...
You can never stop burning oil if all you use is oil.
Also I wasn't aware you could extract oil, gas, and coal with no environmental impact. I must have just dreamed the words Deepwater Horizon.
For transport, trains! Trains of different sizes, shapes and designs, solve most of the transport issues. The fact that western countries are behind on this doesnt mean it's too late to start.
For heat, better insulation and heat pumps do wonders!
For feedstock maybe feeding animals is simply bot the way we should move forward.
And I say all this as a person who drives a gas car 70 miles every day, lives in an old house with bad insulation and eat meat several times a week
And you still need trucks for last mile haulage.
Chemical feedstocks are only a small percentage of the petroleum market. The large majority is fuel. If you stop burning it there is plenty of supply and you're not worried about whether you can get any from Iran.
Half of the "heavy duty vehicles" (which I believe is roughly similar to the classification you are using) sold in China in December were electric. Between rapidly improving batteries and maturing technology for swapping batteries as a refuelling strategy electrification of trucks is the obvious and inevitable future. They are simply cheaper to operate.
We can afford what we can do. We don't need to do what we can afford. If we wanted to build and deploy electric trucks enmasse like China then we could do it, regardless of upfront capital.
You don't need any upfront capital. Do it when the trucks become due for refurbishment a truck. Then it's almost a no-brainier, as its cheaper convert it to an EV: https://www.januselectric.com.au/
Isn't this the purpose of a loan? You have a truck with a higher purchase price that adds ~$2000/month to your loan payment but then you save ~$3000/month in diesel.
And you're saving a lot more than that in diesel when it's $5/gallon.
We don't know that. Beijing might have been investing in them as insurance against its not being able to get enough diesel fuel to run an all-diesel fleet of trucks, so countries that are self-sufficient in oil shouldn't just blindly imitate Beijing's move.
If you have evidence that there is a fleet of electric trucks anywhere (big enough to make a dent in China's transport needs) whose actual total cost proved to be less than a fleet of diesels doing the same work would have cost, then share it. If all you have to offer is words to the effect that "an examination of the relevant technologies by any competent analyst will of course find that the battery-powered fleet would be cheaper", then I repeat my assertion.
I am certainly not backing down from the claim that "they are simply cheaper to operate". That is an absolutely trivial claim that is entirely obvious to anyone even remotely familiar with numbers in this space.
I would note I was discussing trucks that swap batteries - and thus the "paying drivers to wait around while trucks recharge" step doesn't exist. I'll also note all the other costs you are listing are capital costs not operational ones. Broadly speaking for most uses we appear to have crossed the threshold where the total cost of ownership is lower for most tasks, but for some niches (like "ice road shipping") I doubt the buildout is worth it (yet).
According to an unreliable source that gives fast answers to my questions, U.S. freight companies spent approximately $32 billion to $36 billion on new diesel Class 8 trucks in 2025.
Now are we to believe that these companies and their investors are foolish? That they didn't do calculations and consult experts before spending this money?
Are we to assign more weight to comments here on HN assuring us that electric trucks are cheaper in total cost of ownership than diesel trucks? -- comments that cost the writers nothing but a few minutes of time?
Countries dependent on the Persian Gulf's remaining open to international shipping trade shouldn't just blindly copy U.S. freight companies here: for those countries, any extra cost for an electric fleet might be worth the peace of mind of knowing they will always be able to deliver food, medicine and other essentials to their populations. France for example takes all aspects of its national security seriously and relies almost completely on imports for any fossil fuels it uses. In response it is electrifying as much of its economy as practical (and continuing to invest heavily in nuclear electricity production and renewables).
Considering your persistent rude tone and denial of basic facts that you could simply google this is probably the last time I'll respond to you.
Edit: PS. Real nice expanding your comment from one line to four paragraphs after I responded.
That's been going on for three years now, so they'd have some data.
