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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

#151

Post by tsimionescu »

bheadmaster wrote: post #30
leethargo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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 yet people in rich countries consume many times more resources than people in the "global south". The USA's 200M citizens consume more overall than India's 1100M, for one of the extreme examples. So there is quite a bit of room for degrowth in the global north without requiring depopulation.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#152

Post by ceras »

weberer wrote: post #82
andrepd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(it is impossible to convince societies to take massive quality-of-life reductions) Why do you say degrowth = lower quality of life? Let me give you a simple and practical example: an American living in a suburb takes her gas-guzzler 3-ton SUV to go shopping or to the park, stands in traffic in a 4-lane freeway for one hour. A Dutch living in a suburb takes her bike to go shopping or to the park, rides it through a…

A typical American in the suburbs certainly does not go on a highway to go to the supermarket or park. Those are all local amenities. I know some regions have problems with sidewalk coverage like Florida and way out west, but the suburbs are perfectly walkable anywhere in the northeast. Cities less so due to crime. And you definitely wouldn't have highway traffic in the suburbs, that's more of a downtown thing.

> suburbs are perfectly walkable anywhere in the northeast. Cities less so due to crime

This isn't true. I've lived in and visited plenty of northeastern suburbs and cities. The suburbs are largely not walkable: no sidewalk, long distances, and as a result basically nobody walks to any shop. The cities are walkable and with a large amount of residents actually walking.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#153

Post by tsimionescu »

d883kd8 wrote: post #148
tsimionescu wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we will mostly decarbonize our economies by the end of this century. Unfortunately unless we completely decarbonize by the middle of the century, we'll reach catastrophic levels of global warming (>3 degrees warming, likely leading to the polar ice caps melting and significant ocean level rises, especially at the equator).

Once we have mostly decarbonized there are many techniques for capturing carbon if you have enough energy

Perhaps, though we would need to do that long before the turn of the century. People just don't want to believe how little time there is left to stop catastrophic global warming.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#154

Post by mlindner »

tsimionescu wrote: post #139
eloff wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But we will mostly decarbonize our economies by the end of this century. Unfortunately unless we completely decarbonize by the middle of the century, we'll reach catastrophic levels of global warming (>3 degrees warming, likely leading to the polar ice caps melting and significant ocean level rises, especially at the equator).

All the trends I've read recently put us to going to no higher than 3 degrees of warming. The trends that put us toward over 3 degrees of warming were made around the time period of ~2010 when the trends were much worse than they turned out to be over the 2010s.

3 degrees is very bad, but it's quite survivable. We can of course always do better. But right now I'm quite happy with the direction things are going and the current trends but still push for trying to do more where we can.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#155

Post by missedthecue »

pharmakom wrote: post #135
thelastgallon wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Hooking up the car to the roof solar is still very expensive. It needs to be done for every house. What if the car is at work and someone needs the battery power at home?

Would you be drawing down the battery on your car every night and leaving in the morning on an empty tank?

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#156

Post by pyrale »

bheadmaster wrote: post #30
leethargo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> Degrowth necessarily implies population control

As it happens, people in many countries are pretty fine with the idea of having less kids, without the need for population control.

> Killing all humans would also solve the climate problem, but it doesn't make it a good decision.

The problem is going to solve itself with or without us. When people talk about solving climate change, they actually mean making it so we can still be around after that.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#157

Post by Schroedingersat »

kmeisthax wrote: post #133
brettermeier wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it obvious to pollute the earth with ultra-deadly waste for the next couple million years?

You mean like all the radioactive coal smog? No, seriously, coal burning released more radiation into the environment than actual nuclear waste. Long-term storage is a problem but it's still a better problem to have to solve than fossil fuel pollution.

Well we could just do neither.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#158

Post by vixen99 »

collyw wrote: post #43
lettergram wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The issue I take with the “Global warming” crowd is that there’s a lot inaccurate predictions (nearly all of them thus far) and the evide…

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

It also amazes me that the government activists, those folk attending COP conferences, never suggest holding a video conference for COP as an example to us all. Instead an estimated 400 private jets have arrived in Egypt (where domestic climate protesters are locked up) along with 33,000 delegates though the largest emitters, India and China are not represented. Do all these people really believe that there's a climate emergency in terms of CO2 emissions? Their actions seem to belie it. Moreover not much results from these jamborees.

Apparently, a private jet can emit two tonnes of carbon dioxide in an hour and is five to 14 times more polluting per passenger than a commercial plane.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#159

Post by Schroedingersat »

collyw wrote: post #43
lettergram wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The issue I take with the “Global warming” crowd is that there’s a lot inaccurate predictions (nearly all of them thus far) and the evide…

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

Obvious things are often wrong. It is not just uneconomical, but also physically impossible to replace fossil fuels with nuclear using known mineable uranium reserves.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#160

Post by lettergram »

myrmidon wrote: post #120
samatman wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 basi…

Have you ever been involved with building or maintaining a nuclear plant?

I have family members who built plants back in the 80's and some still maintain them.

They claim the main issue has to do with government regulation(s) and unions. I can dive into it further, but effectively the regulation(s) required inspection on ever weld a welder would make. This meant you needed two welders on site, one making a weld and one signing off. You'd have a pipe fitter line up the pipe(s), a different inspector would have to come around and sign off on that work. Sometimes they wouldn't show up, so you'd end up with a days work lost (everyone still getting paid). If someone who was part of a different union or not unionized tried to do the work, the union would strike / the person would be fired.

Then at the end of it, the regulation(s) would change slightly and they'd have to cut out a large section and start all over.

This happened at multiple plants in the 80's per my family members. Today, they're pushing the plants past where they're really safe to use. In the case of Fukushima, they didn't even have a cut-off switch. It was an earlier design.

All that being said, Illinois has been running on mostly nuclear power for decades, as has France. No issue in terms of safety and relatively cheap power (natural gas being cheaper). An updated design, with a reduction in unionization and a loosening of regulations would make nuclear far better than any alternative.

You can do the math yourself and it comes out cheaper and safer than wind or solar. The other thing to consider is what happens when the power goes out in a place like Texas for a week or two due to weather conditions -- people die. Solar, coal, wind, nuclear all have pros/cons. Thus far in the United States nuclear has caused far fewer casualties than per gigawatt than any alternative.

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