I’m curious what the estimate for rodent population is. In the largest city near me, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were multiple large rats per human being.
Given the latest demographic projections, kids in 2150 might actually be asking: "Were there really so much people?" while the wilds will have regained serious ground.
While I think the anthropocene is a stupid concept[0] I read an interesting article yesterday that human pumping of groundwater may have shifted the axis of the earth's spin due to the mass displaced: https://nationalpost.com/news/humans-have-used-enough-ground...
We will do almost anything to save the planet except what needs to be done: less electricity, less meat, less travel and fewer people. There's one sure strategy for beating climate change and no one dares speak it out loud.
It'll be fine even at 3.0C. The IPCC report has scenarios up to 5.0C, and if you carefully read those and compare the population adversely affected to the overall population of the planet, you'll see that mankind will not end from climate change. Not even remotely.
Plenty of people speak it out loud. But getting billions of people across numerous cultures to collectively give up what they consider basic comforts is not going to happen. It goes against basic human nature. You can try to fight that, but you will lose. The planet will die off first.
In light of that, it seems wise to me to try and get other plans in place to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Definitely not. It may go through a bottleneck in which humanity has to adapt or die (not for the first time, I might add), but (if anything) after the climate has stabilized and life has adapted it will be more fecund than anything -- all those new shallow seas will be totally awesome biomes.
Yep. Just like your face will be hairier if you were to pluck every single one of your eyebrow follicles but stop shaving your beard.
It will take millions of years to recover from the biodiversity loss we've already put into motion. Hundreds of thousands, millions of species that just don't exist anymore. The intricate relationships from parasitism to symbiosis and everything in between, a vastly complex machine we just stomp on, cut up, blow holes in. Yep. That machine will be fine, shame about those eyebrows though.
You’re free to give up modern conveniences. You’re even free to stop living if you truly feel there are too many people. Or we can keep living, keep enjoying our advancements, and find a way to make it work in a way that keeps the climate stable. Like I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t leave my immediate geographic area. I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t have kids. I would rather have kids with the potential that they inherit a destroyed Earth. At least in this case there is hope they inherit something other than a peasant’s lifestyle.
> Or we can keep living, keep enjoying our advancements, and find a way to make it work in a way that keeps the climate stable.
Press X to doubt. The level of technological hubris in this statement is astonishing - we don't know that we'll be able to do this, and we can estimate that the cost of mitigation will be higher than prevention.
Very few are advocating living like acetic monks, but we absolutely need to work on including externalities into our pricing system.
I think part of it is the truly staggering disconnect most people have from the natural world. Start learning about it in earnest and you will see the slow rolling apocalypse everywhere.
There's no reason to believe we can successfully run away from all the problem's technology's caused with more technology, specifically tech that doesn't even exist yet and that, more importantly, is not profitable. Even green energy just is not profitable even though it's increasingly affordable. In a weakly regulated capitalist society, that's a death sentence for it. Nobody's saying abandon the cities and go back to the dark ages. But we need to be much more judicious in our production and use of technology.
> There's no reason to believe we can successfully run away from all the problem's technology's caused with more technology, specifically tech that doesn't even exist yet and that, more importantly, is not profitable.
I agree with this statement. But, absent technological breakthroughs, how many humans can Earth sustainably maintain? Maybe a few hundred million? We're talking about an order of magnitude decrease in population size. Are you OK to say goodbye to 9 out of every 10 people you know? Are you OK to be one of those 9 of 10 that need to die?
I don't see anyone except for you advocating for that kind of neo-malthusianism. OP said we should eat less meat, travel less, and have fewer kids. Family planning isn't the same thing as advocating for people to die.
1. While global population growth is slowing, population is still growing.
2. There are many real problems with population decline, but that's not an excuse to just throw your hands up and assume we need endless growth.
Also, do you mean replacement rate? Sustainment birth rate is not a term in common usage.
For the record, population growth is not my highest concern, especially since it decreases with improved quality of life anyway. I simply have no patience for lazily dismissing discussion of population growth as "eco-fascism" or whatever. The truth is that a lot of our existential risks would be easier to manage with smaller global population, especially if we care about that whole global population having access to good quality of life (which we should).
> The truth is that a lot of our existential risks would be easier to manage with smaller global population
This is why your detractors are calling you an eco-fascist.
