Thank you to Azeem Azhar for joining us on Cleaning Up. Listeners of Cleaning Up can receive one year of complimentary access to Exponential View Premium, visit: www.exponentialview.co/cleaningup. Offer valid for 7 days starting November 27, 2024.
Nuclear doesn't run at 92% cf, more like 82%, because in the first figure self consumption of the plant - about 100-150Mw - is drawn in, which is never provided as electricity to the market. If you read the footnotes in the IEA reports you can read it by yourself. Best wishes.
From fossil fuels to alternative energy is an existential shift, from energy we burn potentially burn every day, to minerals we make the catalyst for creating energy, called solar panels and wind generators. One barrel of fossil fuels burns in minutes, and one barrel of lithium, minerals to make make panels and wind generators that create electricity for up to or more than 20 years, theres no comparison
And then those minerals get recycled, and 10% get lost, but the new solar panels, wind turbines or batteries are more than 10% better than the old ones, so the same minerals keep delivering their energy services essentially forever. How cool is that?
The biggest constraints for the switch to green energy by home and small business owners and local communities come from a lack of affordable financing. Both are easier for large corporations and projects. Next, insulating and upgrading existing homes to heat pumps aren’t sexy, but are essential for moving away from dirty fossil fuels.
you are right, A good govt program would be to guarantee loans that have lightweight payments, but completely independent on the rest of the house's finance, such loans being to upgrade the construction to a more efficient build.
Consider decreasing your investments in innovation 55% and INCREASING your investments in installation 55%. We have everything required to move many times faster than we are. Unfortunately very few installers and no scaled companies that can perform all work associated with electrification. In addition the device software is siloed. Installed carrier heat pump and carrier mini splits. Machines exceed expectations but software doesn't talk to same companies products and is very primitive. Only connects with Alexa.
The internet has been around since the 1960's. It's the web that has transformed our ability to communicate. Add that to smart phones, and massive increases in network speeds, and there you get this exponential change. Adoption of standards, where everything talks to everything, facilitates growth.
I suspect that the huge demand for electricity to power AI training and data centres will be solved by future designs of microchips that will be orders of magnitude more efficient than current designs.
@@shaneelliott9045 There is vanishingly small returns on AI as yet, and almost no proven use cases that 90% of people feel comfortable using or care about. But generally I agree with your bitter sentiment. =/ I'm kinda hoping the AI bubble will burst and then a few more responsible companies will generate AI that's specifically useful and augmentative rather than just replacing people's jobs with a crappier version of them.
@Urduhkhan dude we are still Increasing emissions we are still extracting exponentially more year after year we are already in overshoot and have been for many decades we are sacrificing our entire civilisation to make number go up crypto serves no purpose extremely energy hungry lets just not Ai same thing its " could be profitable do it at literally all cost" cut corners get ahead unleash unregulated unfinished fake intelligence and give it access to the hate and bigotry and violence and give it the sole purpose of turning a profit who cares Money is more important ...fukk that let's not Cut down all the forests poison all the water land air and fukkn space aswell ffs The ecosystem that is our life support is collapsing .. Now And we are still sprinting in the wrong direction Finite planet finite resources finite ecological capacity its not our numbers its our enslavement to capitalists their puppet politicians and "number go up forever and ever and ever"
1:06:55 I struggle with the gap between techno optimist visions and the reality of climate change and planetary boundaries. This Full steam ahead approach, looks to me like the mars-ification of earth. We would need vast energy to keep cool and get drinkable water. Heading towards living in safety pods on earth. The biodiversity reduction of 2% per year will presumably have ever greater impact in the years ahead.
What is there to struggle with, doomerism isn't saving the planet, it's the people and companies creating solutions, not sticking their head in the sand like you. There are problems, but they are getting addressed, but that falls on deaf ears like yours
Some of the lower hanging fruit of vehicles to grid house level solar where power is not lost in transmission line losses as the development of heat pump technology to be made more cheap for water heater and home heater the best way to get to best used at peak demand smart machine use at peak power production saving heat from data center to things like Sand battery for long term heat storage
@1:04:54 any company wanting to build a data center in space, because they think space is cold, and that will keep their data centers cold for free, has incredibly stupid people working for them. At least people who have never looked at the International Space station, or study the laws of thermodynamics... Space itself isn't that cold, and also because of the near vacuum, the only way to transmit Heat is through radiation... No conduction, no convection. It's one of the biggest problems on the ISS, most of those panels you see on the International Space Station are not for solar, they're for cooling. Then there's the fact that you need a strong radiation Shield to make sure that your information isn't having its digital bits flipped by cosmic rays... So all that, coupled with the fact it'll cost you hundreds of millions, if not billions, of more dollars to send and build a robust Data Center in space, is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard.
