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deptstoremook posted:If we're talking purely in terms of the environment, the 20,000ish years of preindustrial nomadic and agri-culture had a minor impact on the environment when compared to 300 years of industrialized production. And yet we've got people here who literally think that more industrialization is the answer. Narbo posted:Just wanted to add a bit about competing factors - We can expect certain improvements in energy conversion efficiency which will deliver social and economic development at a lower "cost" per capita, perhaps up to a doubling of overall life-cycle efficiency. Human population is also expected to double though, and it's not a given that efficiency upgrades will reach the areas that require them most over a reasonable time frame. Exactly this. Resource productivity per unit of GDP is a ubiquitous measure of the progress towards sustainability - efficiency is basically the entire rationale behind "green economies". BUT it describes relative reductions, not absolute reductions in resource use. If you look instead at environmentally efficient well-being (i.e. not GDP but literacy, life expectancy and income; or "life satisfaction" as the Happy Planet Index uses) then some developing countries are doing very well. By this account, Costa Rica should be our model to emulate.
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Jan 7, 2012 20:27
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Balnakio posted:What is the answer then? It seems you are pushing for a return to pre-industry, what do you suppose we do with the other 6.5 billion people who will be unable to eat in this scenario? Massive renewable high tech industrialization is the only way to reliably support the whole planet while fighting climate change. The 3rd world is not going to stop it push for westernization no matter how much we crow about the environment. People tend to get caught up in the whole equity issue while failing to consider the difference between needs and wants.  These are regressions of HDI and primary energy, carbon emissions from 1975 to 2005 (Source: Steinberger & Roberts / Ecological Economics 70 (2010) 425-433). Notice the decoupling of human well-being and resource use around 50-100GJ Energy / 1-2T carbon. We can all live perfectly well on resources that are well within the limits of the biosphere, IPCC scenarios included. Rich countries just gotta degrow; then we need absolute caps on all resources, including population (it is a key IPAT identity after all). Tough decisions have to be made, but they may be done with a minimum of regressive policies while using market mechanisms (see Prosperity Without Growth). Massive renewable high tech industrialization would spell disaster for the planet. Besides Jevon's paradox, there is a strong correlation between energy use and environmental impact. Myotis fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Jan 8, 2012 |
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Jan 8, 2012 00:59
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duck monster posted:Its peak-fish that worries me I prefer to think about peak-resource in general. Phosphorous be bad though, being an essential ingredient for life and all: Isaac Asimov posted:...I am suggesting, though, that while we try to cope with the inevitable disappearance of coal, oil, wood, space between people, and other things that are vanishing as population and per capita power requirements mount recklessly each year, we had better add the problem of disappearing phosphorous to the list, and do what we can to encourage sewage disposal units which process it as fertilizer rather than dump it as waste - or to mine the ocean floor. Extra reading Myotis fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Aug 12, 2012 |
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Aug 12, 2012 15:49
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Lets look at some numbers and scenarios! Source. Assume first of all that we take a cumulative budget of global CO2 emissions required to meet the IPCC's 2 degree goal (going with the "high" budget). Now make assumptions for the growth rate in emissions and peaking date in non-annex 1 countries: 2025 for example, to allow for a reasonable level of development. What is left in the budget for annex 1 nations? Just calculate the area under the graph:  1. For both scenarios, including the somewhat more optimistic (b) graph, the reductions necessary are unprecedented. Take a look at historical CO2 mitigation over the last 50 years. Recessions, oil shocks, the soviet block collapse, coal to gas switching, French nuclear development: none have come close to the steep lines on those graphs. 2. Annex 1 countries should have peaked two years ago. 3. This CO2 budget has a 38–48% chance of not exceeding 2°C. 4. The paper was published in 2010. Emissions have since caught up from the 2009 dip - and actually exceeded original projections (it seems countries have been building their way out of recessions with massive infrastructure development). 5. Nothing other than a prolonged period of planned austerity will really work.
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Aug 26, 2012 11:48
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Quantum Mechanic posted:I've linked it in this thread before but as an example, Australia could move to 100% renewable energy in 10 years with a cost, over a 30 year time frame, lower than continuing to rely on fossil fuels. This is without any appreciable drop in standard of living. Common misconception: per capita GDP = standard of living. There are plenty of well-being indicators that have no statistical relationship with carbon emissions (beyond minimum thresholds). I could imagine, for instance, a de-growing economy (in absolute terms) with increasing employment, health and education. We don't have to "pay" for climate change with our standard of living. We just need the courage to imagine a different mode of living.
