Humans have caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates

What nobody talks about is there’s not enough oil and natural gas left to miss 2C by much. At current consumption rates we run out of both in ~50-60 years. Coal isn’t competitive with renewables and as soon as we stop pumping hydrocarbons the associated influx of Methane also stops. So we’re almost guaranteed to miss 2.5C of global warming, and stopping at 2C is likely.

So congratulations humanity, all that money spent on R&D instead of directly cutting emissions without any solid alternatives actually worked!

US CO2 emissions in 2007 peaked at 6,016 million metric tons before consistently falling since down to 4,807 in 2023.

Per capita numbers are even better, but everyone assumes its from imports seemingly ignoring the massive reduction in coal use and vastly improved efficiency of just about everything. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1049662/fossil-us-carbon...

At current prices. As prices go up new sources of fuel become economical and the cycle continues. Not to mention that methane emissions from agriculture are a significant contributor as well (30% from cows) so just removing hydrocarbons doesn’t solve that problem.

It seems like an unrealistic bet that hydrocarbon-based emissions drop to 0 just because you think we’ll run out of fuel in 50 years. Does that mean airplanes stop flying in 50 years? No one is making these bets in the marketplace alongside you for good reason. And remember, consumption grows quite a bit year over year so you’re looking at a much shorter time frame if your prediction were to be true.

2050 is only 26 years away, though.

I just got back from a off-grid island here in New Zealand - 20 years ago, generators were everywhere and as soon as it got dark you'd hear nothing but the buzzing of running them all around you. Now there is solar everywhere and it's completely silent.

We use oil because it’s cheap not because it’s the only possible solution. It’s not that we’re going to run out 100% year X, it’s that as economies of scale end priced inherently spike. Gas stations can scale down to 1940’s levels by having most of them close, but giant fuel refineries, pipelines, etc need scale to be worth the maintenance.

That was true before recent developments in exploitation and conversion. Canada had proven oil reserves of 5 billion barrels in 2002, but by 2005 it had proven reserves of 180 billion barrels because the Alberta oil sands became viable. South America now has far more oil than the Middle East - it's oil that wasn't considered economically recoverable until about a decade ago. Over recent years, we have discovered far more oil and gas than we've burned. Coal doesn't have much of a future as an energy source for electricity generation, but it might have a future as a feedstock for synthetic liquid fuels.

We're probably going to leave most of those hydrocarbons in the ground, but only because of the huge progress that has been made in renewable energy technologies. If that progress stalls or there are big breakthroughs in hydrocarbon technology, then there's still a real risk of substantially exceeding 2C. We have reason to be optimistic, but not complacent.

We can make anything up. Why not stick to the facts, as we know them, and reasonable projections?

There is no reasonable projection for any fuel other than fossil fuel to maintain the sort of flying we do now.

Unless you are deeply involved in battery technology, your prediction seems overly pessimistic.

Not suggesting the article below is in any way conclusive but just one of many that turn up on a basic google search.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/passenger-electric-planes-be...

It's not working, so it's fairy tale. Is there evidence that it's really an effective plan to save lives and money caused by climate change?

> People were never going to accept, nor IMO should they have, a massive reduction in their living standards.

The first is just a claim - people accept hardship all the time for one purpose or another (such as wars). Also, what is so sacrosanct about their living standards?

Also, the liability of climate change is already on the balance sheet - and the massive reduction is coming, due to climate change. Just think of all the dead people, all the people who lose their property, all the poverty.

It's like saying, 'I won't suffer a massive reduction in my spending in order to pay my mortgage.' You already have the liability; that sentence doesn't mean anything.

The question is, given that reality, what will you do? Make up fairy tales about fairy godparents giving you magic wands to solve you problem?

I don't even think a massive reduction is necessary, though. Just stop driving, and your carbon footprint shrinks massively. I bike everywhere, and I don't consider it a sacrifice at all. Obviously, there still needs to be commensurate increases in funding for public transit to match the decrease in driving, but most people would still save money by not having to buy gas anymore. Really, I think that living an eco-friendly life would mean improving life, not worsening it.