People are not cows. You have no right to manage us, or our birth rate, or change us to suit you. That you can even fathom such a sentance is itself suggestive of deficiency.
If you want to change your life, please do. Attempting to force your preferences on others is unwise.
> especially if we care about that whole global population having access to good quality of life
You assume you know what makes my life good. What makes my life good is not the same thing that makes the lives of others good.
The best advice I can give you is to travel and spend time with other people who are different from yourself. What you value, others may not. What they value, you may not.
How dare you. You don't know me, and you have not interacted with me sufficiently to possibly justify such inflammatory accusations.
> People are not cows. You have no right to manage us, or our birth rate, or change us to suit you.
I'm not. Implying I want to manage people like cows is clear bad-faith nonsense.
The arguments of neomalthusians are not correct, because birth rates plateau in response to lots of external forces (like education, providing people access to family planning if they want it, and general quality of life) - with that said its stupid to pretend that we have the technology to sustain our current population levels with even the current distribution of lifestyles, let alone the opportunities we should be attempting to provide to all. One might call that lack of understanding "deficient".
I believe in the agency of individual people - I am against coercive reproductive policies. I understand the problematic history of movements associated with population anxiety. None of that justifies your absurd accusations.
> You assume you know what makes my life good
I'm not the one making assumptions here. What would you say of native peoples whose land is being made unlivable by the climate crisis and loss of biodiversity? Would they be "eco-fascists" for wanting the industrial world to get its shit together?
> The best advice I can give you is to travel and spend time with other people who are different from yourself. What you value, others may not. What they value, you may not.
Again, how dare you. Your condescending inflexibility is truly unreal.
To summarize - you think any discussion of human population equates to eco-fascism, regardless of context, motivation, or the ethical and scientific basis on which it is being discussed.
Is all of macroeconomics fascist because it talks about the behavior of people in groups rather than recognizing all of our unique individuality?
Is anatomy fascist because it studies our literal, physical, animal bodies?
Is all regulation fascist because it constrains our individual freedom in favor of collective good? Even workplace safety regulations? Even pure food and drink regulations? Even regulations against environmental damage that affects future generations?
If there's no room to talk about collective things at all, then your ideological bubble is small enough to suffocate you (or in this case, everyone).
No, I simply believe that you attempting to exert control over the birth rates of people you don't know is an ethical no go, regardless whatever "scientific" basis you think you have.
> The arguments of neomalthusians are not correct, because birth rates plateau in response to lots of external forces
And attempting to engineer those things to an end of changing birth rates is starkly dangerous territory, nor will a pattern always hold. Not all cultures have less kids upon becoming more educated.
> What would you say of native peoples whose land is being made unlivable by the climate crisis and loss of biodiversity?
There was a young woman attempting to collect signatures to "stop burning the rainforest".
I asked her if she understood that those burns came from people who lived there, often the poor, who were attempting to farm.
She doubled down that it was wrong. So I asked what she would have them do instead. Would she be willing to give them different land? A different place to live?
It's easy to make "other" people sacrifice at no cost to yourself. When you have to directly compensate them, suddenly people change their tune.
"Collective good", "save the children" and so on are red herrings. Of course we want the commons to be well treated and the children safe, but how often is that action actually achieving that? How much more often is it merely control by a minority?
I think it'd do you extremely well to take a dose of the medicine that you're prescribing. I'm not going to put up a length reply as I don't have the time to put in to do it right, but I think you're failing to look at the whole picture and focusing solely on a selfish view of the world.
> Even green energy just is not profitable even though it's increasingly affordable.
Green energy has been profitable for years and investment is massively outpacing even the most positive projection of a decade ago.
> There's no reason to believe we can successfully run away from all the problem's technology's caused with more technology
There is actually a lot of reason to believe we can. People were basically having the same attitude regarding food production at the beginning of the 20th century just before the Green revolution happened.
The impact of innovation has been systematically underestimated by environmentalists and climate specialist for the past thrity years. For example, the part of the IPCC scenarios dealing with it is very poor (admittedly it's also old and couldn't really anticipate investement would grow so much).
I think most people face the climate issue from a practical and moral standpoint which is fundamentaly wrong. Sadly the level of applied scientific knowledge of the general population is going down the drain so fast, it's in no way surprising.
