102
votes
Accepted
Does fossil fuels use since 1990 account for half of all the fossil fuels used in history?
True
More detailed data confirm the claim.
This chart is taken from https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels ; most data there comes from the published paper:
Vaclav Smil (2017). Energy Transitions: ...
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50
votes
Did "fossil-fuel pollution [kill] three times as many people as COVID-19 did" in 2020?
The smoke and smog from those engines and appliances directly kill nine million people a year
I’ll address the “nine million people a year” estimate. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates ...
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49
votes
Accepted
At the current rate are we going run out of fossil fuels by 2060?
No
First, this figure is for petroleum. For coal, the figure is much larger. Some of the figures I found for coal were 133 years, "anywhere from 68 years to a hundreds of years", and 357 ...
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42
votes
Will SpaceX's fleet of rockets triple the entire United States demand for methane/natural gas?
Source Confusion from TechCrunch+
The article by the Energy Consulting Group cites an article by Darrell Etherington at TechCrunch which is not an interview with Musk but instead a badly summarized ...
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30
votes
Accepted
Did "fossil-fuel pollution [kill] three times as many people as COVID-19 did" in 2020?
The claim's specificity is probably not rock-solid, but the idea that fossil fuels kill huge numbers of people annually is sound.
I'm assuming McKibben was relying on this study from Harvard ...
24
votes
Did "fossil-fuel pollution [kill] three times as many people as COVID-19 did" in 2020?
The smoke and smog from those engines and appliances directly kill nine million people a year
In 2020, fossil-fuel pollution killed three times as many people as COVID-19 did.
The Dan Romik's answer ...
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20
votes
Does the fossil fuel industry benefit from trillions of dollars of subsidy from governments every year?
Yes, the fossil-fuel industry benefits from subsidies equivalent to trillions of dollars, each year. Yes, the IMF's figures are broadly consistent with other studies: in particular, the cost of ...
- 4,668
15
votes
At the current rate are we going run out of fossil fuels by 2060?
For oil, using proven reserves and current oil production, the date is more like 2067. World proven reserves are approximately 1.7 trillion barrels, or 1.7 million-million barrels (EIA figures]). ...
- 1,923
12
votes
Will SpaceX's fleet of rockets triple the entire United States demand for methane/natural gas?
Will a Starship launch require 1000 tonnes of LNG?
Yes, this is a reasonable estimate. Wikipedia lists 800 tonnes just for the booster, citing an August 2021 interview with Musk. An additional 200 ...
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9
votes
Accepted
Does Shell's "Nitrogen enriched" gas have positive effects?
A good starting point for information about this topic is The Gasoline Wars Chemical & Engineering News, vol. 87, pages 20-21.
First, when shell says "nitrogen-enriched", it does not mean that ...
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7
votes
At the current rate are we going run out of fossil fuels by 2060?
On current trends, we won't run out of fossil fuels, even oil or gas.
This is a slightly misleading statement because the question asks about the current burn rate, and this answer rephrases to "...
- 187
7
votes
Did Willie Soon fail to disclose a conflict of interest with the fossil fuel lobby?
note: This question was originally much longer and quoted section 1 of this response by The Heartland Institute. My comments here are in reference to those claims.
The Heartland Institute's claims ...
- 382
5
votes
Can Hemp free us from oil dependency?
"In 2015, the United States consumed a total of 7.08 billion barrels of petroleum products" https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=33&t=6
One US oil barrel is 159 litres. One acre or rapeseed ...
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5
votes
At the current rate are we going run out of fossil fuels by 2060?
While reading the other answers, you might get the impression that fossil fuel availability won't be a problem for 100 years.
According to this Nature paper ("Unextractable fossil fuels in a 1.5 ...
- 498
4
votes
Have there been no long lines or price hikes for gas in the eastern US?
The article from the tweet you linked claims that both long lines and gas price increases occurred. I would guess either the tweet is a typo or it is click bait to get you to go to the article.
https:/...
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3
votes
Have there been no long lines or price hikes for gas in the eastern US?
No
Comments about the article made me revisit this.
The text in the tweet (at least about long lines) did appear in the original New York Times article on May 10.
Since the pipeline shutdown, there ...
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3
votes
Does the fossil fuel industry benefit from trillions of dollars of subsidy from governments every year?
Among the references cited in that IMF paoer, I found the 2015 ECFIN brief "Measuring Fossil Fuel Subsidies" by Bárány and Grigonytė fairly illuminating in this matter. (To establish authority, ECFIN ...
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Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible