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.
Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
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Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#92I'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/publish…
"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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
[2] https://emrod.energy/emrod-partners-with-airbus-and-the-euro...
[3] https://elifesciences.org/digests/43959/generating-electrici...
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#93"Degrowth" aka the poor will have to deal with it. aka lots of death and suffering in places I can't see so it doesn't matter.
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#94Unfortunately, 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 ot…
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. Bu…
The best time for fusion energy is 30 years from now
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#95Isn'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 pre…
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.
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#96I'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/publish…
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…
You might be generating 120% but what happens if everybody installs?
Do you have storage installed to smooth out the dead hours?
Unfortunately the answer is that you need days of storage for solar and wind to be anywhere near 100% of the energy mix.
The cost of that is astronomical.
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#97I'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/publish…
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 mas…
>80% of GDP is spent on wants. And if people want a clean environment more than they want the latest consumer crap
I don’t know where you’re based, but pigs will fly before taxpayers in the United States agree to an 80% environmental income tax.
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think the new question then becomes, can we make enough solar panels for everyone without destroying the Earth?
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.
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
It amazes me that climate activists never seem to push for nuclear, the most obvious solution.
It’s the tell. 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). https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/596304-invest...
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.
Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think the new question then becomes, can we make enough solar panels for everyone without destroying the Earth?
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.