Employing a lot of people isn't really a sign of progress. You'd prefer a new industry to require less human labor, not more. I feel like a lot of people misunderstand this.

And yet fossil fuels provide 80% of the world's energy.

Yes, all it means is there's a shit ton of money flowing into "clean" energy. That doesn't mean it will be well spent.

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But isn't the whole point of capitalism to create jobs!?

/s

It's nice that this industry is creating jobs but this doesn't look very efficient.

You want productivity to be high. If more jobs are needed to produce less energy that doesn't bode well.

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If they provide 56% of the jobs while providing 20% of the worlds total energy, i wonder how many jobs would be created if the industry got 5 times larger lol.

(156 million jobs if it scaled linearly)

Thats not how that works, even with all the upfront cost added (that includes employee salary) solar energy still costs the same per kilowatt as coal.

Thats not even including the literal millions of lives that could be saved by switching.

I see the sarcasm, but it's worth an answer anyway: no. If you're primarily concerned with job creation then the last thing you want are "labour-saving devices." You want people doing everything manually -- think of digging ditches with spoons instead of backhoes.

For people to prosper -- for the standard of living to go up -- you need more productivity, or more stuff produced per unit of input. Increased productivity means that last decade's innovative thing gets better understood and the process of making it more reproducible, and now making that thing becomes a well-understood process needing fewer people.

Now people need to find new jobs, but that also means that we're producing more things with less effort than when we started. We aren't able to disconnect "innovation" from "creative destruction." Whole companies get created, flourish, and die because of this lifecycle.

Understanding this made me a lot less resentful about my career, and helped me to better anticipate my next moves.

Apples to Oranges comparison. If all other costs are equal, the company/industry with less labor has lower cost to produce the same good. But if solar costs less than coal per kwh even though it hires more people- that's because it has a different business model with different costs.

It's fueled by government subsidies so it completely depends on if subsidies are increased and will completely collapse if removed

Government could do that for the jobs numbers. And the companies receiving said subsidies likely won't have to produce much in return.

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Regardless of how anyone wants to interpret this, if you think the solution to anything is to stick with oil youre not smart.

“If you don’t agree with me, you’re stupid. I don’t care what the facts are.” There fixed it for ya.

This is a great answer.

Capitalism is all about adding value. More output for less input increases wealth for everyone.

Imagine if grain still had to be harvested by hand. Each person harvesting would only be able to do say 1 acre per day. Then have to thresh by hand after. Which you cold maybe do 5 acres a day with a horse and then haul to a bin.

So 12 hours cut plus 3 hours thresh plus 1 hour transport per acre

A modern custom operation charges about $25 per acre for harvesting service.

So if done by hand the labour would only be worth $1.6 per hour.

My brother in christ you just admitted you think the world should be powered by oil indefinitely. Now you have to marry your mother in law.

He didn't actually say anything about that though.

You would prefer it, but one of the features of disruptive technologies is that initially they won’t beat the existing tech in every metric. Over time they might, but that’s not the point.

Fossil fuels are pretty efficient now because we’ve had hundreds of years to perfect their extraction and build up their scale. If we were still reliant on people mining coal with picks and shovels and drilling for oil with tiny little drill rigs on land then that labour efficiency would tank.

What a disingenuous comment. He mocks the anti oil statement, therefore he's pro oil. It's that fucking simple.

Renewables are being constructed at an extremely rapid rate. Installing millions (billions?) of solar panels requires a ton of people. I suspect most of these job numbers are in construction, not operations like it is for fossil generation. The article states 70% of the clean energy jobs are in "building out" the projects.

Renewables, especially solar, is a lot more labor up front (one time at construction) but a lot less labor during operations. Over a 20-30 year life of the plant that breaks even pretty easily. Levelized cost of energy.

B Gates has a startup that has robots assembling solar farms

That's how they get big profits!

I really hated stacked graphs for info like this. Just makes the comparison really difficult to conceptualize

He mocked a snooty comment. Didn't mention pro or anti oil, you snoot.

Hydro folks, big chunk is probably hydro.

You misunderstood it when you called hydro “new”.

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Is it? One is a massively growing industry, the other is an established one. What else should people be expecting?

‘Fossil Fuels Received $5.9 Trillion In Subsidies in 2020, Report Finds’

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trillion-in-subsidies-in-2020-report-finds

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The EU? Certain countries are perfectly fine. It is the fact that some countries decided to become completely dependent on Russian energy supplies. Countries that did not aren't doing badly at all.

