I don't believe the hype. From what I can see fusion still isn't anywhere near being a viable source of energy, other than in the form or solar power.
Side comment: fusion can be seen as a solution to many of our worst problems. But another way to see it is that without a complete change in what societies value and how they act (i.e. a cultural/philosophical/storytelling change), fusion is just going to increase the rate at which we are transforming this planet into a giant pile of garbage, whether its solid and liquid garbage (leading to wiping out 60% of wildlife in 50 years, spilling the phosphorus of our soils into the sea -making them sterile and killing life in the sea- etc etc), or gas garbage (typically greenhouse gases).
We do that by extracting resources nature concentrated for us for free for millions of years and dispersing them all around in our buildings, phones, playstations, fertilizers, fuel etc.
As long as Black Friday is the highlight of the year, there are reasons to think fusion might be more dangerous than helpful.
It’s good to have an increasing ability to transform matter, as long as you are using that ability in the right direction.
I'm not saying I don't want fusion, I'm saying that without getting much better at deciding collectively what to do with it then those graphs will stay coupled, taking us to a sure doom.
Anyway it's likely we'll get there before fusion so it should not distract us from all other necessary transformations the system needs.
Induced demand is still valid economic demand, and congested roads are still being used productively. There's a reason why sane governments don't regularly "improve" roads by removing lanes.
Another problem of car-centric infrastructure is that it doesn't scale as well as public transport - a single bus can, potentially, take 50 or more cars off the road.
That does not justify it.
I guess that depends on your perspective. I see expanding freeways as enabling further sub-urban growth, which is fundamentally unsustainable (from an energy, logistics, and municipal funding perspective).
has this kind of initial dismissal ever won anyone any favor in an argument?
I see it all over the thread, and I find myself having a hard time wanting to consider the argument afterwards even if I am personally aligned with them just because it seems so inconsiderate and rude.
Is it supposed to signal your experience in the field, having heard this argument so many times -- or does it signal the opponents inexperience? Either way I find that approach to come off as arrogant and rude.
The admins make it clear that neither behavior is wanted, but the argument in question really gets my goat. In my area, road diets and similar ways to deny demand for increased capacity aren't just fallacious arguments, but key elements of public policy that are seemingly engineered to waste time and fuel while contributing to pollution. The only time such arguments are valid are when they've already been applied farther downstream, where the next bottleneck is inevitably cited as a reason why expanding capacity in a given area "won't work."
Similar policies could be applied in many other places, yielding outcomes that pretty much everyone would agree are worse than the status quo, yet for some reason they always find a receptive audience when the problem domain is transportation.
increasing demand on a highway gets more people to where they are going, but if the destination doesn't have more parking spots, you've caused an imbalance in the system. same as the electrical generation - if it suddenly becomes absurdly cheap to manufacture more consumer goods, we've just increased the pressure on the whole system that needs to manage the rest of the lifecycle of those goods after manufacture. sure, some people will make money, but that's not the point.
One of the underlying assumptions of all mainstream economic theories since the XIXe century is that EVERYTHING that comes from nature is infinite and has been provided to us for free, whether it's resources, clean air, a durably nice temperature, animals etc. What has a cost is to pay people and machines to extract those things, but not the things in the first place.
Based on this assumption, we've acted as if nature was infinite and increased our rate of extraction to ridiculous heights, reaching the limits of a system that is sadly, due to the laws of physics, finite. One example : China has used in 3 years roughly as much sand for construction as the US has in the entire XXth century (btw sand is the new gold and a huge black market for it is now in place...)
Economic demand is just a metric.
You are celebrating a metric without considering if and how it contributes positively to the goal, and I'm not even sure we agree on the goal, if yours is tumor-like growth.
- Designing things to be durable and recyclable in the first place is probably more economical and sustainable (both can be combined though, no problem)
- Recycling is not a silver bullet. Extracting and re-combining all the microscopic parts of different metals in an iPhone to get back the original metal is incredibly expensive or unfeasible, compared to just extracting that metal from nature
- Unlimited energy makes it easier to go deeper and deeper extract resources from earth's crust, generating more and more garbage. What do you think we'll do, when you observe what we've done so far?
