:this-is-fine:
Andreas Malm breaks this down really well in Fossil Capital. Pretty much, capitalists haven't shifted to wind/solar/water energy because the opportunity for surplus value extraction is nowhere near that of coal and other fossil fuels. You don't need to dig it out of the ground, it's already free.
The only way to harvest exchange value out of it is capturing, converting, storing it in technology. And like all capitalist resources it's subject to economies of scale, so once mass production slashes the cost of it the profitiability doesn't stack up at all to fossil fuels.
Proves conclusively that green capitalism can't save us, it's a literal oxymoron. Renewables are an anathema to the capitalism system- fossil fuels have always been and will continue to be baked into capitalism.
You don’t need to dig it out of the ground, it’s already free.
rare earth minerals in Bolivia are free real estate when you remove the indigenous opposition.
You don’t need to dig it out of the ground, it’s already free.
Making solar panels is incredibly power intensive because you can't just dig rocks out of the ground and turn them into PV cells (though it's getting better as newer panels need less silicon per watt).
This is why it's so easy to be a doomer. There needs to be trillions of dollars worth of expenditure within the next several years. Not by fucking 2035 or 2050 or whatever the fuck. There is no market mechanism that exists that would allow anything on such a level because ROI would have to be expected on a scale of several decades, maybe even a century. Unless we start seeing rapid nationalization within the next decade, there is little cause for optimism.
There needed to be trillions of dollars of expenditure 20 years ago
it's already over
Yeah, we can talk about the actual positive benefits of solar energy and energy storage, but there's virtually nothing that's truly 'renewable', at least not enough to stave off the impeding climate apocalypse at least under the current economic model. The economics of it all prevent wind, solar, etc from truly catching fire under capitalism and saving us to some degree.
The prevailing theory that Oil is the single biggest driver of 'prosperity', at least as far as the first world knows it, still holds true. Fossil Fuels are a fucking powerhouse that changed the course of human history. We need de-growth more than anything because even if we were to replace FF with renewables, the benefits wouldn't outweigh the drawbacks such as transportation, material logistics, etc enough to keep up with current human development.
As far as I've read they're mainly against GDP growth as the measure of prosperity. It's not like they're saying return to monke
During the 1930s, the economists Simon Kuznets and John Maynard Keynes set out to design an economic aggregate that would help policymakers figure out how to escape the Great Depression. The goal was to calculate the total monetary value of all the goods and services produced in the economy so they could see more clearly what was going wrong and what needed to be done to fix it. Kuznets argued for a measure that would help society maximise well-being and track the progress of human welfare; he wanted GDP to exclude negative things like advertising, commuting and policing, so that if those things went up governments would not be able to say that people’s lives were getting better when in fact they were not. But when the Second World War struck, Keynes broke from this vision and insisted that we should count all money-based activities – even negative ones – so we would be able to identify every ounce of productivity that was available for the war effort. In the end Keynes won,and his version of GDP came into use. GDP was intended to be a war-time measure, which is why it is so single-minded – almost even violent.
[...] Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with measuring some things and not others. GDP itself doesn’t have any impact in the real world. GDP growth, however, does. As soon as we start focusing on GDP growth, we’re not only promoting the things that GDP measures, we’re promoting the indefinite increase of those things. And that’s exactly what we started to do in the 1960s. GDP came into widespread use during the Cold War for the sake of adjudicating the grand pissing match between the West and the USSR. Suddenly, politicians on both sides became feverish about promoting GDP growth. Kuznets was careful to warn that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic success, for it would incentivise too much destruction. And yet that is exactly what we began to do – and then it was swiftly pushed around the rest of the world by the World Bank and the IMF. Today, nearly every government in the world, rich and poor alike, is focused obsessively on the single objective of increasing GDP growth.
