Back to seriousness - the author claims there are limits to nuclear, wind, and solar, but does not state what those limits are. The limit on nuclear is not clear to me - France gets something like 75% of its energy from nuclear. It seems the main limit on nuclear has been public sentiment, which must be weighed with public sentiment on climate change.
Back in the 50s, nuclear was being treated as the magic that would solve all energy problems. There were ideas for making fission cars, trains, planes, etc. But since then, civilization has only benefited from nuclear reactors via power plants, naval ships, RTGs, and depending on how you see it, bombs. The magic of nuclear fission never provided the complete revolution it was setup to do. Just as we weren't responsible enough to plan for fission's partial failure back then, we are not able to envision the same partial failure with solar and wind. Fusion is the only thing I can think of that still has a chance to be the magic it is hyped to be. But that is only because its another 50 years away. And that is just too late to stop climate change in its accelerating state.
Finding appropriate sites for generators would probably be the engineering limit for nuclear. I don't know if nuclear is easy or hard to get started in a black start condition; if they're hard to start, there's probably a max % of the grid you'd want to be nuclear.
But the will of the people and regulatory hurdles mean permitting and construction is slow and economics are not great. Also, there's probably a manufacturing capacity issue; if you wanted to get 100 new plants online in the next 5 years, and permitting and siting were a non-issue, getting the parts made would be.
The limits to various forms of energy are well-known. It's a bit more than I can describe in an HN comment, though Tom "Do the Math" Murphy has a good guide, index to his posts here: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/post-index/ Heinberg himself has written of them in earlier books and articles.
Essentially humans have access to the fluxes of solar, geothermal, and tidal energy, and the stores of fossil fuels, nuclear fission from naturally occurring uranium and plutonium, and potentially nuclear fission from hydrogen plus a few other essential light isotopes and/or elements.
All other energy sources are either carriers (as with hydrogen as a combustion fuel), or derivative. Notably hydroelectric, wind, biomass, and wave energy are all derivatives of solar flux. (Fossil fuels are derivatives of past solar flux.)
Solar is the most tractable large-scale power source. The raw rate of incidence is about 1 kW/m^2 at Earth's surface. This is reduced by a number of considerations, including land area, spacing factors, panel efficiencies, and losses through conversion (DC/AC), transmission, and storage. The net potential is perhaps 5% of the total incident quantity. And there's the small factor that all other life on Earth also competes for this resource.
Hydro is proven but largely exploited, and has environmental consequences now increasingly recognised and often untenable.
Total wind and wave power (the latter is effectively nil) are small fractions of total solar power. Wind power is attractive principally as in places where it HAPPENS to be prevalent, the capital costs are low relative to energy returned.
Geothermal, while independent of solar, is a small fraction of the latter, and is already largely utilised where available and practical, though there's significant undeveloped resource in Africa, and in the US in the Yellowstone Caldera, though official resource estimates exclude this due to its protected status as a National Park. (Pointed, the USGS utterly omits the Yellowstone Caldera in its geothermal resource survey of a decade or two back.) As baseload power, geothermal is attractive. Capital-intensive "enhanced" geothermal has proved disappointing to date (see Australia's Habanero project).
Tidal energy is worth mentioning only because it's independent of the usual solar/nuclear axis: tidal energy actually represents a tap on gravitational potential of the Earth-Moon-Sun system. It's slightly more viable than wave energy, but save for a few very limited local applications, not practicable. Tapping the entire tidal potential of, say, the San Francisco Bay would not even power the city of San Francisco at current electric utilisation, let alone full energy demands, or of the greater Bay Area. And this would require entirely damming the Bay.
Nuclear fission suffers from a fuel shortage problem: known nuclear reserves would power present human energy needs for about 15 years, total. At present rates of utilisation, that lifetime is extended, but still comes in at under a century. There's the standard bickering about definitions of reserves, and talk of seawater extraction (of uranium, other fuels not being salt-water soluable), breeding (of plutonium), or use of thorium, under either existing or novel reactor designs. All three options have significant limitations, though some may be technologically feasible. The resulting energy system and economy would be fragile and risk-prone.
Fusion is as it's always been, the power source of the future. And always will be, as the punch line goes.
That's the lineup. Murphy has a good overview of numbers. Vaclav Smil in numerous of his books (Energy and Civilization and Energy in World History, an earlier edition of the same book, though with somewhat different organisation, as well as others) takes a deeper dive into many of these issues.
Mind that solving the energy problem is only one of numerous stumbling blocks between now an a long-term viable technological human civilisation. Numerous others exist, and the fundamental fact remains that economic growth (and its concommittant and requisite resource and energy growth) simply cannot continue indefinitely.
