I don't like those techs because they don't guarantee that they will offset fossil fuel extraction.
What's really needed it's culture change on growth and consumption.
The best technology is light technology.
What's really needed it's culture change on growth and consumption.
The best technology is light technology.
Convincing everyone in the world to do a massive cultural change involving large standard of living decreases is not happening except at the point of a literal gun. The world can't afford to wait for impractical solutions.
Technology has solved the vast majority of all of the major problems of human beings throughout all of human civilization. Agriculture is technology. Writing is technology. Inks and paper are technology. Pharmaceuticals are technology. Heart surgery is technology. The modern industrial supply chain is technology. Transportation is technology. Seatbelts and blood typing to enable blood transfusions - technology.
It is theoretically possible that technology could solve the problem of death itself.
To make claims to the contrary, which would be extraordinary, something a great deal more substantial than a handwavey dismissal is required.
The issue is not what the world will be like in 200 years when the climate crisis is solved, it's how we get there. Tech takes decades to research, design, and develop; we need ways to limit the damage that can be implemented in years to limit the effects we'll see in our lifetimes. I agree tech will be the end solution, but continuing to burn at current rates while we wait for that is going to cause, or already is causing, massive problems.
50% of children died before their 5th birthday
I think no sensible person would protest a more sustainable solution than the current fossil burning tech even if it is not 100% renewable.
Nuclear fusion for energy generation purposes has been promised for, what, 60 years now? Hoping for that to eventually succeed will only lead to one thing: it won't work out and whoops, suddenly humanity is out of options because everyone had refused to change in the hope for a miracle.
It is more sensible to prepare for the worst case now.
Too bad we barely used it.
A nuclear project on average has a probability of going over time and budget somewhere between an IT project and organizing the Olympics.
These are not great odds, especially that renewables are on the other end of the same scale.
It delivers plent. And if we actually developed fission technology beyond the 1970 we could do so so much more.
Nuclear projects in Western nations done as low priority "keep the industry alive" individual projects are often late.
But historically when large amount of investment is made, you get very large amount of energy quickly.
Lets not pretend that every renewable project is perfectly on time on budget either. Its just that those are smaller and on project being late isn't news worthy.
India just finished reactors very cheaply. UAE and South Korea just showed an amazing buildout of nuclear that could be scaled to much larger easly.
Finlands project took a while and was expensive but now they have great reactor that produces lots of power for the next 80 years or more.
Frnace literally made its grid green in 20 years and they have had cheap energy since.
Fission is amazing, fusion is totally unneeded. Not using fission more is one of the dumbest things humanity ever did.
Nobody says we should go back to Stone Age but we should unleash our narratives of what is a nice future.
Living in a world where everyone is eating healthy local food, where you live longer because it’s safe to use your bicycle and hard to use the car. Living in a world where you can walk everyday because there are trees to give you their shadows. Living in a world where work is meaningful. For me that’s a bright future.
Nobody says we have to abandon all of our technological and cultural advances but that we have to prefer some over others.
Like my grandfather said, plant 2 trees when you build your home and you’ll never need air conditioning. His idea wasn’t that you should ban A/C but rather that you can use it way more efficiently just by adding some shadow.
That’s the world we must live in now : consuming energy is ok but not if it is a countermeasure to our own stupid decisions.
It’s the same with cars. Ok they are nice sometimes. But they are stupid if we use them to go in a far office with the same computer you have at home.
We don’t need to go back to Stone Age but we need to dream of a future where we don’t use the energy for stupid things. And this implies being able to see what is stupid and who have interest in keeping a given stupid thing, stupid.
That sounds nice and all (although as a canadian, too much heat due to lack of shade is definitely not the issue around here ;) ). I'd even go as far as to say that those types of life style changes have an important part to play. However, even if implemented to the fullest extent possible, i don't really think it solves the greenhouse gas problem by itself or even comes close.
Well, yeah...ok, everyone rides around on bikes. Someone has to make the bike. Is it done by hand? How do you scale that to 8B people? Or is it done by a scaled industrial process, and if so, how do you power this?
The answer to these questions isn't to limit technology, it's to limit population. The scale of our population is the cause of all of these strange threshold-breaking externalities we're now facing. And you can't point at the technology and say "SEE?! It's ruining everything!"
