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Re:The Saudis Are Lying About Their Oil Production? by zaroth on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @04:55PM (#21064524)
More seriously? I’m not sure it’s a reasonable position to claim that renewables and battery tech are not being “seriously” worked on.

Just looking at solar and battery manufacturing growth, on the order of $100 billion / year is being invested annually in these technologies. I think it’s very reasonable to conclude that doubling the investment would not nearly double the rate of advances, because all the top experts are already fully employed and fully funded.

Re:The Saudis Are Lying About Their Oil Production? by BlueTemplar on Monday October 07, 2019 @10:26AM (#21181198)
"World's top banks pour $1.9T into fossil fuel financing since 2015"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21180826

So that's ~$380 G$/y for "just" the "top banks".

Re:The Saudis Are Lying About Their Oil Production? by BlueTemplar on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @02:20AM (#21068189)
Hmm, how does this compare with money invested in fossil fuels ?
Re:The Saudis Are Lying About Their Oil Production? by zaroth on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @11:18PM (#21077847)
As a percentage of the current market size, the R&D for batteries and renewables is probably an order of magnitude greater than R&D in fossil fuels.

From a public investment perspective, the trend is that fossil fuel R&D is shrinking, and renewables investment is increasing or steady. Renewables public investment was first higher than fossil fuels in 1998, and has been higher than fossil fuel public investment 9 out of the last 10 years. [1]

[1] - https://www.iea.org/statistics/rdd/

Re:The Saudis Are Lying About Their Oil Production? by BlueTemplar on Thursday September 26, 2019 @05:27AM (#21079443)
But 20 G$ isn't 100 G$... And that's just for the IEA countries, if you aren't counting the big fossil fuel players like Russia and OPEC on one hand and also China on the other - what is even the point of these numbers ?

And I see that the biggest US tight oil firms had a deficit of nearly 7 G$ for 2018, so I'd assume that their development costs (which are the majority of their costs due to the very high depletion rate) are even higher - so where does yours "order of magnitude greater" comes from ?

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-shale-finances/cash-flow...