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Honestly I kind of have to disagree with your entire premise.

We’re seeing pretty dramatic decreases in emissions across any advanced society that took major regulatory action to decrease emissions. EU emissions in 2023 were 37% lower than in 1990, despite population increases. A good chunk of the early drops were due to fuel substitution, but now increasingly they’re due to the deployment of renewables. In 2024, about 47% of the EU’s total electricity generation for the year came from renewable sources! These are incredible results, especially if you compare them to a decade or two earlier. If you’d told me that in a matter of 15-20 years, the EU’s pro-renewable industrial policy would have achieved these results (say back in the late 2000s) I would have been very surprised. Yet here we are, and the numbers keep jumping every year. So I would not say “regulatory approaches haven’t worked,” I would say “wow, this is one of the most effective regulatory interventions that human beings have ever devised.”

The reason global emissions haven’t dropped is because China’s emissions kept rising during this time. However: now we’re seeing a similar process unfold in China, just at a much larger scale. There the central government is massively subsidizing and encouraging the deployment of renewables. Current estimates are that China’s emissions may have already plateaued and are entering a structural decline. Again, yes, a lot of this is due to technology being available. But the rapid deployment of the tech is a function of strong government intervention.

We are going to reach a point very soon where 90%+ of any modern nation’s energy can be supplied using renewables, nuclear and storage. It’s actually coming very fast. (And that 90% is really only capped by intermittency issues, not because there are major limits on what we can generate.) At that point we’ll be into the very substantial “mop up” phase where we try to work through the remaining high-emissions industries. This will require massive amounts of regulatory intervention, since most of the barriers will be due to the need to replace existing infrastructure on an expedited schedule.

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slashdev 3 days ago | parent [-]

The developing world, including especially China and India are building out massive amounts of coal power still: You can see the data for yourself: https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-coal-plant-t...

It's possible that will turn negative at some point, but I think that would only be through innovation when coal power isn't economically competitive anymore.

> We are going to reach a point very soon where 90%+ of any modern nation’s energy can be supplied using renewables, nuclear and storage. It’s actually coming very fast.

That's exactly my point. We have to get there. Until we do, regulations will just move the consumption around. If it's not Europe it's China, if it's not China it's India, if it's not India it's Africa, etc.

I still think the only we get out of this is make green energy much more economically competitive - the full cost of green energy including the cost of dealing with it's intermittent nature. We're not there yet, and it's a very hard problem to solve, because the more intermittent energy you add to the mix, the more expensive it gets to solve the intermittency.

I don't see regulation ever getting us there, except for those cases where it helps drive the innovation faster. Which comes back to my premise that the only way out is through innovation.

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matthewdgreen 3 days ago | parent [-]

If you look closely at what China is doing, you’ll see that they’re building out a massive fossil-backed renewable grid. The new coal they’re constructing consists of modern dispatchable coal that can be spun up and down quickly to supplement the variability of renewables. They’ve also proposed a scheme of capacity payments [1] to pay coal plants for not generating. This is more or less the same as what Europe and the US have been doing, except we’ve been using natural gas instead of coal (and of course the scale of China’s renewable buildout utterly dwarfs what the West has done.)

The important thing here is that this makes economic sense. Coal is not cheaper than renewables and doesn’t really compete well with them when both are available (especially as the price curve for new renewables keeps dropping) but until storage is vastly more available, fossil backing is pretty much the only way to build out a renewable grid.

My big worry is not that “regulation won’t work” (I think we’ve already pushed ourselves over the economic tipping point where renewables and storage are pretty much inevitable.) My fear is that it will come too late, and that we’ve been much too optimistic about our carbon budgets.

[1] https://www.raponline.org/blog/changing-how-coal-power-plant...

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slashdev 2 days ago | parent [-]

That’s the official narrative out of China, and it’s a hopeful one. It doesn’t fit the data though, at least so far. China is constructing record amounts of coal power and consuming ever increasing quantities of coal. https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...

But even if they manage to turn that around decades from now, the coal will go to India or Africa, it’s not going to stay in the ground until it’s really uneconomical (and even then more likely to be replaced by natural gas than renewables.) Again, some countries may achieve success with regulation in isolation, but what matters is what the whole world does. There I think regulation doesn’t work because we don’t have one government, but instead many competing nations. Tragedy of the commons rules more often than not. This is where we disagree. The data is currently on my side, fossil fuel consumption is at record levels and increasing still. I think your position is this will change at some point in the future, with the help of regulation.

Renewables are way cheaper than coal power in many places, but at the extreme they basically need backing by equal fossil fuel infrastructure as they come to dominate the grid. Because you have to have electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. When you add that to the costs, then they don’t currently win. Fixing that is the innovation that can solve this, which I think we both agree on.

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matthewdgreen 2 days ago | parent [-]

According to the same source (site), it looks like emissions in China have plateaued in Q3 2024 as compared to Q3 2023. So we’re already seeing some effects. https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-no-growth-for-chinas-em...

I agree with you that the coal capacity buildouts are worrying. The best we can hope is that China has just structurally misallocated a bunch of funds, and when it comes time to burn that coal, continued improvements in renewables and storage will make all those plants unprofitable. That’s what’s happening most other places.

	▲	slashdev 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don’t share your optimism, but I admire it. For all our sakes, I hope you’re right.