With the current advances of PV and, amazingly at the same time, wind energy, we certainly don't need more nuclear fission plants. It is pretty obvious by now that building a PV factory and a battery factory instead of a NPP is the economic solution. At the same time, we're well on a way to global energy abundance even though we're in a local crisis right now. The only thing I am worried about is that PV capacity is currently way too concentrated in a single state.
The cost of batteries is still reducing so my numbers may be out of date, but last I checked it was close to the same for a nuclear plant and a sufficiently large battery pack (the PV to recharge the batteries is so cheap it's essentially a rounding error in this comparison).
I'm optimistic about future cost reductions to both batteries and PV. I'm pessimistic about the possibility of any future cost reductions to nuclear.
Despite this, I still think there's a place for nuclear — diversity (and not just of power supplies) is inherently a good thing because it de-correlates risks.
Don't forget that right now, a PV or battery plant will be producing after a couple of years, while your NPP is still in planning or, ignoring any legal battles, in construction. The renewables will produce power for years when that NPP finally goes online.
Changing this state of affairs is certainly possible but would also take several years.
Sure. I didn't make it clear in the other comment, but the slow process of building reactors is part of my world model — remember, the benefit I see from them is about preventing correlated failures, and those can happen any time not just tomorrow.
RepowerEU plan is precisely what it takes to completely switch away from fossil fuels in less than one generation while still supporting healthy economic growth.
Granted, it's not like we are starting from zero - in 2021, renewables amounted to 22% of all total final consumption of all kinds of energy in EU (not just electricity, that is), up from 8.5% in 2005. It only puts forward already existing plans, accelerating development through 2030 (45% renewables) and 2050 (75% renewables), while increasing energy consumption and yes, electrifying everything.
And no it doesn't require any terrible effort or funding amounts anyone will even notice.
It doesn't require any batteries.
Panic is simply not justified. U.S. shouldn't worry because it has more than plenty of fossil fuels for the next 50-70 years even with no technology improvements, and by then, renewables will be so cheap they will fill in the market by themselves, Europe will go through RepowerEU, and China, well, the worse for them, the better for us (although with their level of industrial capacity and skill of doing things on scale, i'm sure they will be fine too).
According to the EU website's : "REPowerEU is the European Commission’s plan to make Europe independent from Russian fossil fuels well before 2030, in light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine."
and "In the short-term, we need alternative supplies of gas, oil and coal as quickly as possible"...
So it's about a third of the EU consumption and it may include just changing supplier, not reducing oil...
Main cost driver is the price of green hydrogen. It is already cheaper than the natural gas prices we are paying now (equivalent of about $1700 per 1000cm of natural gas equivalent vs about $2500 we pay), by 2030 it should be down to $500 per 1000cm natural gas equivalent and that's about 2019 price.
Production costs are easily low enough to go further and faster than that. Logistics and economics may slow things down, but it’s not a cost problem right now.
Yes and no. For raw energy production, it is dirt cheap. Storage and transformation is a bitch though, and so far costs are quite high there although they are getting better. Given that we will need to increase green hydrogen production by 400x in 9 years and further 4x in next 20 years, prices will of course drop.
Hydrogen is the easy one. If you want battery storage I agree we need to get it cheaper (the effective cost of battery storage was close to nuclear last I checked, which isn't cheap enough, though my numbers may be out of date), but hydrogen is something I first made when I was single-digit years old.
Russian sources of energy gave 22% of European consumption in 2021 and renewables, another 22%. So 45% goal by 2030 seems to be yes, "bring market back to equilibrium with 2021-level prices, but without Russian energy, by 2030".
Of course, we will not be using any Russian energy long before 2030. About half of it is gone already (all coal, about 40% of oil and 60% of gas), and at least 80% will be gone by February next year. It's just that we will see elevated prices on most energy for a few years after 2024 or so when Russian supplies will zero out for all countries apart from Hungary.
PV produces ~150W/m^2 for a very optimistic solar input of 1000W/m^2.
PV produces this output only 50% of time (when sun is up, very very optimistic), so 75W averaged on 1 day
France Nuclear production is 61370MW [1]
To replace all the nuclear power plants, we would need 818 million square meters of PV panels, which amounts to a square grid of 30km.