> The impact of innovation has been systematically underestimated by environmentalists and climate specialist
... "innovation" is exactly what put us in this position to begin with. It's a losing battle, whatever comes is accepted as the new default standard of living, we'll always want more
What got us there is burning fossil fuel not "innovation", even if you put scare quotes around it.
I know it's hipe to pile up on the modern world but I quite enjoy hunger being a solvable issue despite the population rising to unheard of before numbers, having eridacated or significantly reduced the impact of most of the nastiest diseases and education and well being steadily rising throughout the world. I don't understand how so many people got convinced that the solution is wallowing in sorrow and selfpity and advocating for a return to the dark age.
Plastic, transportation, medicine, food, &c. every single thing that allowed us to live like we do today is 100% fossil fuel based. Fossil fuel were a miracle, finding alternative will be extremely long and hard, if not completely impossible
> I don't understand how so many people got convinced that the solution is wallowing in sorrow and selfpity and advocating for a return to the dark age.
Nobody is advocating for that, it's not a solution, it's the reality we'll be facing soon, even if you don't want to. The choice is to be realistic and prepare for what's coming VS continuing business as usual
> I quite enjoy hunger being a solvable issue despite the population rising
Are you sure about that ? That as many people suffering of hunger _right now_ that there were inhabitants in the whole fucking world in 1800
> having eridacated or significantly reduced the impact of most of the nastiest diseases
Innovation and burning fossil fuel are not synonymous. Obviously having plenty of available energy is what allowed us to reach this point but we are long past the time when we couldn’t do anything without burning coal or using oil.
We have clean energy sources. Alternative are already there for the most polluting usage: nuclear power, wind and solar, electric propulsion. You are stuck thirty years in the past and arguing for us to go further back.
> Are you sure about that?
Of course I’m sure about that. Production has been above demand for decades. The issue is instability and logistic. We have the technical means to feed everyone and hunger affects an infinitely smaller proportion of the world than 200 years ago (population was multiplied by 8 since 1800).
> The choice is to be realistic and prepare for what's coming VS continuing business as usual
No one is advocating for continuing business as usual. Some are advocating strongly for curbing everyone freedom and accepting making everyone life worse to conform to their moral standards. Others want to actually tackle the problem like we have done for every other one: by working on finding and developing appropriate solutions which clearly do exist.
> All fun an games until bacteria started becoming antibiotic resistant
It’s still fun and game. The issue is broad antibiotic use in farming and poor economic return for companies working on antibiotic and despite that we still have effective cure.
... Obviously? We're facing a threat to global civilization, so parden me if "that one thing that would help isn't sufficient" doesn't strike me as a particularly insightful or useful comment.
Obviously we need to do lots of things.
And also, what about fertilizer? Right now we're using it to grow too much corn to feed to cows and burn in cars. I'm saying we should do less of that.
Fertiliser is a complicated topic, and at industrial scale probably does require inputs from the livestock industry; however, there are also many options for producing large amounts of biomass without livestock, they're just more costly, and probably don't work as well with large-scale, monoculture agriculture.
I really agree with your sentiment, although maybe not the details. All those efforts are gargantuan YC-scale world-changing efforts that can compensate… a small fraction of people not driving 50 miles to work daily. Or, at least, drive an EV. Or even, have people eat pasta rather than beef once a week. It’s very sad that it’s so hard to ask people to make such a small effort.
I suspect that if we electrify transport, there will be more electricity, and we could have more travel overall with night trains, etc. So I’m not sure it has to be less consumption overall. Eating like a pig (which I wouldn’t recommend), but vegan food has less carbon footprint, for example. So “less electricity, less meat, less travel and fewer people” makes sense, but I’m hoping it won’t be necessary.
That and much more will be soon if we don’t change many things fast, but so many of those things are as simple as teaching people to cook dahl (it’s so simple, even I can do it).
Those are miracles that good advertisers pull off every week, but so far, they are focused on getting more giant trucks on the road and pretending hybrid engines are good enough. They are fighting for milk and beef and airlines, while alternatives use amateurs who keep making blatant mistakes.
