Ferarris don't contribute at all to global warming relatively. The many Gulfstream's and 747's the wealthy own are actually statistically significant in terms of impact.
Heck, I know they're hybrids but just look formula one. The total emissions of every car, from all sessions at every single race in a year combined produce less emissions than a one way flight from London to New York. Which is then completed negated by the fact that the drivers all take private jets around the world
i don't think that's a good comparison. think how many flights a single F1 race "causes". Not just the team members, theirs cars and equipment, but the millions of fans traveling to races around the world.
There is no carbon neutral fuel before we have a surplus of carbon neutral energy. Currently, any kWh you use to synthesize fuel could instead be used for something else. It's probably less carbon intensive to keep on burning regular fuel, because it takes a lot of energy to make synfuel.
Of course it's nice that they subsidize R&D for synfuels (we might need them for niche applications after all), but selling them as "carbon neutral" is just greenwashing.
How do your links counter my argument that any kWh spent on creating synfuel could be used for something else instead and as long as we don't have a surplus of carbon free energy all the carbon free electricity used in this way needs to be compensated by fossil fuels somewhere else in the grid?
I don't think this argument makes any sense. Just because there can be better uses for additional clean energy, does not make the additional energy any less clean.
By this definition, no source is clean, because there are always "better uses" for energy.
The honest way is using the average CO2/kWh for the grid you're plugged into (including the CO2 emitted for constructing the power plants with some discounting function) to estimate how much carbon your synfuel releases.
The House of Saud, for some time, has attempted and failed to diversify away from oil wealth for when the time comes they can no longer rely on it. Norway, arguably, will reach that point soon (as they’ve bootstrapped electric mobility and can now deprecate existing petroleum supply chains, both for domestic use and for export).
Be like Norway and use the time you have left selling a natural resource wisely, because bans and cross border tariffs are coming, and you’ll be left with what you could build during your transition when the revenue dries up. Hopefully as a country, you don’t end up empty handed.
(Norway also supplies the UK with a large amount of clean hydro power, roughly 690MW continuous, through a newly commissioned underwater HVDC transmission line, so it’s not all dirty fossil exports)
