Hans Rosling has a very good argument that we need a certain minimum amount of energy usage if we want both social and population stability. Wasted energy in the developed world is an interesting discussion, but if we want to address climate change the focus has to be on the much larger population of the world that is trying to rapidly increase their energy needs.
> without confusing it with lowering the standard of living
That's precisely the problem. Any proposal that significantly reduces energy usage almost certainly involves telling a large portion of the world "no, you don't get a washing machine" or similar restrictions on the basic benefits of industrialization.
Binding? Name one that doesn't involve nuclear weapon proliferation.
You can't Carbon tax people by income (because people don't pollute directly). You'll target polluters.
So you go to Apple and tell them that they emitted so many kg of CO2, pay ... tax,
Which will undoubtedly find its way to rising phone prices, which means (poor) people don't get nice things.
Anyway, let's not get lost in the details, I was just offering a trivial counterexample against the claim that
> Any proposal that significantly reduces energy usage almost certainly involves telling a large portion of the world "no, you don't get a washing machine"
Probably more like "No you don't get a dryer" though, as a washing machine can use less water ?
Not saying we shouldn't do them all, but I don't think nuclear is the most difficult of these three.
Either way, we need a larger and more capable grid, so that production and demand can be balanced over larger areas.
Molten salt reactors would be quite good at load following, because the reaction rate slows down so much as the fuel temperature increases. If you draw less power, you apply less cooling, so the fuel heats and the power output goes down. For example, the IMSR, likely the first MSR to be commercialized, is naturally a load-following reactor [2].
This doesn't mean it wouldn't make economic sense to, say, run nuclear for baseload, add solar for extra daytime demand, and use storage to smooth out the remaining demand mismatch. But that's a matter of economic optimization, not a technical limitation of nuclear.
[1] http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/02/14/responding-to-system-de...
In contrast, we know with near certitude that investment in basic infrastructure, such as a capable and robust power grid, will promote a plurality of solutions and pay for itself over time.
Yup. Larger power markets benefits every kind of power: wind, solar, and nuclear. There is a lot of resistance to this though. Every state would prefer wind sites build in their own state, rather than buying power from the windier state farther away.
If you had a truly national sized grid then the power distribution between even just wind and solar is remarkably stable.
As for the latter, it's great actually. Lifting people out of poverty and keeping their kids alive lowers their birth rate.
And generally, lifting people out of poverty has meant increasing their carbon emissions.
EU28 and Japanese electric consumption is falling. Population is falling in Japan and is in some EU countries (Germany) and likely will on average in the EU in the not too distant future.
What, exactly, do you mean?
(1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-lift...
And failing at it, oil use is still going up
> Less food? Working on it (see: /r/progresspics, and all the science and journalism on this, soda bans, etc).
And failing at it, see worldwide obesity statistics
> Less cars? Working on it (see: Waze, Uber, Lyft, public transit, et al).
And failing at it, see the meteoric rise of motorization in developing countries
> Do you suggest that China didn't try population control at scale for generations?
Are you suggesting it was a success, and didn't cause a huge gender imbalance which is threatening to cause social strife?
This is more of a food quality issue than a food quantity issue. The strict hypercaloremic hypothesis is one that really is ready for retirement (and more or less has been retired in research circles).
It is not physicially possible to gain weight when you have a caloric deficit. Where would it even come from?
A flippant counter-example: eat only carbohydrates with a 1000 calorie deficit, drink 5 liters of water daily- 0 additional calories. How would you not gain water weight? Doesn't that count also?
The body is not a closed system.
The laws of thermodynamics tell you your caloric equations have to be balanced, but the internal state of the body can alter behaviors such as feeding and moving, so appealing to the laws of thermodynamics is pretty much off-topic. It's a common fallacy, and you're not alone in committing it. Obesity is increasingly seen as a metabolic disease with behavioral consequences rather than the other way around.
Here are two arbitrary papers I've blindly pulled out of the google-scholar hat, both of which discuss aspects of the issue at hand. Much has been written on the subject, and I respectfully urge you to investigate further.
1. http://www.nature.com/nrendo/journal/v2/n8/abs/ncpendmet0220...
2. https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2...
Also, if you're going to be sardonic, you really should make sure you're not missing anything...
In contrast to popular opinion, cars are one of the greatest equalizers on the planet.
Before cars, who gets to enjoy a nice Sunday morning at the beach?
The rich with beachside estates. There aren't too many busses going there at random hours of the day.
Without cars, how would the poor get to a national park?
Practically, public transportation only works when you want to go where the crowds are.
If you want to stand out, you've got to take a car.
I don't want to eventually live in a world where I'm only allowed to order 8oz steaks (with the fat helpfully removed by law in case I got funny ideas about eating some of it) and small fries. It's a serious issue that people take that soda initiative as some kind of good thing.
It does not count as less consumption if you replace oil with solar. Replace it with a void. Whatever activities you were doing that required energy, just don't do those things.
We could do a lot better if we just lived like the 1600s.
Sure, nothing like a bit of plague and disease to thin out the population a bit.
The US energy productivity (GDP per unit of energy) has gone up 58% in the last 25 years, and most other regions of the world have seen large gains as well: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27032
Our energy use per capita also continues to decline.
Reducing consumption is a strange one. We keep making our devices more power efficient, but we pile on more of them. We have more efficient cars, but we seem to be driving them longer and more often. Busy-ness fills whatever space it's given, and that's a huge driver of consumption.
Of course, the very notion of "start ups" as promoted by sites like this are all about increasing consumption, often with new and frankly superfluous service-based conveniences. Money flows when consumption increases, so it'd have to be a truly cultural shift of simplicity, not a legislative or business shift.
