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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

#241

Post by londons_explore »

gruez wrote: post #228
londons_explore wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are better approaches. For example a supplier could sell you 5 kWh per day at a fixed price, and anything extra you use is at instant market price, with some kind of pay-as-you-use system. Then if the prices go sky high, users who chose that plan at least get to use 5kWh each day. 5kWh is plenty to not freeze and to keep your phone charged and fridge going. If you want more, you can pay more. The UK already has…

> For example a supplier could sell you 5 kWh per day at a fixed price, and anything extra you use is at instant market price, with some kind of pay-as-you-use system. I suspect 5 kWh/day is way to little to keep the house warm and still be able to cook food. The exact number doesn't really matter here. What's more problematic is how the 5 kWh of guaranteed/insured/subsidized power would be allocated. If it's your fi…

5/24 kWh per rolling hour, with an audible beep if you'll run out of credit before the end of the hour would be a suitable way to do it.

Then you can hear the beep and either decide to turn off a few things, top up your balance, hit the 'emergency 1 kWh' button, or just sit in the dark for 15 minutes.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#242

Post by magicalhippo »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #221
magicalhippo wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need those interconnects though. Here in Norway the electricity prices this summer and fall were up to 100x higher in the south compared to the north, due to lack of interconnect capacity between the north and south. Building hundreds of miles of high-capacity interconnects ain't done in a weekend either.

People misunderstand the impact of interconnects. It's like saying, this remote town in the hills has cheap housing because it takes so long to drive to it so lets build a high speed express train right to the city. Then we can have cheap housing and access to the city. Except you can't, because as soon as you have access to the market demand, the price goes up to match the market price. Interconnects are useful, but…

Oh we've noticed that as well. Our interconnects to Germany and UK certainly contributed to the high prices in the south this year.

But better internal interconnects between south and north would certainly have contributed to averaging out the prices across the country, avoiding the extremes we saw this year.

After all, there were hydro plants in the north which halted production due to the low prices at the same time as we had prices >10x normal in the south.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#243

Post by asadotzler »

lettergram wrote: post #235
matthewdgreen wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you calculated the costs of nuclear without government subsidies? As best I understand, it’s completely unsupportable.

It varies wildly by government and if you built at scale costs would drop dramatically as they did in the French and Russian build outs.

And how do you get scale when the costs are so steep? Cut US regulations to lower costs and you also give up taxpayer supported insurance caps without which no new nuclear would ever be built. It's unsolvable while wind and solar have already gotten far cheaper than nuclear.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#244

Post by AngryData »

andsoitis wrote: post #147
mellavora wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing that a problem with solar is that it doesn't work at night. So I can see that as a (solvable) problem for industry, but for personal life? This idea that you need to have your lights on all night is rather recent. For a very very long time people survived by following the natural rythms of daylight. Some people even think this is healthier, and suggest special apps to adjust screen brightness to follow…

> This idea that you need to have your lights on all night is rather recent. For a very very long time people survived by following the natural rythms of daylight. People have used fire, candles for a very very long time to provide light at night.

Also you can't underestimate moon light either in premodern times. Deep in the trees or an urban landscape with tall buildings all around it is less reliable, but even a half moon on a clear night without washing your vision out with bright artificial lights leaves you with a ton of light. And even when overcast you aren't completely blinded at night as long as you have a decent amount of sky above you.

I think the idea of people sleeping as soon as the sun is down and not just doing low-light activities even 3000 years ago as ridiculous despite being a pervasive idea.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#245

Post by bheadmaster »

andrepd wrote: post #202
bheadmaster wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not your pal, buddy. > Your caricature is just silly. Funny, I feel the same way about yours. Sure, everyone in the world is driving SUVs, flying private jets, and building nuclear reactors in their backyard. Let's stop people from consuming - force everyone to be vegan and eat the bugs! People consuming are the problem - not the military-industrial complex spending enormous amounts of energy on things that have…

Ahaha, good old "if you don't drive a gas guzzler you're a vegan poof". Auto marketing departments are really worth their salt. >building nuclear reactors in their backyard If only!

> Ahaha, good old "if you don't drive a gas guzzler you're a vegan poof". Auto marketing departments are really worth their salt.