The only hope for hydrogen: Electrolysers price => 0 Electricity price in an unregulated market thanks to solar/wind/batteries=> 0 Process equipment will also become cheaper if specifically hydrogen ready equipment becomes more readily available/standardised. High pressure H2 valves/compressors are not "cheap" yet as there are not many manufacturers with long experience here... And it will be only used for 1% of the time during dunkelflaute
Hydrogen ONLY becomes what some would call 'viable" when the Grid is 100% renewable with spare capacity. But when the Grid is 100% renewable with spare capacitor...... you don't need hydrogen.
The AI infrastructure growth curve in terms of energy demand leads to a question of energy availability equity - in a world where supply chases demand (at least from the point of view of national infrastructure), how do 'we', the little people (retail end-use consumers) ensure that 'our' needs are met equitably? 'We' surely represent the least value and highest cost per unit of all energy producer customers, yet 'we' are the people whose industries are driving the electrification transition? How do 'we' have a say in this? Will it always be "industry first, consumer what's left"? I'd analogise to last-mile logistics.
Thank you so much for this amazing video! I need some advice: I have a SafePal wallet with USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How can I transfer them to Binance?
This completely disregards the rarity of raw materials and the industrial capacity required for extraction, manufacturing and distribution. In any case i cant wait to see those battery or wind turbine powered steel plants and ore extraction facilities.
We're don't disregard it, we just don't believe it's a showstopper. For instance, 90% of EV batteries are already recycled. So, as long as each generation of batteries is more than 10% more materials-efficient than the one before, all minerals extracted for the battery sector will deliver an increasing stream of energy services over time. How cool is that! Listen and learn: ruclips.net/video/wc-ZW_xT-vI/видео.htmlsi=cGqWa4f5ow5qpiE8
@ Great channel btw. I was just trying to make the point that the way the world measures growth needs to change to protect the environment. Maybe one new measure could be how many days of leisure does the average person get per annum?
I could easily go buy a second-hand battery and panels, but I'm not allowed to install them and I have no easy way of powering my rental with the power they would produce. My landlord has zero incentive to put solar on the roof and swap out our gas for electric. He has no incentive to increase the insulation effectiveness, double-glaze, etc, and others would have no incentive to exchange old AC units for reverse-cycle units (what you call heat-pumps). That's a good third (and growing) of people here in Australia locked out of the most basic ways to switch to renewables, and we also can't afford EVs and have nowhere to charge them. Govt doesn't really care about any of us and just does the bidding of their fossil fuel and mining donors who are still getting tax breaks and fuel rebates. Nothing is "driven by knowledge". Knowledge is allowed to produce certain technologies which are then commodified and either allowed to grow or wither based on the whims of the elites and how they want to make their money. The reason solar took so long was fossil fuel corp capture of govt/regulation. Same with EVs. Same with the walkable cities and rail that really should be focus, rather than EVs. Did the PC revolution cut our work week in half? Of course not, it just allowed more production in the same time and now MORE overtime for lower wages as a percentage of a home loan as they continue to squeeze every last drop from the lower classes. Yanis is always right. It's the incentives of capitalism that holds us back from the utopias we can envision. The people are all pretty uniform in what they want and govts around the world are all uniform in doing the bidding of the corps that have captured them, while pretending to give a shit. This idea that "the market realities" come in and somehow bully the elites into no longer having an iron grip on what is allowed to grow and where the benefits go is just frankly absurd. "Solar panels powering AC units" [somehow enabled by AI growth will save us all from climate change] is just absolutely ridiculous. WE CAN ALREADY DO THAT, WHY AREN'T WE?? Answer: politicians working for corporate donation and graft, the same reason every landlord hosting a person on welfare isn't paid by the govt to reduce that person's living costs (and emissions) by putting solar on the roof. Govts everywhere could wake up tomorrow and say, right! We going to fix homelessness, the housing and cost of living crisis, wealth inequality, and climate change. We KNOW HOW - the solutions are all out there, plain as day, but they refuse to implement them, because actually working for the people, rather than their funders, is not what incentivises them. They know they'll get re-elected, regardless, even if it has o be next election cycle when everyone's jack of the incumbent and it's their turn to fuck us over again, because all around the world it's a duopoly. Azeem has his head the clouds if he thinks such market forces will overcome the oligarchy that's been dictating everything since before he was in diapers.
