Climate Change Thread

[Husar]

Efforts to curtail growth in human societies have always had a strong negative backlash on one level or another. Growing our way out of this problem is not going to be a volume growth effort, it will have to involve advancement in several areas of energy production. Yes that means we will have to make more of solar, geothermal and nuclear powers -- but the amount of power being used cannot be curtailed enough to make a difference without a world dictatorship plunging 90% of the planet into an agrarian existence. We could reduce emissions to zero tomorrow and STILL have to adapt to a warmer planet and different sea levels which will persist for a substantial period of time. And you are well aware that that kind of radicalized solution won't happen.

And we currently produce enough food to feed the entire global population 1.4 times despite numerous sub-optimal production efforts (not that the food gets to the right spots mind you, just that it is made).

I'm thinking long-term. If you say growth cannot be stopped then I ask you what happens at 50 or 100 billion humans on this planet?
I'm pretty sure at that point it won't be pleasant anymore regardless of how much the ecenomy has grown.
A smaller groth etc. could also be incentivized, e.g. by cutting all the child benefits from the second child on and so on. But even for governments there is no incentive in most cases because population means power, growth of the economy and so on. And so everything grows, even that which shouldn't.

That we have to adapt to a warmer planet is correct, but rather a 2°C warmer planet than one 10°C warmer.

As for nuclear energy, you already mentioned that the storage of spent fuel is quite problematic, especially in the long term again. You wouldn't really want some of it to spill into the ground water when your grand grandchildren are alive, would you? It is possible that the storage sites will have to at least be monitored and maintained to some extent for the next few hundred thousand of years. And in the really long term, the fuel is also limited, even more so if we increase use by a large margin.

I was also wondering whether centralized power production is really that great if you consider this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ather-threats/

The 2008 National Academy of Sciences report said power outages after an extreme solar storm could last months or longer, since transformers take a long time to replace.

Perhaps more local power assets would not be damaged as much or could be replaced faster, e.g. by the community having replacements around at all times, whereas this is not economical for corporations. A power outage for more than a month may already lead to a large catastrophe as people would run out of food and suppliers could become unable to supply enough and so on. Almost makes me want to become a doomsday prepper...

Either way it is interesting how much we rely on the availability of electricity these days and how little we seem to have in terms of safeguards should it break down in a catastrophic event. A local emergency power production wouldn't even have to cover all the needs, just enough to continue using refrigerators and some electric ovens to cook. If such energy is provided by renewables, it also provides "free" energy (in terms of fuel cost) when the grid is operational in a normal way. That is one of the reasons I think we should plaster the planet with renewables and advance research in that field as well.

Even for corporations renewables offer interesting investment opportunities such as desertec (and comparable projects), off-shore wind parks and tidal power. Of course the investments can be huge early on, but in the end you get the benefit of not having any fuel costs whatsoever, because the fuel is already plentiful in the sky, sending the energy down for free.