In the late 1800s, when steam ships were replacing sailing cargo ships, one of the last roles for the sailing ships was to carry coal around the world to supply ports where steamships wanted to go. A clean technology was essential to enable the growth of a dirty technology. And even today, fossil fuels aren’t magically just everywhere. A gigantic *** 40% *** of global shipping is just moving fossil fuels. So eliminating fossil fuel also drastically cuts global shipping emissions. #climate#ships
@helenczerski The Greek island of Crete is a good example for this: some old oil power plants are now replaced by two submarine cables to the Greek main land (and of course wind and solar). It will drastically reduce maritime traffic of oil tankers.
@helenczerski
Another curiosity about shipping: immigration to North America was heavily promoted by shipping companies that hauled wood, pelts, etc from Turtle Island to Europe and saw a profit in carrying people back across rather than returning empty.
@helenczerski The situation has reversed today: "dirty" technology is essential for enabling the growth of a "clean" technology. Fossil fuels are needed to mine, refine and ship minerals and components necessary for renewables.
One could also question how "clean" these technologies really are. Even the sailing ships required chopping down forests, cultivating flax or cotton and mining metals. Renewables today also depend heavily on the whole industrial system that is far from "clean".
@helenczerski That is an interesting point, and it's not just shipping. Digging/pumping and refining fossil fuels requires more energy still. As reserves dry up we have to use more energy-intensive methods to dig deeper and refine a more diluted resource. Overall, the energy returns compared with energy we put in diminish.
@helenczerski It’s time the world live, act and work smarter. We can’t continue to take from the planet and not be good Stuart’s. Science and commercialism need to come to some sort of agreement.
@helenczerski
That's an interesting bit of history that I had never heard before!
40% is a huge fraction of global shipping, but global shipping is only 2% of global emissions. We really need to focus on green electricity generation, which is 28% of global emissions. https://rhg.com/research/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2021/
@helenczerski I think it's important to note as well, the power it takes to unload those ships. The Port Authority in the sate I live in is one of the top consumers of electricity in the entire state (guess how the state generates that power?). There are many ports that still use fossil fuels to operate all of their cranes. I am near one that mostly uses electricity though, which is a (small) step in the right direction.
@helenczerski but some of this oil, gas and coal will be used as chemical feedstocks, so the graphic is completely invalid. WE MUST BURN MORE OIL!!!!!!
I've read before that almost all of the fuel that space rockets need is in order to generate enough thrust to get the rocket fuel itself into space. As @helenczerski points out, a similar principle applies to fossil fuels used for cargo shipping.
@helenczerski The transportation costs of fossil fuels is one of those things which makes fossil fuel synthesis so interesting. Turn a surplus of solar/wind power into methane by sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere. Burning it later results in net zero carbon emissions, but also, you can produce methane at the point of consumption instead of having to lossily and leakily transport it. https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2022/07/24/terraform-industries-whitepaper/ @else
@helenczerski The problem is, renewables alone aren't a viable replacement for fossil fuel energy production. That leaves either a hybrid approach (slow transition to renewables) or phasing out fossil fuel power plants for nuclear plants. The first one doesn't work because the added capacity from renewables just primes greater energy consumption and then nobody bothers to shut down the fossil fuel plants. The second doesn't work because NuCuLaR WaIsT FuKuShImA WARGARBLE and it's one of the very few issues where it's possible to pander to both environmentalists AND the oil companies at the same time.
One considers that you need 99% less uranium to run a power plant than you do to run a coal or natural gas-fueled powerplant, and that literally just leaves oil for those few nations that are still transitioning to electric vehicles (which they also can't actually do either without going nuclear).
TLDR: we either learn to split atoms and deal with the small amount of fuel and waste, or keep burning dinosaurs and (continue to not) deal with the HUGE amounts of fuel and waste that involves. But again: nuCuLaR WaIsT FuKuShImA WARGARBLE remains factor...
This explains a lot of the pushback on shifting to clean energy from fossil fuels that is not coming directly from the fossil fuel industry. If a shift to the 100% clean energy means a 40% cut to global shipping business I would expect that business to fight the shift wherever possible. It also underscores that we not only need to create replacements for direct fossil fuel jobs but also these indirect jobs.
@helenczerski It would be interesting to see Africa take up solar panels to use to generate hydrogen from the sea. That hydrogen could then be shipped in tankers powered by... Hydrogen... To the developed world to be used to power cars etc.
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