quote:

To recalibrate our focal lens, consider the following accelerating changes. The population of H. sapiens is nearly eight times larger than it was at the beginning of the fossil-fueled Industrial Age a mere 200 years ago, and it has been growing nearly 20 times faster [8]. To accommodate the explosion of humanity, over half the land surface of Earth has been substantially modified, particularly for agriculture (that most ecologically destructive of technologies). One consequence of this is the competitive displacement of non-human species from their habitats and food sources. Prior to the dawn of agriculture eight to ten millennia ago, humans accounted for less than 1%, and wild mammals 99%, of mammalian biomass on Earth. Today, H. sapiens constitute 36%, and our domestic livestock another 60%, of a much-expanded mammalian biomass, compared with only 4% for all wild species combined [9–11]. McRae et al. [12] estimate that the populations of non-human vertebrate species declined by 58% between 1970 and 2012 alone. Freshwater, marine, and terrestrial vertebrate populations declined by 81%, 36%, and 38%, respectively, and invertebrate populations fell by about 50%.

quote:

By 1997 (when annual consumption was 40% less than in 2021), humanity was already burning FFs containing about 422 times the net amount of carbon fixed by photosynthesis globally each year [15]. Between 1800 and 2021, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 48%, from 280 ppm to approximately 415 ppm.

quote:

GND proponents are appallingly tolerant of the inexplicable. They fail to address how the gigatons of already severely depleted metals and minerals essential to building so-called RE technologies will be available in perpetuity considering typical five to 30-year life spans and the need for continuous replacement [17–19]. They offer no viable workarounds for the ecological damage and deplorable working conditions, often in the Global South, involved in metal ore extraction [20,21]. Green New Dealers advance no viable solutions (technical or financial) for electrifying the many high-heat-intensive manufacturing processes involved in constructing high-tech wind turbines and solar panels (not to mention all other products in modern society) [22–25]. The waste streams generated by so-called renewables at the end of their short working lives are either ignored or assumed away, to be dealt with eventually by yet non-existent recycling processes [26–28]. Proposals for electrifying the 80% of non-nelectrical energy demand overlook crucial facts, namely that the national-scale transmission systems and grids required for electrified land transportation do not even exist today, nor is the needed build-out likely given material, energy, and financial constraints [29].

quote:

Only 19% of global final energy consumption is in the form of electricity. The other 81% is in the form of liquid fuel [31]. There are formidable obstacles to converting electricity consumption alone to so-called renewable sources

quote:

Transitioning the U.S. electrical supply away from FFs by 2050 would require a grid construction rate 14 times that of the rate over the past half century [32]. The actual installed costs for a global solar program would have totaled roughly $252 trillion (about 13 times the U.S. GDP) a decade ago [33], and considerably more today. A recent report describing what would be needed to achieve 90% “decarbonization” and electrification by 2035 neglects to mention that, in order to meet such targets, the United States would have to quadruple its last annual construction of wind turbines every year for the next 15 years and triple its last annual construction of solar PV every year for the next 15 years—only to repeat the process indefinitely since solar panels and wind turbines have average lifespans of around 15 to 30 years [34,35]. In addition, Clack et al. [36] found that one of the most cited studies on 100% electrification in the United States is error-prone and laden with untenable assumptions

quote:

Approximately 30% of industrial heating applications require temperatures below 212 ◦F (100 ◦C); 27% can be met with temperatures between 212 ◦F and 750 ◦F (100 ◦C and
400 ◦C); and 43% require temperatures above 750 ◦F (400 ◦C) [37]. Most existing RE heating technologies can supply heat only within the lowest temperature category [37]. This is highly problematic given that solar panel manufacturing requires temperatures ranging from 2700 ◦F to 3600 ◦F (1480 ◦C to 1980 ◦C) and the steel and cement manufacturing for high-tech wind turbines, hydropower plants, and nuclear plants require temperatures ranging from 1800 ◦F to 3100 ◦F (980 ◦C to 1700 ◦C).

...

