Thanks for sharing your somewhat optimistic viewpoint. As a US-based researcher in the green economy, I wish I could be so optimistic. My pessimism is based on experience. In 2010, the “tea party” wave election ushered in the pre-MAGA politicians. I was leading a major research program to develop renewable fuels and create jobs in rural areas. They just cut off the funding, setting the project back at least a decade. I met with these politicians and learned that, in private, they freely admit that they don’t care about rural voters. They only represent the plutocracy and their own interests. This personal experience leads me to believe that they will never consider rural district voters anything more than a bunch of chumps to be fooled. As for my renewable fuels project, it’s in the hands of a private company who has licensed it to a developer in the asia-pacific region. I am now trying to license some green steel technology inventions in Europe and Asia. I don’t expect to ever see these implemented in the USA, and fully expect my research program to be slashed to zero. I tried to use my education and career to help create economic opportunity for rural regions, but Americans don’t want what I have to offer.
Well, it was an impossibility at that level to sell it sorry to say, it doesn't matter what the propaganda says if you're actually reaching those people and showing them point blank, that this saves you money, gives you jobs, and makes your life better. You have to pierce the veil as it were, reach in, and yank every single hook out one by one, painstakingly, to make them understand, and then you have to demonstrate it, you can't give projections, you can't give theory, you have to give them something they can hold in their hands and say "Yup, I'm here for this". I'm not saying you did wrong, I'm saying that the capability for a rural voter, who is largely specialized in fields other than environmental studies and other esoteric studies, needs something in their hands or else they get bought on by easier lies than harder truths. Once people like you come back around with actual projects to be put down, procedures to follow, jobs to be created, plans drawn up, and a strategy to implement, the rural base is more than happy to get right to work and do everything in their power to enact real changes. My source is that, these are my neighbors, and while I'm a classically educated business admin with a great love of the environment and new potential economic impacts of the Green New Deal: my neighbors are flight mechanics, truckers, miners, and blue-collar that know what they do, and do it well, but the bigger picture stuff is not on their radar. Now that we're seeing actual adoption of these things, real boots-on-the-ground initiatives, oh you better believe they're gonna fight with all their strength to keep a hold of it all and work their hardest to make it successful. I have no doubts that, while bumpy, the US is wells on its way to full adoption because we now have products to sell to people that they can invest their labor into and work hard to make a success. That being said, trump will harm it badly, but we'll simply fix it afterward because now we're not starting from zero, we're gonna erupt with power and basically overtake the situation with sheer momentum
As an outsider (a Brit), I'm inclined to agree with the tea party's view of rural district voters. Though I'm not sure if the word "chumps" is quite strong enough. Are they inbred? That might explain it.
@@Skumm93 Did you not read what he said. This has nothing to do with the will of Rural voters. its to do with those that control the will of those rural voters who as we have seen are easily manipulated. My Source: the recent American Presidential Election.
Billionaires and millionaires will invest in whatever makes the money. If renewable Green or (whatever you want to call it energy) makes them the money, they will invest.
Some things need long term investment before it makes money. Once upon a time, Germany had all the solar tech, but couldn't yet make a profit. They sold all their machines to China. Guess who is the leading solar panel producer now?
In what year did the us produce the most oil of any country in earth's history? 2023. 2024 is expected to be more. If you can't see the con, you are the mark.
@@timradde4328 I mean, I am. Off-grid is more affordable than ever right now. Battery prices will go up when the Trump tarrifs hit, but there are some pretty good domestic solar panel producers afaik (though they might be buying parts from Asia 🤷♀️)
It's all ideological, but neither logical, nor much of an idea...but with seven times more energy consumption per caput and a boom in exploitative carbon mining, the US was always going to be weird. Musk's involvement signals a shift...but who can say?
Trump also promise to bring back coal last time, but that failed and died in a ditch because no one wanted it, I expect similar things to happen to gas and oil regardless of what they try to do. States like CA will continue to drag the US forward, and if the US decides to destroy its clean energy industries then China will fill the void and totally dominate and become way less fossil fuel dependent in the long run, which will mean there low cost advantage will become even bigger.
Worth noting that China is already tanking global oil demand, which directly reflects into the profits of US oil producers. China is the leader in industry electrification among all large nations - meaning a lot of things that use fossil fuels in the US and even EU, Chinese companies can do with electricity alone - and is installing more renewable capacity than the rest of the world combined. Heck, lower Chinese demand is the main reason the IEA predicts a large oil glut next year, with demand lower than production by something close to a million barrels per day - and, contrary to what some people keep saying, the main reason for that isn't a lagging economy, but structural changes as China moves away from fossil fuels. To make things even more interesting, they are actually saving money - and a lot of it - by using renewables instead of importing fuel, so the fabled Chinese competitivity should actually grow as it reduces oil imports. The oil industry is looking at the possibility of sub-$60 oil, which would make fracking largely unprofitable. On the positive side, that is the oil price cap that Russia has been avoiding by using its shadow fleet, so this price drop would finally cut into Russia's oil profits in ways that the sanctions never could.
California has fallen to crony capitalism / regulatory capture, NEM 3, and electric bill fees applied only to solar owners based on their income. Rooftop solar has slowed, maintained only due to very high electricity costs (4PM to 9PM, $0.68 / KWh). Electricity is turned off during higher than average winds, because that is cheaper than maintenance and putting power lines under ground. Not sure how many emissions the home generators put out.
@@FabioCapela Could it be China has used up it's ability to manufacture for the world, build hundreds of ghost cities, and needs a new economic stimulus, EV's and renewable & nuclear energy?
One mind blow statistic came out this week. China's electricity generation is now 37% renewable. As a percentage that doesn't sound much but that is for residential and industry. That means that 500 million people in China get all their needs met by renewables including the charging of their electric cars and a good chunk of the worlds manufactured goods that China exports. .
They get the majority of their electricity from coal and burn more coal than all other countries combined, and that's not likely to change any time soon.
Wind and solar made up 16% of electricity generation in China. Coal made up 60%. The other clean energy sources are hydro (13%), nuclear and biomass(that's debateable). Solar and wind barely surpass their hydro
Yes, here in the US, we are about to live in “interesting times”! You know that the energy transition is going full throttle when even the CEO of Exxon-Mobil also wants to keep on track with the current energy transition to maintain “certainty” in the markets while they continue to develop their carbon capture tech. And as you mentioned, many Republican leaders have already called for “caution” in disrupting the IRA. All the things you mentioned (especially our already expansive fossil fuel drilling) were little understood by many of our citizens who voted for Mr. Trump who were instead preoccupied with outrageous claims on immigration or left leaning “woke” conspiracy theories. There really isn’t a constructive conversation going on in the US but rather more of an angry shouting match. This administration will bring a real test for our institutions as well as our 3 branches of government to function as intended. Thanks for an informative video…and I have seen the documentary you mentioned and it is quite sobering.
@@janvanruth3485 Green energy is cheaper then fossil fuels. The fact of the mater is 1 out of every 4 dollars in subsidies is to the fossil fuel industries. Look at the price of Gasoline in Europe if you want to see the actual price of Gasoline is
@@petewright4640do you really think that the billions of people living in poverty are going to accept staying in poverty because some moron do-gooders want to save the planet? not a chance...
@@jefferyspurlock4272 really? out of every euro i pay for my petrol here in europe some 55 cent are taxes. the rest, 45 %, divides into some 37 % production costs and some 8 % profit mark up. there are no subsidies for the fossil fuel industry over here. i guess the costs of production etc. would be the same in the usa as they are in europe. at the moment the price for unleaded over here is about 8 dollar for a gallon. now please explain what the price of petrol would be in the usa if there would be no subsidies to the fossil fuel industry....
By The Economist's models, the cost of the transition is less than many popular models suggest and the profit forces as you've identified are a major factor im accelerating things. That's not to say we can be complacent. Far from it. I think this election result is a disappointing setback for climate action, but not a cause for despair. Keep educating folks on the economic and health benefits of the transition and getting people on board for individual and collective climate action and we'll get it done.
I'm using direct from PV light to light the room I'm in right now. I'm experimenting with the ways I can use PV as I make it without traditional batteries. Even on the dark days I'm getting plenty of light to work by.
In the year or so after I installed my solar system, the darkest day still produced some 13% of the energy that the brightest days produce - so if I have 8x the solar capacity that I would otherwise need and a day of battery storage I can weather through basically everything without losing power or drawing on grid energy. I can also increase the amount of batteries to reduce the need for solar generation. The kick is, with solar panel and battery prices falling, it's increasingly getting close to the point where just installing that much solar and battery is cheaper than being connected to the grid, even with the cheap electricity in my country. More so if I do my own installation, which for a system not connected to the grid isn't much of an issue, as without a grid connection I don't need the system to be certified. Funny thing, Pakistan is already seeing this scenario play out. Their electricity is too expensive, so a lot of people in that country are just installing solar power and batteries and going off-grid; the trend is going fast enough that the government fear the electricity utilities will collapse due to a lack of paying customers.
What about a wind turbine? Have you hear of this one: "One such solution is the hexagonal wind turbines developed by a Scottish company. The LIAM F1 silent wind turbine, developed by The Archimedes, ups the ante in this field."
1:12 As an American, the whole thing is a bit shit. I couldn’t believe we elected him the first time, and it’s even harder to believe that we did it again. 🤦🏼♂️
@@Mediiiicc That's part of it. But I feel in the current media landscape the rightwing propagandists could successfully smear just about anyone running as a Dem at this point. Very sad.
Love your optimistic take on green initiative, Been slightly depressed when I had to listen to all that Trump noise I am hearing about lately, cheered me up!
My home is 100% powered by solar energy now. I didn't do it so much because of environmental concerns but more because the cost of electricity here in the Northeast has gone up to the stratosphere because of the green energy mandates and other factors like the covid-19 bill payment programs that the utility companies have for people who couldn't pay their electric bill by socializing the cost among the people who do pay their bill. At any rate, my solar installation will have paid for itself in another 2 years at the rate we're going. I saved $14,000 on electric bills already just in the past 2 years.
This is what Dave is talking about. Renewable energy is the cheaper alternative now, so progress is going to continue no matter how much lobbying the oil industry does. The most cost effective option will always win out.
Yep these guys are wholly capable of voting against their own interests. Im sure they would happily put 10,000 solar jobs out of action to save (say)1,000 coal or oil jobs.
@@christophermahon1851 I have been very disappointed in Elon, but his influence may keep some programs going. He is very anti-subsidy even though SpaceX and Tesla have received billions in subsidies. He may, at least, advocate for eliminating subsidies for oil companies if also advocated for eliminating ev subsidies. I’m hoping he’ll get in Trumps ear to preserve solar and wind programs.
Its a good thesis, I do agree with it. Renewables have long since crossed fossil fuels on cost and value. And strangely enough, republic states have laws that are designed to allow generators to really take electricity consumers for all they are worth during times of high demand. Australia is similar. Laws were designed such that individual disruptions such as "unexpected" plants going offline would benefit generators at unreasonable scales. In both cases, renewable energy storage systems, particularly batteries, have been able to out-compete fossil sources using the very laws that were designed to benefit fossil fuel and the fossil generators began falling into bankruptcy when their gravy train stopped rolling. Plus the distributed nature of the many smaller renewable generation sites made it nearly impossible to game the system any more by purposefully taking a large generator off-line. On an even playing field, fossil generation just can't compete with renewables. It got so bad that Texas actually began passing laws to benefit only fossil generation to try to compensate for their quickly dropping political and economic power (a primary benefactor for republican candidates). But it's too late methinks. Republican states now have to contend with the rising political power of the renewables industry. Also keep in mind that those maps are by county or by congressional district... there are vast differences in population density. In the U.S., rural districts and rural states have an outsized vote. Though in this particular election, for the first time in many years, Trump actually did get a majority of the vote. Which is really sad to see... we live in an actual idiocracy, apparently. -Matt
"On an even playing field, fossil generation just can't compete with renewables." Really? How much OIL do we get from SLAVE LABOR? Your China made Batteries and Solar Cells are Loaded with SLAVE LABOR or near Slave labor. All Things being equal my FOOT!
