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Bro just ignoring all the ships we’ll need to carry all that wind and sunlight
Another way to look at it: the shipping industry will take a beating while everyone transitions.
If anyone is left wondering why there’s so much institutional resistance to changing our energy diet, its institutions like this that are lobbying and generating the propaganda behind it. Energy companies are just one faction.
the biggest resistance is coming from the owner class. the great fear is that we could enter into an age where human labor isn’t needed and it becomes feasible to have a society where resources just get distributed for free because everything* is* practically free.
Or they’d just ship something else? They’d lose some money and scrap a few ships, but the drop in costs would make it more economical to ship whatever else people want, like lumber and funko pops.
Good lord I hate Funko Pops. Them and Minions™ are are the false idols of consumerism.
Look, let me tell you something. A Minion died for you. A Minion paid the price of sin for you and me that we deserve. Why? Because they love you. And if you think Minions are a false idol, then keep on scrolling. But if you know that a Minion died for your sins, type ‘wonderful savior’ and smash that upvote button
Minions can eat my fucking ass
Funko Pops are just Precious Moments for millennials.
Why don’t we just have one or two very big ships, powered by nuclear reactors. Like, 40-50 kilometers long each, with hydrofoils, top speed just under mach one. Zip around and deliver everyone’s shit with big deck-mounted gauss guns that fire packages right to your doorstep as the ship screams past the nearest coastline.
Thats exactly how I want my buttplug delivered - shot via a rail gun directly at it’s destination.
What if I live in the geographic center of a continent? How do I know which coastline cannon to order from?
Depends on prevailing winds.
I see no setting where this could go horribly wrong.
Im gonna need some concept art first. for research puposes
Currently seeking angel investors for 500m buy-in, or I’ll take a 200kg of plutonium, if you’ve got that.
Good god, the stress that would be on the hydrofoil’s connecting pieces makes my meager mind whimper.
Honestly this does sound fucking awesome. It could be sold to the ‘murica crowd.
You have me thinking of like… A ring around the equator with space elevators on it (with stations at the top), and “rail” tracks, with trains traveling between all the stations. Gaussian launchers sending packages to your nearest delivery depot.
Believe it or not, that’s a feasible (ish) plan for a space elevator we could build right now. Instead of having a counterweight at GEO that’s pulling on a carbon nanotube rope, you have a ring spinning inside another ring in LEO. The outer ring could be made of Kevlar, and IIRC, it would take something like a year or two of all current Kevlar production. You then need four stations approximately equidistant apart around the equator to act as counterweights.
The station for the Pacific would itself be quite the engineering challenge. Not a lot of land you can use at the place you need.
Just anchor one of the garbage patches and use that.
Bill McKibben is based.
Inaccurate statement.
https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels
40% of traffic is for petrochemicals, which according to this article is coal, oil, gas, and things derived from them, which would include fertilizer and plastics and probably some other stuff too like industrial lubricants, asphalt etc. Not just fossil fuels, so not all that 40% would be affected by a switch to renewable energy. It’s also worth noting that building out renewable energy generation involves shipping a lot of hardware around the globe as well.
That last sentence, yep. People don’t tend to factor in the carbon footprint of building anything they deem environmentally friendly. There’s a cost/benefit analysis to be made. A bad idea may actually be worse than what it’s replacing, or not beneficial enough to pursue.
People have done those cost/benefit analysis for solar, wind, and EVs. They come out a pretty clear winner. We don’t really need to keep hounding on this while pretending to be smart.
Now E15 gas, OTOH? Utter trash that should go away.
There may be carbon emitted in creating green energy but green energy is ultimately reducing demand for hydrocarbons, which is better than sequestration. Also you need to factor into the operational life of the green tech. If you do, it’s pretty clear pretty fast that it’s beneficial to go with green energy options. The argument you’re making is a common strawman argument for not investing in green energy.
Interestingly you’re both correct.
We swapped to ICE vehicles as they were cleaner than shit covered streets from all the horses, making a new problem.
Renewable energy is much cleaner long term- but what new issues are we not seeing? If we through ourselves head first into this (and we need to) what did we miss?
If we ~~through ~~ throw ourselves head first into this (and we need to) what did we miss?
literally the only way to know is to do it. same with horses. there’s a 30 year transition period as infrastructure accommodates the world to the new technology.
I’m very much a proponent of careful planning and going into things with our eyes open. Sadly, I don’t think we are in a position to know what we don’t know or even find it out at this point because we are on a compressed timeline.
