I'll be casting my vote with the skeptics for this one.
That said, even if economic activity was fully decoupled from emissions, Earth's environmental problems would remain overwhelming. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures.
My inner cynic sees headlines like the above and assumes that A) the writer/publisher wants people to think everything is OK, and B) the writer/publisher wants people to narrowly focus on global warming as opposed to the greater health of the natural environment.
While obviously not easy, transitioning to lower-emissions energy sources is far,far easier than fully acknowledging the material basis of our economy and factoring in actually sufficient environmental protections to our systems of production and distribution. If we suddenly weren't allowed to replace old-growth forests with mono-culture, pollute our groundwater, fill the earth with plastic, kill off a majority of animal species, and so forth, how much would the economy shrink? More than anyone published in The Economist would ever admit, I suspect.
I was skeptical until I saw how good my sun panels work. We only have installed about 50% of capacity and they generate enough to cover 120% of our annual electric usage.
Everything here is electric except the heating and I work from home all day (with an energy-drinking PC set-up).
I live in The Netherlands - the same panels will generate about 2x as much energy a year if they were in Spain or North Africa.
I wouldn't be surprised if we could run our houses and light industry for 6 months a year purely on solar panels if we put them on every roof top in the country.
Then you look at wind: we have a huge potential for wind energy especially off-shore (and in our big lakes).
Like most of the EU the main problem is heating in winter - that requires a reduction in energy usage through insulation and heat-pumps combined with energy import from countries which have high potential for solar and wind (North Africa has huge potential here).
Yes. Quite easily, the materials are common. They require energy to process and ship, but that does not have to come from fossil fuels.
I'm confident we'll get there. There will be lots of mitigating the damage from climate change, because that train wreck is still in motion. But we will mostly decarbonize our economies by the end of this century.
> But we will mostly decarbonize our economies by the end of this century.
Unfortunately unless we completely decarbonize by the middle of the century, we'll reach catastrophic levels of global warming (>3 degrees warming, likely leading to the polar ice caps melting and significant ocean level rises, especially at the equator).
A goal, which it is now clear, that would have been absolutely trivial to meet while making a solid profit on the deal, if we'd just started earlier, like when the problem became widely known four decades ago.
But we didn't. So we can probably still do it, and we can probably still come out richer, but some people are still trying to slow it down so they can profit from the short term chaos and impoverishing and risking our lives to do so.
The only possible solution four decades ago was nuclear, and even then it was only a partial solution, and which people oppose for illogical reasons. The story now is much more hopeful. I also hope nuclear can be a part of it, but I think battery advances are more likely to beat it to the starting line.
Climate change is not just about electricity production.
There was a wide array of solutions available 40 years ago, including, but not limited to nuclear.
Notable mentions: carbon fees, preventing deforestation, not subsidizing fossil fuels, not actively encouraging methane release from oilfields, more efficient cars, trains, insulation, heat pumps and solar water heaters but really the list is very, very long.
> Climate change is not just about electricity production.
Agreed, but that was the part that could be addressed with nuclear.
> There was a wide array of solutions available 40 years ago, including, but not limited to nuclear.
I think we're in agreement, except for the word "solution". The things you mention are not solutions, but rather mitigations, bandaids, things that slow the pace of climate change. Which still would have been extremely useful to buy us more time to decarbonize.
I think three degrees of warming is unavoidable at this point. The massive coordination and effort it would take to avoid that seems like wishful thinking at best. I still hope I'm pleasantly surprised here, but I'm skeptical.
It's going to come down to mitigating, and that might mean different things in different places.
I think there will be some amount of geo-engineering to cool the poles and avoid some of the sea level rise and permafrost melting. There will also be some active carbon removal, but we also will not reach zero emissions either. That may mostly balance out, or reach "net zero".
There will also likely be a slow migration away from low lying coastal areas, as well as seawall construction.
All the trends I've read recently put us to going to no higher than 3 degrees of warming. The trends that put us toward over 3 degrees of warming were made around the time period of ~2010 when the trends were much worse than they turned out to be over the 2010s.
3 degrees is very bad, but it's quite survivable. We can of course always do better. But right now I'm quite happy with the direction things are going and the current trends but still push for trying to do more where we can.
Perhaps, though we would need to do that long before the turn of the century. People just don't want to believe how little time there is left to stop catastrophic global warming.
The biggest risk to this is that efforts to decarbonize will lead to cost of living increases that disproportionately impact the poor and working class, leading to a populist uprising against these measures and an enthusiastic return to burning coal. (Coal remains the cheapest way to generate energy in most places.)
We have already seen a little bit of this. It's only been a preview of what a more serious revolt would look like.
It's important to realize that anything that increases energy costs is regressive. The wealthy can afford these cost increases and their lifestyle is barely impacted. For the poor and working class increases in these costs can be absolutely devastating.
The upper classes can also afford EVs, solar panels, batteries, and can very often telework at least some of the time. Working classes are stuck with older technology that is more expensive to fuel and generally have to commute to work jobs in person with no option for remote work.
How often do people with power make decisions for the greater good?
Maybe I'm cynical, but the observer who said that the problem with political power is that the worst people will do anything they can to take it (as a result, good people won't have it)
I don’t see how decarbonization will lead to a cost of living increase for the poor and working classes. Do you have any sources for this?
Solar and batteries are still rapidly dropping in price. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry is engaging in rampant hostage taking (Putin) and price gouging (oil is under $100/barrel. Why is gasoline 2x what it was the first time oil was at this price?)
If anything, I’d expect decentralized generation of renewable power to stabilize energy costs, eliminate wars for oil, and create well paying jobs for unskilled labor.
As for EV affordability: All EVs in the US have a 10 year battery warranty (or lose subsidies), which should create gluts in the used car market moving forward.
All of those things help the poor and working class: lower, more stable energy prices, better jobs, fewer wars to fight and cheaper used cars are each individually huge wins.
A more pertinent question is possibly can we make enough storage to smooth the supply sufficiently to allow adoption of solar as the principal electricity supply technology.
Seems like we're going to need to become more diurnal and more seasonal in our approach to industry? Make hay while the sun shines, as the idiom says.
Sodium-sulfur batteries are made of two very abundant elements, where the other active elements are mostly aluminum oxides and the structural elements are iron and carbon.
Hydrogen is hard to store, but there is sufficient space for satisfying most of our needs by itself. Hydrogen generators are also mostly made of iron, carbon, and aluminum, or alternatively a lot of organic chemicals and aluminum.
Pumped hydro has some problems to compete on the open market, but it also can satisfy most of our storage requirements by itself. Pumped hydro systems are made mostly of steel.
What kinds of resources do you expect we to run out of?
Hydrogen is extremely easy to store underground. It is expensive to make (i.e. inefficient and capital intensive) and to move around with compressors but actually storing it if you have access to salt domes and depleted gas fields is not hard at all.
If the thesis is that electrical energy will be hyper abundant 80% of the time and deeply scarce the remaining 20% (which is the case if you use only solar and wind) and that periods of scarcity are correlated - so a "bad" day is likely to be preceded and followed by other "bad" days, then large scale hydrogen storage is quite a good match to get you through your worst week.
"Extremely" is really not a good way to describe it.
Yes, salt domes are quite viable. They are more the "expensive" kind of storage, and require a lot of scale. They are probably not economically viable for electricity storage as it's usually understood, but they are cheap enough that it's perfectly viable to dig them at a loss for societal assurance. They are certainly a lesser drag on the economy than nuclear power.
AFAIK the vast majority of depleted gas fields can't be used for hydrogen storage. The ones that can are obviously a major gain, but those aren't enough to sustain a society.
Storing hydrogen is perfectly viable, and won't have any catastrophic impact on electricity prices. But the "extremely easy" is a bit too optimistic.
We're getting to the point where wind > hydrogen > combustion will be cheap enough to cover that kind of swing. We're going to be connecting electric systems over a huge landmass which will resolve much of the non-seasonal swings.
I think industries that are overwhelmingly dependent on energy often are like that now. Energy prices vary throughout the day and some industries (aluminum?) are very price sensitive.
I think that would need to go hand in hand with social change to allow people greater quality of life outside of consumerism (e.g. greater economic stability, autonomy, home ownership, access to education, etc.).
Right now it seems that the social contract is "give up your autonomy and stability to capitalism and in return you get to consume lots of stuff". If we remove the "consume lots of stuff" part of the equation, then I doubt people would be happy with the "give up your autonomy and stability" part.
Energy efficiency is skyrocketing though. My house uses 25% the energy it would with if we installed 20 year old appliances (even ignoring improvements to insulation).
The answer actually isn’t that you need days of storage. A researcher I follow on Twitter here in Australia called David Osmond has been running a simulation for over a year that scales up the wind and solar we have to the levels we would need to achieve around 100% renewable energy, and using real time data simulates storage requirements.
