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Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

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Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#171

Post by Bakary »

ericmcer wrote: post #8
Bakary wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We aren't heading to extinction just on account of birthrates, it's the transition phase with a large number of elderly dependents and a small number of workers that is going to be the real problem.

Unless most work is intellectual/creative and most manual labor is automated or machine assisted 50 years from now. There are way more 70+ year olds still in the workforce currently than ever before and it isn't crazy to think retiring at 60 is a thing of the past.

Right now we are seeing the dawn of the automation of creative work. Or at least a change in its barriers to access that will decrease the ability of creative professions to make a living. It's still early days but the writing is on the wall.

We are also seeing a trend where technology is leading to additional surveillance and control for the population as opposed to a reduction in inequality and rising living standards.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#172

Post by lm28469 »

PeterisP wrote: post #41
mr_toad wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> constant growth != infinite growth constant growth just means converging growth if the population is shrinking all we need to do is increase gdp per capita. In theory. In practice GDP growth is strongly correlated with things like energy use and waste/pollution generation. There will come a point when either that correlation has to be broken or growth has to halt.

While GDP growth has historically been strongly correlated with energy use and pollution (including CO2/greenhouse gas emissions), due to the switch to service and digital economy, in rich countries GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already, already before year 2000. The correlation is already broken, and it seems quite plausible to continue GDP growth even with a decrease in energy us…

> GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already, already before year 2000

Only because we delocalised all the industries to Asia, globally co2 = gdp, before and after 2010

https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/GDP-CO2-wor...

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gabe-Scelta-2/publicati...

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#173

Post by Brometheus »

kragen wrote: post #115
ben_w wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need rare earths to make renewables, we choose them because they are cheaper; and calling renewables "so called" in this context is a bit weird even though yes the sun will eventually die.

We mostly don't use rare earths to make renewable energy at all. Solar panels and lithium batteries don't have any rare earths in them. Most wind turbines do: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J... but Amory Lovins argues that the advantage of doing so is small or even nonexistent: https://rmi.org/rmi-reality-check-greener-friendlier-alterna...

The turbines of ENERCON don't need "rare-earths", because of their ring generator https://www.enercon.de/technologie/komponenten/

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#174

Post by Bakary »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #90
fomine3 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are SERIOUS problem expected to come, primary for working population, pension, and national insurance. Some are delayed thanks to huge national debt. Demographics is really good indicator for the future, but it's hard to improve.

30 years ago there were SERIOUS problems expected to come. The doomsayers were all just comprehensively wrong, there's just no fearmongering your way around that. Japan is a stable and prosperous society that's not significantly worse off than the best and richest countries in the world. On the contrary it's right up the top of many metrics. It's funny, still today it has like 4x the GDP per capita of China and yet h…

Refuting propaganda does not mean that the demographic trend ceases to exist. It's true that there is a cottage industry of doomsayers, and nation-based agendas that criticize Japan and praise China, but we still have the raw numbers indicating that Japan will be one of the first if not the first laboratory where we can see and understand the effects of rapid aging and worker imbalance. This will be relevant because the EU and China will have to deal with this too.

It does not mean that Japan is doomed, but rather that some policy will have to be implemented and some large change to the structure of the economy will have to happen in due time.

The thing with demographic problems is that they are background noise for a very long time and then suddenly become a much bigger problem. You can verify this yourself by playing around with some simple math such as having a cohort of 100 people at t0, set an average expectancy, and seeing the effects of different birthrates as time goes on.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#175

Post by lm28469 »

hcks wrote: post #150
fallingknife wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As they say, past performance is not a guarantee of future results

Obviously, but I'll need a bit more than a 50 years old computer simulation of a few coupled PDEs before I give back my job and go live the peasant life.

> give back my job and go live the peasant life

There are a whole lot of scenarios between amazon same day toilet paper delivery, lidar enabled autonomous vacuum cleaner, 3 tonnes tesla doing 0-60, bluetooth enabled fridges and the peasant life

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#176

Post by weatherlite »

fny wrote: post #60
gandalfgeek wrote: post #54

This kind of Malthusian thinking has a horrible track record. Imagine if we drastically altered the course of technological progress every time a cabal of "experts" declares that we're going to destroy the planet. I'm not arguing that we should be reckless with the environment, but there are massive existential risks to humanity with this kind of self-limiting belief system. It's not obvious that one side of the argu…

This whole paper is lazy, panic-ridden grift. Why lazy? Because it's core thesis is that fossil fuels are a natural constraint... The word "nuclear" does not appear a single time in the entire paper! We have more than enough carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen on this earth to do incredible things given an energy source. It's time to stop dooming and start exploring. Also, fuck Mars. Why not try to make the desert…

Nuclear energy is expensive, tricky to get right and constrained by Uranium. We have about 230 years at today's consumption rate left. Sounds like a lot but today's consumption isn't much...many countries barely use nuclear. So imagine what happens if we need to increase nuclear by 10x ...oops now we have 20 years worth of Uranium left.

