XKCD's massive, vertical climate change infographic

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What do you mean “it’s not going to happen”?

We’re going to either make do with using less power, or continue using fossil fuels and thus see what the results of rapid AGW are going to be. The likely results of AGW are going to be serious climactic disruptions that prevent us from drilling for sufficient fossil fuels to continue our current power output, meaning that we will be using less power.

Either way, we are using less power.

So while you say, “it’s not going to happen”, I can’t see diminished power usage as anything but inevitable.

Maybe you’ll argue that some combination of nuclear, wind, water, and solar can replace fossil fuels and so we can have all our toys and also prevent global warming. But part of what I’m arguing is that this isn’t the case – the very action of building out enough nuclear, wind, solar, etc. to be able to replace fossil fuels will require using massive quantities of fossil fuels, thus exacerbating the very problem that we are attempting to solve.

The only possible outcome is less power usage. If we don’t do it voluntarily, we will be forced by circumstance.

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But politicians sure do.

Here’s a strikingly timely article:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/4e555a1f920548db84aeb4c83fc1a284/poll-americans-favor-slightly-higher-bills-fight-warming

“If the cost of fighting climate change is only an additional $1 a month, 57 percent of Americans said they would support that. But as that fee goes up, support for it plummets. At $10 a month, 39 percent were in favor and 61 percent opposed. At $20 a month, the public is more than 2-to-1 against it. And only 1-in-5 would support $50 a month.”

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I could probably cut my power usage by ten percent without really noticing it.

But how do you tell the 1-2 billion who don’t have power that they ain’t getting any?

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They aren’t using an infrastructure reliant on fossil fuels. Solar panels and wind turbines would work well for them and potentially increase their standard of living.

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@bobzwrz put it more succinctly than I could.

Things like refrigeration are more than just luxuries, they prevent disease and make lifespans predictable and stable. You can’t reduce power without people dying. So if people are going to die either way…

Well, at least you have the hard numbers on how nuclear can’t possibly reduce the CO2 levels to provide us cold comfort in the warming nights to come.

ETA:

Yeah, people in the third world don’t need things like sophisticated modern healthcare. They’re happy with what they have, the simple souls.

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Yeah, ten percent isn’t going to do it.

10% of 14% is 1.4%. Even if everyone dropped their power usage by 10%, we only shave the barest bit off the total. Worse than that, Jevons’ paradox assures us that all these savings will only serve to lower the price of energy, causing more of it to be used outside of the commercial sector – previously unprofitable uses of fossil fuels would become profitable and spur more usage.

This requires a massive overhaul of the entire technological infrastructure of our society. This means not getting electricity from the grid – maybe you can hook up a hand-carved wooden wind-driven turbine on your roof to some lead acid batteries to have some LEDs on to read by at nighttime.

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You seem to be getting moralistic about this, and I’m tempted to follow suit – “if people are going to die either way…” is a terribly nihilistic sentiment. But I’m really just trying to present the facts as I see them so that we’re all dealing with reality. Moralisms won’t help anyone.

“If people are going to die either way” is not the right way to look at things. Less power means a higher death rate, certainly. But we still have a lot of control over how high the death rate will actually climb. I would argue that voluntarily giving up energy use will allow us to keep the death rate lower than it would otherwise be. I would argue that pouring all our energy in a last-ditch effort to build up enough nuclear/wind/solar/etc. to maintain the current death rate will ultimately backfire and result in a higher death rate.

The numbers aren’t meant to provide comfort, they’re meant to inject some reality into the discussion – just as you were trying to do when you tried to “school” me about the unreliability of the renewables I was never advocating for in the first place.

I honestly think that building up nuclear right now is the wrong move. That judgment is I think based on a pretty solid confrontation of the facts at hand. I could be wrong, and I’m willing to discuss the issue further and be convinced otherwise, but ignoring the downsides of nuclear won’t help us make good decisions.

Sanitation and some basic preventive care will do a great deal more for life expectancies in the developing world at a far lower cost than “sophisticated modern healthcare”.

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I mentioned renewables because that’s the got-to answer for many. Sorry I’m not more telepathic. I’ll work on that.

The purpose of mentioning the numbers was a giant hint that I don’t think you have them. I could tell you why I don’t think you have them, but as we’ve already determined, telepathy isn’t my strong suit. Just shove them in my face already. A DOI is fine, I can get the paper.

Glad we’re making those decisions for them. Good on us. I’m sure they have no objections and won’t just do whatever they feel like while giving us the finger.

That’s not moralizing, that’s expecting a real response from real people. How’s that for realism?

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And the cost of continuing to subsidize climate change?

And the cost of not fighting climate change?

