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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

#231

Post by incrudible »

weatherlite wrote: post #181
incrudible wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electricity can be turned into gas. People do not need to live like US suburbanites. As fossil fuels deplete, this will happen automatically, through the price mechanism. That said, fossil fuels are nowhere near to depletion and may well last for centuries.

> That said, fossil fuels are nowhere near to depletion and may well last for centuries. They ARE getting more expensive (see U.S shale oil in the last decade) because the best spots are always mined first. Once gone you have to dig deeper and harder and use increasingly more complex and expensive methods to extract it. At some point you will get negative return on energy - so even if it is there it will be wasteful…

> They ARE getting more expensive

Good.

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

#232

Post by trashtester »

weatherlite wrote: post #214
trashtester wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are all fertilizers and material used renewable or are they coming out of finite earth resources? Nitrogen is about 75% of the earth's atmosphere and potassium and phosphorus make up 2.6 and 0.1% of the Earth's crust, so we have plenty of all of them. To turn them into most of the common fertilizers, we need energy (and water, which is plentiful for this purpose). And atoms don't go away (with the exception of atom…

Nitrogen is only one ingredient, what about the others phosporus and potassium? If it was so readily available why did the war in the Ukraine affect the fertilizers market? Also what about soil degradation...? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus In the top 5 phosphorus producers are China, Russia, Morocco and Jordan. Sounds super stable. > Way before that happens, we should be able to use Thorium or fusion.…

> Nitrogen is only one ingredient, what about the others phosporus and potassium?

I did cover that, above.

> If it was so readily available why did the war in the Ukraine affect the fertilizers market?

Primarily because the most popular chemical processes for creating ammonium is to use natural gas to bind the nitrogen. (It carries the hydrogen needed as well as the energy, and is cheap when natural gas is cheap.)

But if you don't have natural gas, you can take the hydrogen from somewhere else (like water) as long as you have the energy needed.

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

#233

Post by thrown_22 »

bawolff wrote: post #31
thrown_22 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion is subject to natural selection just like anything else. Religions which produce more offspring that stay in the religion will always win out over the ones that don't.

Until it becomes outweighed by splitting resources amongst too many children. Everything has pros and cons.

So long as the children survive to give birth to more children it doesn't matter how poor they are. Evolution doesn't care for the comfort of anyone.

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

#234

Post by ouid »

hinkley wrote: post #19
ouid wrote: post #3

>infinite exponential growth which is impossible on a finite planet. its impossible in any space with non negative curvature. the kind of growth that is unsustainable in a finite region is any growth at all.

Part of the problem is people thinking, "myself and everyone I could ever have the notion of caring about, and everyone they could ever have a notion of caring about" is the same thing as infinity. The universe is so goddamned big that it's hard to fathom how long it would take us to actually ruin the entire thing, or at least the parts that aren't flying away from us at faster than the speed of light. But 5% annual…

5 percent growth for just the length of human history overflows the double precision floating point type.

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

#235

Post by aeternum »

lm28469 wrote: post #170
aeternum wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also if we really value life, we should probably optimize for total lives lived. The universe will not last forever and entire galaxies are being lost to both the cosmic horizon and blackholes at an alarming rate. For some reason Earth seems to be the only planet with life, so every second we spend without making life interplanetary we are snuffing out an unfathomable number of future human and animal lives.

Nothing guarantees we're on a path that leads to that. We might very well be the proverbial frog being boiled alive People think that all new tech = progress = we'll have star trek at some point. Don't forget all these things are sci-fi, 101% sci-fi, for now all we did is put a few dozen dudes a few hundred thousand miles from earth inside tiny ass metal cans. Some people apparently think it's easier to terraform Mar…

You don't have to believe that all new tech = progress. Just that on average new tech makes things better over the long term.

That second part has been true for pretty much all of human history.

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

#236

Post by bruce343434 »

simonhorlick wrote: post #123
personomas wrote: post #121

This. This is really the real direction we need. Changing to renewable energy is only one small part of the whole problem. The real problem is that there are too many people on the planet.