No wind or sunshine and the renewables don't work so no energy to store. Maybe you think more storage then, that's more slave labour digging up Cobalt then. The solution is proper investment in renewable technologies not investment in current technology that isn't good enough. Writing long comments makes you look stupid. Need to cut investment in oil and gas etc when the time comes but clearly with China constructing plenty of new coal power stations the time isn't yet.
Based on the latest reports Trump only received 49.9% of the U.S. popular vote. Definitely NOT a mandate for radical wide spread destruction of our government!
Elections are 90% economic and business is 100% economic. If renewables and EVs are cheaper they will be adopted and the cheaper they get the faster they will be adopted.
Literally not how economics or business or our current markets work. For example... You can't build your own electric grid and compete on any real scale with the current monopoly. This was a choice our governments made. If we want a valid competitive market we would need to subsidize those vehicles and energy generation to the tune of 14 trillion a year to even come close to what pollution based energy and transportation receives. Which... would make those EVs and energy wildly more cost efficient and effective... collapsing the market for pollution based vehicles and energy.
Renewables are cheaper than fossils per kWh without subsidies or assistance already. They have been for almost a decade. The subsidies were just to put some fire under the industry’s ass, hence how we’ve reached nearly 30% renewables in such a short timespan across utility + rooftop generation. But that’s why I’m not all too worried. Trump can do whatever he wants to try and prop up the ass… sorry, gas - and other dino liquids - industries all he wants. But the numbers don’t lie, and there’s more profit & geopolitical stability in renewables with proper storage and as such, utilities and developers will continue to make them. And even then, propose he ruins everything and we indeed do have a stagnant 4 years in renewables going online. Then in 4 years, when another Democrat who knows how to use their head gets installed, they’ll remove the tariffs, the rest of the world will be salivating to sell perovskite solar panels and solid state battery cars to US customers at great costs and tech specs compared to now, and things will get back on a proper course.
It requires some recharging infrastructure that is already slow being implemented. I wish we could have had an administration in that would keep working to aid progress. I voted that way, for all the good it did.
@@valoriethechemist Well I did. I put solar on the roof of my home and bought an EV. I now produce more electricity than I need including the charging of my EV. In Australia 40% of all homes have solar which competes directly with the grid.
@@markumbers5362 That's an example of what I mean beyond the obviousness though. These systems are interrelated and complex. Especially as populations rise. Australia is doing a decent job of addressing the biosphere shift in energy... comparatively. The stats look fine until we really do the deep dive into resources and how fast things are happening. And what we're likely to expect. For example... even if we ended fossil fuels this year and made everyone a solar panel... that's a major hurdle... making it. And to maintain and sustain making them? We're thinking too high tech and big energy still to be honest. We're thinking too old school economics and not resource efficiency and utilization. The entire system of economics we have is based in unlimited supply. We're decades from exhausted resources. That was one short example. A philosophical start at least. We have a finite supply. We're burning it up at a rate so astounding it's setting the world's thermostat out of wack. When we look at EVs replacing everything... even to just a point to do anything positive to emissions... the resources aren't there... and if they are burn even more in the short term... which is the whole problem.
Sure, the actual problem is that people are to underinformed or misinformed to realize what is actually going on. I mean the whole inflation issue probably cost the election for democrats, even though it was a world wide phenomenon that was outside of the power of control of the president and his response was actually really strong and decisive.
Just because something is sensible doesn't mean they'll do it that way. The last round of tariffs already cost a lot of jobs and a substantial chunk of economic development.
Trump tried to bring back the coal industry in his first term and failed. Renewables are the future. Fossil fuels are at its peak production levels right now.
What a lot of people don't realize is that where there is utility scale renewables, negative wholesale electricity prices are achieved quite regularly. Fossil fuels can't achieve this. As I write this, we using electricity generated from our solar panels to wash and dry our clothes - in the middle of November.
..........Negative wholesale electricity prices are a horrible thing. It means you're dealing with an installed power source that is chaotic and unreliable, and distributors don't want to buy from it, and will literally *pay you* to produce less. How the xxxx do you think that could possibly be a good thing? It also inevitably comes with radically higher prices when the chaos pendulum swings back the other way, and resulting in faaaaar higher prices overall. Fossil fuel plants literally can't overproduce to the point of damaging the grid because you just..... turn them off and stop burning fuel when demand drops. You can still end up with shortages when mismanagement happens, but you will never end up with overproduction that damages the grid and *drives up long term prices.* Do you know the other power source that can create too much power and as a result makes radically less income, sometimes even negative? Nuclear, for a similar reason: they can't shut off and just wait. They're nowhere near as chaotic and damaging as utility scale renewables, and so both the negative value and the *higher than normal cost* periods are shorter and less extreme, but they still have that *problem.* Negative electricity prices are a symptom of a problem, not a good thing, and they also come with far higher overall prices: do you somehow think that a distributor having to pay producers not to produce is going to somehow lower costs for consumers? Obviously having to pay out extra money without any income for it will drive *up* prices to end users, because it drives up the average amount of cost per unit of delivered energy.
@@ASDeckard The grid in Germany (and in the European interconnect) is perfectly stable. Most people don't know that we have so many old power plants sitting around in the countryside that even if all renewables suddenly stopped producing and all electricity consumption doubled, there would not be a problem. Beyond that, battery storage is gearing up rapidly. Hence, these low prices which are so reviled (I mean: WTF?) will be there most of the time, not just during certain times of the day or year as it is now.
Only an option for a few, mostly in progressive regions. I do that, but only up to what I have otherwise drawn from the grid. Anything extra I make, they take without compensation.
@@joelsmith4394 Even without selling back, solar and batteries are getting cheap enough that just installing extra to cover for cloudy or rainy days is becoming a worthy investment. And if you go the EV route, you can also replace some of your fuel costs.
I got in under NEM 2.0 and have all of 11 panels, 3.9 kW peak. That is enough to run my house and provide an excess of 1,500 kWh annually. So I get a small check of about $120 annually. The big difference was insulating well a house built in 1903 with no insulation. Living in coastal northern California helps. We are at the latitude of Southern Portugal. In the future I will add batteries. I watch their progress with interest.
A lot of green tech eventually gets to the point where you have to make a conscious decision to pay more for the alternative. Electric vehicles are just about there with solid state batteries about the hit the market, in high end products in 2025, then full scale adoption by 2027. Beyond the EV battery itself other components will become cheaper and lighter. Weigh can be removed from the vehicle frame, suspension, brakes, lower weight class tires, the battery won't need to be thermally coddled as much due to a greater operating range.
Thank you Dave, I needed the perspective. I was pleased to see you linked the Climate Trace presentation by Al Gore et al in Azerbaijan in the notes. I watched that earlier this morning and it was great, I highly recommend that people watch it.
In Australia we have had successive governments fully against all renewables but yet we are on target to hit our 2030 Paris targets. This is largely due to Private investors, local governments and individuals investing in renewables. The Prim Minister in an international gathering this week tried to take credit for what they didn't do. Fortunately the Pacific Island Nations shot him down siting his approval to allow Woodside to open an enormous gas mine off Western Australia. Gas that is given for free to those company s that mine gas in Australia!!! So, Australia gets nothing but quicker climate change for this, I can not imagine the bribes politicians have taken to allow this...
@blu It’s also due to extremely low targets. That’s the problem with Paris. Well, one of the problems. BTW, I’d love to see the kind of outfits the Prim Minister wears. Got any pictures?
To put it another way, it looks like the whole country is red, but it's actually close to 50/50. The red voters are just more spread out, and low density rural or remote counties usually vote Republican.
That's why I constantly have to tell my ....well-educated family members that "Land can't vote". When they lose an election, they always point to the map and go, see! We've been frauded and cheated! No, you idiots - more people live in those little islands of blue than almost ALL the red. They just can NOT grasp that concept.
@@incognitotorpedo42 They like saying there are no blue states, only blue cities, I like to say, a state's heart is its people, no matter where they live
When you put toddlers in charge then breaking stuff is all they know, sadly. Trump is just the obvious figurehead but he is bringing a whole bunch of noisy toddlers in with him.
Not just economy. All over the West, voters are turning sour, fed up with the system, obtains vote for extreme right, not just because of migration, but also of how things are run since the neo capitalism took over social democratic policies which spread wealth more evenly. Even if we succeed to build more renewables - prices per megawatt are better, after all, at some point resources required for new built renewable will become scarce, as hardly anything is being recycled, and those materials are called rare earth for good reasons. AI might make things more efficient, but no computer Intelligence can restore emptied out resources. Resource constraints will likely play up increasingly during the 2030s, when cheap fracking comes to an end -that resource is finite too, and climate heating will cross 1,5 in a breeze and close in on 2C plus towards 2040. Enjoys these last years of easy luxury, they are set to become a nice nostalgia within a decade
@@reuireuiop0 Rare earth metals are some of the most common on the planets crust, actually. We call them rare because they're well mixed in (rarefied, not rare) and relatively hard to mine and refine, but they exist literally everywhere in high quantities, just low concentrations. If prices get too high that will make highly industrialized but high cost of labor nations, like oh I don't know America, price competitive again and we'll open our own mines and refineries back up, or build new ones with will be less expensive and faster since we have the existing industry to build out more industry quickly. In the 1980's more than half of the worlds rare earth metals came from California of all places, vs the literal hard zero today.... but those mines are currently rising in price as the expectation of re-opening builds, despite the harshest mining regulations on the planet and the highest cost of labor at the same time. I suppose we'll see. We've seen it happen before, and we're watching it begin happening now. Even as China continues to build up their own industrialization America is now growing faster again as prices rise and our worlds highest cost of labor becomes less of a hindrance. Then we end up with a bunch of very highly paid laborers that swell our already worlds largest consumer market, and the economy goes burr, the line goes up.
@@ASDeckard The problem with rare earths, and a lot of the other materials used for the energy transition, isn't the mining, but the refining. The country with the most advanced technology, and the skilled labor force, for those pursuits right now is China; the US can catch up, but it will likely take a decade or more of directed investment to get to that point. More so if trying to do it without importing Chinese workers, as very few people outside China graduate in the required fields, so the US would need to build up even its university courses, delaying things by years.
Where is the UK getting the battery storage from to back up the wind farms? Tesla Why are we able to buy electric cars? Tesla, without which the auto industry would not have been disrupted to change.
If there is one thing US CEOs are very good in, it is calculating profits. Green energy got that cheap now that nowadays oil, which is hard to get, is more expensive, AND! Those managers know that in 4 years the wind might change again, even before they see a ROI on the new wells. Texas, an old synonym for oil, has the most windmills per capita in the US
@@rjbiker66 Which right now gas is cheap because it's a side-product of extracting oil. But even with this cheap gas, it's still cheaper to generate electricity with solar panels. More so outside the US, since the tariffs on Chinese solar panels have left the US with some of the highest prices for solar panels in the world - rooftop solar in Australia costs about half the price of what it costs in the US, for example. And solar is getting cheaper, so expect gas demand, and revenues, to drop.
Solar panels are non recyclable, wind turbines are non recyclable. Both take petroleum products to be manufactured and maintained. Look at how much synthetic oil and regular oil it takes to maintain a wind farm. It's like the just stop oil folks who protest oil wearing petroleum products from head to toe while they protest oil.. wtf man
I live in the US and it feels like our society is collapsing. That being said my feelings are just that. I needed to hear this. Thank you for doing this video!
He or policies can not " trump" the economics involved in energy. Too late. Won't happen. The world is moving away from fossil fuels. Can't beat the economics. What strand even more assets
@@davidblair9877 When China stops importing oil it won't matter, prices will crash. The forecast on oil prices is already dismal for 2025 due to demand being expected to lag production to the tune of a million barrels per day, mostly due to China quickly electrifying both industries and cars; China is investing heavily on replacing every fossil fuel with electricity in the industry, and when it comes to cars most new cars sold there already come with a plug - and due to how their incentives work, favoring fully electric range and performance, even their plug-in hybrids are still good enough for fully electric day-to-day usage.
