European Politico-economics QA Mega-thread - Page 1373

On May 06 2022 07:59 farvacola wrote:

Thanks for that, it would otherwise be difficult for me to access such information and I’m always interested in how other countries manage social programs and stuff like access to healthcare.

London (CNN)Northern Ireland is on the cusp of having a nationalist leader for the first time in its history after Sinn Fein, once considered the political wing of the IRA, emerged as the largest party in regional elections.

Sinn Fein overtook the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in voting for the province's 90-member national Assembly, winning the most seats, 27, and securing the highest share of first preference votes. This compares with 24 seats for the DUP and 17 for the Alliance Party.

The counting of votes is still underway on Saturday, with 88 out of the 90 seats counted, according to the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland.

Sinn Fein is now in pole position to install a first minister for the first time. The party is opposed to Northern Ireland being part of the United Kingdom and is in favor of a united Ireland.

"The preparation for constitutional change in Ireland needs to begin now," Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald told CNN on Friday evening as results began to emerge. "We need to be alive to the fact that change is underway.

"It is my absolute determination that that change will be entirely peaceful," she added.

A clause in the 1998 peace accords, signed with the British and Irish governments after decades of deadly conflict known as The Troubles, established that a referendum on Irish unification could be held if it appears likely that the majority of voters would back it.

That day remains a distant prospect despite the results of Thursday's vote. But Sinn Fein's emergence as Northern Ireland's largest party nonetheless could force a conversation around a so-called border poll.

On May 10 2022 06:11 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
Being able to call a vote is pointless if you can't get a majority, which in this case, it appears that most will be voting against unification for now. SNP for instance can call a vote of Scottish independence again but it is pointless if they don't get a majority again. But who knows what the future will bring.

On May 11 2022 11:36 mounteast0 wrote:
How the EU's feeling about Ireland and North Ireland unification?

A big part of if that is going to happen does depends on the fact that the "big players" actually have big influence on the matter, not just the people / voter in the region.

During the scottish independent vote / referendum, the EU basically used all their indluence / effort to push the scot to remain in the UK. (Even though the UK repaying the favour with Brexit).

I did not see anything regarding the reunification by EU or it's member. May be they have said something, but I just happened to missed that.

On May 11 2022 11:36 mounteast0 wrote:
How the EU's feeling about Ireland and North Ireland unification?

A big part of if that is going to happen does depends on the fact that the "big players" actually have big influence on the matter, not just the people / voter in the region.

During the scottish independent vote / referendum, the EU basically used all their indluence / effort to push the scot to remain in the UK. (Even though the UK repaying the favour with Brexit).

I did not see anything regarding the reunification by EU or it's member. May be they have said something, but I just happened to missed that.

On May 03 2022 05:44 Artisreal wrote:

two things:
a) show, don't tell. (i.e. what are fossil fuels good at and how they are essential for the process it's used in? what exactly do you think poses a threat to the economy?)
b) you don't read what I write and that makes it tiring to engage.

You do nothing but write talking points and it's a bit boring if I'm honest, doesn't feel like you actually want to discuss.
Also what the fuck with the strawman of burning brides or trying to frame what I say as a simple solution when I've shown you what I consider major hurdles to be overcome. I'm a bit baffledI how you can read my posts and come to think that this is what I think.

And fuck yes, renewables are the cheapest energy source there is. Because it's like comparatively zero running costs. You can't really compete with that if you're burning fossil fuels at a rate of 82€/ton of CO2.
That we cannot run any economy on that is not something anyone is disputing. And if you read my previous posts, you can see how the problem is tackled from various angles.
We cannot wait until we have tinkered out a solution that is copy blueprint paste and go.
This time, the engineering is there but the science is robust at best and the solution is trial and error.

In sum, what is holding back progress is slow regulatory improvements and lack of additional kWpeak or windpower.
What do you think happens with the money? It goes into the economy, it's like a massive infrastructure undertaking. How that crashes the economy is beyond my understanding.
Waiting now just fucks up the planet even more. We're lucky in fortress USA and fortress Europe.

NATO ascension for a new member state requires consensus approval from all existing members. Turkey joined NATO in 1952, and has the second-largest military in the 30-member alliance after the United States. Erdogan referenced the Nordic countries' hosting of members of the Kurdish Workers' Party, or PKK, which Turkey considers a terrorist group.

