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I’m sure you may have seen a lot of “how to inoculate yourself against climate disinformation” posts, but we’re experiencing a huge amount of content paid for by Fossil Fuel Interest’s to put pressure on the internet. And it’s been really concentrated for a few months.
The funding is pushing for a cultural shift for people who are undecided in the climate conversation and are possibly more easily swayed. And it’s important to remember, fossil fuel interests wouldn’t pay for it if they didn’t need it.
Most of the disinfo looks like “yeah climate change is real but we can’t possibly do anything to fix it” or “these solutions simply don’t work.” about solutions that are tried and true. They look a lot like nuanced takes, but specifically are trying to motivate inaction.
So if you wake up today and ask “what can I do today that makes a difference?” is honestly post a lot to tip the scales regarding the presentation climate solutions. Silly or serious, for example posting about renewables getting you excited, community food forests that are feeding people, cool solutions to targeting methane, etc. Post about a climate book or show you liked, or whatever. Just make sure it’s clear to an onlooker that there are people who believe climate change is anthropogenic, it was mostly caused by extractive practices and fossil fuel use, and that we can still demand rapid action to fix it. And all of this is true, because the science supports it.
Let’s disregard all of the other misapprehensions you’ve made and focus on one thing. This is the second time you’ve repeated it:
Are coal power plants and wind farms mutually exclusive? Does one existing prevent the other from existing simultaneously? Is it possible to run both at the same time?
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.
Pop Media Literacy Quiz!
Here is a graph from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What information is supported by this graph?
a) The total amount of fossil fuel used in energy generation is decreasing
b) Coal power plants are being shut down and replaced by wind farms
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.
The graph is scaled based on the total energy generation in the year 2020.Here is the second graph from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What information is supported by this graph?
a) Coal is being phased out for renewable alternatives
b) There has been a major shakeup in how the United States gets its energy during the last five years
c) Where the United States generates its energy changes over the timescale of months, but from 2019 to 2022 has remained roughly static.
This is text taken from the source you claimed said that renewables are replacing coal. What can be inferred from this text?
a) Coal is being phased out, never to return as a source of energy generation in the United States
b) Desire for clean energy overwhelms market forces when it comes to using coal as fuel
c) Coal use is projected to increase more than it decreases, and will rise to be the second most prevalent energy source behind natural gas in 2021.
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?
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.
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.
Correct again. So do you understand that some of the decrease in coal was from renewables replacing them or have you an alternate explanation?
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.
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.
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.
This is a 3 years graph of a very unusual time. Please tell me you realized that.
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.
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.
I’d love it if you could teach me someting, but your strategy of throwing sources at me that don’t back up your statements undermines your authority as a media literacy educator. The total fossil fuel use peaks in 2005, but saying the graph conclusively shows a decreasing trend in Fossil Fuel use is evidence of wishful thinking; the slopes are so small that if you drew a line from that peak to the COVID minimum in 2020 and extrapolate from that slope, the zero fossil fuel use point would still be in 2090. There is a local maximum in 2018, and an increase in fossil use at the end of the data set in 2021, suggesting a return to pre-COVID growth. Covid has nothing to do with 2018, and while it explains the increase in fossil fuel use in 2021, it doesn’t explain why fossil fuel use increased faster than alternative energy use in the same year. If there was an unambiguous downward trend in fossil fuel use, you would not expect ‘noise’ large enough to poke holes in that hypothesis.
The standard explanation I’m aware of is that with the discovery of new fracking techniques, natural gas has become economically cheaper than coal, causing some of the less profitable coal plants to shut down. This is also the simplest explanation from the explosion of natural gas on graph #1. Wikipedia lists ~30 decommissioned US-based coal power plants with +200 still firing.
You can’t claim ‘coal has been replaced’ when a percentage of its total capacity is simply being furlowed for when it becomes competitive with other energy sources again, like your source projected it to in 2021. May I remind you that the alternative name for Jevons Paradox is the ‘Bounce-Back’ effect?
Furthermore, the hypothesis that manufacturing new alternative energy sources will replace fossil fuel energy use without any need for social or political pressure would predict that with each increase in alternative energy growth, there would be a corresponding decrease in fossil fuel use. This is soundly contradicted by the data you’ve provided.
Only the year 2010 from 1955-2010 showed negative fossil energy growth from the previous five years, and in that year the amount of energy provided by alternative sources grew much more than the amount that fossil fuel use shrank. This not only contradicts the ‘replacement’ hypothesis, but also supports my hypothesis, which predicts that without significant political or social resistance, market forces will cause alternative energy to complement fossil fuel rather than replace it. Using both renewable energy and fossil fuel creates lower energy prices than either one individually, and lower energy prices stimulate economic growth. Economic growth results in more demand for energy, and thus more sources of fossil fuel and renewable energy in a ‘virtuous’ cycle.
The more granular recent data also contradicts the ‘replacement’ hypothesis.
From 2010-2020, total energy used in the United States has shown little growth and been roughly static. If fossil fuel was being replaced by alternative energy, you would expect to see fossil fuel energy use decrease with each renewable energy increase. That behavior does not appear in the data. Instead it looks like the kind of bouncy data you expect from market behavior between competing goods.
I didn’t expect to see the energy use stagnation in the United States from 2010-2020, which was interesting. My guess is that this coincides with a change in US trade patterns where energy-intensive domestic manufacturing was shifted to Asia.
Based on this trade graph, I would predict a boom in both new fossil fuel plants and renewable energy plants in China from 2010 to at least 2017, and similar paired growth in other Asian countries the United States traded with. I suspect the United States’ stagnation is due to energy - from coal, renewables, or otherwise - being cheaper abroad than from any domestic source. Once that is no longer the case, I predict the United States will ‘bounce-back’ and begin producing significantly more fossil-fuel-based energy if there is no significant political or social force to stop it.
If China built no new fossil fuel plants during those years, or if manufacturing returns from abroad to a politically and socially stagnant US and there is a decrease in fossil fuel energy generation, that would be a significant blow to my hypothesis. If I haven’t convinced you that the ‘replacement’ hypothesis is wrong, please tell me what prediction would have to be false in order for you to abandon that hypothesis?
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.
I’ve taken the graphs and numbers you’ve given me in gratitude, and used them to debunk your ideological position. Everyone makes reading comprehension mistakes occasionally, but it unusual for someone to get things this wrong this consistently. I’m reminded of the Sinclair quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And this is tragic, because while it may benefit your short term feelings of privilege and stability to trivialize the need for drastic degrowth while engaged in an extremely energy intensive industry, you are also a victim. Your near term future is going to be impacted just like everyone else’s by the widespread inability of many people like you to meaningfully grapple with the difficult but necessary steps required to avoid the worst of the climate catastrophe.
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.
My ‘assumptions’ are that you work in machine learning and AI. We’ve shared this platform for a while. If you didn’t announce it almost as much as you announce your anti-capitalism, I could correctly assume it from the pages of patronizing apologia you’ve written about it.
And while I’m happy to ‘antagonize’ you on behalf of all the other people you’ve belittled and spoken over, I don’t think you’re the enemy. I appreciate the pushback to my ideas occasional adversarial scholarship provides. I hope your ego eventually softens to appreciate what I’m trying to achieve here.