In short, no RE source or system is viable if it cannot not generate sufficient energy both to produce itself (literally from the ground up) and supply a sufficient surplus for society’s end-use consumption. Currently, no so-called RE technology is in the running.

quote:

. Only a few power plants in the United States have operational battery storage, accounting for 800 MW of power capacity [56,58]. Consider that the United States consumes around 4000 terawatt-hours of electricity every year [59], or 563 times the existing battery storage capacity.

quote:

Not all vehicles and machinery used today can be powered by batteries. Small cranes, a crawler crane [64], light and some heavy-duty construction equipment, and passenger cars can be powered by batteries. However, other large cranes (used to load and unload cargo and in large construction projects, mining operations, and more), container and other large ships, airplanes, and heavy-duty trucks cannot [29,60].

quote:

To meet the anticipated primary energy demand in 2050—assuming 60% emissions reductions from 2004 levels—approximately 26,000 1-GW nuclear power plants would have
to be built. The world currently has 449, many of which are nearing the end of their lives and will soon face decommissioning [76]. The EROI and materials for facility construction and operation aside, the enormous financial costs, regulatory time frames, social opposition, and waste disposal hurdles make the all-nuclear option a practical impossibility [76].

quote:

Nuclear power plants cannot be built without large fossil-fueled cranes and enormous amounts of concrete, the production of which, as noted, emits a significant amount of CO2 and requires high temperatures that cannot currently be generated without FFs.

quote:

The demand for minerals is expected to rise substantially through 2050. Hund et al. [18] project increases of up to 500% from 2018 production levels, particularly for those used in energy storage (e.g., lithium, graphite, and cobalt), and a recent Inter- national Energy Agency (IEA) [82] report estimates that reaching “net zero” globally by 2050 would require six times the amount of mineral resources used today. This would entail a quantity of metal production—requiring considerable FF combustion—over the next 15 years roughly equal to that from the start of humanity until 2013.

quote:

Much of the mining and refining of the material building blocks of so-called renewables takes place in developing countries and contributes to environmental destruction, air pollution, water contamination, and risk of cancer and birth defects [20]. Low-paid labor is often the norm, as is gender inequality and the subjugation and exploitation of ethnic minorities and refugees [20]. Mining often relies on the exploitation of children, some of whom are exposed to risks of death and injury, are worked to death in e-waste scrapyards, or drown in waterlogged pits [20]. Land grabs and other forms of conflict and violence are routinely linked to climate change mitigation efforts around the world [21]. In short, while so-called RE technologies may deliver cleaner point-of-use conditions in the Global North, substantial ecological costs and social damage have been displaced to the Global South [20]. As the push for “green” energy and technology intensifies, such harms are increasingly spilling over into North America and Europe [21].

quote:

Every so-called RE technology today is subsidized by FFs throughout its entire life cycle. The metals and other raw materials are mined and processed using petroleum-fueled, large-scale machinery. These metals and raw materials are transported around the world on cargo ships that burn bunker fuel and on trucks that are powered by diesel and travel on roads constructed with FFs. Manufacturing processes use very high temperatures that can only be generated reliably and at scale from FFs. Finished products are transported from manufacturing to installation sites on trucks powered by diesel and, in the case of industrial-scale wind turbines, nuclear facilities, and hydroelectric dams, erected on-site
with large petroleum-fueled machinery. At the end of their lives, they are then decon- structed, oftentimes with FFs, and transported to landfills or recycling facilities on large petroleum-fueled trucks. There is no possibility that all these FF-demanding processes can be replaced by renewable electricity in the foreseeable future, let alone on a schedule consistent with the Paris Agreement.

quote:

. “Renewably” powered DAC alone would use all wind and solar energy generated in the United States in 2018—and this would capture only one-tenth of a Gt of CO2 [83]

quote:

Moore’s Law is sometimes used to assure society that there can be equivalent exponential increases in future renewable energy output [32]. Regrettably, the analogy does nothold—Moore’s law is irrelevant to the physics of energy systems. Combustion engines are subject to the Carnot Efficiency Limit, solar cells are subject to the Shockley–Queisser Limit, and wind turbines are subject to the Betz Limit.

Bound by the Shockley–Queisser Limit, a conventional, single-junction PV cell can convert a maximum of only about 33% of incoming solar energy into electricity (multi-layered solar cells could theoretically double this efficiency but can be orders of magnitude more expensive; useful in space exploration, they are impractical for large-scale terrestrial applications) [87,88]. State-of-the-art commercial PVs achieve just over 26% conversion efficiency—close to their theoretical efficiency limit.

The Betz Limit states that the theoretical maximum efficiency of a wind turbine is just over 59%, meaning that blades can convert at most this amount of the kinetic energy in wind into electricity [89,90]. Turbines today exceed 45% efficiency, again making additional gains difficult to achieve.

