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I dont know where else to post this and it doesnt seem like it belongs in the climate change threads or the energy generation thread. I am asking about peak oil, peak helium, rare earth metals, and all those things. I have heard that we're pretty much running out and when we run out, that's it, our civilization will not be possible any more. Our civilization is built on cheap access to raw materials and soon we won't have those. I have heard that sustainable reneweable energy is impossible and we're pretty much screwed because we need fossil fuels, but those are running out. Sorry if this isnt coherent, I'm not knowledgeable enough to state my question more smartly. But is any of this true? I'm not asking about climate change and what it will do to us, just the raw materials and ores and all those things.
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# ? Feb 10, 2017 06:07 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 08:07 |
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We require more Vespene gas.
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# ? Feb 10, 2017 11:19 |
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Peak Oil is real near term possibility, but they're is plenty of coal and natural gas still out there. Rare earth materials aren't actually that rare, they're only mined in China because that's where is cheapest. But the more important resources that are in real trouble is fresh water and arable land, and climate change is not gonna do nice things to either.
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# ? Feb 10, 2017 12:37 |
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Rare earth metals aren't rare as in uncommon, they are rare as in "not concentrated". They aren't mined very many places because no one had any use for them till very recently. When people talk about shortages they mean "yearly supply won't meet yearly demand in time" and not that it will be absolutely depleted. (although in general that applies to everything, there isn't really any mineral that is possible to actually "run out of" meaningfully on earth, it's always "run out of at X price point" )
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# ? Feb 10, 2017 15:15 |
As far as I can say, we're getting pretty close to "Peak Everything". It's important to add that this is not because we run out of resources (like no more uranium etc. on the whole planet), but because we have already exploited the most concentrated sources of them. What's left is less concentrated, ie. we're wasting more and more of the available energy to gather, concentrate, and process the lovely stuff we have left - and that energy is no longer available for the rest of the economy, leading to more productivity problems etc. The biggest whopper is that the same happens to our energy sources: the eroei of our global energy supply has been dropping for the last decade, because our finite supply of high-quality oil is running low - and we have to spend even more energy to get LESS energ out of the lovely kinds of oil. So yeah, you can imagine the rest. Our current use of resoures cannot and will not be maintained - thanks to basic physical laws. For graphs, more info, have a look at the 40-year update to "The Limits of Growth" or works from John Michael Greer. One of his books is Called "Green Wizardry" and describes ways to make do with less... and we will all have to do with less in the future. Edit: Just Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested), but here are a few interesting pieces of info on varying oil eroei: US produced Oil & Gas: EROEI Source 30.0 Oil and gas 1970 14.5 Oil and gas 2005 8.0 Oil discoveries Non-Us sources, imported into the US: EROEI Source 35.0 Oil imports 1990 18.0 Oil imports 2005 12.0 Oil imports 2007 So the energy return of the oil we use get more and more lovely with every year - and this absolutely fucks with the rest of our economies, even if nobody talks about it. SavageGentleman fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Feb 10, 2017 |
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# ? Feb 10, 2017 15:55 |
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What does 'enough' mean under an economic system that requires permanent growth of consumption and population? Edit to actually answer OP's question: nobody really knows if we're running headfirst into a malthusian crises of energy, food or raw material production. So far we've done a pretty good job finding alternative ways to source these things, but unless we start space mining, we're going to hit a wall, sometime this century probs. Wakko fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Feb 10, 2017 |
# ? Feb 10, 2017 18:40 |
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Space mining is a dumb nerd fantasy.
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# ? Feb 10, 2017 18:59 |
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Space mining is a dumb nerd fantasy. Only if the fantasy includes returning supplies to Earth. Leave space to the spacers, Earth to the earthers.
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# ? Feb 10, 2017 19:06 |
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Space mining is a dumb nerd fantasy. Yeah but so is the fall of man.