The world is moving away from fossil fuels huh... really?? Because everything is made from petroleum products dude. Rubbers, plastics, textiles just to name a few.. we're not moving away from crap..
Trump also said in 2016 that he would support coal mining and generation but during his Presidency massive amounts of Coal Power Stations closed down. Theres one thing you say to get elected and what you actually say in office, just like our dear Labour Party
Every third word out of Trump's mouth is a lie, so there's no telling what he'll do, other than to say that if something is both good and difficult, it will not happen.
The reality that I struggle to understand is that when I talk to my Republican friends who voted for Trump, they don't believe that Trump will actually do 90% of what he claims he will do. How on the earth can you vote for someone who you think lies 9 out of 10 times? What happens if he does actually pull off some of the crazy stuff he has talked about doing?
@@michaelharrison1093 You have to judge him by his last term in office, was the economy better, were peoples live better, it obviously was and he did all that whilst being held back by the swamp appointments, this time he's bypassing the swamp. Also what crazy stuff are you referring to ? is it stuff he has actually said he's going to do or is it stuff the leftie media claims he's going to do
Only discovered your channel in the past couple of weeks, after becoming increasingly concerned about Trumps impending (and now actual) election, especially its impact on climate change. Anyway, just wanted to say your channel is excellent, informative, very clear and very measured.
@@Quicks1lvr I do agree this was democracy, it was a fair election. But I am worried about the eroding away of certain aspects of our democracy, though hopefully they will hold.
Tariffs on Chinese solar panels will screw with even ongoing projects. Even assuming trump ruins the country enough to ruin it for the Republican Party we will be decades recovering from the damage.
Wind and solar are not viable options to fossil. At best they are arbitrage plays (cheap but unreliable) for a small fraction of demand. The 262GW crowed about here is not actual generation. Solar has a 20% duty cycle and wind about 30%. Today wind and solar represent less than 7% of primary energy supply and we only have enough installed battery capacity to run the US for 0.81 seconds of demand. If you include the requisite storage capacity wind and solar are far more costly than nuclear power. In the 1980-90's France went from zero to 80% nuclear in just over a decade (zero deaths btw). We've been deploying wind and solar for three decades and they have had almost no impact. We are kidding ourselves.
@@moletrap2640and that’s why more and more companies are adopting solar/wind power, lol. It’s FREE fuel. Do you know how much a nuclear plant costs? We will have more nuclear, but also more solar and wind. There’s a place for all of it…
@@CR-ud5qj thank you. Understood. But solar and wind are worthless as sources of energy without storage and at this point we have less than one seconds worth of storage. we will eliminate no fossil fuel facilities with wind and solar and retaining redundant facilities or storage takes the cost of wind and solar far higher than nuclear power. China, South Korea and Japan can all build a nuclear power plant for less than a third of what we can. It is highly doable.
Excellent vid as always, but if anything, it's actually underselling how strong renewables are. First, if you look at data on renewable deployment in 2017-2020, the growth rate is pretty consistent with 2009-2016 and 2021-2024. Second, if you look at the United States’ grid interconnect queue, roughly 95% of proposed projects are wind, solar, or batteries (circa mid-2016 it was barely above 50%). Assuming roughly 20% of these proposals are built (historical average), that’s another 300+GW of renewables ready to put shovels in ground today - largely battery-backed. Conversely, there'll be almost no new fossil generation of any kind. Third, annual energy installs in the US have been 75+% renewables since 2020. This year, they'll be nearly 95% of installs. Fourth, there are obvious fundamental reasons for all this: batteries cost about a quarter of what they did in 2016, and solar panels are less than half. If anyone thinks renewables won't get cheaper from here, I have a clean coal plant to sell you. We’re in a totally different world from 8 years ago. At this point, deregulating the grid just means renewables run away with it faster, and “energy dominance” functionally means “build wind/solar & batteries as fast as you can.”
This is why China is forging ahead with renewables to the degree they are doing; it just makes economic sense regardless of any environmental concerns. Chinese coal power is cheap, but Chinese battery-backed solar is even cheaper, so the more (and the faster) they build renewables, the lower electricity costs in China gets (and, thus, the more competitive their industry gets). Heck, they just connected a new 3GW solar plant the other day.
"US is a democracy" lol, I love you man, but when there's this much moneyed interests and studies showing the will of the people is insignificant in congress. Its called an oligarchy. But everything else. Loved it, thanks for the injection of hope
The US system is flawed. It has basically been condensed to 2 parties, red and blue, R and D, red states and blue states. Other democracies are moving the other way where political expression is shown in more parties that have influence and power. The US now looks like an oligarchy very corrupted by money. Pew research shows the majority of ordinary American people want similar benefits to those achieved by European and other nations workers but can’t achieve them.
I get where you are coming from, but all these multinationals and superrich certainly wouldn't spend that much money and hassle if the government wasn't an obstacle and in certain cases even a threat to their interests. I understand the frustration but this way of thinking dissuades you and other people from enganging with and improving democracy and government, which plays into the hands of those money interests perfectly. It's very similar to the narrative that government is wasteful and should be cut down to make room for private solutions, designed to sound common sense and reasonable at first glance but really it's just a subtle and slow power grab to erode trust in the government and open new profit avenues for private interests.
The introduction to the video you're commenting on shows why you're wrong. If the US voters had chosen differently, they could have had an administration without climate change deniers and which has actually passed anti-climate-change legislation. There were two very, very different options available; the will of the people would have made a significant difference.
I work for a company that has been and is investing in biofuels along with a couple of the big oil companies. Biofuels are and will be a massively profitable business. They don't completely eliminate carbon emissions, but they significantly reduce them. So when people chant, "We are not going back"....perhaps this is what they mean...LOL
Tractors and processing plants run on bio fuel?? Huh... I never would have guessed.. I'm going to put on petroleum products from head to toe, det in my humvy, and drive down the asphalt street to the town Square and protest just stop oil now. I might even order some synthetic leather pants. Because you know... "green" energy.
The sheer number of projects already in the works means we have quite a jump on whatever he tries to do. I hoped for better for sure. I'm rather ashamed by anyone who voted for DJT. Sadly a lot of my family was conned by him years ago and no amount of truth makes it through their cult indoctrination.
Side note, the red/blue political map of the US reflects political control, not population data. Everything is red because the physical land region is controlled by Republicans, but the blue areas tend to be more urban and obviously population-dense. If the country was actually divided along political lines the way those maps suggest, no democrat would ever get elected to anything. The country is not "red" because that map has a lot of red on it. But right wingers love to throw that map up and say, "See? Everyone's a republican except people who live in NYC!"
We transitioned from horse and buggy in the early 1900s and it happened very fast. Not because we pushed it but because something better came along. Build something better and we won’t have to coerce people into adopting it.
That "something better" is fusion, which hasn't accomplished the modest goal of even sustaining a constant state of nuclear reaction, let alone actually producing viable electricity. Until someone figures out how to make a tokamac reactor produce a regular current, we're going to have to live with a mixed energy market.
Yes, my fellow Americans have re-elected our own Boris and I'm extremely uncomfortable in my own country. Messed up! The Orange Julius is back and its bloody frightening.
Don't see how he will try to kill the electric strides made so far, but he will clamp down on the distribution of newly printed money by the federal reserve to make sure funds go to outfits that are operating on good engineering standards. If a company has such good ideas they will need to rely more on the private money than gov't handouts. EV trucks are not doing the job promised. Have two former subcontractors in Vegas that bought, then subsequently sold theirs because they could not pull loaded tool trailers reliably. We've along way to go here in the states for the average person to be able to afford EV's. It will be well after 2050. But , 'sigh', at 87, I won't be around to see the great results the ever improving technology will bring. In the meantime I'll scoot around on my mobility scooter powered by two lead/acid batteries. Scared shitless about lithium ion and possible fire. Got over a thousand miles on the bugger in 14 months so far.
Het lifepo4, no fire risk, only 6kg per 1kwh and 6000 cycles before i degrades to 80% of its original capacity Only masochists use lead acid nowadays for evs
@Quicks1lvr must be hard for you. You know, being so great and all. With your hive mind brainwashed make the rich folks richer and the poor folks poorer garbage. Self reflection is hard man but at some point you'll have to decide if you're in it for others, or just for yourself.
Hi Dave, nice one. I'm trying to get through the five stages of grief about that election but not quite reached acceptence yet. The graph that starts at 3.06 ... is that capacity installed that year or total installed capacity? The numbers look too big to be the former but the latter would suggest that some years total solar and wind capacity actually reduced on the year before....
After seeing info about oil extraction in the USA (Art Berman) I wonder what will happen if they try to increase oil production. Will it shorten the horizon so that those in industry and power could then see the writing on the wall.
I loved this channel for a long time, Dave, but never more than when watching this most recent post. Yes, the recent election results here are "a bit shit, really" but in the end the underlying economics will win, as you describe. Of course, as you also note, it may be a very bumpy ride, with delays in progress the planet absolutely cannot afford.
When you nominate a news host to be the Defense Secretary or put a half baked loose cannon in charge of economic tinkering... renewables will be the least of US worries. Expect economic collapse, followed by foreign boots on the ground in a year or two. We do appreciate the attempt to cheer us up though. I hope your view is right.
I think you have it backwards. The U.S. is much more likely to be the aggressor (ala Putin) with this crowd in control. They *always* start wars and then leave it for the democrats to clean up.
As a resident of West Virginia, USA, I appreciate your optimistic view. However, I feel you severely under estimate how stupid and short sighted America actually is. (Hence the election results.)
I've thought for a long time that it will be economics that will bring about a switch to green energy. I feel that politicians, whether left or right, never seem to make much difference. Sure they talk differently, but I don't think they act much differently!
High taxes on fossil fuel drive sales of EV's in Scandinavia, yes. Indeed, the Norwegians are world leading, having exonerated themselves from oil guilt - and oil revenues - with generous EV subsidies. Politcians make a difference!! But policies, such as gas subsidies, becomes entrenched.
@@user-pt1ow8hx5l I think it's great that the Norwegians have done that. As a Brit, I do have a habit of looking at eveything through a UK/US lens, so yes, you are right that politicians can and do make a difference, sometimes. I just feel that nothing much has changed here in 30-40 years!
@@fig7047 That's understandable!!! Being a Sussex Graduate myself! who wrote about the very first climate summit back in 1992 at the I.R. department,...... Strangely Thatcher was very much aware of climate chance, yet her contemporaries in business, most of them, failed to hear the message,.......... By the way. Think it would be feasible to get hold of a very large chunk of Danish pension capital - or a straight credit line - for AngloDanish ventures,.... Such as widespread solar - people power!! - and 'AeroMines'; a Danish invention that has been covered in this channel...... (Stationary-rooftop-windchatchers..)
Don't you dare to claim that all politicians are the same! Can't you see the enormous difference in the policies and legislation between Democrats and Republicans in the US? Or Tories vs Labour in the UK? There is NOTHING more important for the climate than getting "conservatives" out of power.
Thank you Dave. Another excellent reality check, when surrounded by disinformation & misinformation. Happy to see economics now driving increases in volume sales of renewables, which sustains the positive flywheel effect of further cheapening price. Gives hope...
thanks for the kind of positive view of green still alive and kicking. on the other side we have a serious deficit in understanding reality in the usofa. ignorant voters elect ignorant leaders, and that's what we have here in spades.
I scanned through some of the comments and not surprisingly i didnt see any comments about how the US is not a democracy. It's a constitutional federal republic. Just goes to show how much we know about our own country....
It's a combination of a representative democracy and a constitutional republic. It is a constitutional republic, meaning the country rests its foundation on a constitution-the supreme law of the land. Moreover, a “republic” is a form of government where the people hold the power. However, the representatives that Americans democratically elect exercise that power and do so subject to the rules of the Constitution.
I'm always skeptical when people go on about how much green stuff has grown. It doesn't matter. What matters is how much greenhouse gas emmissions have fallen. If they actually have fallen why would you not lead with that???????????
