# How much do we have to give up to save the planet? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 30, 2019, 9:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-do-we-have-to-give-up-to-save-the-planet/828667 "2019-01-30T09:39:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2019, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-do-we-have-to-give-up-to-save-the-planet/828667/41 "2019-02-01T19:19:19Z")
> [@k9bfriender](#): > > Density of energy is the entire point. The more dense the energy that humanity has access to, the more improvements we get in out standard of living. Solar can never be dense, and can only soak up as much energy as the sun puts out at 93 million miles away. Sure, but if the non-dense collectors are out in space, and they then “compress” that energy (Either by beaming it to the surface with a concentrated laser, storing the energy in some sort of cell or battery that can be brought down, etc) then that’s not much of an issue. > [@](#): > > Solar has a place, but we need a dense, reliable energy source to power our civilization. Keep in mind, we need to not only replace our electrical generation, but also as much of our transportation as possible. Electrical demand will go up just a little bit when everyone is riding around in electric cars. this isn’t even counting increases that will come about if we need to start desalinating water and piping it all over the place. > > We can wait “30 years” for fusion, or we can use fission now. absolutely-- we need dense power now, and really we SHOULD have gone fully nuclear decades ago, temporarily at least. Fusion and orbital solar collectors are both better than fission, but they’re also both out of reach for now. Maybe they’d be easier to reach if we took the fission step first – imagine trying to go from a rennaissance level of development to solar panels and nuclear reactors without making use of hydrocarbons on the way, for example. > [@](#): > > I would hope that we get some city utilization on rooftops and maybe parks, but the reason that we have cities is because the land is valuable. In order to feed its inhabitants is going to need more land than is available in or close nearby to the city. Certainly true. The question is, if we can grow food on less land, does it at some point become cheaper to buy a more expensive lot close to the city and avoid shipping? As the cost of building greenhouses drops, and the benefits of greenhouses over farmland continue to grow (both of which I think are very likely as technology develops), we may get to a point where transport makes up a larger portion of the cost of food, even as food becomes much cheaper overall. Mind you, at the same time we will he improving our transportation network. So maybe cheap magnetic trains running on abundant nuclear power will make transport so easy that we will instead grow all of a nation’s food in one centralized place. > [@](#): > > Salmon swim for thousands of miles. Not saying that farming fish isn’t a good idea, and doing it in the ocean has some promising advantages, but it will be hard to replicate the conditions of wild caught fish. > > Farming fish on land also has the advantage of being able to more control the mercury problem. there are definite benefits to land based aquaculture as well, but the big benefit I see to ocean farming is that increasing the biomass of the ocean should improve the rest of the planet, too. If our fish farms can be designed to dump excess nutrients into the sea, especially if we can surround our farms with artificial reefs that coral can then grow on, we can make Earth’s oceans a lot more productive. > [@](#): > > We will certainly need to be stewards of the environment. A few hundred years ago, we had much less impact, and we didn’t really know how our actions would effect things, much less how to effect things in positive ways. We do have much more influence these days, and it would behoove us to understand that influence, and mitigate it to our benefit. I agree 100%, and I would even go further to say that any changes we make to the planet to improve its habitability for US is a good thing. Irrigate the Sahara\*; drive back the oceans with dams and dykes like the Netherlands did to give us more prime real estate; etc. > [@](#): > > We will not destroy the world through deforestation or global warming, it will spin merrily on no matter what we throw at it. What we can do is trigger a mass extinction event, ruining the ecology and environment, and making it harder for us to live here. if we melted all the ice at the poles, maybe we didn’t destroy the world from the perspective of whatever creatures dominate the planet 10 million years later – maybe we got it ready for them, the same way the K-T asteroid primed the way for us. But we certainly would destroy OUR world 😉 > [@](#): > > The first step would be to reduce the amount raised. After that, we can look into ways of raising a smaller number more sustainably. Maybe feed them crickets. > The squick factor does hold up much progress. We can just do our best to move on past it. It’s not just squick, people are just terrified of new things… Maybe nuclear power has drawbacks, but how many people have died from Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima combined? How many people have gotten lung cancel from breathing in fossil fuel byproducts, not to mention the million and one other costs of our current system? ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2019, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-do-we-have-to-give-up-to-save-the-planet/828667/42 "2019-02-01T19:45:33Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > Are they poorer? Or do they just spend less than we do for greater benefit? For example, in the US the average household of 4 spends 28,000 dollars per year on healthcare, in 2018. That’s 7,000 dollars a person. France is around 3,000 USD per capita. And yet their healthcare is superior to ours in most areas (cancer, especially childhood cancer, is the exception – go figure, the one thing we are good at treating is where all the money is) If you look at [individual consumption](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/140509/t140509b001-eng.htm) which includes money spent by government on healthcare and subtract the $4k per year from the US. The consumption in the US per capita is still 26% higher which is significant. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [February 1, 2019, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-do-we-have-to-give-up-to-save-the-planet/828667/43 "2019-02-01T20:20:25Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > Total carbon dioxide emission in 1950 for the US was 2.3 billion metric tons. It is currently 5.14 billion metric tons. Per capita emissions are approximately the same. So in order to get back to 1950 emission levels we either have to make the economy twice as efficient as currently, give up half of gdp, or kill 170 million people. I hope we choose wisely. Hard to choose wisely when a lot of the assumptions there are coming from misinformation and fear sources. Specifically, that bit about the GDP, studies from serious sources show that it is more likely that 1% of the world’s GDP what is needed to deal with the issue. [http://www.un.org/dpi/ngosection/annualconfs/60/pdfs/John\_Holdren.pdf](http://www.un.org/dpi/ngosection/annualconfs/60/pdfs/John_Holdren.pdf) (PDF) > [@](#): > > Paying $100/tC to avoid half of it would be $0.5 trillion/year, about 1% of the Global World Product (much of it a transfer, not moneydown a black hole) > > •More sophisticated analyses of mitigation costs for stabilizing at 550 ppmv CO2e come out ~1% of GWP (range 0.5-2%) in 2100 (Stern review); mid-range IPCC 2007 estimates are ~0.5% of GWP in 2030. > > •Money saved by averting damages is almost certainly far larger than the costs. John P. Holdren, Harvard University, Director of the Woods Hole Research Center for the UN 60thAnnual DPI/NGO Meeting, “Climate Change: How It Impacts Us All” Richard Alley, (Republican scientist BTW) who was cited by that report, used the example of humans deploying water and sewer systems in developed nations to show that expecting great costs to control an issue that affects most humans, is not needed to be as expensive as contrarians of the past and the present assume. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7bmg65SS20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7bmg65SS20) (4 minute video) > [@](#): > > It took a considerable investment for all those pipes bringing water to wash with and to take the waste away, the revolution and hygiene involved an extensive infrastructure of toilets and homes sewers underneath our city’s water treatment plants today we might call it the Sanitation smart grid. > > So how much did all this cost? Not that much if you consider the millions of lives saved with clean water, prevention of diseases like cholera and typhoid; something like 1% of the economy in very round numbers. And that’s more or less the estimated cost of switching the world to a sustainable energy system that doesn’t dump fossil fuel co2 into the public space. > > Cleaning up the cities took decades and even centuries and we’re trying to do things a little faster but the revolution in waste management shows that we can do big things to get benefits that none of us would ever walk away from. Of course, one thing they noticed years ago was that the cost will increase the longer we do wait, and the current administration is not just happy to wait, but to reverse course. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-do-we-have-to-give-up-to-save-the-planet/828667.md?page=2)