US and 19 Other Countries Agree To Stop Funding Fossil Fuel Projects Abroad (gizmodo.com) 62
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo, written by climate reporter Brian Kahn: In a major announcement at United Nations climate talks on Thursday, 20 countries said they would stop funding fossil fuel development abroad and instead plow money into clean energy. The group of countries includes finance heavy-hitters like the U.S., UK, and Canada as well as smaller players like Mali and Costa Rica. An analysis by Oil Change International indicates that the 20 countries plus four other investment institutions who signed on could shift $15 billion annually from funding fossil fuels to clean energy projects. "The signatories of today's statement are doing what's most logical in a climate emergency: stop adding fuel to the fire and shift dirty finance to climate action," Laurie van der Burg, the global public finance campaigns co-manager at Oil Change International, said in an emailed statement.
[T]he agreement doesn't pull funding from projects already in the pipeline (climate joke, please laugh). Between 2018 and 2020, Oil Change International also found, the G20 kicked an estimated $188 billion to fossil fuel projects in other countries. That's a lot of very recent extraction happening. The lack of financing abroad also doesn't mean a lack of financing at home. The U.S. and Canada, for example, are major oil and gas producers. Without a plan to wind down production at home, the pledge to end financing for fossil fuels abroad is a bit like promising you won't lend your neighbor money for cigarettes while you keep smoking a pack a day.
Some of the biggest smokers -- errr, fossil fuel funders -- on the block also didn't sign on. Those include Japan, Korea, and China, which are the biggest fossil fuel backers in the G20, according to Oil Change International. Together, they account for more than $29 billion in annual fossil fuel development abroad. That's a major lifeline for fossil fuel developers. We also still need more details on the pledge to end funding, including how exactly the 20 countries and banks define fossil fuel funding. Lastly, the world's private banks and investment firms also need to sign on.
[T]he agreement doesn't pull funding from projects already in the pipeline (climate joke, please laugh). Between 2018 and 2020, Oil Change International also found, the G20 kicked an estimated $188 billion to fossil fuel projects in other countries. That's a lot of very recent extraction happening. The lack of financing abroad also doesn't mean a lack of financing at home. The U.S. and Canada, for example, are major oil and gas producers. Without a plan to wind down production at home, the pledge to end financing for fossil fuels abroad is a bit like promising you won't lend your neighbor money for cigarettes while you keep smoking a pack a day.
Some of the biggest smokers -- errr, fossil fuel funders -- on the block also didn't sign on. Those include Japan, Korea, and China, which are the biggest fossil fuel backers in the G20, according to Oil Change International. Together, they account for more than $29 billion in annual fossil fuel development abroad. That's a major lifeline for fossil fuel developers. We also still need more details on the pledge to end funding, including how exactly the 20 countries and banks define fossil fuel funding. Lastly, the world's private banks and investment firms also need to sign on.
Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
US and 19 Other Countries Agree To Stop Funding Fossil Fuel Projects Abroad
At best, this will last until the next Republican president. Then it's back to that good old anachronism: "The future is coal and oil!!!"
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We have enough domestic fossil fuel projects to back, without going off-shore. It's a simple promise for the US reps to make.
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Same for Canada [wikipedia.org]. If only they had a transition plan to clean energy...
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The US cannot make such promises without an actual treaty ratified by 60+ Senators.
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Why would treaties be involved?
Certainly, they'd be needed if the US Government was making the investment, but we have numerous examples over the last two decades that presidential orders can stifle private investment in foreign enterprises without involving treaties.
But, as pointed out in other comments, those orders can be fleeting. Investing based on presidential orders is not a particularly winning strategy, long-term.
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You don't need the Senate to approve a treaty for the government not giving loans or paying for foreign fossil fuel investment. You just don't give the loans. Unless there is some specific earmark of funds, it's completely discretionary.
And as a point of information, it takes 67 Senators to approve a treaty. It's technically not ratification, but it's really a distinction of language and formal process. Ratification takes place after the Senate formally votes to give their approval (advice and consent,
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We have enough domestic fossil fuel projects to back, without going off-shore. It's a simple promise for the US reps to make.
Exactly. Countries like Russia, Iran and Saudi also could make the same pointless pledge without blinking an eye.
It would be actual news if the US stop funding domestic fossil fuel projects.
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At best, this will last until the next Republican president.