Thank you for the video. Note: If you can give his face less air time, that would be great. His mug on the thumbnail is a real turn off to those who know what he is.
The problem with most green energy is that it uses so much dirty energy to make. Not a joke except on us. Australia has a proposal to make green hydrogen to supply the world. To make this hydrogen they will use a process known as Steam Reformation, this is where gas usually methane is heated to very high temperatures to catalyse and strip out the hydrogen. A lot of brown coal is planed to be used in this process. In most cases green energy takes one and a half barrels of oil to make one barrel of green. Englands biomass fuelled power stations are estimated to use four barrels of oil per barrel of green. Hydrogen when made and packaged for transport could take up to ten barrels of oil per barrel of green. To replace coal with windmills and solar panels and ice with EVs up to a thousand times the resources need to be mined resulting in thousands times more real toxic pollution and environmental damage. For Frickles sake please stop trying to save the planet it cannot take anymore of your kindness.
hydrogen has its own problems. While I think its a good local battery storage, its not a good over all thing to have around, transport, and then pressurize around. If anything, its just as bad as using gas for cars today. Cleaner when burn yes, but because of the massive amount of work it takes to transport it, its just as bad in terms of power usage for what you get out of it. From a power to transport... only problem is the cable it self and the storage (batteries) that hold onto it. Let alone the other dangers of having a tank full of the stuff vs a battery when things do go wrong.
@@adr2t Except for the fact the storage of hydrogen requires very specialized and expensive tanks that have a very short life span among other problems Hydrogen is actually a heck of a lot safer than 500 to 3000 to 6000 kilograms of lithium batteries The explosion risk is mostly from the pressure not the flammability unless it's in a tunnel when the rupture occurs, the flame is clean and it burns upward not outwards and from what I hear with less radiant heat than propane or natural gas. Natural gas is the cheaper better alternative fuel that existing vehicles can be converted to and it is much cleaner than all other fuels and totally renewable But that's why they hate it and nuclear , The scam would come to an end.
@@anomamos9095 Yea clean, but you are ignoring the power it takes to cool and pressurize that down to a liquid then transporting that around (much like how gas is today). Thats a lot of extra power alone just to transport enough it around. Not at all. Batteries, even if they do catch on fire, would still be way less of a risk if they do go off as it takes time for it to burn - enough time to put sand around to stop the fire. Where hydrogen is going to go off and fast - there is no stopping that. Let alone, I've seen "clean" burning hydrogen before and there are times you cant even see the flames... thats bad actually. Again, dont get me wrong, I think it can be used in local power stations or heavy steel industry (as an example) but to say to use it in cars is just crazy to me.
While this is a great argument, it is based on logic. That, unfortunately, does not always meld well with Republican politicians. I sure hope you are right, but I'm not holding my breath. We're looking to accelerate our solar + battery + EV purchases just in case Trump successfully revokes the Inflation Reduction Act. (Hopefully many others are also accelerating such purchases, which will bring prices down even faster and make the energy revolution that much more difficult for Republicans to slow it down.)
You avoid the elephant in the country ie Yanks are genuinely thick, inward looking and, arrogant. They still believe they are the best country in the world without ever bothering to see the facts. They truly are pumped up on themselves. I used to visit every other week until trumpf got in, no more, done!
@@PNurmi but it required the gov't's support for years and in the case of computers, decades before technology reached the point of floppy disks and 64K of dram. it was gov't subsidy that got us the transistor. now we have ASICs and billions of transistors in a chip.
TX is really slaying the renewables the last decade. The isolated ERCOT grid covers 90% of the state and is a fairly good proxy for the state. You can watch the daily stats there on their website - look for the dashboards - Fuel Mix - panel. Storage has recently started putting back GW levels just prior to and end of the solar day, easing those periods. Solar the past 2 years, has really taken off and is reducing volumes of NG burned during daylight hours (some coal too). What I think we'll see - all personal and coming from a share holder in Tesla and never Trumper Republican... We'll see new power additions be CC NG for the demand by AI etc... some of the coal will convert as well ... that reduced GHG move is a plus. You just don't see the same fervor for climate change, zero degree etc in the states amongst most people. I like to refer to energy here as the United Stasis of Merica... people resist change, especially in the red states as a general cultural point - yet TX is nearly 2x the generation output of nearest state (FL) and leads the country in actual production from renewables - mostly wind, solar coming on strong... hardly any hydro in TX. We're down to 16.2% coal in 2023, huge drop the last 15 years - TX ERCOT is lower than that, and thus far 33% wind and solar for all power generated in it this year, should go up Nov and Dec as wind patterns come back from late summer drops. I predict Musk will run into opposition or get frustrated with Trump and they'll part ways before long. I hope we keep doing good things, MPG improves or PHEVs find buyers and BEVs have some magic battery jumps that kill the bad image effects - charging time, range, longevity and really take off.
Humans are criminal towards themselves and the natural world in general. We don't need Trump for that. He is merely a reflection of the selfish, destructive humans.
Total capacity of renewables is misleading. Capacity only represents the power you'd theoretically generate if you the sun was maximally bright and the wind blowing 24/7. I don't need to point out why real life numbers are way off. (Spoiler alert: they are by almost 2 orders of magnitude)
I live in Québec (Canada), and I was pretty discouraged by the Trump élection and it's promises of going back to the fifties without the fifties hopes! You helped me a little this morning even if I know I cannot underestimate the possible wrongdoing of "The Orange Syndrome"🤔😕
With Musk in a position of power, whatever else happens we can expect a continuing rise in battery storage, both in vehicles and in grid support facilities
Yeah, he’s the bigger wildcard I see in the planned incoming administration with possibilities of huge long term gains or short term, catastrophic failures, or both. Or his involvement may amount to nothing if he gets fed up with the company of ideologues and departs early.
The clock is already ticking. Two malignant narcissists will not abide each other for long. I predict a Musk/Trump falling out within a year. Probably sooner rather than later.
I was thinking that, but I'm hearing that Elon is calling for the end of the EV tax credit. I would not be in an EV right now if that didn't exist. Hopefully, he is just trolling and does not want to hurt his own business and the adoption of EVs.
Umm, Musk has ZERO power in the US govt. The president of the US cannot create departments, only Congress can, so this "dept." being created by tRump for Elon, his fake buddy other than Elon echoes tRump's nonsens, will have NO power to actually do anything that will affect the US govt. no matter how many studies Musk has done and desires to get rid of the EPA, Fish and Wildlife, etc...... ALL of which slow down his expansions of SpaceX or Tesla, etc.............
Only one word. Brilliant. Thanks for injecting some realism at this time.
A fascist will come draped in stars and stripes carrying the Bible' - George Carlin
@@WayOfTheZombie Cope
@Mediiiicc dope
@@WayOfTheZombie When GC said that? Never heard him saying it! U should not make these things up and spread the disinformation...
@@WayOfTheZombie you are the definition of zombie
Thanks for sharing your somewhat optimistic viewpoint. As a US-based researcher in the green economy, I wish I could be so optimistic. My pessimism is based on experience. In 2010, the “tea party” wave election ushered in the pre-MAGA politicians. I was leading a major research program to develop renewable fuels and create jobs in rural areas. They just cut off the funding, setting the project back at least a decade. I met with these politicians and learned that, in private, they freely admit that they don’t care about rural voters. They only represent the plutocracy and their own interests. This personal experience leads me to believe that they will never consider rural district voters anything more than a bunch of chumps to be fooled. As for my renewable fuels project, it’s in the hands of a private company who has licensed it to a developer in the asia-pacific region. I am now trying to license some green steel technology inventions in Europe and Asia. I don’t expect to ever see these implemented in the USA, and fully expect my research program to be slashed to zero. I tried to use my education and career to help create economic opportunity for rural regions, but Americans don’t want what I have to offer.
Try Canada instead.
Sounds like the kind of technology we could use in Australia
Well, it was an impossibility at that level to sell it sorry to say, it doesn't matter what the propaganda says if you're actually reaching those people and showing them point blank, that this saves you money, gives you jobs, and makes your life better. You have to pierce the veil as it were, reach in, and yank every single hook out one by one, painstakingly, to make them understand, and then you have to demonstrate it, you can't give projections, you can't give theory, you have to give them something they can hold in their hands and say "Yup, I'm here for this".
I'm not saying you did wrong, I'm saying that the capability for a rural voter, who is largely specialized in fields other than environmental studies and other esoteric studies, needs something in their hands or else they get bought on by easier lies than harder truths. Once people like you come back around with actual projects to be put down, procedures to follow, jobs to be created, plans drawn up, and a strategy to implement, the rural base is more than happy to get right to work and do everything in their power to enact real changes.
My source is that, these are my neighbors, and while I'm a classically educated business admin with a great love of the environment and new potential economic impacts of the Green New Deal: my neighbors are flight mechanics, truckers, miners, and blue-collar that know what they do, and do it well, but the bigger picture stuff is not on their radar. Now that we're seeing actual adoption of these things, real boots-on-the-ground initiatives, oh you better believe they're gonna fight with all their strength to keep a hold of it all and work their hardest to make it successful. I have no doubts that, while bumpy, the US is wells on its way to full adoption because we now have products to sell to people that they can invest their labor into and work hard to make a success.
That being said, trump will harm it badly, but we'll simply fix it afterward because now we're not starting from zero, we're gonna erupt with power and basically overtake the situation with sheer momentum
As an outsider (a Brit), I'm inclined to agree with the tea party's view of rural district voters. Though I'm not sure if the word "chumps" is quite strong enough.
Are they inbred?
That might explain it.
@@Skumm93 Did you not read what he said. This has nothing to do with the will of Rural voters. its to do with those that control the will of those rural voters who as we have seen are easily manipulated. My Source: the recent American Presidential Election.
Billionaires and millionaires will invest in whatever makes the money. If renewable Green or (whatever you want to call it energy) makes them the money, they will invest.
Some things need long term investment before it makes money. Once upon a time, Germany had all the solar tech, but couldn't yet make a profit. They sold all their machines to China. Guess who is the leading solar panel producer now?
That's right. It went from all the tobacco companies. Being in the government, to now all big pharma. It's all about money they don't care.
The problem with that is billionaires and millionaires are already invested in fossil fuels and they use their money to protect those investments.
For sure. That's how we get scammers like Al Gore.
@@calysagora3615 i'm really getting sick of people like you.
What could be more independent than generating your own power ?!?!?!
In what year did the us produce the most oil of any country in earth's history?
2023.
2024 is expected to be more.
If you can't see the con, you are the mark.
What could be more naive than to be unaware that you already have been generating our own power. lol
But windmills and electric boats and sharks!
@@nathanhales2049I think the commenter was referring to individuals generating their own power on their own roof.
@@timradde4328 I mean, I am.
Off-grid is more affordable than ever right now.
Battery prices will go up when the Trump tarrifs hit, but there are some pretty good domestic solar panel producers afaik (though they might be buying parts from Asia 🤷♀️)
Thanks, as an American, I needed this.
As a citizen of one of those tiny blue sections in fl, USA... thank you, things suck here and that made me feel better.
I'm in a red section of nm. This was indeed a breath of fresh air.
😂😂😂
It's all ideological, but neither logical, nor much of an idea...but with seven times more energy consumption per caput and a boom in exploitative carbon mining, the US was always going to be weird. Musk's involvement signals a shift...but who can say?
You’re still dealing with American on the brink of fascism. You need to organize
@@simonmasters3295musk is a fascist parasite who contributes nothing to clean energy
Trump also promise to bring back coal last time, but that failed and died in a ditch because no one wanted it, I expect similar things to happen to gas and oil regardless of what they try to do. States like CA will continue to drag the US forward, and if the US decides to destroy its clean energy industries then China will fill the void and totally dominate and become way less fossil fuel dependent in the long run, which will mean there low cost advantage will become even bigger.
