Jean-Marc Jancovici

This is the best summary of why we're so well headed to a catastrophe. It seems that be definition, you won't accept any reduction of your standard of living. What if there's no way around it? Your standard of living relies on exploiting amounts of energy equivalent to several hundred slaves per person. That amount of energy can't be found in renewable sources only. How much of a slave master am I? https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/energy-and-us/how-much-of-a…

The website of Jean-Marc Jancovici mentionned in the posted wikipedia page is worth a read https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/energy-and-us/how-much-of-a… https://jancovici.com/en/category/energy-transition/long-series/

Jean-Marc Jancovici has IMO the best analysis of energy options when it comes to climate change (his whole website is excellent reading), and he does not think that rail transit can directly substitute for car and truck use with today's population distribution in developed countries: https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/transportation/could-we-rep…

> As of 2022, the total combined energy capacity of electric vehicle (EV) batteries sold in Europe reached approximately 690 GWh, and grows very quickly. Lol, so for context, a single French person is using 2.5GWh/year. One single inhabitant. France is consuming 1.2TWh of electricity per DAY in winter. So the whole electric vehicle fleet in the whole Europe is worth half a day (being generous) of electricity just in France during the time which is the tightest in electricity. That's so low it's not even worth mentioning. And that's the whole Europe compared to a single country, that's not going to make it. > Note: dams are a renewable source. There's also pretty much no new place where you can build one in a developped country as it's an old technology. > You wrote that "solar and wind" can drop "to 5% capacity for weeks at a time", and I ask for the source of this Solar produces most of it's production during 6 months and only gives 3% of the yearly production on each month of January and February. That's the two months where the countries are using the most electricity for context and need the most production. For wind, that happens regularly, even right now as we speak, Germany has a 7% capacity which isn't far. > deployed on whole continent. Guess what? The wind production is synchronized right now, you can check it. That's another kind of strange of being shown the reality right now and denying…

I believe you’re a little confused. > But [nuclear] takes the most time, cost hilarious amounts of money Depending exactly what you mean, this is either very true, or dead wrong. It is true that a single nuke plant costs gigantic amounts of time, money, and resources. But it also deliver significant power, typically 1GW (sometimes a bit less, generally more). Windmills are vastly cheaper, but typical ratings are around 1MW, and that’s a maximum, not an average, and if you need to control energy output you’ll need a buffer (batteries, flywheels, dams…). To replace a single nuke plant, you’ll probably need something like 2000 windmills, and energy storage to match. Or less if you’re okay with temporary power shortages (a harsh but valid political choice). Now which is cheaper? One nuke plant? Or 1-2K windmills? All those windmills will need a lot of concrete, for which we’re destroying quite a few beaches (desert sand does not work unfortunately). You’ll also need quite a bit more rare earth materials to get that thousand dynamos to work. And eventually you’ll need to transport all that in a world without oil (one reason renewable energy is cheap is because transport is still cheap, thanks to oil). > We need technology which is cheap, deployable before it is too late to reduce our emissions and accessible for every country on this planet. Agreed. > if you really care about the environment and are not merely one of those people who blindly recite Michael…

Did you check my links? "Collapse" may have several definitions; generally for a complex society or ecosystem it's a rapid simplification, reduction of exchanges and population. Here is our situation: as you may have heard, every year around August we reach the "Overshoot day". That means that we use more resources (even renewable ones) than the Earth can produce (its carrying capacity), i.e. we're actually "mining" renewables resources such as oceans, soil, forests, etc. That means that the quantity of renewable resources globally available tends to go down while our resource usage still goes up. At some point, our resource usage WILL fall down UNDER the line of globally available renewable resources. The longer we wait, the LOWER we will need to back down. See https://www.sustainable.soltechdesigns.com/over-carry.html for a relatively detailed explanation and real-life examples. Also I don't really get where you're going with your fossil fuels example. We switched from renewables to fossil fuels back in the 18 and 19th centuries because they're so much denser, easier to use and powerful than renewables. They enabled the "great acceleration" by providing almost limitless energy, and doing without them is a tremendous, unprecedented effort. Human history is about getting better energy sources: our ancestors got bigger brains by eating meat (more energy). Then they invented fire (more energy) to make their food more digestible (more energy). Later on they invented…