He’s found that for the NEM grid in Australia at least, just six hours of storage can bring us to over 99% of demand being provided by renewables and storage over a month, almost every month. On a weekly basis, some weeks it’s 100%, but worst case will be something like two or three percent being provided by something like gas turbines over the week.
We have more pumped hydro coming online and will have more in the future, so not all those six or so hours worth will be chemical batteries.
Part of what makes this work is because on the eastern seaboard, often it might be, for example, windy in northern Queensland while it’s calm in South Australia, so being interconnected helps a lot. At this point we really don’t have (and it’s not simulating) any kind of serious demand management (apart from in emergencies, but I’m talking everyday kind of management), which could potentially remove some of the need for gas peaking. We also don’t have any offshore wind yet (legislation only legalised it last year and there are some early projects). As some of that offshore generation comes online with better capacity factors than onshore, it will likely make things more consistent.
Here in Norway the electricity prices this summer and fall were up to 100x higher in the south compared to the north, due to lack of interconnect capacity between the north and south.
Building hundreds of miles of high-capacity interconnects ain't done in a weekend either.
It's like saying, this remote town in the hills has cheap housing because it takes so long to drive to it so lets build a high speed express train right to the city. Then we can have cheap housing and access to the city.
Except you can't, because as soon as you have access to the market demand, the price goes up to match the market price.
Interconnects are useful, but people wanting to build interconnects so they can access the cheap power from places that only had cheap power due to a lack of interconnects is upside down thinking.
Oh we've noticed that as well. Our interconnects to Germany and UK certainly contributed to the high prices in the south this year.
But better internal interconnects between south and north would certainly have contributed to averaging out the prices across the country, avoiding the extremes we saw this year.
After all, there were hydro plants in the north which halted production due to the low prices at the same time as we had prices >10x normal in the south.
In Australia, based on current electricity demand it's 24 GW / 120 GWh.
Primary energy replacement obviously will require more than that, but it won't be so bad as people make out, since electrification can drive massive efficiency increases - electric cars are 3-4x as energy efficient as ICE cars, and there are very few places in the parts of Australia that get decently cold that are too cold for air source heat pumps, so that's a 3x efficiency increase over gas space and hot water heating (even as much as 5x for CO2 hot water heat pumps!).
A comment like this comes up in every discussion of renewables and needs to die. We don't need separate stationery storage, enormous storage capacity will be free as car batteries. EVs will have 17 times the battery capacity of stationary storage systems by 2030 [1].
By the time we completely transition to EVs, it will be 100s of times of storage. All this storage capacity is available at zero cost, people buy cars anyways. It is decentralized, no single point of failure. This is the sweetest kind of energy demand, can charge whenever electricity prices are negative or zero. Cars are parked nearly all the time, grid adaptations will evolve demand management. Cars will supply power back to the grid at its highest prices, providing a source of income for EV owners.
Power prices have been going negative and spiking up 100x in the UK for a decade or more.
Yet the vast majority of EV's don't have the ability to discharge into the grid to earn money... Most can't even charge when power is negatively priced unless you pay for a third party charger and service.
Basically, Car owners, charger owners, Utility companies, and EV manufacturers would all like to earn the money by charging/discharging your EV at times to earn the most money. But all of those people don't want someone else being able to take that sweet sweet revenue. So they put roadblocks in the way.
EV's usually have the capability to charge into the grid, but firmware that won't allow it.
Chargers (AC and DC) won't allow power to flow back into the grid, and will disconnect any car who tries.
Utilities refuse to let home users take part in the minute by minute pricing - instead the best available is dynamic pricing set half hourly a day in advance.
And users want to do this, but have three parties who've assembled roadblocks in the way. And there is no indication of that impasse ending anytime soon.
Most of the benefit can be achieved in one step by putting an 'eco mode' button on home chargers that makes it dispense power if and only if there is curtailment (which can be looked up over network) or the car battery is critically low. Make this an overridable default with some messaging about owners doing their part for a greener future to make it palateable and you don't need the battery to feed back out for the EV to be acting as storage.
This benefits the grid operator because they get to massively overcharge for curtailed energy. It benefits the EV manufacturer because they get to greenwash. And the consumer doesn't get a say because they don't actually own their DRM'd remote controlled car and charger.
>Utilities refuse to let home users take part in the minute by minute pricing - instead the best available is dynamic pricing set half hourly a day in advance.
That seems reasonable considering what happened with griddy in texas.
There are better approaches. For example a supplier could sell you 5 kWh per day at a fixed price, and anything extra you use is at instant market price, with some kind of pay-as-you-use system.
Then if the prices go sky high, users who chose that plan at least get to use 5kWh each day. 5kWh is plenty to not freeze and to keep your phone charged and fridge going. If you want more, you can pay more.
The UK already has a system of electricity meters that have a 'balance', and when the balance reaches zero it cuts off till more credit is added. Such a scheme integrates well with that, and means a user can never rack up a massive unexpected bill if the price goes crazy high or low.
> For example a supplier could sell you 5 kWh per day at a fixed price, and anything extra you use is at instant market price, with some kind of pay-as-you-use system.
I suspect 5 kWh/day is way to little to keep the house warm and still be able to cook food. The exact number doesn't really matter here. What's more problematic is how the 5 kWh of guaranteed/insured/subsidized power would be allocated.
If it's your first 5 kWh/day, it will be you'll blow past the quota by noon, and if there was a price spike in the evening you would pay the full price of it, or shut off your breaker until prices go down.
Having it as a some sort of pool you can draw from anytime you want doesn't suffer from the above problem, but would make such a service very expensive to run for the counterparty due to adverse selection. Anyone using such a service would opt to use the market price when electricity is plentiful/cheap, and switch to fixed price when electricity is scarce/expensive. The net result is that the 5 kWh ends up always being the most expensive electricity for the day, and a service providing such a guarantee will be priced accordingly. In a competitive market, you would expect the price of a fixed price plan to be the same as the "5 kWh per day at fixed price and anything extra at instant market price" plan that you propose. You might be tempted to argue that utilities/the government can subsidize the latter plan as some sort of green energy initiative, but that would be be bad. The most expensive energy also tends to be the dirtiest, because peaker plants (power plants that can quickly turn on/off) tend to run on fossil fuels. Subsidizing such a scheme would also be subsidizing electricity consumption during peak hours, and therefore subsidizing fossil fuel plants.
5/24 kWh per rolling hour, with an audible beep if you'll run out of credit before the end of the hour would be a suitable way to do it.
Then you can hear the beep and either decide to turn off a few things, top up your balance, hit the 'emergency 1 kWh' button, or just sit in the dark for 15 minutes.
Hooking up the car to the roof solar is still very expensive. It needs to be done for every house. What if the car is at work and someone needs the battery power at home?
Car batteries are not going to be a substantial source of grid energy. You need those for driving and additionally the battery chemistries used in cars isn't optimized for the kind of loading that a grid would put on it.
People won't want to put their plans at the mercy of a fluctuating grid. There will never be a time when people are happy to plug in their car and come back to find it empty, electricity spot price be damned. It's my car, not your grid storage system.
That's true, and it's why other sources of energy are useful still, such as wind and nuclear and hydro.
But I also think we'll never get to the point that everyone has solar installed. There are plenty of situations where it doesn't make sense, such as properties with lots of taller trees around short buildings.
Also, generating 120% generally doesn't make sense because the payout from the electric company for the other 20% is pitiful.
A battery makes sense for a lot of people for a few reasons, too, so the power company doesn't necessarily have to be the one to do all of that, either. We did it mainly for relief from power outages, but it also works well for places with prices that change by time of day.
What do you mean by astronomical? My back-of-the-napkin estimate is that you'd pay about $8k a year in battery costs to supply a household ($20k 18kWh battery system lasting 5 years, then double it).
Obviously that's missing commercial power, utility-scale storage, heavy industry, electric vehicle charging, etc., but it seems like factoring those in would give you a big yet feasible cost, especially if storage gets cheaper over the next decades.
Here is 30kWh of LFP batteries for $9,000. Now that doesn't include the inverters or installation or anything but LFP batteries have excellent longevity, in this case 7000 cycles to 80% depth-of-discharge. That means charging and discharging the battery every day for 19 years and at that point, you still have 80% of the remaining capacity.
I keep hearing that a problem with solar is that it doesn't work at night. So I can see that as a (solvable) problem for industry, but for personal life?
This idea that you need to have your lights on all night is rather recent. For a very very long time people survived by following the natural rythms of daylight. Some people even think this is healthier, and suggest special apps to adjust screen brightness to follow natural light patterns.
A good fridge/freezer should hold its cold overnight, especially if you aren't snacking at midnight.
So while it might be true that your current lifestyle is based on 24/7 electricity, but what makes that lifestyle sacrosanct? You'll probably change it over the next few years anyway, and odds are it is different today than it was 5 years ago.
