"Just stop oil"

b0rn2sk8 said:
I don’t really get the narrative that developing countries will just turn to burning enormous amounts of coil and oil (which is typically imported).

Why would developing countries want to build huge fossil fuel power stations which need a huge amount of centralised infrastructure and imported expensive fuel when they can deploy renewables for much less?
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You've put forward two choices as being the only two possibilities and you've constructed one to be obviously better than the other. That's good for politics in a wealthy country with energy stability, but it's not reality and it doesn't work in a country without wealth and energy stability.

It's currently impossible to power a country (developed or developing) from renewables except in a tiny handful of countries with extremely unusual circumstances. Iceland is the only one I can think of. Very high wealth, very low population, tiny population density, loads of geothermal, loads of hydroelectric possible in a way that doesn't pose a huge risk to huge numbers of people when it fails. Few if any other countries have all that. Certainly not any developing countries.

Even partially using renewables to power a country requires the huge amount of centralised infrastructure you refer to, so it has to be there anyway. Without it you can do some disjointed partially reliable highly localised power generation that provides some power some of the time. That has valid use cases as an add-on to reliable power generation, but it's not a solution by itself and it's a big ask for a developing country that would be much better served by reliable, controllable country-wide power.

Many countries don't have to import expensive fuel for reliable and controllable power stations anyway. But even for those that do the situation is far more complex than the false dichotomy you propose.

It's probably mostly doable in some places (e.g. solar is much more effective in areas that have large amounts of very hot very sparsely populated land) but it requires a huge amount of infrastructure and it requires buying stuff from other countries. It also doesn't do much for providing jobs locally. Unlike, for example, coal mining and running coal-fired power stations. See South Africa for that problem in abundance.

What could have happened in some places was an energy partnership. For example, much of northern Africa is well placed for solar. Much of northern Europe is at least fairly well placed for wind, with some scope for hydro in some places and some scope for tidal in some places. It's technologically possible to build a large excess nameplate capacity (required because the nameplate generating capacity of renewables is effectively a lie) of those things and a transcontinental grid (or a bunch of interconnects between the two continents) and sharing. There would be transmission losses, but they wouldn't be deal-breaking. There would be a high initial cost, but probably an affordable one and it would be worth it. But politics makes that idea impossible.
 
Maple Leaf said:
...and a generally apathetic population:
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Protesting that pees off the public typically has that effect.

explicit4u said:
Doesn't want to be an hour late for work so lets get arrested instead???
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Consequences for being late can have a major effect on an employee which would explain why some people are going to the lengths they are to get on with their day.
Shame really, especially as these protests have achieved* diddly squat for the cause other than to demonstrate what peeing in the wind looks like :(

* Not entirely true, they've helped the Government bolster anti-protesting laws, so...

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Chuk_Chuk said:
I’m curious. Why does everyone’s predictions of the future seem to involve humans not adapting to the change in climate?
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Because it's difficult to imagine what that future would be.
Once climate change falls over a tipping point, the future becomes very uncertain for all life on the planet. We could see 99% of all species dying off. What would that leave us? We'd survive, but what would be the point? No planet, no nature, just living to exist in an underground bunker. And it's not like we could come out next Tuesday, it would take millions of years for the planet to recover.
The first tipping point is thought to be around 3 C. We are already half way there...way ahead of the most pessimistic estimates.
 
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PlacidCasual said:
You'll probably find no barrister will defend the guy arrested whilst they fall over themselves to pro-bono the ********* blocking the road.
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This is why they have a cab rank rule; someone has to defend a person charged with a crime for the justice system to function no matter how evil or socially unacceptable the criminal is deemed to be.
 
Police just standing there doing nothing until a MoP intervenes then they drag the MoP away in handcuffs. What a surprise.
I thought the police had new powers to stop these protests?
 
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JonRGV250 said:
They should tossed them over the bridge into the Thames, probably be the first bath most of them would have had in ages.
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JonRGV250 said:
The police took an awful lot of flack when they tweeted about it yesterday.
Strangely enough they were a LOT quicker to get the filthy hippies off the roads today :D
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a lot of them in recent tweets in here look like somebody's gran or grandad in comfortable slacks rather than hippies.

You want to throw some old timers into the Thames?
 
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