We aren’t making anywhere near as much use of Geothermal as we could.
Indoor farm companies are already claiming a 100x reduction. I can’t confirm these figures, but there’s nothing implausible about them. A 1000x reduction is possible but will require that the only way water leaves the facility is in the food (either as water or converted to carbs).
For meat, a 10,000x reduction is possible, but will almost certainly require culturing. Or maybe we just switch to vegetable protein meat simulators.
It’s daunting, but frankly we have no choice, IMHO. The current approach is unsustainable. It will simply not work forever.
Of course we should start on the least sustainable crops–the low-hanging fruit, as it were (ducks). And maybe that’ll be enough, for a while. But I think once the ball gets rolling, and it becomes clear that indoor farming is effective, economies of scale will be an increasing benefit.
We will also want to engineer crops to be more suited for indoor use. They don’t need to be resistant to cold, or wind, or insects, or a bunch of other things that are required when growing out in the elements. Those are all constraints that lower crop efficiency and won’t be needed in a controlled environment.
I don’t disagree here. But frankly, technology tends to be easier than social or political changes. Although I don’t think people should stop pointing out the utter stupidity of corn ethanol as fuel, or how cheap HFCS plays a role in obesity, ultimately I think more sustainable agriculture is going to come from tech development.
That’s very common but I don’t think it has to be true. Private business are not nearly as tied to the quarterly dynamics as public ones. “Making your quarter” indeed exerts a force toward short-term, reactive thinking (although some business do manage the balancing act).
I think we should reevaluate the rules that we’ve set up. The quarterly disclosures that public companies are required to make are in the interest of transparency–investors should know what they’re investing in. That’s a positive, but the timing means that companies game the results. I don’t have any real answers here–perhaps disclosures should be annual instead. Or weekly? It might be worth experimenting here.
Anyway, part of the reason I have a reductionist view is because it eliminates the ideology of it. It’s almost impossible to talk about capitalism or socialism or whatever because people use these words as a bucket for whatever ills or gains they want to put in them. And will defend their position to the end, while convincing no one, because they are simply talking past the other person.
But seen as an optimization tool, it’s harder use as an ideological cudgel. Like any tool, it’s appropriate for some things and inappropriate for others. It is useful when used properly and dangerous otherwise. If its proper use is still too dangerous, we should investigate safety mechanisms to reduce the harm.
True enough, but the actual large-scale deployment has almost always been private. The difficulty in turning a technology into a product shouldn’t be underestimated. Nor should the cost of pursuing dead-end approaches to implementing some technology. I think the division of labor between basic research coming from government and scaling into a product being private is an ok one. The current setup isn’t 100% optimal but it’s adequate.
Keep in mind the time distance between now and 2500 is about the same as between Columbus and now, so looking at the results of 500 years of climate overlayed on the current pattern of human civilization is a bit naive. The Myan civilization of that time would also be shocked to see where they were by end of the long count. Before the time the tropics are uninhabitable, people will have already moved out.
What will happen is that the human race will stumble along blindly and adapt to changing circumstances as they arise. Many will die, there will be social upheaval, political systems will come and go, life may well be nasty, brutish and short, but it will still be a life. People will love, and hate laugh and cry, and basically make the best of the circumstances in which they find themselves.
The better job we do in terms of nipping climate change in the bud, the better things will be and the softer the landing, but what will be will be.
I had to run through the comments to confirm that this wasn’t a joke post. I’m sorry, but this is a ridiculous premise.
Insufficient clean energy resources over a multi-century timeline? We are looking at several infinite fuel sources - hydro, solar, wind, wave and nuclear (fission and fusion) and whatever else we figure out in the next few centuries. Just think about the energy sources we utilize today that we only dreamed of in 1800.
Now, the resources needed to deliver these sources may be limited (lithium/helium/whatever), but not so limited that we couldn’t effectively meet all our energy resources from clean sources. And that’s not to mention all the ‘dirty’ sources, which could be made clean over the next two hundred years (carbon sequestration, greater efficiencies, etc.).
If you are arguing that climate change makes much of the planet unlivable, well, nature will take care of that with a decrease in population. Unless a planet-destroying catastrophe occurs, a decrease in population will only help us meet our energy demands. And, as other posters have noted, this isn’t a one-sided equation, demand-side efforts have resulted in massive increases in efficiency.
Any of these clean energy sources which are scalable, also depend on a global high technology infrastructure being in place. If climate change is so bad that we lose the high tech infrastructure, then we also are going to lose solar, nuclear, and any sort of large scale wind or hydro.
There is a doomsday clock running, and we have to find and implement these clean energy sources before the alarm goes off. Making the problem even harder, is that all of the stuff we talk about now, just slows down the clock, doesn’t stop it.
I don’t think the thread title is quite the right question, it should be something like “What if we don’t implement clean energy resources quickly enough in the future?”
This is exactly what I am thinking that we need to act while we’re still strong. Once things start breaking down it will be like a house of cards. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to think that we could use the global biomass as somewhat of a temperature regulator. It would take a global effort and several decades you have any real I also think it’s important to start now building an infrastructure that can move water around. This would be very instrumental and manipulating the biomass
This part?
What next? You going to refuse to acknowledge that the only viable solution to meat shortages is cannibalism?
Why wait for a meat shortage?
It’s far-fetched to think that we could use the global biomass as somewhat of a temperature regulator.
Reason one:
- current global land use and land use change causes a net release of carbon. We’ve been unable to do much to slow down some of the worst carbon source land use changes despite decades worth of international efforts motivated as much by biodiversity loss as by climate change, in fact we’re seeing accelerated loss instead in many areas. Look at Brazilian rain forest policies for instance. Covering the US in trees isn’t even going to counter that loss in the growing phase, much less as stable forest.
Reason two:
- alternative ways of increasing biomass that generate long term carbon binding require an input of effort and resources. To bind carbon at the volumes required to have an impact requires an amount of effort and resources that is wholly unrealistic. Even optimistically it would need to become a significant fraction of the world economy, and in the worst case scenario the energy use for implementing all but the lowest hanging fruits will start adding up to where humanity just doesn’t have the ability to do enough to matter.