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The world has probably passed peak pollution

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Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#321
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It follows naturally from differential equations that describe population:

dPop / dt = fertility rate * pop (birth rate) - deaths

Note the "current population" factor in that. As long as the number of births depends on the current population (i.e. anyone has a chance to give birth), this equation will result in an exponential curve. If the fertility rate is greater than replacement rate (that "deaths" term that I've handwaved away), the population will exponentially grow. If it's less than the replacement rate, the population will exponentially decay. But it is necessarily exponential, because it's a constant rate multiplied by the current population, and if you remember your calculus, an exponential is defined by a constant growth rate.

There's a whole subfield of population dynamics, and I remember lots and lots of predator/prey models, resource constraint models, etc. from my applied calculus class. Some of those do have non-exponential growth curves, eg. a basic 2-species predator/prey model gives rise to sinusoidal population curves as the increase in prey leads to an increase in predators, which results in more of the prey being killed and eaten, which results in a decrease of food, which results in the predators dying off. But what they all have in common is death rates that are proportional to some function of the current population. In other words, you have to kill off proportionally more of the current population based on how many people they are, something which would be ethically unacceptable to most humans. If you just have natural deaths (i.e. a death rate proportional to Pop(t - life expectancy)), you always get either exponential growth or exponential decay, because that's the way the math works.

I suppose there was one other population curve that gives a sigmoid function (i.e. a logistic curve that asymptotically approaches a limit but never reaches it). This is what you get when there is a natural resource limit to giving birth, i.e. when instead of births being fertility rate * total population, it's fertility rate * (exponentially decreasing fraction of the population). Many people find this scenario ethically challenging as well: in plain English, it means that only the elite can afford to have kids, or alternatively - cap the number of houses so that only the top X families can have a house and raise a child, and then create social stigma around having kids when you cannot afford those increasingly scarce markers of stability. It is disturbingly close to reality, though.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#323
post #68
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…

> 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%.

That doesn't sound all that misleading then? If they've installed 20 times more coal generating capacity than the rest of the world and are operating it 50% of the time then they're still adding 10 times more emissions than the rest of the world combined, and that's assuming the rest of the world will all be operating their coal-fired power plants fully 100% of the time.

> By comparison China added 217 GW of PV in 2023 alone which came online over the year.

217 GW of nameplate capacity or of average generation? These are very different numbers for solar because of the low capacity factor.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The issue isn't just the total number, it's the demography. The population is getting very old at a breakneck speed. I'm not sure how healthcare and pensions are supposed to be provided for old people when the tax base gets smaller and smaller every year. The end result is pretty terrible elder poverty.

Not to mention the changing political dynamics of having a lot of old people outnumber younger people by 2 or 3 times in the voting booth. The gerontocracy is bad enough now. Imagine it 3x worse.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#325
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It follows naturally from differential equations that describe population: dPop / dt = fertility rate * pop (birth rate) - deaths Note the "current population" factor in that. As long as the number of births depends on the current population (i.e. anyone has a chance to give birth), this equation will result in an exponential curve. If the fertility rate is greater than replacement rate (that "deaths" term that I've…

Fantastic explanation, better than I could have put into words. Thanks for filling in.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the concept of pollution highly subjective?

Within certain bounds. Climate scientists likely don't agree on the ideal CO2 PPM level, while agreeing that the current level is not it. Anyone who wishes to claim pollution is always a subjective concept is welcome to drink a few gallons of water from Lake Karachay.

> Lake Karachay

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay

> Today the lake is completely infilled, acting as "a near-surface permanent and dry nuclear waste storage facility."

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#327
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Peak baby - 2013. [2] I think your source's claim that "The planet will never see more babies than it has in 2013" is open to question. To just use the US as an example: mainstream Americans have a declining fertility rate, and we have no reason to think that is going to reverse in the foreseeable future. Immigrants have higher fertility, but they tend to converge to the mainstream after a generation or two. So,…

Putting aside the considerable statistical skepticism, the natural next question we all have at noticing these trends is - is there any way for secular society to get some of the "special sauce" these ultra-religious groups have, before the aggregate supply of everything starts to fall? Secular pronatalism doesn't seem like it has a lot of staying power with most people as an ideology. But I've been on board for a lo…

Pronatalism doesn’t belong to religion especially. People didn’t used to have a lot of kids because God told them to, they had a lot of kids because they were free labor.

In that way, the pendulum is already starting to swing the other way in the US with the loosening of child labor laws.

Secularly, though, we’d have to do something to make it not hellishly expensive and inconvenient to have children. The US can’t even extend the child tax credit, much less fix healthcare, housing, education, food deserts, or childcare all at once.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posted from a huge house with air conditioning while using multiple petroleum products (iPhone/computer, chair, desk, fleece, etc). The pollution lifted every single person’s standard of living across the globe to levels unimaginable 100 years ago. It’s easy to be in Seattle or New York and say we gotta stop burning oil and coal but there are trade offs that were worth making. If you live in a developing country with…

Every single person? Not exactly. What about farmers forced off their land for corporate interests? What about people working in the garbage dumps of Tijuana in Mexico [1]? I've actually lived in the "first world" (born there) and now have lived over a year in a developing country where most people (including myself) don't have "aircon", and whether technology has improved things is not as clearcut as you might think…

> Yes, we have better health care and more products, but we also have more pollution, more meaningless jobs, weaker local communities (especially in the most developed parts of the world), and beautiful species are going extinct.

Small tangent, I just want to point out that all of the issues you've pointed out in first world countries are maybe a problem in the cities, but not so outside of them. To wit, where I live in small town Iowa, USA, there's no pollution; there's a strong sense of community; plenty of beautiful species; and if I wanted a "meaningful" non-tech job I could easily get hired working on any number of farms in the area.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "shortf…

Let’s hope their renewable strategy works out because they’d otherwise be burning a lot of coal

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#330
post #207

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.

I thought greenhouse gasses will increase in concentration as the feedback loop of polar region is forcing trapped gasses out of the ground.

Importantly, this article is not primarily about greenhouse gasses.
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