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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

> “Electricity is just 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions,” said Gates. “There is no substitute for how the industrial economy runs today.”

That’s why...

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Electricity may be only around 25% (it's actually a little more than that for the US and almost half globally), but cheap renewables don't just affect the share currently from electricity, they also (by way of emerging use of electric vehicles) attack the share that comes from transportation, which together with electricity is over half in the US and close to 70% globally.

US: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Global: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-co2-emissi...

Don't forget space heating also.

There's a lot of things that can be electrified, that currently aren't.

Funny thing, space heating is probably the last thing you want electrified, instead investing in heat (re)capture and building design.

Air conditioning including plain old ventilation is the hard one to tackle and is already electrified.

By heat recapture do you mean heat pumps and insulation?

I (personally) include heat pumps in the heating category, and yes most houses are probably under insulated. Insulation can lower the air con load also.

I think the point is that electric transport is not limited by the cost of electricity, so it will largely happen or not happen independent of whether power generation is low carbon. Yes, conditional on transport being electrified, reducing the carbon cost of electricity increases in importance. But the latter is not enough on its own.

What percent of that transport is planes and boats?

With abundant clean electricity, running planes on synthetic fuels (that only release what had been captured during production) would be a no-brainer. The only reason ships are not massively tapping into wind is because the refinery waste they burn as fuel is so cheap thanks to our enormous use of higher grade crude oil derivatives.

You just wrapped my mind around. Of course a sailing super tanker would be hard to manage, but why on earth don’t we use solar + wind conversion to propel them, that should be obvious.

Originally, a main reason for cargo ships to abandon sails was more efficient dock logistics. Construction of cargo sail did not stop until well after the more speed sensitive military and passenger applications had converted to steam engines, even to steam turbines. Late cargo sail like the giant American schooners got by with surprisingly small crews (though it could be argued that they were too thinly crewed for reliable operation).

Modern concepts like https://skysails.info/ hardly interfere with deck access at all.

The difference is energy density. You can propel a large ship much faster on fossil fuels. This is why every Navy rapidly switched to coal and then oil and then to nuclear. For cargo, economies of scale in shipbuilding want big fast ships. And international commerce likes things to be delivered quickly. Sure you can go back to sails and solar, but it will be many orders of magnitude less powerful than fossil fuel or nuclear powered shipping.

That's a bit stupid, really. We can substitute many GG producing activities with carbon free electricity.

Some examples:

- Heat pumps for space and water heating, instead of gas, heating oil etc. Cooking on an induction stovetop instead of gas.

- Electric transport (cars, buses, trains.... maybe hyperloops to substitute for airplanes)

- Electric heating for furnaces, kilns etc

- Production of industrial chemicals via electric processes, eg hydrogen (hence ammonia, methanol etc) by electrolysis instead of steam methane reforming

etc. etc. With electricity, you can even reform CO2 into useful products (eg methanol, synthetic hydrocarbons, dimethyl ether), replacing current CO2 producing processes with ones that utilise CO2. (And if you are interested in supporting this, I would like to hear from you as this is my current area of work).

> Cooking on an induction stovetop instead of gas.

Congratulations, you have banned Chinese food. I’m reasonably confident most professional chefs and a lot of amateurs would be very, very angry if you tried to ban cooking with gas. People aren’t actually willing to make sacrifices to their own personal quality of life to fight climate change as we’ve seen many times with carbon taxes or with the yellow vest movement in France.

I'd say that resturant-grade induction stovetops perform as good as or even outperform gas.

Actually induction woks are amazing. You can get them as hot as gas. Here's a really bad Youtube video showing some guys testing one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUuu6nRT29Y

They aren't cheap though. I seriously want one :-) But your general point is well taken.

> with carbon taxes or with the yellow vest movement in France.

I believe the main problem with yellow vests was that they balanced raised diesel tax by eliminating wealth tax. Had they instead reduced income tax in the lowest bracket for example, people might have been much less angry.

As far as I'm aware, Chinese food is cooked in pans, not over open flame.

But, you've banned the kebab shop instead. They will have to use the slower heated stone frying. ;)

In addition to what others have said, you could still use biogas or synthetic derivatives when you really have to. It becomes more expensive and people do not like that but I would not call it a ban.

Not really. Induction boils water faster most times - there are multiple videos showing this, my link is just one of them. I'm pretty sure you can get quick and very hot with the induction tops. If you specialise in wok-type food, i'm pretty sure they will be customised to be even better.

https://youtu.be/h45dzeugIZw

My understanding is the preference for gas is more about being able to instantly adjust the heat and see it rather than the raw heat output. I also haven't used an induction top in a long time so maybe this is better now.

Being able to instantly adjust heat works great for induction devices; you can go from 0 to 100% and back to 0 pretty much immediately, the only limit is the heat inertia of your pan/pot/wok/whatever.

Being able to see that heat is different - yes, gas flame is more visible and intuitive.

Thanks for clarifying, didn't know it was so instant.

Well, not sure anyone would actually mind working with induction woks, but if you really need "natural gas", you can generate that using electricity as well. And not only can you do that, it's actually a thing that's being done right now, as a method of storing surplus renewable energy: You simply use it to generate methane and feed that into the existing natural gas distribution infrastructure for storage, and as a side effect you displace some fossil fuel.

>Congratulations, you have banned Chinese food.

No, I have not. Stop being silly.

I had an interesting conversation with my wife's friend's son who is a buyer of natural gas for a large electronics company in Japan. He told me that they generate all their electricity on site with gas. The main reason is that they need gas for heating furnaces and things, they need the waste heat from the generators and they need the electricity. While they could replace quite a lot of the things they have with electric alternatives, it basically means rebuilding the entire factory from scratch.

It made be realise that it's going to be a bit of a long haul for getting industry away from greenhouse gas producing energy. BTW, this also largely explains why Japan's auto makers didn't have a massive problem when the nuclear power plants shut down after the Fukushima disaster. It's a bit depressing to think about it...

What about less dense social poles ? it seems history liked to have big poles for jobs or industries that everybody would migrate to, especially since we have cars and highways .. Maybe a more organic + local mindset..

Huge swathes of the world are currently transitioning from fossil fuel powered transport to electric. This statement seems to ignore future trends that are already upon us.

The longest range Teslas have 100 KWh batteries in them. Our house of 6 people uses about 8-10 KWh per day.

It's not just cars too - every transportation system is in some state of transitioning now, even boats and planes (though very early stages there). All of the trains in the Netherlands are powered by wind energy.

Civilization is electrifying, so cheap renewables are only becoming more effective at mitigating CO2 emissions.

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