The technology is just a companion to our population. Real primitivists should be arguing for drastically reduced population (however that is achieved ethically), not a reduction of technology.
Read "The Population Bomb" its literally what people were obcessed about back then. Save the enviornment because of old zero ideas that German generals really licked too.
The podcast "If books could kill" did a great episode on this book.
Its an incredibly dumb amd harmful idea but its sticking around.
As someone who dislikes physical movement or being outdoors, this sounds terrible. Local food is often heavy in ingredients I don't like or to which I am allergic, or doesn't fulfill my nutritional needs and desires. This is not the idea of an ideal world for many modern people.
I'd much rather we solve the issues related to being sedentary with technology than we try to figure out how to make everyone bike everywhere, which most people don't want to do, even given the option. I don't wash my clothes by hand and I'm not sure why bicycling is seen as some ideal correspondingly. I'd take a 200 year perfect artificial heart over safe bike lanes. I'd take better solar (to run more AC and dehumidification) over more trees. I've swallowed enough bugs whilst cycling for more than one lifetime.
Your position, to me, is still just a yearning for historical lifestyles that we abandoned en masse for good reasons. Using energy on air conditioning and transportation are perhaps the least stupid things one can spend energy on - right alongside spending energy on washing machines for your bedclothes and underwear, which nobody seems to regard as some insanely wasteful luxury. Why is energy for heating seen by europeans as OK when energy for cooling is regarded as a senseless waste? It's just cultural bias and tradition.
When the majority of humans live in space or on bodies without an atmosphere, this whole "fresh air and trees" meme will finally die, I hope.
I'm not the type of person who would want everyone to cycle - chiefly because four wheels > two everywhere and everytime, but there's an argument to be made against overusing AC, namely: you're just moving heat around and producing some in the process, so the net effect is that the area around you gets extra hot.
AC is a pretty blunt tool and there are ways of keeping places cooler without it.
...or when you have millions of people on the Western borders fleeing from climate change and its side effects (we're already seeing just how cruel politicans behave towards the relatively small amount of people at the borders currently - imagine how the situation will look like with just 10x as many!), or entire of our states being devastated by wildfires, hurricanes or tornadoes. Probably it's going to take the latter until politicians wake up, when the situation is undeniable even to the hardest MAGAts and other deniers.
The key thing is: humanity is using more resources (no matter if you're talking about food, drinkable water or fuel) than nature can regenerate, each year. We are currently digging into reserves that took (in case of groundwater) sometimes many millennia to create.
> The world can't afford to wait for impractical solutions.
It can't afford doing nothing, because continuing as-is without managing sensible degrowth may work out for our generations, but the ones born after 2010? They're fucked.
To summarise the review: there are two approaches to solving humanity's big problems, from food production (mostly solved) to climate change. The Prophet approach is to go around saying "we must live within our means!" and "technology bad!", and the Wizard approach is to seek techological solutions. And as the reviewer writes:
> Though Mann insists from the start that the book is not meant to advocate for or condemn either side, it was initially difficult for me to read it as anything but two-and-three-quarters cheers for Wizardry.
It turns out that Prophets tend to be misanthropes at best, and racists at worst. William Vogt, Mann's archetypal Prophet, founded (according to Mann) much of modern-day environmentalism but also (according to the review, which I personally trust) called people in India "backward populations" who "breed with the irresponsibility of codfish". Says the reviewer:
> _Which_ people deserved to live in harmony with nature in the ensuing pastoral utopia and which would be relegated to the dustbin of history was not an exercise they left to the reader.
(Meanwhile Norman Borlaug, the Wizard, was busy producing a Green Revolution that ended up raising rice yields in India from 2 to 6 tons/hectare and lowered rice costs from $550 to $200 a ton, according to the Wiki page.)
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-w...
The problem is also that there is the burocrate. And the burocrate in the 60s made society into a car depended nightmare.
And most modern prophets are mostly saying "he can we rethink some of the policies adopted".
Why would you oppose technological solutions in favor of ideological ones? Unless of course you don't care about solving the problem...