If you're interested in learning more about the big picture connection between our human society and energy, I recommend "Energy and Civilization: A History," by Vaclav Smil.
My biggest takeaway from his book is that transitioning a society to affluence requires, at minimum, 22.6 megawatt hours of energy per capita per year. High energy societies like the United States use far more. To de-carbonize, we have to plan new energy sources that provide at least this much energy for every person on the planet. Otherwise, people will understandably turn to carbon-based energy sources to meet their energy needs.
Producing this much energy from renewables is possible, but it is hard! Fossil fuels provide an exceptionally compact (in terms of land area) and effective energy source.
[edited to correct typo in the energy figure, what I originally wrote as 2.6 mw/h is 22.6 mw/h]
That's surprisingly low. 2.6 megawatt hours per year is 300 watts per person which is almost the same order of magnitude of what the human body can produce.
I would really doubt power estimates with three significant digits when I could reduce my total power demand by at least 30% by switching to a heat pump for heating instead of burning oil without changing my quality of life in the slightest.
This strikes me as a very defeatist and Malthusian take on the world, and, frankly, too US-centric.
While the US hasn’t managed the political will for significant climate reform, we are far from the majority of the world, and even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation, it’s unlikely that this would be enough to avert climate change. The developing world wants modern life, and if they have to burn fossil fuels to catch up, they will.
There are really only a few situations that lead to radical global change:
1. Severe crisis, such as a nation-ending war.
2. Extraordinary visionary leadership in the right place at the right time... which often leads to serious crises such as nation-ending wars.
Otherwise, progress comes from the chaotic, messy evolution of humanity. Perhaps we will innovate our way out of climate disaster, perhaps the ecology will gradually change and we’ll be forced to adapt, or (my guess) perhaps some of both. The good news is we actually have a lot of the technology we need, and more is being developed all the time. I for one am optimistic that between innovation and adaptation the future will continue to be bright.
> even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation, it’s unlikely that this would be enough to avert climate change.
It's actually quite likely that it would go a long way towards averting climate change. Sure, the US contributes only about 6 GT of greenhouse gases of the 50 GT emitted by the whole world annually, so it first seems that zeroing out this would still result in 44 GT worth of emissions left.
But going from 6 GT to zero cannot be done without huge innovation. Technological innovation, innovation in policy, oversight, enforcement. These pieces of innovation can (and will) be shared with the rest of the world. When the price of solar panels went down, it went down globally. If the US Navy implements a way to scrub CO2 out of seawater and make fuel out of it [1], others can use the method too. Even if the US won't share the technology outright, just knowing it can be done will let others know the idea is worth investing in.
My sincere guess is that we'll kludge the problem with relatively low-tech geoengineering solutions. Primarily stratospheric aerosol injections. The technology is very well understood and fully mature. We know with certainty, from historical volcano eruptions, that a large enough dosage will lower global temperatures near instantly. And the cost is low enough that even a single mid-size economy could afford to unilaterally engage in it.
The downsides are secondary environmental effects (e.g. ocean acidification), the hesitancy of a single country to make a climate altering decision for the rest of the world, and the general bad optics of sweeping the problem under the rug for future generations. All that being said, up until now the tangible costs of climate have so far been relatively mild. If nothing big enough gets done on the carbon side, which seems increasingly likely, then warming will reach the point where it starts imposing major economic and humanitarian costs.
At that point, it's nigh inevitable that at least one major power will bite the bullet and start pumping the stratosphere full of sulfur dioxide.
No, that does not require some incredible earth-shattering event. It requires political consensus of a majority of nations. Like was done to forbid emissions of ozon-layer damaging chemicals.
People thought that obviously, all countries would see the common interest in protecting Earth's climate. There was ONE major rogue nation in this big plan: USA. G.W Bush was the one who presented climate change denial as a respectable policy. I am not sure people measure the impact of this position.
Most other advanced countries cut down their emissions, much more than the US did (no, it is not a matter of density, distance between cities or so on: even if you remove all emissions due to vehicles, USA is still way above EU).
> The developing world wants modern life, and if they have to burn fossil fuels to catch up, they will.
China will peak at a much lower level of CO2/capita than the US currently has. Given the current trajectory, it is quite possible that China will never in its history emit more CO2/capita than the US.
> Extraordinary visionary leadership in the right place at the right time
Give me a break. Listening to the consensus of experts, both international and domestic experts, on issues that threaten the whole ecosystem, is not "visionary leadership". It is called "not electing a cartoon villain in office".