Worth noting that China is already tanking global oil demand, which directly reflects into the profits of US oil producers. China is the leader in industry electrification among all large nations - meaning a lot of things that use fossil fuels in the US and even EU, Chinese companies can do with electricity alone - and is installing more renewable capacity than the rest of the world combined.
Heck, lower Chinese demand is the main reason the IEA predicts a large oil glut next year, with demand lower than production by something close to a million barrels per day - and, contrary to what some people keep saying, the main reason for that isn't a lagging economy, but structural changes as China moves away from fossil fuels. To make things even more interesting, they are actually saving money - and a lot of it - by using renewables instead of importing fuel, so the fabled Chinese competitivity should actually grow as it reduces oil imports.
The oil industry is looking at the possibility of sub-$60 oil, which would make fracking largely unprofitable. On the positive side, that is the oil price cap that Russia has been avoiding by using its shadow fleet, so this price drop would finally cut into Russia's oil profits in ways that the sanctions never could.
California has fallen to crony capitalism / regulatory capture, NEM 3, and electric bill fees applied only to solar owners based on their income. Rooftop solar has slowed, maintained only due to very high electricity costs (4PM to 9PM, $0.68 / KWh).
Electricity is turned off during higher than average winds, because that is cheaper than maintenance and putting power lines under ground. Not sure how many emissions the home generators put out.
Bud, physics will be what stops green energy.
@@TimothyGasser And its physics of burning stuff that's cooking our planet.
@@FabioCapela Could it be China has used up it's ability to manufacture for the world, build hundreds of ghost cities, and needs a new economic stimulus, EV's and renewable & nuclear energy?
Thanks Dave, you made me feel a little less gloomy today.
And just as smug
@@jimsouthlondon7061 What's the last century you got laid, sucker?
Nay, that's for Dave.
Remember Brexit !
One mind blow statistic came out this week. China's electricity generation is now 37% renewable. As a percentage that doesn't sound much but that is for residential and industry. That means that 500 million people in China get all their needs met by renewables including the charging of their electric cars and a good chunk of the worlds manufactured goods that China exports. .
They get the majority of their electricity from coal and burn more coal than all other countries combined, and that's not likely to change any time soon.
They don't burn any coal, either, like hardly any at all.... certainly not more than every other country on Earth combined!
Wind and solar made up 16% of electricity generation in China.
Coal made up 60%.
The other clean energy sources are hydro (13%), nuclear and biomass(that's debateable).
Solar and wind barely surpass their hydro
@@rjbiker66 so?
@@PistonAvatarGuy That's because they make everything for everyone.
I love your phrasing, wise and as usual glass half full take on the situation! Excellent synopsis!!
Yes, here in the US, we are about to live in “interesting times”! You know that the energy transition is going full throttle when even the CEO of Exxon-Mobil also wants to keep on track with the current energy transition to maintain “certainty” in the markets while they continue to develop their carbon capture tech. And as you mentioned, many Republican leaders have already called for “caution” in disrupting the IRA. All the things you mentioned (especially our already expansive fossil fuel drilling) were little understood by many of our citizens who voted for Mr. Trump who were instead preoccupied with outrageous claims on immigration or left leaning “woke” conspiracy theories. There really isn’t a constructive conversation going on in the US but rather more of an angry shouting match. This administration will bring a real test for our institutions as well as our 3 branches of government to function as intended. Thanks for an informative video…and I have seen the documentary you mentioned and it is quite sobering.
Similar with Brexit using immigration as the scare tactic.
I get fed up with the propaganda
@@leftcoaster67 which has been allowed to get worse since brexit so proper kick in the teeth
It's all lead by Fox News company
@@leftcoaster67 It's not a scare tactic people on the ground see what is happening in their communities daily and they want it to stop.
At most there will be a slow down in clean power, the fact that clean energy is now as cheap/cheaper than fossil fuel will dictate future decisions.
But as fossil fuel demand dwindles oil and gas prices will crash which could slow the transition.
cheaper ?
only if you leave out a major part of the costs.
and only if you tax fossil fuel until it gets more expensive than " clean" energy...
@@janvanruth3485 Green energy is cheaper then fossil fuels. The fact of the mater is 1 out of every 4 dollars in subsidies is to the fossil fuel industries. Look at the price of Gasoline in Europe if you want to see the actual price of Gasoline is
@@petewright4640do you really think that the billions of people living in poverty are going to accept staying in poverty because some moron do-gooders want to save the planet?
not a chance...
@@jefferyspurlock4272 really?
out of every euro i pay for my petrol here in europe some 55 cent are taxes.
the rest, 45 %, divides into some 37 % production costs and some 8 % profit mark up.
there are no subsidies for the fossil fuel industry over here.
i guess the costs of production etc. would be the same in the usa as they are in europe.
at the moment the price for unleaded over here is about 8 dollar for a gallon.
now please explain what the price of petrol would be in the usa if there would be no subsidies to the fossil fuel industry....
By The Economist's models, the cost of the transition is less than many popular models suggest and the profit forces as you've identified are a major factor im accelerating things. That's not to say we can be complacent. Far from it. I think this election result is a disappointing setback for climate action, but not a cause for despair. Keep educating folks on the economic and health benefits of the transition and getting people on board for individual and collective climate action and we'll get it done.
Legend. You’re genuinely a source of solace, sanity and reassurance in our increasingly insane world.
I'm using direct from PV light to light the room I'm in right now. I'm experimenting with the ways I can use PV as I make it without traditional batteries. Even on the dark days I'm getting plenty of light to work by.
In the year or so after I installed my solar system, the darkest day still produced some 13% of the energy that the brightest days produce - so if I have 8x the solar capacity that I would otherwise need and a day of battery storage I can weather through basically everything without losing power or drawing on grid energy. I can also increase the amount of batteries to reduce the need for solar generation.
The kick is, with solar panel and battery prices falling, it's increasingly getting close to the point where just installing that much solar and battery is cheaper than being connected to the grid, even with the cheap electricity in my country. More so if I do my own installation, which for a system not connected to the grid isn't much of an issue, as without a grid connection I don't need the system to be certified.
Funny thing, Pakistan is already seeing this scenario play out. Their electricity is too expensive, so a lot of people in that country are just installing solar power and batteries and going off-grid; the trend is going fast enough that the government fear the electricity utilities will collapse due to a lack of paying customers.
What about a wind turbine? Have you hear of this one:
"One such solution is the hexagonal wind turbines developed by a Scottish company. The LIAM F1 silent wind turbine, developed by The Archimedes, ups the ante in this field."
@weldonyoung1013 I've been thinking about a vertical wind turbine.
@@jmr if you look up the one I stated about it has an 88% efficiency. And is suppose to run quiet
Still getting that slightly sick feeling in the pit of my stomach!
Must be from all the semen you’ve swallowed
You ain't alone.
Yeah it's your instincts
not as sick as when the result of Pennsylvania came in 🤣🤣🤣
Harris had that same feeling on election night! And it turned out to be true.
1:12 As an American, the whole thing is a bit shit. I couldn’t believe we elected him the first time, and it’s even harder to believe that we did it again. 🤦🏼♂️
He got elected on social issues. If he focuses on those, the adults running the country will do just fine.
Maybe the democrats should stop nominating puppets.
@@Mediiiicc
That's part of it. But I feel in the current media landscape the rightwing propagandists could successfully smear just about anyone running as a Dem at this point. Very sad.
@@Mediiiicc One could say the same about Trump. He just has Fox pulling his strings.
The billionaires own all media, who do you think they backed?
Love your optimistic take on green initiative, Been slightly depressed when I had to listen to all that Trump noise I am hearing about lately, cheered me up!
My home is 100% powered by solar energy now. I didn't do it so much because of environmental concerns but more because the cost of electricity here in the Northeast has gone up to the stratosphere because of the green energy mandates and other factors like the covid-19 bill payment programs that the utility companies have for people who couldn't pay their electric bill by socializing the cost among the people who do pay their bill. At any rate, my solar installation will have paid for itself in another 2 years at the rate we're going. I saved $14,000 on electric bills already just in the past 2 years.
$14k on electric in 2 years??? That’s $583 a month. What are you powering that could possibly cost that much?
This is what Dave is talking about. Renewable energy is the cheaper alternative now, so progress is going to continue no matter how much lobbying the oil industry does. The most cost effective option will always win out.
@@TheGagnonRxI would say they are using green energy to grow some other green stuff. 😂
@@gnsavage1That's a HIGH quality answer.
…in winter?
That is good to hear. Let's not, however, underestimate the stupidity, and willful ignorance of the Republican leadership.
Yep these guys are wholly capable of voting against their own interests. Im sure they would happily put 10,000 solar jobs out of action to save (say)1,000 coal or oil jobs.
Never underestimate the willingness of a MAGAt to hurt himself to prove a point.
See: 19, COVID.
@@christophermahon1851 I have been very disappointed in Elon, but his influence may keep some programs going. He is very anti-subsidy even though SpaceX and Tesla have received billions in subsidies. He may, at least, advocate for eliminating subsidies for oil companies if also advocated for eliminating ev subsidies. I’m hoping he’ll get in Trumps ear to preserve solar and wind programs.
@keithv3767 I'm more worried that he will push for tariffs to limit competition with Tesla. I hope you're right, though.
@@Joe-lb8qn or, more likely, for a few millions in campaign donations from the energy sector.
Its a good thesis, I do agree with it. Renewables have long since crossed fossil fuels on cost and value. And strangely enough, republic states have laws that are designed to allow generators to really take electricity consumers for all they are worth during times of high demand. Australia is similar. Laws were designed such that individual disruptions such as "unexpected" plants going offline would benefit generators at unreasonable scales.
In both cases, renewable energy storage systems, particularly batteries, have been able to out-compete fossil sources using the very laws that were designed to benefit fossil fuel and the fossil generators began falling into bankruptcy when their gravy train stopped rolling. Plus the distributed nature of the many smaller renewable generation sites made it nearly impossible to game the system any more by purposefully taking a large generator off-line.
On an even playing field, fossil generation just can't compete with renewables. It got so bad that Texas actually began passing laws to benefit only fossil generation to try to compensate for their quickly dropping political and economic power (a primary benefactor for republican candidates). But it's too late methinks. Republican states now have to contend with the rising political power of the renewables industry.
Also keep in mind that those maps are by county or by congressional district... there are vast differences in population density. In the U.S., rural districts and rural states have an outsized vote. Though in this particular election, for the first time in many years, Trump actually did get a majority of the vote. Which is really sad to see... we live in an actual idiocracy, apparently.
-Matt
Idiocracy. That was a great movie. Prophetic.
"On an even playing field, fossil generation just can't compete with renewables." Really? How much OIL do we get from SLAVE LABOR? Your China made Batteries and Solar Cells are Loaded with SLAVE LABOR or near Slave labor. All Things being equal my FOOT!
Never underestimate the willingness of a MAGAt to hurt himself for the sake of “owning the libs.”
See: 19, COVID.
No wind or sunshine and the renewables don't work so no energy to store. Maybe you think more storage then, that's more slave labour digging up Cobalt then.
The solution is proper investment in renewable technologies not investment in current technology that isn't good enough. Writing long comments makes you look stupid.
Need to cut investment in oil and gas etc when the time comes but clearly with China constructing plenty of new coal power stations the time isn't yet.
Based on the latest reports Trump only received 49.9% of the U.S. popular vote. Definitely NOT a mandate for radical wide spread destruction of our government!
Elections are 90% economic and business is 100% economic. If renewables and EVs are cheaper they will be adopted and the cheaper they get the faster they will be adopted.
Literally not how economics or business or our current markets work.
For example... You can't build your own electric grid and compete on any real scale with the current monopoly. This was a choice our governments made. If we want a valid competitive market we would need to subsidize those vehicles and energy generation to the tune of 14 trillion a year to even come close to what pollution based energy and transportation receives.
Which... would make those EVs and energy wildly more cost efficient and effective... collapsing the market for pollution based vehicles and energy.
