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Ecological Wealth of Nations

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Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#81

Post by DominikR »

hx87 wrote: post #76
DominikR wrote: post #63

> A national ecological deficit means that the nation is importing biocapacity through trade, liquidating national ecological assets or emitting carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere. Before we had this trade and industrial activity that outputs all of this carbon dioxide waste life spans of humans were 3 times shorter than today. And by the way the world population was also 8 times smaller, meaning that we today…

> if we go down this path they'll simply slaughter us Not before they "slaughter" themselves with pollution.

You really believe this? People lived and will continue to live in much worse conditions than the Chinese do.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#82

Post by marcosdumay »

ajmurmann wrote: post #58
marcosdumay wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the habitat can be a great place to live. With all the comfort we are used to have here on Earth, but all the resources collectable at space. And if they are discriminatory, you gather an asteroid and build another one. More than 99% of the difficulty is gone just by the fact that you are not on a planet's surface. We are, of course, far from being able to build such things.

Can you please elaborate on the resources in space? There is better solar energy but what else? I intuitively would have expected resources to be far better on Mars.

The huge theoretical bottleneck on life is energy. This is the only one you need to "expend" on some way, any other resource you just need "enough".

But for the others, with just a reasonably low delta-v and some patience you can get into cubic kilometers of unclaimed raw resources for extending your habitat. You just have to know how to use them (what we currently don't).

You'll certainly get a bigger density of material resources on any planet, but then you will be trapped inside a gravitational wheel and must spend all that delta-v again to break free from it once it's completely claimed. For the short term (to the point that any timeframe is "short" in this discussion) small moons and big asteroids are probably the best places to colonize.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#83

Post by eudox »

agentgt wrote: post #67
maehwasu wrote: post #54

It's pretty revealing that almost everyone in the world would far prefer to live in the red countries.

Seriously? Did you not see Canada, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia. For me it was relatively balanced and mainly the US really throws it off. There are also some red countries that I would seriously not want to live in.

The only context where Argentina can be in the same sentence as Australia is in a list of countries in the Southern Hemisphere, or countries whose names start with an 'A'.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#84

Post by mikegioia »

miloshadzic wrote: post #29
devy wrote: post #7

So what are the real options of survival? a) accelerate migration to Mars b) population control? Anything else we can do to prevent "fucked"?

Interesting how migrating to space is more "Real" than changing how we use resources.

This has never made sense to me. Why people think terra-forming Mars and moving 10Bn people there would be a better decision than just cleaning up the current planet we have? The amount of effort to rebuild our forests would be a blip next to what would be required to move to a new planet.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#85

Post by marcosdumay »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #50
marcosdumay wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the habitat can be a great place to live. With all the comfort we are used to have here on Earth, but all the resources collectable at space. And if they are discriminatory, you gather an asteroid and build another one. More than 99% of the difficulty is gone just by the fact that you are not on a planet's surface. We are, of course, far from being able to build such things.

These days people prefer to live either in suburbia in Mediterranean climate or in old capitals (think Paris and London). That's a definite trend - we no longer have colonization of new spaces, we instead have consolidation in known good places. One can perhaps start a commune in a forest or on an island even today, with handpicked people, but it doesn't happen. Wanting to flee from Earth with all its problems is und…

Think about a place with a terrain build to be perfect for living, with perfectly planned ratios to water and land (perfectly distributed), controlled temperature into what the community decides is best (with the possibility of temperature zones), and finely controlled rain, wind and "sun" incidence so that it can be sunny on your pool area but still raining on the crops just near it. Oh, and also think about something reasonably big.

No idea how we may get people there, neither socially of physically, but this is what is possible. I'm also in no rush to get there, but we will someday, because it is just too tempting. (More because of energy availability than any of the above paragraph.)

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#86

Post by carapace »

We need to live in harmony with Nature. This kind of awareness (hard metrics) has to be fed back into our decision making to do it. I believe we can support current population density with ecological enrichment through "applied ecology", e.g. Permaculture, etc. but only if we are aware of the need and priority.

---

For example see David Blume's concept for small-scale organic alcohol fuel production integrated with Permaculture food production. http://permaculture.com/node/518

Not to give away (part of) the punchline, but the on-site extraction and distillation of the fuel retains all the trace elements, minerals, etc. The molecules in the fuel have come from the air and water, their energy-holding arrangement has been paid for by the Sun. The farm exports sunlight in fluid form.

As part of an integrated agriculturally-productive ecosystem alcohol fuel production just makes sense. The economics are totally different from large-scale ethanol, for instance.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#87

Post by sliverstorm »

RGamma wrote: post #53
saalaa wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have not reduced their ecological footprint. They are relying increasingly on coal, especially as new bioenergy installations are slowing down and demand is only growing. They have never burnt as much coal as nowadays. It accounted to 45% of their power in 2014 (couldn't find a more recent figure). They are still building new coal plants and they need so much coal these days that they raze whole villages to dig…

One of the stupidest things our government did (in my mind) was to introduce the accelerated moratorium of nuclear power (this wasn't planned at first but put into place after Fukushima, except that nuclear power station was built at the coast in an earthquake area, something the middle of Europe is not exactly known for). The short term demand will just be met with coal and a bit of renewables (which might have no l…

For me, it was the ultimate example of environmentalists shooting themselves in the foot. Always opposed to nuclear (scary!), wind (birds!), natural gas (fracking! CO2!), and as a result we keep burning coal, the worst of them all.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#88

Post by schoen »

agentgt wrote: post #67
maehwasu wrote: post #54

It's pretty revealing that almost everyone in the world would far prefer to live in the red countries.

Seriously? Did you not see Canada, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia. For me it was relatively balanced and mainly the US really throws it off. There are also some red countries that I would seriously not want to live in.

I would also have mentioned Uruguay, Finland, and Norway as developed countries that are pretty green on the map.

Edit: although it looks like a way to be a green developed country by this ranking is largely to have extremely uneven population density.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#89

Post by nickff »

carapace wrote: post #86

We need to live in harmony with Nature. This kind of awareness (hard metrics) has to be fed back into our decision making to do it. I believe we can support current population density with ecological enrichment through "applied ecology", e.g. Permaculture, etc. but only if we are aware of the need and priority. --- For example see David Blume's concept for small-scale organic alcohol fuel production integrated with P…

I have read a few studies on alcohol fuel production, and none of the facilities studied have been a net-producer of energy. While the idea is an intriguing one, energy production is difficult. Has Blume actually shown an ability to produce fuel?

Note: I've always been a fan of using seaside solar-powered electrolysis to produce hydrogen fuel, though hydrogen storage has its own issues.

Re: Ecological Wealth of Nations

#90

Post by hosh »

Many of the countries marked deep green (having higher biocapacity than ecological footprint) have been trending downwards for the past twenty years. The rate at which the biocapacity is diminishing appears to be slowing. But it makes me wonder if there is a way to visualize rates of decline as well.

I also wonder if there is a way to divide this up into spatial buckets so we could see say, the footprint of a metropolitan area versus other parts of the country. While national policies have affect on this, ecological impact is not necessarily confined to political borders.

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