I think my problem with this talk is it shows a complete disconnect between realities. Assuming we will go to solar because it is cheaper and the market will take care of it is wrong. We burn more wood, and coal today then when it was the primary energy supply. We burn more oil and natural gas today then at any point in human history. As long as we continue to grow at all new energy will be additive and never replace an old form. There is a financial reality and a physical reality that care little about finance. Cheaper does not matter because you can hide the true cost to mine the materials, construct and transport said good to market.
An inescapable fact that escapes most pundits. Making life more efficient means we do more. Transport conduits..... Canals made transportation easier, railways ditto, then build a highway, say round London, and the commute time acceptable to high earners is still 2 hours but they live further out! Feed people who are starving and the population goes up, because more kids is a better pension pot. So cheaper power > More stuff made, and pollution goes up with it. Have a nice day y'all
It's called induced demand, bro. And across the developed world emissions are falling, trees are growing back and fertility is below replacement rate. So maybe it's not quite as inescapable as you think.
Enjoyed the talk, BUT in my opinion there were some fundamental flaws: 1. There is a consensus the free markets and deregulation will give the right incentives, but most of the clean tech (Wind, Solar, Batteries, EVs) come from China which subsidized these technology on behalf of the communist party. 2. The actual question in the title has not been answered. More energy efficiency and recycling technology may save the planet, but they cannot continue to grow exponentially but would stop growing when the problem has been solved; surely one could immagine an exponentially growing AI industry drawing their power from an exponentially growing renewable source.... 3 the so called dematerialized growth is an illusion , as employees from a consulting business will also buy cars and bigger houses. So yeah, would be interesting to hear some real answers from this channel.
The big elephant in the room wasn't mentioned. Planetary boundaries. We are a biological species, subject to laws of nature. What goes up must come down
Intellectually stimulating but I have to challenge again the priority of technological innovation in delivering the requisite ~78% reduction in U.K. emissions (relative to 1990) by 2030 (~1800 days) which the U.K.’s equitable share (as opposed to equal share) of the remaining 200 Gt carbon budget dictates for limiting global heating to +1.5 Celsius. This comes down to some basic arithmetic. Those of us who are equipped to appreciate our predicament have a responsibility to set aside our personal interests and join the few academics and climate activists in lobbying the CCC and government to own up to their dissimulation.
Unless you've got lobbying dollars to match those of the fossil fuel industries still controlling everything through the capture of the govts you want to lobby, good luck.
I hear your passion for addressing climate change, and I deeply respect your commitment to protecting our planet. However, we need to have an honest conversation about the critical role fossil fuels have played in supporting global food production. Right now, our agricultural system feeds 8 billion people through processes that are fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels - from fertilizer production to machinery, from transportation to agricultural chemicals. If we're going to seriously tackle climate change, we can't just condemn fossil fuels; we need a meticulously planned, phased transition that ensures food infrastructure. That means developing scalable alternative technologies that can truly replace our current food production infrastructure. You need to articulate detailed, pragmatic plans to maintain global food security while dramatically reducing fossil fuel dependency? The good news is there are doable solutions, like diesel-electric farm equipment and diesel-electric trucks and ships for containerized logistics that can dramatically reduce emissions while maintaining our food production capabilities.
Let me give you a tip. If you want positive engagement, try saying you would like an episode on decarbonizing agricultural machinery and freight, rather than accusing us of not having an honest conversation. Oh, and if you think diesel hydrids are the answer, you're asking the wrong question.