Renewables are cheaper than fossils per kWh without subsidies or assistance already. They have been for almost a decade. The subsidies were just to put some fire under the industry’s ass, hence how we’ve reached nearly 30% renewables in such a short timespan across utility + rooftop generation. But that’s why I’m not all too worried. Trump can do whatever he wants to try and prop up the ass… sorry, gas - and other dino liquids - industries all he wants. But the numbers don’t lie, and there’s more profit & geopolitical stability in renewables with proper storage and as such, utilities and developers will continue to make them.
And even then, propose he ruins everything and we indeed do have a stagnant 4 years in renewables going online. Then in 4 years, when another Democrat who knows how to use their head gets installed, they’ll remove the tariffs, the rest of the world will be salivating to sell perovskite solar panels and solid state battery cars to US customers at great costs and tech specs compared to now, and things will get back on a proper course.
It requires some recharging infrastructure that is already slow being implemented. I wish we could have had an administration in that would keep working to aid progress. I voted that way, for all the good it did.
@@valoriethechemist Well I did. I put solar on the roof of my home and bought an EV. I now produce more electricity than I need including the charging of my EV. In Australia 40% of all homes have solar which competes directly with the grid.
@@markumbers5362 That's an example of what I mean beyond the obviousness though. These systems are interrelated and complex. Especially as populations rise. Australia is doing a decent job of addressing the biosphere shift in energy... comparatively. The stats look fine until we really do the deep dive into resources and how fast things are happening. And what we're likely to expect. For example... even if we ended fossil fuels this year and made everyone a solar panel... that's a major hurdle... making it. And to maintain and sustain making them? We're thinking too high tech and big energy still to be honest. We're thinking too old school economics and not resource efficiency and utilization. The entire system of economics we have is based in unlimited supply. We're decades from exhausted resources. That was one short example. A philosophical start at least. We have a finite supply. We're burning it up at a rate so astounding it's setting the world's thermostat out of wack.
When we look at EVs replacing everything... even to just a point to do anything positive to emissions... the resources aren't there... and if they are burn even more in the short term... which is the whole problem.
Dave does it again. Excellent video, mate. Carry on with your videos and keep calm in the meantime. 🎉😊
Thanks Dave. I think a lot if your regular viewers will leave this week's video feeling better than they did at the beginning.
Do you really think there's an emergency?
@@tims9434 traitor trump, so yeah, dark days ahead.
@@tims9434 Define emergency.
What a great documentation! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
Trumps going to take credit for all Biden’s hard work.
And pardon his son
@ pardon who’s son?
@@nicksimmons7234 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣and get his laptop and his guns back
@@jimsouthlondon7061 think you’re watching the wrong channel.
Sure, the actual problem is that people are to underinformed or misinformed to realize what is actually going on. I mean the whole inflation issue probably cost the election for democrats, even though it was a world wide phenomenon that was outside of the power of control of the president and his response was actually really strong and decisive.
Thank you for the enlightening information. This needs to be taught in all of our schools.
Just because something is sensible doesn't mean they'll do it that way. The last round of tariffs already cost a lot of jobs and a substantial chunk of economic development.
Trump tried to bring back the coal industry in his first term and failed. Renewables are the future. Fossil fuels are at its peak production levels right now.
What a lot of people don't realize is that where there is utility scale renewables, negative wholesale electricity prices are achieved quite regularly. Fossil fuels can't achieve this. As I write this, we using electricity generated from our solar panels to wash and dry our clothes - in the middle of November.
tell that to Germany.....🤣🤣🤣🤣
..........Negative wholesale electricity prices are a horrible thing. It means you're dealing with an installed power source that is chaotic and unreliable, and distributors don't want to buy from it, and will literally *pay you* to produce less. How the xxxx do you think that could possibly be a good thing? It also inevitably comes with radically higher prices when the chaos pendulum swings back the other way, and resulting in faaaaar higher prices overall.
Fossil fuel plants literally can't overproduce to the point of damaging the grid because you just..... turn them off and stop burning fuel when demand drops. You can still end up with shortages when mismanagement happens, but you will never end up with overproduction that damages the grid and *drives up long term prices.*
Do you know the other power source that can create too much power and as a result makes radically less income, sometimes even negative? Nuclear, for a similar reason: they can't shut off and just wait. They're nowhere near as chaotic and damaging as utility scale renewables, and so both the negative value and the *higher than normal cost* periods are shorter and less extreme, but they still have that *problem.*
Negative electricity prices are a symptom of a problem, not a good thing, and they also come with far higher overall prices: do you somehow think that a distributor having to pay producers not to produce is going to somehow lower costs for consumers? Obviously having to pay out extra money without any income for it will drive *up* prices to end users, because it drives up the average amount of cost per unit of delivered energy.
@@ASDeckard it's called energy storage and free EV charging during the day. Check out Australia.
@@carlmartel8510 Germany's not going back to fossil fuels. It's doing the tough work now to be energy secure in the future.
@@ASDeckard The grid in Germany (and in the European interconnect) is perfectly stable. Most people don't know that we have so many old power plants sitting around in the countryside that even if all renewables suddenly stopped producing and all electricity consumption doubled, there would not be a problem. Beyond that, battery storage is gearing up rapidly. Hence, these low prices which are so reviled (I mean: WTF?) will be there most of the time, not just during certain times of the day or year as it is now.
Another excellent report with no hype. Just facts. Thanks heaps.
If the US had watched Dave‘s vlog regularly they might have voted differently… 😏
Thank you. You always manage to make your videos hopeful.
Keep doing what you’re doing. Super important work.
If you have room its achievable to install enough solar power to run your place and sell extra back.
Only an option for a few, mostly in progressive regions. I do that, but only up to what I have otherwise drawn from the grid. Anything extra I make, they take without compensation.
@@joelsmith4394 Even without selling back, solar and batteries are getting cheap enough that just installing extra to cover for cloudy or rainy days is becoming a worthy investment. And if you go the EV route, you can also replace some of your fuel costs.
I got in under NEM 2.0 and have all of 11 panels, 3.9 kW peak. That is enough to run my house and provide an excess of 1,500 kWh annually. So I get a small check of about $120 annually. The big difference was insulating well a house built in 1903 with no insulation. Living in coastal northern California helps. We are at the latitude of Southern Portugal. In the future I will add batteries. I watch their progress with interest.
Nothing good or bad lasts forever! He is 80 after all😅
But the madness that put T in power will continue?
JD Vance is only 40, Don Jr is young, and Barron Trump ( the tallest president) is only 18
that statement is as hopeful as it has to be
He’s like herpes. He never goes away.
@@petewright4640 Barry Goldwater wrote the manual a long time ago.
A lot of green tech eventually gets to the point where you have to make a conscious decision to pay more for the alternative. Electric vehicles are just about there with solid state batteries about the hit the market, in high end products in 2025, then full scale adoption by 2027. Beyond the EV battery itself other components will become cheaper and lighter. Weigh can be removed from the vehicle frame, suspension, brakes, lower weight class tires, the battery won't need to be thermally coddled as much due to a greater operating range.
i knew you were bold, and i admire that. but now i know you are fearless, and that rocks! go team 'tell it'
Thank you Dave, I needed the perspective. I was pleased to see you linked the Climate Trace presentation by Al Gore et al in Azerbaijan in the notes. I watched that earlier this morning and it was great, I highly recommend that people watch it.
In Australia we have had successive governments fully against all renewables but yet we are on target to hit our 2030 Paris targets.
This is largely due to Private investors, local governments and individuals investing in renewables. The Prim Minister in an international gathering this week tried to take credit for what they didn't do. Fortunately the Pacific Island Nations shot him down siting his approval to allow Woodside to open an enormous gas mine off Western Australia. Gas that is given for free to those company s that mine gas in Australia!!! So, Australia gets nothing but quicker climate change for this, I can not imagine the bribes politicians have taken to allow this...
@blu It’s also due to extremely low targets. That’s the problem with Paris. Well, one of the problems.
BTW, I’d love to see the kind of outfits the Prim Minister wears. Got any pictures?
Bear in mind those maps people like to display are often also population distribution maps. Red for low density, blue for high density.
To put it another way, it looks like the whole country is red, but it's actually close to 50/50. The red voters are just more spread out, and low density rural or remote counties usually vote Republican.
That's why I constantly have to tell my ....well-educated family members that "Land can't vote". When they lose an election, they always point to the map and go, see! We've been frauded and cheated! No, you idiots - more people live in those little islands of blue than almost ALL the red. They just can NOT grasp that concept.
Being insulted by politicians is the exit polls telling @@incognitotorpedo42
CRY HARDER MAGATARDS 😢
@@incognitotorpedo42 They like saying there are no blue states, only blue cities, I like to say, a state's heart is its people, no matter where they live
Breaking stuff is easier than fixing stuff. I expect the economy to go sour and that will hinder the transition a lot.
When you put toddlers in charge then breaking stuff is all they know, sadly. Trump is just the obvious figurehead but he is bringing a whole bunch of noisy toddlers in with him.
Not just economy. All over the West, voters are turning sour, fed up with the system, obtains vote for extreme right, not just because of migration, but also of how things are run since the neo capitalism took over social democratic policies which spread wealth more evenly.
Even if we succeed to build more renewables - prices per megawatt are better, after all, at some point resources required for new built renewable will become scarce, as hardly anything is being recycled, and those materials are called rare earth for good reasons. AI might make things more efficient, but no computer Intelligence can restore emptied out resources.
Resource constraints will likely play up increasingly during the 2030s, when cheap fracking comes to an end -that resource is finite too, and climate heating will cross 1,5 in a breeze and close in on 2C plus towards 2040.
Enjoys these last years of easy luxury, they are set to become a nice nostalgia within a decade
@@reuireuiop0 Rare earth metals are some of the most common on the planets crust, actually. We call them rare because they're well mixed in (rarefied, not rare) and relatively hard to mine and refine, but they exist literally everywhere in high quantities, just low concentrations. If prices get too high that will make highly industrialized but high cost of labor nations, like oh I don't know America, price competitive again and we'll open our own mines and refineries back up, or build new ones with will be less expensive and faster since we have the existing industry to build out more industry quickly. In the 1980's more than half of the worlds rare earth metals came from California of all places, vs the literal hard zero today.... but those mines are currently rising in price as the expectation of re-opening builds, despite the harshest mining regulations on the planet and the highest cost of labor at the same time. I suppose we'll see.
We've seen it happen before, and we're watching it begin happening now. Even as China continues to build up their own industrialization America is now growing faster again as prices rise and our worlds highest cost of labor becomes less of a hindrance. Then we end up with a bunch of very highly paid laborers that swell our already worlds largest consumer market, and the economy goes burr, the line goes up.
Economy literally booming the day Trump was declared winner. He's not even in office yet!
@@ASDeckard The problem with rare earths, and a lot of the other materials used for the energy transition, isn't the mining, but the refining. The country with the most advanced technology, and the skilled labor force, for those pursuits right now is China; the US can catch up, but it will likely take a decade or more of directed investment to get to that point. More so if trying to do it without importing Chinese workers, as very few people outside China graduate in the required fields, so the US would need to build up even its university courses, delaying things by years.
Fantastic job, mate. Cheers
Thank you for the positive outlook! I was feeling down when he got elected...
BRAVO to you MATE .. thanks for all the hard work and for TELLING the TRUTH Cheers from British Columbia
Where is the UK getting the battery storage from to back up the wind farms?
Tesla
Why are we able to buy electric cars?
Tesla, without which the auto industry would not have been disrupted to change.
Thank You Valued Customer! The Doors On Your Roadster Will Now Unlock.
If there is one thing US CEOs are very good in, it is calculating profits.
Green energy got that cheap now that nowadays oil, which is hard to get, is more expensive,
AND! Those managers know that in 4 years the wind might change again, even before they see a ROI on the new wells.
Texas, an old synonym for oil, has the most windmills per capita in the US
You don't use oil to generate electricity. You use gas.
@@rjbiker66 Which right now gas is cheap because it's a side-product of extracting oil. But even with this cheap gas, it's still cheaper to generate electricity with solar panels. More so outside the US, since the tariffs on Chinese solar panels have left the US with some of the highest prices for solar panels in the world - rooftop solar in Australia costs about half the price of what it costs in the US, for example. And solar is getting cheaper, so expect gas demand, and revenues, to drop.