Addendum: Found battery change footage from a year past- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj9pdB9cYVQ
Rio Tinto (runs fleets of 100 tonne+ haul paks at many global sites) is running EV heavies in China and Australia with an eye to expand that usage:
* https://australianminingreview.com.au/news/rio-drives-electr...
* https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251204183951/en/BHP...
Mobile electric shovels for loading haul paks straight off the blasted shelf have been a thing for 50+ years now: https://www.komatsu.com.au/equipment/electric-rope-shovels
>Now are we to believe that these companies and their investors are foolish? That they didn't do calculations and consult experts before spending this money?
Or you know smart investors/planners making peace with stupid US energy policy the precludes freight electrification which is vastly more economical if there was state capacity to deploy it economically.
This seems like a non-problem to begin with. There are electric semis with a 500 mile range, which at 60 MPH is over 8 hours of driving, i.e. the legal maximum in most places. The same trucks can also add 300 miles of range in 30 minutes, which adds five hours of driving in the time it takes for a typical lunch break. Why do you even need to swap the batteries?
It does not. It moves the dependency to the manufacturing source of the panels. That is China. No thanks.
Can we please just build more reactors? The insistence on solar is becoming a cargo cult (thanks, Elon Musk).
Solar actually makes a lot of sense for a significant fraction of the grid. It's specifically excellent for electrifying transportation, because most cars are stationary at an office park during the majority of sunlight hours. Install chargers there and you solve the problem of people in apartments not having them at home and you don't have to worry about the intermittency because you're literally using it to charge batteries. Solar is cheaper at the cost of intermittency, so for the things where intermittency doesn't really matter it makes obvious sense.
When it sucks is when you need reliable power in winter at night. Which is what nuclear is good at. But then... you can use both, each one for the thing it's better at.
Solar panels are not gas. You don't burn them to make energy.
There is no dependency on solar panel manufacturers. Once you install a panel it's going to make electricity for the next 25 years. At least. After that you can recycle it and use it another 25 years.
Reactors on the other hand require fuel that is consumed. Unless you can mine it yourself, you're just trading an oil dependency for a uranium dependency.
Consider if the entire world was solar powered today. Iran targets solar plants in the gulf states instead. Gulf states target iran solar plants. Prices of panel materials surge just like oil prices surge today in response to the demand brought on to the supply chain. Maybe Iran wants to twist the knife, sends submarines to target solar supply chain networks directly either in shipping at sea or to be closer to shelling or missile striking mining or production facilities.
The world is all too easy to disrupt in the very same way it is being disrupted in terms of oil today, thanks to the asymmetries brought on by drone and missile warfare in this new era.
Not to mention: PV generation is way more distributed than drilling oil and gas. Commercial PV generation facilities are smaller and more spread out. And even if the enemy bombs them all in a war, you can disconnect your rooftop solar panels from the grid and keep your house going. Do you have an oil well and refinery in your backyard?
I'll repeat it again: you don't burn solar panels to make energy. We need growing numbers of panels today because we're going solar. If the world were already at 100% solar then we wouldn't need nearly as much manufacturing or mining. We'd mostly just recycle old panels.
This is unlike fossil fuels. If you burn gas you will always need new gas. Forever.
Well, in the context of the US, we certainly do. And yet, our prices go up, because of course they would. In every domestic produced industry prices would go up if global supply were diminished. This is just how a globalized economy works. People assume a degree of economic isolation with solar that just isn't realistic with how the economy is structured today. It might have been realistic 100 years ago but today it is not.
And you bring up an excellent point with the globalized economy. Solar plants being bombed in a faraway country's war won't drive up the cost of your electricity because (most of the time) your electricity can't be exported. But oil can. If oil becomes expensive outside America, it becomes expensive within America. Even if America has its own oil.
Oil and gas infrastructure is full of choke points like pipelines, port facilities, storage facilities and large, concentrated refineries that supply entire country's worth of fuel. There is no central choke point in a solar based grid.
