Malazan Empire: amphibian - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

We need to be weaned off fossil fuels, not shoved off.

This is the super intuitive one. When you hear EV drivers complaining about the fact that they can’t find a charger, that happens on the way back down too. You get to a system where there aren’t as many gas stations as you’re expecting, and they maybe go out of business in slightly unpredictable ways, or not unpredictable ways, but in ways that aren’t really matched to the optimal placement of where you would want gas stations to support the remaining need. That stuff comes up a lot.

In the power sector, one of the examples that I like to point to is the notion of having to curtail resources. When people talk about the duck curve or having natural gas peakers start-stop to accommodate solar in the middle of the day, or having to shut off solar because there is too much of a baseloader available, these are the kinds of maladaptations that reveal that we can’t run the traditional system the way that we’ve historically run it, but also the new things that are coming online are entering into institutional structures that weren’t designed for them. It’s leading to these strange outcomes that would not probably be the case on either stable side — either a fossil system or a not-fossil system, you wouldn’t really see those problems.

One that we get into a lot with the minimum viable scale stuff is on the petroleum refining side, which is that we expect product demand to go down unevenly. We may expect to see gasoline demand dropping off faster because it’s easier to replace those kinds of services with buses and dense transit options, but also with EVs or something like that. It’s much harder to conceive of seeing jet fuel demand or petrochemical demand going down quite as fast. But the way that refineries are actually designed has these products in pretty specific ratios that are difficult to change. Stuff like that comes up a lot.