The richest 10% of the global population are responsible for an estimated 47% of emissions. The problem has never been that there are too many people. The problem is that there is a small number of people that are destroying the planet for the rest of us.

Could this be a case of Zipf’s law? I.e. there will always emerge a top 10%? In which case the true solution is to decrease human population across the globe.

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

#237

Post by sbierwagen »

Animats wrote: post #66
mberning wrote: post #16

I got to the plan section and was mighty disappointed. This is simply a treatise on how bad humans and civilization are in the eyes of the new age Gaia religion. All problems and very few “pro human” solutions.

That's a problem with this article, and too many like it. OK, we're going to run out of various natural resources over the next 100-200 years, let alone the next 1000-2000. We will have a mostly sustainable society, like it or not. But it need not be a low-tech one. Energy probably won't be a problem. We have so many low-cost renewable sources now that the fossil fuel industry has trouble getting capital. The energy…

>Something to expect is metal scrap sorting that does a quick spectrographic analysis on each item and routes it to the appropriate bin for re-melting.

Steinert has a product line that uses XRF to sort different alloys in mixed aluminum scrap: https://youtu.be/td8IDt2ke1E?t=96

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

#238

Post by bawolff »

thrown_22 wrote: post #233
bawolff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until it becomes outweighed by splitting resources amongst too many children. Everything has pros and cons.

So long as the children survive to give birth to more children it doesn't matter how poor they are. Evolution doesn't care for the comfort of anyone.

> So long as the children survive to give birth to more children

Big if. In a true famine, the poor usually die first.

> Evolution doesn't care for the comfort of anyone.

Evolution cares about sexual desireability and fitness. Rich people usually have more.

In nature we see these two strategies as well. Some species try and have as many babies as possible, where others have fewer but concentrate resources to make sure the few are more likely to survive. Neither strategy is optimal in all situations.

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

#239

Post by adastra22 »

ben_w wrote: post #182
adastra22 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um.. no? I don't know what you might mean here. Higher CO2 levels will result in vastly more arable land, mostly from the reduction of deserts and the warming of permafrost. Higher CO2 levels make agricultural crops grow faster and bigger. Higher CO2 levels (within the range I was talking about) has no effect on human respiration. Ideal for plants is good for us too.

"For most crops the saturation point will be reached at about 1,000–1,300 ppm under ideal circumstances" - http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm "They found that if the outdoor CO2 concentrations do rise to 930 ppm, that would nudge the indoor concentrations to a harmful 1,400 ppm. … In fact, at 1,400 ppm, CO2 concentrations may decrease basic decision-making ability by 25%, and complex strategic…

Ok I didn't mean to imply maximally ideal. 300-400ppm CO2 would be a tremendous boon to both agriculture and most biodiverse wild ecosystems (e.g. jungles & forest tundra, not deserts). It would also warm polar regions more than it does equatorial regions, making northern Alaska, Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia more tolerable to large-scale, year-round human habitation, as well as Antarctica and Greenland (the resulting sea level rise being an issue tho).

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

#240

Post by throwawaylinux »

scottLobster wrote: post #206
throwawaylinux wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, because Japan has had decades of being the only country in the developed world with that distinction, while the rest of the global economy continued to grow. That's not what the propagandists claimed though. > That gave it advantages and opportunities that won't exist for many countries once the developed world at large ages into mass retirement What unique advantages and opportunities that won't exist for oth…

For one, they could be a high-end export-driven economy, as there were lots of wealthy (by global standards) consumers. They've now built out the bureaucratic and practical infrastructure of building where they sell at scale. They also had time to test out various central bank/financial/strategic policies to figure out what worked. With the rest of the developed world (outside of the US and a few others) moving into…

I don't think any of this opportunity was enabled by Japan's population demographics at all. Germany, South Korea, Hong Kong, are notable exporters of secondary and tertiary products.
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