[0]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
[1]: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/10/26/lets-come-clean...
One of those rare "have your cake and eat it too" moments.
I just want to ensure that the electricity that powers those heat pumps doesn't get more expensive as a result of the shift away from nuclear and fossil fuels. There's some preliminary research to indicate that more renewable power in the grid results in lower wholesale prices[0], but the relationship isn't very strong, and it's likely that Europe soon will (if not already) meet the point of diminishing returns. After all, there are only so many places you can put wind turbines, solar panels, or dams.
[0]: https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2022/Engli...
If I crank up the wave generator in a wave pool, I would get both taller waves and shallower water. Cranking up the heat retaining gases in the atmosphere is going to make both weather extremes more likely.
[1] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/sep/nobel-prize-winning-econ...
In any case, yes, the Nobel Prize committee for Economics is made up of eminent economists, who are indeed probably best thought of as small-c conservative small-p politicians, rather than academics in the tradtional sense.
More thorough critique: https://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/The_app...
Anyway, they gave a Nobel to Al Gore who made some pretty wacky claims that have failed to materialize, so it's not like the Nobel Committee has a spotless track record.
Those who take climate change seriously should have gone all in on nuclear, but somehow there was enough of an overlap between that group and anti-nuclear activists that it never happened. That's what's truly baffling.
More and cheaper energy is quite literally the solution to all of humanity's physical problems. I don't care if the summers get hotter or winters get colder, if we have abundant, cheap, stable, clean energy from nuclear sources. Barring that, abundant, cheap, stable, and regrettably unclean energy from fossil fuels is the second best option. But what some in the developed world has chosen is stasis, degrowth, and decay instead.
I may be ignorant, but you don't seem to be offering any viable alternatives to my ignorance.
What? No. That makes no sense. Human development includes a lot of things that have nothing to do with that ridiculous and narrow definition.
>Those who take climate change seriously should have gone all in on nuclear, but somehow there was enough of an overlap between that group and anti-nuclear activists that it never happened. That's what's truly baffling.
Follow the money: https://atomicinsights.com/how-important-has-oil-money-been-...
>Barring [nuclear energy], abundant, cheap, stable, and regrettably unclean energy from fossil fuels is the second best option.
What about increasing renewable energy options? What about increasing carbon efficiency by introducing it as a concept into markets via a carbon tax significant enough to drive innovation and behavior change? What about increasing city density and improving subways and trains? What about reducing meat consumption?
What other concept so concisely captures the difference between how our primitive ape ancestors lived, to how cavemen lived, to how the ancient cultures lived, to how we live now? Or how countries at different stages of development now are to each other?
The Human Development Index correlates highly with per capita energy expenditure[0]. It's basically a necessary but not sufficient component of human development; otherwise you'd see countries in the lower-right quadrant of that chart. I find it surprising that you have such a strong reaction to this.
> Follow the money
Of course, Big Oil lobbied for their interests. I'm sure solar executives spend money on lobbying, too. Doesn't mean that the public, especially the interested and motivated public ("those who take climate change seriously"), should have been duped by it.
No one is absolving Big Oil for their part in swaying public opinion, but the public should also grow a backbone.
> What about [...]
They're all good ideas. My point is that good ideas don't happen in a vacuum. Everything carries with it an opportunity cost. "Increasing renewable energy options" isn't something that happens as a result of someone waving a wand; it's accomplished using limited time and resources that could be used elsewhere. So when you implement those ideas by taking away from fossil fuels, you had better make sure that the tradeoff is worth it.
> What about increasing city density and improving subways and trains?
On this point especially, I'm all for reforming zoning so that cities can become more dense. This would alleviate so many problems in America's highly desirable cities that are laughably sparse compared to other world cities (but of course, the precious "neighborhood character"...).
And sure, let's improve transit systems. But how? Take a look at the MTA's budget[1]: only a quarter is paid for by fares, meaning that people who don't use the subway already pay for three-quarters of the MTA. Even pre-pandemic, fares were a little over a third[2]. And this is in the area with the highest transit usage percentage by far out of anywhere in the country; the one place where they should be able to make it work!
So it appears that there is already a high degree of subsidization of subways and trains. Given how rapidly the ridership experience is deteriorating in almost all American transit systems, it seems irresponsible to put even more tax dollars in that direction, without first addressing the issues that make people not want to ride them very much.
