I wasn’t approving it, quite the opposite in fact.
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Either we learn to manage our population and land usage or it will deal with us.
If we do all live in efficient urban and agricultural areas , which Im all for , we will still have to manage all the wilderness. People will go there and destroy it just like they are right now. Many well protected areas are still poached and felled even with armed guards.
Wow! I had no idea that the white rhino was the planet and life itself. Which one? Was it a specific one or can all white rhinos be called the planet or life itself?
Where did you learn this amazing bit of information?
Someone has only read the history of the winners.
Can you name me a civilization that has survived a 3 foot rise in sea level?
Marketing. Pure marketing. Nothing in the intervening decades has slowed the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere. We don’t have the tech, the timeframe we need it in has passed.
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Now if anything other than a tiny fringe of the “green left” were actually anarcho-primitivist you might vaguely start to have an argument there.
As it is, it still seems like a strawman to me.
Then again, it kinda seems like this whole line of argument is oriented towards finding justifications for dismissing critics and skeptics of “bright green” cornucopianism as being fascists and Nazis instead of taking their arguments seriously, so carry on I guess.
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speaking of strawmen…
Did the OP claim that the “green left” wants to reduce earth’s population by 50% and is potentially genocidal or didn’t it?
Oh, the effects of climate change will definitely suck, and we’re not doing anywhere near enough to combat it. I’m not hopeful about the fate of many cities and regions housing hundreds of millions of people, or the consequences of what could happen as a result.
But that’s just it - we know how to stop emitting CO2 and still have a functioning economy, in most cases, and we know what the path to get there looks like in other cases. The problem is that humans are terrible at collective decision making. We haven’t actually tried to walk that path, and aren’t going to until and unless it becomes the path of least resistance - which will mostly likely happen to late to matter.
That was kind of my point - the proposal in the OP isn’t wrong per se, or technologically unrealistic. It just isn’t going to make much difference that we have one more proposal that could help a lot.
Nevertheless, remember that we do now live in a world where renewable energy is cost competitive with fossil energy without subsidies, when the price of energy storage has fallen enough to make currently-in-development electric cars cost and range competitive with fossil fuel cars, and that there’s at least some noise about advances in electric flight or biofuels for aerospace. The hard parts are going to be things like agriculture, steel and concrete production, and petrochemicals. And then we also have to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, which no one has a good way of doing at sufficient scale that isn’t absurdly costly and dangerous.
Would you mind providing some sources on this? There’s a lot of problems with solar and wind energy that usually aren’t addressed by advocates, and I’m wondering whether your sources do a better job of addressing those.
did you use that as an example of critics (plural) and skeptics (plural)?
Strawman (singular).
What can we do, technology aside? Serious Question!
What can we do today that does not rely on us having things (tools, political arrangements, alternative sources of energy, economies that scale back gracefully) we do not have today?
We really, really do not. Not today.
What’s unhelpful is describing something that does not exist as yet another missed opportunity
Sad fact, we are not all going to make it, not by a long shot.
I’m going to assume you’re talking about siting and intermittency. Both are being partially addressed by rapidly falling prices - you can overbuild more, and go after less ideal sites, when capex is lower. We also need serious electric grid upgrades (many of which we should be doing anyway with or without renewables) - long distance HVDC lines, microgrids, better demand response especially for industrial users.
We do still need better energy storage. Prices of batteries have fallen by a factor of five to ten in the past decade (<$200/kWh for best in class producers) and technologically there’s still clear room for improvement, at least another factor of 2. Flow battery innovation has been picking up lately, too.
Sorry I can’t share links - I work for a company that does these kinds of projections, market analyses and tech landscapes and forecasts, I’m not on our Energy team but I read their work, it’s just not publicly shareable.
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This doesn’t really make sense. There are multiple (plural) critics (plural) and critics (plural) within the “green left” (singular mass noun).
So accusations about the “green left” constitute accusations against multiple critics and skeptics.
Argumentum ad grammarium doesn’t really prove anything.