> I keep seeing justifications like that and it makes me want to puke This kind of justification is _indeed_ a bit cynical and morbid. I suspect it is a way to respond to the sometimes overly emotional argument from nuclear opponents. I don't think it helps having a cool-headed debate on this complicated topic. However, I do think mentionning that all form of electricy productions have risk trade-offs, and illustrating it with the insane number of casualties caused by other sources of energy production is relevant. (Eg: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-ene… But a bit of "tact" is warranted. > First of all: The total number of victims is unknown and it is still rising. Even for Chernobyl. The total number of victims from the direct events (explosion, short term exposure) is largely "known" (although the Soviet numbers might not be trustworthy, if you want to go this direction.) The long-term numbers are of course harder to estimate. Again, it's going to sound morbid; but, to know if it's "still rising", you have to determine if someone who dies from a cancer 34 years after the event died because of the event. I'm in no way qualified to say so. I have to revert to the same method I use when I don't know stuff: I find scientists to trust. In this case, the UN organization that has to investigate such things does not see a massive hidden mortality, as I understand it.…

this is 2013, but so little has changed... https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/societal-choices/what-trans…

How does that add up if he's a proponent of replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power? Won't that get more expensive too? He's a weird one, as he's generally on board with consensus climate change, but he's always had a bee in his bonnet about renewables, making lots of claims that haven't came true. Could we live as today with just renewable energy? (2005) https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/renewables/could-we-live-as…

> GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already, already before year 2000 Only because we delocalised all the industries to Asia, globally co2 = gdp, before and after 2010 https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/GDP-CO2-world-768x443… https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gabe-Scelta-2/publication/3310726…

Pretty messed up : https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/societal-choices/what-trans… 250 to 300 billion euros, which is more than the cost of rebuilding from scratch all the French nuclear power plants, is what Germany has invested from 1996 to 2014 to increase by 22% the fraction of renewable electricity into the gross production of the country (that went from 4% to 27%). For this price tag our neighbors did not decrease their energy imports, did not accelerate the decrease of their CO2 emissions per capita, that remain 80% higher to those of a French, increased the stress on the European grid.

Electricity production with coal. From the top of my head is a two digit number, but I’m currently suffering from the aforementioned jetlag… so let check with that French guy jancovisi. He has a utterly pragmatic approch. https://jancovici.com/en/climate-change/ghgs-and-us/how-do-greenhouse-… See : « CO2 emissions by activity since 1971 » Transports comes third after power, and industrie.

> Soon, the focus will shift from weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, and into, "What can we do with all this cheap energy to make life better?". That's not going to happen. People basically don't understand where energy comes from, or what's entailed with an "energy transition". See this lecture for a good overview: https://jancovici.com/en/video/can-we-save-energy-jobs-and-growth-at-t…

This is not the case, wind is not enough, the production depends on the strength of the wind "In particular the occurrences of wind blowing below à 8 m/s (4 Beaufort, blue line) are far from being negligible, and that winds of 7 Beaufort or over, which are necessary to get the full power of the above wind turbine, blows much less than 50% of the time." https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/renewables/how-many-windmil…

The idea of a link between CO2 and a greenhouse effect was expressed before that, by Claude Pouillet in 1838 (but maybe not published in a paper). sources: https://jancovici.com/changement-climatique/croire-les-scientifiques/d… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect "1838: Claude Pouillet, a French physicist, attributes the natural greenhouse effect to water vapor and carbon dioxide. He concludes that any change in the amount of water vapor, such as CO2, is expected to result in climate change." (google translate). edit: I think it was this paper https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k95017r/f1.image.r=Pouillet,+Cla… but I have not checked (cannot Ctrl-F).

There's a lot of irrational talk on nuclear (which one could even be tempted to suspect was the result of astro-turfing campaigns by oil companies), I find this is a pretty decent starting point to question mainstream opinions and beliefs: https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/nuclear/discussing-a-couple… Also, regarding accidents, it is not solely a property of nuclear power, see for instance the Banqiao dam catastrophe.