> Iran targets solar plants in the gulf states instead.
A drone exploding in a solar plant will take out what, a couple hundred solar panels? The rest will keep working once you blow the dust off.
You set one oil storage tank on fire and it takes care of everything else in its vicinity.
Not to mention solar can be truly decentralized. You can just buy a solar panel, plug it in your outlet and start generating electricity. You can turn every house into a solar power plant if you want and an enemy will have to bomb every house to get them offline.
> Maybe Iran wants to twist the knife, sends submarines to target solar supply chain networks directly either in shipping at sea or to be closer to shelling or missile striking mining or production facilities.
Iran will totally just go to war against china to prevent more solar panels from being made, yeah.
The distribution becomes the target, not the generation. I agree with most of the other things you're saying, about how I can generate a small amount of electricity on my own if I buy a PV system. That's irrelevant, however.
PRC has spent the better part of the last two decades gobbling up the supply chains that feed into solar panel manufacturing. Suppose you and I, being experienced technologists and enterprising individuals, decided tomorrow that we were going to start a solar panel manufacturing company. Surely this will be a growing, potentially high margin business because demand will be high if we're electrifying everything because of the aforementioned energy crisis. We are going to run head first into a wall of raw materials supply that is controlled by ... China.
So my point is that if you want to flip the energy generation to "green" and solar on some aggressive timeline, you are going to be dependent on China to do so. There are very obvious geopolitical reasons for why this is a very dumb idea. One of the ways I gauge how serious someone is about moving energy generation in the United States to solar is if they are okay with opening up closed mines so we can produce the rare earths, here, that are needed to manufacture the panels themselves. If they're cool with that, great, let's get stared. If they aren't, then they're not serious and are bandwagoning.
If they ever stop, use the reserve and gas plants to backstop. Spend the next 20 years developing domestic PV manufacturing capability, safe in the knowledge that your current panels are good for at least that long.
Straight up Solar Panel grid arrays sans that stuff, it's 2,800 kg copper and 3,900 kg Silicon per MW and not much else directly (aluminium for framing, glass protection, can be added).
( Although lots of new copper (oxide ore, the most common) requires lots of new sulphur and the world has just lost 3.8 million tonnes of annual sulphur production by product from Qatar refineries )
> But China also owns the supply.
Well then, damn, we better get started making deals today?
Your plan to do absolutely nothing and continue losing forever with increasingly no way out seems utterly rediculous.
[1] Honestly probably only really viable in China and the U.S. plus maybe South Korea; nuclear is unpopular in Japan after Fukushima, and I doubt the E.U. would be able to coordinate everything. Everyone else is probably too poor outside of petrostates, which have the whole petro thing going on.
> Honestly probably only really viable in China and the U.S. plus maybe South Korea
Because it costs a lot of money.
For example, India quietly (by HN and Reddit standards) passed a nuclear energy megabill in December which has a TAM of $214 Billion [0]. French (EDF), American (Westinghouse, Holtec, GE Vernova Hitachi), Russian (Rosatom), and Korean (Hyundai) JVs with Indian Public (NPTC, BHEL) and Private (Tata, L&T, Jindal Group) players are now able to build and distribute nuclear energy without dealing with an older SOE and can subsidize the buildout [1] using Green Bonds, which gives them access to around $56 Billion in capital [2] with an added .
These players will also be eligible for India's $2.5 Billion SMR subsidy [3]. This also helps India's $160 Billion data center buildout [4] which is being subsidized by the Indian government [5], and piggybacks on India's $205 Billion infrastructure buildout [6].
Other countries can do that as well, but if they are fine spending tens to hundreds of billions of dollars - that's where the blocker arises, but most of the players with this technology are now backlogged with orders from this buildout in India and other existing and in-progress buildouts.
> outside of petrostates, which have the whole petro thing going on
The UAE [7] is participating in financing India's nuclear buildout as part of their defense pact.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-08/india-see...