Obviously you'd have to spread this along the longitude so that eastbound PVs would still be alight when the westbound have fallen out of the terminator.
It doesn't look like much actually. But I'm not counting the batteries to compensate for the night fallout, and I'm assuming 100% sun input all the time.
> We can also deal with water shortages through desalination.
I mean we can't. Shipping water is _hugely_ expensive. Assuming that we make electricity for free, the amount of water needed to irrigate the bit between the Rockies and Appalachians is huge. Literally millions of tons of water a minute.
All of that energy could be used to do something more useful.
Especially as we can do a few things to keep water about longer that helps stops flooding and keep ground water higher.
Yes, we need more power. Yes nuclear is the answer. However the reason that we didn't build them is because it was expensive, and without government incentives they don't get built.
Drinking water is the tiny part of overall consumption. Almost all water humankind is using, is used in agriculture, so the need is very, very distributed just as the farmland where stuff grows, is.
Shipping water isn’t expensive. Southern California has been doing it for decades. It’s a steep initial investment but not a prohibitively expensive system to maintain.
We didn't build them because of a smear campaign by fossil fuel industries.
I don't understand how people can look at big tobacco, big sugar, big oil all paying for fake science between the 1940s to today and then think "Yes, but coal barons are the one group of people ethical enough to not spread fud about their main competitor".
Anti-nuclear sentiment was a broad grassroots movement. While companies smearing competitors isn't something unheard of, it just doesn't happen between industries with any degree of success and scale. It's just easier for Big Money to diversify and re-invest: you can watch it in real time with oil companies spawning solar and wind power departments.
> However the reason that we didn't build them is because it was expensive,
No, because there's been a concerted move against nuclear from several actors (petroleum industry, greenpeace and related organizations) which made us not invest in Nuclear for 50 years. It's not for the lack of means to build to it. China is building hundreds of reactors in the past few years while the US enjoys power cuts.
China built around 50 reactors to date - they still have less generating capacity than France and wind power has been producing more energy (in terms of TWh delivered) than nuclear in China since at least 2013.
For once I wish the article was longer and would expand on the theme. For example, why did governments not think like this? Literally no country had this kind of policy. Even China_, which had so many long-term plans and executed them well, did not really overbuilt in terms of energy. They built the long-distance DC lines, which is a good start, but no generation capacity afaict.
PS. Actually France kind of did [1], but then they stopped.
China is currently building more than 20 nuclear reactors IIRC. They're building them at an incredible clip, faster (like 3 years) than anyone else in the past.
Yes, now multiple countries have started thinking like this. If we don't get cooked by the sun in the next 5 years, we'll have excess energy for a while.
It remains to be seen if nuclear or renewables can really carry the kind of energy expenditure we had with oil by themselves, it's very easy to ignore hidden costs when you have a cheap energy resource that can cover them, not so easy when that crutch runs out.
There's no law of nature that says that if we run out of oil, we will find an alternative energy source, rather that just going back to a different type of civilization with a much lower energy usage where most of the economy is just food production.
Sometimes I wonder if all the decarbonization tales are just story we like to tell ourselves to pretend we are in control, rather than just becoming much poorer because oil is running out and there's nothing we can do about it.
On the other hand, if we want to go really dirty, I guess there's always coal, but many countries only have low quality reserves.
The Wikipedia article reads like it was written by activists, and doesn't mention replacements for fossil fuels in food production or nitrogen fixation. Count me skeptical...
I don't deny it may be possible, but I'd be interested in knowing:
- What amount of natural resources (lithium for batteries, neodymium for wind turbines, ...) would be required, where would it come from, how would we transport it using renewable energy, ...
- What's the EROI for each renewable energy source? Would it still be profitable if there are any unexpected maintenance costs or externalities?
- Your link mentions "unsustainable energy consumption" as one of the issues, does that mean the transition will involve increased energy poverty?
Oil isn't running out, the ability of our atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gasses is the limiting factor, not our access to oil reserves. We need to leave oil in the ground to preserve the climate.
Well, the point of peak oil was never that oil will run out, just that it will get more expensive to extract it until the point where you have to spend more energy to extract it that what you get back.
This may not be happening, but I see some suspicious signs:
- Energy expenditure per capita in the US peaked in the 70s and hasn't gone up in 50 years.