Starry-eyed optimists who argue that the amount of solar radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface far exceeds global energy consumption confuse total energy flow with practical harvestability, and thus generally ignore the limiting laws of physics.

quote:

The current population—and projected growing populations—can only be fed by using an array of fossil-fueled subsidies. The FF-based synthetic pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, not to mention the petroleum-fueled heavy machinery, responsible for The Green Revolution have allowed for much higher agricultural outputs per unit of land area—at great ecological cost—than was previously attainable. Today’s global food distribution system also relies on liquid fossil-powered transportation and refrigeration systems. Clearly, removing FFs from the agricultural system would result in significantly reduced output. Even if a global one-child policy were enacted soon, we would still have eight to 3.5 billion mouths to feed by the end of the century [91]. Even under such an optimistic scenario, virtually every square inch of arable land would have to be dedicated to food production. This would ethically prohibit the widescale production of fuels like
bioethanol and biodiesel.

quote:

We have exposed fatal weaknesses in the technologies widely advanced as solutions to the climate crisis. The notion of clean energy is an illusion that ignores innumerable biophysical realities and costs that cannot be afforded by any reasonable measure. So-called RE technologies are neither renewable nor possible to construct and implement in the absence of FF. They are not carbon neutral and will simply increase human dependence on non-renewable resources and cause unacceptable social and environmental harm.

Not only is the GND technically flawed, but it fails to situate climate disruption within the broader context of ecological overshoot. Anthropogenic climate change is merely one symptom of overshoot and cannot be treated in isolation from the greater disease. The GND offers little more than a green-washed version of the unsustainable growth-based status quo. Even if feasible, its operationalization would only exacerbate human ecological dysfunction.

quote:

Truly renewable energy sources will be largely based on biomass (especially wood), simple mechanical wind and water generation, passive solar, and animal and human labor.
This means society will have to innovate and adapt its way through major reductions in energy supply. The upside is that new variants on old extraction technologies will be more ecologically sophisticated than today’s so-called renewables, closely tuned to essential needs, and cognizant of the conservation imperative. On this latter point, it is important to highlight that approximately 62% of energy flow through the modern economy is wasted through inefficiency [97], and more still is wasted through trivial or at least non-essential uses (think leaf-blowers and recreational ATVs). Globally, per capita energy consumption has increased nine-fold since 1850, though perceived well-being certainly has not. Together, these facts show there is much latitude for painless reductions in energy use.

quote:

The second front in a one-Earth living strategy is a global one-child fertility standard. This is needed to reduce the global population to the one billion or so people that can thrive sustainably in reasonable material comfort within the constraints of a non-fossil energy future and already much damaged Earth [101,102]. Even a step as seemingly bold as this may be insufficient to avoid widespread suffering, as such a policy implemented within a decade or two would still leave us with about three billion souls by the end of the century [91]. Failure to implement a planned, relatively painless population reduction strategy would guarantee a traumatic population crash imposed by Nature in a climate-ravaged, fossil-energy-devoid world. (A human population crash imposed by a human-compromised environment (not Nature) may already be underway. Controversial studies have docu- mented evidence of falling sperm counts (50%+) and other symptoms of the feminization of males, particularly in western countries, caused by female-hormone-mimicking industrial chemicals; see, for example, [103]).

Concerns over the restriction of procreative freedom, racism, and physical coercion that dominate much of the present discourse on population reduction must be put into perspective. Population is an ecological issue that, if left unchecked, can have catastrophic consequences. The human population growth curve over the past 200 years resembles the boom, or “plague”, phase of the kind of population outbreak that occurs in non-human species under unusually favorable ecological conditions (in our case, the resource bounty made available by abundant cheap energy). Plague outbreaks invariably end in collapse under the pressure of social stress or as crucial resources are depleted [10

quote:

We cannot stress enough that a non-fossil energy regime simply cannot support anywhere close to the present human population of nearly eight billion; this urgently
necessitates reducing human numbers as rapidly as possible to avoid unprecedented levels of social unrest and human suffering in the coming decades. (This flies in the face of mainstream concerns that the falling fertility rate in many (particularly high-income) countries is cause for alarm; see, for example, [110])

quote:

Lots of socioeconomic fluff about how to build a just world, which KSR should probably sue for plagiarism over.

quote:

Second, history shows
that monied and ruling elites do not relinquish their power willingly—their hand must be forced. Virtually no important gain has ever been made by simply asking those in power to do the right thing. Unrelenting pressure must be exerted such that the people and/or systems in question have no choice but to capitulate to specific, well-thought-out demands. We must reacquaint ourselves with the revolutionary change-makers of the past who, at great cost, delivered for us the better world we live in now through intelligent, direct action and risk-taking.

mediaphage posted:

https://twitter.com/sickofwolves/status/1433459728517058560?s=21

quote:

The Medea hypothesis is a term coined by paleontologist Peter Ward for a hypothesis that contests the Gaian hypothesis and proposes that multicellular life, understood as a superorganism, may be self-destructive or suicidal. In this view, microbial-triggered mass extinctions result in returns to the microbial-dominated state it has been for most of its history.

endlessmonotony posted:

Since all of this poo poo repeats, I have a question.

When did calling green vegetables "rabbit food" catch on?

endlessmonotony posted:

Since all of this poo poo repeats, I have a question.

When did calling green vegetables "rabbit food" catch on?

Minenfeld! posted:

I need to engage with it in more detail, but that paper is equal parts compelling and horrifying.

Any time I engage with climate change in detail though I'm just overwhelmed by existential dread and hopelessness and end up retreating into things like buses and trains. It's all so frivolous by comparison and I really don't know what to do.

brakeless posted:

At this point studying and reading about climate poo poo is just the ultimate way of playing yourself, you'll be just as powerless to do anything about it as some idiot useless app developer who's really into crypto but you'll be much less happy, and you should only do it if your brain is already so broken that you can't just enjoy being a good little consumer anymore

mediaphage posted:

according to my perfunctory searching, in the earlier part of the 20th century. however it rose in popularity around the 40s, i wonder if it was led there by rationing.

mediaphage posted:

according to my perfunctory searching, in the earlier part of the 20th century. however it rose in popularity around the 40s, i wonder if it was led there by rationing.

Xaris posted:

SniperWoreConverse posted:

e: in a later vid he uses an acid technique instead of enzymes and is able to make some sick nasty candy out of cotton balls.

Rime posted:

Speaking as a mod-thirties millennial, I suspect the generations not yet teenagers will view us with considerably more contempt than they will the boomers. The boomers, at least, can try and plead ignorance. The issues weren't obvious yet in their youth. And, sure, that's actually true, I mean look at that graph of plastic production and most of it has occurred since 1997.

While we can sit here and argue They should have known! , in fairness the bulk of western humanity are loving idiots.

Millenials? My generation? We Knew. By the time we were teenagers, it was obvious to anyone how hosed things were. FFS, I was writing essays about the coming socioeconomic driven collapse of western civilization by the time I was fifteen. We graduated ighschool or college into the worst economic crisis in decades, giving us a paint-by-numbers explanation of how the system was rigged against us.

And what did we do with all that?

By and large, we spent the past decade and a half sitting here doing nothing while the world burned down around us at a furious pace. Playing videogames and feeding our narcissism on social media, sharing memes about late stage capitalism and making jokes about blowing up pipelines instead of, you know, Blowing Up Pipelines. I don't think there's ever been a generation as deeply aware of the existential threats to their own existence - and yet completely unwilling to do anything about it. Too high on life and research chemicals to muster up the effort to be a rebel, the unstable fringes happier to drown in conspiracy theories and protest hospitals or telecom towers than find a convenient library depository.

We're angry at the Boomers because they pulled up the ladder and we don't get the comfortable lifestyles of excess which they enjoyed. Boo Hoo. The coming generations will be angry at us because we sat around and watched while the world burned, and consumed their futures fully aware of what the price would be for all of us.

We should be very, very afraid of a generation which will come of age knowing that it has Nothing to lose, and who to blame for it - just like we did.

Rime posted:

I'm going to repost this paper again: Through the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition and the accompanying white paper: Pulling Back the Curtain on the Energy Transition Tale: Why Renewables Can't Match Fossil Fuels, both courtesy of this "Real Green New Deal" group, because I think it got lost and not enough people really dug into it.

