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Given that their former biggest fossil fuel supplier (Russia) is now an international pariah this was kind of expected.

Edit: Clarified who the pariah is for those in the comments.

It still makes me happy!

I don’t know. We should see if total electricity production dropped to be able to make that comment. Also we should see whether this is a new data point in an already decreasing trend or an outlier.

What a great article! The climate crisis is always in the back of my mind, news like this gives hope that there is a chance for a sustainable future for my kids!:)

Is the US a pariah? Or Norway? Those are our biggest fossil fuel supplier currently just so you know. It used to be Russia, of whom I suspect you refer, but no more my friends, we're canceling that maniac.

Politician: shhhh this is a small detail

What I meant was their former biggest partner (Russia) is now a Pariah. Sorry if my tense isn't quite clear.

Got it, sorry if I missread you, thanks for the clarification.

But what's the difference? How is it any less of a achievement?

They cut down on consumption of fossil fuels because a gun was tied to their head and heating your home with natural gas is now more expensive than most mortgages. It was more that they were almost forced to go into fuel rationing rather than by choice.

Well yes and no. The EU has been on a path to phase out fossil fuel for quite some time, and has been investing heavily in carbon free electricity sourses. So this is a path we've been on for a while, that was intensified by Russias illegal invasion of Ukraine, and the failed efforts of putin to use Russias gas and oil as an extortion tool. If anything, putin has hence only sped up a trajectory that the EU was already on. And gasprices are lower now than at the time of the invasion, so please check facts before echoing krelin propaganda talking points. No gun was pointed to our heads, we could have said "off course putin, whatever you like sir". We chose not to. I pay around €90 per month on heating and electricity now, compared to around half of that a year ago. €90 is what I spend on wine when I go out to eat, so it's not that much. My morgage is €1000 per month, so it's no where close. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/12/29/european-natural-gas-prices-return-to-pre-ukraine-war-levels.html

Fair point. I guess my numbers were coming from the UK which is suffering from the biggest self-inflicted crisis in its history.

Ah. Yes the UK, especially poorer people there, are suffering under the higher gas and electricity prices. This war hit us just as we were phasing out carbon based energy sources, and quite honestly, not that many countries where even close to be self sufficient in their carbon free electricity and heat generation. I happen to be from one of the countries that was self sufficient, and our challenge has been that the Germans (who turned off their nuclear power plants before having a substitute) are bidding for our electricity. So my prices have gone up primarily because of higher bidders in Hamburg 😀 I take a higher bill and helping my fellow Germans any day compared to sucking up to putin though. Even if he "wins" this war, Europe will never again buy from him anywhere close to the quantities we used to. Russia is a gas station with an army, and they will never see as many European customers ever again.

It was indeed expected, but not this year, with everyone scrambling to make up electricity shortfalls.

>“Even though the energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has propped up global coal demand in 2022 by making natural gas far more expensive,” IEA said, “the relatively small increase in coal emissions has been considerably outweighed by the expansion of renewables.”

I'm sure the world was expecting and hoping for fewer coal burners.

When Russia unexpectedly saves the world. Maybe that was the special operation all along.

Meanwhile UK plc is about to break records in the opposite direction ...assuming the relevant data gets released and not shoved under a 350 million NHS bus

I thought the thumbnail was one of those lavender fields, but solar panels is good too, I guess.

>I take a higher bill and helping my fellow Germans

holy shit it's so refreshing to read someone not feeding the 'divide and conquer' psyop bullshit

Exactly. You make things too expensive and people will use less. This isn't rocket science. I guess old people freezing to death because they cant afford to heat their homes is considered a necessary evil for the sake of "progress".

Phasing out fossil fuel is a ridiculous pipe dream. Renewables don't even come close to supplying the energy needs of the world. I think the last chart showed it at like 4% of the total and that is before you consider the fossil fuels necessary to build the solar panels, electric cars, the coal powered electricity needed to power the electric cars, etc. The only thing that comes close to being a viable alternative is nuclear and we have been getting rid of those for years now. Our energy policy is insane.

