We have put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to melt the icecaps.
The only thing worth doing now is converting everything to nuclear so we can scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere before industrial society becomes impossible.
In short: even if we get the most fervent dreams of de-growth and live like cavewomen starting tomorrow we've still got a million years of global warming before we're back to pre-industrial levels.
Even if we were to not use a single drop of oil tomorrow and start putting nuclear powered fans to capture CO2 everywhere, the biodiversity would still be collapsing. Climate change is only a portion the problem of the destabilisation of our environment as a whole.
When need to reduce our energy consumption and our footprint on the environment. That means roughly less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and the very low-tech "more trees". "AI for Y" is just a distraction...
"It is not possible to support the Rome city population without the empire and its corresponding technologies and institutions."
Same argument, but perhaps you now imagine a slightly different outcome.
The piece that "gives way" is (of course, as any historian or anthropologist will attest) that the population size...... fluctuates. Generally the process isn't too too fun for people who find themselves in those populations.
I can only assume you are living in a mud hut, with no personal transportation, and you walked to a public library to use their computer so you could make this comment.
Everyone wants to talk about reducing other people’s consumption.
Out of all the countless times you've surely seen this particular argument play out on the internet, have you ever seen it go somewhere productive?
"Yet you participate in society, curious!" is not a productive response to the suggestion "We should improve society somewhat"
Either we do this voluntarily and as orderly as possible, or it just happens for us. Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness of the impending situation our species is going to be facing.
> Either we do this voluntarily and as orderly as possible, or it just happens for us. Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness of the impending situation our species is going to be facing.
I think it's a pretty natural reaction against the relentless push of this false choice by people who cannot imagine a third way that actually makes life better.
Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness that there are other options besides enforced poverty.
>Either we do this voluntarily and as orderly as possible, or it just happens for us. Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness of the impending situation our species is going to be facing.
Or we use the fact we can still run an industrial society to build CO2 scrubbers using nuclear energy to power them, keeping our improving our living standards while fixing our mistakes.
It's quite likely to be a far better use of those resources to invest them in tree planting initiatives if your goal is to sequester carbon.
But if you want to satiate your techno-lust a technological solution to some of our climate problems may lie in the form of space based optical systems that reduce the amount of sunlight from falling on glaciers and the poles.
This simply opens a "hole" for new trees to grow up around them. It's not that any one tree holds carbon forever, it's that an acre of forest in dynamic equilibrium holds a lot more stored carbon.
When people suggest planting trees, the process isn't one-and-done. It's actually re-afforestation, where the land is permanently forested. Otherwise yes, if you cut down all the trees and then also prevent anything from growing back in its place, then of course you're undoing future benefits.
There is also 'mild' re-afforestation, where you simply increase the equilibrium amount of stored biomass in a landscape. You can plant 20-40 trees per acre in agricultural landscapes (this actually improves crop yield if you choose the right species, search for "farmer's trees"), or re-green suburbs that have lost their vegetation cover over time.
These projects are less stark than Atacama-desert-to-Amazon-rainforest, so many folks will neglect the possibility entirely and therefore conclude that "the only solution is to green deserts." :-\
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It's also probably related to cultural biases that view deserts as useless, worthless, and most important uninhabitable spaces. However if you actually try to green a desert, you'll suddenly find lots of terribly inconvenient "desert people" actually do live there, and oppose you destroying their home and displacing them. See the real reason behind building "The Line" in Saudi Arabia.
It is fair to point out that people in the third world that already live on "less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and more trees" choose to ramp up their consumption of those things as soon as they can afford to. The Chinese for example probably have more cars per capita than the US did when its GDP per capita was what China's is now -- and mopeds and motorcycles (and bicycles if my hours spent watching Youtube videos of urban outdoor environments in China are any indication) are banned in the Tier 1 cities: to travel on the roads, you have to have a car or ride a bus -- and the privately-owned cars vastly outnumber the buses just like in any US city.
And the Chinese eat many times more meat than they used to.
It is fair to point those things out because it is evidence that living on "less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and more trees" really sucks and that it is possible for us to overdo our response to climate change and ocean acidification.
"less" doesn't mean "none", it's not hard to find plenty of evidence of better living standards without car dependency or smaller average houses compared to the US for instance. Active mobility is good for your health, so is a moderated consumption of meat. Lots of benefits to organizing society better while respecting the finiteness of all our resources.
It's always the same rhetoric with your kind, you pretend to fight for the poor, when all you really want is freedom to keep on grabbing as much as possible for yourselves.