- Fracking companies have never made a profit.
- Arabia Saudi has been pushed to extract more barrels since the war started, they haven't, in theory it's for political reasons but some experts mention that they may be unable to increase production any further.
Note that electrification is a form of energy efficiency. Yes, if we convert transportation and industry and heating to use electricity instead of fossil fuels we'll need twice as much electricity, but since electric motors are more efficient than fossil motors and heat pumps more efficient than furnaces, full electrician means we'll be using a lot less energy.
You are forgetting that you still have to create the electricity. So you have to multiply with the thermal efficiency of the electricity generation (if it uses fossil fuels).
The TEs for car motors and gas turbine electricity generation are roughly the same (0.4).
So the electric motor has to have an efficiency of 1 (read 0 losses) to not be less efficient overall.
So, no, just electrifying is not more efficient.
We need a sustainable, renewable energy source like solar.
Almost all new electricity generation is renewable. Nameplate capacity installation is only about 66% renewable, but the the actual generation of electricity by natgas plants is switching from continuous to intermittent peaking, so that balances out.
Regardless your original thesis is also wrong, since a gasoline engine is 20-40% efficient and a combined cycle gas turbine is 50-60%+ efficient.
If you measure by carbon emissions, it's even more stark. A gasoline car emits more than twice as much carbon as an electric car running on natgas generated electricity.
not really, keep in mind that electric cars are able to recover energy from breaking, while traditional convert that to waste heat, that should tip average efficiency by dozen of percent points. That's also from where mild hybrids have better efficiency.
for heating heat pumps have it's average yearly efficiency about 300-500% (depending on climate) so when we use the same fuel to just make energy at with that 40% you mentioned, we end up with overall efficiency well over 100%
so in both cases it's better to burn the same fuel to create electricity than to use it directly
So we should just let the stars waste the enormous amounts of energy every single second while providing near-zero value to anything concious, when we could instead harvest it?
For as long as humankind has existed, we wanted more and we strived to get it. That's not greed, that's a struggle towards better tomorrows. Energy in abundance has a tremendous potential and not just for more wanting and more consumption. Consumption goes hand in hand with creation and of course we will always want more. You speak like it's a bad thing that people have desires at all.
I think 'more' is definitely an answer here, you're just thinking too small.
> If a degrowth advocate came out and said point blank that under their proposals it would be only say 2 billion people, at least that would be intellectually honest and I would respect that as a coherent point of view.
Except that the _healthy_ carrying capacity of the planet _is_ 2 billion people, assuming a vegan consumption somewhat less than a first-world level.
Put an omnivorous consumption at first-world levels, and it’s somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion.
Sure, the planet can “support” ten or twenty billion or more, but only by farming 100% of the planetary surface and making 99% of all species extinct, whereupon a complete collapse of the biosphere would quickly ensue, resulting an effective planetary carrying capacity of 0 humans for the following several million years as the biosphere recovers.
Carrying capacity depends on tech as well as lifestyles and dietary choices.
If we were willing to cover the entire planet and make 99% of all species extinct (and I agree that would be bad), greenhouses would are enough to boost production to the 100 billion to 1 trillion range, hydroponics and aeroponics about ten times that.
But that's expensive and we don't have a clear and present need to shift away from open air farming in most cases.
Vegan diets are cool, but they're not actually that much more GHG friendly than a sensible omnivorous diet, see the EAT-Lancet diet plan for example:
> The resulting EAT-Lancet reference diet promoted increased consumption of nuts, fruits, legumes and vegetables and suggested that global consumption of red meat and sugar needed to decrease by more than 50% by 2050
But yeah, eating much more food than your doctor recommendeds and subsidizing lots of terrible things going into processed foods is bad, If that's what you mean by "first-world levels".
Feels like this completely misses the problems of habitat destruction, biodiversity, etc. I don't want to live in a big mall, so I'm not really in favour of plans that go "let's go live on Mars, the goal is only for the human species to survive".
IMO we need to produce less, consume less, and stop destroying whatever remains of life other than the human species. More energy doesn't seem like the solution to that.
No, I agree with environmental protection but fundamentally disagree with your live small mindset. We can do both, we sustainable and be highly technologically progressive at the same time.