As we saw in 2020, just killing the cruise lines saves more carbon from entering the atmosphere than all cars in the USA produce. We should take these low hanging fruits. Do what's easy. Manufacturing from China is moving to Mexico because of the FTA, we should fully support that. Less transport == less fossil fuels
Electricity + meat + (long-distance) travel comes to less than half of emissions in developed countries. Expand that to all transportation and you're just over half. Furthermore, electricity is probably the easiest sector to decarbonize (construction might be the hardest).
Halving the emissions of the wealthiest 1% would have the same effect as eliminating the emissions from the poorest 50% of the population[1].
It's not a population problem. It's a consumption problem. The number of people consuming is only one variable of the equation, and it is neither the easiest, fastest, most attainable nor the most ethical one to adjust.
There are a lot of low hanging fruit we could tackle with willing policymakers, before depopulation has to be even considered.
Industrialization, growing wealth and rising standard of living of impoverished regions were thoroughly accounted for in the IPCC scenarios.
Now the parts of the world who got us here in the first place are burning through the remaining CO2 budget, with no regard for these regions, while pointing fingers at third world nations.
Birth rate limitation won't work. Even if no more humans are born from today, we still have like 4 billion under the age of 21 that are going to be around for a while and plenty above that age who intend to stick around for many decades.
If part of your solution is less people it is a non-starter. The only solutions for less people are imposed child restrictions, war, or genocide. If you force less electricity and less meat you will get less people by starvation and death from the elements. How about solutions that dont kill people.
Regenerative agriculture is a great carbon sink. It's more hands on and management intensive, something hard to scale, though, so big Ag isn't interested.
There was a good Ask Reddit question recently that really drove home how the "use less electricity, travel less, eat less meat" solution is completely unrealistic when it comes to what is needed to arrest climate change. The question asked why, during 2020, when there were huge lockdowns around the world, with gargantuan portions of traffic completely eliminated, that overall CO2 emissions only fell 6%
Think about that. To arrest climate change we really need to bring CO2 emissions down nearly 100%, and the greatest worldwide economic pause in living memory only brought it down 6%.
The only thing that can possibly solve this problem is improved technology.
Human transportation is less than 35% of transportation pollution - most of it is moving _stuff_, usually cheap junk between factories. Not food or even finished products.
Your electricity usage doesn't go to people. Residential electricity use is ~20%. It's not your air conditioner.
Meat doesn't even enter into calculations. While it consumes biomass, changes to feed easily offset it's greenhouse gas output.
And, as the above shows, it's not people living their lives that causes global warming. It's not people in their homes or going on vacation or even leaving the tap running or the AC on a bit much.
You could, as a person, do all of the things and convince your neighbors to do them to.. and you would change almost nothing.
Stop buying junk, buy less, and push the commercial and office sectors to fix their behavior. Stop sending entire planes to move a 2 or 3 people.
It sounds like a motto for people who want those outcomes, even if technology somehow let us have more electricity, more people, more meat, and more travel.
There's only one bottom line, CO2 and methane in the atmosphere must decrease. That means real carbon storage that outweighs the oil that's pumped. Preferably with less human and animal suffering.
Fewer people is already on the way. We just need to pass the bump and things will be good. Demographic lag is a real pain.
Electricity is shifting massively towards renewable production so there really is no need to consume less of it (and we need more anyway - electrifying the part of the planet without electricity is a very significant gain in quality of life).
Less meat is also significantly engaged. Consumption is rising because the population is rising.
Meanwhile, we need effective solution now not in thirty years so any things which reduce the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere is good to take.
> There's one sure strategy for beating climate change and no one dares speak it out loud.
No idea of what you are talking about. What you are pushing is sadly the only thing we hear about as most environmentalists in the west are actually looking to force people to change lifestyle because of what they believe to be morally right rather than solve our actual issues. I wish we had more people working on solutions and less people proselytizing their new religion but well, that's how it is.
Anything less than net-zero carbon will cause catastrophe. So unless you want to reduce to 0, your strategy won't work.
OTOH, net zero is possible with other strategies. For example, switch to zero-carbon electricity generation, switch from fossil fuels to electricity for 98% of the carbon sources and use carbon capture to offset the remaining 2%.
To me the numbers don't make any sense. Maybe you can help here.
We put in the atmosphere roughly 50 billion tons of CO2-equivalent per year. About half is removed by forests and the ocean, but we are still talking tens of gigatons.
