You’d think this would give us some wiggle money to play with to build out new energy infrastructure. You’re wrong though, there is no wiggle. We need all renewables like Germany.
Although the transition to EVs will require an enormous increase in base production capacity, it would be wasteful to build out nuclear to meet it.
$16m an hour might seem like a lot of damage, but nuclear can only exacerbate economic loss which is equally important as climatic loss.
Renewables now!
Germany is in no way a role model when it comes to renewable energy.
Aren’t they ahead of many other developed nations? Just because they’re not perfect or their journey isn’t complete doesn’t mean their progress isn’t worth taking inspiration from.
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Germany has made great sacrifice to be a leader in renewables. An example for other nations of what can be accomplished with confident determination.
Germany is heavily relying on coal: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/coal-germany
It’s also building inefficient LNG terminals for liquid gas. Far away from being a leader in renewables.
Furthermore EVs are not a solution for climate change, but rather to save the car industry, which is particularly strong in Germany.
The past conservative governments have slowed down renewables unnecessarily. But one of the biggest successes of the world destruction lobby is to make people believe the energy transition was hard. Don’t focus too much on the little things. Look at the big picture: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&legendItems=01
Hard coal and lignite have a share of 35.3 percent in German power production (compared to 35.2% from renewables, 11.7% from nuclear and 12.8% from natural gas in 2018).
As of five years ago they were also heavily relying on renewables according to your source.
That economic loss isn’t affecting the people it needs to affect for there to be real change. That’s the problem.
Privatize the Profits. Socialize the losses. It is known.
EVs are just a drop in the bucket. Most of the greenhouse gasses come from factories and industrial use
transportation accounts for 1/3 of emissions. as that demand transfers from oil to the electric grid, we’ll need a lot more renewable-only capacity
Transitioning away from cars entirely is far cheaper and more viable than transitioning to EVs. Fuck cars
We have all this car infrastructure already. Unless the plan is to somehow replace that all with light rail in the next ten years, EVs are a reasonable solution we can roll out on a shorter timeline.
aye, fuck cars
That’s ok, they’ll just raise prices and “rightsize” to keep the shareholders happy.
Oh, is that all?
It’s not costing the companies that are causing it anything though because the cost is subsidized by the public.
In Econ there’s opportunity cost, I think that’s what companies end up losing, the greater profit they could have made (if they were like a bit less short term oriented).
Sure, but that’s generally ignored by company owners and investors. All companies try to do is to maximize profit for each quarter, this tends to be the singular metric which is completely at odds with any sort of long term planning.
Yeah fair enough. They’re too busy sowing the seeds of their own destruction and can’t see the forest for the trees.
And even if they did, in many cases they’d be legally obliged to ignore it in favor of profits this quarter. At least in the US.
Germany predominantly sources its energy from fossil fuels. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
And in 6 years, we will end coal as the first nation of the industrialized countries. The US is currently planing to phase it out in 16 years. Some other countries do not even have a plan for the next 20 years. What is your point?
i wish we would do a space race to end coal
There are more fossil fuels then just coal though. You could squint and if you were paid to be dishonest you could say that Lignite isn’t coal and therefore in 6 years when Germany is still burning Lignite, they have transitioned away from coal. Additionally they are not planning on transitioning away from Natural Gas at all.
That’s still cheaper than the wealthy paying taxes.
As long as it doesn’t affect profits, nothing will change.