It’s like worrying about the effects of fire retardant from the fire department’s trucks, when your house is on fire… and the other option in the equation is a flamethrower
Make no mistake, im not saying we should stop. Far from it. Only that we should have had these discussions 30 years ago, and don’t be soo quick to dismiss the next tragedy to focus on this one - we just repeat the cycle.
You’re right, the timeline is compressed from the 50 years we “thought” we had, down to literally months, and I don’t think people actually realise that. Too bad most targets are 2050, 2060…
For all the things you think of when you hear “renewables”, that analysis has already been made, and it’s overwhelmingly better in every way to ditch fossil fuels.
I’d assume this is true over any sufficiently long time horizon.
I’d guess it’s like 20 years for a lotta stuff? i.e. short enough the average Lemming would benefit in their lifetime
More like a year. A wind turbine, depending on size, position etc, generates the amount of power used in it’s construction within 2.5 - 11 months. Over it’s life cycle it generates about 40x the energy you put in.
Incredible, love it!
Thanks for the bright fact :)
Also it requires shipping oil to fuel the mining operations needed to produce full scale renewable energy. But if we wait a little bit the quality of power output from the same mining inputs will improve which means renewable later requires less total mining than full scale renewable now, and so you will use less fuel to do that smaller amount of mining.
What people don’t realize is that the expense of renewable technology mostly is fuel. Fuel to mine it, fuel to move the raw materials, fuel to refine it, fuel to manufacture it, fuel to ship it to you. The total labor is quite small. So if taken on a specific case the financial perspective alone of a particular application of renewable vs conventional energy the numbers don’t add up then likely the renewable is less green. If you wait a little bit for the green cost to come down that indicates improved efficiencies and now it actually is green.
So the answer to make the world more green is not to shift our calculations to spend money on green solutions beyond financial sense. It’s to work on technology to lower green costs until it naturally makes sense and thereby also make it more green at the same time.
So if taken on a specific case the financial perspective alone of a particular application of renewable vs conventional energy the numbers don’t add up then likely the renewable is less green.
Renewables are more climate efficient and cheaper. Today. All this included. A wind turbine, depending on size, position etc, generates the amount of power used in it’s construction within 2.5 - 11 months. Over it’s life cycle it generates about 40x the energy you put in. There is no valid excuse to keep burning stuff because it appears cheaper short-term.
Yeah, I feel like GP was a comment that was valid 10-20 years ago, but not now. We improved green energy during that time by a lot. It’s past time to deploy it as fast as we can.
Do we know what the percentage is after subtracting out things derived from fossil fuels? I looked at the article and tried to do the math, but it seems like the stats are bundled together.
Yeah me too, I couldn’t figure it out.
We need Hank Green.
localizing and streamlining production is a bigger factor to climate change anyway imo
technology and production should absolutely not be as centralized and wasteful as it currently is.
That’s China. Are you making a product in China and need a bunch of screws? The factory down the street makes those. Need a housing? Another factory down the street makes those. An LCD display? Believe it or not, down the street.
localizing and streamlining production
These are two distinct goals, sometimes that work against each other. Localization is often a tradeoff between saving energy on transport and logistics versus economies of scale in production, and the right balance might look different for different things.
The carbon footprint of a banana shipped across the globe is still far less than that of the typical backyard chicken, because the act of raising a chicken at home is so inefficient (including with commercially purchased feed driven home in a passenger car) that it can’t compete on energy/carbon footprint.
There are products where going local saves energy, but that’s not by any means a universal correlation.
Don’t forget that if those other things which are derived from them are reduced too that would be a massive win for the health of the planet and everything living on it. Without primarily consuming the fuel component of petrochemicals I think it would drastically change the economics of producing the derivatives and make them scarcer. It looks like a win-win.
Joke’s on you when we get even more ships sending the sun and wind around the world, idiot.
The delivery mechanism for sunlight keeps burning me while the delivery mechanism for wind keeps knocking things over. Someone help me, I need a lawyer!
Fuckin demolished that snowflake. With climate change
Facts!
Fun vaguely related fact: the 1800s are often hailed as the century of steamships, but in reality steamships had pretty short range and required frequent re-coaling in order to get anywhere and back. The coaling stations around the world were mostly stocked by sailing ships since there was no way to economically transport coal by using vessels that burned coal for their propulsion. So it’s more accurate to say that the worldwide transportation revolution of the 1800s was a steam/wind power hybrid.
If we switched to renewable energy, the cost of coal and oil would crash, but it wouldn’t drop to zero. Wealthier countries would stop producing oil locally and shipments would still circle the globe from countries desperate enough to keep producing at lower profits, to countries that cannot affort the more expensive renewable infrastructure.