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# ? Feb 10, 2017 21:07 |
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If post industrial revolution history is any indication, human technology and ingenuity has more than compensated for natural resource depletion. Fears that population growth will outstrip food supply or that we will run out of oil seem completely unsupported by empirical evidence. Malthusian ideas have done enormous harm to humanity and I'm surprised that they're still so widely believed. You might find some solace in reading the writings of Julian Simon. This isn't to say we shouldn't pursue conservation, worry about inequality in resource availability, or that certain sources of energy will become too expensive to be used. Yet, outside of some cataclysmic event I see no reason to worry about natural resource scarcity writ large.
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# ? Feb 10, 2017 21:22 |
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Al Bartlett is worth examining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY
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# ? Feb 10, 2017 21:26 |
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The Al Bartlett talk is a good one, but perhaps the best part about it is that it was made in the early 1990's, and therefore many of the trends he talks about can be examined 20 years later. The price of a ski ticket at Vail's has indeed continued to grow at roughly 7% a year. But the population of Boulder has been relatively flat (as has the population of Los Angeles, which also no longer suffers from abysmal air quality), and US oil production, which had been declining sharply from 1971 to 1992, is now higher than it was when this talk was made. As far as material resources go, its worth distinguishing between consumable and non-consumable resources. Things like fossil fuels are gone once you burn them, and the only way to get more is get it out of the ground, and if it isn't there tough poo poo. Things like rare-earth metals don't disappear once they are put in a product. Lots of metals are routinely recycled. In other cases (like lithium ion batteries at present), it doesn't always make economic sense. But the stuff doesn't go away, it's just a question of 1.) how easy is it to recover material from discarded or obsolete products and 2.) how much total material needs to be in circulation based on present demand, and how does that compare with the amount currently available or the rate of extraction?
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# ? Feb 10, 2017 23:01 |
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The helium shortage is actually overblown, for what it's worth, and it's definitely not a crisis at the moment. The short version is that the US has been releasing vast quantities of helium from its strategic reserve for decades, which in turn kind of hosed up the market and any attempts at further discovery. It's absolutely a limited resource that needs to be conserved, but we're not in any near term danger of running out. Rudatron is right that the resources to be seriously concerned about in the near future are water and land. Water access and management is going to be a huge issue for the developing world and likely a major economic drag for the developed world over the next several decades.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 03:02 |
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Fish are definitely a diminishing resource. We don't harvest them in a sustainable way and so they're being depleted. Coral reefs represent a full 1/4 of global fish stocks and they're bleaching and dying due to being stressed by rising temperatures and pollution. This fucks up the food chain. Growing food and obtaining water can be fixed via technology if one has plentiful amounts of power and the right technical know how. Good luck redesigning a fish if they're all gone.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 03:32 |
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah but so is the fall of man. For what it's worth, the vast majority of species to ever exist have gone extinct.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 03:33 |
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The thing about complaining about malthus is that the real issue isn't running out, it's low availability + bad usage. So let's talk land: the about of arable land is set to fall, thanks to climate change. The global population is also rising. We also have countries that are industrializing fast, and importantly, are shifting their diet to a more western meat-heavy style. Meat consumes a lot of resources to produce little food. So we have demand going up, supply going down. That's going to lead to massive price increases, and the poorest of the world are going to have a hard time affording food, because capitalism means chasing money, so exporting to the west is gonna mean more profit, in instead of exporting to the places that really need it, on account of them having no money. That's a recipe for massive starvation, social unrest and instability, as well as a massive migration pressure, for people in the global south to move north. Here's the twist: Look at what's happened, so far, with migrants from syria. What do you think is gonna happen, when millions of environmental refugees starting showing, up at the doorsteps of other countries? This problem will hit sooner than actually running out of oil.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 04:11 |
CyclicalAberration posted:If post industrial revolution history is any indication, human technology and ingenuity has more than compensated for natural resource depletion. Fears that population growth will outstrip food supply or that we will run out of oil seem completely unsupported by empirical evidence sorry what? Did you completely miss the last posts? Going "well technology will solve everything" is not even a proper argument - it's basically a statement of faith... which becomes even less believable when the posts before you pointed out that our amazing technological solutions of the last centuiry were only possible because they were powered by the same 'free'/high eroei oil that is running out and is replaced by more and more diluted variations. And seeing how badly projects like ITER are over budget/mismanaged, the chances of fusion power coming online in any meaningful/afforbale way before our economies are buttfucked by water/soil/resource/oil shortages, climate change and its sociopolitical effects are really slim. SavageGentleman fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Feb 11, 2017 |