Humankind produces very few things in gigatons per year numbers. Obviously (and sadly) CO2 is one of them. Coal, petroleum and natural gas are part of this family too, multiple gigatons each.
There are 4 agricultural crops that we produce in gigatons per year: sugar cane, corn, rice and wheat.
And then there's cement and iron. About 4 gigatons and 2 gigatons per year each. Cement is mixed with sand, gravel and crushed stone to produce concrete. We make
about 30 gigatons of concrete per year.
Everything else we make is in numbers less than 1 GT/year. The next 2 things are fertilizers and plastics, maybe about 0.5 GT/year.
I'm saying all these things to set the scene for the proposed olivine use.
What is the idea here? That we will create an entirely new industry that will produce a new material (olivine) in quantities larger than anything any other industry produces, with the few exceptions mentioned above? All the industries I mentioned did not spring overnight, they had been around for hundreds of years.
Is the idea to create a new industry that grows at triple digits every year for a few decades? Because if this is not the idea, then I don't think this whole thing would make a dent.
I apologize for sounding a bit brusque, but I don't see how this thing makes any sense from the numbers point of view. These guys in the article are talking about 500 m3. How do you get from 500 m3 to billions of m3? Billions per year.
Many, including myself, don't believe that solving the climate crisis will be done, by invention of a single new technique. So I agree, scaling up this project to be the only solution would not be possible.
C02, methane, and other greenhouse gasses are produced from multiple large sources. And tackling that problem will just not happen by only using 1 solution. Any project that large would almost require some other environmental impact. We are having trouble scaling up batteries without such a consequence.(as an example)
I am not 100% sure what you are trying to say, but I think you are implying that since no one single solution can solve the climate crisis, then olivine could be part of a portfolio of solutions that each could help a bit.
If that's what you are trying to say, then no. Olivine still does not make sense. One ton of olivine can absorb about one ton of CO2. That means that if we produce and distribute 500 million tons of olivine, we can reduce emissions by 1%. But take a look for about 5 seconds around you. See how many things made of plastic you can identify. No matter where you are, there are dozens or hundreds of them in the same room as you. Well, all the humanity produces only about 400 million tons of plastics. Probably thousands of factories churn out plastics day and night, employing millions of people. If you replicate that in order to produce olivine, it's going to take decades, all for the ultimate result of reducing emissions by 1%. Does that make sense?
I can recite for you right now 20 things that can have a much bigger impact and require much less effort. And you can too.
First and foremost: We must reduce emissions, FAST
Secondly we need a multiple set of solutions.
And now the answer to your question.
- we as human kind of moving Gigatons of sand/aggregate every year. Part to be extract minerals/coal below them. Part to make roads, dikes, beaches etc etc.
So these quantities are already moved around.
In contrast with plastic, the olivine needs to be mined, crushed and applied.
So a lot less work as making plastics
78 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadAdmittedly we are vastly outweighed by sea life, plants and bacteria - but our sheer mass dominates Mammalia.
90% wild, 10% domesticated in 1900
Now it's the opposite and the wilds are losing.
"Were there really wild Giraffes/tigers/elephants?" Is probably a question that kid will ask in the 2150's.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arroganc...
The potential for serious positive feedbacks makes this even more important.
In light of that, it seems wise to me to try and get other plans in place to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Definitely not. It may go through a bottleneck in which humanity has to adapt or die (not for the first time, I might add), but (if anything) after the climate has stabilized and life has adapted it will be more fecund than anything -- all those new shallow seas will be totally awesome biomes.
It will take millions of years to recover from the biodiversity loss we've already put into motion. Hundreds of thousands, millions of species that just don't exist anymore. The intricate relationships from parasitism to symbiosis and everything in between, a vastly complex machine we just stomp on, cut up, blow holes in. Yep. That machine will be fine, shame about those eyebrows though.
Press X to doubt. The level of technological hubris in this statement is astonishing - we don't know that we'll be able to do this, and we can estimate that the cost of mitigation will be higher than prevention.
Very few are advocating living like acetic monks, but we absolutely need to work on including externalities into our pricing system.