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  1. You don’t have to be telepathic. There are comments from me in this very thread discussing the problems with renewables. My position on that is not secret or hidden.
  2. Here are some numbers: The Energy Trap | Do the Math

When France decided to go big on nuclear, they built 56 reactors in 15 years. In doing so, they replaced 80% of their electricity consumption, which translates to about 30% of their total energy use. So this puts them at about 2% per year in energy replacement.

(Note that when France did this, they were able to import what they needed from other countries that used fossil fuels to produce it. From a global perspective, there’s nowhere to import from, so no way to hide the fossil fuels required to do the buildup.)

If they’re not the exact numbers you’re looking for, say so and I’ll try to find ones that address your particular concerns.

It is just a fact, though, that nuclear reactors are made from steel, concrete, and a bunch of other stuff and right now our only way to make steel, concrete, and all that other stuff is to use fossil fuels. Same with mining and refining uranium. It’s not easy to come up with specific numbers here, but I don’t see how you could argue that we can significantly build up nuclear capacity without increasing GHG emissions. Care to share some numbers of your own?

Uh, yes: “glad we’re making those decisions for them. good on us” is indeed moralizing. I’m not making decisions for anyone, I’m pointing out that “sophisticated modern healthcare” is the sort of diminishing returns domain that we’re going to have to get realistic about in the post-carbon future. An MRI machine can be used to save lives, sure, but if it costs $1,000,000 and you can save the same number of lives with $100 worth of penicillin, then the penicillin is a much better investment and it might not be worth investing in the MRI at all if the opportunity cost kills more people than the MRI machine saves.

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I think there are some experiments with reducing the emissions from making concrete, or even with using ccs to make concrete…

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Try making penicillin without generating any CO2.

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I think you’re taking my hypothetical example a little too literally, but also maybe you should have done a little research before making your comment:

Long story short, penicillin is a fungus – a living thing. It’s manufactured by taking a culture of penicillin and then feeding it so that it reproduces. Fungi do produce carbon dioxide through respiration, but the amount is trivial and they also consume carbon as food so penicillin is actually probably just slightly carbon negative.

Modern large-scale production of penicillin does use energy, but it’s not clear to me that this is strictly necessary. It seems quite likely that penicillin could be manufactured more efficiently with respect to energy and less efficiently with respect to time, space, and manpower.

Edit: Sorry, penicillin is a metabolite of the penicillium fungus, not a fungus itself.

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[Chesterfield] Chesterfield https://bbs.boingboing.net/users/chesterfield
September 14

Well, historically speaking, it /is/ mild so far, isn’t it? It’s the velocity (first derivative) and
the fact that we are the cause that’s differentiates this warming cycle, no?
Yes? So? The absolute value of the current situation is somewhat mild indeed. But the horizontal log
scale exaggerates the first derivative in ancient times, so the current velocity seems mild in
comparison. The XKCD version is better since you can see the speeds is way higher this time.

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It can’t be done that way unless you want to unleash the four horsemen, and maybe not even then. It’s self-defeating to conceptualize the transition that way.

Decarbonizing the economy means replacing all the productivity derived from using fossil fuels to leverage human labor. You have to make something better (like when you replace a Lamborghini with a Tesla) and we have the ability to do that. In fact we’re already halfway there - most of our productivity is driven by electricity, and that decouples tasks from specific fuels. Electricity is the same no matter what method is used to generate it. Since a lot of our infrastructure used to be based directly on coal and whale oil, electricity was a big step.

The sun never stops shining, and power storage is a solved problem. The problem you are indirectly referencing is not inherent to solar power itself, it’s the restrictions on grid interconnection and infrastructure building that are entirely political and social in nature. And while you are certainly correct that the cost isn’t trivial, it’s both already affordable and steadily dropping.

Power regulation and storage are solved problems. Again, the issues are political and social - although it’s worth noting that wind power requires skilled maintenance staff, which creates large numbers of permanent, high paying jobs, and that’s something which our lords and masters truly hate.

That’s two separate points.

The first one, that all have drawbacks and limitations, is entirely correct. There are some, though, that have fewer drawbacks than nuclear or fossil fuels do.

The second point is again political. Since nations and peoples aren’t willing to co-operate to save the human race from extinction, by generating and sharing power over a global power grid, there are indeed places with no options.

I don’t have a solution for the political piece.

All that being said, the best path forward for India is thorium reactors. They are chock full of the stuff, so they need to buckle down and make the technology work.

But the best option for the USA is agriculturally based renewables. We have vast croplands, huge pipelines, and the technological base to create direct replacements for fossil fuels using 100% carbon neutral feedstocks. Methane is already the base fuel for most of our electricity production anyway, and that’s the easiest carbon neutral fuel to make. Avoiding nukes for a mix of solar, wind, and biofuels will be cheaper, safer, and better for our politics and economy than building out more fission plants.