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Mar 20, 2013 22:24
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crazypenguin posted:Hmm, sort of agree. But rather than talking about how we'll have to make sacrifices, we should be talking about accurately pricing externalities. Pricing externalities, in this case carbon emissions, requires a subjective, value-laden view on biophysical quantities. The climate helps us here - thanks to the "robust near-linear relationship between global warming and cumulative CO2 emissions" - we simply need to chose an acceptable level of warming and distribute the carbon budget accordingly. However note that pacific island states strongly favour 1.5 degrees rather than 2, and expect the latter target to shift again as the difficulty of achieving it becomes apparent, so accurately pricing externalities is still somewhat fraught. But to get to my point, I suspect fully assigning this task to the market is fundamentally an uncertain venture: 1. The principal advantages of allocating emissions rights though the market are in efficiency (least cost mitigation) and (as you emphasise) choice. Latterly, we must recognise that every long-haul flight now constrains choice in the future by removing a portion of the carbon budget that may be safely emitted by all present and future persons. As noted earlier in the thread, concerns over future constraints on choice are washed away by discounting - i.e. by assuming an improvement in technological capacity. Suffice to say therin lies a question mark (perhaps in thermodynamic terms, as well as the social desirability of say geo-engineering), not to mention the ethical dimensions of discounting mitigation costs. 2. Markets also assume all interactions are equal (pareto improving). This amounts to weighing up "luxury" emissions (on positional goods, for instance) against emissions that may be necessary for basic needs and development (such as the construction of healthcare & sanitation facilities). This is the trade-off that concerns me, since I would very much expect a market based system to facilitate business as usual for the wealthy, albeit at a greater cost that will likely recovered by means of grandfathering or spending elsewhere, as the political economy of such things go. Meanwhile we risk commensurating necessary emissions with superfluous emissions, with consequences for inequality across social, geographic and intergenerational space. 3. Concerning efficiency, I haven't thought about this in much detail (perhaps someone can help me flesh this out?), but price theory assumes interactions at the margin: i.e. incremental change. Mitigation requires non-marginal, radical change (beyond 10% per year reductions in emissions for high emitters). Throw in business and investment cycles and you find a significant portion of future emissions are already "committed". To illustrate, a coal power plant built now will continue emitting for 20-30 years; similarly, airports and planes are hard to retrofit and more or less commit us to a certain level of emissions. If we don't stop building these things, you can throw price theory out of the window, as the cost of carbon will rapidly fluctuate as assets become stranded and certain technologies prove underwhelming or overly expensive (carbon capture). My feeling is the market will neatly disguise these issues until they manifest as a rude awakening that we don't have enough emissions left to smoothly transition based on current technologies. Consequently the temperature target will be re-framed as "economically implausible" and costs socialised to Bangladesh et al. Non-market based solutions: strict quotas on an individual & national level, ban certain high-emitting technologies and practices, and introduce a timetable for incremental efficiency standards for appliances & vehicles (which by the way I think most companies will prefer to the uncertainty of a fluctuating carbon price). Thoughts?
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Oct 11, 2014 21:07
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Radbot posted:Why should I, as an American, give a poo poo about raising the Global Poor's wages when mine are decreasing? Because the deregulation of Western labour rights, exploitation of the natural environment and alienation of the global poor are all manifestations of the same problem: a sophisticated and concerted war being conducted against all of us on behalf of a transnational class of political and economic elites.
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Oct 15, 2014 21:25
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blowfish posted:just... electrify everything and build low-carbon power stations. That's like 90% of the problem solved for the mid term. It's a problem of inertia and timing. Energy efficiency improvements can be implemented with immediate effect, generating demand reduction and reducing emissions. The immediacy comes from bringing in progressively tighter efficiency standards so that better vehicles, appliances and so on filter through the economy as they are purchased. Perhaps the most powerful efficiency gains are to be made at the point of consumption (i.e. how people interact with energy services, rather than the energy throughput of the services themselves). Decarbonising the power supply is a long term game. Existing power plants are locked into investment cycles and thus committed emissions. New power plants take decades to commission and build. To me it makes sense to simultaneously cut demand through efficiency standards and "finding better ways to live", while rolling out a low-carbon supply. Placing all bets on the latter seriously constrains your future choices (e.g. to CCS), due to aforementioned inertia and the cumulative effect of CO2.