Yeah I really think the future economy and society would have to be ecological in nature. It doesn’t mean we have to eat gruel and live in tiny casket rooms all our lives (or at all). It just means we can’t have constant production/consumption for its own sake. Basically think of having nice things but they may be decades or centuries old (imagine a smart phone or its analog that would last that long) and we only replace what we can’t repair (and if we can’t repair it then we recycle it to minimize waste). Plus, I think such a future would see the old ways of cities being changed with something like you said an “urban forest” of a kind. Less concrete and more wood. And definitely few or no cars.
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are there? Find more than that one and line them up side by side rather than all behind one (strawman).
Not this (singular) one. This accusation is about one.
Broad brushes and appeals to misused latin fare worse.
Partially but not only. The actual production of e.g. solar panels and wind turbines requires extensive use of fossil fuels (mining, smelting, manufacturing, and transport). That is, producing carbon-free energy in the long-term requires a short-term acceleration of carbon dioxide production (which is why I’d claim it’s false that we "know how to stop emitting CO2 and still have a functioning economy).
Besides that, the margins seem barely large enough to support wind and solar facilities even despite rather extensive subsidies. The low marginal price of renewable electricity coupled with the large up-front cost creates the possibility that wind and solar facilities will lose money in the long term – a real problem given those same low marginal prices are causing problems for the fossil fuel-based facilities that are being relied upon to deal with intermittency. The upshot is that wholesale electricity prices in e.g. Germany are too low for the producers to be profitable, but at the same time the retail prices are so high that a lot of poorer people can’t afford to keep their lights on.
There’s also the fact that taxes on fossil fuels are quite high and fossil fuel-producing states (including the US) are heavily reliant on those taxes to meet their budgets. We can already see the problems this causes in Venezuela, and we’ll likely start seeing these problems in Saudi Arabia very soon. (The US will use its leverage over the rest of the world to forestall its own issues for quite a while yet.)
The fact that this stuff is needed for wind and solar to be viable whereas it’s just highly desirable for a fossil fuel-based grid shows what the real problem is: so far, wind and solar are much more expensive in real terms than fossil fuels when taking costs across the entire energy system into account.
That’s unfortunate. “I have evidence that I can’t share” at least sounds a little better than the response I usually get (“do your own research!”). I suppose it’s nice to have someone tell me that the cost of wind and solar can fall far enough to solve the problems that need to be solved, but I’d feel much more reassured if I could look at some research that said the same thing.
The production process doesn’t care where the input energy comes from, and EROEI is way over 1, and almost always over 5 at a minimum (though not as high as fossil fuel extraction).
The actions and choices of companies that produce electricity do not align with this narrative anymore, and I’m inclined to believe the people putting billions of dollars on the line.
I agree that this is a problem, but there are many ways to modify tax laws. Ironically, those same states are generally also ones that refuse to be sensible about raising taxes when and where needed.
I know, and I apologize. I will see if I can find which of their sources are public and get back to you.
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but not by the Green Left’s usual (and potentially genocidal) tactic of reducing our population by 50%.
I’m not sure I understand your argument. Are you claiming that the OP is making this claim about a singular critic, perhaps named “Green Left”? Or do you think it’s at least possible that “the Green Left” refers to more than one person?
Must not be in your interest to. Pretty straightforward. Your loss.
I disagree that EROEI just has to be above 1 and everything is hunky dory – EROEI isn’t a very good measure for a lot of reasons, but mainly because it doesn’t take into account a lot of system-wide costs (e.g. the costs of storage or overbuild to deal with intermittency).
I disagree that the production process “doesn’t care” where the input energy comes from. For example, mining equipment mostly runs on diesel fuel; it may be possible to retro-fit to use electricity or produce synthetic diesel using wind or solar-generated electricity, but these solutions will have costs of their own and therefore increase the total system cost.
And the production process definitely “cares about” the true system costs involved in producing energy.
Are they putting their own billions on the line, though? And are they doing it because it’s actually a good idea or just because they don’t have a better one?
