So basically you are saying that you have been and are still happy to wait for the drop in cost of renewable energy to below that of fossil fuels so that the free market can substitute for human intelligence and planning. And this, presumably is to save you from any increase in your energy bills even though they will rise anyway as fossil fuels become harder and more expensive to locate and develop and despite the fact that the longer action is postponed, the more difficult life on the planet will find it to adjust without trauma. In a previous post, Greg pointed out that there is already enough warming to come because of past greenhouse gas emissions to cause a significant rise in sea level over what would have happened otherwise. What do you think will happen when the people in the present coastal cities on low-lying coasts have to move elsewhere. More good farmland covered by city and suburban sprawl, more people forced to move from where migrations are headed because of rising prices for land and the resulting increases in other prices and property taxes as well as the overcrowding and stretching of services as the inland cities try to cope. Yeah, it’ll be great — for people who own property they don’t need to live on..

There will be whatever warming is ‘locked in’ plus the emissions of the next decade and a half which will be higher than now, and then the emissions will start to drop whenever renewables are cheaper, taking RCP8.5,4.5 etc off the table and more towards RCP2.6. All of this would happen with no specific action targeted towards global warming, just because it is cheaper.
Note emissions have already started to drop in some places due to a switch to natural gas from coal, but this drop is not a path towards stabilizing CO2 emissions. Depending on the price difference, there may not be a 100% drop in emissions, but there would be a path towards a substantial drop that would significantly reduce global warming not just the 30% or so reduction that natural gas can produce, but 80% or more.

I stand by my claim that renewables are not cheaper than fossil fuels. They may be at some point, but not yet.

Re #26: Are you saying that #25 is misinformation and South African energy costs are not less for renewable energy, or what?

Yes. At small scale, as in SA at present, W&S are free riders on the back of existing FF-fired plant which compensates for their intermittency. W&S plant owners pay nothing for this service as it is implemented at grid-level. So their costs are artificially reduced.

Anyway, if energy costs rise to save the planet drastic climate change then so what? Did you expect energy to be cheap forever? do you think fossil fuel costs going to stay constant as supplies dwindle and it costs more to obtain it from lower and lower grade supplies (like Alberta’s oil shale)?

What I am saying is that the W&S industries should stop peddling the meme that their products are cheap when in fact they are only partially costed. That’s coming very close to a false prospectus and there will be consequences.

It would also be nice to see the meme disappear from online discourse.

You’ll be glad to know that the bulk of your comment at #29 can be filed under ‘Preaching to the choir in a hyperechoic closed space.’

That said, I’m very grateful for the reminder that this is really about those human beings we’re all guilty of forgetting, even the best of us, from time to time: those displaced, bereaved and dispossessed by the horrors of climate-aggravated conflict.

Whenever the news turns to a man-made Hell like Syria, I’m ashamed of all the times I’ve cheapened words like ‘climate wars’.

There are people out there for whom that term actually means something, and surviving a couple of brusque twete-a-twetes with Rob Honeycutt doesn’t give me the right to appropriate it.

That’s why I was so disgusted by the triumphalism on display a couple of days ago at WUWT, with Mr Watts crowing, “Sorry, Alarmists: New research disputes claims that climate change helped spark Syrian civil war.”

My snarky response (as follows) may have cost me the opprobrium of the denialistic wing of the Worshipful Church of “Skepticism,” but that’s a small price to pay on a question of conscience.

Brad Keyes
September 8, 2017 at 10:27 am

At least we’ll always have Khartoum….

New York Times, June 10, 2032

‘For Darfur, justice. For Northern Africa, a chance to heal?’

THE HAGUE, Netherlands—Twenty years late, a war crimes tribunal has given Sudan’s most celebrated genocidaires their freedom again. The conviction of the ‘Darfur Four’ over a spree of atrocities between 2002 and 2003 was overturned today after courts finally accepted the science blaming regional violence on climate change.

“In rendering [the original verdict in 2012], His Honor erred by treating traditional peoples and Earth’s systems as independent,” said an appeals court judge this morning, his voice hoarse from sobbing.

“This led to a significant overestimation of the free moral agency of the appellants, who are black.”

The acquittal brings closure not only to decades of hell for the four men, but to a test case in international climate-legal theory.

The released rapists and torturers held a conference in Khartoum this evening to thank the scientists and climate ethicists who “never gave up” on them. They closed by imploring the crowd of thousands to never forget—or forgive—the real culprits, “who sit in the air-conditioned boardrooms of America’s great oil companies.”

Alcohol is dangerous according to traditional knowledge-holders, so revelers who thronged the capital’s pro-government suburbs had to make do with firing their assault rifles into the warm night air.

But justice comes too late for Muammar bin Skaf al Khartoumi, one of the original Darfur Five, who died behind bars in 2022. The tragedy was a complication of an HIV infection blamed on one of his victims, a child prostitute who gave him the disease while being raped in the bloody summer of 2003.