I was pleasantly surprised that this weeks episode of Radio Ecoshock is an interview with one of the authors, which gave me some additional insight into the thought process behind it. For those of you who abhor reading, I absolutely endorse queuing it up, it's great. Discovering that the paper is co-authored between a masters in systems analysis and a Professor Emeritus / the originator of the ecological footprint analysis - the basis for most sustainability studies, explained why it was like reading a summary of five years of my own posting. I've come to believe that only those who either possess a layman's aptitude for, or formal training in, "systems thought" are fully capable of grasping the magnitude of how irrevocably we have damaged the biosphere. In my earliest climate postings I referred to this as "juggling multiple balls inside my head and visualizing how they flow", because I'd never heard of this poo poo before.

Anyways, let's dig into some more highlights, emphasis throughout will be mine:

I have, in the past, been vilified for suggesting your average human life holds intrinsically less value than that of a salmon, I probably should have used beef or something instead (goon mods lack an understanding of dramatic effect) since they apparently outnumber us 2:1.

Clearly, reforestation efforts are at this point less than useless as a carbon mitigation effort - given the carbon cost of engaging in treeplanting.

Something I was writing extensively about on here back around 2019 was the concept of "Externalized Costs", IE: How, rather than pricing the pollution generated by industrial enterprise and incentivizing it by rendering it prohibitively expensive, we have "hidden" these costs from the balance sheets by relying on environmental disposal - often of substances which we do not even possess a process by which we could break them down or render them inert. We're now several generations into living with that state of affairs as normal, very few of us question the greater impact of anything we utilize or consume on a daily basis, and I would argue now that this has resulted in a tremendous blind spot for society. Our daily ignorance of this situation is to blame for the common assumptions displayed in the above quote, and why such concerns are frequently hand waved away when brought up in regards to renewable energy sources.

Of course, thinking that you can dump terratonnes of toxic waste into the environment and not have the "cost" come due at some point isn't sustainable indefinitely. More on this later.

We have negative emissions budget left to avoid extinction, and a significant chunk of our civilization cannot by any means convert to electric.

This is, of course, only the figures for the USA. As most goons know, there are a fair few developed high-consumption nations on earth now. Scale the costs appropriately in your minds.

If renewables must necessarily be rebuilt, en-masse, every half century, how will that be achieved if we commit to zero fossil fuel emissions and a 100% renewable grid. As an aside, every time I bring up the regular rebuilding of renewables facilities as an issue, and somebody points out that "well nuclear and hydro need regular maintenance!" - I just assume they are an idiot because we clearly don't rebuild major hydroelectric facilities from the ground up every forty years.

While the battery pilot plants I have watched being installed on some renewables sites are cute, and a cool PR toy, I leave the reader to imagine the ecological ramifications involved in the extraction of sufficient materials to manufacture and install grid-scale storage as described. Saying “there is no shortage of X” almost always ignores the costs of extracting said resource. Remember: Externalization.

Again, the fundamental underpinnings of our civilization are strictly beholden to fossil fuel power. I have worked with some of the tallest mobile cranes on earth, electrifying their requirements is outside the realm of modern physics. "Electrify Everything is not possible, and a statement born of ignorance.

I have heard lots of arguments over the years for and against nuclear. Personally I love nuclear, would have been fantastic if we'd fast-tracked SMR's 40 years ago. Yer smart people, goons, good honest folk. You and I both know we aren't cranking out several thousand nuclear plants in a decade or two, we can barely manage to toss up a few dozen wind turbines in under six months on any given project. Stick a fork in the nuclear dream, it ain't coming.

This point comes up a lot, the fundamentally non-renewable nature of an industrial civilization which transforms fully to renewable is really the crux of the paper.

Liberals: Pfft, you see any slag in your backyard doomer? There's plenty of planet left to mine, who cares if we live on a barren rock at the end of it - so long as I can drive my Tesla?

Attempting to prolong our comfortable developed world will necessarily ride on the backs of untold enslaved child miners in the congo and elsewhere, and no "Well we'll just bring in regulations to prevent that!
" is not a solution.

I think a fair lot of people are dimly aware of this paradigm and just keep it at bay so that they aren't overcome with existential-dread induced temporary insanity.

Problematic, if "net zero" strategies rely on sucking 110%+ of carbon emitted back out, while also powering literally everything off renewables.

Brushing awfully close to the wall on all of our options, barring effectively magical discoveries in materials science.

I have written at length over the years about the risk to our JIT industrial agricultural system from prolonged natural disaster or climate alteration. It goes without saying that the same applies should we be unable to provide the petrochemical feedstocks which underpin it. Oil: It's got what wheat craves.