[...] Despite these obvious problems, for some reason we have come to believe that GDP growth is equivalent to human progress. We assume that when GDP goes up, it makes our lives better: it raises our incomes, it creates more jobs, it means better schools and hospitals and so on. This may have been true in the past, when the world was relatively empty of people and the human footprint was small relative to the bounty of the Earth. Unfortunately, it no longer holds. In the United States GDP has risen steadily over the past half-century, yet median incomes have stagnated, the poverty rate has increased and inequality has grown. The same is true on a global scale: while global real GDP has nearly tripled since 1980, the number of people living in poverty, below $5 per day, has increased by more than 1.1 billion. Why is this? Because past a certain point, GDP growth begins to produce more negative outcomes than positive ones – more ‘illth’ than wealth. The reason is because there are no longer any frontiers where accumulation doesn’t directly harm someone else, by, say, enclosing the land, degrading the soils, polluting the water, exploiting human beings or changing the climate. We have reached the point where GDP growth is beginning to create more poverty than it eliminates.
When the entire global political establishment puts its force behind the goal of GDP growth, human and natural systems come under enormous pressure. In India it might come in the form of land grabs. In the UK, it’s privatisation of public services. In Brazil it looks like deforestation in the Amazon basin. In the US and Canada it brings fracking and tar sands. Around the world it means longer working hours, more expensive housing, depleted soils, polluted cities, wasted oceans and – above all – climate change. All for the sake of GDP growth. People who push against these destructive trends will tell you how futile it feels. It is futile because our governments don’t care. They don’t care because according to their most important measure of progress, the destruction counts as good, and must continue at all costs. This is not because humans are inherently destructive. It is because we have created a rule that encourages us to behave in destructive ways. As Joseph Stiglitz has put it, ‘What we measure informs what we do. And if we’re measuring the wrong thing, we’re going to do the wrong thing.’
From Jason Hickel's The Divide
According to Marx and Engels, who were working off of Morgan's concept of a natural evolution of history from savagery to civilization, yes.
According to the wetsuweten land defenders who are deliberately readopting non industrial Lifeways, material plenty is already here.
There are many paths to liberation, and it's up to the oppressed to determine them through struggle.
My tentative suggestion is to undeveloped the west (and especially America) to develop the rest on their terms.
That's all cool and good, but the point is that it's being framed as "if it's not profitable it's not worth doing" while capitalism is currently on its way to boil every single one of us alive.
I think it's more that it's being framed as "if it's not profitable it's not happening," which is true.
Easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, etc, etc
I’m skeptical that energy storage is really a solution at a large scale, either.
Not to be a technolib but I don't think we've even tapped the potential for energy storage. Lithium Iron will hopefully be seen as caveman technology 10 years from now but even that is pretty fucking hopeful.
There's the liquid batteries that are infinitely scale able that are pretty cool and good old fashioned fly-wheels.
liquid batteries that are infinitely scale able
what are those called?
Redox flow batteries really promising tech. China's already installed a couple grid scale ones.
I’m skeptical that energy storage is really a solution at a large scale, either
Different type of grids, storage, good load balancing and incentives to produce then are actually good. Plus different kinds of mobility.
Via grid you can transport electricity from the East coast nearly to the West coast competitively even today. This means you are suddenly talking about 10 hours for LA, PLUS 3 hours for electricity generated in NYC.
Honestly talking about solar electricity availability between 4 to 17 o'clock LA time in deepest winter doesn't sound half bad. Esp. if you compare it to 3 to 20 o'clock in LA during summer time. I argue that no one can sensible tell me those time spans aren't wide enough to produce in them.
Furthermore if we go and look at wind generation we see that this can complement the times of high demand or low solar very well. With a super grid that also taps into water, hydroelectric and geothermic electricity and energy you are suddenly at no hour in which not a good amount of clean energy is created. Even with wind you reduce the time in which there is no significant electricity output in the analysis of only PV and wind into a range that can be expressed in quarters of hours.
However in the US you could also reduce the electricity consumption by up to three quarters to facilitate the change even better (if looked over the next 15 years or so).
In terms of storage, there are always also gravity storage solutions, which will store energy for hours on end, eliminating the wholes in supply curves and enabling nice fitting of supply and demand curves. Naturally this would be combined with other storage types, too. (Btw. I mean gravity storage in a more broad way, pumping water is also gravitational storage).
The mix is the solution to the problem, the problem is the capitalist structure of current electricity and energy consumption, infrastructure and interfacing systems.