@@MLiebreich I apologize for the accusatory tone. What I was trying to get at is what I think Rory Sutherland said about the near possible. Taking intermediate steps that are more practical in the short term. Decarbonizing agricultural machinery and freight can only be a part of the solution and diesel hybrids would only be a step in moving away from hydrocarbons. In addition there needs to be a realization that hydrocarbons have been the foundational to our modern standard of living. That what is needed is practical ways to do all the things that hydrocarbons do without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Your comments and discussions are so general as to be close to worthless. Dismissing the need for the baseload power for big users is disingenuous. smelters need constant power. if they have to pay more, so prices go up. Its the way the market works, given that the main users need constant power. similarly solar panels are next to useless in northern europe, which does not have an air conditioning issue, it has a heating requirement, for which solar is totally mis-matched.
Solar panels next to useless in Northern Europe? That must be why Germany generate over 12% of electricity from solar! Of course, less useful in say Northern Sweden, but Scandinavia is basically 60-100% renewables thanks to hydro.
You may need to update your understanding of how electricity networks work. Baseload is simply the lowest level of demand on the network. You seem to be confusing that with large concentrated sources of demand, which you seem to think need to be matched by large centralised sources of supply, and which it also appears you call baseload. These are common mistakes. The fact is that power grids are systems, with reliability delivered by having a diversity of supplies - some dispatchable, some variable, some flexible some not - plus demand response, storage and interconnections, all managed digitally. The amount of flexible back-up you need is an emergent property of the system. Big inflexible plants that can't load follow and occasionally fall over requires as much or more backup as variable renewables that can be forecast with a high degree of accuracy a day or more in advance. Look at France during summer 2022 when half of their nuclear plants were out.
@MLiebreich Having worked at the UKs largest power station, a refinery and chemicals plants, I'm fully aware of how the grid works. But you seem to have missed the memo that you cannot run plants requiring continuous power off windmills and solar panels. Conventional power plants can flex quite a lot, agreed, nuclear struggles, but it's well known that variable, inverter fed systems lead to frequency variability and being intermittent are not reliable power sources. Thus your overly simplistic and optimistic viewpoint is fine for RUclips, but will get short shrift in an engineering environment, which is where industry makes it's decisions. Dr C. Williams FEI
@@cliffwilliams8616 I think engineers with a background in gas are overly sceptical of ability to run a grid mainly on variable renewable energy, whereas engineers who come from variable renewable energy see it differently, maybe overly optimistic. While the former may in theory have a point, my question is this. What do you think is the maximum share of renewable energy electricity mix you can run a grid? 40%, 60%, 80%, 90%? Denmark already runs on 70% wind, and if you point that out to gas engineers, they start talking about unusual degree of connectivity with highly dispatchable Swedish grid (hydro). But Spain and Portugal have 40% variable renewable electricity, 50%-65% if you look at total renewable (i.e. you count hydro, which is present but not huge). And that is with energy storage in its infancy, no vehicle to grid, and fairly crude demand management. So realistically, surely we will be able to get to at least 50%-60% variable renewable? Much more if you have hydro and or nuclear? P.S. I think it is a bit reductive, and rude, to say that Michael's analysis is good only for RUclips, when he probably has made a few tens of million of dollar from selling his company to Bloomberg😂
Because their practice is to capture the economies of scale and to control the supply chains so as to make it HARDER for anyone else to do the same kind of work. But given that solar is a pure commodity and you can't get a patent for fundamentals of chemistry and physics, you will see others emulate what they do, but progress could be faster if they were no trying to be the world exclusive supplier. Also they may be using coal burning to supply the energy, along with slave labor from uyghur's in re-education camps.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Thank you to Azeem Azhar for joining us on Cleaning Up. Listeners of Cleaning Up can receive one year of complimentary access to Exponential View Premium, visit: www.exponentialview.co/cleaningup. Offer valid for 7 days starting November 27, 2024.
Nuclear doesn't run at 92% cf, more like 82%, because in the first figure self consumption of the plant - about 100-150Mw - is drawn in, which is never provided as electricity to the market. If you read the footnotes in the IEA reports you can read it by yourself. Best wishes.
@@juliane__Very good point.
Sadly i was in Italy and missed the free sub. Great episode though
This is the first quality podcast I’ve found that addresses the climate issues in a factual and structured way. Thank you
Climate change is a scam
We are the carbon they want to reduce to zero
These conversations are great, I am so glad i found you all.