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 17:31 |
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SavageGentleman posted:sorry what? Did you completely miss the last posts? Going "well technology will solve everything" is not even a proper argument - it's basically a statement of faith... which becomes even less believable when the posts before you pointed out that our amazing technological solutions of the last centuiry were only possible because they were powered by the same 'free'/high eroei oil that is running out and is replaced by more and more diluted variations. And seeing how badly projects like ITER are over budget/mismanaged, the chances of fusion power coming online in any meaningful/afforbale way before our economies are buttfucked by water/soil/resource/oil shortages, climate change and its sociopolitical effects are really slim. Resources aren't running out today, they aren't running out tomorrow. There really has been few times in human history where someone can talk about society in 300,400,500 years and actually have anything meaningful to say because of the way technology reshapes the world over timeframes like that.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 18:10 |
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Blue Star posted:I dont know where else to post this and it doesnt seem like it belongs in the climate change threads or the energy generation thread. I am asking about peak oil, peak helium, rare earth metals, and all those things. I have heard that we're pretty much running out and when we run out, that's it, our civilization will not be possible any more. Our civilization is built on cheap access to raw materials and soon we won't have those. I have heard that sustainable reneweable energy is impossible and we're pretty much screwed because we need fossil fuels, but those are running out. yeah there is literally no way any western lifestyle is long-term sustainable and without unforseeable technology developments the world's either going to need to re-evaluate it's resources or let poor people starve in their millions, growing eventually to billions there is nothing more to it than that.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 18:27 |
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Spangly A posted:yeah there is literally no way any western lifestyle is long-term sustainable and without unforseeable technology developments the world's either going to need to re-evaluate it's resources or let poor people starve in their millions, growing eventually to billions I don't believe that's true, but even if it is the burden of the belt-tightening here isn't going to fall on the West, it's going fall on the Global South just like it always does. Probably in the form of mass death. Not a pretty picture.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 20:01 |
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Spangly A posted:yeah there is literally no way any western lifestyle is long-term sustainable and without unforseeable technology developments the world's either going to need to re-evaluate it's resources or let poor people starve in their millions, growing eventually to billions It's gonna be the second one.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 20:07 |
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Also 75% of greenhouse gas emissions come from countries that aren't EU or America so the whole moralizing about Western lifestyles isn't true anymore. Those countries also happen to be the best-equipped to cut emissions, and in fact they already peaked back in 2007. So when people push a belt-tightening line, what they're actually doing is foreclosing on third-world development, whether they realize it or not.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 20:12 |
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rudatron posted:Peak Oil is real near term possibility, but they're is plenty of coal and natural gas still out there. Rare earth materials aren't actually that rare, they're only mined in China because that's where is cheapest. There's plenty of oil, too, it's just not as cheap to extract.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 20:41 |
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Liquid Communism posted:There's plenty of oil, too, it's just not as cheap to extract. Peak oil is actually just a prediction about production, not supply. You can have peak oil while there's still plenty of the stuff in the ground, it just has to be so expensive to extract that we don't bother or can't afford to increase production anymore.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 22:11 |
Not really sue why some people here are dismissing my arguments with "technology will change everything and save us" and just leave it with that. Many cultures on earth have accessed resources at an unsustainable rate, rose, and then collapsed when they lost easy access to them. Even NASA is pretty sure we're running into the same trap(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists) I would even give you that we could be able to think of new substitues for most of the stuff we're running out of - but all of that depends on a ready supply of cheap, concentrated energy. And it's exactly here where we're running into massive problems. The cheap oil sources that powered our rise through the 20th century are running out and alternative energy sources are not doing so well on the eroei front - if they will ever get online. Just saying "I'm sure they will think of something" is not really a contribution to the discussion, but a way to make sure one does not need to engange with the possibility that technology will not help us out of this predicament. SavageGentleman fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Feb 11, 2017 |
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 22:24 |
