EU Fossil Fuel Burning for Electricity Fell To Lowest on Record in 2023, Data Shows (theguardian.com) 38
The European Union is stoking its power plants with fewer lumps of coal and barrels of oil and gas than it has ever recorded, data shows. From a report: The 27 member states burned 17% less fossil fuel to make electricity between January and June 2023 than over the same period the year before, a study from the clean energy thinktank Ember found. The EU made 410TWh of electricity from sources that release planet-heating gases, which analysts say is the lowest level since 2015 -- the first year for which they have monthly data -- and "very likely" since 2000.
The drop in fossil fuel generation was driven by a fall in demand for electricity, as well as some growth in clean power, the study found. "We're glad to see fossil fuels down, but in the long-term it is not going to be sustainable to rely on the fall in demand to do this," said Matt Ewen, a data analyst at Ember and author of the report. "We have to be replacing this energy rather than just expecting it to go away and not be used." To try to stop the planet heating, the EU has promised to cut greenhouse gas pollution by at least 55% from 1990 levels by the end of the decade, and hit net zero emissions by 2050. To get there, it will probably have to use less energy but more electricity than it does today, as more people heat homes and drive cars with electricity instead of fossil fuels.
The drop in fossil fuel generation was driven by a fall in demand for electricity, as well as some growth in clean power, the study found. "We're glad to see fossil fuels down, but in the long-term it is not going to be sustainable to rely on the fall in demand to do this," said Matt Ewen, a data analyst at Ember and author of the report. "We have to be replacing this energy rather than just expecting it to go away and not be used." To try to stop the planet heating, the EU has promised to cut greenhouse gas pollution by at least 55% from 1990 levels by the end of the decade, and hit net zero emissions by 2050. To get there, it will probably have to use less energy but more electricity than it does today, as more people heat homes and drive cars with electricity instead of fossil fuels.
Indeed (Score:3, Insightful)
Putin deserves a lot of thanks for having ramped up the Greenification of the EU massively.
Bullocks (Score:1, Troll)
Putin deserves a lot of thanks for having ramped up the Greenification of the EU massively.
Bullocks.
When the Nord Stream pipeline was destroyed (Sept 27) everyone was predicting mass death from freezing across Germany, but the subsequent winter was unseasonably mild. Something like 40 degrees F (22 C) higher temperatures than expected for the season, for which many people remarked that this single fact averted a massive humanitarian disaster and gave Germany a year to find alternative sources of heat.
The fall in demand was entirely due to unseasonably warm weather, weather this mild is not expect
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I’m surprised his checks clear.
Re:Bullocks (Score:5, Insightful)
Single fact averted a massive humanitarian disaster and gave Germany a year to find alternative sources of heat.
That was exaggerated. Germans would have had their first winter where they would be cold inside, but not freezing to death; because
1. German homes have excellent insulation;
2. Germany would have halted its industry to preserve the gas for house heating;
3. Germany could have changed the law to allow to decrease the heating temperature in the houses.
Decreasing from currently 18 C to e.g. 13 C would make it fresh like grandma's house in the countryside who only had a chimney in the centre of the house and the sleeping rooms you'd be quite cold in the morning.
They would sleep with a warming water bottle and a wool sleeping hat, or with a (low power) heating bed cover like grandma. It's not deadly.
I know because I don't live in Germany, my current apartment is very poorly insulated and I commonly have 13 C (55 F) in winter inside my sleeping room. When I was young and broke I'd leave temperature decrease down to 10 C (50 F) inside (snow outside) until connecting gas heating.
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Does nobody here remember waking up on a winter morning to see the delicate tracing of frost on the inside of your bedroom window?
OK, I'll admit it's at least 10 years since I saw that myself - mostly because I no longer live in a flat where my bed is right next to the window. Now I have to get up and put my specs on to see the frost.
I do have central heating. Every year I turn it on for a couple of days to check that everything is still working. H
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Does nobody here remember waking up on a winter morning to see the delicate tracing of frost on the inside of your bedroom window?
OK, I'll admit it's at least 10 years since I saw that myself - mostly because I no longer live in a flat where my bed is right next to the window. Now I have to get up and put my specs on to see the frost.
I do have central heating. Every year I turn it on for a couple of days to check that everything is still working. Haven't turned it on otherwise since I moved here.
The thing is, that central heating is a relatively new thing. A lot of people, even in the US, will have memories of having to rug up because they couldn't keep the heating source running 24/7. Europe, being an early adopter tended to keep that attitude and that keeping the heating on 24 hours a day is considered wasteful. Most houses will turn their heating down or off for the night/early morning hours, roughly from 22:00 to 6:00 because during this time most people are in bed and it's a lot cheaper to jus
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When energy for heating is in short supply, there's loads of ways we can adapt to get by. Maybe we won't live as effortlessly luxuriously as before but it's not that
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Since when is Germany the EU? And how is the EU to blame for the actions of Putin?