Thank you for using episode numbers in the title. Everyone should.
I listened to the Pod. Cheers.
Amazing, this man is amazing.
From fossil fuels to alternative energy is an existential shift, from energy we burn potentially burn every day, to minerals we make the catalyst for creating energy, called solar panels and wind generators. One barrel of fossil fuels burns in minutes, and one barrel of lithium, minerals to make make panels and wind generators that create electricity for up to or more than 20 years, theres no comparison
And then those minerals get recycled, and 10% get lost, but the new solar panels, wind turbines or batteries are more than 10% better than the old ones, so the same minerals keep delivering their energy services essentially forever. How cool is that?
I might become a fan of these conversations.
I hope you do!
Excellent
The biggest constraints for the switch to green energy by home and small business owners and local communities come from a lack of affordable financing. Both are easier for large corporations and projects.
Next, insulating and upgrading existing homes to heat pumps aren’t sexy, but are essential for moving away from dirty fossil fuels.
you are right, A good govt program would be to guarantee loans that have lightweight payments, but completely
independent on the rest of the house's finance, such loans being to upgrade the construction to a more efficient build.
Consider decreasing your investments in innovation 55% and INCREASING your investments in installation 55%. We have everything required to move many times faster than we are. Unfortunately very few installers and no scaled companies that can perform all work associated with electrification. In addition the device software is siloed. Installed carrier heat pump and carrier mini splits. Machines exceed expectations but software doesn't talk to same companies products and is very primitive. Only connects with Alexa.
The internet has been around since the 1960's. It's the web that has transformed our ability to communicate. Add that to smart phones, and massive increases in network speeds, and there you get this exponential change. Adoption of standards, where everything talks to everything, facilitates growth.
Takeaway: Resistance to change falls if benefits become real. - John Naisbitt, Mind Set!
I suspect that the huge demand for electricity to power AI training and data centres will be solved by future designs of microchips that will be orders of magnitude more efficient than current designs.
I suspect money will be put before life on earth until there's no life left
@@shaneelliott9045 There is vanishingly small returns on AI as yet, and almost no proven use cases that 90% of people feel comfortable using or care about. But generally I agree with your bitter sentiment. =/ I'm kinda hoping the AI bubble will burst and then a few more responsible companies will generate AI that's specifically useful and augmentative rather than just replacing people's jobs with a crappier version of them.
@Urduhkhan dude we are still Increasing emissions we are still extracting exponentially more year after year we are already in overshoot and have been for many decades we are sacrificing our entire civilisation to make number go up
crypto serves no purpose extremely energy hungry
lets just not
Ai same thing its " could be profitable do it at literally all cost" cut corners get ahead unleash unregulated unfinished fake intelligence and give it access to the hate and bigotry and violence and give it the sole purpose of turning a profit who cares Money is more important ...fukk that let's not
Cut down all the forests poison all the water land air and fukkn space aswell ffs
The ecosystem that is our life support is collapsing ..
Now
And we are still sprinting in the wrong direction
Finite planet finite resources finite ecological capacity its not our numbers its our enslavement to capitalists their puppet politicians and "number go up forever and ever and ever"
1:06:55 I struggle with the gap between techno optimist visions and the reality of climate change and planetary boundaries. This Full steam ahead approach, looks to me like the mars-ification of earth. We would need vast energy to keep cool and get drinkable water. Heading towards living in safety pods on earth. The biodiversity reduction of 2% per year will presumably have ever greater impact in the years ahead.
What is there to struggle with, doomerism isn't saving the planet, it's the people and companies creating solutions, not sticking their head in the sand like you. There are problems, but they are getting addressed, but that falls on deaf ears like yours
From fossil fuel time line to alternative energy time line is an existential shift, w
Some of the lower hanging fruit of vehicles to grid house level solar where power is not lost in transmission line losses as the development of heat pump technology to be made more cheap for water heater and home heater the best way to get to best used at peak demand smart machine use at peak power production saving heat from data center to things like Sand battery for long term heat storage
@1:04:54 any company wanting to build a data center in space, because they think space is cold, and that will keep their data centers cold for free, has incredibly stupid people working for them. At least people who have never looked at the International Space station, or study the laws of thermodynamics...