Opposite of “live small” usually means “each year bigger and better”, which kind of means geometric growth, which almost by definition seems unsustainable.
We were told 1 billion people was unsustainable a century ago, look where technology brought us. Not only we manage almost 10x more without mass starvation, but at the same time everyone is much, much richer than their great-grand-parents
> we manage almost 10x more without mass starvation
Really? We're going towards mass extinction right now. And I think it's pretty safe to say that the growth that allowed us to get here is what's killing us. I don't think we can say we managed, we just haven't paid for it yet.
Does it? The opening poster specifically wrote: “we need to produce less, consume less” that is not just non-geometric growth but negative growth. So in this case the opposite of live small can simply be zero growth, or further exponential growth for a limited time and then zero growth or linear growth.
Seems like your post is also completely missing the point: if you want a sustainable economy you will have a sustainable standard of living. That roughly translates to eating grass hoppers once a day at our current population density.
There's very little reason to eat grasshoppers when chicken has roughly the same efficiency at converting food into protein. Especially considering that the necessary infrastructure and marketing already exists for chicken.
Let's be honest: mass extinction means less people. We are going towards wars and mass starvation. Either we can admit we're not sustainable and try to save what's left, or we can bet that we need to do more (much more, according to the article) of what's killing us, and at some point it will magically work.
I enjoyed this article, but disagree with it. For me it comes down to an economic argument, is it cheaper (on a case by case basis) to buy energy or save it? For example, my front door has a huge gap that lets cold air inside in winter. The amount of energy needed to heat my hallway is astronomical, so it's much better to fix the gap.
Also, a word on nuclear. People seem to ignore the fact that nuclear is by far the most expensive way to generate electricity. If you want to impoverish your country, build nuclear power stations! It's much cheaper to build renewables and use the surplus electricity to create hydrogen which can be stored indefinitely and then burnt when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
Meh. Energy cost has been plummeting ever since the steam engine came about. I cannot stress this enough, it has plummeted several orders of magnitude (versus for example gold). I prefer to use my ruler to stretch out the line on a log plot, naively. The only serious roadblock we've seen is CO2 emissions, but there's still probably a few decades before a serious crisis emerges.
"Yes, let's consume everything, screw conservation. Drive more and bigger cars. Cage all the animals we need, and kill the rest. Trees? Cut them all. So what if that sort of thinking destroys the planet? We need to think bigger: there is a whole galaxy out there to consume, I mean explore. Humans are awesome. Woooo!"
The low energy trap BS is nothing new. Tell me, what do you think they mean when they say we need to consume more? How does it all work? It's psychos all the way down.
This is a conclusion I have intuitively come to for several years now - good to see a terminology for it. Indeed major advancements for technological civilization will come out of energy plenty. If you keep double-clicking into most of worlds economic, environmental & even some social problems, fundamentally they boil down to energy availability & cost minimizing collateral damage.
Take for instance - habitat destruction due to increasing destruction of forests for farmland. I had once calculated that in an energy unconstrained world, with a few thousand sky-scraper farms, you could literally feed the whole world and let farmland return to wilderness (boosting oxygen, green cover, increasing C02 capture etc). Of course this has security implications but then the trigger for most conflict is also typically in-equality - which again you can double-click down to energy.
Similarly, in an energy unconstrained world, most pollution can be tackled with closed-cycle recycling processes. The main reason re-cycling doesn't happen is due to the energy cost of producing complex technologies to sort waste or filter chemicals out of waste-water etc.
This is why it is critical for us to figure out ways to unlock & expand energy generation capabilities at scale that minimize or eliminate collateral damage. Efficiency will help but is not the game changer.
> The main reason re-cycling doesn't happen is due to the energy cost of producing complex technologies to sort waste or filter chemicals out of waste-water etc.
The main reason it doesn't happen is externalities.
There's all sorts of horrible things that are re-used and recycled by industry in expensive and complicated ways because if they didn't they'd need to buy more of it and they can do basic sums.
The cost of energy can't be the limit because we actively subsidize that.
The ones they don't recycle are generally because they've figured out a way to make someone else bear the cost instead.
