I disagree. With China and India on the verge of having a vastly increased middle class, many who will want cars, AC, better heating etc, current first world efforts to “save the planet” will only be a minor piece of this puzzle.
By “going back to the 1950s” I think people are envisioning <1000 square foot houses without AC, one car and one TV for the whole family, 99% of meals cooked and eaten at home, making and mending your own clothes, and using a reel mower. Not unregulated coal pollution and 10mpg land behemoth vehicles.
We have incredible resources both energy and substances. I believe technology will develop to use them in harmony with nature, because that’s were the sustainable energy is. We just have/are going through a dirty start. So no steps backwards, just steps forward to a more sustainable future, as that is where the energy is.
But that’s misleading. A big house with good insulation uses less energy than a small house with poor insulation. You can run many modern TVs for the same power it took for one 1950s TV. Two efficient cars will use a lot less energy than one 1950s car, especially if you’re still driving the same distance.
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.
The wind farms I passed were in reasonably remote regions. The power grid in the US means that getting power from them to the grid isn’t all that hard. It seems though that getting individual solar power (from rooftops) onto the grid has a lot more problems.
I went to Hilversum for work once, and we decided to take the train to Amsterdam. We walked to the station but took a cab back, and the one km cab ride was more expensive than the much, much longer train ride.
Still, that last bit uses much less energy than taking a car the entire way.
Giving up half of gdp might be a bit misleading, because in terms of commercial products you can easily spend twice as much effort and resources to get an outcome that’s only 20% better, or 10% better, by some objective standard.
For instance, the waste in the clothing industry is such that if production were cut to a half or a third it would probably make a negligible impact on people’s day to day life
In 2014 U.S. per capita CO2 emissions were 15.6 tons compared with 4.6 tons for France. Is France being hobbled to a pre-1950’s life-style? (The French figure is down 49% compared with 1980, while the U.S figure fell only 21%.)
Thanos would like a word with you.
You do have losses in the electrical lines. Make a power source remote enough, and it’s really not doing you any good. there is a reason why most power plants are centrally located in populated areas.
You are also paying for labor and such on the individual driver, so that’s going to increase costs. But yes, rail is pretty much the most efficient way to transport things on land.
The fact that France gets 75% of its power from nuclear probably has an effect on that.
Of course there are losses, but from here
My search indicated that the longest transmission line is over 2,000 km long, in Brazil, though I don’t know what the losses are there. Obviously that is way longer than anything we need for wind power.
Power is typically shunted across the country already. Which leads me to believe that the losses are not nearly as large as you are implying.
OK. Here’s the page where I got that info. The U.S. is higher than any developed democracy except Luxemburg (which is also down sharply from 1980). Note that Italy, with little or no nuclear, is at 5.3 tons, less than ⅓ the U.S. level. (OTOH, Italy imports a significant amount of electricity from France which, I suppose, wouldn’t count as Italy emissions even if France had carbon-based electricity.)
No, those are about the losses that I would be implying. I wasn’t saying you don’t get anything from them, just that locating them in remote areas does lower the efficiency of the overall system.
For those higher voltages, you need transformers, which have losses of their own. Then, of course, there is the expense of building and maintaining the transformers and lines. While you would be getting power, just about no matter how long the line is, you are also increasing the cost of that power, the longer the line is. At a certain point, you just can’t bring power in economically anymore.
I’m not saying that wind has no part in a sustainable power grid moving forward, just that it will always only be a part of it
We could be fully sustainable today, and each person on the planet could have access to far more energy per capita, if we really focused on building a sustainable world.
Solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and tidal power could easily supply most of our power needs, supplemented by nuclear power where those other sources fall off in effectiveness. Or we could go 100% nuclear.
We could feed 7 billion people a dozen times over, if we switched our agriculture to greenhouse-based – greenhouses give many times more yield per acre, and can be used year-round to grow any kind of crop you want. Couple that with the transgenetic techniques we already have, and we could drastically cut down the amount of land we allocate for agriculture.
Currently, we only build greenhouses in places that wouldn’t make good fields anyways. For example, both the Negev in Israel and (on a momnumental scale) Almeria in Spain have gone from arid, unproductive regions to true breadbaskets. As resources become scarcer, our population grows, and we start protecting our environment, greenhouses will come to the United States, too. Those rolling fields of wheat and corn that cover our Midwest are an ecological disaster in their own right.
That’s not even considering other areas we aren’t even tapping yet. For example, instead of exploiting natural fisheries to the brink of extinction, we should farm fish in nets out in the ocean. Much of the surface area of the world’s oceans is very scarcely populated – you have nutrients at the bottom of the sea, and light at the top, but the two regions are separated by vertical miles of dark, empty ocean. We could set up large netted areas around oil rigs or similar structures and farm fish in enormous quantities, which we could then use to feed huge human populations.
If we were truly harnessing everything our planet has to offer, we could feed the world many times over; and if we were efficient about it, the rest of the planet’s ecosystem could be healthier than ever.