> even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation
You would also need to nuke Bhutan and Suriname, two carbon-negative countries.
It's amazing how long we have known about the impact CO2 would have on the climate. We're now talking about human lifetimes, and yet look at where we are in the public debate. We are still mostly ignoring the issue or debating its reality.
Who is "we"? The IPCC was created in 1988, at the alarmed demand of the Weather and Environment offices of the UN. In 1997 the Kyoto protocol was signed by 184 countries, recognizing the urgency and the need for CO2 reduction.
Only in the US is there a political debate about climate change denialism. Thanks to you it is coming to other countries, but before GWB it was a fringe position everywhere.
1. Trillion-dollar fortunes are built on pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. We, as humans have committed genocide against entire cultures over less money.
2. The wealth of industrialized societies is not built on money, or labour. It is built on energy. All of their wealth is derived from energy. Fossil fuels are an incredible source of energy. Cost-effective competitors to them had limited potential to replace them, for a large number of technical and political reasons.
Jules Verne was talking about coal depletion in the 19h century (albeit with a more positive note)
In the 60s France started switching to nuclear power because it worried about the depletion of oil wells in the areas it controlled. It is wrong to say nuclear power can't power more than 10% of a country.
Somewhat more substantively, so were William Stanley Jevons, in The Coal Question (1857),[1] and earlier by John Williams, a mineral surveyor, in Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom (1789).[2]
Thing is that since the time of Jevons, the only energy sources added to our knowledge are nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and the rather improbable prospect of antiatter annihilation (an energy carrier rather than energy source).
Solar PV has emerged as an energy conversion technology, first discovered as the photoelectric effect in the late 19th century and scientific theory identified by Einstein.
We've seen considerable technical improvements to technologies known since the 1950s, but also clear limitations (fission and fusion most especially, but also maximal efficiencies of PV and battery storage). Efficiencies have improved, toward the bound of theoretical limits, and costs fallen.
But we're still largely living in the world of 1857 in terms of the options available to us.
Solar power and batteries have come a long way, but there's still little political will to change things. Nuclear power could progress a lot further too, but again no political will.
There's no economic forcing function either since coal and gas remain on average the cheapest and easiest to deploy and manage sources of energy, and that won't change unless there's enough investment in alternatives to get them over the mass adoption hump.
The worst fears about fossil fuel depletion have so far not manifested, which might be a bad thing long term. We may have enough fossil carbon to cause truly catastrophic climate change if we actually burn a significant fraction of it.
I wonder though if the economic structural problem isn't even harder to solve. The entire financial system relies on eternal growth. Number must always go up or everything breaks.
Even if we put an end to most fears about supply side limits to growth by cracking fusion or developing super cheap utility scale batteries, there would still be demand side limits to growth from things like stabilizing populations and diminishing marginal utility of wealth. Mere stability without significant growth would bring about the collapse of the financial system and the economy as we know it, and probably quite a lot of political turmoil since we don't have a really great replacement sitting in the wings.
(No, planetary migration won't keep GDP growth going any time soon. Humans could settle on the Moon or Mars but they're too far away to contribute much to our Earthly GDP. They'd be mostly isolated economies of their own.)
> (No, planetary migration won't keep GDP growth going any time soon. Humans could settle on the Moon or Mars but they're too far away to contribute much to our Earthly GDP. They'd be mostly isolated economies of their own.)
I don't really agree with your take on things but this one stuck out to me as particularly wrong. If there were suddenly another population of humans on another planet, there would, at a minimum, be a regular flow of digital goods, as well as physical shipments, largely one way earth -> mars.
I will say I disagree about fossil fuel being cheapest though. The data show we’re at the inflection point now such that new renewables are cheaper even than natural gas and coal. That is very likely to get even cheaper.
I think the real exciting and interesting challenge is how to adopt society to energy that is incredibly cheap and abundant BUT not necessarily stable. Batteries are the most obvious and likely best solution, but are there other adaptations that we could make?
Consider, for example, and two-priority grid: your house could have one circuit that it “interruptible” and may cut off during severe shortages, while a second circuit is uninterruptible and powers things like your heating in the winter. This is just an idea off the top of my head, but there are many many other things that we could potentially do to adapt.
Why in the world is this comment being downvotes? There is nothing in this comment that I see is incorrect, and if you’re going to vigorously down vote because “I don’t like things that make me feel bad!” you at least ought to comment as to what could be wrong here.
> But let’s assume there is indeed enough time, and that we suddenly get serious about planning. What should we do?