I agree with this statement. But, absent technological breakthroughs, how many humans can Earth sustainably maintain? Maybe a few hundred million? We're talking about an order of magnitude decrease in population size. Are you OK to say goodbye to 9 out of every 10 people you know? Are you OK to be one of those 9 of 10 that need to die?
1. While global population growth is slowing, population is still growing. 2. There are many real problems with population decline, but that's not an excuse to just throw your hands up and assume we need endless growth.
Also, do you mean replacement rate? Sustainment birth rate is not a term in common usage.
For the record, population growth is not my highest concern, especially since it decreases with improved quality of life anyway. I simply have no patience for lazily dismissing discussion of population growth as "eco-fascism" or whatever. The truth is that a lot of our existential risks would be easier to manage with smaller global population, especially if we care about that whole global population having access to good quality of life (which we should).
This is why your detractors are calling you an eco-fascist.
People are not cows. You have no right to manage us, or our birth rate, or change us to suit you. That you can even fathom such a sentance is itself suggestive of deficiency.
If you want to change your life, please do. Attempting to force your preferences on others is unwise.
> especially if we care about that whole global population having access to good quality of life
You assume you know what makes my life good. What makes my life good is not the same thing that makes the lives of others good.
The best advice I can give you is to travel and spend time with other people who are different from yourself. What you value, others may not. What they value, you may not.
> People are not cows. You have no right to manage us, or our birth rate, or change us to suit you.
I'm not. Implying I want to manage people like cows is clear bad-faith nonsense.
The arguments of neomalthusians are not correct, because birth rates plateau in response to lots of external forces (like education, providing people access to family planning if they want it, and general quality of life) - with that said its stupid to pretend that we have the technology to sustain our current population levels with even the current distribution of lifestyles, let alone the opportunities we should be attempting to provide to all. One might call that lack of understanding "deficient".
I believe in the agency of individual people - I am against coercive reproductive policies. I understand the problematic history of movements associated with population anxiety. None of that justifies your absurd accusations.
> You assume you know what makes my life good
I'm not the one making assumptions here. What would you say of native peoples whose land is being made unlivable by the climate crisis and loss of biodiversity? Would they be "eco-fascists" for wanting the industrial world to get its shit together?
> The best advice I can give you is to travel and spend time with other people who are different from yourself. What you value, others may not. What they value, you may not.
Again, how dare you. Your condescending inflexibility is truly unreal.
To summarize - you think any discussion of human population equates to eco-fascism, regardless of context, motivation, or the ethical and scientific basis on which it is being discussed.
Is all of macroeconomics fascist because it talks about the behavior of people in groups rather than recognizing all of our unique individuality?
Is anatomy fascist because it studies our literal, physical, animal bodies?
Is all regulation fascist because it constrains our individual freedom in favor of collective good? Even workplace safety regulations? Even pure food and drink regulations? Even regulations against environmental damage that affects future generations?
If there's no room to talk about collective things at all, then your ideological bubble is small enough to suffocate you (or in this case, everyone).
> The arguments of neomalthusians are not correct, because birth rates plateau in response to lots of external forces
And attempting to engineer those things to an end of changing birth rates is starkly dangerous territory, nor will a pattern always hold. Not all cultures have less kids upon becoming more educated.
> What would you say of native peoples whose land is being made unlivable by the climate crisis and loss of biodiversity?
There was a young woman attempting to collect signatures to "stop burning the rainforest".
I asked her if she understood that those burns came from people who lived there, often the poor, who were attempting to farm.
She doubled down that it was wrong. So I asked what she would have them do instead. Would she be willing to give them different land? A different place to live?
It's easy to make "other" people sacrifice at no cost to yourself. When you have to directly compensate them, suddenly people change their tune.
"Collective good", "save the children" and so on are red herrings. Of course we want the commons to be well treated and the children safe, but how often is that action actually achieving that? How much more often is it merely control by a minority?
Green energy has been profitable for years and investment is massively outpacing even the most positive projection of a decade ago.
> There's no reason to believe we can successfully run away from all the problem's technology's caused with more technology
There is actually a lot of reason to believe we can. People were basically having the same attitude regarding food production at the beginning of the 20th century just before the Green revolution happened.
The impact of innovation has been systematically underestimated by environmentalists and climate specialist for the past thrity years. For example, the part of the IPCC scenarios dealing with it is very poor (admittedly it's also old and couldn't really anticipate investement would grow so much).