> This idea that you need to have your lights on all night is rather recent. For a very very long time people survived by following the natural rythms of daylight.
People have used fire, candles for a very very long time to provide light at night.
Also you can't underestimate moon light either in premodern times. Deep in the trees or an urban landscape with tall buildings all around it is less reliable, but even a half moon on a clear night without washing your vision out with bright artificial lights leaves you with a ton of light. And even when overcast you aren't completely blinded at night as long as you have a decent amount of sky above you.
I think the idea of people sleeping as soon as the sun is down and not just doing low-light activities even 3000 years ago as ridiculous despite being a pervasive idea.
If we built our houses right, we could drastically shift energy usage requirements for heating and cooling to daylight hours (utilizing thermal mass storage like https://www.steffes.com/ets/ )
Really depends on the insulation if you're in Western Europe close to the sea (making the winters less harsh). I live in a flat and the whole complex has been upgraded with modern insulation and modern windows about five years ago. I turn on the heat on a few days when I feel exceptionally cold, otherwise I don't and it still maintains 18-19° (being chubby helps, that's my comfort temperature). It's not because my neighbors are doing the heating for me -- I've talked to them, and they barely ever turn it up, either.
Granted, that would change somewhat if we get a super harsh winter here, but otherwise: I consume much more electrical power than heating.
"Now this decoupling must accelerate" says the article's subtitle. What is generally missed in this kind of discussions is how much better, both in kind and in degree, electricity is as an interface to power than natural gas, petroleum, biomass, and so forth.
The "win" is not that once you have everything electric you won't need to burn all these irreproducible resources, but the win is that the consumer now operates with a more "generic" interface, electricity, and is "decoupled" from the burning itself, think of "Burning as a Service" instead of "Self-Burning".
And maybe, in some kind of future, we will be able to produce electricity without burning at all: maybe fusion, maybe arrays of solar panels in GEO [1] beaming power to Terra [2], maybe some kind of bacteria eating all the plastic we've been landfilling [3], who knows.
Who told you it would hurt the economy to not pollute groundwater or clear cut old-growth forests?
And what have those same people been saying about our ability to transition to lower-emissions energy sources, which you think is possible?
Presumably along the lines of "we don't need to do that, it's fine", "actually we do need to do that, but it's impossible", "okay it is possible but it would cost too much", "okay, it would actually be cheaper but it'll put all the poor groundwater-polluters and clear-cutters out of a job, why do you hate poor people" and finally "It's a conspiracy by the gays and the jews and the authoritarian left to control you by passing laws to not let you pollute groundwater, not that I want to pollute groundwater, but I'll defend to the death your right to do so etc."
>Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures.
The disconnect is between the recognition that there are problems and the assertion that we cannot simply solve those problems. Wastewater reclamation, urban planning, and the at least partial displacement of dietary animal protein can address the cited problems without "degrowth". Furthermore, while several trends are concerning, they mostly do not represent an immediate threat on the level of climate change except in the writings of click-chasing environmental journalists and the appeals of donation-funded activist organizations. We have time to study and refine our approach.
For example, the largest biodiversity loss event actually happened before the dawn of recorded history — the Quaternary Extinction. Yet this massive 'crisis' failed to prevent the rise of human civilization. Degrowth advocates usually want to impose a lot of pain on society very soon — in your words, 'suddenly' — which is more punk rock than practical reason. In reality, most of these trends are things we need to be aware of and plan for, but the sky is not falling. Climate change is still the biggest threat, and the one thing that may require a little pain. Attaching pain in service of other causes becomes a lead shoe as we are trying to swim to the shore.
Sure but we then need to acknowledge that the root cause is the level of the human population on this planet.
I don't think we should get to sustainability by in effect keeping people poor and restricting what they are allowed to consume. Rather we should get to a sustainable number of human beings allowed to be free, to travel, to have a good life.
Even in the face of slowing population growth? That's the primary driver of increased consumption, and population growth has slowed dramatically.
> If we suddenly weren't allowed to replace old-growth forests with mono-culture, pollute our groundwater, fill the earth with plastic, kill off a majority of animal species, and so forth, how much would the economy shrink?
But would it? Such a transition would create a massive number of jobs producing the alternatives.
A very small portion of the economy is spent on what people need, 80% of GDP is spent on wants. And if people want a clean environment more than they want the latest consumer crap, that means the clean environment is worth more in dollars, and so cleaning the environment grows the GDP.
To pick an example which is both low-stakes and topical: many, probably most, of the 11,000 Facebookers who just got canned, were misallocated. Zuck was just paying them not to work for anyone else, whether that was explicit in his mind (as it was for Brin and Page), or not.
Does that layoff reduce human productivity? Rather the opposite: the majority will be hired by companies which expect them to actually deliver value (not saying FB employees are lazy, far from it, just that they mostly do useless and harmful things), which is good.
As long as we stay out of broken window territory, banning or tax-restricting harmful practices will increase productivity, especially if (as I do) you don't consider actions where the eternality outweighs the profit to be productive.
Obvious example: if California struck down the traditional water rights system and replaced it with auctions, this would do good things for water conservation.
It would also increase the productivity and market value of California's agriculture, I would bet a lot of money on this. The land currently used for alfalfa, an insultingly poor crop for the central valley, would be converted for other uses. The tragedy of alfalfa in California is that it's barely profitable, even with robbing the commons of enormous amounts of water they should have to pay for.
Why more profitable crops are not grown instead? Maybe Alfalfa is the only profitable thing. And with fair water rights even that wouldn’t be grown. Which would probably be better than current situation.
> (population growth is) the primary driver of increased consumption
I disagree. My suspicion is that the primary driver is marketing, telling people that happiness and self-realizations comes from what you buy rather than what you give/create.
The basic thesis is that the industrial revolution was so successful at producing goods that it produced more than people were willing to buy. It took tremendous effort to convince people that they should consume more.
> That said, even if economic activity was fully decoupled from emissions, Earth's environmental problems would remain overwhelming. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures.
The issue I take with the “Global warming” crowd is that there’s a lot inaccurate predictions (nearly all of them thus far) and the evidence misrepresented and questionable.
Personally, this makes the “warming” tied to “emissions” just seem like a red herring. If I was a company producing forever chemicals, but low “carbon emissions” and I could afford the carbon tax, and extra carbon reducing infrastructure. Of course I’d promote the “green agenda”. It’s a barrier to new comers and it distracts people from the poison I’m adding to the environment.
If it becomes too burdensome the whole “carbon reduction” crowd just moves to a different country. One that slows higher level of pollutants.
These policies, to me, are really just business decisions.
I always thought this too. Just googled "how many nuclear reactors for all worlds energy needs". First result: "Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy needs" [1].
Global energy needs at 15TW. Would need 15K nuclear plants total. Currently we have 440 @ 375GW total.
It's an interesting read.
But I agree that it is completely absurd that climate activists make such dire predictions of apocalyptic scenarios, and then won't consider a completely obvious stop-gap that would buy 100 years to get our act together.
That calculation is like taking the consumption of a car from the 60s and multiplying by the known petrol capacity at the time, it just makes absolutely no sense to predict future capacity.
It does not account in technology changes and discovery of more fuel sources. The reason it's not done yet is because the problem isn't the lack of fuel but the lack of plants.
They are, as a sibling comment demonstrates, deluded, after decades of being maliciously lied to by 'environmental' movements with ties to the fossil industry.
Anyone against nuclear is a shill for petrochemical power, there are no exceptions. There are the deluded and the liars, that's it.
Completely disagree. And I used to be strong nuclear proponent until 2015 or so.
Nuclear power is no longer a viable pathway for a government to throw tax dollars at, and there are multiple reasons:
1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind.
2) Nuclear power costs explode if the capacity factor of your plants decreases: Meaning that they are basically ONLY viable for baseload power (running at full tilt all the time), which makes them very unflexible and a really bad match with other renewables (=> which, again, are cheaper per MWh than the fission reactors).
3) Nuclear power failed to deliver on safety promises, mainly with the Fukushima incident: If a modern, technologically competent nation like Japan can not be expected to keep their reactors running incident-free, then how are you going to convince e.g. Italians, Indians or other nationalities with significant (perceived?) government corruption/incompetence that their government can be trusted with regulating nuclear tech?!
4) Building plants is slow, extremely expensive and a huge commitment: Considering how rapidly PV/wind/batteries decrease in cost currently, committing on nuclear power right now would be economically irresponsible, and also has huge latency on acutally delivering power, unlike PV or wind, which you can basically buy off the shelve, install and hook up within the year.
> 1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind.
This argument is an important one, but most of the reasons that this is the case is a related problem to the ever lasting light bulb problem, they last too long. Because we're not building them they're expensive to build. Once we start building them the costs go down.