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Thug Lessons posted:Also 75% of greenhouse gas emissions come from countries that aren't EU or America so the whole moralizing about Western lifestyles isn't true anymore. Those countries also happen to be the best-equipped to cut emissions, and in fact they already peaked back in 2007. So when people push a belt-tightening line, what they're actually doing is foreclosing on third-world development, whether they realize it or not. Except in many cases those greenhouse gas emissions come from factories that are exporting everything they produce to the west.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 22:30 |
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SavageGentleman posted:And it's exactly here where we're running into massive problems. The cheap oil sources that powered our rise through the 20th century are running out and alternative energy sources are not doing so well on the eroei front - if they will ever get online. By what metric are they "running out"? Like I am sure you will claim that the government and oil companies all conspire to hide the truth and you know in your heart the apocalypse is coming any minute now to punish the wicked but all the data anyone seems to actually have shows a world where fossil fuels are gonna be just fine for a very long time. Like maybe you are right and your sci-fi story about what the year 2185 or whatever is better than someone else's sci-fi story, but it's all sci-fi stories once you are talking about far flung times in the future.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 22:57 |
Owlofcreamcheese posted:By what metric are they "running out"? Like I am sure you will claim that the government and oil companies all conspire to hide the truth and you know in your heart the apocalypse is coming any minute now to punish the wicked but all the data anyone seems to actually have shows a world where fossil fuels are gonna be just fine for a very long time. What I mean is not that we're quantitavely running out of oil - far from it, governments and companies are doing everything they can to get more oil sources online. This is just the US example, but it's similar on a global scale: it's not that we have no oil left: Conventional oil (the stuff that just flows freely out of the ground, is mostly free of impurities and does not need much refining) production is declining, but unconventional sources are coming online to close this gap. But let's have a closer look on them: The 'oil' that is produced from tar sands, fracking, etc is super hard to extract, full of impurities, and not highly concentrated. We have to spend MUCH more energy and resources, money and time on it to refine it for use. Let's have a look at the energy we get from it compared to the energy we have to spend on extracting, refining, and distributing it: (short via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested) Conventional oil's best-case EROEI can be 30-50:1. So for spending 1 unit of energy, you get basically 29-49 units of energy to use on your economy. Whee! Unconventional sources: Fracking, etc. hovers at around 8:1 while Bitumen tar sands are at a glorious 3.0 EROEI ratio. That means you suddenly have to spend a shitload of work end energy just on generating energy that almost came for free before. The net return is suddenly super low - and our contemporary Western lifestyles are absolutely dependant on that not happening. The thing is that a low EROEI is adding invisible costs to every action that a fossil-powered society performs...which is one of the reasons why Western economies are super slow to recover. So if we're NOT stumbling over the final and definite technological energy solution in the next 10 years, our economies will be further weighted down by this energy issue - while climate change accelerates. It's an uncomfortable scenario because it shows few ways to uphold the status quo - but it's not the sudden apocalypse you're trying to strawman me into. Things are just getting additionally lovely: Oil will once again get pretty pricey while governments will have even less money to spend on infrastructure, healthcare, etc. and the economy regularly amputates non-vital parts of itself in the crunch between high energy/resource costs and increased automation. I'd love to see a solution for these problems that allows us to live as we'e used to, but everything I have read about fusion research (have a look at ITER: http://www.businessinsider.com/r-iter-nuclear-fusion-project-faces-new-delay-cost-overrun-les-echos-2016-5?IR=T) gives me little hope. We in Germany tried renewables, but are finding out the hard way, that renewables (via EROEI) cannot pick up the slack of fossil fuels. SavageGentleman fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Feb 11, 2017 |
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 23:39 |
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Helsing posted:Except in many cases those greenhouse gas emissions come from factories that are exporting everything they produce to the west. Not as big a factor as you probably think. China, by far both the biggest emitter and biggest exporter outside the West, embodied about 16% of its emissions in exports. Even if you take the broadest possible definition of the West and measure carbon by consumption rather than emission to account for exports, you're still not going to get a scenario where the West emits a majority of GHG.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 23:53 |
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Morbus posted:The Al Bartlett talk is a good one, but perhaps the best part about it is that it was made in the early 1990's, and therefore many of the trends he talks about can be examined 20 years later. Those examples are used more as thought experiments to illustrate the broader issues of growth. The lesson isn't specifically regarding Boulder, but rather that at some point something has got to give and the material significance of growth is often buried in rhetoric about stimulating economies and such. Sure, lots of deviations from a broad trend of growth will occur when looking at a specific place and time, but the broader point (that I've taken from this and other discussions) is that growth is unstable and surprisingly fast. It's a very back-of-the-envelope physics-y argument which I am partial to due to it's simplicity, rather than pointing to ultra-specific periods of time and space that one should watch out for.