Ay nice

The article has a graph that total EU energy is down about 35 GW from 2021. Wind and solar are the only ones up, for what looks like maybe 10GW together.

EDIT: nuclear is down about 20 GW with France apparently having some issues so that's playing a big non-fossil fuel factor playing a role.

Hear hear!

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> a new data point in an already decreasing trend or an outlier.

Longstanding trend.

• Change in annual CO₂ emissions
• Change in per capita CO₂ emissions
• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Europe
• Change in production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions per capita, Europe

As can be noted, I did not mention renewable energy. I talk about phasing out fossil fuel, becoming carbon neutral, i.e. including nuclear power. Take Sweden and Norway as examples, no gas is being burned there to generate electricity or heating. The public opinion on nuclear has shifted thoug, the public has realized - as you point out - that nuclear is needed as the base power generation, as well as the adjustable component of the total power generation. But Norway has zero nuclear, and manages to supply their power needs (including the world's biggest fleet of electric vehicles per capita) from hydro alone. Sweden has roughly 45% hydo and 45% nuclear, and solar and wind makes up for the rest. So renewable, short term, is not realistic, no. Carbon / fossil free is however.

If anything the west has come together and is stronger in its resolve as a result of putins actions. He wanted to divide us. He got the opposite. It's amazing to see. Take the EU. The sanctions packages. The joint message. The total lack of sucing up to that murderous dictator. Beautiful. If Trump would have been in power I honestly do not know what would have happened. But under Biden we've been able to pull this off. Impressive. Sure, Hungary and Serbia are still on team putin, but they are too small to make a dent in the otherwise aligned democracies of the world. India is neutral, but not really helping putin. Just extremely impressive how alone he is on the world stage, with only dictatorships such as Belarus, Iran and North Korea as his buddies.

Yeah, cause nobody can afford to heat their home

Where are you getting that from? Funnily enough it's been more or less fine over here.

You mean the US

Is the US making the EU drop it’s emissions?

Go to r/Europe and ask around lol

edit: whoever keeps spamming "suicidal" reports for me is the one who needs serious help. Mental health is a b/tch, get yourself checked

Yes

Go to Europe and ask around haha, it's been fine for the most part, all the panic before the winter led to a lot of measures being taken which led to very little changing in terms of peoples standard of living. Also, I need to stress that Europe is not 1 country, and there's definitely a couple places that have been worse off, but the majority of countries in Europe have been genuinely fine! Can't really generalise all of the EU together

Defying corporate expectations… and notwithstanding corporate agendas…

Someone is not uplifted :(

Where are you getting that from?

Haha sorry! I’ll try to do better.

Oh it's easy, the same way they dropped emissions in China and Japan, the same way they cratered the Euro, by raising rates and causing a global recession, by having a trade imbalance with the rest of the world causing a liquidity crisis in the Euro-Dollar banking system.

Or you can say what Merkel, Poroshenko and Holland have said that they used the Minsk2 peace treaty as a delay strategy to arm Ukraine for a war with Russia. And as such Obama and Trump were able to cut off gas supplies to Europe and have them dependent on US and Cnaadian LNG, Trump specifically forced this deal on the EU for gas and soy beans, and Obama put sanctions on Russia for Hilary's internal email leak that also affected Nordstream1 and 2 which were however never put in place.

Or easier then that both Nuland and Biden have said they'll find a way to turn off Nordstream pipelines if a war in Ukraine blows out, abd they did, simply put the US navy bombed it and left the Germans no choice but their own LNG.

Isn‘t the Euro back where it was? Like I think checked a week ago and the euro‘s dip semmed over then. Like Euro and Dollar meandering around each other like they have for a while.

Lol no it's still down like 20%.