In the United States public planning is typically limited to figuring out how to prop up the private financial system for one more quarter. In the U.S. most money is created through real estate mortgages. Although people like to talk about gold, crypto, consumers, producers, and government spending the mainstream financial system in charge of allocating the resources is really a mortgage based system.
Suppose someone has an estate with buildings and structures with replacement cost of $200,000. A broker says the estate has a comparable sales price of $600,000. In a loose money system we just trust the banks and brokers to do all of the planning, publicly guarantee mortgages at the reported $600,000, and have federal reserve buy assets to prop up prices at whatever number private finance has fixed upon.
In a slightly tighter system, we might cap real estate loan guarantees at 200% of replacement cost of non-land fixed capital. So if property has buildings and fixtures worth $200,000 public loan guarantees max out at $400,000 even if broker says property is worth $600,000. In order to write up price to $600,000 the owner would need to install $100,000 more in fixed capital, the effect of which is to redirect a larger share of the money created through mortgages to other sectors of economy.
How to use this to promote green energy investment?
Suppose instead of a replacement cost cap of 200% there was a replacement cost cap of 150% for normal capital and 250% for green capital. Then in order to take out a property loan for $600,000 the owner would have to install at least $400,000 of normal capital (structures, fixtures, equipment) or at least $240,000 of green capital (solar panels, wind turbines, lifted mass storage systems), regardless of how high the land values in the location had been written up.
In our current system the incentive of brokers is really just to write up asset prices as high as possible until the financial system collapses in order to generate some nice asset gains during credit bubbles. We can take advantage of this greed and use it to promote green energy investment by tightening up rules for lending against speculative land values using fixed capital replacement cost caps, which are slightly looser for fixed capital which is green.
The very last sentence sums up this general ethos quite well:
> Agriculture may have set us humans on an unsustainable path, but fossil fuels broadened that path to a superhighway.
We need to put the "agriculture was our biggest mistake" trope to bed. Sustainability is an illusion. Nothing is sustainable in the cosmos, it just looks that way when you constrict the time horizon enough. Pre-agriculture, Homo Sapiens were on the constant brink of extinction, just like every other animal. The earth provides no safe comfort to any being. (The fact that we've created a society which provides for me to type this screed without glancing over my shoulder once is a miracle.)
Humans are unique, and agriculture was a monumental step in our epic journey. Without agriculture, the dunes of Mars would crumble in darkness and countless stars would radiate for no conscious creature to marvel at and wonder.
Fossil fuels were a tremendous gift: cheap energy. Without it, who knows how far behind our society would be? We almost certainly wouldn't yet have commercial air travel, 4+ billion people globally connected on the internet, or mRNA vaccines.
Yes, no gift comes for free. But let's not treat this like some deal with the devil. It is up to us to manage the costs (and they are real!) We don't master plan this stuff, but I'll bet on humans to figure it out every time.
So, is it any surprise that someone that calls agriculture "the biggest planning failure in human history" would have this conclusion?
> Without planning, this is what will most likely happen: we’ll fail to produce enough renewable energy to power society at the level at which we want it to operate. So, we’ll continue to get most of our energy from fossil fuels—until we can’t, due to depletion. Then, as the economy crashes and the planet heats, the full impacts of our planning failure will finally hit home.
If you're going to be a doomsaying pessimist (which, mind you, every era of history has had in droves), at least put some effort into it.
> “Based on present knowledge, it does not appear likely that the fission of uranium or thorium could ever support more than 10 to 20 per cent of the energy system of the United States patterned as at present.”
I think he was clearly too pessimistic about the potential of nuclear.
> Today, the US gets about 8 percent of its total energy from nuclear power...
Note this is of all energy including the gas in your car. Obviously we are reliant on electrification if our transport system to tackle that, which doesn’t seem considered here. Possibly he didn’t foresee the potential to electrify transport hence the pessimism. No one is expecting solar, wind, or nuclear powered cars. They’re expecting solar, wind, and nuclear powered electricity grid charging batteries in cars, third rails, and overhead catenary.
Nuclear is ~20% of all electricity output on that grid today in the USA. And in France it’s ~70%.
Given how long these problems have been staring us in the face, it's truly hard not to be totally pessimistic about the future. If we haven't changed yet, do we even have the capacity to do so?
The world is (one hopes) just beginning to emerge from a global disaster of a known variety, for which there has been longstanding scientific and technical understanding, as well as existing paybooks for dealing with the situation. Response by the most capable and technologically-advanced countries has often been abysmal.