Space itself isn't that cold, and also because of the near vacuum, the only way to transmit Heat is through radiation... No conduction, no convection. It's one of the biggest problems on the ISS, most of those panels you see on the International Space Station are not for solar, they're for cooling.
Then there's the fact that you need a strong radiation Shield to make sure that your information isn't having its digital bits flipped by cosmic rays...
So all that, coupled with the fact it'll cost you hundreds of millions, if not billions, of more dollars to send and build a robust Data Center in space, is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard.
It seems Michael mentioned Hydrogen first....and no repercussions 🤷♂😅
The only hope for hydrogen:
Electrolysers price => 0
Electricity price in an unregulated market thanks to solar/wind/batteries=> 0
Process equipment will also become cheaper if specifically hydrogen ready equipment becomes more readily available/standardised. High pressure H2 valves/compressors are not "cheap" yet as there are not many manufacturers with long experience here...
And it will be only used for 1% of the time during dunkelflaute
Hydrogen ONLY becomes what some would call 'viable" when the Grid is 100% renewable with spare capacity.
But when the Grid is 100% renewable with spare capacitor...... you don't need hydrogen.
Its a pity that we cannot comment live :(
you can
@Acemeistre well yes and no. This is pre recorded
The AI infrastructure growth curve in terms of energy demand leads to a question of energy availability equity - in a world where supply chases demand (at least from the point of view of national infrastructure), how do 'we', the little people (retail end-use consumers) ensure that 'our' needs are met equitably?
'We' surely represent the least value and highest cost per unit of all energy producer customers, yet 'we' are the people whose industries are driving the electrification transition?
How do 'we' have a say in this? Will it always be "industry first, consumer what's left"? I'd analogise to last-mile logistics.
Thank you so much for this amazing video! I need some advice: I have a SafePal wallet with USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How can I transfer them to Binance?
This completely disregards the rarity of raw materials and the industrial capacity required for extraction, manufacturing and distribution. In any case i cant wait to see those battery or wind turbine powered steel plants and ore extraction facilities.
Look up electric arc furnaces. We have them in the UK, and more to come.
We're don't disregard it, we just don't believe it's a showstopper.
For instance, 90% of EV batteries are already recycled. So, as long as each generation of batteries is more than 10% more materials-efficient than the one before, all minerals extracted for the battery sector will deliver an increasing stream of energy services over time. How cool is that!
Listen and learn: ruclips.net/video/wc-ZW_xT-vI/видео.htmlsi=cGqWa4f5ow5qpiE8
The definition of growth needs to change. It’s not all about covering everything with concrete.
I am pretty sure that is not the definition of growth.
@ Great channel btw. I was just trying to make the point that the way the world measures growth needs to change to protect the environment. Maybe one new measure could be how many days of leisure does the average person get per annum?
As long as the exponent is negative we'll be fine.
I could easily go buy a second-hand battery and panels, but I'm not allowed to install them and I have no easy way of powering my rental with the power they would produce. My landlord has zero incentive to put solar on the roof and swap out our gas for electric. He has no incentive to increase the insulation effectiveness, double-glaze, etc, and others would have no incentive to exchange old AC units for reverse-cycle units (what you call heat-pumps). That's a good third (and growing) of people here in Australia locked out of the most basic ways to switch to renewables, and we also can't afford EVs and have nowhere to charge them. Govt doesn't really care about any of us and just does the bidding of their fossil fuel and mining donors who are still getting tax breaks and fuel rebates.
Nothing is "driven by knowledge". Knowledge is allowed to produce certain technologies which are then commodified and either allowed to grow or wither based on the whims of the elites and how they want to make their money. The reason solar took so long was fossil fuel corp capture of govt/regulation. Same with EVs. Same with the walkable cities and rail that really should be focus, rather than EVs. Did the PC revolution cut our work week in half? Of course not, it just allowed more production in the same time and now MORE overtime for lower wages as a percentage of a home loan as they continue to squeeze every last drop from the lower classes. Yanis is always right. It's the incentives of capitalism that holds us back from the utopias we can envision. The people are all pretty uniform in what they want and govts around the world are all uniform in doing the bidding of the corps that have captured them, while pretending to give a shit. This idea that "the market realities" come in and somehow bully the elites into no longer having an iron grip on what is allowed to grow and where the benefits go is just frankly absurd.