The countries are "home to many terrorist organizations," Erdogan claimed. He also referenced NATO's acceptance of Greece as a member in 1952 as a mistake. Turkey and Greece are longtime rivals and have fought in conflicts against one another even as NATO members.

"As Turkey, we don't want to repeat similar mistakes. Furthermore, Scandinavian countries are guesthouses for terrorist organizations," Erdogan said. "They are even members of the parliament in some countries," he added. "It is not possible for us to be in favor."

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/13/erdogan-says-turkey-doesnt-support-sweden-finland-joining-nato.html

On May 14 2022 01:15 LegalLord wrote:

Well, being argumentative is not the same as making an argument, and if you re-read your own post I'm sure you can see that it was much more the former than the latter. But I suppose that now that I'm not on the road anymore, I can give it another go and try to write up my thoughts in a bit more detail.

Bottom line: you have to be realistic with what you can and can't do in a green transition, and given that a modern economy is deeply dependent on energy you'll run into big problems if you bungle it.

That's really the big point to be made here, and each of the comments made before are really sub-points of this one. Let's revisit some of those as a way to make the bigger point.

You don't have to think that we should use coal/oil/gas etc forever to acknowledge that there's a lot of advantages that these sources have that are tough to do without. In terms of energy density, storability, and versatility

- the common renewables are simply no match for the big three chemical fuels.

It's very much worth noting that electricity tends to be the core of where renewables are discussed, but once you start talking about the other big users of chemical fuels - industrial, heating, transportation, etc. - you run into situations where they become less and less viable.

Yes, there are ways to bridge the gap ("electrify everything" seems to be the common one), but electricity is something like 25% of total emissions and for the other 75% you're fighting an uphill battle to make renewables work. Sure, it's possible, but it's not even remotely "cheaper than fossil" which is dubious even for electricity.

You should also take a look at some of the things you can do to reduce environmental impact holding power sources constant (i.e. a mostly fossil-based energy supply):

1. Swap out coal for natural gas and nuclear

2. Encourage hybrid automobiles that have excellent gas mileage but not the cumbersome giant batteries of EVs

3. Incentivize public transport, carpooling, reduction of travel by automobile & air in general by various means

4. Take carbon capture and utilizing waste heat more seriously

5. Curtail energy-gobbling industries like shitcoin, aluminum, and semiconductor fabrication

6. Favor pipelines over ship-based transport for oil & gas and favor buying from those nearby over those further away

And so on. A lot of these ideas will in fact do a whole lot more than "green energy, electrify everything" for the environment without ever swapping out the fuel source, without needing any new technology, and without any fanfare.

On May 02 2022 19:26 LegalLord wrote:
You might just be underestimating the infrastructural challenges associated with an actually environmentally friendly economy. To be fair you’d no more short-sighted as the talking heads spouting terrible energy policy across the EU, but that’s no real standard.

Sure, under some narrow conditions you can get cheap green energy - a good bit of fraudulent reporting later and you’ll have “cheapest energy is renewables” being sold to a public that may very well not know any better.

What the IEA said on energy generation prices
The key insight from this 2020 edition is that the levelised costs of electricity generation of low- carbon generation technologies are falling and are increasingly below the costs of conventional fossil fuel generation. Renewable energy costs have continued to decrease in recent years. With the assumed moderate emission costs of USD 30/tCO2 their costs are now competitive, in LCOE terms, with dispatchable fossil fuel-based electricity generation in many countries.2 In particular, this report shows that onshore wind is expected to have, on average, the lowest levelised costs of electricity generation in 2025. Although costs vary strongly from country to country, this is true for a majority of countries (10 out of 14). Also solar PV, if deployed at large scales and under favourable climatic conditions, can be very cost competitive. Offshore wind is experiencing a major cost decrease compared to the previous edition. Whereas five years ago, the median LCOE still exceeded USD 150/MWh, it is now significantly below USD 100/MWh and therefore in a competitive range.

But the reality is that fossil fuels provide energy in a far more versatile and reliable form than renewables, and to match the practical use cases you’ll have to sacrifice quite a lot of the apparent cost efficiency of using renewables.

Kind of touched upon most of this above, but mostly just wanted to add that infrastructure isn't free (up-front or maintenance), and energy is only as useful as your ability to actually use it. Storage and transmission of energy you generated comes with its own costs, as does having to deal with ups and downs in energy availability. Natural gas is "pretty much free" if you use it right where it's extracted, because it's often cheaper to burn it on the spot (flare) than to pipeline it to somewhere it can be sold for money. If something is "pretty much free - just add infrastructure" then it's nowhere near free at all. And overall, while renewables are great in spots where you can generate a lot of energy demand around them (hydroelectric dams are especially good here because they actually have consistency unlike many other options), the overall profile of where fossil fuels do better is much, much better than for any renewable source.