The coming global energy transition is going to be orders of magnitude more complex and fraught than the COVID-19 pandemic has been. And this is uncharted territory, with no tested playbook (the IPCC guidelines and publications are at least a playbook), and ongoing dissent within and among countries as to measures to be taken and how costs are to be allocated.
William Ophuls studied this question beginning in the late 1960s. His PhD dissertation in political science at Yale was published as Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity[1] in 1977 (it's been revised since), and the question has been Ophuls's life work.[2]
In particular, Ophuls's assessment of the global situation in the 1970s, the likely developments in ensuing decades, which 44 years on we can compare against history, and likely sticking points yet to come, stand out. Ophuls is a realist, but an optimist (perhaps somewhat less of the latter with time). He does see a path out. But it hasn't been the path chosen over the past five decades.
Problems are solved by optimists. Dont be pessimistic, we will solve problems as they arise. If you are truly worries about your future the best way is to get into the trenches.
actinium226|4 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
Back to seriousness - the author claims there are limits to nuclear, wind, and solar, but does not state what those limits are. The limit on nuclear is not clear to me - France gets something like 75% of its energy from nuclear. It seems the main limit on nuclear has been public sentiment, which must be weighed with public sentiment on climate change.
1970-01-01|4 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
https://www.ans.org/news/article-109/army-offroad-nuclear-tr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_NB-36H
_acco|4 years ago
If we believe the Titanic is sinking, why are we being picky about the lifeboat?
Anything beyond averting disaster is an over-optimization.
byroot|4 years ago
That's not quite correct. We do get 75% of our electricity from nuclear, but electricity is only ~25% of the energy consumed in France.
So in practice about 18% of our energy comes from nuclear, and way over 75% of it from fossil fuels.
toast0|4 years ago
But the will of the people and regulatory hurdles mean permitting and construction is slow and economics are not great. Also, there's probably a manufacturing capacity issue; if you wanted to get 100 new plants online in the next 5 years, and permitting and siting were a non-issue, getting the parts made would be.
dredmorbius|4 years ago
Essentially humans have access to the fluxes of solar, geothermal, and tidal energy, and the stores of fossil fuels, nuclear fission from naturally occurring uranium and plutonium, and potentially nuclear fission from hydrogen plus a few other essential light isotopes and/or elements.
All other energy sources are either carriers (as with hydrogen as a combustion fuel), or derivative. Notably hydroelectric, wind, biomass, and wave energy are all derivatives of solar flux. (Fossil fuels are derivatives of past solar flux.)
Solar is the most tractable large-scale power source. The raw rate of incidence is about 1 kW/m^2 at Earth's surface. This is reduced by a number of considerations, including land area, spacing factors, panel efficiencies, and losses through conversion (DC/AC), transmission, and storage. The net potential is perhaps 5% of the total incident quantity. And there's the small factor that all other life on Earth also competes for this resource.
Hydro is proven but largely exploited, and has environmental consequences now increasingly recognised and often untenable.
Total wind and wave power (the latter is effectively nil) are small fractions of total solar power. Wind power is attractive principally as in places where it HAPPENS to be prevalent, the capital costs are low relative to energy returned.
Geothermal, while independent of solar, is a small fraction of the latter, and is already largely utilised where available and practical, though there's significant undeveloped resource in Africa, and in the US in the Yellowstone Caldera, though official resource estimates exclude this due to its protected status as a National Park. (Pointed, the USGS utterly omits the Yellowstone Caldera in its geothermal resource survey of a decade or two back.) As baseload power, geothermal is attractive. Capital-intensive "enhanced" geothermal has proved disappointing to date (see Australia's Habanero project).
Tidal energy is worth mentioning only because it's independent of the usual solar/nuclear axis: tidal energy actually represents a tap on gravitational potential of the Earth-Moon-Sun system. It's slightly more viable than wave energy, but save for a few very limited local applications, not practicable. Tapping the entire tidal potential of, say, the San Francisco Bay would not even power the city of San Francisco at current electric utilisation, let alone full energy demands, or of the greater Bay Area. And this would require entirely damming the Bay.
Nuclear fission suffers from a fuel shortage problem: known nuclear reserves would power present human energy needs for about 15 years, total. At present rates of utilisation, that lifetime is extended, but still comes in at under a century. There's the standard bickering about definitions of reserves, and talk of seawater extraction (of uranium, other fuels not being salt-water soluable), breeding (of plutonium), or use of thorium, under either existing or novel reactor designs. All three options have significant limitations, though some may be technologically feasible. The resulting energy system and economy would be fragile and risk-prone.