I think most people face the climate issue from a practical and moral standpoint which is fundamentaly wrong. Sadly the level of applied scientific knowledge of the general population is going down the drain so fast, it's in no way surprising.
... "innovation" is exactly what put us in this position to begin with. It's a losing battle, whatever comes is accepted as the new default standard of living, we'll always want more
I know it's hipe to pile up on the modern world but I quite enjoy hunger being a solvable issue despite the population rising to unheard of before numbers, having eridacated or significantly reduced the impact of most of the nastiest diseases and education and well being steadily rising throughout the world. I don't understand how so many people got convinced that the solution is wallowing in sorrow and selfpity and advocating for a return to the dark age.
Burning fossil fuel IS _the_ thing that brought us here. There is no innovation without fossil fuel, there is no growth without fossil fuel: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-correlation-between-...
Plastic, transportation, medicine, food, &c. every single thing that allowed us to live like we do today is 100% fossil fuel based. Fossil fuel were a miracle, finding alternative will be extremely long and hard, if not completely impossible
> I don't understand how so many people got convinced that the solution is wallowing in sorrow and selfpity and advocating for a return to the dark age.
Nobody is advocating for that, it's not a solution, it's the reality we'll be facing soon, even if you don't want to. The choice is to be realistic and prepare for what's coming VS continuing business as usual
> I quite enjoy hunger being a solvable issue despite the population rising
Are you sure about that ? That as many people suffering of hunger _right now_ that there were inhabitants in the whole fucking world in 1800
> having eridacated or significantly reduced the impact of most of the nastiest diseases
All fun an games until bacteria started becoming antibiotic resistant: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378521/
The very thing that allowed us to live like we do now is coming to bite our asses
We have clean energy sources. Alternative are already there for the most polluting usage: nuclear power, wind and solar, electric propulsion. You are stuck thirty years in the past and arguing for us to go further back.
> Are you sure about that?
Of course I’m sure about that. Production has been above demand for decades. The issue is instability and logistic. We have the technical means to feed everyone and hunger affects an infinitely smaller proportion of the world than 200 years ago (population was multiplied by 8 since 1800).
> The choice is to be realistic and prepare for what's coming VS continuing business as usual
No one is advocating for continuing business as usual. Some are advocating strongly for curbing everyone freedom and accepting making everyone life worse to conform to their moral standards. Others want to actually tackle the problem like we have done for every other one: by working on finding and developing appropriate solutions which clearly do exist.
> All fun an games until bacteria started becoming antibiotic resistant
It’s still fun and game. The issue is broad antibiotic use in farming and poor economic return for companies working on antibiotic and despite that we still have effective cure.
Obviously we need to do lots of things.
And also, what about fertilizer? Right now we're using it to grow too much corn to feed to cows and burn in cars. I'm saying we should do less of that.
I suspect that if we electrify transport, there will be more electricity, and we could have more travel overall with night trains, etc. So I’m not sure it has to be less consumption overall. Eating like a pig (which I wouldn’t recommend), but vegan food has less carbon footprint, for example. So “less electricity, less meat, less travel and fewer people” makes sense, but I’m hoping it won’t be necessary.
That and much more will be soon if we don’t change many things fast, but so many of those things are as simple as teaching people to cook dahl (it’s so simple, even I can do it).
Those are miracles that good advertisers pull off every week, but so far, they are focused on getting more giant trucks on the road and pretending hybrid engines are good enough. They are fighting for milk and beef and airlines, while alternatives use amateurs who keep making blatant mistakes.
It's not a population problem. It's a consumption problem. The number of people consuming is only one variable of the equation, and it is neither the easiest, fastest, most attainable nor the most ethical one to adjust.
There are a lot of low hanging fruit we could tackle with willing policymakers, before depopulation has to be even considered.
[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...
> In 2015, around half the emissions of the richest 10 percent - people with net income over $38,000 - are linked to citizens in the US and the EU
Now the parts of the world who got us here in the first place are burning through the remaining CO2 budget, with no regard for these regions, while pointing fingers at third world nations.
It's a sad joke, and nobody's laughing.
> There's one sure strategy for beating climate change and no one dares speak it out loud.