Nobody will invest in a long-term project based on a change of administration that may change back again in another four years.
Trump promised to bring back coal. During his term, coal use continued its steady decline.
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In defense of the former alleged president, it isn't like he recalled every saying such a thing.
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It doesn't even matter. No China, no progress. If China keeps pouring billions of yuan into building coal and natural gas plants throughout the world, and signing contracts with those countries to buy Chinese coal and gas, a few countries in the west saying they won't makes no difference - the market slack will just be picked up by China.
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What this blockage against oil funding is really code for, is fuck all the poor countries, we want to make sure they do not have access to power to grow and achieve the success the first world countries have. .
Basically this. If billions of poor people are allowed to have reliable power, a consumer lifestyle, and personal transportation some day (the nerve of them to even think it), it will make privileged children in first world countries whine that they have no future. And that will be reinforced by western media, where poor people get very little coverage because that is not what we are supposed to feel guilty about.
Help the poor countries in particular! (Score:5, Insightful)
What this blockage against oil funding is really code for, is fuck all the poor countries, we want to make sure they do not have access to power to grow and achieve the success the first world countries have.
Most third-world countries don't have good electrical distribution infrastructure, so they would do better with distributed power generation. Many of them do have abundant solar power, so foreign aid in the form of grants to install solar arrays would be a good choice.
Wait until you see what the long term side effects of banning oil and coal production are on fertilizer and plastics, gonna get interesting....
The materials cost is an absolutely trivial part of the cost of making plastic, and the cost of plastic itself it an almost trivial part of the cost of goods made from plastic, so the "long term" side effects are going to be indistinguishable from zero.
Two further points: (1) if the use of fossil carbon for fuel is decreased, the cost of oil will go down, because the world will have an enormous oversupply. Plastic will get cheaper. (But not by much, because the oil cost is not a major part of the cost of making plastic).
(2) use of oil for plastic does not contribute to the greenhouse effect. There are other reasons to not want to flood the world with waste plastic, of course, but banning use of oil for plastic is not a part of reduction of fossil fuel use for reducing the greenhouse effect.
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The materials cost is an absolutely trivial part of the cost of making plastic, and the cost of plastic itself it an almost trivial part of the cost of goods made from plastic, so the "long term" side effects are going to be indistinguishable from zero.
Mostly wrong. Raw materials are the major cost driver in many consumer products. Just look how the price of granulates fluctuates in sync with oil and gas prices. Then consider that plastic granulate will determine roughly half the price for a ballpoint pen made in low cost countries like India. Everything but "absolutely trivial".
Check your numbers [Re:Help the poor countries...] (Score:2)
The materials cost is an absolutely trivial part of the cost of making plastic, and the cost of plastic itself it an almost trivial part of the cost of goods made from plastic, so the "long term" side effects are going to be indistinguishable from zero.
Mostly wrong. Raw materials are the major cost driver in many consumer products. Just look how the price of granulates fluctuates in sync with oil and gas prices. Then consider that plastic granulate will determine roughly half the price for a ballpoint pen made in low cost countries like India. Everything but "absolutely trivial".
Checking the web, price of ballpoint pens vary, but looks like if you buy 36, they cost about 20 cents each. A cheap ballpoint pen contains about 5 grams of plastic. Googling the price of plastic pellets, I see they cost $0.80-$1.50/ kilogram, so the cost of the plastic used in the pen is between half a cent to 3/4 of a cent per pen
I stand by my statement. The price of the plastic is a trivial portion of the price of the product manufactured.
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A couple of years ago I went on a five week tour of Southern Africa. We went through at least six countries (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Swaziland (now Eswatini, as they were concerned people might confuse it with Switzerland), Namibia, I kinda lost track). I was looking out for them, but didn’t see any solar panels anywhere.
I found this incredible, and very sad. I saw housing varying from huge mansions (with barbed wire, electric fences, and dogs), to literal mud huts.
No solar panels on roofs, no
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Wow, this is absolute bonkers. The coal dependence of relatively rich South Africa is appalling and wrong as well. Meanwhile, cloudy and rainy Germany has solar roofs in every street and in larger installations
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If solar is so awesome and works so great then you don't need any grants or subsidies because it will make financial sense to go solar. The problem with solar is they are only good for about 15-25 years and no one has figured out a good way to recycle used solar panels. You have the same exact problem with wind power. You have to replace the blades and motors every 10-15 years and there is no good way to recycle them. Everyone who invests in solar and wind power has said without the subsidies they don't mak
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Everyone who invests in solar and wind power has said without the subsidies they don't make any financial sense at all.