Funny because I have similar ideas but on the degrowth side of the board. Yes war like efforts can remove friction and allow for great changes. But limits are also source of immense improvements. Laptop CPUs are efficient because they had no choice, whereas desktop cpus could just be full on 100% of the time.
I also believe people today are too comfy and ignorant because they rely on the system fixing things for them, it's a bottomless pit. Slower pace and smarter usage seems a better path IMO. People that know how to act efficiently in groups are probably the happiest.
You build a well insulated home with heat pump HVAC, Vs a shack that you need to constantly heat with imported fossil fuels.
Why are we supposed to celebrate the latter? Doesn't seem to benefit anyone but the people selling fossil fuels and asthma doctors.
As for massive energy deployments, go look at a graph of solar and wind deployments (it's sometimes hard to find them without hydro, which totally obscures the trend), then check the sober predictions of expected rollout.
We've already escaped the trap, and people like this were keeping us in it for no obvious logical reason, just tribal politics.
The low energy, energy efficiency drive isn't a trap isn't about using less energy, it's about wasting less energy, and sourcing energy in a sustainable way that doesn't render the planet uninhabitable.
Why heat a room with your 100W light bulb when you get more light from a 7W LED alternative?
We absolutely can use more energy, but we haven't figured out how to scale out sustainable generation and storage. Right now, dumping fossil fuels is important to accomplish that second goal. Wasting less is an important part of that.
> What does having a lot more energy let us do? For starters we can avoid the worst of the climate crisis by aggressively shifting to electrification of transportation, heating and cooling, production and so forth.
Electrification means a decrease in overall energy usage. No increase in energy production required.
Then the whole discussion is only a matter of confusion between "energy" and "electricity". In fact, reduction of consumption of "energy" under most scenarios means increase of consumption of electricity, because electricity allows to do a lot more with less e.g. electric vs gasoline powered cars. And, electricity is the easiest form of energy to produce in a renewable way. 63% of electricity in EU is renewable or nuclear i.e. low-carbon, while only about 22% of energy overall is renewable and some about 27% is low-carbon.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadI'm optimistic about future cost reductions to both batteries and PV. I'm pessimistic about the possibility of any future cost reductions to nuclear.
Despite this, I still think there's a place for nuclear — diversity (and not just of power supplies) is inherently a good thing because it de-correlates risks.
Changing this state of affairs is certainly possible but would also take several years.
Granted, it's not like we are starting from zero - in 2021, renewables amounted to 22% of all total final consumption of all kinds of energy in EU (not just electricity, that is), up from 8.5% in 2005. It only puts forward already existing plans, accelerating development through 2030 (45% renewables) and 2050 (75% renewables), while increasing energy consumption and yes, electrifying everything.
And no it doesn't require any terrible effort or funding amounts anyone will even notice.
It doesn't require any batteries.
Panic is simply not justified. U.S. shouldn't worry because it has more than plenty of fossil fuels for the next 50-70 years even with no technology improvements, and by then, renewables will be so cheap they will fill in the market by themselves, Europe will go through RepowerEU, and China, well, the worse for them, the better for us (although with their level of industrial capacity and skill of doing things on scale, i'm sure they will be fine too).
and "In the short-term, we need alternative supplies of gas, oil and coal as quickly as possible"...
So it's about a third of the EU consumption and it may include just changing supplier, not reducing oil...
> 2030 (45% renewables) and 2050 (75% renewables)
Of course, we will not be using any Russian energy long before 2030. About half of it is gone already (all coal, about 40% of oil and 60% of gas), and at least 80% will be gone by February next year. It's just that we will see elevated prices on most energy for a few years after 2024 or so when Russian supplies will zero out for all countries apart from Hungary.
PV produces ~150W/m^2 for a very optimistic solar input of 1000W/m^2. PV produces this output only 50% of time (when sun is up, very very optimistic), so 75W averaged on 1 day
France Nuclear production is 61370MW [1]
To replace all the nuclear power plants, we would need 818 million square meters of PV panels, which amounts to a square grid of 30km.
Obviously you'd have to spread this along the longitude so that eastbound PVs would still be alight when the westbound have fallen out of the terminator.
It doesn't look like much actually. But I'm not counting the batteries to compensate for the night fallout, and I'm assuming 100% sun input all the time.