Is it possible thats the rub? Float companies until they work, then rugpull their subsidies and let your mates "aquire" them?

We will collapse if we keep relying on fossil fuels though

Well it is useless information to begin with. But to your point new industries like solar do require less human labour not more then legacy ones. The disparity is in building out capacity. The construction is capital intensive.

I think this is more about that not phasing out fossils to protect jobs is not a valid argument, if renewables provide even more jobs..

I mean. Okay. So is U.S. agriculture. Nobody ever brings that up. Roughly 20% of net farm income is due to government subsidies and our current farming model will completely collapse if they're removed.

Subsidies are used as a way to encourage industries to thrive despite low initial or ongoing profit margins in sectors that are important to the population at large. They're not inherently bad and their use isn't an indicator of worthiness or lack thereof.

Wouldn't that be a negative given the returns?

I think it's just one of the weird side effects of capitalism. People need jobs in order to survive, so we can't view greater efficiency as something purely positive as it ideally should be.

What if you ignore corn, corn is such bullshit its not good for making fuel and corn syrup is just used in junk food. Corn is a huge scam in the US, heavily subsidized but no real benefit to society. Eating corn normally is fine.

Oh you meant that under the coal comment np

> there's a shit ton of money flowing into "clean" energy

There's much more money flowing into fossil energy https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/yq0n0i/comment/ivnj1s3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

He also has a new generation of a nuclear reactors. It's called TerraPower, I think.

I would bet for solar.

Have you considered the facts are what lead to this person's opinion in the first place

Only takes a handful of people to run a petrochemicals plant.

This is so embarrassing for you.

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Electricity, maybe. Heating and lighting, no way.

You know the bright thing up in the sky during the day...

I prefer an industry that spends it’s money in the local labor market over an industry that spends it’s money in foreign dictatorships any day!

did i accidentally sort by controversial? what's going on here?

People like you crack me up. "If you're not with me you're against me!" It must be nice to have such a shallow view on the world.

Yeah and growing rapidly. Just got hired at a Dutch firm making smart grid/battery/car chargers etc. They grow about 50% a year. It's not just Tesla growing at this rate

They can't just be jobs they need to be productive jobs that add value otherwise you're subsidizing waste and inefficiency

Look, I don't know what to tell you, renewables are already the cheapest way to produce energy in many countries and states and they have the benefit of not further advancing climate change, both of which adds value to the economy.

How? They all have to be backed up with gas and coal because they're unreliable so it's renewable + gas/coal which isn't very green

Are you arguing that being fully fossil is more green than renewables with fossil backup?

And how many are jobs are associated with nuclear?

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This really highlights why oil is so popular. It's insanely cheap and energy dense. Like, by workers, it's 5x to 6x more effective than renewables, if you go by kwh per employee.

There is a criminal level of disinformation around "clean energy". Germany has been long touted as a clean energy pioneer, yet they are still absolutely hooked on fossil fuels for their grid. France on the other hand, less than 10 percent of their power is from fossil fuels.

The bottom will fall out of the clean tech / renewables energy market at some point. It makes sense for certain areas, certain places, etc. But right now, you can't fly a plane with batteries, they aren't energy dense enough. It's just physics.

I hope to see a massive nuclear Renaissance in our lifetimes. It is a bird in the hand solution to decarbonizing our grid, and now. Not like, in ten years when X Y Z battery breakthrough will save us.

Yeah, why not.

1. The production and demand just shifts to other places so going green does very little in the grand scheme of things.
2. Creates reliance on outdated unclean oil/gas/coal infrastructure and rouge nations especially in the case of an emergency.
3. The net total reduction is minimalized by the need for backup until the battery tech is there.

If that's what you choose to tell yourself to rationalize not going green then please stick to it, you are beyond being argued with...

I'm not saying don't go green. I'm saying the current plan is beyond stupid and pointless

Reminds me about dat corn

I wonder how many would go without heat in the winter? Lol

> Understanding this made me a lot less resentful about my career

Same. I'm not automating jobs away, I'm improving productivity. It's the fault of politicians and businessmen that that excess productivity is not put to improving working conditions.
The solution to growing inequality is to regulate profits/tax them rather than oppose technological improvements.

> youre not smart

Delicious irony.

Hold up, who touted germany as a clean energy pioneer ever since they completely murdered their solar sector by suddenly just completely ripping all subsidation (which ended in china buying out local companies, taking trade secrets and then closing them)?

The (relative to german politics) conservative CDU had the power for like close to two decades and essentially just fcked over anything not coal, because coal lobby is paying well. (Looking at RWE specifically).

