"Environmental problems have contributed to numerous collapses of civilizations in the past. Now, for the first time, a global collapse appears likely. Overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich and poor choices of technologies are major drivers; dramatic cultural change provides the main hope of averting calamity."
The fact that economics hasn't still catch up with simple physics and biology is mind boggling. I mean that the religion of infinite growth on a finite planet has to stop.
Of course, we will "save trillions" if our ecological systems won't collapse.
We will save trillions of lives upon which we depend. We will also avert many food crisis due to drought (already happening here in Italy with -30% of the total agricultural production due to a drought).
> Overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich and poor choices of technologies are major drivers; dramatic cultural change provides the main hope of averting calamity.
Why this extreme leftist language?
We have a problem with greenhouse gas emissions. The way to net zero by 2050 is fairly clear. It's going to be difficult, but by no means impossible. The US is well on track. China claims to be able to get to net zero in 2060. Not too bad. India wants to become a green hydrogen powerhouse. Etc.
What overpopulation? What does that even mean? What would be a "good level of population"? 6 billion, 2 billion, 100 million? The population is clearly stabilizing. Most projections say that we'll probably exceed 10 billion by a bit at some point, but then we'll start going down.
Overconsumption by the rich? Again, how much are the rich supposed to consume? Musk is about a million times as rich as the average person. Does he eat and drink a million times as much?
> dramatic cultural change
What dramatic cultural change is needed?
There will always be advocates of revolution, and bringing back the guillotine, and doing away with the rich. But CO2 emissions have nothing to do with this.
Using free fuel ... no-mine, no-drill-platorm, no-rock-crusher, no-train-shipping, no-long-wire-towers needed ... will obviously save a lot of money. No study needed. (Not to mention all of the other side benefits.)
The paper is "Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition"[1].
It documents "lines of best fit" spanning decades, and details the mechanism: the experience curve/learning curve/Wright's law.
Standard methods (used by the IEA, the EIA, etc.) of snapshotting manufacturing technology and extrapolating costs based on the snapshot have consistently wildly over-predicted future costs.
After reading the paper I looked at PV, and I can see how PV prices can fall to approximately a tenth of today's, by means of R&D and manufacturing improvements currently in train. That took about 50 hours, so I haven't looked at other technologies in detail yet.
Batteries and electrolysis definitely are key technologies, but R&D effort is about three decades behind PV in terms of scale at this point.
[+] [-] Mildlypolite|3 years ago|reply
The fact that economics hasn't still catch up with simple physics and biology is mind boggling. I mean that the religion of infinite growth on a finite planet has to stop.
Of course, we will "save trillions" if our ecological systems won't collapse.
We will save trillions of lives upon which we depend. We will also avert many food crisis due to drought (already happening here in Italy with -30% of the total agricultural production due to a drought).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3574335/
[+] [-] credit_guy|3 years ago|reply
Why this extreme leftist language?
We have a problem with greenhouse gas emissions. The way to net zero by 2050 is fairly clear. It's going to be difficult, but by no means impossible. The US is well on track. China claims to be able to get to net zero in 2060. Not too bad. India wants to become a green hydrogen powerhouse. Etc.
What overpopulation? What does that even mean? What would be a "good level of population"? 6 billion, 2 billion, 100 million? The population is clearly stabilizing. Most projections say that we'll probably exceed 10 billion by a bit at some point, but then we'll start going down.
Overconsumption by the rich? Again, how much are the rich supposed to consume? Musk is about a million times as rich as the average person. Does he eat and drink a million times as much?
> dramatic cultural change
What dramatic cultural change is needed?
There will always be advocates of revolution, and bringing back the guillotine, and doing away with the rich. But CO2 emissions have nothing to do with this.
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robertlagrant|3 years ago|reply
What does this mean? It's not happened, but if we draw a line of best fit we can say we've "shown" it's likely?
[+] [-] tuatoru|3 years ago|reply
It documents "lines of best fit" spanning decades, and details the mechanism: the experience curve/learning curve/Wright's law.
Standard methods (used by the IEA, the EIA, etc.) of snapshotting manufacturing technology and extrapolating costs based on the snapshot have consistently wildly over-predicted future costs.
After reading the paper I looked at PV, and I can see how PV prices can fall to approximately a tenth of today's, by means of R&D and manufacturing improvements currently in train. That took about 50 hours, so I haven't looked at other technologies in detail yet.
Batteries and electrolysis definitely are key technologies, but R&D effort is about three decades behind PV in terms of scale at this point.
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1. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X