Solar panels are non recyclable, wind turbines are non recyclable. Both take petroleum products to be manufactured and maintained. Look at how much synthetic oil and regular oil it takes to maintain a wind farm. It's like the just stop oil folks who protest oil wearing petroleum products from head to toe while they protest oil.. wtf man
It doesn’t matter which party is in control. Clean energy just makes sense, so it will continue to grow.
That's not making a lot of since.
Its kind of like saying the status quo will continue.
Dirty grid / large gas guzzling private vehicles and all.
Lol
I live in the US and it feels like our society is collapsing. That being said my feelings are just that. I needed to hear this. Thank you for doing this video!
Thanks for articulating this so well!
He or policies can not " trump" the economics involved in energy. Too late. Won't happen. The world is moving away from fossil fuels. Can't beat the economics. What strand even more assets
Never underestimate the willingness of a MAGAt to hurt himself to prove a point.
See: 19, COVID.
@@davidblair9877 Cope loser.
China generates only 16% of its electricity from wind and solar. Hardly moving away from fossil fuels
@@davidblair9877 When China stops importing oil it won't matter, prices will crash. The forecast on oil prices is already dismal for 2025 due to demand being expected to lag production to the tune of a million barrels per day, mostly due to China quickly electrifying both industries and cars; China is investing heavily on replacing every fossil fuel with electricity in the industry, and when it comes to cars most new cars sold there already come with a plug - and due to how their incentives work, favoring fully electric range and performance, even their plug-in hybrids are still good enough for fully electric day-to-day usage.
The world is moving away from fossil fuels huh... really?? Because everything is made from petroleum products dude. Rubbers, plastics, textiles just to name a few.. we're not moving away from crap..
Trump also said in 2016 that he would support coal mining and generation but during his Presidency massive amounts of Coal Power Stations closed down.
Theres one thing you say to get elected and what you actually say in office, just like our dear Labour Party
@@stevehayward1854 that’s my hope is 99% of what he wants he will forget about.
Every third word out of Trump's mouth is a lie, so there's no telling what he'll do, other than to say that if something is both good and difficult, it will not happen.
SStarmer must be obeyed, he’s clearing out the old British Tory voters and filling hotels with new labour comrades in 6 yrs time when it matters! Lol
The reality that I struggle to understand is that when I talk to my Republican friends who voted for Trump, they don't believe that Trump will actually do 90% of what he claims he will do. How on the earth can you vote for someone who you think lies 9 out of 10 times? What happens if he does actually pull off some of the crazy stuff he has talked about doing?
@@michaelharrison1093 You have to judge him by his last term in office, was the economy better, were peoples live better, it obviously was and he did all that whilst being held back by the swamp appointments, this time he's bypassing the swamp.
Also what crazy stuff are you referring to ? is it stuff he has actually said he's going to do or is it stuff the leftie media claims he's going to do
Only discovered your channel in the past couple of weeks, after becoming increasingly concerned about Trumps impending (and now actual) election, especially its impact on climate change. Anyway, just wanted to say your channel is excellent, informative, very clear and very measured.
I agree. Also a new listener here and climate has been my number one issue apart from democracy.
@@r.h.lincoln9889 then you should realize this was Democracy in action, or do you NOT agree with the people voting?
@@Quicks1lvr I do agree this was democracy, it was a fair election. But I am worried about the eroding away of certain aspects of our democracy, though hopefully they will hold.
I just want all the incentives to do solar and EV credits to go away, let the industry stand on its own feet/pocket. As a US citizen.
I want the same for oil, gas, and coal. Make the field truly level.
@@Vazzini42 Agreed, do away with Gov subsidies for buisness all together.
Excellent video, keep up the great work! Thanks!!!
Tariffs on Chinese solar panels will screw with even ongoing projects. Even assuming trump ruins the country enough to ruin it for the Republican Party we will be decades recovering from the damage.
A colonialist empire in decline. What else did you expect?
Wind and solar are not viable options to fossil. At best they are arbitrage plays (cheap but unreliable) for a small fraction of demand. The 262GW crowed about here is not actual generation. Solar has a 20% duty cycle and wind about 30%. Today wind and solar represent less than 7% of primary energy supply and we only have enough installed battery capacity to run the US for 0.81 seconds of demand. If you include the requisite storage capacity wind and solar are far more costly than nuclear power. In the 1980-90's France went from zero to 80% nuclear in just over a decade (zero deaths btw). We've been deploying wind and solar for three decades and they have had almost no impact. We are kidding ourselves.
@@moletrap2640and that’s why more and more companies are adopting solar/wind power, lol. It’s FREE fuel. Do you know how much a nuclear plant costs?
We will have more nuclear, but also more solar and wind. There’s a place for all of it…
@@CR-ud5qj thank you. Understood. But solar and wind are worthless as sources of energy without storage and at this point we have less than one seconds worth of storage. we will eliminate no fossil fuel facilities with wind and solar and retaining redundant facilities or storage takes the cost of wind and solar far higher than nuclear power. China, South Korea and Japan can all build a nuclear power plant for less than a third of what we can. It is highly doable.
@@moletrap2640 stop talking sh1te. Only shows your ignorance on this subject.
Excellent vid as always, but if anything, it's actually underselling how strong renewables are.
First, if you look at data on renewable deployment in 2017-2020, the growth rate is pretty consistent with 2009-2016 and 2021-2024.
Second, if you look at the United States’ grid interconnect queue, roughly 95% of proposed projects are wind, solar, or batteries (circa mid-2016 it was barely above 50%). Assuming roughly 20% of these proposals are built (historical average), that’s another 300+GW of renewables ready to put shovels in ground today - largely battery-backed. Conversely, there'll be almost no new fossil generation of any kind.
Third, annual energy installs in the US have been 75+% renewables since 2020. This year, they'll be nearly 95% of installs.
Fourth, there are obvious fundamental reasons for all this: batteries cost about a quarter of what they did in 2016, and solar panels are less than half. If anyone thinks renewables won't get cheaper from here, I have a clean coal plant to sell you.
We’re in a totally different world from 8 years ago. At this point, deregulating the grid just means renewables run away with it faster, and “energy dominance” functionally means “build wind/solar & batteries as fast as you can.”
That's good news.
@@Kevin_Street It's amazing news, and even better, it's all true!
This is why China is forging ahead with renewables to the degree they are doing; it just makes economic sense regardless of any environmental concerns. Chinese coal power is cheap, but Chinese battery-backed solar is even cheaper, so the more (and the faster) they build renewables, the lower electricity costs in China gets (and, thus, the more competitive their industry gets). Heck, they just connected a new 3GW solar plant the other day.
"US is a democracy" lol, I love you man, but when there's this much moneyed interests and studies showing the will of the people is insignificant in congress. Its called an oligarchy. But everything else. Loved it, thanks for the injection of hope
Neoliberalism really fckd us all.
The US system is flawed. It has basically been condensed to 2 parties, red and blue, R and D, red states and blue states. Other democracies are moving the other way where political expression is shown in more parties that have influence and power. The US now looks like an oligarchy very corrupted by money. Pew research shows the majority of ordinary American people want similar benefits to those achieved by European and other nations workers but can’t achieve them.
I get where you are coming from, but all these multinationals and superrich certainly wouldn't spend that much money and hassle if the government wasn't an obstacle and in certain cases even a threat to their interests. I understand the frustration but this way of thinking dissuades you and other people from enganging with and improving democracy and government, which plays into the hands of those money interests perfectly. It's very similar to the narrative that government is wasteful and should be cut down to make room for private solutions, designed to sound common sense and reasonable at first glance but really it's just a subtle and slow power grab to erode trust in the government and open new profit avenues for private interests.
The introduction to the video you're commenting on shows why you're wrong. If the US voters had chosen differently, they could have had an administration without climate change deniers and which has actually passed anti-climate-change legislation. There were two very, very different options available; the will of the people would have made a significant difference.
Spot on!
I work for a company that has been and is investing in biofuels along with a couple of the big oil companies. Biofuels are and will be a massively profitable business. They don't completely eliminate carbon emissions, but they significantly reduce them. So when people chant, "We are not going back"....perhaps this is what they mean...LOL
Tractors and processing plants run on bio fuel?? Huh... I never would have guessed.. I'm going to put on petroleum products from head to toe, det in my humvy, and drive down the asphalt street to the town Square and protest just stop oil now. I might even order some synthetic leather pants. Because you know... "green" energy.
I like the visualizations! You've stepped up your game.
The sheer number of projects already in the works means we have quite a jump on whatever he tries to do. I hoped for better for sure. I'm rather ashamed by anyone who voted for DJT. Sadly a lot of my family was conned by him years ago and no amount of truth makes it through their cult indoctrination.
Side note, the red/blue political map of the US reflects political control, not population data. Everything is red because the physical land region is controlled by Republicans, but the blue areas tend to be more urban and obviously population-dense. If the country was actually divided along political lines the way those maps suggest, no democrat would ever get elected to anything. The country is not "red" because that map has a lot of red on it. But right wingers love to throw that map up and say, "See? Everyone's a republican except people who live in NYC!"
Well done Dave. 💚
Thanks, very appreciated information, good work
Dave, all I can say is, I'm glad we have you!
We transitioned from horse and buggy in the early 1900s and it happened very fast. Not because we pushed it but because something better came along. Build something better and we won’t have to coerce people into adopting it.
That "something better" is fusion, which hasn't accomplished the modest goal of even sustaining a constant state of nuclear reaction, let alone actually producing viable electricity. Until someone figures out how to make a tokamac reactor produce a regular current, we're going to have to live with a mixed energy market.
@@joshuarichardson6529no regular nuclear will do. Micro nuclear modules are preferable as they can be locally based.
Yes, my fellow Americans have re-elected our own Boris and I'm extremely uncomfortable in my own country. Messed up! The Orange Julius is back and its bloody frightening.
Time to move out!
You have our sympathy
Sadly, not a viable option for a disabled vet.
@@v.e.7236 Yeah, Obama and his VA cuts did a number on ya
Thing to remember about that sea of red on the county map of the US is that *most* of the people live in the blue areas.
Face it! You lost
And let’s not forget gerrymandering. Lots of that.
@@kitemanmusic You lose too, we all lost
That IS the beauty of the US of A Constitutional Republic!! Relax: Everything is gonna be alright!!
And much of the red areas see FOX as news and think trump talks without lying
Great video Dave, keep up the good work 👍
Great video and good information, helps to get not too depressed by the development
Don't see how he will try to kill the electric strides made so far, but he will clamp down on the distribution of newly printed money by the federal reserve to make sure funds go to outfits that are operating on good engineering standards. If a company has such good ideas they will need to rely more on the private money than gov't handouts. EV trucks are not doing the job promised. Have two former subcontractors in Vegas that bought, then subsequently sold theirs because they could not pull loaded tool trailers reliably. We've along way to go here in the states for the average person to be able to afford EV's. It will be well after 2050. But , 'sigh', at 87, I won't be around to see the great results the ever improving technology will bring. In the meantime I'll scoot around on my mobility scooter powered by two lead/acid batteries. Scared shitless about lithium ion and possible fire. Got over a thousand miles on the bugger in 14 months so far.
Het lifepo4, no fire risk, only 6kg per 1kwh and 6000 cycles before i degrades to 80% of its original capacity
Only masochists use lead acid nowadays for evs
"stupid and short sighted things to do" is the traitor trump policy.
go have a digital role call for your next President with 0 votes lol
@Quicks1lvr must be hard for you. You know, being so great and all. With your hive mind brainwashed make the rich folks richer and the poor folks poorer garbage. Self reflection is hard man but at some point you'll have to decide if you're in it for others, or just for yourself.
Hi Dave, nice one. I'm trying to get through the five stages of grief about that election but not quite reached acceptence yet. The graph that starts at 3.06 ... is that capacity installed that year or total installed capacity? The numbers look too big to be the former but the latter would suggest that some years total solar and wind capacity actually reduced on the year before....