[0]: https://visualizingenergy.org/does-more-energy-use-increase-...
[1]: http://web.mta.info/budgetdashboard/Budget_Transparencyd.htm...
[2]: https://new.mta.info/sites/default/files/2019-03/MTA-2019-Ad...
One is bigger than the other.
> the public should also grow a backbone
:)
> zoning & public transport
Let's take inspiration in Europe or Japan, not in the USA.
You want more of public transport, not less. And you want it ideally (almost) free, omnipresent and reliable, to let more people use it.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/25/story-cities-...
That chart has major outliers on the top right. Most countries toward the top are clustered close to the left. Yes, the top left is rounded off and everyone at the top uses more resources than everyone at the bottom, but the outliers are enough to skew an average and make the effect appear larger than it is.
My reading is that several energy intensive countries can significantly reduce their energy expenditure while maintaining a high level of human development.
[1] I say might, because there's uncertainty around this. I do know, with absolute certainty that redistributing - say - your organs to multiple people who need transplants would definitely be a 'net plus', but you don't see me making such bloodless utilitarian arguments.
Whereas we have exactly zero historical precedent to know whether or not climate change will even be a 'net plus'.
(I do know that organ redistribution would definitely be a net plus, though. We kill one person, we save the lives of N people, the calculus seems to add up to me...)
My point exactly! If you respect Chesterton's fence, we shouldn't make radical changes to the status quo without clear and convincing proof that the change is worth the cost. Fossil fuels, as bad as they are, also brought up living standards for literally billions of people. There are still billions of people who have yet to enjoy Western standards of living. We shouldn't handicap their growth by demonizing fossil fuels before alternatives are ready.
At the same time that we've been flooding the atmosphere with carbon with nations around the world industrializing (1970-2019), climate-related deaths around the world shrank to one-third, while the human population doubled[0]. Not one-third in rate, that's one-third in absolute number. Is that the "climate catastrophe" you're talking about? The IPCC released its first report in 1990, and deaths of climate has only decreased since then, mainly due to the improving ability of developing nations to better master their environment -- again, via cheap energy enabled by fossil fuels.
I'm not the one with mental gymnastics and blind spots if you cannot acknowledge the instrumental role that fossil fuels have played in getting humanity to this point, and the inability of current renewable energy technology to replace it wholesale.
You're also presenting a laughably false dichotomy for an alternative. I have an incredibly hard time imagining that you honestly believe that to be the only alternative for our current trajectory.
Given that most of the world's land is in the northern two thirds of the globe[0], it seems more likely than not that eventually it will be a net plus in arable land and overall agricultural output. Other commenters, of course, have a good point in how pleasant that transitional period will be.
[0]: https://www.ecoclimax.com/2016/08/land-mass-at-each-longitud...
It is also the case that a large part of the world is simply not built to withstand such temperatures, and using more energy to accommodate that means putting more heat into the atmosphere.
Yes, that's a thermodynamic certainty. But the moment Homo sapiens left the year-round pleasant high plains of East Africa, we were going to need energy; you can't blame the caveman for lighting a stick on fire to keep himself warm.
> a large part of the world is simply not built to withstand such temperatures
People live in some truly inhospitable places, some cold, some hot, and have done so since before modern conveniences. Unless the plan is to make sure everyone in the world lives in places where you naturally don't need (or want) heat or air conditioning, the extra heat in the atmosphere is the price we must pay.
Infrastructure in London was melting last summer, lots of our infrastructure will have to be rebuilt, which is severely inefficient, and will require even more energy.
Climate scientists agree that if the world stopped all carbon emissions today, at the snap of a magical finger, the planet will continue to warm for the foreseeable future. It seems to me then that the correct path out is through, not backwards. And "through" involves building and rebuilding, using whatever energy sources are economical. By all means, bring renewables in that fold, but renewables alone are far from sufficient.
It's not just a matter of everyone driving Teslas instead of F-250s, or indeed even of everyone cramming into electric-powered city buses or walking instead of using automobiles. The primary industries are all still powered by vast amounts of fossil fuels: the huge mining trucks, farm tractors, and backhoes that produce the real things that real people need to consume to survive, have such high energy density requirements that there are no viable electric alternatives yet.
When the jet-stream splits, air from Sahara gets trapped between the now two or three streams, and cannot escape. This creates a heat dome that we can’t manipulate and change.
