1) renewable energy is only a part of climate action, it's not sufficient - renewable energy being cheap alone doesn't help a bit if you don't keep fossil fuel in the ground

2) not technology aligned societies incentive systems, but politics which a) incentivized producing electricity by renewable methods and punishing electricity produced by fossil fuels, which again encouraged research which in return made renewables mostly cheaper than fossil fuels - and we are lucky that the physics aligned with that.

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epistasis 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Renewable energy and replacing carbon emitting industrial chemistry with carbon neutral processes are the sum entirely of climate action.

There might be a tiny bit of nuclear built, but we don't have the capability to build enough to make a dent in the time scale we need to, and nuclear is far more expensive than solar plus batteries, so the profit motive means solar wind and batteries will win.

The people that built the technology aligned industrial policy and government incentives to allow them to create the technology, true. But it was technology action that is solving climate change.

There are two groups of people opposed to clean energy, one right wing and one left wing, and they were both extremely wrong about the technology, and the path of technology has been crystal clear for decades.

It was obvious in the 2000s, based on learning rates, that batteries solar and wind were improving at rates that would solve our climate crisis. The only question I had was if nuclear could play a part, and Vogtle, Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville, and Hinkley proved decisively that nuclear would not be a big player.

We don't need carbon taxes, those turned out to misalign incentives in weird ways (not all industries are equally sensitive to carbon prices, so applying equal taxes is far less than economically ideal for motivationchanges). Tax credits and guaranteed small purchases turned out to be extremely effective and efficient.

	▲	belorn 6 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Solar and batteries are great for any region where solar production align with electricity consumption and where the battery solves the issue of night time. Wind is great to reduce fossil consumption to around 50% in regions where the conditions of solar is not great. After 50% the cost increase significantly as overproduction competes with existing investments and prices drops below zero (see Denmark as an example). Batteries is also prohibitively expensive to cover months of poor production, which is why regions that heavily invest into wind also construct thermal power plants for equal capacity that burn carbon rich fuel for electricity and heat (see all of central/northern Europe). Regions with colder climates also has inverse consumption behavior than warmer climates, which mean that solar produce the least when consumption is highest. This is where nuclear can be economical viable, but only if we discontinue building more thermal power plants that burn cheap fuel. EU voting to have natural gas defined as "green" demonstrate this perfectly well, as well as the complete lack of any political party advocating to building battery as the solution for low wind production.
	▲	tcfhgj 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> But it was technology action that is solving climate change. what even is this? > We don't need carbon taxes, yes we need them, otherwise we will keep emitting CO2 as always > We don't need carbon taxes, those turned out to misalign incentives in weird ways (not all industries are equally sensitive to carbon prices, so applying equal taxes is far less than economically ideal for motivationchanges). so? the ones which are most sensitive (usually the ones with the highest footprint) will transition first, others will follow later with increasing cost of emitting co2 - not including difficulty which will rebalance the equation > Tax credits and guaranteed small purchases turned out to be extremely effective and efficient. what tax credits and what guaranteed small purchases? and how do they prevent greenhouse gas emissions? and why do we want them if technology already provides the incentives (your claim)?