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ILikeNeurons t1_jd879az wrote

I used MIT's climate policy simulator to order its climate policies from least impactful to most impactful. You can see the results here.

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DisasterousGiraffe OP t1_jd8deu4 wrote

The MIT graphs look plain wrong. For example, the left-hand graph for heavily subsidize renewables shows coal, oil and gas as primary energy sources effectively flat or slightly increasing out to 2100. The current growth of solar and wind is already reducing fossil fuels in major areas, for example in the US for electricity generation, this will accelerate as solar becomes cheaper.

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altmorty t1_jd91anz wrote

You're arguing with a free market fanatic. He'll just completely ignore what you say and continue to spam the same bullshit. He's been doing it for years on behalf of a libertarian lobby.

In his mind, anything other than a pure free market solution is communism. It's his holy war!

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DisasterousGiraffe OP t1_jd9bkko wrote

Perhaps, but even with a pure free market, and not imposing the external costs of coal (like health and climate change) on the industry, I can't see how the US electricity generation industry will continue using coal plants beyond the working life of the existing plants. Solar is just so cheap, and under free market theories it will get cheaper as volume manufacture of the panels increases. It seems to me therefore that the MIT graph of coal use out to 2100 cannot possibly be correct whether or not we like free markets.

We might reasonably argue that US electricity generation using coal plants is not representative of the global coal industry, but 92% of India's new electricity generation capacity was solar in 2022 and although they are building lots of coal plants China seems to be building solar at approximately the same rate as coal. The IEA says global coal increased 1.6% in 2022, mostly in Asia, but they also say renewables met 90% of last year’s global growth in electricity generation. So I guess we are at approximately global peak coal. After peak coal the MIT graph should go downwards. Exactly when and how fast it goes down is open to debate, for example the UK shut down 90% of its coal in 10 years, but MIT have drawn the graph going upwards to 2100. That's why I think the MIT graph is plain wrong.

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