I think it's more accurate to say that consumer-side regulation is not a solution. I'm willing to bet there are tons of industries out there that can significantly reduce their energy usage, but it's either undesirable from a profit perspective or infeasible from a cost perspective.
That said, the "obvious" solution at this point seems to be larger supplies of non-carbon-releasing power generation (e.g. green or nuclear energy).
As with food calories: either for an individual or a population group, if you don't have enough, more is very, very much better.
This is not the same as more being always better. Sometimes the same or less in a smarter implementation produces better outcomes, and sometimes it takes a regulatory shove to get there.
Societies that require everyone to have a car just to have a basic acceptable level of mobility and participation, and which expect even moderately high performers to fly multiple times a year, case in point. Huge amounts of energy deployed for marginally better outcomes.
The mistake is in observing a strong positive correlation on part of the curve, and extrapolating that to interpret it as a linear relationship.
There are parts of the world which still need a lot more deployable energy. Getting household white goods to the majorities in poorer countries, etc. The same additional amount in the hands of the top 80% or so of Western hands would be frittered away to no noticeable benefit - we could get by with a lot less.
We could, but getting by with less out of choice is much better than getting by with less out of deprivation (like you said, "if you don't have enough, more is very, very much better"). And if your solution involves a large group of people depriving themselves to benefit those on another side of the world, I'm afraid there's no historical evidence to suggest that it will work even a little bit.
> sometimes it takes a regulatory shove to get there.
Almost all the time, additional powers granted to the government for that regulatory shove are not relinquished. Virtually all the time, a government that is powerful enough eventually becomes tyrannical. We have to weigh that very real possibility against the cost of what appears to be inefficient outcomes.
This does get more complicated when it's a societal level choice. You might feel subjectively energy-deprived at a very different point to me. At the same time though, a well-designed low-energy regime isn't perceived by its citizens as despotic. There's very little call (nowadays) to smash Houston-style freeways through Europe's semi-pedestrianised neighbourhoods. Curiously, this was not the case in lower-information times, but the intersection of high bandwidth/discoverability and walkability is a much bigger topic.
Now I'm old enough to remember Eastern Bloc totalitarianism, and I find the current Gen Z fashion/fetish of all things DDR/Soviet vaguely tragic, but the outcome of the path we're on right now is at least equivalent to tyranny, at least for the three billion or so people at the pointy end of it all.
Despotic it may not be, yet people vote with their feet. Way more Europeans leave their delightfully walkable cities to make a living in Houston than the other way around[0]. 650k Germans, 180k French, and 90k Dutch lived in the US in 2017, compared to 140k, 50k, and 30k Americans living in the respective countries.
And despite the ugliness of Houston's monstrous freeways, it at least grows and takes newcomers: Metro Houston nearly doubled (grew 70%) from 2000 to 2020, compared to (the metros of) Berlin only 5%, Paris 13%, and Amsterdam 14%.
Broadly, I see current European policy as a defensive posture, one looking to maintain things as they are in all aspects: climate, population, wealth. There doesn't appear to be the same appetite for change and growth. It's as though they've decided that the way things are now is the best it'll ever be, and anything more advanced (that is, requiring more energy expended per capita) is somehow immoral. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it.
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/interactives/global-migra...; obviously, I don't mean literally Houston itself.
Paris, London and Berlin of 2023 are markedly different in so many ways to, say, 1983. Berlin was in two different countries back then, and if you tried to cross, you died. Much of London was still semi-derelict from WW2 and post-war economic changes.
Perhaps a history measured in millennia means a little more patience around change. Perhaps Europeans don't see the struggle for more wealth as the most important thing.
And looking at life expectancy trends in the developed world (as a very crude proxy for wellbeing).. perhaps they might be on to something.
‘I Don’t Want to Be Here Anymore.’ The Economic Cost of Houston’s Heat (wsj.com)
Making energy efficiency a priority concern often leads to overall better systems. Smaller, quieter, doing more with less and doing it better.
(Otherwise we'd all be posting on Presler Pentium D's.. dual Netburst all the way /s)
really? lighting alone is a huge sector for unrealized power savings, in all categories.
Do you have some sources I can read about this? I find it hard to believe that large consumers of light haven't already switched to LEDs given the financial incentive to do so, and on the consumer side, the transition has already been made in most of the world that has lighting.