Wanna go light? Ditch your computer, phone and most of electronic/digital devices you use every day (for a start, then follow up with car and basically anything that depends on "heavy technology" to exist and run). But that is probably not the lifestyle you're imagining ATM.
im using a low performance computer, and computer have enough power to do things.
it's about the ressources spent to make a computer.
It is not.
At no point in the history of human civilization has growth been static. It will not ever be. It will and should be exponential. Figure out how to make that happen or go join one of the religious groups that stop using new technology.
We want, need, and benefit from growth.
Our energy source just needs to change, and is changing. Plenty of earthbound solar and nuclear to satisfy our growth for a good while. There isn't enough fossil fuel around anyway if we wanted to keep growing with it.
By the time we need it we can produce plenty of energy in space. Think square miles of solar arrays in solar orbits fixing energy into whatever passes for a future battery while also colocating with asteroid smelting and refining facilities.
I in all seriousness love this angle and find it super refreshing, the puny amount of oil on this tiny planet isn't enough to satisfy human ambition. We should own the stars.
And this assumes that the hydrogen is available in exactly 50/50 deuterium/tritium combinations, which seems extremely improbable given that tritium has a very short half life (a few years at most).
I very much doubt that refueling from the ISM is plausible.*
100MW is more than the energy consumption of 50,000 homes. To collect 6*10^16 cubic meters/year at an average speed of 100km/h (walking pace in outer space), you'd need a "net" of less than 10km x 10km, which is completely plausible for a ship that large.
If you have a small ship using the reactor for thrust, at 1% of the speed of light the width of the "net" is much smaller.
And tritium is used in existing designs but we're still in the infancy of the technology. Stars fuse deuterium with neutron-free hydrogen (protons), and make the deuterium themselves.
There is plenty of coal left and you can make oil out of it, so we could burn fossil fuels for centuries to come if we don't mind the side effects .. otherwise agree.
From the 1200s to 1600s England went through a period of zero or extremely low growth.
Generally: correct. So far.
> It will not ever be.
Yes, it will. This will be forced by 2 factors:
a) The Earth we live on is essentially a closed system. Yes @ some point we might be able to mine asteroids, use extraterrestrial energy sources, move people off-planet etc. But this depends on technology to make this feasible. Until such technology appears, we're stuck on this rock. And thus, have to make do with what this rock provides. Which is a lot, but finite.
b) The laws of physics (those related to energy, in particular).
The "eternal growth" is a classical economist's view. Which (sadly) is very pervasive.
Historically, population growth, raw materials consumption, energy use, and technological progress have been tightly coupled.
But this coupling will be loosened.
Technology will probably keep progressing ..somehow.
Energy use might increase if eg. we can get nuclear fusion to work. Even that is not 100% a given, btw (apart from the timescale). How energy is generated will be very different 30..50y from now.
But raw material consumption can NOT keep increasing. There is finite amounts of [insert material here] on this planet. Never mind agri stuff like phosphor, pollution, or the amount of CO2 we can release 'safely'. And it's not feasible to recover 100% of any reserve.
Same with population. Earth is already too crowded. Would you want continued growth until entire Earth surface is covered with humans? Stacked 50 humans high?
No? Then population growth will stop. Not to mention that population growth eats any gains made elsewhere (10% more raw materials, 10% more energy, 10% more food, followed by 10% more people = back to square 1 despite the gains).
Historically this wasn't a problem because those limits weren't hit (well... they were, locally, which caused past civilizations to collapse). But we are hitting those limits now - globally.
It's this decoupling of growth factors that's a hard pill for people to swallow. Especially economists & politicians.
But don't worry! The laws of physics are very reliable.
Essentially, we can do this now. There is no real technological barrier and several organizations are actively developing solutions. We're at over a billion dollars invested. Go read a report on the status of things [1]. This isn't far off science fiction but something practical folks are throwing money after.
1. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/space-mi...
This is a bold and hard to believe claim. Weren't the Dark Ages in fact a reversal? Can you provide a source for your claim?
So? "The limits to growth" was published in the 70, you should try to educate yourself on finiteness of earth.
Good luck with your space dreams. Smells like the Elysium movie.
Indeed countless civilizations collapsed once they depleted natural resources.
And then it killed its host and died. The. End.