---
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
I mean we can't. Shipping water is _hugely_ expensive. Assuming that we make electricity for free, the amount of water needed to irrigate the bit between the Rockies and Appalachians is huge. Literally millions of tons of water a minute.
All of that energy could be used to do something more useful.
Especially as we can do a few things to keep water about longer that helps stops flooding and keep ground water higher.
Yes, we need more power. Yes nuclear is the answer. However the reason that we didn't build them is because it was expensive, and without government incentives they don't get built.
I don't understand how people can look at big tobacco, big sugar, big oil all paying for fake science between the 1940s to today and then think "Yes, but coal barons are the one group of people ethical enough to not spread fud about their main competitor".
tl;dr blame your hippie parents
No, because there's been a concerted move against nuclear from several actors (petroleum industry, greenpeace and related organizations) which made us not invest in Nuclear for 50 years. It's not for the lack of means to build to it. China is building hundreds of reactors in the past few years while the US enjoys power cuts.
Nonsense! All we need to do, is use huge lasers to evaporate gigatonnes of ocean water. It will blow inland, and rain will take care of the rest!
Easy peasy.
PS. Actually France kind of did [1], but then they stopped.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Independence
There's no law of nature that says that if we run out of oil, we will find an alternative energy source, rather that just going back to a different type of civilization with a much lower energy usage where most of the economy is just food production.
Sometimes I wonder if all the decarbonization tales are just story we like to tell ourselves to pretend we are in control, rather than just becoming much poorer because oil is running out and there's nothing we can do about it.
On the other hand, if we want to go really dirty, I guess there's always coal, but many countries only have low quality reserves.
But one thing is pretty sure, if we don't do anything, the problem will solve itself (which usually means war...)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
- What amount of natural resources (lithium for batteries, neodymium for wind turbines, ...) would be required, where would it come from, how would we transport it using renewable energy, ...
- What's the EROI for each renewable energy source? Would it still be profitable if there are any unexpected maintenance costs or externalities?
- Your link mentions "unsustainable energy consumption" as one of the issues, does that mean the transition will involve increased energy poverty?
This may not be happening, but I see some suspicious signs:
- Energy expenditure per capita in the US peaked in the 70s and hasn't gone up in 50 years.
- Fracking companies have never made a profit.
- Arabia Saudi has been pushed to extract more barrels since the war started, they haven't, in theory it's for political reasons but some experts mention that they may be unable to increase production any further.
The TEs for car motors and gas turbine electricity generation are roughly the same (0.4). So the electric motor has to have an efficiency of 1 (read 0 losses) to not be less efficient overall.
So, no, just electrifying is not more efficient. We need a sustainable, renewable energy source like solar.
Regardless your original thesis is also wrong, since a gasoline engine is 20-40% efficient and a combined cycle gas turbine is 50-60%+ efficient.
If you measure by carbon emissions, it's even more stark. A gasoline car emits more than twice as much carbon as an electric car running on natgas generated electricity.
for heating heat pumps have it's average yearly efficiency about 300-500% (depending on climate) so when we use the same fuel to just make energy at with that 40% you mentioned, we end up with overall efficiency well over 100%
so in both cases it's better to burn the same fuel to create electricity than to use it directly
Perhaps 'less'is not the answer. However, 'more' certainly is not either.
Why not?
There are so many false dychotomies and assumptions in your comment I do not know where to start.
Except that the _healthy_ carrying capacity of the planet _is_ 2 billion people, assuming a vegan consumption somewhat less than a first-world level.
Put an omnivorous consumption at first-world levels, and it’s somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion.
Sure, the planet can “support” ten or twenty billion or more, but only by farming 100% of the planetary surface and making 99% of all species extinct, whereupon a complete collapse of the biosphere would quickly ensue, resulting an effective planetary carrying capacity of 0 humans for the following several million years as the biosphere recovers.
If we were willing to cover the entire planet and make 99% of all species extinct (and I agree that would be bad), greenhouses would are enough to boost production to the 100 billion to 1 trillion range, hydroponics and aeroponics about ten times that.
But that's expensive and we don't have a clear and present need to shift away from open air farming in most cases.
https://youtu.be/XAJeYe-abUA
Tldv; if we pave over the earth the carrying capacity is humongous. Only limited by heat and energy.