Fusion is as it's always been, the power source of the future. And always will be, as the punch line goes.
That's the lineup. Murphy has a good overview of numbers. Vaclav Smil in numerous of his books (Energy and Civilization and Energy in World History, an earlier edition of the same book, though with somewhat different organisation, as well as others) takes a deeper dive into many of these issues.
Mind that solving the energy problem is only one of numerous stumbling blocks between now an a long-term viable technological human civilisation. Numerous others exist, and the fundamental fact remains that economic growth (and its concommittant and requisite resource and energy growth) simply cannot continue indefinitely.
jfengel|4 years ago
jdblair|4 years ago
My biggest takeaway from his book is that transitioning a society to affluence requires, at minimum, 22.6 megawatt hours of energy per capita per year. High energy societies like the United States use far more. To de-carbonize, we have to plan new energy sources that provide at least this much energy for every person on the planet. Otherwise, people will understandably turn to carbon-based energy sources to meet their energy needs.
Producing this much energy from renewables is possible, but it is hard! Fossil fuels provide an exceptionally compact (in terms of land area) and effective energy source.
[edited to correct typo in the energy figure, what I originally wrote as 2.6 mw/h is 22.6 mw/h]
exporectomy|4 years ago
adrianN|4 years ago
burlesona|4 years ago
While the US hasn’t managed the political will for significant climate reform, we are far from the majority of the world, and even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation, it’s unlikely that this would be enough to avert climate change. The developing world wants modern life, and if they have to burn fossil fuels to catch up, they will.
There are really only a few situations that lead to radical global change:
1. Severe crisis, such as a nation-ending war.
2. Extraordinary visionary leadership in the right place at the right time... which often leads to serious crises such as nation-ending wars.
Otherwise, progress comes from the chaotic, messy evolution of humanity. Perhaps we will innovate our way out of climate disaster, perhaps the ecology will gradually change and we’ll be forced to adapt, or (my guess) perhaps some of both. The good news is we actually have a lot of the technology we need, and more is being developed all the time. I for one am optimistic that between innovation and adaptation the future will continue to be bright.
credit_guy|4 years ago
It's actually quite likely that it would go a long way towards averting climate change. Sure, the US contributes only about 6 GT of greenhouse gases of the 50 GT emitted by the whole world annually, so it first seems that zeroing out this would still result in 44 GT worth of emissions left.
But going from 6 GT to zero cannot be done without huge innovation. Technological innovation, innovation in policy, oversight, enforcement. These pieces of innovation can (and will) be shared with the rest of the world. When the price of solar panels went down, it went down globally. If the US Navy implements a way to scrub CO2 out of seawater and make fuel out of it [1], others can use the method too. Even if the US won't share the technology outright, just knowing it can be done will let others know the idea is worth investing in.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200715123120.h...
dcolkitt|4 years ago
The downsides are secondary environmental effects (e.g. ocean acidification), the hesitancy of a single country to make a climate altering decision for the rest of the world, and the general bad optics of sweeping the problem under the rug for future generations. All that being said, up until now the tangible costs of climate have so far been relatively mild. If nothing big enough gets done on the carbon side, which seems increasingly likely, then warming will reach the point where it starts imposing major economic and humanitarian costs.
At that point, it's nigh inevitable that at least one major power will bite the bullet and start pumping the stratosphere full of sulfur dioxide.
Iv|4 years ago
People thought that obviously, all countries would see the common interest in protecting Earth's climate. There was ONE major rogue nation in this big plan: USA. G.W Bush was the one who presented climate change denial as a respectable policy. I am not sure people measure the impact of this position.
Most other advanced countries cut down their emissions, much more than the US did (no, it is not a matter of density, distance between cities or so on: even if you remove all emissions due to vehicles, USA is still way above EU).
> The developing world wants modern life, and if they have to burn fossil fuels to catch up, they will.
China will peak at a much lower level of CO2/capita than the US currently has. Given the current trajectory, it is quite possible that China will never in its history emit more CO2/capita than the US.
> Extraordinary visionary leadership in the right place at the right time
Give me a break. Listening to the consensus of experts, both international and domestic experts, on issues that threaten the whole ecosystem, is not "visionary leadership". It is called "not electing a cartoon villain in office".
> even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation
You would also need to nuke Bhutan and Suriname, two carbon-negative countries.
Lammy|4 years ago
Try buying petroleum from OPEC in anything but USD: https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/data_graphs/40.htm
Corollary: http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/meast/10/30/iraq.un.euro.reut/
drdrey|4 years ago
Iv|4 years ago
Only in the US is there a political debate about climate change denialism. Thanks to you it is coming to other countries, but before GWB it was a fringe position everywhere.
melling|4 years ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2014/11/30/why-...