Re:Bullocks (Score:4, Informative)
"Entirely?" Germany's total energy consumption has been in a steady downward trend for 15 years
https://www.cleanenergywire.or... [cleanenergywire.org]
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Germany replaced nuclear with renewables.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Gas has been replacing coal mostly.
Also it's "bollocks".
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False. The amount of gas burning the EU has reduced is less than the increase accounted for by the added carbon intensity LNG has over CNG. By all accounts gas consumption has reduced by about 17% while doubling the actual emissions from the gas it now does burn.
Make no mistake, the EU is burning less today, but emitting more. LNG is not a 1-to-1 substitute for Russian pipeline gas in terms of carbon emissions.
global oil consumption at highest level ever (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/econ... [lemonde.fr]
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Nothing that oil is also used for things other than generating energy ...
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Nothing that oil is also used for things other than generating energy ...
Yeah, oil is also used to scare the gullible ones.
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How clever of you to see how foolish every scientist of the past half-century has been, and how poorly-calibrated all the thermometers on Earth are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Wikipedia is a known woke source, so I don't trust them when it comes to anything ever so slightly political. And this is more than slightly political. So Wikipedia is out. I was regularly contributing to Wikipedia but I stopped doing so over their blatant partisanship.
Woke Wikipedia I [nationalreview.com]
Woke Wikipedia II [nypost.com]
Furthermore, not all scientists agree. Judiith Curry, Richard Lindzen and Bjorn Lomborg are scientists who don't agree. The infamous "98% consensus" was a politically driven hoax. There is no current field
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But I have to wonder why you're using numbers in your comment, since numbers are a well-known woke leftist librul hippie commie propaganda tool. Scientists can't prove that numbers exist, so clearly the only reality is press releases by oil companies and Vladimir Putin.
People like you are kind of NPCs in the world, aren't you? Just little weirdos willing to lie about anything and eve
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Actually no, numbers are usually on the side of the people on the right, like in the case of "97%" hoax. And Wikipedia is no conspiracy, it's quite ordinary and unremarkable leftist cesspool, much less prominent than Disney, Anheuscher Busch or Target. There is nothing special about Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales and the gang are not super villains, they are cowards, afraid of the woke backlash. After all, that is what one of the Wikipedia founders has confirmed. Larry Sanger probably knows a thing or two about Wik
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We will correct our math and thermometers accordingly, and stop reporting on the climate disaster deaths you've caused since they never happened. In fact, those people never lived.
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Personal attacks and no arguments. You are being a good member of your cult. However, your leftie antics makes the conversation dull and uninteresting. It's not me who is redefining science, it's you. You are trying to debate me using personal attacks and by treating an extremely fluid area of science (climatology) as a doctrine of a cult. Non believers are "denying science". That didn't work so well with Covid and is unlikely to work with the climate science. Dr. Judith Curry, a very well qualified scienti
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The EU doesn't count burning wood as fossil fuel though.
Total energy usage in the EU increased by 6% last year. The amount of wood burned as fuel in the EU has risen from 10% to 22%. So of the "17% decrease" - which is minimal, 12% of that has been replaced by wood (clearcutting hardwood forests in Norway/Denmark etc) and another 7% has been replaced by lignite coal and other soft/brown coals.
In 2021, EU greenhouse gas emissions increased by roughly 5% despite its supposed decline in use of fossil fuels and
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We're talking, like this article does, since the start of the war in Russia. Multi-decade trend in Europe has been to lower emissions, much less so than the US though but the last 2 years it has bucked that trend and increased again.
Re:global oil consumption at highest level ever (Score:5, Insightful)
Wood technically isn't a fossil fuel though. It's not made from the bodies of ancient animals that have been processed by heat and time in the earth.
Wood is also renewable - you cut down a tree, you plant a tree, and 5-10 years you have a tree you can burn. Manage your forest right and you have a never ending supply and the carbon you emit gets absorbed into the tree which then is burned creating the carbon cycle for it.
There used to be gigantic protests over "save the forests" - as in stop cutting down trees to make paper. That pretty much died out over 20 years ago because the forests kept getting replanted after taking the trees for paper, and it's become a cycle.
I wouldn't call it great, but wood's still better than fossil fuels as you're not extracting carbon from the earth and putting it into the air. You're just using the carbon in the air and fixing it into wood and then emitting it back out in the air again.
