The Death Of Fossil Fuels

[Gfamily]

. Cuba is now installing solar at a great pace given they’ve been reliant on Venezuelan oil until now.

Is that Cuba resourced, or is it a version of the Chinese "Belt and Road" approach, developing Cuba as a strategic ally/client state in the Caribbean?

[bjn]

AIUI it’s mostly Chinese investment, Cuba being short of hard cash and all. They are aiming to get 2GW by 2028. FWIW Pakistan install over 22GW in 2025.

[jimbob]

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk ... -year-low/

Less coal use in the UK since the time of Shakespeare

[Grumble]

The Iran war and particularly the associated disruption to fossil fuel supplies will drive adoption of EVs as never seen before. My prediction FWIW. In the past people did not have an alternative, the Ukraine invasion mainly affected gas, not really petrol and diesel.

[IvanV]

The Iran war and particularly the associated disruption to fossil fuel supplies will drive adoption of EVs as never seen before. My prediction FWIW. In the past people did not have an alternative, the Ukraine invasion mainly affected gas, not really petrol and diesel.

But the immediate problem is gas. The price of gas in Europe has shot up. Enough gas comes out through the Straits of Hormuz for the restriction there to affect the global gas market, even if in practice most of it moves E rather than W - the easterners are looking for alternative supplies. And a large gas liquefaction plant in Saudi has been hit by the Iranians and needs repair.

[bjn]

Which is why we need to restructure the electricity market to reduce the impact of expensive foreign gas, which sets the price over 90% of the time, even if its generating only a fraction of demand.

[Grumble]

The Iran war and particularly the associated disruption to fossil fuel supplies will drive adoption of EVs as never seen before. My prediction FWIW. In the past people did not have an alternative, the Ukraine invasion mainly affected gas, not really petrol and diesel.

But the immediate problem is gas. The price of gas in Europe has shot up. Enough gas comes out through the Straits of Hormuz for the restriction there to affect the global gas market, even if in practice most of it moves E rather than W - the easterners are looking for alternative supplies. And a large gas liquefaction plant in Saudi has been hit by the Iranians and needs repair.

I wasn’t thinking about immediate problems in that post

[Sciolus]

I reckon Trump's latest adventure was fomented by the Committee on Climate Change to publicise their latest report.

​​​​Cost of Net Zero by 2050 less than a single fossil fuel price shock​ – CCC

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has released a new report to complement its 2025 advice on the UK’s Seventh Carbon Budget.

The independent, statutory body tested its cost and energy security conclusions against different scenarios. It found that the total additional cost of a single fossil fuel price spike of 2022 magnitude is likely to be as large as the total net additional cost of meeting the pathway to Net Zero across every year to 2050.

In all scenarios, achieving Net Zero was found to be a more cost-effective path for the UK economy than continued reliance on fossil fuels, bringing a net benefit to society.

Nigel Topping CMG, Chair of the Climate Change Committee, said:

“There has been a lot of public interest in the cost of transitioning to a low carbon economy. Going through an economic transition is exciting, but a sense of uncertainty about the future is completely reasonable. As such, it’s important that decision makers and commentators are using accurate information to inform debates.

“In light of current world events, it’s more important than ever for the UK to move away from being reliant on volatile foreign fossil fuels, to clean, domestic, less wasteful energy.”

The report also includes additional cost-benefit analysis of the CCC’s proposed Balanced Pathway to Net Zero. This pathway was modelled for the Seventh Carbon Budget advice the CCC gave the UK Government in February 2025. This is carried out in line with the government’s Green Book guidance.

The Committee’s key findings are:

For every pound spent on Net Zero, the benefits outweigh this by 2.2 to 4.1 times.

Avoiding climate damages is the most significant benefit of the transition. This saving is estimated between £40 billion and £130 billion in 2050.

Energy losses are halved compared to today. Losses in a Net Zero system are valued at £30 billion per year, compared to £60 billion a year in today’s energy system.

The transition is set to deliver far greater health and wellbeing co-benefits than costs. Cleaner air, warmer homes, more active travel and healthier diets strongly outweigh downsides like extra public transport time or potential congestion from increased EV use. These ‘co-benefits’ are estimated to provide £2 billion to £8 billion per year in net benefit by 2050.

(Their emphasis.)

[Gfamily]

A little thing, but it annoys me.
The Fuel Duty discount and even more-so the suspension of the indexation of Fuel Duty.

I see that there's opposition to the announcement that the 5p discount on Fuel Duty (implemented in 2022) would be withdrawn over the next year or so.
"Oh, the humanity" - when the discount was applied, pump prices were well over £1.60 per litre (and it was noted that the retailers only passed on part of the discount)
Where are prices now? Less than £1.40 per litre (even with the current supply issues), and the discount doesn't even begin to be removed for another 6 months, and a full year (more or less) for the 5p discount to disappear,

But looking further back - there used to be an "Inflation Plus" fuel duty escalator, but that was removed in 2011 - when pump prices were pretty much the same as 2 weeks ago, over the 15 years since 2011, the price of fuel has gone down and up, but has been inflation proof over the time. If fuel prices had followed inflation, a litre at £1.35 in 2011 would cost over £2.00 now.

Why the hell have we allowed this? At an estimated cost of over £100 billion to the revenue.

[IvanV]

... the Committee on Climate Change to publicise their latest report.