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Jan 5, 2015 20:16
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Trabisnikof posted:I guess if giving poor people access to clean water, fresh foods, healthcare and vastly improved economic growth conditions is "bad" in your books then we shouldn't burn all the fossil fuels we can. Because you can't give those things to the poor people of the world without fossil fuels. Denying the poor people of the world access to cheap energy just because we've smugly decided it's no longer "cool" to have economic development and cheap energy, well....that's your idea not mind. This line of argument is essentially based on a spurious correlation between economic growth, energy consumption and fossil fuel use on the one hand, and life expectancy, educational achievement and access to basic needs and services on the other. From what we understand, certain levels of energy consumption (as well as inevitable fossil fuel emissions, particularly in hard to treat sectors like agriculture) are necessary for the latter development outcomes, but beyond a certain threshold of infrastructural development, human well-being within societies becomes a more complex issue of distribution, justice and prevailing expectations of 'the good life' shaped within a socio-cultural space. Thinking about development patterns more broadly, global inequalities of material consumption do not represent distinct stages of development in historical time. Feeding low-cost energy to the world's poor is not going to alleviate social inequalities perpetuated by unequal exchange relations, repressive political regimes, military conflict and the systematic undermining of labour and environmental rights by the free movement of international capital.
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Jan 20, 2015 14:06
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This seems to be a relatively new thing (but I suppose not unexpected). Here's what I could find: https://www.skepticalscience.com/kevin-cowtan-debunks-christopher-booker-temp-conspiracy-theory.html And the data stations that 'don't exist' in South America can be found here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datatools/findstation
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Jan 28, 2015 09:59
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Trabisnikof posted:Yes? But that doesn't mean the scientific consensus is that if we follow business as usual the apocalypse will happen either. If you're talking about the likes of Richard Tol, Nordhaus and other climate economists fond of their welfare optimisation models, these are full of nifty tricks that smooth out impacts to make a 'clean' cost-benefit analysis (high discount rates, utility functions and Negishi welfare weights). Neoclassical economics has trouble with non-marginal problems and in my view has very little to say about the seriousness of climate change.
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Jan 30, 2015 10:11
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I feel the technical issues with nuclear reactors, waste recycling and management, and so on are eminently surmountable. Instead, what we have in my country (UK) is a very unfavourable political economy: a small number of private utilities with a known history of cartel behaviour, a weak energy regulator, a pro-austerity government and opposition desperate for private infrastructural investment, and a political system highly susceptible to industrial and financial interests. Nuclear energy seems to me to have all the features of a state-private venture ripe for skimming off public money: a very limited and specialised number of suppliers (reducing competition), highly risky financials (leading to guaranteed strike prices), and the very long lead time of construction and maintenance (locking in consumers and allowing decommissioning to be ultimately offloaded on to the public). As someone working on climate change mitigation, it seems to me an expensive distraction that (in the case of the UK) wont lead to a substantial impact on our carbon budget and will divert limited public funds (as well as attitudes) away from needed investments in electricity distribution, grid resilience and demand reduction, ultimately paving the way for cost reductions in the renewable sector.
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Mar 3, 2015 10:45
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Av027 posted:To contribute: Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels is the goal. Nuclear, renewables like solar and wind, etc are all productive ways to accomplish this, but I don't think we have the time to wait for these, both from an implementation standpoint (nuclear power plants take ~5-7 years for the construction phase alone), and from a maturation standpoint (solar efficiency improvements). We're dangerously close to, if not beyond the point of no return (see: positive feedback loops), which means that, putting aside the lack of political will, while such efforts are laudable, and necessary, they aren't the timely solution we need to attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole we're in with as little damage done as possible. These two strategies (decarbonisation & energy demand reduction) are complementary. A massive effort to reduce energy demand in the global North - through more efficient technologies, infrastructures and changing social norms - generates the carbon space to allow slower, supply-side changes to occur. This seems to be the only way to stay within budget (temperature change is driven by cumulative emissions, i.e. the area under the curve). Nuclear probably has a role to play, but given practical rates of deployment in these supply side technologies, energy demand reduction is the key to a 2oC future.
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Nov 3, 2015 17:28
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