We do need to keep in mind though, any environmental protections we put in place will have to be artificial. Take the giant panda as an example. That species was on its way to extinction long before we showed up. I mean – they can only eat one plant, it’s barely digestible, and they are large animals that require lots of calories. And pandas show very little interest in reproduction. In nature, the giant panda would go extinct. But we value it, so we protect it, for our own reasons. That’s fine by me, but don’t pretend that protecting the pandas isn’t just as unnatural as building a dam or chopping down the rainforest to make farms.
According to thisthe consumption expenditure per capita in France is 36% lower in the US. So France is a much poorer country than the US. How much of that is because of lower carbon use is probably an impossible question.
Does their consumption figure include healthcare payed by the government on citizens’ behalf? Does it reflect the value of increased leisure time to consumers?
Calling France a “poorer” country than the U.S. is too facile.
Don’t need 100% nuke, but I don’t see a way to be sustainable if we are not getting the majority of our power from it.
The nice thing about current farming is that it just uses land. Greenhouses and hydroponics is more infrastructure that does not come cheap. Yeah, it’d let us feed more people per acre, and with supplemental lighting, can have longer growing seasons, but the real saver on a greenhouse and/or hydro system is on the water.
Transgenics? I have no problem with them, well, most of them. But, pretty much the same people that complain about nuclear are also going to complain about eating food with DNA in it. Not completely a circle on the Venn Diagrams, but pretty close.
Yeah, agriculture definitely changes the land and its properties. But, we will not replace the amber waves of grain with shiny rooves of glass. We will build the greenhouses where it makes sense, and grow crops in the soil where that makes sense.
Greenhouses are already in the US.
Most of the fish we like to eat like to have plenty of room to swim. Farm raised fish are not as healthy for you( except the mercury) as wild caught. We would still only be using the surface and down to a few dozen feet.
Get rid of cattle as a staple food source as a great first step. Most animal products could be reduced substantially as well.
I personally recommend genetically altered crickets to have all the vitamins and nutrients that we need. Real easy to raise, and little waste.
Well, we are protecting it from artificial sources, us, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be artificial itself. For instance, not raising 39 million cattle a year to be slaughtered would make a drastic improvement in greenhouse gas emissions, and there is nothing artificial about simply reducing that to a few hundred thousand. Personally, stuff like the Panda doesn’t bother me. Biodiversity in general is important, as a healthy ecosystem is a healthy environment to live, but I don’t rally care about individual species. If people want to make an effort to save samples of species that are no longer able to maintain a viable population in the wild, then I’m all good on that, I’ll even support it to some extent, but IMHO, humans are more important than Pandas, and if Pandas and the great horned owl and even that cute little lizard in the desert need to get out of our way, then they need to get out of our way.
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)
They also have maximum work weeks of like 32 hours, and minimum 5 weeks vacation a year, mandated by law. Not things that I really think need to be replicated in full here.
That alone could account for the bulk of that 36%.
And, as mentioned above, if you are taking into account the healthcare costs paid by american consumers, and not taking into account the health care costs paid by the french govt on their citizens behalf, then that would be pretty much the rest, if not putting them over.
Hydrocarbons are so energy dense that our Victorian ancestors could pick them up off the ground and industrialized their society with them. As we are reaching the limit of hydrocarbons, we may need to temporarily make use of another highly energy dense source of power: fissionable materials like Uranium. There’s no reason why we couldn’t eventually switch to, say, Solar full time. Especially if we are able to continue improving collector technology, and find a way to transfer energy from orbital collectors to the surface. The Earth receives enough energy from the sun each day to power a civilization orders of magnitude larger than ours, if we could only tap even a small fraction of that energy.
absolutely, and we certainly expect to see (and do see) greenhouses springing up in marginal areas first. One interesting benefit to greenhouses is the move to put a city’s food production back inside the city. This let’s you drastically cut down transportation costs. We’re seeing the very beginning of this process today, but we have a long way to go yet. I expect that we will first see large scale greenhouses in places like Somalia or Morrocco long before they come to the United States
you’re right again, and these people are causing more damage to our wordld than anyone else is.
it’s a matter of scale – build these fisheries large enough and your fish would have plenty of room to swim. Not to mention that the transgenic techniques can and should be applied to fish, too. Honestly, large scale aquaculture is a very promising field that’s still in its infancy.
We can also terraform our own planet. Think about how successful sinking ships to create artificial reefs has been. We could increase the total biomass of our oceans in a very real way by changing the environment. If we can destroy the world through deforestation and global warming, we know that we already have the.potential for geoengineering. We should make use of that potential.
the way we produce beef today is certainly harmful to the environment, but it isn’t an insurmountable challenge to lower the ecological cost of our cattle husbandry practices. It’s probably more trouble than it’s worth, though, and in the US we definitely eat too much need regardless.
if you could do the same thing with a plant of some kind, you’d have less of a “squick” factor to overcome. And for whatever reason we do seem more comfortable with modified plants than with modified animals. But if you got the culture adjusted to let this happen, I agree that it’s not a bad idea.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.