[1] - https://powermin.gov.in/sites/default/files/Seeking_comments...
[2] - https://www.climatebonds.net/news-events/press-room/press-re...
[3] - https://www.trade.gov/market-intelligence/india-energy-small...
[4] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2227953&re...
[5] - https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/01/india-offers-zero-taxes-th...
[6] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-06-12/india-...
[7] - https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/india-uae-annou...
But the American energy industry has negative net margins [0], which makes buildouts difficult without significant state support as the American energy industry is operating at a loss after operations cost are included.
> $2 trillion dollars worth of bonds to lower the price per kWh is modest
Land and Liability.
The upfront cost to build is significantly higher in the US because land is privately owned. On the other hand, India's federal and state governments are subsidizing land purchases for nuclear reactors as part of the SHANTI Act. The only other large economy doing something similar is China.
Furthermore, liability has remained a major issue in the US. India [1] and China [2] both gave nuclear operators a broad liability shield which externalizes the cost of a nuclear accident, especially for SMRs as they cap out in the $30-50 million range in India and China.
If the US can provide a similar liability shield beyond what is already on the books, buildout would be much faster, but this is politically untenable as can be seen with the data center buildout. Imagine the attack ads - "Trump"/"Newsom"/"Vance"/"Pritzker" are poisoning innocent Americans while in the pocket of Wall Street and BigTech. A growing number of Americans view any kind of infrastructure buildout as a subsidy for rich people, almost as if there was an ongoing social media campaign for years that has solidified this sentiment amongst Americans [3].
The big capital players at this point in this space are the US, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Russia, and France. All the other 6 (even Russia) have blocked Chinese access to initiatives and subsidizes for domestic nuclear buildouts, and Russia is also blocked from 4 of them.
That said, the US has quietly started similar initatives as well, like the $80 Billion SMR buildout [4] but HN will never give Trump a win.
[0] - https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
[1] - https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publication...
[2] - https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubccommun...
[3] - https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
[4] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/westinghouse-megadea...
Which is why I said to subsidize it as state policy in the original comment.
>cost to build is significantly higher in the US because land is privately owned
Which is why I said there should be liberal use of eminent domain in the original comment.
And as I pointed out, it's almost impossible because of the political implications
> there should be liberal use of eminent domain
Eminent domain is de facto impossible in the US in 2026 and would take decades of litigation for a project the size of an SMR.
---
Even the current megaproject the Trump admin initiated will come on the chopping block this election cycle.
Hell, look at ProPublica [0], UC Berkeley Law's [1], and former Democrat political appointees [2] opposition despite this being almost the exact same as similar initiatives we worked on during the Biden admin.
Once the Republicans are out of office, they'll go on the same attack like they did with the IRA.
We have a far-right [3] and a far-left [4] media ecosystem that are backed and subsidized by our enemies who mutually attempt to undermine such initiatives.
[0] - https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-nuclear-power-nrc-s...
[1] - https://legal-planet.org/2026/02/02/new-trump-nuclear-reacto...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/trumps-big-nuclear-r...
[3] - https://www.isdglobal.org/media-mentions/the-role-of-tucker-...
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-...
Courtesy of Fox News.
We invested _heavily_ and prematurely in renewable energies -- see my comment from a couple of years ago [0]. Since then, our energy prices were high for a while and now they're not much lower than the EU's average because all that investment needs to be amortized [1]. Two years ago, we ran a whole month on renewables [2]. Despite this, our increase in energy prices since the Iran war started has been dramatic and the price of everything has been going up significantly. I can't help but think about the ROI on all those renewables if they can't help make our lives easier at a time like this. I'd much rather we go nuclear.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37719568
[1]: https://eco.sapo.pt/2026/03/11/precos-da-eletricidade-e-gas-...
[2]: https://www.portugalglobal.pt/en/news/2024/april/renewable-e...