Thank you for saying this. Unlimited almost-free energy makes energy-saving measures moot, including building insulation. People would heat or cool even open spaces with little regard for the environment.
And all the heat is eventually released into the atmosphere.
Consumerism would be supercharged as well. Indeed we need a huge shift of societal priorities.
(Needless to say, when I point that out HN downvoted me. Here technology is always and only good.)
edit: there you go, already downvoted at -2 for saying the same thing as the parent.
So I'm also skeptical.
Translation of "middle class": class of mass consumers.
Life is literally as affordable for people as the amount of energy that is available to them, that's the main factor (a bit of optimization of processes also plays but at a more minor order). Food used to be 25% of households' spending early XXth century, when someone would go buy eggs from the local market or farmer. Today it is 10% if you count the margins of industrials, distributors etc. But if you just look at the price of the eggs, then it's probably less than 1%.
What allowed this? Energy! Energy allowed for abundant food, a long life, studying and the general tertiarisation of the economy (giving birth to tech) and of course consumerism. The more energy the cheaper everything is the more people consume, at least as long as we persuade people that buying things is the greatest pleasure in life.
The evidence clearly shows that humanity is not acting rationally and we are letting consumerism run unchecked.
A good example is plastic: we are aware of the health impact of particulate and yet we can't even have a conversation around stopping using plastic worldwide. Rather than a choice it looks like an addiction.
felixmeziere wrote about cultural change.
Additionally, it's very likely that fusion will be viable primarily in developed countries, further increasing energy inequality.
That rate does not scale negatively with energy prices. It scales positively with population, in the West.
We could just accelerate towards stagnant global population growth. Improving economies and access to contraceptives in poor nations could do that. Everybody wins, except the very richest.
Coercing the population to stop consuming is a non-starter. We could also create stronger incentives and regulations surrounding waste. There are lots of new biodegradable tech companies now, to replace plastics, for instance.
I wouldn't uses "prices" here as a framing. If you plot the graphs of worldwide energy usage and worldwide garbage emissions (let's take greenhouse gases or amount of artificialized soil as examples), you will see that they are correlated. We have grown to this gigantic population solely thanks to our mastery of energy, that's the one factor that enabled all the rest (abundant food, time to go to college instead of farming, developments in medicine to make your life longer, retirements, consumerism etc.).
What I'm saying is that, looking at what we've done so far with energy, it's not entirely sure more energy will be good for our prospects of survival. We need to have a collective philosophical revolution first.
You've mentioned this twice, and so it's worth nothing that important factors also correlated in that period of time: the rapid rise of the middle class following the decimation of wealth from the world wars, which led to a population boom.
Another factor you're taking for granted: fertility rate drops in economies as they get very strong. Western countries boost immigration for this reason: you need more bodies to increase GDP growth (and by extension, waste), if that's what you want. Lower energy prices alone will not lead to people breeding more. If it did, we'd have more kids than our grandparents/great-grandparents did, just as you alluded that they spent more on food.
So on top of the fact that we're projecting GLOBAL STAGNANT POPULATION GROWTH, which means an end to increase in consumption, technological innovation means that consumption produces less waste. You can't account for innovation in energy and nowhere else.
> What I'm saying is that, looking at what we've done so far with energy, it's not entirely sure more energy will be good for our prospects of survival. We need to have a collective philosophical revolution first.
I know what you were saying, and I'm saying it's wrong.
The 2 questions now are: 1) what allowed us to reach this amount of population? 2) can this amount of population remain stable with the current inputs given to the system or not?
My two answers:
1) Energy. Abundant energy is what allowed population to reach such heights (x7 in 200 years). In a nutshell it did so by enabling us to get abundant resources, food, medicine and comfort, the first stages of Maslow basically. It did so at scales that would have defied imagination in previous centuries.
2) There are two possible answers here:
- Yes, it is sustainable, meaning we don't deplete earth's resources faster than they renew themselves, situation which will get better with the improvement of technology and will compensate for more and more people getting into the middle class (i.e. more consumers).