It feels like this slow train wreck will have to get worse before we do enough, giving us more time to advance technology.
The United States is no longer the biggest emitter. Now we need more global coordination.
Of course, the sooner we started addressing the problem, the longer we could have delayed the problem.
Fusion by 2050?
vkou|4 years ago
1. Trillion-dollar fortunes are built on pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. We, as humans have committed genocide against entire cultures over less money.
2. The wealth of industrialized societies is not built on money, or labour. It is built on energy. All of their wealth is derived from energy. Fossil fuels are an incredible source of energy. Cost-effective competitors to them had limited potential to replace them, for a large number of technical and political reasons.
Iv|4 years ago
In the 60s France started switching to nuclear power because it worried about the depletion of oil wells in the areas it controlled. It is wrong to say nuclear power can't power more than 10% of a country.
dredmorbius|4 years ago
Thing is that since the time of Jevons, the only energy sources added to our knowledge are nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and the rather improbable prospect of antiatter annihilation (an energy carrier rather than energy source).
Solar PV has emerged as an energy conversion technology, first discovered as the photoelectric effect in the late 19th century and scientific theory identified by Einstein.
We've seen considerable technical improvements to technologies known since the 1950s, but also clear limitations (fission and fusion most especially, but also maximal efficiencies of PV and battery storage). Efficiencies have improved, toward the bound of theoretical limits, and costs fallen.
But we're still largely living in the world of 1857 in terms of the options available to us.
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Notes:
1. Jevons: https://archive.org/details/TheCoalQuestion
2. Referenced by Jevons. Available at https://archive.org/details/naturalhistorym00millgoog
api|4 years ago
There's no economic forcing function either since coal and gas remain on average the cheapest and easiest to deploy and manage sources of energy, and that won't change unless there's enough investment in alternatives to get them over the mass adoption hump.
The worst fears about fossil fuel depletion have so far not manifested, which might be a bad thing long term. We may have enough fossil carbon to cause truly catastrophic climate change if we actually burn a significant fraction of it.
I wonder though if the economic structural problem isn't even harder to solve. The entire financial system relies on eternal growth. Number must always go up or everything breaks.
Even if we put an end to most fears about supply side limits to growth by cracking fusion or developing super cheap utility scale batteries, there would still be demand side limits to growth from things like stabilizing populations and diminishing marginal utility of wealth. Mere stability without significant growth would bring about the collapse of the financial system and the economy as we know it, and probably quite a lot of political turmoil since we don't have a really great replacement sitting in the wings.
(No, planetary migration won't keep GDP growth going any time soon. Humans could settle on the Moon or Mars but they're too far away to contribute much to our Earthly GDP. They'd be mostly isolated economies of their own.)
klmadfejno|4 years ago
I don't really agree with your take on things but this one stuck out to me as particularly wrong. If there were suddenly another population of humans on another planet, there would, at a minimum, be a regular flow of digital goods, as well as physical shipments, largely one way earth -> mars.
burlesona|4 years ago
I will say I disagree about fossil fuel being cheapest though. The data show we’re at the inflection point now such that new renewables are cheaper even than natural gas and coal. That is very likely to get even cheaper.
I think the real exciting and interesting challenge is how to adopt society to energy that is incredibly cheap and abundant BUT not necessarily stable. Batteries are the most obvious and likely best solution, but are there other adaptations that we could make?
Consider, for example, and two-priority grid: your house could have one circuit that it “interruptible” and may cut off during severe shortages, while a second circuit is uninterruptible and powers things like your heating in the winter. This is just an idea off the top of my head, but there are many many other things that we could potentially do to adapt.
baron_harkonnen|4 years ago
visualradio|4 years ago
In the United States public planning is typically limited to figuring out how to prop up the private financial system for one more quarter. In the U.S. most money is created through real estate mortgages. Although people like to talk about gold, crypto, consumers, producers, and government spending the mainstream financial system in charge of allocating the resources is really a mortgage based system.
Suppose someone has an estate with buildings and structures with replacement cost of $200,000. A broker says the estate has a comparable sales price of $600,000. In a loose money system we just trust the banks and brokers to do all of the planning, publicly guarantee mortgages at the reported $600,000, and have federal reserve buy assets to prop up prices at whatever number private finance has fixed upon.