I think/hope you mean "I'd rather we adopt/use nuclear energy."
It’s the best bang for buck. Australia, one of the world leaders in grid connected battery storage and it’s a reason prices keep falling there. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/19/power...
Can you imagine prices falling during an energy crisis, high inflation and datacenter build outs? Well it’s happening and pretty drastically in Australia.
I don't think going nuclear would've made a difference here. Someone is making a lot of money selling power locally for prices that only make sense in an international context. Whether that's done by wind farm operators or nuclear plants, the result will still be the same.
Regardless and despite this nordpool weirdness; with some rooftop & batteries I haven't been paying a cent for electricity outside of January so I don't need to care about prices in the market much at all.
I make a point to have my direct energy use be electric (e.g. for driving) so the recent jump in the pricing of molecules affects me relatively little. Unfortunately I don't have much say in indirect energy use (as used for food production) but I believe that people are rational and will figure they can do what I did sooner or later.
It’s a fundamental fact of commodity trading.
Saudi Arabia produces oil at $12 per barrel. They sell it at the global marginal cost.
The idea is that on some schedule (e.g. each hour) you use the cheapest forms of energy you can to meet demand, but the final price is set by the most expensive one you had to use. This means that the cheaper forms of energy (i.e. renewables) make more money (which increase their profitability and can be reinvested). Obviously though we need better storage if we rely on renewables or we are almost always going to have to use fossil fuels at some point.
Whether there are better models, I will leave to people who know more than I do, but it is certainly a very common way to do this.
It is fundamentally how the grid works. You can bring it down to a singular household or company level to see the raw incentives:
Why should a household or company with solar and storage buy expensive grid based electricity when their own installation delivers? They don't.
Why should this household or company not for example charge their battery on their battery when the price is low and sell/use it when the prices are higher?
Why should this household's or company's neighbors buy expensive grid electricity rather than the surplus of renewables and storage? They don't.
With the distributed electricity generation renewables enable monopolized grids no longer function. Because consumers have a choice and can vote with their wallet.
Countries that have genuinely lower prices either built nuclear 40 years ago, or have great access to hydro they built 40 years ago or a bit of both.
Wanting to build nuclear now for cheap prices doesn't make any sense. It has the same high up front investment shape as renewables, except higher costs.
Having that said, I half agree with you concerning nuclear. I don't think we should have bet on nuclear as an alternative to renewable energy. In the long run, renewable energy will be more sustainable. For one, nuclear fuel is a limited resource, so we'll eventually run out of it. (Yes, kicking the can down the road sometimes is actually the best solution, but still). For another, since Portugal isn't uranium rich, we'd be trading one set of external dependencies for another. However, I am completely against the ideologically driven anti-nuclear political attitude that have and the fact that we've downright refused to accept any kind of nuclear energy projects whatsoever, regardless of whether those projects would be competing with renewable energy projects for investment. In fact I think that nuclear is the perfect companion to renewable energy, not a competitor. The more renewable energy we have, the less uranium we'd be importing, thus shrinking external dependency. Yet, at the same time, nuclear power plants would be a cheap, carbon-zero, solution to renewable energy's greatest problem, intermittency.
Just one final point. Unlike, for instance, Germany, with a large amount of territory with very low seismic risk, we would need to be very careful with where we'd build the plants. It would be complete recklessness to build a nuclear plant in Lisbon, for instance.
From your older comment:
> Our CO2 emissions are like 0.15% of the total and our per-capita emissions are already lower than for ex. Germany. We basically have no industry. If we could wave a magic wand and completely stop our CO2 emissions it wouldn't move the needle on global warming at all.
Well, it would move the needle by 0.15%. Portugal has 0.11% of the global population by the way.
Why Portugal and Spain Dodge Europe’s Energy Price Shock: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Why-Portugal-and-...
https://www.publicpower.org/system/files/documents/Americas-...