- No, it is not sustainable, meaning we are depleting earth's resources faster than they renew themselves, and this situation will get worse with more and more people accessing the middle class (or worse: higher classes) and so the population will collapse at some point due to shortages of food/pandemics/wars etc.
Data to help answer the questions:
- all serious scientific reports (IPCC, https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound... and others) say that we are currently depleting earth's resources much faster than it can renew them and destabilising many natural systems like climate/life etc to irreversible points
- the average american currently emits 16 tons of CO2/year, the average human emits 4 tons/year, we need to get to under 2 tons/year to make sure the climate does not blow up too much => consequence of this: 5 billion people with a lifestyle a bit closer to the one of americans (i.e. a growing middle class) is much worse than 10 billion with the living standard of people in say, south-east asia or Africa => the living standard is much more important as a factor than the amount of people, if we get more energy with the same amount of people, we'll just keep giving more and more comfort to more and more people, trust me that energy won't stay unused on the side nicely.
- Similar idea to previous point: there is a direct correlation between living standard and amount of destruction of the environment. The rich destroy the planet incredibly more than normal people, even in developped country (symbolised extremely by Brandson & friends). More and more rich/middle class people = more and more energy consumption. This factor is much more powerful than population growth.
- [To be fact checked] I don't remember exactly the numbers but in the past 50 years, optimisations thanks to technology have divided the consumption of machines by 2, while emissions have been multiplied by 4 or 5: so far with what we observe, technology is not a silver bullet to reduce the problem. It is more the cause of the problem by enabling us to do always more and more, with our clumsy, human ways and therefore disrupting nature always more and more.
What are your answers?
We're depleting resources, and we're also still growing. If we're scrutinizing a future with a non-growing population, it makes no sense to assume the same level of depletion. It's a function of demand. Much of new land encroachment isn't for any novel products, it's to increase the output of meat production to satisfy demand (in South America at least, in the U.S. that land-use has not been growing).
This also doesn't take into account technological innovation.
> This factor is much more powerful than population growth.
The rich are too few in number and they're primarily rich by virtue of everyone else's consumption. Notwithstanding that their own practices can be very damaging, it doesn't meet that scale.
> It is more the cause of the problem by enabling us to do always more and more, with our clumsy, human ways and therefore disrupting nature always more and more.
This is purely philosophical. There's no evidence that a zero-carbon world with improved energy efficiency would necessarily lead to environmental destruction.
> This means that the imminent concern in the capacity of sustainability (exacerbation of climate change) is largely addressed, save for the carbon capture / cooling aspect we will want.
This seems to show that you have a climate-only lens to look at the problem, even though the point that fusion would greatly disrupt CO2 emissions is 100% correct. The imminent concern is not just exacerbation of climate change.
1) This lens is incomplete because even if we completely stopped emitting CO2 right now we would still go to a destabilisation of the physical world around us due to all the other planetary boundaries being crossed https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound.... For example food supply would be disrupted by the artificialization of soils and disruption of the Phosphorus Cycle, many if not most food chains on which we depend will collapse due to the fact that we are killing or consuming most animal species, among which vital insects (the 6th mass extinction has started and is much faster than previous mass extinctions), water supply will be disrupted more and more etc.
2) It's also incomplete because it doesn't account for the other end of the problem : the depletion of ressources. Fusion means we can extract more and more resources, deeper and deeper, creating an even more unbalanced system if it's not done in a way were resources can regenerate themselves at the same rate we extract them.
With what we have done every time we got additional energy so far, it is likely that getting fusion will increase pressure on planetary boundaries that are not CO2 emissions : you fix a problem by worsening the others.
> it makes no sense to assume the same level of depletion. It's a function of demand.
Good point. It's a function of demand, therefore it makes sense to assume the same level of depletion will increase, since more and more people will get access to middle-class (or more) lifestyle, which is the main driver of demand for resources (as opposed to population growth, which is less of a driver if it's population growth in countries without a middle class).