> 3) Nuclear power failed to deliver on safety promises, mainly with the Fukushima incident: If a modern, technologically competent nation like Japan can not be expected to keep their reactors running incident-free, then how are you going to convince e.g. Italians, Indians or other nationalities with significant (perceived?) government corruption/incompetence that their government can be trusted with regulating nuclear tech?!
Fukushima is the latest in scare tactics. The level of radiation released was low and the government overreacted to that danger. Further, it was built right next to the ocean which was itself right next to a major fault line running under that ocean, with backup generators that were at ground level.
> 4) Building plants is slow, extremely expensive and a huge commitment: Considering how rapidly PV/wind/batteries decrease in cost currently, committing on nuclear power right now would be economically irresponsible, and also has huge latency on acutally delivering power, unlike PV or wind, which you can basically buy off the shelve, install and hook up within the year.
See my response to point #1. Because we're not building them, we're not used to building them so they're slow to build.
Is the fact that Fukushima was built in a poor location with poorly designed generators part of nuclear's failure to deliver on safety promises? That is to say, if nuclear power cannot reliably avoid design failures then that sounds to me like it is failing to deliver on safety promises.
Have you ever been involved with building or maintaining a nuclear plant?
I have family members who built plants back in the 80's and some still maintain them.
They claim the main issue has to do with government regulation(s) and unions. I can dive into it further, but effectively the regulation(s) required inspection on ever weld a welder would make. This meant you needed two welders on site, one making a weld and one signing off. You'd have a pipe fitter line up the pipe(s), a different inspector would have to come around and sign off on that work. Sometimes they wouldn't show up, so you'd end up with a days work lost (everyone still getting paid). If someone who was part of a different union or not unionized tried to do the work, the union would strike / the person would be fired.
Then at the end of it, the regulation(s) would change slightly and they'd have to cut out a large section and start all over.
This happened at multiple plants in the 80's per my family members. Today, they're pushing the plants past where they're really safe to use. In the case of Fukushima, they didn't even have a cut-off switch. It was an earlier design.
All that being said, Illinois has been running on mostly nuclear power for decades, as has France. No issue in terms of safety and relatively cheap power (natural gas being cheaper). An updated design, with a reduction in unionization and a loosening of regulations would make nuclear far better than any alternative.
You can do the math yourself and it comes out cheaper and safer than wind or solar. The other thing to consider is what happens when the power goes out in a place like Texas for a week or two due to weather conditions -- people die. Solar, coal, wind, nuclear all have pros/cons. Thus far in the United States nuclear has caused far fewer casualties than per gigawatt than any alternative.
>the main issue has to do with government regulation(s)
You can't have it both ways - but of course they want to.
The Price-Anderson Nuclear Indemnity Act shifts the risk of nuclear accidents onto the tax payers. In return, the industry accepts regulations. Tell the nuclear industry that we're taking away your insurance caps and they'll say "we can't stay in business".
1) I don't believe this for a moment, not when you include capacity factor and storage requirements for renewables to actually compete with on-demand power. What do you do when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow? How long can your storage solution sustain that? If it's anything less than "infinity", it's inferior to nuclear.
2) This is just trying to spin reliability as a disadvantage. You can throttle nuclear just fine. Overbuilding in order to have "peaker" nuclear plants is perfectly viable - France's grid does so. Pointing out the difficulties of integrating with flighty, unreliable renewables is a point against renewables, not nuclear - you are failing to account for grid storage, then complaining that nuclear is a poor grid storage solution. Well, yeah!
3) The safety record of nuclear vastly exceeds any other power generation technology, even if you factor in Chernobyl. We are making the perfect the enemy of the good. I daresay that India could weather a nuclear incident or two and still come out ahead of the 2 million people who die yearly there from air pollution, in large part from burning fossil fuels.
4) This just point 1 repeated, and again, you ignore grid storage. True, you can throw up PV or wind quickly enough, but it won't solve your energy problem. People were complaining about how slow it is to construct nuclear plants decades ago. If we'd ignored them and started building, we'd be in a much better situation now. The best time to build a nuclear plant is 20 years ago; the second best time is now.
How many terawatt-years of electricity can the entirety of accessible uranium reserves produce?
How many terawatt years of non-low-grade-heat energy do we need between now and 2030?
Now that we know that PWRs are irrelevant, can we move on from the constant gaslighting about how 'the next one will he cheaper we swear' or 'it's totally safe if everything goes perfectly always, just ignore the mines'. Or are you just trying to distract from the only thing that can replace the majority of (or even a tiny minority of) fossil fuels?
5) Most countries do not have access to them for political reasons, and this will not change, ever. A few government will even mass murder their people if they try to do it without authorization.
Monde Diplomatique made a documented article about France plan to bury its own nuclear waste in Meuse department...
It has been a clownshow, with fire incident lasting weeks because an elevator tire went to flame, necessity to run a water pump for the next 10.000 or 100.000 years (no joke) because the underground storage facility would be underwater after 3 days and will probably leak radioactive materials in the surrounding aquifere and will go back to surface after a few hundred years. In short, they have no realistic plan for long term storage.
Maybe there is just an olympic swimming pool of radioactive waste in the US (I suppose so it's about 4000m3), but it is not the way you store it for tens thousand of years. And definitively not the cost of a swimming pool.
There are roughly 40,000t of accessible fissile material (U235 and Pu239) on earth.
You need about 3.5t to run a GW of PWR for 6 years. This generates up to half a tonne of Pu239.
Primary energy is about 17TW. You need about 12TWe to meet this. We'll assume 5TW of heat needs can be met with a geographically isolated low head steam generator.
Assume your reactors are free and all mining capacity grows at 100% p.a. from the current ~200t of U235 that isn't in inaccessible tails per year and reactors are constructed in record times of 5 years.
Make it make sense. Provide a net zero solution for 2050.
The nuclear power I push for is still in development. It amazes me that you push for bad and unsafe designs combined with bad economics and management practices.
Lots of reports pointing out Russia funds environmental groups. China does the same - but more openly - advertising cheap solar and wind (neither function as well as nuclear).
Right now wind and solar have dropped so much in price that they represent a serious threat to fossil fuels on a short time frame. Have all storage problems been worked out? No. But even moving 50% of our current fossil sources to renewables would have a huge impact on the profits of those industries and it’s now completely feasible in the short term and very cheap. If I was in the fossil fuel extraction industry I’d be throwing every astroturfing dollar into FUD calling for those plans to be abandoned because “only nuclear works.”
PS I’m 100% supportive of a mix that includes cheap renewables and more costly nuclear baseload. It’s when you see comments promoting nuclear and renewables as somehow in opposition, that’s the tell.
> Right now wind and solar have dropped so much in price that they represent a serious threat to fossil fuels on a short time frame.
I recommend sitting down and calculating the input cost for solar / wind. It's being subsidized substantially.
There aren't even enough materials currently mined to support the US switching to mostly (>50%) solar / wind. Silver/gold/copper/nickle prices would go up an order of magnitude, for instance.
I'm for cheap energy - period. It's directly correlated with improvements in life. If solar / wind get us there, great. If nuclear improves it, let's do it. Right now natural gas is also very cheap, should be drilling as much as we can. The more we maximize growth and cheap energy now, the quicker we advance technology, innovation and automation.
> There aren't even enough materials currently mined to support the US switching to mostly (>50%) solar / wind. Silver/gold/copper/nickle prices would go up an order of magnitude, for instance.
You're thinking of nuclear. Which has a variety of critical resources and no plan reduce them. Renewables live in the real world where using less of a scarce resource allows you to outcompete your competition.
Modern perc panels use 30-50g (so half of silver production would produce 500GW/yr) of silver per net kW with commercial but not fully deployed technologies to reduce it to 18-30g, and feasible technologies to bring it below 5g (which is what a nuclear reactor uses). This is the only limiting resource that renewables necessarily use more of than nuclear other than concrete.
And how do you get scale when the costs are so steep? Cut US regulations to lower costs and you also give up taxpayer supported insurance caps without which no new nuclear would ever be built. It's unsolvable while wind and solar have already gotten far cheaper than nuclear.
I don't think people realize that when you have a huge commodity income stream under threat of ceasing to exist, it's quite realistic to spend a huge percentage of this on lobbying to stretch it as far as it will go.
Such as by constantly filling the internet with lies about how the technologies that are eating 1% of your market share per year, and growing by 20-40% per year can't possibly solve the problem and we must divert all funding from it to a technology that costs 3x as much, has consistently gotten more expensive with time, and can't scale?
Tbf, fracking does have proven issues with geological stability and soil contamination. But it would be very hypocritical of the UAE to go on an anti-nuclear tirade, since they themselves use nuclear energy.
Obvious things are often wrong. It is not just uneconomical, but also physically impossible to replace fossil fuels with nuclear using known mineable uranium reserves.