At least in germany i haven't found people who think germany is doing well at all in terms of renewable energy lol.

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It'll also depend on past vs present investment. Industries which invested a lot in creating assets in the past now have large capital costs to pay. Industries investing now are going to be paying for more labour.

Then there are the external costs, but they're not included in the price and that's a whole other topic.

Relative to its competition (whale oil, burning logs, etc.) when it was still nascent, fossil fuels were still leaps and bounds more efficient in labor input vs. energy output, that’s why they became and remain dominant. Renewable’s competitive advantage going forward will be their distributed nature that increases system resiliency and reliability.

How is that irony?

According to the article, the lion's share is environmental impact (estimated), such as a carbon tax that no one pays. That is not a subsidy.

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How about the fact that fossil fuels require many fewer jobs to provide the world with enough energy to sustain

Amazing what massive government subsidies produces

Yet they're still the cheaper form of energy production. Which means the money is going to workers instead of oligarchs.

No they are not? Wtf are you talkin about. They are much more expensive for the output you get

Will Big Clean Energy come take Big Oil's congressional representation someday?

The required labor of renewables gets less over the lifetime of an installation as you don't need to keep a whole mining/drilling/shipping operation going to provide fuel.

But besides that what would it matter that you need more labor? As long as it's cheaper overall to produce renewable energy the number of jobs doesn't really mean anything.

Its not cheaper overall and has so many more employees because of the necessary human labor to get anything within a magnitude of fossil fuel production. Or we could just go nuclear green and get over the shitty wind turbines already

[Renewables are now significantly undercutting fossil fuels as the world’s cheapest source of energy, according to a new report.

Of the wind, solar and other renewables that came on stream in 2020, nearly two-thirds – 62% – were cheaper than the cheapest new fossil fuel, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/renewables-cheapest-energy-source/)

Forgot the punctuation, I assume.

https://www.irena.org/publications/2022/Jul/Renewable-Power-Generation-Costs-in-2021

>The lifetime cost per kWh of new solar and wind capacity added in Europe in 2021 will average at least four to six times less than the marginal generating costs of fossil fuels in 2022.
>
>Globally, new renewable capacity added in 2021 could reduce electricity generation costs in 2022 by at least USD 55 billion.
>
>Between January and May 2022 in Europe, solar and wind generation, alone, avoided fossil fuel imports of at least USD 50 billion.

so this is why gas is so expensive thanks Biden

Where are you getting the kWh per employee data from?

Its what happens when things are starting out, how many people worked on the railroads to haul the coal? or pipelines?

How dumb are you?

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I disagree since it's usually taxpayer-funded projects that have to deal with that impact. We all pay a carbon tax in terms of air quality and premature deaths. The idea being that externalized costs aren't taken into consideration and they most certainly should. The price of fossil fuels are kept low because they externalize cost in addition to getting billions a year in direct government subsidies.

Math. 80 percent of energy is from fossil fuels and 10 percent more workers in clean than fossil

Any electric transport company able to grow at that rate will.

Yet it's still more expensive for me even after a 3x price increase on fossil fuels.

What the hell.

Means more people working is not good news

There's corruption everywhere, even in fossil fuels.

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This is not beautiful. Lacking a legend, it's barely even a graph.

Oh yeah I forgot that people never have intentions beneath what they openly state. My bad.

It’s only because clean energy is government backed

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Are we discussing the definition of subsidy or what you think is right? There are substantial societal benefits to fossil fuels as well as negative environmental impact. Do we subtract that portion? Defining value and burden are not black and white. I'm also not in favor of poor folks having to pay more for gas when it represents a chunk of their income. The best solution is that no one should get subsidies and let the market push ripe alternative energy technology.

Subsidy, n: a sum of money granted by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive.

From the IMF report: "Underpricing fossil fuels not only undermines domestic and global environmental objectives but is a highly inefficient policy for helping low- income households2 and has a sizable fiscal cost—too little revenue is raised from fuel taxes, implying other taxes or government deficits must be higher or public spending lower."

The subsidy is that we, as taxpayers and breathers of air, are paying is in higher taxes or lower spending elsewhere or by increased debt/deficits. So, because their costs are externalized, the price of the commodity is kept low thereby forcing governments to pay those costs.

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It's true - more people are employed in clean energy than in fossil fuels.
In fact, many new technologies are emerging in the clean energy field, such as using boron to improve solar cell efficiency. So it's an exciting time to be involved in this industry!