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Oil industry has sought to block state backing for green tech since 1960s
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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We weren’t ready for most of this technology until recently. I’d love to see more spending on nuclear power and focusing on safer reactors. Coal/gas need to be phased out except for cooking.
Maybe we could have been ready sooner if oil companies hadn't systematically obstructed funding and research, while spreading disinformation about the harms of fossil fuels, for many decades.
I don’t know what happened to solar water heating, but that was a thing in the 1970s, at least in warm climates
Solar panels existed. Some of what has brought their prices down, is just volume: more production, more installs, better setup, google planet. Even if we couldn’t have hurried some of the scientific and technical progress, they could have reached an inflection point sooner.
Wind turbines were there and ready. Again, scaling up, both 8n volume and size, has been critical to get them where they are today. That part could have happened sooner.
Anything having to do with transit and 15 minute cities, could have been triggered by the oil shocks of the 70s, and could have helped rebuild cities from the poverty and crime then.
We could have started electrifying everything - the writing was on the wall. My parents built an all-electric with time of use metering rural house in the 1970s on the promise of nuclear power. Especially for rural houses, how did we backslide into propane and oil? If we had gone with time of use metering, we could easily be ahead of where we are now, with more intelligent use of energy.
Even if you just count vehicle efficiency - that exception for light trucks has surely been an environmental catastrophe. Surely we had the technology to word that regulation better
There are still companies that do it. And it seems like they are getting better. Or at least that's what I have heard.
Note: not an endorsement of the company that I linked just using it as an example.
Technology takes time to develop. I’m not saying they are not faultless but we are now reaching the spot where we can really do something. We had electric cars in the past. They were garbage. The tech wasn’t there yet. It’s still not there but it’s close enough now.
You know what helps speed up development? State backing.
In France, we've had electric trains since the 60s, diesel train were phased out except for some lines with exceptional difficulty.
We also had electric streetcars in big, medium and small cities before ww2, they were taken out to make more place for... ICE cars.
Public transportation tech has been ready for a long long time. Cars are the worst way of transportation, saying tech was not ready because electric cars were "garbage" does not make a lot of sense.
France also had most of its grid on nuclear power decades ago.
And as far as I know. They’ve run it successfully.
I want more nuclear power but everyone is afraid we will have a Chernobyl event. Nuclear power is highly regulated and I’m OK with that. I wouldn’t mind even more regulations to keep it safe.
The one issue we refuse to solve is long term storage
From what I've read, and it's been a while), engineers plan for safety, but project managers and other company execs convince clients to take "cost-effective" corner cuts, leading to disaster. Looking at companies like Duke, Fluor, Dominion.
At the end of the day, you have to produce a product that is safe but cost effective. Nobody wants to pay 1per kWh for a safety level that is unmeasurable.
That is why utilities are regulated since they are monopolies. I feel the regulations need to be cleaned up but that’s the goal.
I think fines should be taken from executive pay. Bonuses should also be set to safety and environmental factors.
My point is that it's not cost effective, in human, environmental damages, but the cost of "clean up" alone negates any savings fun* not doing it right from the jump.
Autocorrect but leaving it.
Yes, in the USA, Goodyear Tires and GM (I believe they were the ones leading the initiative) lobbied against trollies and buses and other public transit so they could make more money seeking their products
France is not the United States.
Now you could say cars created the spread in the United States but we are a spread out nation.
Our train system is subpar and the government won’t invest the money to improve it.
Most Americans won’t or can’t give up their cars.
https://www.wanderingfrance.com/blog/articles/182/how-big-is-france
Think of all the government regulations, the subsidies, the trillions of dollars , that went toward making cars such a compelling choice. Surely some of that could have been used for transit, making that a very different decision all along.
We all helped cement cars as the transportation of choice, both by investments and action, and lack of action, partly in response to industry lobbying. We would be in a very different place now, if someone had stepped back to look at the bigger picture
https://kbin.social/m/world@lemmy.world/t/888215/-/comment/5607478
Wind and solar are cheaper and easier to build. The nuclear power should have been built decades ago.
What is needed is an excess of wind and solar, improved international grind connections and hydrogen made during wind/solar spikes.
The rest of it's good, but hydrogen is not a good energy storage solution. It's a nasty thing to try to keep in a tank because of problems like embrittlement.
Hydrogen can be useful as a portable energy source but it's not something you want to try to keep around in bulk. For most applications it's safer to generate hydrogen right before you intend to use it.
Pumped hydro is still the most cost-effective and safe way to store excess energy.
The best way to store hydrogen is to combine it with carbon.
(As a bonus, if you do that then you suddenly don't need a whole bunch of new infrastructure and vehicles to use it!)
Interesting, I wasn't aware of this. How scalable is it? How easy is it to continuously cycle? Has anyone actually tried to build an energy storage system with it?
It's pointless if the hydrogen is initially coming from cracking hydrocarbons in the first place -- and the dirty secret of the hydrogen industry is that it is -- so it doesn't really get used much. Similarly, if you're still allowed to just make gasoline from oil, it can't compete.
It's not a new or experimental thing, though. The Nazis used it in WWII to make liquid fuel from wood gas to overcome petroleum shortages. It would become viable (in peacetime) only if we quit allowing fossil fuels to undercut it on price.
Your rhetoric is decades out of date. We can easily store hydrogen in vast quantity at very low cost. If anything, you are spread an old oil & gas talking point. According to them, nothing except fossil fuels is storable.
Ehm... rhetoric?...
The problem with storing hydrogen is related to the nature of the hydrogen atom being one proton and one electron... I don't see how that could be "out of date"... the relatively free nature of the protons makes them particularly damaging because they can slip into and break up the structure of almost any material you might try to contain them with.
I would be very interested to read a source for this.
Not really. It's funny that you're trying to paint me as a shill for fossil fuels, when the alternative storage system I recommended is (again) pumped hydroelectric, which has nothing to do with fossil fuels.
Modern tanks leak very little. Large underground cavern stores even at very low cost. You are just out of date on your information.
It doesn't matter what you think you are advocating for. Your rhetoric is basically just oil & gas propaganda. At best, you can accept that you were fooled by it.
Lmao your comment and smugness is so ironic
I don't think you understand how embrittlement works, or what the problem is. Define "very little", and over how long of a lifespan?
Well, that's not very reliable for setting up grid storage is it? I mean, you have to have a suitable cavern.
Still waiting on some sources... so far you haven't provided any information, only opinions.
You clearly don't yourself, since tanks are made of carbon fiber. Embrittlement is very alloy dependent too. Choose the right alloy and it is a non-issue.
There are vast quantities of suitable underground caverns. It gives many orders of magnitude more storage capacity than any other idea, including pump hydro (which is significantly more geographically limited).
It's sad that you claim knowledge, but you can't be bothered to google it. There are many studies out there like this one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004223028481
By the way we use oil, and it's by products we weren't ready for that either.
It filled the need just fine. It’s just time to move away from it. There are better solutions out there. When we first started to use gasoline, it was the best solution
For sure and it revolutionized personal mobility, jobs, industry, etc. gasoline was a huge step in our advancement as a society. We’ve just followed it too exclusively and held onto it too long.
1970’s had oil shock and the creation of Amtrak to hold off the collapse of passenger rail. Imagine if instead of listening to industry lobbying to rescue manufacturers, we had used Amtrak to invest in passenger rail. Imagine if we had been building out useful passenger rail since then? The technology existed