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A tree isn't ready in 5-10 years. Even a fast growing pine, like say, a Christmas tree, is 6-10 years old by harvest and given this fits in most people's houses, you can see that the carbon balance isn't the same when you cut a 100-300 year old tree and then replant one.
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Wood technically isn't a fossil fuel though. It's not made from the bodies of ancient animals that have been processed by heat and time in the earth.
Wood is also renewable - you cut down a tree, you plant a tree, and 5-10 years you have a tree you can burn. Manage your forest right and you have a never ending supply and the carbon you emit gets absorbed into the tree which then is burned creating the carbon cycle for it.
There used to be gigantic protests over "save the forests" - as in stop cutting down trees to make paper. That pretty much died out over 20 years ago because the forests kept getting replanted after taking the trees for paper, and it's become a cycle.
I wouldn't call it great, but wood's still better than fossil fuels as you're not extracting carbon from the earth and putting it into the air. You're just using the carbon in the air and fixing it into wood and then emitting it back out in the air again.
Large swaths of forests are still being cut down in developing countries for materials or food products. However if you want to change that, the best way to do it is supporting sustainable forestry and agriculture. Demand won't go away, the best way to deal with it is to meet it sustainably.
And your conclusion is (Score:2)
Yet, global oil demand has surged to it's highest level ever - despite all advances in renewables.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/econ... [lemonde.fr]
So... what conclusions can you draw from this, and what actions do these conclusions imply?
Could it be that parts of the world *other* than the West will have an outsized impact on climate change? And should your efforts to reduce carbon be focused on the Western nations or those other parts of the world?
Show us the logic. Assume that you have a finite amount of time, effort, and money to spend combating climate change.
Where do you focus your efforts *first*?
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The EU and US can't pull Russian oil from the market without a complete market collapse. So they instituted a price cap, Russian oil can't be traded for more than ~$60/barrel which is slightly lower than the $70-75/barrel benchmark. This meant that now suddenly third world markets (China, India, Africa) had cheaper access to oil, so Russia is shipping even more oil than they ever did to make up for the $15/barrel discount and the other countries are gobbling it up to either ship on towards EU at a markup of
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The EU and US can't pull Russian oil from the market without a complete market collapse. So they instituted a price cap, Russian oil can't be traded for more than ~$60/barrel which is slightly lower than the $70-75/barrel benchmark. This meant that now suddenly third world markets (China, India, Africa) had cheaper access to oil, so Russia is shipping even more oil than they ever did to make up for the $15/barrel discount and the other countries are gobbling it up to either ship on towards EU at a markup of over $20-25/barrel or use it themselves to fuel their economy.
It's a simple economics game, if you can't move product, you lower the price a bit and suddenly you can move lots of product. This does mean now that more countries are even more dependent on Russian oil and since Russia has the market captured, it is even charging over the $60 price cap. Hence why Saudi's are cutting oil production, because the export market to Asia and Africa is pretty much dead to them, all they can do is sell to the EU and others that are close enough it still makes financial sense to ship.
Time to lower the cap then.
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Burisma Holdings also holds controlling interests in the currently Russian captured and Kazakh oil market, hence why the current US administration doesn't want Ukraine to progress back into certain regions and why the supposed military aid (the tanks and planes etc) didn't make it and the counter-offensive stalled. War profiteers (both the Bidens and the Putins) don't want this conflict to end, it's far too profitable.
Re:global oil consumption at highest level ever (Score:5, Informative)
Very little oil is used for generating electricity, most of it is burned as transportation fuel. The EU is transitioning away from oil as fast as they can, and oil consumption there peaked in 2005.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/... [europa.eu]
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Per capita oil consumption has been falling since 2013. Oil use is now growing slower than population growth.
Carbon 0 (Score:2)
We must eliminate all carbon-emitting fuels. We must expand nuclear and green energy production. If we don't the human species will not survive. Billions will die prematurely. That's one way to solve the problem of atmospheric heat stroke.
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Why must we expand nuclear? And why would humanity not survive if we don't? To me, it appears it will now be cheaper to get off fossil fuels without building any new nuclear. New nuclear construction is just too expensive, and renewable and storage costs are falling too rapidly. The experience rate for utility scale solar has accelerated in the last decade, now faster than the traditional 20% per doubling cost decline PV had been experiencing before.
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Why must we expand nuclear?
Because math.
Renewable energy takes more land, materials, water, and labor for the same energy as nuclear fission while being less reliable and producing more CO2.
New nuclear construction is just too expensive, and renewable and storage costs are falling too rapidly.
That is a matter of politics, not due to anything related to physics, technology, or economics.
We can ride this fantasy of renewable energy being less expensive for only so long, at some point reality will catch up with us. The material needed, like steel and concrete, will drive up costs for renewable energy. Because nuclear fission requires le