That’s not a reason not to switch. We just need to be prepared for the reality that no single solution will resolve all our problems. Conservatives and energy barons will fight tooth and nail, and will point to the new problems as evidence that we never should have switched. was
countries that cannot affort the more expensive renewable infrastructure
This presumes renewables are more expensive. But I would posit that a rapid adoption of renewables is going to occur as the cost of operating - say - a thorium powered container ship falls below that of its coal equivalents.
What I would be worried about, long term, is the possibility that advanced technologies further monopolize industries within a handful of early adopter countries. That’s not an ecological concern so much as a socio-economic concern.
a thorium powered container ship
If the experience of the NS Savannah is anything to go by, the major hurdle that ship is going to face is Greenpeace etc. fomenting irrational anti-nuclear hysteria until it’s banned from so many ports that it’ll be too difficult to operate it profitably. I hope I’m wrong and I wish them luck.
Good luck, they’d have to ban nuclear subs and no nation wants to throw that protection away.
Also fuck Greenpeace and their often more harmful than helpful stunts.
Good luck, they’d have to ban nuclear subs and no nation wants to throw that protection away.
No, that doesn’t follow. I’m pretty sure nuclear subs – or nuclear aircraft carriers, for that matter – rarely dock at commercial ports, and there’s no reason (other than hypocrisy, which is not relevant) that a country can’t decide to bar nuclear ships from commercial ports while still allowing them at military naval bases.
Depends on the sub but yeah they do. Lots and I’d go so far as to say most naval bases are the deepest port inland for protection often surrounded by private commercial businesses. Hell the shipyard most of the us nuclear subs are made is adjoining one of the nations largest ports.
They wouldn’t port ban them since that doesn’t actually solve the complaints, it would be exclusion from territorial waters and no one wants to do that. A. because they’re safer B. Because the protection nuclear navies provide is something everyone values C. These things are usually decided between nations not generally by a sole nation.
That and developing countries have been able to adopt some green initiatives, which points to them being at least somewhat affordable
Green energy has very short supply lines when compared to fossil fuels. Great if you live somewhere remote or prone to sudden economic distributions.
countries that cannot affort the more expensive renewable infrastructure.
Renewables are already cheaper than fossil fuel power.
Yes but fossil fuel cost will drop, and they have existing infrastructure
Would the price crash or would it stabilize at a much higher price as a specialized commodity where the cost of refining no longer benefits from economies of scale and instead only benefits from buyers who are unable or unwilling to use alternatives?
Oil is used for more than just energy.
70% of crude oil ends up gasoline and diesel.
Idk why you’re being downvoted. Petrochemicals are used for a bunch of stuff, including plastics manufacturing.
We should switch to renewables as quickly and completely as we can, but it wouldn’t eliminate 100% of oil use
I mainly agree, but it could be substituted. Various biomolecules are being investigated as a replacement substrate for established (petro)chemical processes. Part of the issue is, that you need to defunctionalise the chemicals which is the opposite of what petrochemistry currently does (which is adding functional groups as needed, not removing them).
This research, however, is stifled by the cheap Price of oil. I know an anecdote of Nivea pulling their funding into a similar project because the price ber barrel recently fell. The project was supposed to last around 5 years.
I argue that if oil wasn’t as cheap, ecological alternatives to plastic would have a chance or would be considered at all.
No, they wouldn’t. Capitalism is driven by supply, not demand.
If by some magic we switched to renewables over night, the owner class would open or expand another market to keep those ships moving.No, we would have an over capacity of shipping space, forcing the price down sharply. In the short term goods would be much cheaper to ship, reducing in a host of global economic changes- some good but alot not.
The ownership class is not physically capable of doubling our good production overnight to keep them running - long term though its quite probable. Ships will be refitted, a lot scrapped, new orders canceled- but it takes time.
And capitalism is absolutely driven by demand. Any organization that tries to tell people to buy something they aren’t interested in will fail. They can alter demand, and yes they control that, but it us demand driven.
Yeah, that worked totally well for the Guano and sodium nitrate businesses.
Is this a meme?
Yo, you right
I’ll allow it.
As nice as it would be, a not insignificant amount of coal being transported is destined to steel production. Steel is iron + carbon, and the easiest source of carbon is coal. Steel is pretty important, so that’s not going away anytime soon. I wonder if carbon capture could make a product that could be used to replace coal here though, and fairly effectively sequester the carbon in an actually useful form?
What biomass grows the fastest without being waterlogged - I imagine bamboo or sugarcane or something
Grow that, and burn it to make carbon neutral steel; bonus points if you do it in a highrise/underground farm but frankly some medium term reversible environmental damage is preferable to killing off way more with climate change
Eh, purity is a thing. Biomass is the opposite of what you want there, but it could be doable. I do wager, however, that the largest “climate cost” of steel comes from the repeated melting of the steel.