As WhiteDoge once pointed out quite accurately in a related context, a lot of studies will make good points but largely come to a conclusion you could have surmised by simply looking at who funded the study. Failing to approach these kinds of claims with a critical approach is failing to do your due diligence.

I noticed, for example, that not much skepticism was applied towards the oft-repeated dogma that "renewables are cheaper" - might that be based on wishful thinking? In looking around, one thing I noticed is that subsidies very often factor into the cost calculations such as to make wind farms seem cheaper than some oil/gas/etc equivalent, which doesn't really seem fair. Infrastructure costs tend to be excluded or externalized very often, which also isn't really fair if a fossil equivalent's infrastructure costs are accounted for. And so on.

Perhaps the most telling factor on that matter, though, is the market reaction. If renewables are, all-costs-included, cheaper than fossil equivalents, why hasn't the overall market adapted to that fact? Certainly, you see renewable build-out when it comes bundled with subsidies or a big PR win for a very large company, but it seems very common that when renewable subsidies expire, the investment sharply declines relative to more traditional options. That hardly seems consistent with them believing that there's a worthy energy savings in play. I suspect that a lot of these companies that could certainly band together and create a sizeable power supply for themselves, have analyzed it in enough depth to know that financially the commitment only makes sense to the extent that subsidies make up the difference.

On May 02 2022 19:26 LegalLord wrote:
Making reliable green energy will cost you a lot more than just using fossil fuels; failing to acknowledge that will just lead you into the situation we see today: fossil fuel production is stifled because all the producers are being told “we need you today, but when the Green Future comes along we’ll want you to go out of business” and they plan accordingly. Meanwhile the Green Future is less appealing than marketed and much of the so-called transition is badly managed, with a lot of the money going into silly little subsidy-sucking frauds rather than meaningful progress.

There’s only one place that leads - choosing between a sudden sharp decline in living standards, and begging coal plants to keep running so you can keep the lights on for a little longer. The past year has seen many make the obvious choice between the two.

There's been a fairly significant energy crisis for about the last year. Partly due to the same supply shock that has made the rest of the post-pandemic economy supply chains messy, but the green energy strategy taken by Europe has caused it to be the core of, and by far the most impacted by, this crisis.

Extracting oil & gas is expensive and requires significant capital investment just to maintain output over time, much less to expand. It doesn't really make sense financially to commit to projects like this unless you get a commitment for a long-term buy, so when the strategy is to run away from ever signing long-term contracts... supply is squeezed. If you're producing oil & gas and don't have a long-term buyer, you're better off just making big money now, paying down your debts, etc., than increasing supply. And that's how you get to $50-200/MWh gas in mid through late 2021, let alone what you have right now. What follows is the realization that there's just not enough gas to go around in the economy, the costs of shutting down the economy are going to be catastrophic, and a less-favorable renewable energy availability that year pushes you into the only reliable power source you have left: coal.

I don't have to tell you that this is neither good for the environment nor for the economy, and could be avoided if there were a bit more forethought as to how things could go. Sure, it seems like a good idea at first - take advantage of cheap gas now, but shed long-term commitments like nuclear power plants, long-term delivery contracts, and potential new gas infrastructure projects like LNG terminals. It certainly took advantage of low costs in the short term, but predictably, the "green economy" just didn't solve all the problems it needed to in the time it took for a supply shock to develop. At least a decade of poor planning creates a situation where the current iteration of the "green strategy" is visibly failing with no good options to get back on track. And very scarce acknowledgment of that things are on track to get a whole lot worse.

I think that's about all I really want to say on the topic. I consider a lot of what passes as "environmentally friendly" to be short-sighted greenwashing that doesn't help and creates new problems, whereas a lot of the less glamorous ideas that give the proper acknowledgment to the importance of fossil fuels but reduce their use tend to be marginalized and underappreciated. It's time to move past the silly green platitudes towards a strategy that might actually work. Or, given the current sorry state of the EU, maybe not.

On May 18 2022 05:20 LegalLord wrote:

And I think that should do for now. Obviously there's a lot more to the issue, but also no point in talking through it when the other side doesn't discuss in good faith. Disappointing but not particularly unexpected.