The UK's CfDs (Contracts for Difference) pay schemes like wind farms a fixed price for their output, allowing projects to go out to market saying look based on our plans we're going to make so-and-so-many MWh of electricity, the UK promises to pay so-and-so-much £££ for that electricity, therefore lend us (much less) £££ to build it and we'll pay you a nice return. This means investors only need to care about whether your wind farm proposal actually makes electricity, not guess what the price of that electricity will be when it's sold.

Normally these schemes cost the government money. Say electricity is selling for £50 per MWh, and your wind farm's CfD specifies £80 per MWh, the government hands over £30 per MWh extra to make up the difference.

But, when prices sky rocket the government actually gets paid the difference. When electricity sells for £200 per MWh and your wind farm's CfD said £80 per MWh, you only get £80 per MWh as promised, the other £120 per MWh goes into the general fund to buy missiles or feed orphans or whatever.

> we can expect high electricity prices to coincide more and more with times when renewables are producing very little power and low prices with times when they're producing lots of it.

Yes to some extent that's true, and we should expect demand management to play a big role in reducing the impact on ordinary households. Alec Watson (Technology Connections) did a video about how his home is set (in summer) to cool over night when power is cheap, so he wakes up in a cold but not yet uncomfortably so house, and during the day the cooling is off, so it gets warmer but unless the day is especially miserable it still isn't actually hot inside until the evening, at which point electricity is cheaper again and it begins cooling back down. This way he gets air-conditioning, in a climate where it's not entirely essential but certainly desirable, yet doesn't pay peak prices for it like his neighbours. Imagine if more people did that!

The UK could use a lot more storage. What it has is mostly black start capacity re-purposed as normal storage, but it is a bit short on non-picturesque mountains to modify. It also, of course, decided it didn't want to be part of the EU, where there's an entire continent of renewable energy sources to trade with, several hours difference in dawn time and considerable variation in weather - the UK is still connected to their grid with several Gigawatts of ties but now trades as an outsider.

Most homes in the colder areas of the US heat with gas because the cost per joule of gas is a lot less than for the equivalent electricity. But a lot of homes can supply most their heat with electricity, and would if the economics made sense. And even more would build that capability if gas was 2x the cost per joule as electricity.

A modern home boiler is very efficient, because what you wanted was heat, which is exactly what you get by burning gas. The gas turbine at a power station has to do the same conversion (burn gas to make heat) but then also convert the heat into electricity, and that's before transport loss.

In the ideal world, the choice is between "Burn gas in your home" (bad, accelerates climate change) and "Use renewable electricity" (good, although maybe expensive depending on policy decisions). But for many people today there is no choice, resistive electrical heating would still burn gas in a power station and just cost them a lot more.

Heat pumps tilt the scales, if they're practical for you, it really is possible that a heat pump running on electricity that's actually produced by burning gas works out cheaper and more environmentally friendly than just burning the gas yourself. And of course a heat pump powered by wind is entirely practical and potentially quite cheap.

A gas-driven heat pump could be even more efficient; that is, it could deliver > 100% of the thermal energy content of the fuel to your home (in the form of low grade heat). This is a consequence of avoiding, at least partially, the large second law loss in a typical furnace where very hot flame transfers heat to rather cool air. Any time you see a large entropy generating process like that in a system it's an opportunity for improvement.

Not a economist either, but those are not exclusive.

Also, this is not the case here, but ever lowering demands triggers structural prices increase at some point, due do scale cost reduction not working anymore, but you won't see investments in production either.

But what's more surprising is that even in per-capita terms, global coal usage has increased since 1990.

However if you change your baseline year from 1990 to 2012, then global coal usage in absolute terms has declined, and will continue to decline over the long term even if there is a bump from the 2020 depressed levels (2020 is a terrible year to benchmark against).

Not true, coal usage[1]: 1990 -> 237Mt, 2016 -> 149Mt

As a tangent, I was shocked that Poland CO2 emission per capita is lower than one of Norway [2]: Norway 9.4t (2018), Poland 8.8t (2018)

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coal/poland-coal/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Renewable energies are cheap (they are basically "free"). Deploying them is expensive. But you only have to subsidize the cost of deployment and after that it's cheaper for everyone.

It's the same thing with insulation : it's expensive, but once it's done correctly, you can basically heat your entire house with only the sun (if it's there) or really low energy consumption.

We're just missing the political will. The transition is possible and would create jobs for the decades to come.

That just sounds like a half-truth, otherwise people wouldn't always be so impassioned about subsidising renewable. They'd jest buy land and build honking great renewable plants.

Now the situation may have changed in the last decade or so, because the growth in renewables is very real. But it takes no political will to deploy cheap energy. There would be queues of bankers trying to invest if they thought they could undercut market producers and make good returns. Every greedy person on the planet (so somewhere in the region of 8 billion of them) would be happy to get in on the deal.

At least in my country, AFAIK regulation explicitly allows for something like that: there's a net metering modality in which a group of consumers (for instance, a condominium) can split the credits from the net metering of a shared solar power plant. It's meant for precisely that scenario (power panels on the roof of an apartment building, each apartment has its own independent meter).

E.g. in Germany one of the chancellor candidates was state MP and personally & illegally forced expansion of coal strip mining while enacting new rules making wind power essentially impossible in his state.

Meaningful action does not require us freezing in our houses, not yet.

But you have a point, which is exactly why survival of our societies should not be a choice on the consumerist menu. The government, the justice system, the corporate world and finally the citizen should lead in the struggle to decarbonize the world, not the consumer.