"Solar panels powering AC units" [somehow enabled by AI growth will save us all from climate change] is just absolutely ridiculous. WE CAN ALREADY DO THAT, WHY AREN'T WE?? Answer: politicians working for corporate donation and graft, the same reason every landlord hosting a person on welfare isn't paid by the govt to reduce that person's living costs (and emissions) by putting solar on the roof. Govts everywhere could wake up tomorrow and say, right! We going to fix homelessness, the housing and cost of living crisis, wealth inequality, and climate change. We KNOW HOW - the solutions are all out there, plain as day, but they refuse to implement them, because actually working for the people, rather than their funders, is not what incentivises them. They know they'll get re-elected, regardless, even if it has o be next election cycle when everyone's jack of the incumbent and it's their turn to fuck us over again, because all around the world it's a duopoly. Azeem has his head the clouds if he thinks such market forces will overcome the oligarchy that's been dictating everything since before he was in diapers.
I think my problem with this talk is it shows a complete disconnect between realities. Assuming we will go to solar because it is cheaper and the market will take care of it is wrong. We burn more wood, and coal today then when it was the primary energy supply. We burn more oil and natural gas today then at any point in human history. As long as we continue to grow at all new energy will be additive and never replace an old form. There is a financial reality and a physical reality that care little about finance. Cheaper does not matter because you can hide the true cost to mine the materials, construct and transport said good to market.
An inescapable fact that escapes most pundits. Making life more efficient means we do more. Transport conduits..... Canals made transportation easier, railways ditto, then build a highway, say round London, and the commute time acceptable to high earners is still 2 hours but they live further out! Feed people who are starving and the population goes up, because more kids is a better pension pot. So cheaper power > More stuff made, and pollution goes up with it. Have a nice day y'all
It's called induced demand, bro. And across the developed world emissions are falling, trees are growing back and fertility is below replacement rate. So maybe it's not quite as inescapable as you think.
Enjoyed the talk, BUT in my opinion there were some fundamental flaws:
1. There is a consensus the free markets and deregulation will give the right incentives, but most of the clean tech (Wind, Solar, Batteries, EVs) come from China which subsidized these technology on behalf of the communist party.
2. The actual question in the title has not been answered. More energy efficiency and recycling technology may save the planet, but they cannot continue to grow exponentially but would stop growing when the problem has been solved; surely one could immagine an exponentially growing AI industry drawing their power from an exponentially growing renewable source....
3 the so called dematerialized growth is an illusion , as employees from a consulting business will also buy cars and bigger houses.
So yeah, would be interesting to hear some real answers from this channel.
The big elephant in the room wasn't mentioned. Planetary boundaries. We are a biological species, subject to laws of nature. What goes up must come down
Intellectually stimulating but I have to challenge again the priority of technological innovation in delivering the requisite ~78% reduction in U.K. emissions (relative to 1990) by 2030 (~1800 days) which the U.K.’s equitable share (as opposed to equal share) of the remaining 200 Gt carbon budget dictates for limiting global heating to +1.5 Celsius. This comes down to some basic arithmetic. Those of us who are equipped to appreciate our predicament have a responsibility to set aside our personal interests and join the few academics and climate activists in lobbying the CCC and government to own up to their dissimulation.
Unless you've got lobbying dollars to match those of the fossil fuel industries still controlling everything through the capture of the govts you want to lobby, good luck.
@@PinataOblongataI believe Clive is moaning about the CCC wanting the UK to help the world fight climate change?
what dissimulation is that? the CCC is an advisory body and doesnt have crystal ball gazing in its remit
I hear your passion for addressing climate change, and I deeply respect your commitment to protecting our planet. However, we need to have an honest conversation about the critical role fossil fuels have played in supporting global food production. Right now, our agricultural system feeds 8 billion people through processes that are fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels - from fertilizer production to machinery, from transportation to agricultural chemicals.
If we're going to seriously tackle climate change, we can't just condemn fossil fuels; we need a meticulously planned, phased transition that ensures food infrastructure. That means developing scalable alternative technologies that can truly replace our current food production infrastructure. You need to articulate detailed, pragmatic plans to maintain global food security while dramatically reducing fossil fuel dependency? The good news is there are doable solutions, like diesel-electric farm equipment and diesel-electric trucks and ships for containerized logistics that can dramatically reduce emissions while maintaining our food production capabilities.