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I just straight-forwardly disagree with this:

  1. As I mentioned already, decarbonizing the economy will necessarily increase the death rate, which is what you mean by “unleash the four horsemen”. I think this is inevitable and we just have to come to terms with it. I don’t think it’s self-defeating to confront reality; I think it’s the only approach that isn’t self-defeating. Failure to deal with the climate crisis will also “unleash the four horseman”, and I think that will be a worse scenario than voluntarily reducing energy usage, so although I acknowledge that there are a lot of negative consequences to voluntary reduction of energy use, I think it is still the best tradeoff available.
  2. You cannot replace the productivity derived from using fossil fuels. A guy with a chainsaw will always be more productive than a guy with an axe. A guy with a gasoline-powered chainsaw will always be more productive than a guy with a battery-powered chainsaw. There is no way to get around the fact that fossil fuels are the most energy dense and by far highest EROEI energy source available, and that using energy from any other source will reduce industrial output.

I’m not so sure that most of our productivity is driven by electricity. A few comments ago I posted a graph of energy use by sector, and industrial is 51%. Much industrial use of energy is direct use of ICEs – transport, mining and earth-moving, powering farm equipment, most kinds of construction equipment… It’s actually not clear to me how much productivity is driven by electricity vs. directly by burning or ICEs, but I would guess it’s directly by burning or ICEs.

Read this to get an idea of the scale of what’s necessary to replace all fossil fuel usage:

http://www.timothymaloney.net/Critique_of_100_WWS_Plan.html

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That was not what I meant at all.

Do you want to tell the people of Bangladesh that their homes and fertile land need to be sacrificed so some other people can continue to burn fossil fuel? Because that is the reality if we don’t cut back on fossil fuel use NOW! We’re already going to lose Kiribati, that’s 100,000 refugees to find a new home for. Do you think it’s going to be any easier when it’s 100 million plus?

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Well, to some extent we’ve just got to do it and find out, since we don’t have a couple of spare planets for you and I to run our experiments on. So there’s certainly plenty of room for honest disagreement.

But let me tell you why I think the way I do.

Dr. Diesel invented the diesel engine in order to allow farmers to produce their own fuel. It was designed to burn 100% vegetable oil produced on site. There is absolutely no need to shut down any diesel engines; all we have to do is replace the fuel. And we already replace the fuel every day. As soon as the biofuel is ready, the same tankers currently shipping (and burning) diesel cut over, with zero loss of productivity, and a net increase in jobs and prosperity. Sure, some insanely rich people will lose some income to fund those additional jobs, but that’s a price I’m willing to have them pay. :slight_smile:

It is now possible to also produce a sustainable biofuel that is 100% compatible with gas engines, so the exact same scenario is possible - although unfortunately intellectual property laws will make biogasoline significantly more expensive than biodiesel. Again, politics as usual, but still doable anyway.

I’ve mentioned before that I have a 1973 electric garden tractor. It’s pretty great. I tear out stumps with it, bulldoze with it, drag huge logs around, and with my big block and tackle I can move buildings with it. It has, over the last 43 years of continuous use, outlasted many gas tractors, and it’s incredibly cheap to operate. Over its lifetime it’s certainly cost less than a tenth of what it would have cost to run gasoline. And yet essentially it’s nothing more than a heavy duty garden tractor with the gas tank and engine removed, and replaced with a battery bank, some relays and a forklift motor. It’s literally 1900s technology. We have fantastically better stuff now.

If we try to stop using fossil fuels entirely and start working on something to replace them, the result will be war, famine, pestilence, and drought. But we could instead start spending some minor fraction of the amount of tax money we currently spend subsidizing polluters and slaughtering foreigners on building out pipelines and digesters, and not stop using fracked fuel until we are ready - and if we do that, we’ll have the greatest age of prosperity this world has ever seen. Massive employment boosts, salary boosts, reversal of wage inequality trends, increased public participation in social goals, it’s all good, and all demonstrably so given human history.

There’s very few downsides to engaging in Great Works. Most people find it inspiring, and there’s very few downsides to having a population inspired to do good things for the human race.

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Hey, I haven’t had time to read the entire content of your link, although I’ve seen it before and am familiar with it.

Just wanted to point out two things: first, it’s rigged. It discounts the socio-political effects of highly militarized power sources like nuclear plants. I’ve been told that it also underestimates the costs and environmental damage they entail, although I do not know if that is true.

Second, I am primarily advocating replacement of existing fuel sources with compatible fuels that do not require liberation of sequestered carbon. The paper does not even acknowledge that such an option is available. When the words “biodiesel” and “biofuel” do not even occur once in a study of sustainability, you know that the study isn’t valid. These things exist, and carbon-neutral sustainable fuels are the only bloodless way we can get from here to a future that doesn’t burn fossil fuels.

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If we can make biodiesel so it is carbon negative, at least in the short term, it might be a solution for the problems that I and @ActionAbe are seeing.