"Everybody" - bullshit. Subsidies in the UK are now negative. That is to say, wind farms are agreeing to long term prices (contracts for difference) which are notably below the standard cost of electricity. These are on wind farms with a 30-60 year lifespan.
The thing is that this is a technical and innovative market so costs have massively reduced in all renewable energy [wikipedia.org] since when your anti-renewable briefing material was written ten years ago. Photovoltaic solar, a few years ago a specialist ultra-exp
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> If solar is so awesome and works so great then you don't need any grants or subsidies because it will make financial sense to go solar.
Yes, because it'll be cheaper than carbon energy sources, right? Because coal, oil and natural gas aren't subsidized, so the playing field is level, right?
Totally not the case. What you pay for (before use tax or value-added tax and commodity or energy tax, most of which just go into non-earmarked public coffers) doesn't represent the cost, because it ignores all the ne
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All I'm reading out of your comment is either outdated information from 5 years ago, or justification for removing the subsidy from fossil fuels. Because that's what we're talking about here - government funding of fossil-fuel energy generation.
So, let's stop subsidizing damage and let solutions compete.
Also, the reason why there isn't a lot of recycling of wind turbine blades is because there hasn't been a whole lot of wind turbine blades to recycle - the first modern wind farms were only being built ~25
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Perhaps the lack of recycling is due to the fact that upwards 99% of all the solar panels ever made are still in service? For instance: about 65% of China's cumulative PV capacity was installed in just the past five years [ref [wikipedia.org]]. In the United States, only about 0.1-0.2% of its cumulative installed capacity is older than 20 years.[ref [wikipedia.org]]
For many years, panels have been wa [google.com]
Subsidies for fossil fuels [Re:Help the poor...] (Score:3)
If solar is so awesome and works so great then you don't need any grants or subsidies because it will make financial sense to go solar.
You do realize that the article we are discussing [gizmodo.com] is about ending government grants and subsidies for fossil fuels, right?
So, to rephrase: "If fossil fuels are so awesome and works so great then you don't need any grants or subsidies because it will make financial sense to use fossil fuels."
The problem with solar is they are only good for about 15-25 years and no one has figured out a good way to recycle used solar panels.
False and false. Modern solar panels come with warranties of 80% performance at 25 years, but that's not the lifetime, that's just how long the warranty is for. And, recycling wouldn't be terribly hard, but nobody is
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> (2) use of oil for plastic does not contribute to the greenhouse effect. There are other reasons to not want to flood the world with waste plastic
Waste is a huge problem indeed, as the poorer the place, the more likely that plastic waste ends up in rivers and inevitably, the oceans.
Still, plastic processing does emit greenhouse gases, I think not just the energy needs but also the processing steps of the petrochemicals.
Also, plastic does break down, and depending on type, it can be a very fast breakdow
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Forgot to add: even the extraction and transport of crude oil is greenhouse gas emitting, for example, lots of pilot lights, other "waste" gases burnt, leaky pipelines, occasional sunk tankers etc. Plastic incurs a lot of negative externalia and within that, the sources for greenhouse gas emissions are numerous from exploration and extraction through refinery to decomposing or burning it in a back yard or licensed incinerator
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When I was learning about chemistry in school, I was taught that many useful chemicals such as plastics and medicines come from oil as a starting point. My immediate thought was "why are we burning this useful stuff?". That'd like cutting down a tree whose wood could make furniture and houses and guitars, and just chopping it up and putting it on the fire.
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Petroleum is produced for the energy it provides. But only the light fractions can be burned. The heavier fractions are essentially waste material that we have found uses for, like plastic and other organic chemicals, and asphalt for paving roads.
It's like using logs to build houses and twigs for the fire.
Once we stop producing petroleum for energy we will have to find some other source for organic chemical feedstocks, or just learn to live without plastics, asphalt paving, etc.
"Cheap plastic" will soon be
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If every country meets all the agreed and announced targets, including the net zero dates, we are looking at a 1.9C rise.
To hit 1.5C by the end of the century we actually need to remove a lot of greenhouse gases from the environment. Well below net zero.
