What began as one oil shock has now multiplied into three separate catastrophes – an oil shock, a shipping shock, and a refinery shock – each triggered by a different war in a different part of the world, culminating into a global catastrophe that’s already hitting. This video would not have been possible without reporting by Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Reuters, CNN, Defense Express, Marine Link, and others.

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[–] 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

Do you think were currently at our absolute maximum renewable energy production/expansion right now?

Cause why could we not just do something like take 100% of our fossil fuel money, put it into renewables, and use 50% of that growth to add new energy to the grid, then 50% to replace the old fossil grid.

Obviously hypothetical, but we could easily not only hold our current power use, but actually increase it while transitioning to renewables.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    During covid, when the entire economy basically shut down, we still consumed 95% of the regular amount of fossil fuels. Basically that 95% is being constantly allocated into the background maintenance of our life support systems.

    The entire "discretionary" part of our economy that goes into the economy, growth and building new stuff is the other 5%.

    So, 50% of the "growth" sector is probably less than 2% of all resource and material flows.

    The only way we can make more rapid change is by cannibalizing the life maintenance functions of the economy. This is an important thing to recognize and to understand the limits.

    There have been many academic studies that have aimed to scope out the material costs of tens of billions of solar panels hundreds of millions of windmills and so on. (For example, Mark Jacobsen at Stanford.). The full elaboration of a sustainable, renewable energy system requires a MUCH higher amount of materials and industry than what currently exists on earth, possible 6 or 7X more industry would be required. This is mining, factories, transport and so on. Another way to put this is that you if you're building a direct replacement for the fossil fuel system and you fully cost the entire supply chain, you need massive and rapid expansion of industry. This isn't a 1:1 investment equality with oil infrastructure....

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Do you think were currently at our absolute maximum renewable energy production/expansion right now?

    Naturally no. We could transition to an entirely renewable electric economy. As my first post said, we aren't prepared to adopt the sociological and economic requirements to live under those conditions.

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