Anything less than producing more energy more cleanly is missing the point. Long term energy usage trends do not go down.
I should note that I am not against fusion and absolutely think we should be doing it. However, it's my feeling and something that I'm trying to learn about that we should also be doing many other things. For example, conservation of land and habitats is no longer viable. We have got to be restoring these things as best we can if we have a chance against climate change. I think it should be renamed environmental change, because that's more accurate and paints the more serious picture. Climate change seems to phrase it in very human-centric terms. We also need another economic system whose end goal isn't corporate world domination. We need an economic model that drives innovation but also redistributes and is sustainable. What's interesting is that this is exactly what nature accomplishes. But humans have gone off the rails in terms of consumption. However, with our adaptability and technology, we have been able to continually consume more and more, whereas other animals (e.g., rabbit populations) cannot continually exist outside of some bounds and are checked. What's interesting is trying to understand where our bound or what our check is going to be. I have a feeling that our destruction will eclipse our adaptability and technology at some point. It will not be pretty when that happens.
There has got to be a nice graph that correlates power usage with these things, but I have yet to find it.
Do you have any resources on those topics? I'd like to learn more about that how cheap electrical energy enables those.
Here’s his channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g
The TLDR summary for your quotation is: Complete recycling — with enough energy you can break everything into atoms; Very land efficient agriculture — the cost of glass and metal for greenhouses and desalination is mostly energy, likewise most of the stuff needed to make vertical farming worth considering.
(I don’t remember Isaac Arthur mentioning ocean cleanup, but that may just be flawed memory).
These are all the things which allow us to live in a modern society with a high quality of life. More power is a more modern higher quality of life for more people, citing the last few hundred years.
As for everything else, we've barely even scratched the surface of this rock we're standing on - to say nothing of the rest of the dist system.
> More power is a more modern higher quality of life for more people, citing the last few hundred years.
Nor do I think that is a given fact. More people starve today than there were people alive a few hundred years ago.
>Nor do I think that is a given fact. More people starve today than there were people alive a few hundred years ago
So no credit for feeding the billions who eat on the back of modern, energy intensive, fertilizer production?
One of the very things destroying the environment and negatively affecting public health?
> So no credit for feeding the billions
This isn't school and human lives and people are not statistics. The question to ask is "at what cost?". Does feeding those billions suddenly do anything to help the 800 million or so starving in a world that has enough to feed them? What about the illions of animals and plants humans have destroyed over the past few hundred years? Again, at what cost?
A related aside: when humans originally started to utilize agriculture in the beginning of human history, the overall affect was a net negative in health, life expectancy, and efficiency (i.e., time spent working).
The world population in 1820 was about 1093 million.
I'm not against fusion at all, but it is important to remember that carbon dioxide isn't the only problem harming the planet.
We have economic democracy, participatory economics and good old Freiwirtschaft (can be translated as free (as in freedom) economics by Silvio Gesell.
>What's interesting is that this is exactly what nature accomplishes
Capitalism only allows for growth, whenever the economy isn't growing, people get fired and you have an economic recession or depression. Freiwirtschaft simply allows for both growth and decay. There is no discontinuity i.e. recession and no unemployment when the economy isn't growing. People will keep working to maintain their existing capital, that includes restoring nature.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co... https://www.statista.com/statistics/183457/united-states--re...
3887 TWH in 2010 / 309.3 million people = 12.57 MWH per person.
3954 TWH in 2019 / 328.3 million people = 12.04 MWH per person.
3930 TWH in 2021 / 331.9 million people = 11.84 MWH per person.
2000: 98.7 quadrillion BTU / 281.4 million people = 350 million BTU/person/year
2019: 100.5 quadrillion BTU / 328.3 million people = 306 million BTU/person/year.
For the CO2 metric:
2000: 20.9 tonnes per capita
2019: 15.7 tonnes per capita
> Global electricity consumption continues to increase faster than world population, leading to an increase in the average amount of electricity consumed per person
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44095#:~:tex....
Note that I really want electricity usage to go up a lot, too. It's just overall primary energy usage that we want to stay level or go down. That's why I used the primary energy usage metric. After all, moving to an electric car or replacing natural gas heating with a heat pump "increases electricity usage."
- "China's modern cities far outshine Cold War Europe-- Wtf is with these misconceptions?"
- "A whole lot of China is rural and undeveloped. You think it's like Cold War Europe-- Wtf is with these misconceptions"
Maybe make an argument instead of just being unkind to other commenters.