So stuff like this is needed. Of course we need to make sure we offer real alternatives. We need to do that anyway or the poorer countries will just burn coal and worse anyway, even without our investment. The good news is that the money is still there to be
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I'm not sure what you are getting at here, but investing in developing nations so that they have alternatives to deforestation, and in fact can make a living reforesting, is going to be key to getting to 1.5C.
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> As always, we will "save the earth" by burying a lot of black and brown people too make it happen.
Subsaharan Africa, India, Indonesia etc. will collectively add 2-3bn people over the next few decades. Unfortunately there's already a way too high ratio of loss of life, and loss of health, and it'll likely get worse, due to overpopulation and climate change. While it's a horrible metric, the ratio of people in these countries who die isn't going to make much of a dent in the population explosion, this is
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The Guardian claimed $11 million a minute fossil fuel subsidies. Divert one day's worth and you could put reactors in every poor country signed up to the NPT.
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You couldn't. You can't just airdrop a reactor in and hook it up to the grid.
For a start a lot of places don't even have a grid, so for them smaller more local generation or a massive infrastructure programme is the place to start.
Even once that is sorted, to operate a reactor they need skilled people and a nuclear regulator, neither of which are trivial to set up. Even if you agree to supply the fuel and take the waste away for them, it will still need some short term on-site storage.
Renewables are the onl
Re: Fuck the poor countries in particular! (Score:2)
Not terminating fossil fuel exploitation is going to fuck all the countries. Poor first yes, but the rest soon after.
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A very large fraction of those poor countries are incredibly rich—in insolation. Pour that money into solar and power transmission. Eg. Sub-Aaharan Africa and South Asia already grown to billions of people, and expected to add a couple of more billion, many in poverty. An emission that'd be necessary for them to get out of poverty and reach their likely aspirations via legacy carbon tech, concrete, ICE car proliferation etc. is so large that the resulting extra global warming would threaten the liveli
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Why? If western nations can build coal power stations, they can build nuclear reactors. More power and no fossil fuel use. Assuming that poor countries can only ever use coal is in contradiction to the NPT rules which say any country in compliance can have nuclear reactors.
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You are probably not wrong, but there is an argument to be made that green energy and it's continuous falling costs have dropped below the price of fossil fuel generated energy, and with increased scale can continue to fall.
Shifting billions of dollars out of carbon and into clean will only accelerate this trend.
Now, this says nothing about the engineering aspects of the problem - base-load generation, energy storage for dealing with variable production, etc. But that's what we have engineers for.
Quit (Score:2)
Treaties. (Score:2)
Treaties are good. Good intentions.
Nothing wrong with that.
But we've got a LOT of bad intentions built into the beating heart of our institutions, and I don't know how much sway these treaties have over the courts and legislature as we've been shaping things recently.
Still - good on them for at least setting a better starting tone.
But most of the real job is going to be for upcoming generations to start actually start taking power to change in the functional running of things.
And we've got a LOT of people
This is why these summits are a joke .... (Score:3)
Like another Slashdot poster commented, many of the major players in oil production worldwide didn't even attend this or agree to any of the terms. If you're a poor nation and its government finds it benefits the nation as a whole to fund oil exploration or production in some way? Now you may be demanding they stop while neighboring nations benefit from increased oil demand created via those supply restrictions.
At the end of the day, I don't see why ANY government funding or subsidies should go to oil production at this stage of the game? The companies involved in fossil fuels are hugely profitable on their own and can afford to do their own R&D. But I say this from an American perspective (1st. world nation). I can't speak for other places who may be sitting on significant fossil fuel resources they just need some govt. assistance to be able to tap into, and who may not be positioned well to make money other ways. (I'm sure some have done the math and realize they'll get severely short-changed if they just let an existing big oil company like BP or Shell come in and do it for them.)
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They're so profitable they need $11 million a minute in subsidies. Cut the subsidies and give the countries nuclear power stations and a rewired grid. The total spent will still be less than spent right now.
Perfect timing (Score:1)
Global shortage and low home heating and power generation fuel stocks ... so let's cut funding.
Dumbasses.
Now's a good time to remind John Kerry that liberal Massachusetts gets most of its natural gas for home heating by LNG tankers from the Caribbean. Ya know...abroad.
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Yeah let's go beg OPEC to pump more oil in between our virtue-signalling episodes. ffs.
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Re:Perfect timing (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, yeah, Saudi Arabia's a real party mecca.