After seeing info about oil extraction in the USA (Art Berman) I wonder what will happen if they try to increase oil production. Will it shorten the horizon so that those in industry and power could then see the writing on the wall.
I loved this channel for a long time, Dave, but never more than when watching this most recent post. Yes, the recent election results here are "a bit shit, really" but in the end the underlying economics will win, as you describe. Of course, as you also note, it may be a very bumpy ride, with delays in progress the planet absolutely cannot afford.
When you nominate a news host to be the Defense Secretary or put a half baked loose cannon in charge of economic tinkering... renewables will be the least of US worries. Expect economic collapse, followed by foreign boots on the ground in a year or two. We do appreciate the attempt to cheer us up though. I hope your view is right.
Do your homework. A war vet is qualified way more than you, I would bet.
@@Donatich.Onataka these people go with the first headline they read from one of those so called news outlets
@@Donatich.Onataka hegseth is an idiot, pro fascist, white supremacist, just the sort of clown traitor trump would choose.
I think you have it backwards. The U.S. is much more likely to be the aggressor (ala Putin) with this crowd in control. They *always* start wars and then leave it for the democrats to clean up.
People like you are so funny
As a resident of West Virginia, USA, I appreciate your optimistic view. However, I feel you severely under estimate how stupid and short sighted America actually is. (Hence the election results.)
Never underestimate the willingness of a MAGAt to hurt himself for the sake of “owning the libs.”
See: 19, COVID.
You really do not think the Democrats will not filibuster any attempt to be too destructive in the Senate?
The point is it doesn’t matter about things like that. The transition is well under way and it’s unstoppable
I've thought for a long time that it will be economics that will bring about a switch to green energy. I feel that politicians, whether left or right, never seem to make much difference. Sure they talk differently, but I don't think they act much differently!
High taxes on fossil fuel drive sales of EV's in Scandinavia, yes. Indeed, the Norwegians are world leading, having exonerated themselves from oil guilt - and oil revenues - with generous EV subsidies. Politcians make a difference!! But policies, such as gas subsidies, becomes entrenched.
@@user-pt1ow8hx5l I think it's great that the Norwegians have done that. As a Brit, I do have a habit of looking at eveything through a UK/US lens, so yes, you are right that politicians can and do make a difference, sometimes. I just feel that nothing much has changed here in 30-40 years!
@@fig7047 That's understandable!!! Being a Sussex Graduate myself! who wrote about the very first climate summit back in 1992 at the I.R. department,...... Strangely Thatcher was very much aware of climate chance, yet her contemporaries in business, most of them, failed to hear the message,.......... By the way. Think it would be feasible to get hold of a very large chunk of Danish pension capital - or a straight credit line - for AngloDanish ventures,.... Such as widespread solar - people power!! - and 'AeroMines'; a Danish invention that has been covered in this channel...... (Stationary-rooftop-windchatchers..)
Don't you dare to claim that all politicians are the same! Can't you see the enormous difference in the policies and legislation between Democrats and Republicans in the US? Or Tories vs Labour in the UK? There is NOTHING more important for the climate than getting "conservatives" out of power.
If only you had written the scripts for David Attenborough's documentaries!
Refreshingly blunt and hard hitting here. 👏👍
Great visuals and information! Thanks for all that you do. Hopefully this information gets out there more and more.
Maybe being in Florida, Mara Logo can share in the effects of climate change.
Do not underestimate the irrational malice of the MAGA movement.
"I imagine he will do everything he can to completely bollocks up all the good progress that's been made" 😄
Thank you Dave. Another excellent reality check, when surrounded by disinformation & misinformation. Happy to see economics now driving increases in volume sales of renewables, which sustains the positive flywheel effect of further cheapening price. Gives hope...
thanks for the kind of positive view of green still alive and kicking. on the other side we have a serious deficit in understanding reality in the usofa. ignorant voters elect ignorant leaders, and that's what we have here in spades.
Your voice is important. I hope youre able to keep teaching people. Good Ideas have good consequences.
The systems will keep getting more efficient. This , big money dont like. Market shrinks. Everything is moving toward independence energy creation
Somebody will have to sell you that independence gear. Doesn't get more "Murica" than that.
I scanned through some of the comments and not surprisingly i didnt see any comments about how the US is not a democracy. It's a constitutional federal republic. Just goes to show how much we know about our own country....
It's a combination of a representative democracy and a constitutional republic. It is a constitutional republic, meaning the country rests its foundation on a constitution-the supreme law of the land. Moreover, a “republic” is a form of government where the people hold the power. However, the representatives that Americans democratically elect exercise that power and do so subject to the rules of the Constitution.
I'm always skeptical when people go on about how much green stuff has grown. It doesn't matter. What matters is how much greenhouse gas emmissions have fallen. If they actually have fallen why would you not lead with that???????????
Renewables are the future
Thank you for the video. Note: If you can give his face less air time, that would be great. His mug on the thumbnail is a real turn off to those who know what he is.
The problem with most green energy is that it uses so much dirty energy to make.
Not a joke except on us.
Australia has a proposal to make green hydrogen to supply the world.
To make this hydrogen they will use a process known as Steam Reformation, this is where gas usually methane is heated to very high temperatures to catalyse and strip out the hydrogen. A lot of brown coal is planed to be used in this process.
In most cases green energy takes one and a half barrels of oil to make one barrel of green.
Englands biomass fuelled power stations are estimated to use four barrels of oil per barrel of green.
Hydrogen when made and packaged for transport could take up to ten barrels of oil per barrel of green.
To replace coal with windmills and solar panels and ice with EVs up to a thousand times the resources need to be mined resulting in thousands times more real toxic pollution and environmental damage.
For Frickles sake please stop trying to save the planet it cannot take anymore of your kindness.
Wind, solar, and batteries are real. Hydrogen, biomass, biofuels, e-fuels, etc. are mostly a joke.
The reply I was looking for. So much misinformation out there.
hydrogen has its own problems. While I think its a good local battery storage, its not a good over all thing to have around, transport, and then pressurize around. If anything, its just as bad as using gas for cars today. Cleaner when burn yes, but because of the massive amount of work it takes to transport it, its just as bad in terms of power usage for what you get out of it. From a power to transport... only problem is the cable it self and the storage (batteries) that hold onto it. Let alone the other dangers of having a tank full of the stuff vs a battery when things do go wrong.
@@adr2t Except for the fact the storage of hydrogen requires very specialized and expensive tanks that have a very short life span among other problems Hydrogen is actually a heck of a lot safer than 500 to 3000 to 6000 kilograms of lithium batteries
The explosion risk is mostly from the pressure not the flammability unless it's in a tunnel when the rupture occurs, the flame is clean and it burns upward not outwards and from what I hear with less radiant heat than propane or natural gas.
Natural gas is the cheaper better alternative fuel that existing vehicles can be converted to and it is much cleaner than all other fuels and totally renewable
But that's why they hate it and nuclear , The scam would come to an end.
@@anomamos9095 Yea clean, but you are ignoring the power it takes to cool and pressurize that down to a liquid then transporting that around (much like how gas is today). Thats a lot of extra power alone just to transport enough it around. Not at all. Batteries, even if they do catch on fire, would still be way less of a risk if they do go off as it takes time for it to burn - enough time to put sand around to stop the fire. Where hydrogen is going to go off and fast - there is no stopping that. Let alone, I've seen "clean" burning hydrogen before and there are times you cant even see the flames... thats bad actually. Again, dont get me wrong, I think it can be used in local power stations or heavy steel industry (as an example) but to say to use it in cars is just crazy to me.
Thanks for another informative episode. Cheers
While this is a great argument, it is based on logic. That, unfortunately, does not always meld well with Republican politicians. I sure hope you are right, but I'm not holding my breath. We're looking to accelerate our solar + battery + EV purchases just in case Trump successfully revokes the Inflation Reduction Act. (Hopefully many others are also accelerating such purchases, which will bring prices down even faster and make the energy revolution that much more difficult for Republicans to slow it down.)
Deftly done! So fun to watch!
Here is something to consider: market forces and consumer choices are what drive emissions reduction more than government funding policies.
You avoid the elephant in the country ie Yanks are genuinely thick, inward looking and, arrogant. They still believe they are the best country in the world without ever bothering to see the facts. They truly are pumped up on themselves. I used to visit every other week until trumpf got in, no more, done!
gov't subsidizing gets things off the ground. think air planes, computers, the internet, medicines, basic research...
Yes, and they've already lead us well past the point of no return.
@jensonee Only to a point, then market forces and consumer choice take over to drive growth. That is the best way, IMO. Thanks for the response.
@@PNurmi but it required the gov't's support for years and in the case of computers, decades before technology reached the point of floppy disks and 64K of dram. it was gov't subsidy that got us the transistor. now we have ASICs and billions of transistors in a chip.
TX is really slaying the renewables the last decade. The isolated ERCOT grid covers 90% of the state and is a fairly good proxy for the state. You can watch the daily stats there on their website - look for the dashboards - Fuel Mix - panel. Storage has recently started putting back GW levels just prior to and end of the solar day, easing those periods. Solar the past 2 years, has really taken off and is reducing volumes of NG burned during daylight hours (some coal too).
What I think we'll see - all personal and coming from a share holder in Tesla and never Trumper Republican... We'll see new power additions be CC NG for the demand by AI etc... some of the coal will convert as well ... that reduced GHG move is a plus.
You just don't see the same fervor for climate change, zero degree etc in the states amongst most people. I like to refer to energy here as the United Stasis of Merica... people resist change, especially in the red states as a general cultural point - yet TX is nearly 2x the generation output of nearest state (FL) and leads the country in actual production from renewables - mostly wind, solar coming on strong... hardly any hydro in TX. We're down to 16.2% coal in 2023, huge drop the last 15 years - TX ERCOT is lower than that, and thus far 33% wind and solar for all power generated in it this year, should go up Nov and Dec as wind patterns come back from late summer drops.
I predict Musk will run into opposition or get frustrated with Trump and they'll part ways before long. I hope we keep doing good things, MPG improves or PHEVs find buyers and BEVs have some magic battery jumps that kill the bad image effects - charging time, range, longevity and really take off.
Crime against humanity.
Humans are criminal towards themselves and the natural world in general. We don't need Trump for that. He is merely a reflection of the selfish, destructive humans.
Not as if he’s letting biological males into Female changing rooms
Total capacity of renewables is misleading. Capacity only represents the power you'd theoretically generate if you the sun was maximally bright and the wind blowing 24/7. I don't need to point out why real life numbers are way off. (Spoiler alert: they are by almost 2 orders of magnitude)
I live in Québec (Canada), and I was pretty discouraged by the Trump élection and it's promises of going back to the fifties without the fifties hopes! You helped me a little this morning even if I know I cannot underestimate the possible wrongdoing of "The Orange Syndrome"🤔😕
With Musk in a position of power, whatever else happens we can expect a continuing rise in battery storage, both in vehicles and in grid support facilities
Yeah, he’s the bigger wildcard I see in the planned incoming administration with possibilities of huge long term gains or short term, catastrophic failures, or both. Or his involvement may amount to nothing if he gets fed up with the company of ideologues and departs early.
The clock is already ticking. Two malignant narcissists will not abide each other for long. I predict a Musk/Trump falling out within a year. Probably sooner rather than later.
I was thinking that, but I'm hearing that Elon is calling for the end of the EV tax credit. I would not be in an EV right now if that didn't exist. Hopefully, he is just trolling and does not want to hurt his own business and the adoption of EVs.
Umm, Musk has ZERO power in the US govt. The president of the US cannot create departments, only Congress can, so this "dept." being created by tRump for Elon, his fake buddy other than Elon echoes tRump's nonsens, will have NO power to actually do anything that will affect the US govt. no matter how many studies Musk has done and desires to get rid of the EPA, Fish and Wildlife, etc...... ALL of which slow down his expansions of SpaceX or Tesla, etc.............
No states "went blue"......some states remained blue.