Canada Sought to Be a Hydro Superpower. Now Its Rivers and Lakes Are Drying Up
wsj.com
wsj.com
I think I read or heard somewhere awhile ago that water will be the new oil of the future, and wars will be fought over it.
Canada is the world's largest producer of tritium, one of the crucial fuels for fusion. They do this through their heavy water reactor fleet. Without it, it will be additionally difficult to launch fusion power into a viable power system... We will probably need to invest in breeder reactors once Q>3 is achieved.
"Old fission" isn't technically a viable economic power system anymore, at least in its current forms. Solar/Wind are so cheap, and still getting percentages cheaper each year, that it gets harder and harder for other forms of power to compete.
Even combined cycle natural gas turbine with downstream heat recapture to exceed Carnot efficiency limits can't compete with wind/solar.
I get what you mean about viable fusion in just sustaining a energy-positive reaction. But even if that is achieved, fusion will likely not be economically viable outside of industrial high-heat constant-load applications (which there are a lot of, fission should be able to handle those but the waste and proliferation concerns are a real barrier).
If there are breeder reactors needed for fuel ... forget viable grid fusion power.
Also saying it in a situation where we don't even really attempt to be efficient.
Now I'm all for efficiency - but that's not what the degrowth people are saying.
Despite some flaws with the above it is not crazy to believe we have finite resources. Your numbers are sadly orders of magnitude too low.
Even if it wasn't, it doesn't meaningfully invalidate anything I said.
Let’s see your source for such a low percentage. I can tell you know we don’t have enough lithium for 1e6x more electric cars then we have now.
Now maybe you’re imagining a future where we can replicate things so we do have the raw materials ie atoms? I’d agree with that
By very far the threat to humanity is global warming, not resource depletion.
A lot of degrowthers want resource depletion to be very important because that's the only way what they call "green capitalism" doesn't work, but that's not fact-based.
Sadly for them basic pigouvian taxes + subsidies to innovation + reasonable behavioral changes (due to taxation) will mitigate most of the problem. That's completely compatible with what they despise as "green growth".
One begets the other...from either direction.
This alone would massively impact population growth.
Yup, let's push our ideology on other countries because the west is white is right.
We won't go into the impact certain gender equivalent movements have had on the world.
That said, the world will probably be black by 2200. Makes sense.
But the new world brought urbanization and birth control, which appears to be the most effective.
And since we are discussion overpopulation, I need to emphasize that the 8 billion people in the world (holy shit, it was 3.6 billion when I was born. I'm not that old) isn't the important metric.
The important metric is the lifestyle / resources consumed per person. China, India, etc all want US-type lifestyles, personal vehicles, abundant and varied food.
Yeah, THAT can't be sustained with our population. Our world survives because about a billion people live like that, probably 2 billion / 25% live in poverty (translate poverty to "doesn't consume a lot"), and the rest live spartan lifestyles.
The danger of global warming isn't really the heat or weather changes. The gradual pressure applied by global warming intensifies geopolitical conflict and reduces viability of farmland, the "war" and "famine" of malthus. It probably will increase disease too, but modern technology seemingly can handle that a lot better than back in Malthus's time.
What normal people think: family planning, greater economic opportunities that do not require large pools of familial labor to achieve, better healthcare leading to fewer dead babies thus a lower incentive to have large families.
But I bet that’s not what the “population control” crowd is thinking.
The “population control” crowd is almost certainly thinking fewer Africans and Asians who consume a 10th of what they’re consuming themselves.