> This also doesn't take into account technological innovation.
As I said this could be a factor that helps with depleting less resources but so far we have observed the impact technology has been to dramatically increase ressource use and waste overall, not reduce them.
> The rich are too few in number and they're primarily rich by virtue of everyone else's consumption. Notwithstanding that their own practices can be very damaging, it doesn't meet that scale.
We are talking about middle classes here, which are massive and meant to become even more massive. It is also true that the richer you are the more you emit but that's a side phenomenon to understand why the amount of middle-class matters.
> There's no evidence that a zero-carbon world with improved energy efficiency would necessarily lead to environmental destruction.
Then you haven't read or studied resources like https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound... to begin with a simple/mainstream one for example, you haven't looked at the impact of mining and the orders of magnitude of resources we would need for a world where societies keep having the same behaviour as today, with just the "carbon-free" component added.
Anyway this is a bet: there is no proof it would work either, and if it does not the population will completely collapse. Which way do you want to try? An organised de-growth (in terms of GDP, not total wealth if we account for the destruction of nature) were we know we can make it at the expense of less comfort and consumerism, or try to keep growing and just become net zero carbon, with the hope that we can make it, to the risk of collapsing and making the earth uninhabitable?
One more resource you can look at in case you didn't know about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth#:~:text=T...
Being obsessed with carbon creates blindspots with respect to all the other planetary limits, our oceans are being emptied of life because of what we have done so far with abundant energy. The earth system is being destabilised in many other ways than just climate change. We need a global systemic solution, not to fix the problems one by one separately, because by doing that you will often make other problems worse by fixing one.
I'm not saying we don't need more abundant energy, I'm saying we need to change our philosophy, the way we organise ourselves and what we do with it first.
You described no other imminent problem.
to your 1), food supply is a moot point as population will stagnate. The West often overproduces as it stands and is poised to reduce food waste.
to your 2), we're nowhere near depletion of resources, and there's no reason to believe the average person's purchasing power will not only greatly increase to allow for inordinate amount of consumption, but that it would outpace technological innovation which minimizes and recycles materials.
> With what we have done every time we got additional energy so far, it is likely that getting fusion will increase pressure on planetary boundaries that are not CO2 emissions : you fix a problem by worsening the others.
Fusion, to the extent you're portraying it, is a long ways off, and additional energy has not done much for the average person in the last several decades. It's irrational to project outsized negative impact.
> since more and more people will get access to middle-class (or more) lifestyle
Before population stagnation, yes. That's among the driving forces leading to stagnation. But after which, no. "More and more people" necessarily ends at "all of them".
> so far we have observed the impact technology has been to dramatically increase ressource use and waste overall, not reduce them.
Technology to reduce is in it's infancy. Necessity is the mother of invention. These externalities were never much of concern to the oligarchic, financial and political classes - that is changing.
> Then you haven't read or studied resources
You're looking too short-term.
> or try to keep growing
Nowhere do I advocate for this. False dilemma.
We know we can make it by limiting population growth.
Not sure why what I described previously is relevant if this assertion is true in itself, however let's double-check this in what I wrote above: "whether its solid and liquid garbage (leading to wiping out 60% of wildlife in 50 years, spilling the phosphorus of our soils into the sea -making them sterile and killing life in the sea- etc etc), or gas garbage (typically greenhouse gases)", "all serious scientific reports (IPCC, https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound... and others) say that we are currently depleting earth's resources much faster than it can renew them and destabilising many natural systems like climate/life etc to irreversible points" <= are these not imminent problems? Actually the main problems I've been describing in this post are precisely not climate change, to try and de-center the debate from just this, I'm not sure how you have been reading this...
> to your 1), food supply is a moot point as population will stagnate. The West often overproduces as it stands and is poised to reduce food waste.
Looking at how things currently work is a very bad indicator: since we are depleting resources faster than they can regenerate themselves (earth overshoot day was a few days ago), if we keep doing things as we are doing right now, even with constant population, even with a bit of improvement from technology, even with current overproduction, the food system WILL collapse. My point is: in all matters environment, the current way we do things leads us to collapse even if everything remains constant.