In a slightly tighter system, we might cap real estate loan guarantees at 200% of replacement cost of non-land fixed capital. So if property has buildings and fixtures worth $200,000 public loan guarantees max out at $400,000 even if broker says property is worth $600,000. In order to write up price to $600,000 the owner would need to install $100,000 more in fixed capital, the effect of which is to redirect a larger share of the money created through mortgages to other sectors of economy.
How to use this to promote green energy investment?
Suppose instead of a replacement cost cap of 200% there was a replacement cost cap of 150% for normal capital and 250% for green capital. Then in order to take out a property loan for $600,000 the owner would have to install at least $400,000 of normal capital (structures, fixtures, equipment) or at least $240,000 of green capital (solar panels, wind turbines, lifted mass storage systems), regardless of how high the land values in the location had been written up.
In our current system the incentive of brokers is really just to write up asset prices as high as possible until the financial system collapses in order to generate some nice asset gains during credit bubbles. We can take advantage of this greed and use it to promote green energy investment by tightening up rules for lending against speculative land values using fixed capital replacement cost caps, which are slightly looser for fixed capital which is green.
_acco|4 years ago
> Agriculture may have set us humans on an unsustainable path, but fossil fuels broadened that path to a superhighway.
We need to put the "agriculture was our biggest mistake" trope to bed. Sustainability is an illusion. Nothing is sustainable in the cosmos, it just looks that way when you constrict the time horizon enough. Pre-agriculture, Homo Sapiens were on the constant brink of extinction, just like every other animal. The earth provides no safe comfort to any being. (The fact that we've created a society which provides for me to type this screed without glancing over my shoulder once is a miracle.)
Humans are unique, and agriculture was a monumental step in our epic journey. Without agriculture, the dunes of Mars would crumble in darkness and countless stars would radiate for no conscious creature to marvel at and wonder.
Fossil fuels were a tremendous gift: cheap energy. Without it, who knows how far behind our society would be? We almost certainly wouldn't yet have commercial air travel, 4+ billion people globally connected on the internet, or mRNA vaccines.
Yes, no gift comes for free. But let's not treat this like some deal with the devil. It is up to us to manage the costs (and they are real!) We don't master plan this stuff, but I'll bet on humans to figure it out every time.
So, is it any surprise that someone that calls agriculture "the biggest planning failure in human history" would have this conclusion?
> Without planning, this is what will most likely happen: we’ll fail to produce enough renewable energy to power society at the level at which we want it to operate. So, we’ll continue to get most of our energy from fossil fuels—until we can’t, due to depletion. Then, as the economy crashes and the planet heats, the full impacts of our planning failure will finally hit home.
If you're going to be a doomsaying pessimist (which, mind you, every era of history has had in droves), at least put some effort into it.
erentz|4 years ago
I think he was clearly too pessimistic about the potential of nuclear.
> Today, the US gets about 8 percent of its total energy from nuclear power...
Note this is of all energy including the gas in your car. Obviously we are reliant on electrification if our transport system to tackle that, which doesn’t seem considered here. Possibly he didn’t foresee the potential to electrify transport hence the pessimism. No one is expecting solar, wind, or nuclear powered cars. They’re expecting solar, wind, and nuclear powered electricity grid charging batteries in cars, third rails, and overhead catenary.
Nuclear is ~20% of all electricity output on that grid today in the USA. And in France it’s ~70%.
It’s clear it can go to much higher.
cosmic_shame|4 years ago
dredmorbius|4 years ago
The world is (one hopes) just beginning to emerge from a global disaster of a known variety, for which there has been longstanding scientific and technical understanding, as well as existing paybooks for dealing with the situation. Response by the most capable and technologically-advanced countries has often been abysmal.
The coming global energy transition is going to be orders of magnitude more complex and fraught than the COVID-19 pandemic has been. And this is uncharted territory, with no tested playbook (the IPCC guidelines and publications are at least a playbook), and ongoing dissent within and among countries as to measures to be taken and how costs are to be allocated.
William Ophuls studied this question beginning in the late 1960s. His PhD dissertation in political science at Yale was published as Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity[1] in 1977 (it's been revised since), and the question has been Ophuls's life work.[2]
In particular, Ophuls's assessment of the global situation in the 1970s, the likely developments in ensuing decades, which 44 years on we can compare against history, and likely sticking points yet to come, stand out. Ophuls is a realist, but an optimist (perhaps somewhat less of the latter with time). He does see a path out. But it hasn't been the path chosen over the past five decades.
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Notes:
1. Ophuls: https://archive.org/details/ecologypolitics00ophu
2. Bibliography: https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=au%3Ao...
ThomPete|4 years ago