Even during WWII Germany had to synthesize much of its hydrocarbon fuel.
Also after the war there has been large-scale production of synthetic hydrocarbons, but eventually this was abandoned due to the low price of fossil oil.
It is possible to synthesize hydrocarbons from syngas, which can be made from carbon dioxide and water, with solar energy. If the carbon dioxide is extracted from air, that requires much more energy than when a concentrated source of CO2 is available, but with essentially free solar energy it would still be feasible.
Obviously, this will not be done as long as cheaper fossil hydrocarbons are offered. However the use of fossil hydrocarbons for plastic, asphalt or other applications that do not release CO2 is not harmful.
Germany [0], as well as Apartheid South Africa (SASOL), and now China, synthesized that fuel from coal. Which is itself a fossil fuel.
[0] https://warhistory.org/@msw/article/synthetic-production-of-...
> Obviously, this will not be done as long as cheaper fossil hydrocarbons are offered. However the use of fossil hydrocarbons for plastic, asphalt or other applications that do not release CO2 is not harmful.
The issue with any fuel/feedstock production is not just the financial cost but the amount of energy returned on the energy invested. A modern civilization (like Japan) requires 10:1. Synfuels made using the method you described are 1:1 - they provide as much energy as it takes to make them.
The same technology can be used with carbon monoxide made by reducing the carbon dioxide from air. This requires more energy, but when that is provided by solar energy, this is no longer a problem.
If the energy used to make synfuel is solar, it is an external input and it does not matter much which is the ratio between it and the energy stored in synfuel, except that it determines the profitability of a plant during the first years of operation, as it determines the ratio between the quantity of fuel produced in an interval of time and the installed power of solar panels.
While this ratio determines the time in which the initial investment can be recovered, it matters little for the ongoing expenses required for production, which will vary very little when the ratio varies in a large range, so it has little influence on the production cost after the assets are depreciated.
Which is why we aren't doing already.
First, fossil fuels currently are used to generate about 60% of the world's electricity. Nearly all of that could be replaced with renewables plus batteries.
Second, only around 20% of fossil fuel used for transportation is used in aviation or marine transportation. Most of the remaining 80% could be replaced by electric vehicles.
Overall something like 75% of what fossil fuels are extracted for could be replaced with renewables, leaving marine and aviation transportation and things that are not using them for their combustion chemistry.
the wake up call for EU , US , and rest of the west that is not happening, that national interest is a real thing. Not a fiction.
How many here have stocked up on solar panels, charge controllers, wire, terminal blocks, high current fuses, home grid batteries, inverters and such? The only thing I am missing is solar panels. Currently I charge my batteries with a generator when commercial power is out. I backed out on a solar panel deal for a bunch of dumb reasons. I run my computer and network equipment on inverters 100% of the time to clean up commercial power and deal with the rare brown outs from tension breakers reclosers during high wind events.
What’s more resilient than solar?
Kind of interesting how electrifying the countryside has lead to such an unintended and ever present Achilles tendon for western nations. In the future we might go to war to protect AC units in Phoenix.
Sadly elec. companies are not a fan of this
People have noticed that the weird social media bot accounts that are usually posting in the UK about Muslim immigrants have all suddenly shifted to talking about drilling for more oil in the north sea.
This is a bad idea for multiple reasons, but clearly someone wants you to think that is the solution rather than wind, solar, batteries, evs and heat pumps.
They've partially succeeded each time we've gone through this kind of fossil energy crisis, and they'll likely partially succeed this time.
I'd guess the propaganda is slightly harder to make in the 70% of countries where they import fossil fuels and the political/media landscape isn't so broken that they can pretend otherwise to dig themselves deeper into a hole.
Also another issue that's not being talked about at all is the impact the war will have in displacing a population of 90 million people. For reference, Syria only had 20 million people and the impact was quite big, although we're still far from reaching that point for now.