Also while not an expert on mining I do know that the best spots are mined first, meaning as/if we grow the dependency on Uranium it will only get more expensive to mine it in the coming decades.

Hey we're alright for now don't get me wrong. But 30-50 years from now it will keep getting harder and harder to sustain us unless we make some impressive breakthroughs that no one can tell are gonna happen.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo....

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#177

Post by weatherlite »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #110
fny wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole paper is lazy, panic-ridden grift. Why lazy? Because it's core thesis is that fossil fuels are a natural constraint... The word "nuclear" does not appear a single time in the entire paper! We have more than enough carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen on this earth to do incredible things given an energy source. It's time to stop dooming and start exploring. Also, fuck Mars. Why not try to make the desert…

Energy source constraints are not the only ones that exist. We also extract many other things from the planet and transform them into other things that we use. These extractions/transformations are also very problematic, and subject to strong constraints. Examples: * The clearing of forests for farmland for the ever increasing population and increased (unneeded) calorie consumption per person destroys ecosystems, and…

Yep. And energy constraints still exist unless some major breakthrough happens, nuclear is a temporary solution because it is non renewable (see my comment above).

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#178

Post by lm28469 »

PeterisP wrote: post #48
Qem wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> due to the switch to service and digital economy, in rich countries GDP growth has become decoupled from energy use for a few decades already. They just pushed pollution elsewhere, by outsourcing manufacturing.

That strengthens the effect, but no, the growth is decoupled even if you take into account the energy and pollution cost of the outsourced manufacturing. The same goods (and better goods) take less energy and pollution to produce than in 2000, and a lot of physical goods have been effectively replaced with features in digital devices; and the main part of GDP growth for developed countries does not involve any growth…

> The same goods (and better goods) take less energy and pollution to produce than in 2000

But thanks to the rebound effect we make/sell/trash more of them

Like with airplanes, it doesn't matter that Rolls-Royce make their engines 5% more efficient every 10 years if in the meantime you have 4 times as many plane flying.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#179

Post by darkerside »

franciscop wrote: post #107
c54 wrote: post #36

I do think some of the concerns here are right on the nose > What can be done to minimize the chances of colossal failure or sub-systemic breakdown, which in the worst case could threaten preservation of science and human knowledge? It seems like the two extremes are degrowth and malthus on the one hand, and haughty denialist expansionism on the other. One is borderline eugenicist and denies billions of people of our…

In my opinion the issue with the balance here is that no matter where you fall on the "climate scale belief" (except probably the most extreme of deniers), people consider anyone that thinks a better future than you is coming will be labelled a denier, while anyone who thinks a worse future than you think is coming is given a soft pass as just having stronger convictions. That unfortunately leaves the vast majority o…

There's a big overlap here with COVID thinking. At the end of the day, people are OK with other people dying. And really, how could we not be? It happens every day. Particularly when the hardest hit people will be in other (poorer) countries, it just feels less meaningful to those who will likely fare better.

Re: Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits: a PLAN for the future

#180

Post by weatherlite »

trashtester wrote: post #164
mellavora wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similar things were predicted in the 70s but new sources of energy and improvements in productivity invalidated those predictions. ok, cool. So you've identified the limits (energy and productivity). Are you sure productivity has grown? Is this growth sustainable? For example, agriculture. Highly dependent on rapidly disappearing resources Like i.e. dirt. If you look at erosion rates in the US, we are on track to r…

> For example, agriculture. I suppose this is not only an example, but probably the most critical type of productivity when determining how big of a population our planet can sustain. > So have we really achieved long-term (> 100 year) productivity improvements in agriculture? If you look back over the past 100 years we definitely have. If you look back over the past 60 years, yields of modern agriculture have triple…

> I have way greater fear that war or similar conflicts may cause us to exterminate each other, or even that some day, AI will take over completely.

It's not like the energy/resource crunch is a totally separate problem to war. Together with climate change it is only going to increase the likelihood for war. It's kinda already happening in the the Middle East / Africa (I'm saying kinda because it's not the only reason for war...people are messed up...but it's not helping).

> If we're able to produce enough energy, we can produce most of the phosphates, nitrates

That's a big if yes? And even if, is the whole supply chain for modern agriculture sustainable? Are all fertilizers and material used renewable or are they coming out of finite earth resources? If it's finite - how long have we got? I'm not claiming to have all the answers but I just started looking at everything through this lens a few months ago ...and it's not going away.

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