Coal has a bunch of impurities compared to charcoal I thought?
And if the repeated melting is done by burning biomass/charcoal or with clean(er) energy then it’s not a huge issue
Still leagues ahead of biomass. Don’t get me wrong, this is an issue that can be solved. Biomass can be converted to biogas which can be purified to produce methane (or you just burn biogas directly) which then in turn can be used for heat (or other purposes) - the problem here is the sheer amount of energy this requires. Yes, significant portions of the steel industry can be “decarbonised” (or at least I think so) but the effort is immense. Doable, necessary, but it will be a huge piece of work.
By “burn it” I meant turn it into charcoal… Charcoal averages 80% carbon (range 50-95%), whereas depending on the type coal ranges from 60-92% carbon, with the purest type, anthracite, being 86-92% carbon
Given a mass production system would likely result in more uniform carbon content near the top of the range, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that they could be swapped out pretty easily
Electric Arc Furnaces are probably our best bet for that - they’re an established, proven technology and can be swapped over to a green power source without any other changes (assuming the society has the energy capacity). I think I remember reading that a factory somewhere in Europe had already done that but a quick search has failed me.
Certainly, they’re the shit, but the energy capacity you mentioned is a huge issue. As I said in my other comment it should/could/has to be done, but it’s anything but simple.
I don’t know about all of you, but I know I wouldn’t want to cross oceans without a good engine.
Storms are not cool. Not being in the age of sail anymore seems good.
I don’t think this is about what’s powering the ships but rather their cargo.
But at least the ships need a non-renewable source. And they are going to need some of it in every country they visit. How do we get oil to every country if not by ship? That’s a lot of pipelines if we go that route. But maybe that is the answer.
But at least the ships need a non-renewable source.
Why would they? Seems like a solveable problem to me, most likely via green H2, but also with big ass batteries (most likely for shorter ranges at first).
We have to reach net 0 come what may, so there will have to be clean power in any port they visit at some point.
Nuclear submarines already exist. Why not use that technology for shipping purposes?
But the point of this meme is that by reducing our use of coal and oil on land, our need for those ships would also dwindle.
Why would you pick a submarine for civil purposes? Just use a “normal” freighter and “slap” nuclear power on it.
(Ignoring the glaring issues from nuclear power on land that would be exacerbated at sea)
Ok maybe I wasn’t clear enough. That’s exactly what I meant. The nuclear technology, not the submarine technology.
What are the glaring issues?
Ships can register any nation as their flag state, so they often choose flags of convenience based on whoever has the lowest fees or regulations – or more insidiously, whoever has the least ability to hold companies accountable.
This is why so many shipping companies register in Liberia, Panama, and the Marshall Islands. Also Mongolia, which is landlocked.
So unless we want to fill the oceans and ports with ships that have nuclear reactors with no regulation, no safety measures, and no accountability, we’re gonna have to fix the last hundred years of international maritime law.
Well, let’s hop to it!
The big thing is that ports need to learn how to handle and refuel nuclear material. It’s all possible, but not a small task. The ports won’t want to do it until there are ships that need it, and the ships won’t want to do it until there are ports that can handle it.
You say that, but modern sail concepts are a thing and are already in place as hybrid shipping solutions. Boats require a LOT of energy to do their thing, so any savings translates to big numbers.
https://cinea.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/new-wind-powered-cargo-ship-sets-sail-2023-08-22_en
Yes, I’m only bothered by the notion that we should ask sailors to start faffing with sails again. It was harder and more dangerous. It’s a good addition, but relying on it seems not worth it when we’ve gotten past it.
I’ve personally raised sails at sea, it’s not that hard. But going up into the mast, especially when the weather starts getting serious, is not something sailors should have to do again if they they don’t have to. It’s practically more suitable as an extreme sport. Human lives were just worth less back then.
But having them as efficiency assists, maybe even just sailing with the engine as a backup, that would be great.
Why wait for others?
Wind Turbine & Solar Panel Combinations: A Guide to Hybrid
Smaller and cheaper units are becoming available as individuals as well. I might try to put something like this up, one at each corner of the home and then have battery storage.
- Small Wind Generator is widely used for boats, terraces, cabins or mobile houses charging, etc; The humanized design of small wind generator is easy to install, maintain and repair
- The wind vertical turbine generator can easily adapt to various environments. Use wind energy resources to maintain a large amount of electricity. Portable vertical wind turbine generator set is suitable for emergency power generation for home, outdoor, factory and garden lighting.
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