What people often don't understand about radioactivity, is that if you have short halflife, like weeks, the radiation is dangerous but doesn't last long. And if you have huge half life, like a million years, then radiation is basically non-existent and not dangerous at all.
This lack of understanding is why people spread FUD about radioactive waste that will poison the planet for million years.
No, seriously, coal burning released more radiation into the environment than actual nuclear waste. Long-term storage is a problem but it's still a better problem to have to solve than fossil fuel pollution.
It also amazes me that the government activists, those folk attending COP conferences, never suggest holding a video conference for COP as an example to us all. Instead an estimated 400 private jets have arrived in Egypt (where domestic climate protesters are locked up) along with 33,000 delegates though the largest emitters, India and China are not represented. Do all these people really believe that there's a climate emergency in terms of CO2 emissions? Their actions seem to belie it. Moreover not much results from these jamborees.
Apparently, a private jet can emit two tonnes of carbon dioxide in an hour and is five to 14 times more polluting per passenger than a commercial plane.
> The issue I take with the “Global warming” crowd is that there’s a lot inaccurate predictions (nearly all of them thus far) and the evidence misrepresented and questionable.
I think that's a problem with general prediction by experts. There is no consequence for anything that media and experts push daily as "the right thing to do". The "Zero covid" strategy is another similar example. A lot of experts and media tried to push to this, but then later one it proved itself as not sustainable[1]
Unfortunately, a lot of climate activists’ primary goal is not stopping climate change but rather advocating for degrowth. They are thus vehemently opposed to any solutions that don’t involve massive reductions in consumption. This is not only politically untenable (it is impossible to convince societies to take massive quality-of-life reductions) but also alienates the majority of people from the cause, who might otherwise support it. Hopefully degrowth advocates’ voices will be drowned out by abundant supplies of cheap GHG emission-free energy.
Reading the article leaves me with a taste of self-delusion as a society.
I mean, we take 3 pollution parameters very limited in time and space, we see how they decrease, and we open the bottle of champagne to celebrate...
If we don't look at the big picture, we are fooling ourselves, and in my opinion only degrowth will save us, just keep in mind that previous societies that consumed fewer resources collapsed for exhaustion of resources in relatively short periods of time (but long in human terms).
Is it difficult to convince people of degrowth? Absolutely. But we either degrow or we will be degrowth.
Or... we can use the information that experts collect and share: https://www.ipcc.ch/
* I edit to copy paste an extract of the report: Emissions reductions in CO2 from fossil fuels and industrial processes (CO2-FFI), due to improvements in energy intensity of GDP and carbon intensity of energy, have been less than emissions increases from rising global activity levels
in industry, energy supply, transport, agriculture and buildings
> it is impossible to convince societies to take massive quality-of-life reductions
What about sustainable growth focused on actual quality of life and not on perpetuating a system that produce/consume useless cheap low quality gadgets and services for the sole purpose of keeping the population at work 8 hours a day until they hit 65/67 years old (age by the time 25% of the poorest are already dead)
The fact that we (may have) decoupled growth and co2 doesn't mean all growth is progress or that all growth is desirable.
People individually choose to buy these 'useless cheap low quality gadgets and services' and work full-time until retirement instead of living frugally and limiting work time (like advocates of FIRE movement). Who are we do prescribe what is best for others?
Society at large already prescribes what is best for others. When the government or major business owners choose to do A versus B. In many cases, people do not to choose on their own for the opposite.
As a clear example, if you want a 3.5 mm headphone jack on the newest iphone, that is just not possible. Apple chose for you.|
In many cases, these choices are more obscured, but it is not at all inappropriate (relative to what currently is acceptable) to force degrowth.
> People individually choose to buy these 'useless cheap low quality gadgets and services'
After decades of Hollywood propaganda, non stop advertisement from birth, &c. yes sure the "choose" it.
We're still Neanderthals looking for shiny sea shells on a beach, the problem is that it's been weaponised against us.
Do people want to doom scroll social medias ? Do people want this sickening political polarisation ? Do people want to retire at 67 ? Did people agree to bail failed banks in 2008 ? Did people agree to go from 1:6 to 1:1000+ employee:employer compensation over the last 100 years ?
> and work full-time until retirement instead of living frugally and limiting work time
I could keep my lifestyle with 1 day of work a week but no company would hire me for that schedule, but at the same time I'd need to save for 30 years to afford my own place.
Most jobs barely pay living wages, talking about frugality and FIRE seems easy in the techbro bubble but it isn't a reality for the vast majority of people. Unless frugality means living in a 30sqm flat and renouncing on basic things like healthcare, vacations, kids, owning your house, &c. that your grandparents could afford while being 10x less productive than we are today
> Who are we do prescribe what is best for others?
Who are they to prescribe what's best for others ? The propaganda is so deeply rooted that questioning our insane consumerist system triggers allergic reaction such as yours
How would you measure "sustainable growth focused on actual quality of life"? Generally economic growth goes hand in hand with an objective increase in quality of life, though as i just mentioned, the ways of measuring that are via poor proxies at best.
> though as i just mentioned, the ways of measuring that are via poor proxies at best.
Goodhart's law comes to mind:
> Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
I don't think we should measure it – at least, not obsessively. We should research and study it, and put in place measures that should theoretically work, and pay attention to whether what we're doing is working, but we shouldn't look at the measurements and go "this is making the numbers go down; we must be doing something wrong!" without at least double-checking that the numbers make sense.
I am not opposed to any solution that doesn't involve a reduction in consumption. However, I do advocate for degrowth and reduction. Consuming less actually has a lot of net benefits for life. In this regard I think it's good to present some optional ideas and their possible benefits for the average person:
* Buying a more modest apartment or house can mean working less or retiring sooner
* Close social media account, etc -- this means more quality time with friends and family.
* Travelling less and appreciating the nice things near where you live (assuming you have them, not everyone does)
* Use as little technology as possible. If there's some new fancy app, phone, or gadget, don't buy it or use it. This will reduce information overload and stress. And if done en masse, it would also start to dry up the revenue streams of large tech companies
> Buying a more modest apartment or house can mean working less or retiring sooner
Additionally there should be some self-sustainability in community. I wouldn't mind, if apartament was connected to power grid that includes solar panels and batteries owned by this community, which effectively would lower my energy costs.
I also think that many people wouldn't mind owning some affordable space nearby for your activities. Maybe some greenhouse, park or garden, maybe just some basement for small storage space for your online shop, maybe just regular shop or some cafeteria, maybe some workshop or server room, maybe just office, maybe some pool.
I think this is very central to the discussion, and one where many of us are utterly unable to comprehend the other side. Many people see (what I consider) excessive work as virtuous, and think you're committing a terrible sin if you don't work as much as possible. And if you're working all the time anyway, you may as well enjoy the spoils.
When I look at that attitude it seems like some twisted version of the protestant work ethic mixed up with hyper-capitalism, and it seems to contribute to the person's own misery and cause misery for surrounding people.
To them, I'm sure I appear to be a lazy bum. Loafing around and wasting my life, not contributing as much as I could to "the economy".
Is one way objectively better than the other? I don't know, but I'm sure I prefer my way.
Why is a reduction in consumption a "massive quality of life reduction"? For example reducing your working hours / increasing vacation time is a quality of life improvement, and a reduction in economic activity.
I’ve got a horrid feeling you’re waiting for this precise question, but any source on degrowth being the aim of a “lot” of climate activists to the extent that it’s vaguely mainstream (as opposed to just being a minor current, which I’m aware exists)
Environmentalist groups often oppose construction of solar and wind farms [0]. The Sunrise Movement has explicitly advocated for degrowth policies (e.g. [1], with some in the movement claiming it does not go far enough [2]).
[0] is classic NIMBYism not degrowth as an aim (I hope you can acknowledge those are different things). [1] is a tweet just saying that capitalism won’t solve the climate crisis, which I hope you can also distinguish from advocating degrowth as an objective (capitalism and economic growth are not synonymous). And [2] is an individual volunteer posting something to the public internet under their own initiative, which (absolutely no disrespect to them) does not make the mainstream of the climate movement.
I don’t know about that: the major activist groups in the uk which get news attention are just stop oil, who want the government to stop issuing new oil and gas licenses, and insulate Britain, who want the government to install insulation in all state-owned housing.
Degrowth isn't just about climate change. The problem with the overconsumption of earth's resources still persist. Unless we have a fully cyclical economy, I don't see how we can really decouple growth and the depletion of earth's resources.
Common sense. Just a single earth and all. Your example is concerned with a single forecast.
If we started asteroid mining, we would obviously increase earth's resources. Otherwise, resources on earth are limited.
Nope, it was a bundle of forecasts that the participants, including the one who had your position, considered representative.