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The stupid thing is (Score:2)
Market forces will move a commodity from one place to another and this process will happen even if there is no pipeline. If the oil doesn't move in a pipeline, it will move on a truck, guess which one generates more CO2?
Tony Seba says renewables are inevitable (Score:4, Informative)
In any discussion like this one, we need to consider if the government's proposals are even possible. I think they might be.
I used to be convinced that renewable energy couldn't possibly solve all our energy needs, that we would always need some nuclear or something when conditions are poor for renewables. (Like, the shortest day of winter when the sun is behind clouds and the wind doesn't happen to be blowing.) But I have discovered Tony Seba's analysis of our energy future and he says I was wrong.
For over a decade, Tony Seba has been saying that everyone is going to transition to renewable energy out of simple self-interest. He plotted cost curves and saw that solar, wind, and batteries would all become inexpensive enough during this decade (2020 to 2030) that it would be cheaper to buy and install renewable power than to operate (do maintenance on, and buy fuel for) existing fossil fuel plants.
He further found that renewables could provide 100% of our power needs as long as they are sized to provide enough energy during the worst time of the year, and the all the other times of the year they will provide extra energy at extremely low marginal cost. So on sunny summer days the solar cells will be powering things like a factory to make jet fuel out of carbon dioxide, or bitcoin mining rigs, or whatever.
So far, his predictions from ten years ago have been proven out. Lithium battery prices not only dropped as much as he said, but actually dropped a bit further than he said.
And oh, by the way, he found that electric car robotaxis will probably make a bunch of people stop bothering to own a car; and producing proteins in bulk will totally disrupt dairy and meat production. (Dairy farming is already marginally profitable, and losing 1/3 of their customers won't help.)
This video is an hour long but IMHO very well worth your time.
P.S. This feels to me like "Psychohistory" from Issac Asimov's Foundation series. Tony Seba looked at data and math, plotted the curves, and made deductions about how future history will go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj96nxtHdTU [youtube.com]
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Anyone can be right in some of their predictions some of the time. The fact that one borne out does not say much about the rest. How many other predictions did he make 10 years ago and how many did he get right?
Not to mention he brings up solar and coal, as if one were replacing the other. However, he completely neglected to talk about natural gas, which is on an upward trend and what's really replacing coal.
He found that electric car robotaxis will probably make a bunch of people stop bothering to own a car
Define "a bunch". People in cities will probably use robotaxis, but most of them don't own a car tod
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But I have discovered Tony Seba's analysis of our energy future and he says I was wrong.
He further found that renewables could provide 100% of our power needs as long as they are sized to provide enough energy during the worst time of the year, and the all the other times of the year they will provide extra energy at extremely low marginal cost. So on sunny summer days the solar cells will be powering things like a factory to make jet fuel out of carbon dioxide, or bitcoin mining rigs, or whatever.
Yeah.... no.... He was wrong... Maybe not on pricing, battery improvements, or the trend towards green power, but about the basic assumption that we will get to the point where we will not need a base load, like nuclear power, etc. Maybe 100 years from now, we'll eventually find a solution, but not in the next 20 to 30 years.
You can oversize a solar farm in the Northeast as much as you want to, but when a major winter storm hits, you need a power source that can power industry, millions of homes, etc.
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there are ways of storing energy such as moving water to a higher level and then releasing it to generate power
He's predicting that storage batteries will be used to store electricity. Solar, wind, and battery (SWB) costs are all trending downward and he showed a graph with an estimated curve.
As stated in the video, his team plotted many tradeoffs between solar, wind, and battery, finding some solutions with more storage and some with more solar and so on. He said they had three case studies: California,
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I just watched the relevant portion of the video again, and Tony Seba said that according to their case studies you only need 2 to 4 days of storage to make SWB work as the only form of power generation. He said Texas only needs 2 days... my guess is New England needs 4 days.
Tesla sells solar plus Powerwall battery for homes, and a few Powerwalls can provide multiple days of storage for a house. For grid scale you would be looking at Tesla Megapack [tesla.com] or similar.
According to this page [iso-ne.com] the highest recorded el
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At least they're going to stop investing in projects to destroy other countries ecologically.
Hahaha (Score:3)
Hahaha. But Biden is asking Russia and OPEC to pump more oil. The rubber is hitting the road. Rubber? Sorry, petroleum is used to make it, from now on we use renewable wooden wheels.