Batteries are fine for ocean shipping on a ~50 year timescale, and that basically covers burning fossil fuels. Using it as a feedstock for plastics etc is a non issue for climate change.

"People farming" aren't expending fuel for personal use (save that which they are consuming for personal use) they're expending fuel on behalf of some {X} number of people who consume the produce.

We have farmers here (I kid you not) who live in a rural town centre and ride electric bikes to their work place, 4 thousand acre farms, upon which they operate giant machines for turning, seeding, and harvesting (and others for fire control, etc).

Personal fossil fuel usage should be reduced, it's just wasteful and counter productive, production fossil fuel usage needs to be made moe and more efficient an replaced to whatever degree possible (Agbots are a booming field).

Oil in place comes to a much larger number, but we’re past the point where this oil is a net positive from an energy perspective. It’s a carbon intensive battery not a fuel source.

It's viable to live on a farm and rarely leave it, many do and many enjoy that lifestyle.

It's viable to have shopping and personal items shipped in with larger supply deliveries and fold that personal usage into the neccessary usage for production.

FWiW I grew up on a cattle station in one of the more remote parts of the planet, no proper roads, TV, shops, etc and somehow still managed to get a good education and write a few million SLOC of mapping, geophysics, and asset managent code in the 80's and 90's.

So yes - I do think its viable ( QED ).

Look we’ve got larger form factor EV’s, but suggesting electric bikes as a viable alternative when it’s clearly a niche case for rural commuters is pointless.

Well duh, that's an edge case. Obviously I don't expect literally every single person to give up driving, but most people who use this website are white collar workers, or at least people who don't need to haul things on a regular basis.

> when it’s clearly a niche case

The entire oh but rural people is your niche case that you bought up.

For more than a decade now countries such as the US, Australia, etc have been more urban than rural. The overwhelming vast bulk of people live within urban areas.

And still some twit will counter a comment suggesting more people should walk, use lighter more efficient vehicles, etc. with a niche but what about farmers type parry.

That's weak.

Efficient solutions for the future should pay attention to distributions of people, trips, resources, etc.

Sad weak counters focus on "but some are different from the many therefore .."

One size doesn't fit all and there will be exceptions.

Activities such as tilling of fields, planting of crops, and shipment of products cause carbon dioxide emissions. Agriculture-related emissions of carbon dioxide account for around 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

That is a fantasy

The cost of doing that at a scle approaching what we use now rules it out except for niche uses

> One size doesn't fit all and there will be exceptions.

There’s ”some” and then there’s 1 in 1,000 people, no that’s an edge case not a solution.

Hell, actually living on a farm is even more efficient, which is why it’s what the overwhelming majority of farmers do. You only brought it up because you found it interesting not because it was actually relevant to the discussion.

PS: Also, at least in the US if someone is living in a town that’s considered an urban area. The threshold for town is higher than the qualifications for urban area.

Okay? Last I checked, it's not 1988 anymore.

It’s an inherent tradeoff, where significant emissions was required to lift them out of extreme poverty. It’s one thing to suggest developing economies shouldn’t have industrialized, but it’s unconscionable to accept the suffering that would have resulted.

> Who is going to pay the equivalent of 50$/gallon when they can use an EV?

If we're going to be arguing for peak oil, let's argue for peak lithium then too. EVs are going to get more and more expensive too as we have to extract from more expensive lithium stores.

> We use oil because it’s cheap not because it’s the only possible solution

For some things sure. Aviation fuel and ship fuel notably don't have any real replacements on the horizon.

From your sibling comment:

> The cost premium of biofuels for air travel aren’t that high and the scale can meet demand for long distance flights. Fertilizer from nitrogen in the atmosphere is again cost competitive relative to that kind of increase. Batteries are fine for ocean shipping on a ~50 year timescale, and that basically covers burning fossil fuels. Using it as a feedstock for plastics etc is a non issue for climate change.