Of course your position happens to be based on...nothing. Except the idea that the earth is not infinite. Well guess what, the lifespan of the solar system is also not infinite. So that's a wash.
If we were serfs owned by a Baron, we would imagine it was politically untenable that the Baron would ever give us freedom, and yet the liberation of the serfs happened.
Never let a narrow view of "human nature" cause you to forget the number of times people have transcended negative situations and created better ones
>(it is impossible to convince societies to take massive quality-of-life reductions)
Why do you say degrowth = lower quality of life?
Let me give you a simple and practical example: an American living in a suburb takes her gas-guzzler 3-ton SUV to go shopping or to the park, stands in traffic in a 4-lane freeway for one hour. A Dutch living in a suburb takes her bike to go shopping or to the park, rides it through a nice street for 10 minutes. The former consumed much more resources than the latter. Who has the better quality of life?
It doesn’t matter what you or I think; what matters is that the American living in a single family house driving a big car will perceive anything else as a reduction in quality-of-life and vehemently oppose it.
Also, not even the worst suburbs require you to regularly wait in traffic for an hour to go to the supermarket or a park. These are usually 10 minute drives away. And if it’s raining, or too cold, or too hot out, I would gladly take the (electric) SUV over the bike.
A typical American in the suburbs certainly does not go on a highway to go to the supermarket or park. Those are all local amenities. I know some regions have problems with sidewalk coverage like Florida and way out west, but the suburbs are perfectly walkable anywhere in the northeast. Cities less so due to crime. And you definitely wouldn't have highway traffic in the suburbs, that's more of a downtown thing.
> suburbs are perfectly walkable anywhere in the northeast. Cities less so due to crime
This isn't true. I've lived in and visited plenty of northeastern suburbs and cities. The suburbs are largely not walkable: no sidewalk, long distances, and as a result basically nobody walks to any shop. The cities are walkable and with a large amount of residents actually walking.
I don't know where you lived, but everywhere around Philadelphia/NYC/Boston had sidewalks unless you were way out in the sticks. I lived within a 10 minute walk to the closest supermarket, and 5 minutes to the closest Wawa. You'd see people jogging and walking their dogs at all hours of the day. Conversely, in North Philadelphia the general advice was to stay off the streets after dark unless you were in a car.
I don't know, isn't "quality of life" a personal, subjective measure?
The best example I can give is Singapore. Fantastic public transit, high vehicle import taxes (like 100%) and a system where you need a separate permit to own a care that costs >$100,000 for 10 years.
And yet no lack of people who buy cars. The people I worked with there all owned cars. They could certainly get around without one, but they wanted one, despite the alternatives.
So, you're saying, hopefully we will soon have "abundant supplies of cheap GHG emission-free energy" and no other resource scarcity to support that infrastructure?
I count myself as sympathetic (but also skeptical) towards the degrowth movement. I don't interpret it as saying that we should (only) reduce consumption and ignore progress in the form of efficiency/decoupling. Rather, the message seems that doing both, simultaneously, is easier/faster/cheaper overall.
Degrowth necessarily implies population control - you can't reduce sum consumption if population keeps growing, as there is a lower bound on the amount of consumption a single person can live off. And population control necessarily implies government control of reproduction, which sets a precedent for controlling other aspects of people's lives.
I am not sympathetic towards the degrowth movement, since the "solutions" they provide create more problems than they solve. Killing all humans would also solve the climate problem, but it doesn't make it a good decision.
My god, two incredible leaps in such a short post!
You drive a 3-ton SUV, burn coal for electricity, and produce literal mountains of plastic crap in China which get shipped around the world. Don't worry pal, there's plenty to cut back before you need to roll out the forced sterelisation.
Second, the population of the developed world is already declining. The population of the world is on track to plateau in the coming decades. Your caricature is just silly.
Sure, everyone in the world is driving SUVs, flying private jets, and building nuclear reactors in their backyard. Let's stop people from consuming - force everyone to be vegan and eat the bugs! People consuming are the problem - not the military-industrial complex spending enormous amounts of energy on things that have nothing to do with consumption and spends an order of magnitude more energy than all human consumption combined!
> Ahaha, good old "if you don't drive a gas guzzler you're a vegan poof". Auto marketing departments are really worth their salt.
Yeah, good old "ignore the argument and insult the argumenter" ad hominem style of arguing - very useful for fueling your self-righteousness and "I'm right, you're wrong" style of thinking.
It's obvious that there is plenty of unsustainable activity going on today; I've given three concrete examples. This is reality: it is simply not long term sustainable to go on living with such waste as we do even today, let alone if everybody consumed like an American (many × over the world average, depending on if you look at energy, emissions, resources). So it's obvious that we both can and need to become more efficient: reduce waste, use more renewable energy, build lasting products instead of single-use, etc.
Your answer to this is "the only way to reduce resource use is population culling, the global elite wants to enact reproductive control" x))
But one thing we agree with, this conversation is utterly pointless!
> there is a lower bound on the amount of consumption a single person can live off.
That may be true, but that bound is clearly a lot lower than many people currently operate at. The has about twice the inflation adjusted per-capita GDP that it had 40 years ago, and about 5 times the current world average. https://www.statista.com/statistics/996758/rea-gdp-growth-un...
Aren't all populations worldwide currently dropping in their reproduction rate already, without government intervention? Nearly all western countries are already way below the maintenance rate of 2.1 already.
Is there a fundamental reason for it, or is it just the way it is right now?
Because the world is kind of shit right now, and that could be the reason people don't procreate - I, personally, don't want to bring children into the world the way it is right now and the way it is going. The way I see it, as soon as the quality of life grows, people will continue procreating the way they did so far for decades.
It's dropping since the 1950s, so not a fluke. Major reasons are probably improvements in living conditions (yes, in comparison to the 50s), the invention and widespread use of contraception and social security (which removes the need for kids to support you in old age).
There’s a lot of tangential government intervention. E.g. no enough daycare funding while pushing moms-back-at-work campaigns. Birth-control hormones ending up in waste water which goes back full circle yet government doing nothing about such pollution.
> You imply that population will increase indefinitely
You imply that it won't.
I don't see a fundamental reason why humans would stop at 8 billion - yeah, currently, (my hypothesis is that) the world is kind of shit, so people stopped procreating due to stress. However, there's no reason to think that people won't procreate once the world becomes a better place to live.
> or that degrowth needs to happen forever
Assuming population keeps growing (which I see no fundamental reason to doubt will happen eventually), degrowth needs to happen forever in order to keep the consumption from growing - basic math:
total consumption = number of people * avg. consumption per person
To keep total consumption constant, avg. consumption per person needs to decrease proportionally to the increase of the number of people.
How?
Though, I am certain that it won't grow indefinitely on earth.
> I don't see a fundamental reason why humans would stop at 8 billion
It can stop at 9 billion and still not grow indefinitely.
Currently a peak of 11 billion and no more than 12 billion is estimated. As said. Because of increased living standards.
> To keep total consumption constant, avg. consumption per person needs to decrease proportionally to the increase of the number of people.
It better to decrease proportionally with a coefficient smaller than 1 and bigger than 0 than decrease consumption not at all.
> you can't reduce sum consumption if population keeps growing, as there is a lower bound on the amount of consumption a single person can live off
And yet people in rich countries consume many times more resources than people in the "global south". The USA's 200M citizens consume more overall than India's 1100M, for one of the extreme examples. So there is quite a bit of room for degrowth in the global north without requiring depopulation.
As it happens, people in many countries are pretty fine with the idea of having less kids, without the need for population control.
> Killing all humans would also solve the climate problem, but it doesn't make it a good decision.
The problem is going to solve itself with or without us. When people talk about solving climate change, they actually mean making it so we can still be around after that.
As energy prices fall and solar becomes more efficient we're likely to use even more energy. The post-energy scarcity stage for society will lead to wild changes, but some could be great. Many things that we see as wasteful today due to efficiency, like splitting hydrogen from water, become acceptable when the energy cost is negligible.
What some activists miss is that to actually stop climate change, we need to accelerate the growth of developing countries. During development, emissions grow, and then decline; By accelerating the development process, we can reduce the duration developing countries spend in the window of high emissions.
This can be done without that much more effort from developing countries, except for absorbing the cost of renewables, the development of the tech, along with contributing technical know-how.
We are at the peak of civilization. A new perfect energy source that was abundant would probably eliminate the carbon boogyman. But the energy, being abundant would only accelerate the ease of our materialistic society we live in to plunder every last square inch of the Earth to put delicacies in our mouths and rape the earth of all precious things. I used to believe in fusion energy and I am closer to a solution. But no way am I going to reveal it to the people now.
In terms of direct thermal heating from waste heat, we are almost precisely where we were when global warming was first raised as a problem.