Yeah, gravity storage is the most sensible, close to zero waste, makes neat towers
We just need to Dyson Sphere Program this shit and built a gigantic land bridge along the equator and fill it with solar panels.
Energy storage isnt the only solution to this problem The excess energy during the day could be used to operate energy intensive machines that dont necessarily need to run all hours of the day, shifting the energy costs of running a modern society into the daytime. For example you could run a desalination plant and produce fresh water, which is especially useful in the hot and arid areas where solar is the most effective. Other things you could run only on excess power include supercomputers for resrarch or some kind of cybersyn digital socialist planning, hydroponics and grow lights for vertical urban farming, electric trains carrying cargo, and all kinds of automated industrial processes. Another idea in the vein of shifting energy use to the daytime is to largely eliminate night shift jobs. Most nightshift jobs are nonessential and only serve to capture more profit for capitalists. Under socialism it is not necessary for every store to be open all night, it is not healthy for workers, and with some variation of a 4/20/69 workweek it isnt necessary for comsumers either, as they have ample days off as well as ample dayight hours on days they are working. Essential services would still operate at night, and some small amount of emergency distribution could remain open for things like medication in case someone needs it while the stores are closed, but for the most part, you dont need groceries at 3am.
Every power grid has a base load which is always present and peak demand, which is generally during the day. Solar and wind are really hard to rely on for base load because (wind is a bit better because it's 24/7). Some countries can get away with hydro or geothermal power for baseload, but in a lot of the world, nuclear is going to need to play a role.
A big part of fixing climate change is also getting more creative with how we use resources. Heat pumps are far more efficient than central AC. District heating via excess steam from power plants (if you actually build proper cities instead of suburbs) is way better than forced air bullshit (and healthier)
Mind of the lib:
Thesis: Capitalism is good, and it's great for market incentives and the profit motive
Antithesis: Market incentives and the profit motive, and the results thereof, do not align with socially desirable goals
Synthesis: Market incentives and the profit motive are themselves socially desirable goals, capitalism is therefore great
I know that people hate it, but hydro is the greenest source of power if constructed in ecologically mindful ways. Solar and wind are less consistent and require highly destructive methods of material extraction and development.
Beavers do it.
Except California is having such bad droughts this year they’re going to be forced to turn off the damns.
Hydro is very localized to places where you can generate high water pressure. Countries like the US and China have mostly built up hydro dams wherever they are feasible.
Solar and wind have significant potential simply because they're far more ubiquitous.
Couldn't you use pumped storage to help alleviate this? This being wasted energy?
That, or make hydrogen. Spin up fly wheels. Batteries, of course. Lots of possibilities.
another fun one is to pull train cars full of rocks up a mountainside
Shove a whole lot of clowns into a tiny car so you can later release them... Or so you can finally eliminate the clown menace by sending them all over to Shelbyville.
Batteries isn't great as they can only be so big and the components are largely mined by child slaves
for lithium ion batteries that may be true, but you can make batteries out of all sorts of elements. Especially when they don't have to be lightweight for mobile applications, the possibilities really open up. See the molten metal batteries someone mentioned in the thread here as an example
I don't know much or actually anything about engineering, but what if the grid just stretched really far from East-West so that night time and daytime had a lot of overlap?
There's considerable losses in energy transmission, actually (see 'lengthy distribution lines'). You could alleviate this by lowering resistance on the line itself - but superconductors are a real pain to build for long distances and costly to maintain in themselves (gotta cool them constantly n shit)
Yes. There's even some nuclear and fossil fuel plants that already use pumped storage for the opposite reason going back decades. They make extra power all night then burn it off during high demand during the day (when people are awake, using AC, etc).
the problem is we did good things but we couldn't profit off it
We need to tie capitalists to a rocket and fire them into space looney tunes style.
is this a serious proposal? ive heard of flywheels used for powering cars/buses/trains, but i havent heard anything about actual grid energy storage. is it feasible?
I'm personally weary of mobile applications, because when flywheels fail, they fail spectacularly. With grid applications, at least you can bury them or have heavy shielding.
Yeah I think you’re right on flywheel applications not being suitable for general grid use. I was thinking about pumped water too.
