by herogreen on 5/19/21, 9:47 PM with 84 comments
by actinium226 on 5/20/21, 1:33 AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
Back to seriousness - the author claims there are limits to nuclear, wind, and solar, but does not state what those limits are. The limit on nuclear is not clear to me - France gets something like 75% of its energy from nuclear. It seems the main limit on nuclear has been public sentiment, which must be weighed with public sentiment on climate change.
by jdblair on 5/19/21, 11:53 PM
My biggest takeaway from his book is that transitioning a society to affluence requires, at minimum, 22.6 megawatt hours of energy per capita per year. High energy societies like the United States use far more. To de-carbonize, we have to plan new energy sources that provide at least this much energy for every person on the planet. Otherwise, people will understandably turn to carbon-based energy sources to meet their energy needs.
Producing this much energy from renewables is possible, but it is hard! Fossil fuels provide an exceptionally compact (in terms of land area) and effective energy source.
[edited to correct typo in the energy figure, what I originally wrote as 2.6 mw/h is 22.6 mw/h]
by burlesona on 5/20/21, 12:31 AM
While the US hasn’t managed the political will for significant climate reform, we are far from the majority of the world, and even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation, it’s unlikely that this would be enough to avert climate change. The developing world wants modern life, and if they have to burn fossil fuels to catch up, they will.
There are really only a few situations that lead to radical global change:
1. Severe crisis, such as a nation-ending war.
2. Extraordinary visionary leadership in the right place at the right time... which often leads to serious crises such as nation-ending wars.
Otherwise, progress comes from the chaotic, messy evolution of humanity. Perhaps we will innovate our way out of climate disaster, perhaps the ecology will gradually change and we’ll be forced to adapt, or (my guess) perhaps some of both. The good news is we actually have a lot of the technology we need, and more is being developed all the time. I for one am optimistic that between innovation and adaptation the future will continue to be bright.
by drdrey on 5/19/21, 11:09 PM
by Iv on 5/20/21, 1:25 AM
In the 60s France started switching to nuclear power because it worried about the depletion of oil wells in the areas it controlled. It is wrong to say nuclear power can't power more than 10% of a country.
by api on 5/19/21, 11:10 PM
There's no economic forcing function either since coal and gas remain on average the cheapest and easiest to deploy and manage sources of energy, and that won't change unless there's enough investment in alternatives to get them over the mass adoption hump.
The worst fears about fossil fuel depletion have so far not manifested, which might be a bad thing long term. We may have enough fossil carbon to cause truly catastrophic climate change if we actually burn a significant fraction of it.
I wonder though if the economic structural problem isn't even harder to solve. The entire financial system relies on eternal growth. Number must always go up or everything breaks.
Even if we put an end to most fears about supply side limits to growth by cracking fusion or developing super cheap utility scale batteries, there would still be demand side limits to growth from things like stabilizing populations and diminishing marginal utility of wealth. Mere stability without significant growth would bring about the collapse of the financial system and the economy as we know it, and probably quite a lot of political turmoil since we don't have a really great replacement sitting in the wings.
(No, planetary migration won't keep GDP growth going any time soon. Humans could settle on the Moon or Mars but they're too far away to contribute much to our Earthly GDP. They'd be mostly isolated economies of their own.)
by visualradio on 5/20/21, 2:58 AM
In the United States public planning is typically limited to figuring out how to prop up the private financial system for one more quarter. In the U.S. most money is created through real estate mortgages. Although people like to talk about gold, crypto, consumers, producers, and government spending the mainstream financial system in charge of allocating the resources is really a mortgage based system.
Suppose someone has an estate with buildings and structures with replacement cost of $200,000. A broker says the estate has a comparable sales price of $600,000. In a loose money system we just trust the banks and brokers to do all of the planning, publicly guarantee mortgages at the reported $600,000, and have federal reserve buy assets to prop up prices at whatever number private finance has fixed upon.
In a slightly tighter system, we might cap real estate loan guarantees at 200% of replacement cost of non-land fixed capital. So if property has buildings and fixtures worth $200,000 public loan guarantees max out at $400,000 even if broker says property is worth $600,000. In order to write up price to $600,000 the owner would need to install $100,000 more in fixed capital, the effect of which is to redirect a larger share of the money created through mortgages to other sectors of economy.
How to use this to promote green energy investment?
Suppose instead of a replacement cost cap of 200% there was a replacement cost cap of 150% for normal capital and 250% for green capital. Then in order to take out a property loan for $600,000 the owner would have to install at least $400,000 of normal capital (structures, fixtures, equipment) or at least $240,000 of green capital (solar panels, wind turbines, lifted mass storage systems), regardless of how high the land values in the location had been written up.
In our current system the incentive of brokers is really just to write up asset prices as high as possible until the financial system collapses in order to generate some nice asset gains during credit bubbles. We can take advantage of this greed and use it to promote green energy investment by tightening up rules for lending against speculative land values using fixed capital replacement cost caps, which are slightly looser for fixed capital which is green.
by _acco on 5/20/21, 1:58 AM
> Agriculture may have set us humans on an unsustainable path, but fossil fuels broadened that path to a superhighway.
We need to put the "agriculture was our biggest mistake" trope to bed. Sustainability is an illusion. Nothing is sustainable in the cosmos, it just looks that way when you constrict the time horizon enough. Pre-agriculture, Homo Sapiens were on the constant brink of extinction, just like every other animal. The earth provides no safe comfort to any being. (The fact that we've created a society which provides for me to type this screed without glancing over my shoulder once is a miracle.)
Humans are unique, and agriculture was a monumental step in our epic journey. Without agriculture, the dunes of Mars would crumble in darkness and countless stars would radiate for no conscious creature to marvel at and wonder.
Fossil fuels were a tremendous gift: cheap energy. Without it, who knows how far behind our society would be? We almost certainly wouldn't yet have commercial air travel, 4+ billion people globally connected on the internet, or mRNA vaccines.
Yes, no gift comes for free. But let's not treat this like some deal with the devil. It is up to us to manage the costs (and they are real!) We don't master plan this stuff, but I'll bet on humans to figure it out every time.
So, is it any surprise that someone that calls agriculture "the biggest planning failure in human history" would have this conclusion?
> Without planning, this is what will most likely happen: we’ll fail to produce enough renewable energy to power society at the level at which we want it to operate. So, we’ll continue to get most of our energy from fossil fuels—until we can’t, due to depletion. Then, as the economy crashes and the planet heats, the full impacts of our planning failure will finally hit home.
If you're going to be a doomsaying pessimist (which, mind you, every era of history has had in droves), at least put some effort into it.
by erentz on 5/20/21, 1:30 AM
I think he was clearly too pessimistic about the potential of nuclear.
> Today, the US gets about 8 percent of its total energy from nuclear power...
Note this is of all energy including the gas in your car. Obviously we are reliant on electrification if our transport system to tackle that, which doesn’t seem considered here. Possibly he didn’t foresee the potential to electrify transport hence the pessimism. No one is expecting solar, wind, or nuclear powered cars. They’re expecting solar, wind, and nuclear powered electricity grid charging batteries in cars, third rails, and overhead catenary.
Nuclear is ~20% of all electricity output on that grid today in the USA. And in France it’s ~70%.
It’s clear it can go to much higher.
by cosmic_shame on 5/19/21, 11:28 PM