Now we get all optimistic:

I view this as a cute way of stating that whomever survives the rather abrupt end of our high-consumption civilization will still possess a rudimentary grasp of physics and be capable of harvesting energy the old fashioned way for a while, tbh. I don't think any government will ever risk legislating away recreational energy consumption, we'll be riding shotgun to the bitter end.



Norman Borlaug was a piece of poo poo right up there with Stalin and Hitler, and pro-natalists are an existential threat to all life on earth, fuckin' fight me.



The clock, is ticking.


I think we will be hearing a lot about this paper over the coming months, much like Deep Adaptation took the world by storm back in 2019. The fundamental issues, so elegantly presented, are horrifyingly compelling (not just because I have been posting all of this, without hard backing and ignoring all goon mockery if not outright aggression, for so many years). The data compiled is a definitive mic-drop on the delusion that we can innovate our way out of this mess.

Alternatively, we could discuss at length how shifting all our infrastructure to flywheel-powered trolley busses will avert extinction.

Rime posted:

mediaphage posted:

yeah i'm aware i was just making a dumb joke and i don't really think we're going to ferment styrofoam into something readily consumable by humans

err posted:

Remove desire from your life.

Rime posted:

The clock, is ticking.

mediaphage posted:

according to my perfunctory searching, in the earlier part of the 20th century. however it rose in popularity around the 40s, i wonder if it was led there by rationing.

Rime posted:

I'm going to repost this paper again: Through the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition and the accompanying white paper: Pulling Back the Curtain on the Energy Transition Tale: Why Renewables Can't Match Fossil Fuels, both courtesy of this "Real Green New Deal" group, because I think it got lost and not enough people really dug into it.

I was pleasantly surprised that this weeks episode of Radio Ecoshock is an interview with one of the authors, which gave me some additional insight into the thought process behind it. For those of you who abhor reading, I absolutely endorse queuing it up, it's great. Discovering that the paper is co-authored between a masters in systems analysis and a Professor Emeritus / the originator of the ecological footprint analysis - the basis for most sustainability studies, explained why it was like reading a summary of five years of my own posting. I've come to believe that only those who either possess a layman's aptitude for, or formal training in, "systems thought" are fully capable of grasping the magnitude of how irrevocably we have damaged the biosphere. In my earliest climate postings I referred to this as "juggling multiple balls inside my head and visualizing how they flow", because I'd never heard of this poo poo before.

Anyways, let's dig into some more highlights, emphasis throughout will be mine:

I have, in the past, been vilified for suggesting your average human life holds intrinsically less value than that of a salmon, I probably should have used beef or something instead (goon mods lack an understanding of dramatic effect) since they apparently outnumber us 2:1.

Clearly, reforestation efforts are at this point less than useless as a carbon mitigation effort - given the carbon cost of engaging in treeplanting.

Something I was writing extensively about on here back around 2019 was the concept of "Externalized Costs", IE: How, rather than pricing the pollution generated by industrial enterprise and incentivizing it by rendering it prohibitively expensive, we have "hidden" these costs from the balance sheets by relying on environmental disposal - often of substances which we do not even possess a process by which we could break them down or render them inert. We're now several generations into living with that state of affairs as normal, very few of us question the greater impact of anything we utilize or consume on a daily basis, and I would argue now that this has resulted in a tremendous blind spot for society. Our daily ignorance of this situation is to blame for the common assumptions displayed in the above quote, and why such concerns are frequently hand waved away when brought up in regards to renewable energy sources.

Of course, thinking that you can dump terratonnes of toxic waste into the environment and not have the "cost" come due at some point isn't sustainable indefinitely. More on this later.

We have negative emissions budget left to avoid extinction, and a significant chunk of our civilization cannot by any means convert to electric.

This is, of course, only the figures for the USA. As most goons know, there are a fair few developed high-consumption nations on earth now. Scale the costs appropriately in your minds.

If renewables must necessarily be rebuilt, en-masse, every half century, how will that be achieved if we commit to zero fossil fuel emissions and a 100% renewable grid. As an aside, every time I bring up the regular rebuilding of renewables facilities as an issue, and somebody points out that "well nuclear and hydro need regular maintenance!" - I just assume they are an idiot because we clearly don't rebuild major hydroelectric facilities from the ground up every forty years.

