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The world has probably passed peak pollution

sustainabilitybynumbers.com

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Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#311

Post by svnt »

missedthecue wrote: post #268
jl6 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conventional wisdom on population growth is that it’s a solved problem and that the population will inevitably stabilize or decline. I say let’s not count our chickens just yet. There are still countries and groups where the growth rate hasn’t stabilized at all, and even if these are small today, exponential growth means they soon won’t be. Population growth will continue until everyone agrees it shouldn’t.

Due to the dynamics of demography, a population is either exponentially growing or exponentially shrinking. A stable population is an unrealistic goal.

You’ll have to provide a lot more context for this to be believable. Maybe it is an unrealistic goal for animals who aren’t interested in having a stable global population.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#312

Post by Dylan16807 »

missedthecue wrote: post #270
jandrese wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of panic over shrinking population where people project it out 1000 years and find there are only like 5 people left in the world. Steady state population should be the long term goal, at least until we start moving into orbital colonies or something. But unfortunately that's an anathema to growth oriented economies which makes it the bad guy in economics and politics.

At fertility rates of 1.6, it takes just 25 generations for the global population to go from 8 billion to 900k. Just 10 generations for the global population to drop below 1 billion. Pretty scary stuff.

That's an extreme drop rate for the whole globe to have, and a very long time, so I'm not scared by it.

The population only went over 2 billion in 1927. Dropping from current numbers is fine, and less competition over space would be nice.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#313

Post by colechristensen »

jl6 wrote: post #205
cs702 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure "peak baby" is a good thing, but agree with you that the other three peaks are encouraging. Arguments by smart people like Sabine Hossenfelder have led me to question the conventional wisdom on population growth. For example, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI1AaZ9OkH8 .

Conventional wisdom on population growth is that it’s a solved problem and that the population will inevitably stabilize or decline. I say let’s not count our chickens just yet. There are still countries and groups where the growth rate hasn’t stabilized at all, and even if these are small today, exponential growth means they soon won’t be. Population growth will continue until everyone agrees it shouldn’t.

It’s nothing about agreement. Everywhere has declining birth rates once they hit a modern standard of living for at least a couple of generations. Not because people think fewer children are a good idea, but because having many children in modern world is unpleasant and very few want more than two.

I think it mostly has to do with increasing desires for a high standard of living when it becomes possible and the pressure of high density cities making lots of kids an unattractive prospect.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#314

Post by Dylan16807 »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #143
wongarsu wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still won't reach peak population until 2060 at the earliest, and more likely around 2100. [1] has a good graph by region on page 4, and a graph for world population near the end. Most regions haven't reached their population peak yet and subsaharan Africa is still growing strongly. Of course a lot of this is just delayed by higher life expectancies. Aging populations will require major social reforms in our lifet…

I think you're looking at peak population, while they are talking about peak number of children. According to some reports, the number of children has already peaked[1]. The remaining growth is just momentum from past births. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-13/earths-population-rea...

You think they're doing the thing they explicitly stated they were doing?

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#315

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bamboozled wrote: post #293
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China still builds more coal power, but they intend to use it only as a backup for when renewables are not producing enough. The YouTube channel Just Have a Think did a video on China's energy future recently, highly recommend checking it out (sorry for not linking directly, writing on my phone).

Doesn’t it take a while to bring a coal station up to energy producing capacity ? Isn’t they why gas is more popular for this ?

China has domestic coal reserves, so they build coal. It's the same reason as West Virginia and just as bad.

If you have any amount of energy storage then the time delay doesn't matter. You turn on the alternate generation method when the storage is starting to run down. It doesn't matter if it takes an hour to come up to temperature because you still have two hours of storage left.

The actual problem is that "shortfall" is a relative concept. Do you have to burn coal because it's cloudy all week, or just because you spent a lot of resources building coal-fired power plants instead of solar panels or wind turbines or nuclear reactors? How often are you going to run the things?

The economics of building and maintaining an entire fleet of coal power plants to use only in a demand emergency is extremely poor. Like you're better off spending half the money on nuclear reactors you can run 100% of the time and the other half on electrifying transportation so you can have a huge demand buffer in the form of vehicle batteries and then get people who only drive a few miles per day to delay their charging by a few days through pricing because a full charge lasts them three weeks anyway.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#316

Post by [deleted] »

Retric wrote: post #68
vondur wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding China: China accounted for 95% of the world's new coal power construction activity in 2023, according to the latest annual report from Global Energy Monitor (GEM). Construction began on 70 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in China, up four-fold since 2019, says GEM's annual report on the global coal power industry China started construction on 70.2 GW of new coal-power capacity last year, almost 20 times the…

That’s misleading because they are idling their existing coal power plants more often. Essentially they are using new coal as demand following peaker plants rather than base load power generation. “In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They're now running around 50%.” https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants#... . By comparison China added 217 GW of PV in 202…

[deleted]

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#317

Post by Dylan16807 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #203
grecy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wow, seeing peak baby is a little scary honestly Are you worried 8 billion is somehow not enough humans?

A big dividing line is between those who think people are a burden vs those who think they're an asset. I've grown convinced people are overwhelmingly an asset. In a rough sense that means they/we produce more value than they consume on average. I think debates about population size are mostly really about this difference.

The way the burdens and assets scale is non-linear. There's no reason to expect that we always or never want the population to go up, regardless of current population.

And we went from 1 billion to 2 billion to 8 billion very very fast. The burdens are really piling up.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#318

Post by mad0 »

illiac786 wrote: post #120

I find this title highly misleading “peak emission” would be much more accurate. “Peak pollution” sounds like the amount of pollution in the environment will actually _decrease_ going forward. That is simply not true, it will continue to increase, just slightly less fast. Sorry if I don’t feel euphoric right now.

So a more accurate statement would be that a derivative of pollution has peaked.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#319

Post by NewJazz »

consf wrote: post #303
NewJazz wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the concept of pollution highly subjective?

I think that it is primarily grounded in objective measurements and scientific understanding

Sure, but interpretation of measurements is a largely individual endeavor, one way or another.

And comparison of different, potentially codependent variables, is notably relevant.

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