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Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

economist.com

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Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#111

Post by erlich »

mountainb wrote: post #84
lettergram wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The Gulf countries do, too, such as when the UAE paid Matt Damon for an anti-fracking film https://www.cnbc.com/amp/id/49218229 I don’t blame them for playing the game well.

I don't think people realize that when you have a huge commodity income stream under threat of ceasing to exist, it's quite realistic to spend a huge percentage of this on lobbying to stretch it as far as it will go.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#112

Post by bryanlarsen »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #110
bryanlarsen wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two goal post shifts in 1 sentence! "unmaintained" and "revenue".

Then what's your definition based on your own goal posts? Making software that's sitting around and doesn't generate any revenue? That's either a hobby which is fine, or is a waste of resources, both in development and in storage/deployment. And if the 20 year old software isn't unmaintained but is actually constantly getting updated and support, then is it still 20 year old software or is it basically up-to-date sof…

It doesn't have to produce revenue, it just has to aid in the production of GDP. I don't pay for Linux, but it is a key part of the GDP I am responsible for.

And while Linux is maintained, the vast bulk of the value it provides is quite old and almost unchanged.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#113

Post by notamy »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #105
bryanlarsen wrote: post #69

Isn'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…

>the software produced 20 years ago still has value Which unmaintained piece of software written 20 years ago still generates revenue?

I would imagine that there's probably a _lot_ of industrial machinery control software out in the wild that's still running on Windows 95/98/etc., where the company that wrote it probably went out of business 20 years ago.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#114

Post by PartiallyTyped »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #18

Unfortunately, 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…

What some activists miss is that to actually stop climate change, we need to accelerate the growth of developing countries. During development, emissions grow, and then decline; By accelerating the development process, we can reduce the duration developing countries spend in the window of high emissions.

This can be done without that much more effort from developing countries, except for absorbing the cost of renewables, the development of the tech, along with contributing technical know-how.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#115

Post by twobitshifter »

leethargo wrote: post #23
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #18

Unfortunately, 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…

So, you're saying, hopefully we will soon have "abundant supplies of cheap GHG emission-free energy" and no other resource scarcity to support that infrastructure? I count myself as sympathetic (but also skeptical) towards the degrowth movement. I don't interpret it as saying that we should (only) reduce consumption and ignore progress in the form of efficiency/decoupling. Rather, the message seems that doing both, s…

As energy prices fall and solar becomes more efficient we're likely to use even more energy. The post-energy scarcity stage for society will lead to wild changes, but some could be great. Many things that we see as wasteful today due to efficiency, like splitting hydrogen from water, become acceptable when the energy cost is negligible.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#116

Post by wccrawford »

pstrateman wrote: post #96
radicalbyte wrote: post #75

Earlier 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…

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.

That's true, and it's why other sources of energy are useful still, such as wind and nuclear and hydro.

But I also think we'll never get to the point that everyone has solar installed. There are plenty of situations where it doesn't make sense, such as properties with lots of taller trees around short buildings.

Also, generating 120% generally doesn't make sense because the payout from the electric company for the other 20% is pitiful.

A battery makes sense for a lot of people for a few reasons, too, so the power company doesn't necessarily have to be the one to do all of that, either. We did it mainly for relief from power outages, but it also works well for places with prices that change by time of day.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#117

Post by [deleted] »

anemoiac wrote: post #35

I'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…

[deleted]

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#118

Post by thelastgallon »

pstrateman wrote: post #96
radicalbyte wrote: post #75

Earlier 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…

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.

A comment like this comes up in every discussion of renewables and needs to die. We don't need separate stationery storage, enormous storage capacity will be free as car batteries. EVs will have 17 times the battery capacity of stationary storage systems by 2030 [1].

By the time we completely transition to EVs, it will be 100s of times of storage. All this storage capacity is available at zero cost, people buy cars anyways. It is decentralized, no single point of failure. This is the sweetest kind of energy demand, can charge whenever electricity prices are negative or zero. Cars are parked nearly all the time, grid adaptations will evolve demand management. Cars will supply power back to the grid at its highest prices, providing a source of income for EV owners.

[1] https://assets.bbhub.io/professional/sites/24/BloombergNEF-Z...

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#119

Post by mantas »

sveme wrote: post #61
bheadmaster wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Degrowth necessarily implies population control - you can't reduce sum consumption if population keeps growing, as there is a lower bound on the amount of consumption a single person can live off. And population control necessarily implies government control of reproduction, which sets a precedent for controlling other aspects of people's lives. I am not sympathetic towards the degrowth movement, since the "solutions…

Aren't all populations worldwide currently dropping in their reproduction rate already, without government intervention? Nearly all western countries are already way below the maintenance rate of 2.1 already. https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#the-global-decline...

> without government intervention

There’s a lot of tangential government intervention. E.g. no enough daycare funding while pushing moms-back-at-work campaigns. Birth-control hormones ending up in waste water which goes back full circle yet government doing nothing about such pollution.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#120

Post by myrmidon »

samatman wrote: post #88
collyw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It amazes me that climate activists never seem to push for nuclear, the most obvious solution.

They are, as a sibling comment demonstrates, deluded, after decades of being maliciously lied to by 'environmental' movements with ties to the fossil industry. Anyone against nuclear is a shill for petrochemical power, there are no exceptions. There are the deluded and the liars, that's it.

Completely disagree. And I used to be strong nuclear proponent until 2015 or so.

Nuclear power is no longer a viable pathway for a government to throw tax dollars at, and there are multiple reasons:

1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind.

2) Nuclear power costs explode if the capacity factor of your plants decreases: Meaning that they are basically ONLY viable for baseload power (running at full tilt all the time), which makes them very unflexible and a really bad match with other renewables (=> which, again, are cheaper per MWh than the fission reactors).

3) Nuclear power failed to deliver on safety promises, mainly with the Fukushima incident: If a modern, technologically competent nation like Japan can not be expected to keep their reactors running incident-free, then how are you going to convince e.g. Italians, Indians or other nationalities with significant (perceived?) government corruption/incompetence that their government can be trusted with regulating nuclear tech?!

4) Building plants is slow, extremely expensive and a huge commitment: Considering how rapidly PV/wind/batteries decrease in cost currently, committing on nuclear power right now would be economically irresponsible, and also has huge latency on acutally delivering power, unlike PV or wind, which you can basically buy off the shelve, install and hook up within the year.

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