From what the Google charts say 1€ buys 1,07$. Soooo…

So it used to be $1.22 in Jan 2021 making it down 20% for the year.

Tell that to my family members who spend between 500-700€ a month on electricity and gas bills alone. Used to be 100-250 max before shit hit the fan. Got plenty of friends living in cities who have difficulties paying bills, too. Personally, I'm lucky enough to be self-sufficient for 90% of my energy needs as I live in the country side with solar and other systems, so I'm not concerned by this BS for the most part.

Even my home town has recently started turning all outside lights (roads, neighbourhoods, highway, stores, shops, public transport stops, malls, etc etc) from midnight until 5AM because of how expensive it still is.

Before the holidays, grocery shops installed glass doors in front of the coolers/freezers to keep the cool air inside, and installed automatic lights that only turn on when you open the door and reach for a produce.

Not sure where you're at, but you're probably not of the Northern part of Europe if you can say all that without lying.

And why did you downvote anyway? Did you even check the sub out? Literally go on that sub and look at all the threads talking about the insane hikes in energy costs... I know it was you so don't even try to say it wasn't lol

https://imgur.com/a/XLVsxnY I didn't downvote, but there is a large quantity of people that auto downvote when they see the word "lol" on reddit, which is a bit wild, I see no problem with what you said despite the fact that it doesn't resonate with me - I think it's more likely that whoever upvoted my comment is the one that downvoted yours, no need to get all defensive over it, chill the beans

Im sorry to hear that about your family, how far north are you living? I know there are certain spots that have had it a little more difficult, but I believe for the majority of the EU its been more or less business as usual! There are people complaining on the sub, yes, but (I feel bad saying this), I know that people tend to only speak of things like this when they're worse off. People complain more often than they do celebrate. There's a name for this phenomenon, I've forgotten what it is

I'm from Ireland, where theres been more or less no change! Definitely not the north, but not the south either!

Ok my bad, then.

But come on mate... Ireland has pretty much been not concerned by the energy crisis... What do you mean?? Russian gas dependencies in European countries. My country is top 3 of that list... My family lives in 5 different countries in Europe, mainly Northern Europe (Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Finland), and one in Italy. My friends are mostly in France and Switzerland. It's crazy everywhere. I know what I'm talking about... It's not "back to business as usual", no, just no.....

It really sounds like you need more perspective

​

>There are people complaining on the sub, yes, but (I feel bad saying this), I know that people tend to only speak of things like this when they're worse off. People complain more often than they do celebrate.

That's a crazy thing to say in times like these... I don't even know where to begin with that... Hopefully you're just young and don't know much about life in general to say stuff like you say, and hopefully you'll reflect on that some more cause that's just crazy

That was informative, thank you. As I understand it Europe is just moving more quickly towards renewables instead of moving from one carbon dealer to another. The benefit the US would get from this would be temporary? What’s your take on this?

No you will never have a grid made up of solar and wind that doesn't use Gas, that was just a lie that Putin told you through the German Green party and Greenpeace.

We could have had more renewables back when Boerbeck was being paid by Putin to advocate for marking Russia gas as green energy in Europe and allow for loans to be used for cheap gas infrastructure.

But as it stands today we can't afford renewables and we can't afford gas, and the only reason we can afford coal is because China has frozen their entire economy.

I can't say what the future holds, not only did we have record gas and oil prices this year in Europe, but we also had once in 50years turnoff of French reactors for maintenance (like half of their energy production was turned off), and we had the worst drought in 400 years that made hydro also under-produce. I can't predict these things, nobody can.

But simply put there's no way out of the crisis but to move out industry and stop migration until the eventual de-population of europe through the demographic bomb next generation, I mean we're already burning down our forests again, that can't last long.

Maybe the French will build new reactors, maybe Musk is right about the exponential growth of grid storage from his German terra-factory, maybe Turkey becomes the new gas hub of Europe, all possible the question is to what degree.