I think this is a non-problem. At least for France and Germany, peak electricity consumption is in winter, because electric heating is much more common (and needed!) than air conditioning. This seasonal surplus is such that nuclear power plants actually have to reduce their power output in summer. Here is a chart showing a ±30% seasonal variation in nuclear electricity production: https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/elec-mensuelle-nuke-F…

> Within the next few decades, we will see the oil majors facing a similar fate, I'm wondering what is the consensus about this statement. AFAIK solar and wind may be cheap at the margin, in specific areas, when they are supported by coal/nuclear. But can we reasonably think they can replace fossil fuel at a large scale in a near future? I have little knowledge on this issue, but I heard reasonable experts [1,2] saying it was doubtful. [1] https://www.withouthotair.com [2] https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/renewables/100-renewable-el…

I remember reading that blog post a few years ago : https://jancovici.com/en/climate-change/acting-individually/doing-ones… It is relatively practical and takes into account the ratio cost or difficulty vs impact It boils down to using less energy for transportation or consumption (food or otherwise)

> is there any unavoidable reason Unless the economy fully decouples from energy and matter [1], then Thermodynamics [2]. Solutions to this include Steady State Economy, reduction of population or the decoupling mentioned above (for example making our lives virtual) [1] https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/energie_graph9.jpg [2] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ edit: Obviously my answer is meant long term, as in a couple hundred years.

Interesting counterpoint, thanks. > A "raw" solar panel in China costs about 25 cents / W, and each watt should produce about 45kWh over its lifetime (5W per day for 25 years). I imagine that you're making assumptions on having sufficient luminosity all year round, right? So perhaps that depends on where on Earth you are. According to Jancovici [1], in most of Europe, solar panels produce about 100 kWh/m²/year, assuming that they are oriented correctly (I don't know if e.g. the necessity of cleaning them up is factored in). From the same source, in terms of energy used to build the panel (is shipping included?), it takes 1 to 4 years to reimburse that energy but that's under the assumption that all the energy from the panel can be used. In practice, solar panel installations produce energy at a rhythm that depends on nature, which means that for many uses, the electricity needs to be stored somewhere if we want to actually use it at a different rhythm, e.g. when you're actually at home/in the office/etc. Unfortunately, storing electricity at scale with current-tech is energy-expensive (both to build the batteries and because of energy loss during storage), e.g. storing it as hydrogen has a yield of ~30%, couldn't find the yield of other technologies of batteries including the energy cost of building/shipping/disposing of the battery. So, in the worst case, these 100 kWh/m2/year turn into ~30 kWh/m2/year, which means 3 to 12 years for recouping energy cost. So, by this…

Investing in renewable energy doesn't mean that you'll drastically reduce your CO² emissions. You have to take into account the capacity factor of what you install https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/load-factor.jpg You need to install 3 to 4 times more windmill and solar panel to approach the same output. You also need to install huge way to store your electricity (mostly using damns, hard to get in places where you don't have mountains such as NL) and you need to invest the double into the electricity infrastructure to transport this electricity (your windmill will produce most of the time at 10-20% of it capacity, but the day it produces 90% you still have to transport it, therefore your grid need to be oversized for the average usage). Solar panels are mostly coming from China and need to be changed each 20-30 years (they are loosing efficiency after a few decades). Windmills need to be changed each 20 years (lots of mechanical stress involved), and are mostly impossible to recycle (https://www.livingcircular.veolia.com/en/industry/how-can-wind-turbine… Also, to install windmills you need to put a lot of concrete in the fields as a base, concrete that is emitting also a lot of CO² to produce. As a result you'll still have a non-controlled electricity production, where prices will vary a lot and where maintenance costs will stay really high decades after decades. It's not only about investing, it's also about maintaining something that…

Let's not forget that: - CO2 emissions of Germany is still 5 times more than a comparable (similar GDP/flatness/weather) than France for electricity production [1]; - Electricity production is roughly a third of all final energy and CO2 emissions come mainly from coal and fuel [2]. Two threats for which Germany has done very little for now. - Germany is spending around 2 billions of dollars [3] for renewable energies, whereas it would have cost more than 50x less with nuclear, allowing to spend the rest of this investment into building insulation and thermal renewable energies. - PV investments were computed from past market prices, not with the negative price obtained with non controllable source of energy [3]. Germany is only at the beginning of energy subsidies. Investing in photovoltaics is politically efficient, not environmentally efficient. Please let's stop to focus on renewable electricity. Let's start focusing on carbon-less solutions. The hard problem is about coal and fuel. The situation could not be more urgent, since conventional oil has reached its peak. Not removing our dependency on oil is strongly damaging for our economies. Focusing on non controllable sources of energy is just accelerating the damages. Please see https://jancovici.com/en/ for more convincing arguments :) [1] - https://electricitymap.tmrow.co [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Energy_supply,_… [3] -…