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# ? Feb 11, 2017 23:57 |
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Thug Lessons posted:Not as big a factor as you probably think. China, by far both the biggest emitter and biggest exporter outside the West, embodied about 16% of its emissions in exports. Even if you take the broadest possible definition of the West and measure carbon by consumption rather than emission to account for exports, you're still not going to get a scenario where the West emits a majority of GHG. China and the rest of the third world have significantly more people than the West. Canada, America and Europe combined have a slightly smaller total population than all of China. If we look at carbon emmissions per capita then the US produces just over twice as much as China.
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# ? Feb 12, 2017 00:11 |
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SavageGentleman posted:This is just the US example, but it's similar on a global scale: You seem well informed enough in the rest of your post that it seems like you are trying to trick people rather than not knowing that this isn't true. World oil production hasn't followed that graph in any way that is similar.
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# ? Feb 12, 2017 00:27 |
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Helsing posted:China and the rest of the third world have significantly more people than the West. Canada, America and Europe combined have a slightly smaller total population than all of China. If we look at carbon emmissions per capita then the US produces just over twice as much as China. Sure, but that's not relevant to what I'm saying given the total level of non-Western emissions, their projected rise over the next half-century, and the point I'm making about them. It's definitely true that the West emits more than its fair share, and has historically been responsible for the bulk of emissions, but at this point it's become a global problem that will be increasingly globalized as development in places like India and Brazil ramps up. Problems like climate change and resource depletion are real, but we've long passed the point where they can simply be reduced to a moral issue of "Western lifestyles".
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# ? Feb 12, 2017 00:36 |
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Thug Lessons posted:Sure, but that's not relevant to what I'm saying given the total level of non-Western emissions, their projected rise over the next half-century, and the point I'm making about them. It's definitely true that the West emits more than its fair share, and has historically been responsible for the bulk of emissions, but at this point it's become a global problem that will be increasingly globalized as development in places like India and Brazil ramps up. Problems like climate change and resource depletion are real, but we've long passed the point where they can simply be reduced to a moral issue of "Western lifestyles". If India started using the resources per capita that the US did we'd already need to use food far better than we do or literally run out "western lifestyles" isn't a moral issue. I'm referencing the ecological footprint of western europe (and the US); which remains at a level that, if matched by China or India, would cause serious and immediate pressure on the food supply. So yes, it's a global problem. And as you specifically mentioned, talk of global resource management basically means "gently caress the third world". Is there then no benefit to establishing a new western standard of better resource use? we have the ability to develop sustainable technologies, or refining/productivity technologies, and pass them to developing nations whose only current choice is poo poo resources or none. Spangly A fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Feb 12, 2017 |
# ? Feb 12, 2017 00:46 |
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We'll run out of fish before we run out of oil, OP, but yes things are going to get pretty bad due to the whole EROEI equation and developing nations finally hitting a Malthusian wall. There won't be another Norman Borlaug and thank gently caress for that, really. Anyone who tells you technology will magically fix it and we aren't going to see billions die this century is an intellectual vegetable incapable of conceptualizing reality.
