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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

#181

Post by evilos »

stephen_g wrote: post #149
pstrateman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The answer actually isn’t that you need days of storage. A researcher I follow on Twitter here in Australia called David Osmond has been running a simulation for over a year that scales up the wind and solar we have to the levels we would need to achieve around 100% renewable energy, and using real time data simulates storage requirements. He’s found that for the NEM grid in Australia at least, just six hours of stor…

How many gigawatt hours is 6 hours of storage though? Also is this just to cover current electricity demand or total primary energy?

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#182

Post by scythe »

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…

>Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures.

The disconnect is between the recognition that there are problems and the assertion that we cannot simply solve those problems. Wastewater reclamation, urban planning, and the at least partial displacement of dietary animal protein can address the cited problems without "degrowth". Furthermore, while several trends are concerning, they mostly do not represent an immediate threat on the level of climate change except in the writings of click-chasing environmental journalists and the appeals of donation-funded activist organizations. We have time to study and refine our approach.

For example, the largest biodiversity loss event actually happened before the dawn of recorded history — the Quaternary Extinction. Yet this massive 'crisis' failed to prevent the rise of human civilization. Degrowth advocates usually want to impose a lot of pain on society very soon — in your words, 'suddenly' — which is more punk rock than practical reason. In reality, most of these trends are things we need to be aware of and plan for, but the sky is not falling. Climate change is still the biggest threat, and the one thing that may require a little pain. Attaching pain in service of other causes becomes a lead shoe as we are trying to swim to the shore.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#183

Post by mlindner »

andrepd wrote: post #37
mpweiher wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From TFA: "Strikingly, consumption emissions, which include a measure of the carbon embedded in imports, have fallen by 15% over the same period."

The USA still has 45x the emissions per capita of Nigeria, to give a sense of scale.

No one said there isn't more work to do, but continuing to grow without growing emissions (or even better, also reducing emissions) is the point.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#184

Post by luckylion »

ericpauley wrote: post #176
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…

> except heating How much of an impact did this actually make, though, since heating was probably the majority of your emissions to begin with? Solar may be sexy, but depending on your heat source you possibly could have done better by installing a heat pump on grid power.

Really depends on the insulation if you're in Western Europe close to the sea (making the winters less harsh). I live in a flat and the whole complex has been upgraded with modern insulation and modern windows about five years ago. I turn on the heat on a few days when I feel exceptionally cold, otherwise I don't and it still maintains 18-19° (being chubby helps, that's my comfort temperature). It's not because my neighbors are doing the heating for me -- I've talked to them, and they barely ever turn it up, either.

Granted, that would change somewhat if we get a super harsh winter here, but otherwise: I consume much more electrical power than heating.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#185

Post by adverbly »

I'd love to see some metrics on GDP growth that are not connected to increasing population/resource extraction/inflation/housing.

In places like Canada and Australia it feels like the entire economic engine is built around population growth, housing, and resource extraction. It makes me sort of nervous about if these countries are actually making real progress.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#186

Post by imtringued »

api wrote: post #173
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.

The biggest risk to this is that efforts to decarbonize will lead to cost of living increases that disproportionately impact the poor and working class, leading to a populist uprising against these measures and an enthusiastic return to burning coal. (Coal remains the cheapest way to generate energy in most places.) We have already seen a little bit of this. It's only been a preview of what a more serious revolt woul…

You do a CO2 dividend and the problem is solved. There is no easier problem than that. It is literally one person one vote.

From my perspective people hate democracy and want people to be unequal by birth.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#187

Post by realusername »

erlich wrote: post #104
collyw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I always thought this too. Just googled "how many nuclear reactors for all worlds energy needs". First result: "Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy needs" [1]. Global energy needs at 15TW. Would need 15K nuclear plants total. Currently we have 440 @ 375GW total. It's an interesting read. But I agree that it is completely absurd that climate activists make such dire predictions of apocalyptic scenar…

That calculation is like taking the consumption of a car from the 60s and multiplying by the known petrol capacity at the time, it just makes absolutely no sense to predict future capacity.

It does not account in technology changes and discovery of more fuel sources. The reason it's not done yet is because the problem isn't the lack of fuel but the lack of plants.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#188

Post by zajio1am »

lm28469 wrote: post #31
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…

> degrowth > it is impossible to convince societies to take massive quality-of-life reductions What about sustainable growth focused on actual quality of life and not on perpetuating a system that produce/consume useless cheap low quality gadgets and services for the sole purpose of keeping the population at work 8 hours a day until they hit 65/67 years old (age by the time 25% of the poorest are already dead) The fa…

People individually choose to buy these 'useless cheap low quality gadgets and services' and work full-time until retirement instead of living frugally and limiting work time (like advocates of FIRE movement). Who are we do prescribe what is best for others?

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#189

Post by realusername »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #106
realusername wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are negligeable compared to their physical counterpart they are replacing though, they so replace a lot of car trips and expensive manufacturing which is now unneeded

Demand for cars is higher than ever, so is the manufacturing of almost all goods, as proven by the supply chain bottleneck in the last 2-3 years. The demand is still there, and is growing thanks to millions of people in places like India, China and Africa getting out of poverty. What exactly have smartphones been replacing lately? Other than PC computers, which ironically also saw a comeback thanks to WFH? You're pro…

We're talking about developed countries here so yeah tons of stuff has been dematerialised, I call my doctor by video instead of driving there, I download movies instead of driving to the cinema, I get deliveries which are batched instead of going to the mall, I no longer need to send letters and buy paper maps, I don't need to drive to the library anymore to get books, the electricity company does not need to drive on the whole city just to read the electric meters... The list is endless, and this is just individual stuff, whenever you get to the whole supply chain, that gets compounded at every level.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#190

Post by abeppu »

The claim that countries that do manufacturing for export have decarbonized faster than the rest of the economy is interesting.

Prior to the pandemic, one sometimes heard that even if you had a desire to do a particular manufacturing step outside of China, the advantages of being in a manufacturing region that was set up for scale, that had so many of your suppliers etc made it much faster and cheaper to set up production for a new product, iterate and change the parts you needed etc. Was some portion of decarbonizing manufacturing exports the sheer concentration of manufacturing steps in the area? Parts don't need to be shipped as far between steps etc? In 2020/2021 people began talking about the need to make supply chains more robust by spreading out and replicating production capabilities more. Will that re-carbonize some of that manufacturing process?

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