Col. al Khartoumi told interviewers on his deathbed that his greatest comfort was having lived long enough to see his killer pay for his crimes against Allah in 2015. (Shari’a does not permit the throwing of homosexuals from tall buildings until they’ve “attained manhood”—a threshold most scholars interpret as the age of 18.)

Sir Julian Assange, a leading advocate for the rights of the innocent, reminded the international community that today’s news was no excuse for complacency.

“Hundreds of men and women still rot in UN dungeons for ‘crimes against humanity’ committed in the heat of wars they didn’t even start, no pun intended.

“Remember: people don’t increase the frequency and severity of regional conflict; global warming increases the frequency and severity of regional conflict.”

Sir Julian is no stranger to legal trials—or at least tribulations—himself, having spent years on the run from one embassy to another. His own nightmare began on an “unseasonably balmy night” in 2010 when he put his penis in a sleeping colleague, only to be charged with an act of microaggression.

“Lied for profit”? Could you be any vaguer, BBD?

Those of us who have been awake to the issue of fossil fuel promoted lying know only too well its history since the early 1990s. Thus the numerous agents of this propaganda are well know and we don’t have to provide a list every time this is mentioned. Here are two linked names to kick off – Western Fuels and Pat Michaels.

Your statement is an example of unnecessary pedantry.

That the true scale of the impact of a warming world because of human activity has been thus suppressed with the anticipated tragedies now unfolding across the globe, but which started even before the latest round of extreme weather events, is a crime against humanity.

Have you totted up the numbers of displaced persons globally. You may try to point at wicked regimes, racial – religious differences with resultant armed conflict as causes of migrants and refugees but that would be to ignore the underlying ‘stressors’ due to climate change – drought and flooding with large scale crop failures. Coming to a place near you before much longer so don’t be smug.

BBD in his #14 and #19 is absolutely correct.

If this is ‘vague’ to you then do some research, I am sure you really know where to begin and are simply playing the annoying sophist card, as ever.

you praise Big Oil by faint damnation (raising obvious questions as to how much they’re paying you):

They lied for profit and in doing so, distorted public policy

“Lied for profit”? Could you be any vaguer, BBD? If your allegiance to the planet isn’t compromised financially, then you ought to have no trouble being specific here:

Their OWN CHEMISTS were telling them that, yes, fossil fuel consumption is addictive, yet they pretended—under oath—that the scientific jury was still out on the neurological effects.

and delayed the onset of decarbonisation by at least two decades. That is a crime against humanity.

Humanity? More lies by omission, BBD.

Preventing decarbonisation was a crime against all organic life on the planet, as I’m sure you know perfectly well. Deep down.

Whatever they’re giving you, BBD, I hope it’s worth it. You’re the one who’s going to have to explain to your great-great-grandchildren why you actively downplayed the worst Holocaust in the future of Western civilization.

Anyway, if energy costs rise to save the planet drastic climate change then so what? Did you expect energy to be cheap forever? do you think fossil fuel costs going to stay constant as supplies dwindle and it costs more to obtain it from lower and lower grade supplies (like Alberta’s oil shale)?

By far the worst offender is the solar industry, which has seeded the meme that because solar modules have fallen rapidly in price, solar energy is ‘cheap’. This is entirely false at utility scale.

Large-scale SPV generation is highly intermittent and has an absolute requirement for utility-scale storage which is still borderline vapourware unless you opt for LiION which is very expensive and inappropriate because of its relatively short charging cycle lifetime.

Solar modules are only the cheapest part of the total system cost of large-scale SPV. So presenting the cost of the array as the total system cost – as is the industry norm – is dishonest.

The same holds true for wind: although turbine costs are falling, the array is only a part of the total system cost but the same misleading claim about cost is made by the industry. Like solar, wind is intermittent and requires a combination of utility-scale storage (pumped hydro is arguably the best option but it is extremely expensive at scale) and wide-area integration via (extremely expensive) new long-distance transmission capacity and grid interconnections. All these things are carefully omitted from the ‘cheap energy’ pitch.

Obviously we need to transition to low-carbon generation technology and we need to do it fast. Obviously wind and solar will be the techologies that must scale to take over from FFs. Obviously W&S do not have the potentially devastating environmental externalities of FFs.

But it is equally obvious that misleading claims about cheap renewables are going to come back to haunt the industry as soon as W&S really start to scale. So IMO, the industry would be well-advised to stop misrepresenting the true cost of its products.

Clean energy is not cheaper than fossil fuels.

In South Africa, there is a program for Eskom (our national electricity provider) to purchase electricity from privately owned suppliers generating electricity from wind and solar. Already, Eskom is paying less for electricity from the independent power producers than it is for electricity generated from its coal fired power stations.
Clean energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels, and as the technology gets better, it will only get even cheaper.