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# ? Feb 12, 2017 00:51 |
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Spangly A posted:If India started using the resources per capita that the US did we'd already need to use food far better than we do or literally run out I do think there has to be a rethinking of global resource distribution, but I don't think that's actually the same as environmental or Peak [Whatever] issues. On the former you're going to need a political solution, but on the latter I think you'll have to depend on some manner of technical solutions or essentially condemn the entire world to a level of poverty and competition for resources that essentially forecloses on the political solutions for the former.
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# ? Feb 12, 2017 01:00 |
Owlofcreamcheese posted:You seem well informed enough in the rest of your post that it seems like you are trying to trick people rather than not knowing that this isn't true. World oil production hasn't followed that graph in any way that is similar. welp, seems you're right! Crude Oil production seems to keep up on a global level for now. Knowing that the planet is finite, this will not stay like that forever, but anything that keeps us afloat a few more years hels, I guess. You were right that beyond some point, all future scenarios become science fiction. However, various scenarios activate us in different was. I guess it's easy to subscribe to the two 'common ones', i.e.a utopian one and a dystian one. Both don't really activate us as individuals - in the utopian version, all our problems will be solved by 'someone' and we don't have to do commit to any actions ourselves. In the dystopian version (we're all gonna die!), the same happens - we don't really have to act because we're all hosed anyways. But I think the scenario I've described in the posts above is different because it forces us to really do something: to consider its variables, its possible results for our lives - and to consider the changes we could implement now and in the future in order to thrive in it.
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# ? Feb 12, 2017 01:01 |
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Thug Lessons posted:Sure, but that's not relevant to what I'm saying given the total level of non-Western emissions, their projected rise over the next half-century, and the point I'm making about them. It's definitely true that the West emits more than its fair share, and has historically been responsible for the bulk of emissions, but at this point it's become a global problem that will be increasingly globalized as development in places like India and Brazil ramps up. Problems like climate change and resource depletion are real, but we've long passed the point where they can simply be reduced to a moral issue of "Western lifestyles". I guess I'm confused by how you're saying that "the whole moralizing about Western lifestyles isn't true anymore" yet you agree that "It's definitely true that the West emits more than it's fair share, and has historically been responsible for the bulk of emissions". You're absolutely right that we can't reduce a complicated like global warming issue to a single cause but that hardly exculpates the west from some very legitimate criticisms about how westerners and especially North Americans are consuming an extremely disproportionate share of the planet's resources. While we do need a global response to resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions it hardly seems unreasonable to say that the west has an additional responsibility to use resources efficiently and responsibly, given the disproportionate share of resources it consumes.
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# ? Feb 12, 2017 01:02 |
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Helsing posted:I guess I'm confused by how you're saying that "the whole moralizing about Western lifestyles isn't true anymore" yet you agree that "It's definitely true that the West emits more than it's fair share, and has historically been responsible for the bulk of emissions". You're absolutely right that we can't reduce a complicated like global warming issue to a single cause but that hardly exculpates the west from some very legitimate criticisms about how westerners and especially North Americans are consuming an extremely disproportionate share of the planet's resources. Sure, the West has an additional responsibility to take the lead on climate change and resource depletion. To some extent they're fulfilling it. As I mentioned before OECD emissions peaked in 2007 and have fallen every year since, (I think there were slight increases in 2009 and 2013 but those were offset by greater decreases in the years directly following). And over I expect that because of their immense wealth and technical development these countries are and will be the best equipped to live up to their obligations, even though those obligations are greater. The much harder issue for me, just on a technical level, is how we're going to get billions of Asians, Africans and South Americans access to basic services and general economic security without destroying planet. Getting China to even 1/3 of the US or Europe's level has already made them the largest carbon emitter on earth, so impoverishing or for that matter exterminating Westerners wouldn't be sufficient.
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# ? Feb 12, 2017 01:25 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 08:07 |
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Rime posted:Anyone who tells you technology will magically fix it and we aren't going to see billions die this century is an intellectual vegetable incapable of conceptualizing reality. Woah now, friend! I'm sure we'll just innovate our way out of trouble, everything will be just fine.
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# ? Feb 12, 2017 01:28 |