> The resulting EAT-Lancet reference diet promoted increased consumption of nuts, fruits, legumes and vegetables and suggested that global consumption of red meat and sugar needed to decrease by more than 50% by 2050
https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/
They're working on version 2 at the moment.
But yeah, eating much more food than your doctor recommendeds and subsidizing lots of terrible things going into processed foods is bad, If that's what you mean by "first-world levels".
IMO we need to produce less, consume less, and stop destroying whatever remains of life other than the human species. More energy doesn't seem like the solution to that.
We were told 1 billion people was unsustainable a century ago, look where technology brought us. Not only we manage almost 10x more without mass starvation, but at the same time everyone is much, much richer than their great-grand-parents
Really? We're going towards mass extinction right now. And I think it's pretty safe to say that the growth that allowed us to get here is what's killing us. I don't think we can say we managed, we just haven't paid for it yet.
producing less and consuming less means less people in the end. Are you in favor of that? Because nobody wants to live with subpar level of life.
Also, a word on nuclear. People seem to ignore the fact that nuclear is by far the most expensive way to generate electricity. If you want to impoverish your country, build nuclear power stations! It's much cheaper to build renewables and use the surplus electricity to create hydrogen which can be stored indefinitely and then burnt when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
"Yes, let's consume everything, screw conservation. Drive more and bigger cars. Cage all the animals we need, and kill the rest. Trees? Cut them all. So what if that sort of thinking destroys the planet? We need to think bigger: there is a whole galaxy out there to consume, I mean explore. Humans are awesome. Woooo!"
Psychos.
The low energy trap BS is nothing new. Tell me, what do you think they mean when they say we need to consume more? How does it all work? It's psychos all the way down.
Take for instance - habitat destruction due to increasing destruction of forests for farmland. I had once calculated that in an energy unconstrained world, with a few thousand sky-scraper farms, you could literally feed the whole world and let farmland return to wilderness (boosting oxygen, green cover, increasing C02 capture etc). Of course this has security implications but then the trigger for most conflict is also typically in-equality - which again you can double-click down to energy.
Similarly, in an energy unconstrained world, most pollution can be tackled with closed-cycle recycling processes. The main reason re-cycling doesn't happen is due to the energy cost of producing complex technologies to sort waste or filter chemicals out of waste-water etc.
This is why it is critical for us to figure out ways to unlock & expand energy generation capabilities at scale that minimize or eliminate collateral damage. Efficiency will help but is not the game changer.
The main reason it doesn't happen is externalities.
There's all sorts of horrible things that are re-used and recycled by industry in expensive and complicated ways because if they didn't they'd need to buy more of it and they can do basic sums.
The cost of energy can't be the limit because we actively subsidize that.
The ones they don't recycle are generally because they've figured out a way to make someone else bear the cost instead.
I also believe people today are too comfy and ignorant because they rely on the system fixing things for them, it's a bottomless pit. Slower pace and smarter usage seems a better path IMO. People that know how to act efficiently in groups are probably the happiest.
You build a well insulated home with heat pump HVAC, Vs a shack that you need to constantly heat with imported fossil fuels.
Why are we supposed to celebrate the latter? Doesn't seem to benefit anyone but the people selling fossil fuels and asthma doctors.
As for massive energy deployments, go look at a graph of solar and wind deployments (it's sometimes hard to find them without hydro, which totally obscures the trend), then check the sober predictions of expected rollout.
We've already escaped the trap, and people like this were keeping us in it for no obvious logical reason, just tribal politics.
The low energy, energy efficiency drive isn't a trap isn't about using less energy, it's about wasting less energy, and sourcing energy in a sustainable way that doesn't render the planet uninhabitable.
Why heat a room with your 100W light bulb when you get more light from a 7W LED alternative?
We absolutely can use more energy, but we haven't figured out how to scale out sustainable generation and storage. Right now, dumping fossil fuels is important to accomplish that second goal. Wasting less is an important part of that.
There is no trap, we're just not there yet.
> What does having a lot more energy let us do? For starters we can avoid the worst of the climate crisis by aggressively shifting to electrification of transportation, heating and cooling, production and so forth.
Electrification means a decrease in overall energy usage. No increase in energy production required.