You'd be better off nuking the rich, they are the ones who are actually producing the bulk of the CO2.
The debate on degrowth isn't whether a Somalian family should have access to a decent home, healthcare, clothing, enough food etc. The answer is a very obvious yes.
The debate is whether a middle class American family really should own 2 trucks, live in a 200sqm house and eat that much meat. But you always make it about the poor.
Tell that to Alberta. Obsessed with rewriting this truth and positioning efforts to reverse the damage that’s been done in the search of short term profits.
Yep. Wind turbines are ugly and can't be built in scenic areas... but I spent my childhood in the foothills there canoe camping with my parents looking at clearcuts, cutlines, oil and gas installations everywhere. And "oil wells in a farm field with the mountains in the background" is a cliche photo/painting/emblem of Alberta since forever, because y'know, somehow an oil well installation is "nice" but a wind turbine is not.
Somehow natural gas flares and pulp mills are okay set against a scenic mountain valley, but a wind turbine is a blight.
These people are broken in the head.
(I live in Ontario these days, but right now in a hotel in Jasper after a day of spring skiing... it's painful to come back to this province sometimes.)
My neighbour is also from the foothills and lives in Ontario now. One of my favourite people, something about the foothills…
Yeah it’s sad, and that’s an amazing point you make. It’s funny when i hear people complain about carbon tax, particularly from Alberta. You know what cuts the tax? Remove the carbon from the price of a kWh. But no, let’s burn coal and gas and have one of the highest carbon per kWh in the country and just complain instead.
Alberta: 778g / kWh
BC: 38.1g
MB: 25.7g
ON: 49.9
SK is just as bad as Alberta, and the territories but that’s mostly because of where they source their energy due to their remote location, not some political decision.
Nuclear is way too slow and carbon intensive. Solar and wind with battery storage make way more sense from every rational angle. They are cheaper, they are faster, they have less embedded carbon, they have far less tosk, etc. Nuclear has been getting hyped and pushed hard by big money interests but the truth is its time has come and gone abd it no longer makes any aense.
I've been hearing this for 20 years and I'll be hearing it until we die from global warming. The only thing that wind and solar have done is make the grid more unstable and make a lot of money for speculators on the power market.
There is a reason why every country which has reduced nuclear power has increased its green house gas emissions.
In just 2023 China added 216 GW of solar capacity which directly offset ~500 TWh of coal power per year and absolutely dwarfing the rate not just China but the entire world is bring Nuclear power plants online per year.
Wind and solar have significantly reduced carbon emissions across most western countries. Nuclear doesn’t scale well due to capacity factor falling with daily and seasonal changes in demand. France sitting next to non nuclear Germany can have lots of nuclear but that’s little different that some US states having more nuclear while connected to other states with less. What matters is the overall grid not arbitrary map locations.
Storing or curtailing wind/solar simply costs less than nuclear at 50% capacity factor, so that’s the only way to make real progress.
You've been hearing it for 50 years, and the project has been going on that long with regular improvements in cost and output.
Every country is different, but wind and solar have scaled from practically nothing ("proving viability") 20 years ago to a majority of new installs 10 years ago to a significant chunk of all generation now.
Wiping out already-built nuclear power is like junking your car two months into a 96-month loan because you don't like the gas bill. Just... why? Sunk costs have generated nearly-free returns. You're still going to pay those costs, in dollars and in CO2, whether you run a nuclear reaction or not. The worst-plausible-case-scenario meltdown has been substantially mitigated with the extant designs, and some of the new designs that are probably never getting built would be difficult to melt down even if you attempted it.
Shutting down existing plants as Germany did is a very different proposition than scaling up a nuclear buildout in 2024. Renewables and various grid improvements are just way cheaper and more justifiable in the short term, and have none of the baggage attached, and have none of the need for state support attached. It would take a gargantuan effort right now to mass-produce reactors cheaply enough that they could even begin to compete with renewables.
Getting rid of nuclear is stupid but so is adding new nuclear. Firmed renewables with lithium ion batteries and pumped hydro makes the most financial sense since the 2020s, especially in the US which has less seasonal solar resources than Europe.
I’d love to know how it’s possible to supply peak demand in the UK on a still day in January purely from renewables and storage. Especially if you consider that demand is also going to have to increase massively to decarbonise heating, transport etc
Europe is more challenging than US due to lower average solar irradiance per sqm combined with more seasonal variability in solar availability. Probably overbuilding wind in diversified locations since the correlation drops off with the square of distance I believe. Denmark's grid would be a template of what to expect. Transmissions with neighbors would help a lot given the decorrelation.