Climate change is just the first of many problems, and claiming that consuming more makes life better is the same logic as finding a starving man, seeing him improve with three square meals, and then concluding everyone should have a gallon a second of saturated sugar syrup pumped directly into their gut.
Although it can appear a bit disingenuous for activists to disguise their primary goal...their primary goal can be valid if taken from their perspective...
Population will be 10bn by 2100.
Then there's 2200, 2300, 2400, etc.
The need for degrowth does seem inevitable eventually does it not?
From a middle-class perspective: everything is about ambition, climbing the corporate ladder, wealth building, and then hoping for your children to exceed you in these aspects also. Addiction to growth. Many of these people are not okay with being a high achievers and not being rewarded for it - i.e. capitalism.
Activists are usually lower income with fixed horizons/needs of income/status/lifestyle.
So it's easier for them to identify with the average global citizen...who is already very poor.
- 3bn live on < 2USD per day
- median world income = 850USD
- avg world income = 7000USD
The activists are identifying as "world citizens", whereas Westerners identify with their income bracket in their wealthy country of choice.
> cheap GHG emission-free energy.
The reality is that even if climate change is resolved, there will still be a push for degrowth until the end of time...unless we find a new planet to inhabit.
The subtitle (or supertitle?) says "Debunking degrowth", implying that the idea of degrowth is that no decoupling is possible and that proponents of degrowth promote negative growth as measured in GDP per capita.
From my limited understanding, degrowth actually stands for different ideas, such as:
- GDP is not a relevant measure for wellbeing
- reduced consumption can lean to higher wellbeing for the individual (reduced working hours, more time for family, gardening etc)
- worth of policy should be measured by new, more holistic criteria
Also, here's a graph from Our World In Data using consumption-based accounting for CO2 emissions. Note that US, Europe, and even India are declining in consumption (and China seems to be plateauing)
Consumption-based accounting shows across-the-board drop in the rate of CO2 emissions (for every continent [0]). Consumption-based accounting is, to quote OWID:
> production-based emissions minus emissions embedded in exports, plus emissions embedded in imports
Isn't Hacker News the home of "software eats the world"? That's a massive part of the de-correlation of economic growth and emissions. Except for AI training and proof of work, software is a low carbon activity. And it's massively cumulative -- it's not consumed, the software produced 20 years ago still has value.
Some other examples: would anybody deny the iPhone 12 is better than the iPhone 11? It's smaller and presumably has a lower carbon footprint.
How about the F-150 Lightning? Each one of those that replaces a standard pickup eliminates demand for about 50,000 pounds of gasoline. The aluminum frame was likely produced using hydro-power so much fewer emissions than the traditional steel frame. The 100 pounds or so of lithium in the vehicle is highly recyclable.
Software needs hardware to create economic growth, namely data centers and disposable computers (smartphones, notebooks, smart watches, routers and so on). It doesn't matter if they are more energy efficient either if you keep making more and more of them. Just the environmental impact of making them is unsustainable. Similarly it doesn't matter how much value new paradigms like Bitcoin or AI adds to the economy, it's just more environmental impact. Replacing hundreds of millions of cars with electric cars is just more impact too.
When I was in high school, the standard weeknight entertainment was driving up and down main street in vehicles that got about 8 mpg.
Today, standard weeknight entertainment for high school boys is multi-player video games.
Yes, multi-player video games are still slightly carbon positive. But they're about a million times better than driving up and down main street. That's massive progress.
Next, what's the environmental and economic impact of a forest ranger? They're adding significant economic value to the economy and also hopefully doing significant good for the environment.
It's not a hard stretch to imagine that the economy of 2200 will consist mostly of holodeck's and forest rangers. It's very possible that GDP will be growing and the environment will be getting better in most ways. Just like the rivers and forests of North America are better than they were 80 years ago.
On the contrary, consumption and energy use went up, not to mention waste. That video game needs 600-700 watts per client and most of it is created very inefficiently, using fossil fuels.
People still drive up and down too, and there are more people.
I don't even know what are you talking about, most teenagers didn't own a car in the 80's. In fact there are more cars now than there were back then, more people too. I don't see how the video game industry helped the environment, on the contrary it had a measurable negative impact on it thanks to the energy consumption and the waste.
The only thing video games have going for them is that they don't get you laid.
Those are negligeable compared to their physical counterpart they are replacing though, they so replace a lot of car trips and expensive manufacturing which is now unneeded
Demand for cars is higher than ever, so is the manufacturing of almost all goods, as proven by the supply chain bottleneck in the last 2-3 years. The demand is still there, and is growing thanks to millions of people in places like India, China and Africa getting out of poverty.
What exactly have smartphones been replacing lately? Other than PC computers, which ironically also saw a comeback thanks to WFH?
You're probably seeing things only from your own tiny bubble, not from the global perspective.
We're talking about developed countries here so yeah tons of stuff has been dematerialised, I call my doctor by video instead of driving there, I download movies instead of driving to the cinema, I get deliveries which are batched instead of going to the mall, I no longer need to send letters and buy paper maps, I don't need to drive to the library anymore to get books, the electricity company does not need to drive on the whole city just to read the electric meters... The list is endless, and this is just individual stuff, whenever you get to the whole supply chain, that gets compounded at every level.
Let me guess, you live in the US/North America? I also live in a developed country in Europe and here you have to go to the doctor in person for almost everything except COVID, people still go to the cinema (at every new blockbuster the cinema is almost full), people still go shopping for groceries as grocery deliveries aren't a thing here or most people can't afford the extra costs, WFH is very rare so everyone still goes to work in person, car sales are up, etc.
Your bubble does not reflect the worldwide situation.
AI training does not use a lot of energy. It is estimated that GPT-3 needed about 1GW-h. A 747-400 aircraft uses 120MW of primary power while cruising (10 tonnes of Jet A per hour). Every time an aircraft flies between Atlanta and London, it uses more energy than was used to train GPT-3. Every single time.
I would imagine that there's probably a _lot_ of industrial machinery control software out in the wild that's still running on Windows 95/98/etc., where the company that wrote it probably went out of business 20 years ago.
Agree, but old industrial software that saw no development and updates in 20 years is too small of a sample from which to generate the conclusion that all software generates value forever. Yes, in the case of industrial machinery it does, but that's mostly due to the hardware itself not becoming obsolete, not the software running on the machine. Often times, machine operators would love to have the software updated and modernized, as he hardware on which it runs is good for decades without any improvements.
Therefore I disagree with this conclusion. I think software is the thing which gets obsoleted and rots the fastest, not the hardware. Which is why SW development is in so high demand and wages so high in contrast to HW and mechanical engineering.
Then what's your definition based on your own goal posts?
Making software that's sitting around and doesn't generate any revenue? That's either a hobby which is fine, or is a waste of resources, both in development and in storage/deployment.
And if the 20 year old software isn't unmaintained but is actually constantly getting updated and support, then is it still 20 year old software or is it basically up-to-date software (the Ship of Theseus problem)?
It doesn't have to produce revenue, it just has to aid in the production of GDP. I don't pay for Linux, but it is a key part of the GDP I am responsible for.
And while Linux is maintained, the vast bulk of the value it provides is quite old and almost unchanged.
But the Linux we use today isn't 20 year old software. Sure, the foundation is over 30 year old, but most of the Linux code we use today is relatively fresh and is constantly being improved and updated. Again, I bring the ship of Theseus argument. I doubt my Android phone has too many lines of code written by Linus on it.
Not many places are running software that saw no more active development for over 20 years. Even governments and banks are pushing updates to ancient codebases.
Unmaintained 20 year old software would be the firmware running on your 20 year old car or microwave oven, as that's frozen on that system, not getting any more development.
So, out of all products made by humans, software has by far the shortest expiration date, with the exception being food products.
You completely misunderstood my point. Yes bit-rot exists, but that's not what I was talking about. Software doesn't rot like food, it just stops being useful for its intended purpose if left un-updated for too long.
Just look at my 10 year old Android phone. It still boots and works just fine, but having not received anymore SW updates for 8 years, it's completely unusable for its intended purpose today despite it still running. There's nothing wrong with the hardware, OLED screen is still very bright and sharp and I changed the battery and everything, but with such old unmaintained software it's basically an e-waste paperweight now.
Most software doesn't stay useful forever, and without updates it has a shelf-life, as most software becomes useless after a while if left un-updated. So yes, my point stands, old un-updated software provides no value in most cases.
GDP is still very much almost exactly correlated to energy consumed. Current inflation is also almost directly caused by energy loss. At this point people should not read any narratives. Look at direct physical evidence and do the math.
Energy may not equal emissions always and energy to GDP conversion ratio can change. Does a 100W incandescent bulb produce more value to GDP than a 14W LED bulb of same luminosity?