>to your 2), we're nowhere near depletion of resources, and there's no reason to believe the average person's purchasing power will not only greatly increase to allow for inordinate amount of consumption, but that it would outpace technological innovation which minimizes and recycles materials.
This is just not true, wether we stay on a carbon-powered society or if we transition towards a battery/renewables-powered society. And again, there is no need to account for future "increases of things", things are bad enough at the current rate.
> Fusion, to the extent.... The amount of energy person has not increased in the last several decades in developed countries.
> "More and more people" necessarily ends at "all of them".
Absolutely. But don't worry, earth will have burnt long, long, long before even half of the world's population has accessed American middle class levels of comfort, so don't worry about getting to "all of them".
> Technology to reduce is in it's infancy.
What makes you think you can bet on technology reaching levels to reduce it that are acceptable? What if we miss the target and collapse because of this bet? It's a risky one...
> Necessity is the mother of invention. These externalities were never much of concern to the oligarchic, financial and political classes - that is changing.
The necessity has been here for decades but nothing has been done, again, I wouldn't bet too much on the fact that the effect of this is going to be enough to compensate our hunger for freely-available resource extraction and depletion.
> We know we can make it by limiting population growth.
I don't know which credible source on the matter says this but certainly most don't. Sources say that much more than just limiting population growth is needed to make it.
Right now we are doing the opposite of that though: the advertising industry, one of the largest in Earth, is mostly about brain-washing people into buying more stuff. We can easily put a stop to this tomorrow while listing nothing of value to society, but instead we fetishize growth so we don't.
Innovation isn't just for the energy sector either. Consumables create less waste over time. Biodegradables are making a big entry in the market. All this means is that as the population levels out (as it is projected to), consumption will create less and less waste.
At any rate this falls into the same category, coercion. People want things, especially if they improve their lives. Much of what you take for granted now was advertised. Take-out food, vehicles, smartphones and computers and media, etc.
Yeah, "nothing of value". I don't think you get to decide what people value, that's what the market is for.
And yes, people are absolutely buying more garbage than their parents - and certainly their grandparents. Look at clothes, jewelry, furniture, home appliances, cars - those all used to be more or less lifetime purchases, and have become things people change every 5-7 years top (much less for clothes). Not to mention things like buying new phones and other electronics every year or two.
These changes are all products of marketing and advertising to a great extent. Stopping these industries (or at least greatly curtailing their power) would help correct the market back into a more rational place.
Source please. 1 in 8 Americans are food insecure, cost of living has been climbing for decades, more than half say they live paycheck-to-paycheck and many say they'll never afford a house. So, which is it, is the economic climate better for millennials and zoomers or worse? Pick one. Because I doubt you would suggest to struggling Americans and Westerners that they are just squandering their money irresponsibly.
> Look at clothes, jewelry, furniture, home appliances, cars - those all used to be more or less lifetime purchases, and have become things people change every 5-7 years top (much less for clothes).
That changed quite awhile ago, with boomers and the ascendance of the middle class, and you just made that number up.
Clothing is not built to last. A suit can with care, but not a t-shirt. Notwithstanding that the waste we're concerned with hasn't to do with cotton material or jewelry, probably not even appliances.
A large amount of waste comes from containers and packaging. That is completely agnostic of the products themselves, there's no reason this can't be improved. There's also nondurable goods, durable goods and food. Check out this fact sheet for municipal solid waste - https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-01/documents/20... , and more from the epa.
> Advertising's purpose is to distort the market.
Indeed, and yet it's irrelevant. It doesn't perform miracles.
The most meaningful correction you can make to level of waste clearly has no dependence on advertising. Everything uses too much packaging, and food providers waste an inordinate amount.
Magnet miniaturisation and CADs like the stellarator [1] refute this.
With respect to waste and embrittlement, those are simpler consumables and waste products than fossil fuels and atmospheric emissions.
They've received $500M (lead by Sam Altman) to demo net electricity by 2024.
and wind and hydro