You also did not dare but I can do it for you, birth rate limitation and perhaps suicide. There is a reason people don’t dare say it.
That is complete and utter nonsense. Education and access to family planning are none of these things.
Think about that. To arrest climate change we really need to bring CO2 emissions down nearly 100%, and the greatest worldwide economic pause in living memory only brought it down 6%.
The only thing that can possibly solve this problem is improved technology.
Your electricity usage doesn't go to people. Residential electricity use is ~20%. It's not your air conditioner.
Meat doesn't even enter into calculations. While it consumes biomass, changes to feed easily offset it's greenhouse gas output.
And, as the above shows, it's not people living their lives that causes global warming. It's not people in their homes or going on vacation or even leaving the tap running or the AC on a bit much.
You could, as a person, do all of the things and convince your neighbors to do them to.. and you would change almost nothing.
Stop buying junk, buy less, and push the commercial and office sectors to fix their behavior. Stop sending entire planes to move a 2 or 3 people.
There's only one bottom line, CO2 and methane in the atmosphere must decrease. That means real carbon storage that outweighs the oil that's pumped. Preferably with less human and animal suffering.
Electricity is shifting massively towards renewable production so there really is no need to consume less of it (and we need more anyway - electrifying the part of the planet without electricity is a very significant gain in quality of life).
Less meat is also significantly engaged. Consumption is rising because the population is rising.
Meanwhile, we need effective solution now not in thirty years so any things which reduce the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere is good to take.
> There's one sure strategy for beating climate change and no one dares speak it out loud.
No idea of what you are talking about. What you are pushing is sadly the only thing we hear about as most environmentalists in the west are actually looking to force people to change lifestyle because of what they believe to be morally right rather than solve our actual issues. I wish we had more people working on solutions and less people proselytizing their new religion but well, that's how it is.
Anything less than net-zero carbon will cause catastrophe. So unless you want to reduce to 0, your strategy won't work.
OTOH, net zero is possible with other strategies. For example, switch to zero-carbon electricity generation, switch from fossil fuels to electricity for 98% of the carbon sources and use carbon capture to offset the remaining 2%.
We have a few interested jurisdictions and now are working on solving logistics to ensure deployment isn’t half assed.
We put in the atmosphere roughly 50 billion tons of CO2-equivalent per year. About half is removed by forests and the ocean, but we are still talking tens of gigatons.
Humankind produces very few things in gigatons per year numbers. Obviously (and sadly) CO2 is one of them. Coal, petroleum and natural gas are part of this family too, multiple gigatons each.
There are 4 agricultural crops that we produce in gigatons per year: sugar cane, corn, rice and wheat.
And then there's cement and iron. About 4 gigatons and 2 gigatons per year each. Cement is mixed with sand, gravel and crushed stone to produce concrete. We make about 30 gigatons of concrete per year.
Everything else we make is in numbers less than 1 GT/year. The next 2 things are fertilizers and plastics, maybe about 0.5 GT/year.
I'm saying all these things to set the scene for the proposed olivine use.
What is the idea here? That we will create an entirely new industry that will produce a new material (olivine) in quantities larger than anything any other industry produces, with the few exceptions mentioned above? All the industries I mentioned did not spring overnight, they had been around for hundreds of years.
Is the idea to create a new industry that grows at triple digits every year for a few decades? Because if this is not the idea, then I don't think this whole thing would make a dent.
I apologize for sounding a bit brusque, but I don't see how this thing makes any sense from the numbers point of view. These guys in the article are talking about 500 m3. How do you get from 500 m3 to billions of m3? Billions per year.
If that's what you are trying to say, then no. Olivine still does not make sense. One ton of olivine can absorb about one ton of CO2. That means that if we produce and distribute 500 million tons of olivine, we can reduce emissions by 1%. But take a look for about 5 seconds around you. See how many things made of plastic you can identify. No matter where you are, there are dozens or hundreds of them in the same room as you. Well, all the humanity produces only about 400 million tons of plastics. Probably thousands of factories churn out plastics day and night, employing millions of people. If you replicate that in order to produce olivine, it's going to take decades, all for the ultimate result of reducing emissions by 1%. Does that make sense?
I can recite for you right now 20 things that can have a much bigger impact and require much less effort. And you can too.