Whats remarkable in the UK is how the huge rise in fossil fuel prices has suddenly revealed how many business's are basically converting fossil fuels into goods and services. I mean people understood that putting petrol in the car is fossil fuels but buying a pint in the pub? But suddenly the pubs, and a host of other business's are saying that without the cheap energy their business isn't viable. It's all rather a wake up call.
I really don't think it is that remarkable? The UK's history with domestic coal and then the global oil crisis in the 1970s are clear examples of an economic reliance on fossil fuels.
Both of those historic events are way before my lifetime, yet the concept of the UK economy being highly dependent on fossil fuels and their pricing seems like common sense to me.
Something like a Steel Mill sure. But the idea that something like a Pub is an energy intensive industry surprised me. I think of most businesses these days as being deindustrialized light industry things that only really need a trickle of energy for some led lights and computers. That so many are actually still quite energy intensive disguised by low energy prices surprised me at least.
Health spending accounts for nearly one-fifth of the U.S. economy [1]. Between 2000 to 2020 health expenditure tripled from 1.4 trillion to 4 trillion, at a 4.2% annual growth rate. This is projected to accelerate, grow at 5.3% and reach 6.8 trillion by 2030. [3]
Happening in other countries as well. Health spending set to outpace GDP growth to 2030 [2]
This shows up as economic growth (GDP), but really nothing has changed, does not require more emissions.
I'd love to see some metrics on GDP growth that are not connected to increasing population/resource extraction/inflation/housing.
In places like Canada and Australia it feels like the entire economic engine is built around population growth, housing, and resource extraction. It makes me sort of nervous about if these countries are actually making real progress.
Seriously? Analyzing data at the country level and claiming to have achieved decoupling is an egregious logical error that ignores our global trade network. Yes the US economy can grow without burning fossil fuels because someone else burns it for us. Decoupling can only be analyzed at a global scale and anyone who claims otherwise is trying to fool you.
The claim that countries that do manufacturing for export have decarbonized faster than the rest of the economy is interesting.
Prior to the pandemic, one sometimes heard that even if you had a desire to do a particular manufacturing step outside of China, the advantages of being in a manufacturing region that was set up for scale, that had so many of your suppliers etc made it much faster and cheaper to set up production for a new product, iterate and change the parts you needed etc. Was some portion of decarbonizing manufacturing exports the sheer concentration of manufacturing steps in the area? Parts don't need to be shipped as far between steps etc? In 2020/2021 people began talking about the need to make supply chains more robust by spreading out and replicating production capabilities more. Will that re-carbonize some of that manufacturing process?
There are some big open questions there though - this may easily be the knell tolling for economic growth as an interesting measure of progress. We don't care about GDP because we really love indexes, but because it used to be a close proxy of energy availability.
GDP doubling used to mean 2x as much energy and an almost unbelievable improvement in the median living standard. Doubling energy availability is huge! You can tell from the political pressures building that a lot of countries with positive GDP are missing that sort of comforting tailwind that keeps everyone happy and working together.
I'm saying that GDP used to measure energy growth. Now it has decoupled. That brings GDP in to question, not energy growth.
We know consuming energy leads to higher living standards. It is now quite possible for GDP to rise and living standards to fall - that used to be an impossible scenario when it was a measure of fossil fuel use.
Ok, you've confirmed to me you don't know what you're talking about.
Living standards may be correlated with energy consumption, in a narrow sense, in some cases, but we don't consume energy, we consume things we can produce with energy. If we do that more efficiently, then our living standard increases even as our energy use decreases.
You seem to be saying a 60W incandescent bulb indicates a higher standard of living than a 10W LED bulb -- even though the latter produces more light. You seem to think a house with less insulation indicates a higher standard of living than one with more insulation, since the former requires more energy use. And on and on.
You've made two mistakes in your reasoning. One is explained as Jevon's paradox [0]. If there is a move from 60W light-bulbs to 10W then people usually end up finding a new use for the 50W. It would be unusual for them to use less energy overall - indeed, as they get more productive they could end up demanding more energy (if it made sense to win X kW for Y production, it often makes sense to win X++ kW for Y++++ production). Ditto home insulation. If less energy needs to go to warming a home, more can go to fabricating goods to put in the home. Energy use wouldn't decrease, it'd hold steady.
The other mistake you've made is, those changes won't cause GDP to go up. The 10W LED probably costs the same/less than the 60W one, and the insulation causes reduced spending too. That is one of the arguments I sometimes trot out to explain that GDP isn't a useful measure if it is divorced from energy.
I reject your Jevons argument. No, it would not be unusual for them to use less energy overall. Whether they do or not is dependent on specifics of the situation.
I think you are misled by historical contingency. When moving from "not mechanized" to "mechanized", energy use increases. People didn't have air conditioning, or refrigeration, or TVs, etc. and then they did. Energy use went up because new use cases were being created. But once they have them, at some point the satisfaction those produce saturates, and the natural progression of efficiency pulls the energy use back down again. We don't eat ever increasing quantities of food just because agriculture has become more efficient. We don't scale the number of TVs we watch because their power use has declined.
Your argument is depending on the existence of ever increasing numbers of new activities to consume the energy, that produce sufficient value to justify them. I am skeptical that such exist, or could exist.
> Your argument is depending on the existence of ever increasing numbers of new activities to consume the energy
There are literally an infinite number of useful activities that consume energy. The only limit is at some point we transform so much energy that the earth becomes unlivable because we can't vent it fast enough. At that point we'd have to give up and ... oh wait, no. We'd use the energy to move off the planet. Energy solves that problem too!
If we could work with them cost effectively humanity could probably find a use for every joule of energy in the universe. Every single one. Because in the limit, energy can basically fabricate new mass out of nothing and make a universe perfectly hospitable to a very large number of humans - a race that grows exponentially. Whatever the limits are we're nowhere near reaching them with what we have right now.
> No, it would not be unusual for them to use less energy overall
In that case we'd see a country somewhere with steady electricity prices and shrinking demand. I don't think that country exists. Do you have some examples in mind? Because the countries I've seen that use less energy tend to have massively spiking energy prices, usually because they just ran out of available fossil fuels.
You are taking a bold stance. Jevon came up with the paradox after observing that this specific effect applies in energy markets. They observed the effect contemporary to the Watt being named the Watt. You're going to need a stronger argument than "I reject..." and "I think...". Because the Jevons' argument is an "Economists have observed and come up with a theory to explain...".
A large and growing group of mostly rich countries has severed the link between economic growth and rising emissions of greenhouse gases
Because they outsourced heavy and polluting industries to poorer countries. And I'm not taking into account the greenhouse gases market, were a rich country A can sell it's "consumption level" to poor country B, by selling/donating cheap solar panels or cheap "efficient" wooden stoves, and show in their books that they are more green now.
If we can grow while reducing emissions 5% a year, we will be at a sustainable emissions rate in just 19 years. It's a pity that will be 35 years too late.
Growth drives consumption which will increase emissions. For poorer countries this means more physical goods / energy intensive infra like air conditioning. Maybe less emission services for wealthy countries but they're already consuming at relatively unsustainable rates already.
Unless there's a global GDP graph showing the same, we're not decoupled.
Or, you could say, we're in an era of weak decoupling where high-tail QoL can be marginally improved without negative env. externalities. That isnt "strong decoupling" where the bulk of QoL improvements around the world lie.
We're interested in GDP growth because it's highly correlated with QoL. Rich-world marginal QoL improvements aren't interesting, nor is their alleged decoupling.
The economist here says the world can get rich from services... er, No. For 80% of the population they dont need more services to improve QoL.
The real problem is that people are usually blind: almost nobody reasons about philosophic implications of induction. What I mean is this: can we know that in the portion of knowledge we don't know there isn't an even worse problem? In general we can't know the unknown, but we should at least try to look
problems of induction are solved by the scientific method, bit by bit there is nothing better we can do except try to lean more, but on the side of what to do with information we have quite large leaps to go still ...
Solved isn't the exact word. It's something. It's the best we can do. That doesn't justify reckless behaviours in my opinion, just because we don't yet have scientific evidence that they are
Many industry chains that are the basis for renewable energy(which many countries will need to transition to), generating wind, hydro and solar power equipment are responsible for a good load of emissions, like the steel industry.
It is close to impossible to grow an emerging economy without producing more energy, as more of the population would want to drive cars, have lights, sanitation etc.
Because of that, as almost all the economist articles, this is mostly centered around developed economies and even those that are developed have a big deficit in energy generation.
And I'm giving the simplest example ever. Imagine if we get into consumer habits and spending...
The truth is that many countries need to grow and need to raise emissions before lowering them. Not every country is Germany with a big industry and influx of cash to support its environment plans.
The "third world" doesn't need to accept living in the wood and shitting in a bucket while americans live in a house of the size of a football field with AC on. If they have nothing to win by caring about emissions, they shouldn't. Raise emissions if you must, to grow. Rich countries that need to set the example, but most of them just don't.