Let me give you a tip. If you want positive engagement, try saying you would like an episode on decarbonizing agricultural machinery and freight, rather than accusing us of not having an honest conversation.
Oh, and if you think diesel hydrids are the answer, you're asking the wrong question.
@@MLiebreich I apologize for the accusatory tone. What I was trying to get at is what I think Rory Sutherland said about the near possible. Taking intermediate steps that are more practical in the short term. Decarbonizing agricultural machinery and freight can only be a part of the solution and diesel hybrids would only be a step in moving away from hydrocarbons. In addition there needs to be a realization that hydrocarbons have been the foundational to our modern standard of living. That what is needed is practical ways to do all the things that hydrocarbons do without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Your comments and discussions are so general as to be close to worthless. Dismissing the need for the baseload power for big users is disingenuous. smelters need constant power. if they have to pay more, so prices go up. Its the way the market works, given that the main users need constant power. similarly solar panels are next to useless in northern europe, which does not have an air conditioning issue, it has a heating requirement, for which solar is totally mis-matched.
Solar panels next to useless in Northern Europe? That must be why Germany generate over 12% of electricity from solar! Of course, less useful in say Northern Sweden, but Scandinavia is basically 60-100% renewables thanks to hydro.
You may need to update your understanding of how electricity networks work. Baseload is simply the lowest level of demand on the network. You seem to be confusing that with large concentrated sources of demand, which you seem to think need to be matched by large centralised sources of supply, and which it also appears you call baseload. These are common mistakes.
The fact is that power grids are systems, with reliability delivered by having a diversity of supplies - some dispatchable, some variable, some flexible some not - plus demand response, storage and interconnections, all managed digitally. The amount of flexible back-up you need is an emergent property of the system. Big inflexible plants that can't load follow and occasionally fall over requires as much or more backup as variable renewables that can be forecast with a high degree of accuracy a day or more in advance. Look at France during summer 2022 when half of their nuclear plants were out.
@MLiebreich
Having worked at the UKs largest power station, a refinery and chemicals plants, I'm fully aware of how the grid works. But you seem to have missed the memo that you cannot run plants requiring continuous power off windmills and solar panels. Conventional power plants can flex quite a lot, agreed, nuclear struggles, but it's well known that variable, inverter fed systems lead to frequency variability and being intermittent are not reliable power sources. Thus your overly simplistic and optimistic viewpoint is fine for RUclips, but will get short shrift in an engineering environment, which is where industry makes it's decisions. Dr C. Williams FEI
@@cliffwilliams8616 I think engineers with a background in gas are overly sceptical of ability to run a grid mainly on variable renewable energy, whereas engineers who come from variable renewable energy see it differently, maybe overly optimistic. While the former may in theory have a point, my question is this. What do you think is the maximum share of renewable energy electricity mix you can run a grid? 40%, 60%, 80%, 90%? Denmark already runs on 70% wind, and if you point that out to gas engineers, they start talking about unusual degree of connectivity with highly dispatchable Swedish grid (hydro). But Spain and Portugal have 40% variable renewable electricity, 50%-65% if you look at total renewable (i.e. you count hydro, which is present but not huge). And that is with energy storage in its infancy, no vehicle to grid, and fairly crude demand management. So realistically, surely we will be able to get to at least 50%-60% variable renewable? Much more if you have hydro and or nuclear? P.S. I think it is a bit reductive, and rude, to say that Michael's analysis is good only for RUclips, when he probably has made a few tens of million of dollar from selling his company to Bloomberg😂
Nobody is thanking and praising China, why????????
VERY good point
Because their practice is to capture the economies of scale and to control the supply chains so as to make it HARDER for anyone else to do the same kind of work. But given that solar is a pure commodity and you can't get a patent for fundamentals of chemistry and physics, you will see others emulate what they do, but progress could be faster if they were no trying to be the world exclusive supplier. Also they may be using coal burning to supply the
energy, along with slave labor from uyghur's in re-education camps.
I’m very thankful China are using climate change seriously! I live in the UK and it’s sad the rest of the world aren’t doing nearly enough.
this is all hand waving and not very productive from 2 businessmen looking for investment opportunities - unedifying