I think you're mistaken here. Biofuels for air travel are much more complex than just pricing. You've got regulatory approvals, cost of retrofitting existing engines / figuring out how to make them drop-in without needing petroleum, etc. If you're thinking that batteries are fine for ocean shipping, I'd like a sample of what you're taking because the energy demands of massive ship containers dwarf the capabilities of batteries. That's why they're talking hydrogen fuel cells and nuclear.

> It’s not that we’re going to run out 100% year X, it’s that as economies of scale end priced inherently spike. Gas stations can scale down to 1940’s levels by having most of them close, but giant fuel refineries, pipelines, etc need scale to be worth the maintenance.

Conversely, there's a huge incentive to have oil be competitively priced and avoid a total collapse of that segment. That's why you see huge resistance politically - there's no real plan put forward for how we transition to a clean energy economy for the people currently participating in the oil economy.

500 miles is nothing. The median flight distance for a commercial flight is ~2000 miles. And this is a concept plane. Certification of a plane is ~5-9 years so let's assume on the longer side since electric planes aren't really a thing. So 20% of your time budget has been spent building a replacement for a puddle jumper. There's a lot of them but the real fuel consumption happens by the large commercial jets.

Oil is consumed, lithium isn’t. There’s plenty of lithium to electrify the world multiple times, but it’s just an element so you can literally recycle it for billions of years.

> You've got regulatory approvals, cost of retrofitting existing engines / figuring out how to make them drop-in without needing petroleum, etc

0.2% of global aviation fuel is already biofuels, the regulatory processes is already involved and we’re talking a 50+ year timeframe here there’s plenty of options without retrofitting existing aircraft.

As to boats, weight and volume are a non issue so they scale just fine into the 24,000 TEU behemoths. Upfront costs are prohibitively expensive though operating costs are presumably. That said, there’s many options, ships are one of the few cases where hydrogen is a realistic possibility.

Recycling lithium is typically more expensive than extracting it through mining. Recycling companies claim a recovery rate of 95-98% so certainly lithium is lost and that's ignoring that smaller batteries often don't even end up in the recycling stream. But the important bit is the cost - if it's more expensive than mining then the recovery isn't economical then either there's a government subsidy or the lithium ends up diluted in the trash stream. You'd have a point about nickle or cobalt because they're particularly valuable but lithium is not so it is effectively being consumed.

> 0.2% of global aviation fuel is already biofuels

But it's not even clear that biofuels reduce CO2 due to production, processing & transport as well as land clearing for scaling it up. [1] suggests that biofuels can actually end up emitting more CO2 than the fossil fuels they replace (for example here's an earlier study [2]). And that's ignoring the substantial scaling challenges that SAF faces on the production side. I hope it works out but the lesson with huge risky bets is that many don't pan out and all we have now is large risky bets left which makes me pessimistic we'll succeed just because we run out of oil (assuming we even do which again seems highly unlikely to me because that's not how economics works).

[1] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-should-we-measure-co2-em...

[2] https://theconversation.com/biofuels-turn-out-to-be-a-climat...

As to lithium being consumed, we’re talking hundreds to thousands of years from now before mining becomes an issue, current economic issues are largely meaningless. Unlike oil, these are the early days of the lithium economy. Making a big battery pile somewhere is perfectly reasonable form of recycling.

The incentives for a government subsidies for lithium recycling are strategic. Reducing dependence on foreign imports is inherently useful, but a stockpile and battery pile serves the same basic need.

As noted in the MIT article:

> Since most natural ecosystems absorb and store carbon, while farmland in active use tends to produce it, this land use change can create more climate-warming pollution

Basically the land is changed from a carbon store to a carbon producer for biomass meaning you're no longer sequestering the carbon which is where you get extra carbon in the ecosystem even if you're not having any carbon in the transportation & production.

There’s a few forests that have stayed that way for millions of years. Go to Daintree in Australia, dig down a deep as roots go, count up the carbon in a given acre, and divide by a 180 million and you get essentially 0/year as the long term sequestration rate.

Transitions between forests and farmland basically store or release a fixed quantity per acre though it’s a slow process for deep root systems. In that context sure you can look at farming as releasing carbon because of the recent expansion of farming, but the numbers aren’t a fixed constant.