Yeah, good old "ignore the argument and insult the argumenter" ad hominem style of arguing - very useful for fueling your self-righteousness and "I'm right, you're wrong" style of thinking.

Good pointless talk! Hope to have one again soon.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#246

Post by roenxi »

pfdietz wrote: post #28
roenxi wrote: post #12

There are some big open questions there though - this may easily be the knell tolling for economic growth as an interesting measure of progress. We don't care about GDP because we really love indexes, but because it used to be a close proxy of energy availability. GDP doubling used to mean 2x as much energy and an almost unbelievable improvement in the median living standard. Doubling energy availability is huge! You…

You seem to be saying that energy growth should be what we're aiming for, not GDP growth? That consuming energy in and of itself is a positive good?

I'm saying that GDP used to measure energy growth. Now it has decoupled. That brings GDP in to question, not energy growth.

We know consuming energy leads to higher living standards. It is now quite possible for GDP to rise and living standards to fall - that used to be an impossible scenario when it was a measure of fossil fuel use.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#247

Post by Schroedingersat »

lettergram wrote: post #166
matthewdgreen wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I recommend sitting down and calculating the input cost for solar / wind. It's being subsidized substantially. There aren't even enough materials currently mined to support the US switching to mostly (>50%) solar / wind. Silver/gold/copper/nickle prices would go up an order of magnitude…

> There aren't even enough materials currently mined to support the US switching to mostly (>50%) solar / wind. Silver/gold/copper/nickle prices would go up an order of magnitude, for instance.

You're thinking of nuclear. Which has a variety of critical resources and no plan reduce them. Renewables live in the real world where using less of a scarce resource allows you to outcompete your competition.

Modern perc panels use 30-50g (so half of silver production would produce 500GW/yr) of silver per net kW with commercial but not fully deployed technologies to reduce it to 18-30g, and feasible technologies to bring it below 5g (which is what a nuclear reactor uses). This is the only limiting resource that renewables necessarily use more of than nuclear other than concrete.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#248

Post by w1nst0nsm1th »

diordiderot wrote: post #178
w1nst0nsm1th wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention nuclear waste, which is still an unresolved issue at current level of nuclear energy production.

This is just false. Annual nuclear wast in the US in volume is "roughly equivalent to less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool." With more modern plants you could recycle that material and cut it down to a fifth the size. Its a political problem, forced by dishonest actors

Le Monde (french) made a special Edition titled Atlas of Energy with a section on Nuclear power (and of course nuclear power waste).

There is an article from science.org about finland plan to bury its own waste.

https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-s...

Tell me about olympic swiming pool.

Monde Diplomatique made a documented article about France plan to bury its own nuclear waste in Meuse department...

It has been a clownshow, with fire incident lasting weeks because an elevator tire went to flame, necessity to run a water pump for the next 10.000 or 100.000 years (no joke) because the underground storage facility would be underwater after 3 days and will probably leak radioactive materials in the surrounding aquifere and will go back to surface after a few hundred years. In short, they have no realistic plan for long term storage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse/Haute_Marne_Underground_...

There was also huge controvercy in germany about storage of nuclear waste in an old coal mine.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-takes-first-sma....

Maybe there is just an olympic swimming pool of radioactive waste in the US (I suppose so it's about 4000m3), but it is not the way you store it for tens thousand of years. And definitively not the cost of a swimming pool.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#249

Post by thethirdone »

zajio1am wrote: post #188
lm28469 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Society at large already prescribes what is best for others. When the government or major business owners choose to do A versus B. In many cases, people do not to choose on their own for the opposite.

As a clear example, if you want a 3.5 mm headphone jack on the newest iphone, that is just not possible. Apple chose for you.|

In many cases, these choices are more obscured, but it is not at all inappropriate (relative to what currently is acceptable) to force degrowth.

Re: Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

#250

Post by refurb »

andrepd wrote: post #209
refurb wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who has the better quality of life? I don't know, isn't "quality of life" a personal, subjective measure? The best example I can give is Singapore. Fantastic public transit, high vehicle import taxes (like 100%) and a system where you need a separate permit to own a care that costs >$100,000 for 10 years. And yet no lack of people who buy cars. The people I worked with there all owned cars. They could certainly get a…

The US has about 6× more cars per capita than Singapore.

Sure, but clearly the demand is still there despite the alternatives!
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