While the battery pilot plants I have watched being installed on some renewables sites are cute, and a cool PR toy, I leave the reader to imagine the ecological ramifications involved in the extraction of sufficient materials to manufacture and install grid-scale storage as described. Saying “there is no shortage of X” almost always ignores the costs of extracting said resource. Remember: Externalization.

Again, the fundamental underpinnings of our civilization are strictly beholden to fossil fuel power. I have worked with some of the tallest mobile cranes on earth, electrifying their requirements is outside the realm of modern physics. "Electrify Everything is not possible, and a statement born of ignorance.

I have heard lots of arguments over the years for and against nuclear. Personally I love nuclear, would have been fantastic if we'd fast-tracked SMR's 40 years ago. Yer smart people, goons, good honest folk. You and I both know we aren't cranking out several thousand nuclear plants in a decade or two, we can barely manage to toss up a few dozen wind turbines in under six months on any given project. Stick a fork in the nuclear dream, it ain't coming.

This point comes up a lot, the fundamentally non-renewable nature of an industrial civilization which transforms fully to renewable is really the crux of the paper.

Liberals: Pfft, you see any slag in your backyard doomer? There's plenty of planet left to mine, who cares if we live on a barren rock at the end of it - so long as I can drive my Tesla?

Attempting to prolong our comfortable developed world will necessarily ride on the backs of untold enslaved child miners in the congo and elsewhere, and no "Well we'll just bring in regulations to prevent that!
" is not a solution.

I think a fair lot of people are dimly aware of this paradigm and just keep it at bay so that they aren't overcome with existential-dread induced temporary insanity.

Problematic, if "net zero" strategies rely on sucking 110%+ of carbon emitted back out, while also powering literally everything off renewables.

Brushing awfully close to the wall on all of our options, barring effectively magical discoveries in materials science.

I have written at length over the years about the risk to our JIT industrial agricultural system from prolonged natural disaster or climate alteration. It goes without saying that the same applies should we be unable to provide the petrochemical feedstocks which underpin it. Oil: It's got what wheat craves.




Now we get all optimistic:

I view this as a cute way of stating that whomever survives the rather abrupt end of our high-consumption civilization will still possess a rudimentary grasp of physics and be capable of harvesting energy the old fashioned way for a while, tbh. I don't think any government will ever risk legislating away recreational energy consumption, we'll be riding shotgun to the bitter end.



Norman Borlaug was a piece of poo poo right up there with Stalin and Hitler, and pro-natalists are an existential threat to all life on earth, fuckin' fight me.



The clock, is ticking.


I think we will be hearing a lot about this paper over the coming months, much like Deep Adaptation took the world by storm back in 2019. The fundamental issues, so elegantly presented, are horrifyingly compelling (not just because I have been posting all of this, without hard backing and ignoring all goon mockery if not outright aggression, for so many years). The data compiled is a definitive mic-drop on the delusion that we can innovate our way out of this mess.

Alternatively, we could discuss at length how shifting all our infrastructure to flywheel-powered trolley busses will avert extinction.

Rime posted:

I was pleasantly surprised that this weeks episode of Radio Ecoshock is an interview with one of the authors, which gave me some additional insight into the thought process behind it. For those of you who abhor reading, I absolutely endorse queuing it up, it's great. Discovering that the paper is co-authored between a masters in systems analysis and a Professor Emeritus / the originator of the ecological footprint analysis - the basis for most sustainability studies, explained why it was like reading a summary of five years of my own posting. I've come to believe that only those who either possess a layman's aptitude for, or formal training in, "systems thought" are fully capable of grasping the magnitude of how irrevocably we have damaged the biosphere. In my earliest climate postings I referred to this as "juggling multiple balls inside my head and visualizing how they flow", because I'd never heard of this poo poo before.

Rime posted:

Cold on a Cob posted:

i've been saying for a few years now that the only solution is depopulation and i've been called a malthusian idiot for it when it just seemed like simple physics to me, so it's nice to get validation.

Cold on a Cob posted:

i've been saying for a few years now that the only solution is depopulation and i've been called a malthusian idiot for it when it just seemed like simple physics to me, so it's nice to get validation.

comedyblissoption posted:

you could kill everyone in the world outside the united states and we'd still have a climate crisis so that's not actually a solution

Rime posted:

Oil: It's got what wheat craves.

SKULL.GIF posted:

err posted:

Remove desire from your life.