...In all scenarios, achieving Net Zero was found to be a more cost-effective path for the UK economy than continued reliance on fossil fuels, bringing a net benefit to society....
​​

It would take me some time to evaluate this properly. But it doesn't surprise me given the identity of the present energy minister that the CCC presents such a rosy picture of decarbonisation, which doesn't have a lot of credibility. I mean the mere fact that they have a path to net zero by 2050 is implausible enough in the present situation. It has mention of the use of CCS, which still doesn't seem to be happening very much so that I can believe it will be substantially used in just 25 years, and BECCS, which, like Drax being good for the climate. most people now believe to be a boondoggle not science.

In this version of decarbonisation, it saves us money, lots of money, from about 2040 onwards. Most of the cost saving is reduced cost of transportation, by powering it on cheap electricity instead of expensive petrol. This saving is so large it eventually outweighs all of the capital costs of the new energy systems, which we know to be large. But I don't believe there is a large opex saving in running cars on electricity rather than petrol, when you remember that most of the cost of petrol is tax, and the equivalent electric car is heavier.

It cites benefits for reduced road wear and reduced road accidents. But heavy EVs cause more roadwear, and cause more damage when they have an accident. So evidently in this future world, people will drive their cars rather less than they currently do. That only makes sense if actually the cost of motoring is substantially increased, not reduced. So there seems to be some inconsistency here. If there is some other change that motivates people to get out of their cars, that's not actually the benefit of decarbonisation, it is the benefit of that other policy.

But it is a cost-benefit analysis, so despite the presentation that it saves lots of money, it must actually cost money. That is presumably the net cost of the first 15 years when it cost money, which isn't fully reimbursed in the post-2040 world when we start saving it. But I would say in the real world, it still costs money much longer than that.

So then they say this money is worth spending, and here is a green book cost benefit analysis to show it. And most of the benefit is the climate change reduction, which is represented by the social cost of carbon. They talk about using a green book method, but the green book doesn't actually give a social cost of carbon. Rather if you want an official parameter for that, you have to go to somewhere like TAG, the DfT's Transport Appraisal Guidance, which they don't cite or mention. They seem to have used a variety of social cost of carbon values from international sources, which are widely variable. They have a lowest sensitivity, which is a value from an official Canadian source. Though if you look at the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost_of_carbon, then by what it says there, the Canadian parameter is still quite a high one.

But the problem with the social cost of carbon is that it is a global social cost. So this CBA is fine, if you don't mind that probably something like 98% of the climate benefits, which is much the largest of the benefit, are enjoyed by the rest of the world, not Britain. Normally the point of a CBA is to say that this generates economic benefits for our society, benefits our economy. But this is not saying that. Rather it is saying we altruistically help the rest of the world like that. Now I think we should probably do that. But I don't think most of society, understanding that this isn't the normal kind of CBA that indicates a stimulus to our economy, but rather saving the world from climate costs, will be very impressed.

None of this is to say that I think we should give up on decarbonisation. But I'm just unimpressed by voodoo that says it is going to save us lots of money, and it is so good we will start to enjoy those savings in just 15 years time. Unrealistic assessments of what things will cost is the road to perdition and wrong-headed policies. If you understand what things are more likely to cost, you make better choices of how to use your money.

But there is another fundamentally false assumption here, which is that this pathway is even fit for purpose for use for policy assessment. Every now and then, net zero pathways are put out. Once upon a time, 15 years ago or something, they may have been fit for purpose. But as time has passed, we have never kept up with the pathways. So new sped-up pathways are put out to catch up. But no speeding up happens. The sped-up pathways are increasingly implausible. In fact, I always thought the point increasingly was to make clear just how implausible it has now become to get to net zero by 2050. They do usually put out a massively failing "business-as-usual" pathway too, which typically turns out to be much closer to what really happens than the pathways that actually head for net zero.

[nekomatic]

But I don't believe there is a large opex saving in running cars on electricity rather than petrol, when you remember that most of the cost of petrol is tax, and the equivalent electric car is heavier.

Not taking issue with anything else you’ve written, but by a back-of-envelope calculation I reckon the price-to-consumer-excluding-tax is about equal for a petrol car compared with an equivalent EV charged at standard home prices, but the EV costs anywhere from a third of that if you charge overnight on a smart tariff to three times that if you use a fast charger at a motorway services. Electricity is also taxed of course, including the climate-related levies that we might think should not fall solely on electricity consumers. Which of those is the ‘true’ cost? Also presumably a factor if this is a national scope analysis is the percentage of the expense that stays in the country versus going overseas?

It cites benefits for reduced road wear and reduced road accidents. But heavy EVs cause more roadwear, and cause more damage when they have an accident.

Given road wear is proportional to the fourth power of vehicle weight, I would be willing to take a punt on the extra road wear caused by EVs being significantly less than that caused by the tanker that used to deliver the fuel to the petrol station for the ICE cars they replace.

[FlammableFlower]

On average EVs tend to be 200-450 kg heavier than the same model ICE. How does that factor into the road wear given the propensity for cars to get bigger in recent years anyway? I have no idea.

I have a colleague* who's very anti-car, full-stop, and has tried out all manner of things he's read as to why EVs are bad. First it was the myth around brake dust due to increased breaking. Now, having debunked that, it's weight.

(*it's slightly ironic from someone so vocally pro-cycling and public transport (fair enough) but who also takes a lot of long haul flights....)