That always sounds like an excuse for doing nothing to me.

Blaming the big bad corporations whilst we continue to consume their crap is a cop out. We've been doing that for decades now and nothing much has changed.

The thing is, it isn't. People aren't islands. Our societies, our economies, are structured in a way that make it really hard to keep your impact on the environment low. It's hard to give up on a car in a car-oriented town or country. It's hard to give up on plastic where every single thing you buy has some in it. It's hard to give up on meat when it's the most cost-effective form of nutrition you have available. And then, when you add up all those sacrifices - the result is not living a good life. It's mortification on principle. It's not something you can reasonably expect everyone to follow.

(At a risk of bringing religion into the topic - Jesus has said, "If you want to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me."[0], and yet almost no Christian in history ever actually did that. No, these words are used as comfort for those already poor - an explanation, not a plan for life. Environmental self-sacrifice, which doesn't have a mainstream belief system backing it, can hardly be expected to fare better.)

Add to that, most people have no fucking clue what is or isn't destroying the planet. Hell, I consider myself somewhat broadly educated, striving for evidence-based, rational thinking, and I still admit I only have vague idea. There are some obvious things one can do, like "don't fly if you can avoid it", "don't use a car[1] if you can avoid it". Then there are plenty of wrong ideas, like "always unplug your chargers" (negligible gain for significant "I've made an effort" cost) or "use reusable bags instead of single-use plastic ones" (actually plastic bags come way ahead environmentally). Most other changes popular articles list tend to be hard to evaluate - they may or may not help, depending on various second-order effects and proper accounting of impact across product/behavior lifetime, which is often nearly impossible to do.

And all of that - all of that - relies on almost everyone making those same sacrifices simultaneously[2], so the effect is noticeable, all while people not making the sacrifice are visibly better off[3]. Meanwhile, corporations and governments are the ones making the most impact[4], and importantly, they hold the biggest levers. A single law, or a single contract change, can make much more impact than thousands or millions of people abandoning everything and moving to live in the woods as hunter-gatherers.

The way I see it, trying to convince everyone to make personal sacrifices is a fool's errand, and insisting on this as a solution is sabotaging our future. This is a systemic problem, we need systemic solutions.

--

[0] - Matthew 19:21

[1] - I say "use", not "own", because if you're just using taxis to do the same trips that you would with a car, you're hardly achieving anything.

[2] - And continuously, as the market will keep adapting to people's preferences, offering new goods and services ruining the planet.

[3] - I'll just defer to "Meditations on Moloch" on that point. It's an obligatory intro reading for any discussion about any of the world problems - because underneath, they're all just aspect of the same issues with human coordination. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.

[4] - As a random example, try stacking up household water or energy use, or greenhouse emissions, against business and industrial ones.

Yet my grandparents led a low impact lifestyle without even thinking about it.

This is more of the same. Excuses.

Just listen to the rhetoric that Shell uses: this is literally what they say.

And, as a consumer, one should also make climate friendly choices, but it's not the most important thing and it should not distract us from where the real difference is made.

We decide what happens, collectively. We vote in governments, and we choose what products to buy. It needs to start with citizens because we're democratic.

The problem is that people's public speech doesn't match their behaviour. Carbon offsets for flights have been available for years. Despite ~75% of people saying "Climate Change is the biggest threat we face" [0] only 1-3% of passengers actually choose the carbon offset [1].

In startups, we know that people lie in surveys, and we need to measure their actual behaviour in order to correctly assess their actual feelings/intentions. From this, we can conclude that most people profess a public belief in climate change, but privately don't care and aren't willing to do anything about it. Companies are taking their cue from this: virtue-signal about changing the world, but don't actually do anything. Governments are likewise taking their cue from it: lots of conferences, lots of talk, no action.

We need citizens to stop driving in petrol-driven cars to marches where they protest about carbon emissions. To stop heating their homes with coal. To stop eating fish completely. To buy the carbon offsets, even if they're crap and not very effective. The mismatch between our public speech and our private behaviour is what's causing everyone else to do the same. It has to start with us, because if it doesn't it'll be ignored.

This attitude of "someone else has to take the first step" is what's causing our inaction. Stop blaming others for your footprint, and do something about it yourself.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/09/1...

[1] https://aviationbenefits.org/media/167226/fact-sheet_11_volu...

These problems are why we invented governments and central regulation. At the very least we need to internalize the cost of pollution.

There's a difference between us as a citizen, and as a consumer. The pandemic has shown perfectly that leaving everything up to 'individual freedom' will result in a mess.

> Stop blaming others for your footprint

Did you know the very idea of a footprint is invented by BP as a mechanism to shift responsibility and place blame on the consumer?

Personally I spend a large part of my income on reducing my footprint by the way, but I have no illusions that this is where the required change will come from. In the country where I live, merely being registered as a citizen, paying taxes and everything that is legally required, will have am unsustainable footprint - before I even begin to take a breath I have consumed my share.

What we need to do is hold the actors who are responsible accountable and make a mass collective change that is non-optional.

Pushing "just personal action" for climate issues is a known delay tactic.

What I don't understand, when I assume good faith, is why people disregard calls for political action as lazy or waiting for "someone else to take the first step"; while also have certain actors pouring millions on lobbying and campaigns to downplay the effects of global warming, to understate the viability of green energies and lastly, on pushing the idea of consumer responsibility.