This is extremely dishonest unless you carefully and methodically link that high cost to renewables. Iowa is a 60% wind grid with cheaper prices than the national average. Does that one data point make wind energy good, by your logic? This is a serious topic that deserves more than silly internet debate tactics.
The short answer is trivially, but the longer answer is renewables include hydro and biomass not just wind both of which inherently provide long term storage. Having excess solar or wind on Monday means you curtail biomass and hydro for Tuesday. Excess power on Monday through Friday and you have a great deal ready to ramp op over the weekend. 0.01% edge cases don’t need to have anything special just as long as the general case is oversupply.
At the same time Solar is always going to produce some power and the more excess generation you have to charge batteries and curtail hydro etc the higher that minimum worst case generation becomes.
Net result is you don’t need to build some huge battery bank to store energy from sunny days in the summer, you just ‘over build’ cheap generation and eventually you have no need for seasonal storage.
Solar still generates power on cold days. But also, wind and hydro work great even on cold days. And of couse, storage. C'mon. This is a solved issue. "Renewables don't work because it's cold/dark/etc." has been answered for decades.
Are you talking about the typical nuclear plant which is often bespoke, or also considering modular reactor units which have (finally!) seen recent development?
> lithium ion batteries... makes the most financial sense
Correct me if I'm wrong but li-ion is still cost prohibitive for large scale energy storage on the grid. Things like V2G etc can help but those are owned by the drivers/consumers and not the state/electricity corps.
This is the thing about nuclear: the promise of "cheap" power has been made since the 1960s, but very rarely delivered on, and it is not coming down yet, while everyone can see the massive cost collapse for renewables that has already happened and more reasonably project it into the future.
Modular units are firmly in the "I'll believe it when I see it, meanwhile keep the renewables building as fast as possible" category.
(also, everyone has forgotten about proliferation. The fighting around Zhaprozhia did remind a few people about the security risks, though)
> This is the thing about nuclear: the promise of "cheap" power has been made since the 1960s, but very rarely delivered on, and it is not coming down yet, while everyone can see the massive cost collapse for renewables that has already happened and more reasonably project it into the future.
Part of this is because of how absolutely f-ed up research in fission has been over the decades.
There is this graph if you can find it showing how much money was estimated to be spent on R&D, vs how much was actually spent. Basically by the 1980s or 90s, if investments were made, nuclear would've been much cheaper today. There's a bunch of things more, but it's not that nuclear is inherently expensive more than the fact that you need to spend money first to save it.
Modular reactor units only cover the least expensive part of nuclear power plants. They still need fuel enrichment, cooling towers, turbines, complex plumbing, containment buildings, huge workforces, security perimeters, spent fuel pools, dry casks, etc.
People play on the words ‘reactor’ but modular reactors themselves don’t actually solve any pressing issues and at least currently just cost more.
It's a pretty large world. I'm okay with some entities putting time into making nuclear cheaper and more viable and adding a few new plants to add to our general power grid resilience. I think that could be worthwhile.
But yeah, the people who are trying to claim that nuclear is the only viable renewable energy solution to climate change haven't been paying attention to renewable energy advances in the past 10-15 years, and/or have been ignoring the massive budget and time overruns pretty much all nuclear plants have had in the past couple of decades, especially in developed nations that are trying to make sure they're built in a safe way.
You are choosing to completely ignore reality. Many entire countries are moving to entirely renewable. My home and EVs are powered almost entirely by our home solar and batteries, and I live in Michigan.
We would be powered 100% by solar but our laws here allow the utility to limit the size of our system.
Sorry but you're stuck in the past and have failed to update with new information. Pull up a graph of renewables levelized cost of electricity, and lithium ion grid scale storage cost per kWh, over the last 20 years, and note change. Renewables are contributing massively today, look at ERCOT or CAISO today. CAISO has about 15 GWh of storage deployed already and will deploy more soon. It's not theoretical. And this contribution of renewable to the grid will grow exponentially as costs keep declining and funding keeps increasing. You were absolutely correct 20 years ago where renewables used to be more expensive and grid scale storage didn't exist, but costs have changed.
The only thing worth doing now is converting everything to nuclear so we can scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere before industrial society becomes impossible.
In short: even if we get the most fervent dreams of de-growth and live like cavewomen starting tomorrow we've still got a million years of global warming before we're back to pre-industrial levels.