While I do think energy consumption per capita in first world countries is probably decreasing, we haven't yet hit "peak population", and lots of people are moving up in poorer nations to be able to consume more.
In most of western countries, the society is set in a way that happiness is directly tied to consumption. Marketing and the society in general, makes people feel that the only way to fill their lives is by buying things.
In some other countries, people may be able to achieve similar levels of happiness with lower consumption levels; for instance, by doing things instead of buying things.
Countries that experience high costs for food and essential consumables see significantly higher rates of social unrest, riots, and revolution [1].
Not to mention that being able to reproduce is a fundamental goal of all sexual reproducing organisms because of evolutionary selection.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...
Telling people to stop producing offspring goes against basic human nature, and requires a pretty educated populace in order to understand why they have to stop this instinctual process.
Sex-drive is hard to stamp out. Actual reproduction, not so much.
And for what it's worth, humans have no obligations to our evolutionary past. "How we evolved" has no direct bearing on what we want (or 'are meant') to do with our lives. It only determines what we are circumstantially capable of.
EDIT: Here's a nerdy analogy for you. There is a relationship between the "programmer's intent" and the "binary program". But that relation has no bearing whatsoever on the relationship between the "binary program" and the "runtime behavior" of that program. These are independent relationships analgous to the relationship between "evolution" to "individual" and "individual" to "individual desires." (The feed-back which would link these -- from "runtime behavior" to "programmer's intent" -- only happens when the programmer is working, long before you end up with the binary you have when you run the program. In fact, this feedback is only ever employed to generate a completely new binary, never to modify the prior one. Thus ensuring that they cannot be co-dependent relationships, and thus evolution has no ability to determine individual behavior past the point of your DNA being fixed at conception.)
I think you're missing the connection. Sex is fun because evolution selects for things that improve reproduction. People that have fun having sex are going to reproduce a lot more than people who don't have fun having sex.
Do you think people in the 1600s had a great quality of life?
It's the 20th century version of "let them eat cake".
In terms of population reduction, history suggests any culture that does not propogate will be pushed aside by one that does. It will be interesting to see if there will still be a Japan in 3 generations.
reducing consumption (and) population
Nuclear has such a bad name in so many countries that it'd be nice if we could consider it a dead technology. To do that, it would really help if we could cut consumption to not need the massive glob of power than nuclear is designed to provide.
solar and wind produce a smaller amount of power with no side effects
What's implied by "produce power with no side effects" is it does not take fossil fuels to keep them running, nor do they put out any harmful by-products. Even hot water discharged into a lake and steam discharged into the air is more of a harmful by-product than the literally nothing that solar and wind generators produce.
Without side effects? wind?
Have you by any chance seen what wind plants do to birds? Or have you had the opportunity to live in a house near a wind plant? The noise is very annoying.
Water plants looks much better than wind plants.
The best way to reduce consumption, especially for a fungible product like electricity, is by increasing the price. The higher the price someone pays, the less they're going to "waste".
The dilemma is gauging and factoring into the price of a product the cost of externalities, especially externalities that are remote from the consumption. Guaging the cost is difficult (we normally use free markets to do that for us), but factoring the cost into the price is easy.
You can remove subsidies, e.g. for things like coal.
You can tax generation, like a carbon tax.
You can tax consumption, and even get fancy, like using progressive taxation (i.e. low base rate so people can operate their refrigerator, with an increasing rate as consumption grows).
Another alternative is energy saving measures. California has very aggressive energy efficiency requirements for all kinds of products, not just cars. They lead by far every other U.S. state, the U.S. federal government, and even Europe. Most people are unaware of it. Conservative economists argue that it just shifts consumption to other uses. But in _reality_ it's been highly effective; it's a significant reason why California has the lowest per capita energy consumption in the country. The fact of that matter is that changes in consumption patterns are relatively inelastic (as are, notably, responses to energy pricing). So as long as California continues to impose and amend efficiency regulations, it can continue hastening more optimal, more economically efficient energy consumption compared to the "free market" laggards. The trick is that the energy efficiency standards very closely track the state of industrial manufacturing techniques, maximize efficiency gains while minimize manufacturing costs. It's a small example of "central planning" by technocrats gone right. It works because it's practical to quantify the costs (changes in technology and manufacturing methods) and benefits (fewer watts) with a high degree of accuracy; and because if there's a miscalculation and the burden imposed is too high, people simply won't buy new products and will continue using the older, more inefficient ones, so there's a strong signaling loop back to the technocrats.
BTW, it's worth pointing out that we do _all_ of these things. At least, California does. So to answer the question of when we'll begin doing it, we already are, and have been for decades. The real question is, can we do better....
Even phrases like "population control" and "population management" carry this negative connotation. There probably needs to be a new, friendlier term. Something positive-sounding like "right-sizing" or "harmonizing".
In short, these ideas need better PR.
B. What exactly are you suggesting they do?
It's very likely that China and/or India will eventually be the most powerful countries in the world. Why? The simple fact that they have the most people and will have the biggest markets.
And anyhow, if we can sustainably support double or triple the current population, then why not?
It's very likely that neither China nor India will ever become the most powerful countries.
Maybe the best thing that global warming could do is force us to confront our choices. What is truly important? We probably don't need the consumption we currently maintain to have the really important things.
We don't, as a society, go the way of minimalism. Technology progress happens as if it has a will of its own, not dependent on individuals, governments and even wars going on. We're witnessing the birth of a new bootstrapped entity - we had the virus, the cell, the organism and now the machine. The moment we make a self replicating factory that only uses cheap local materials, we've seen the birth of this new life form. It will be the new cell, the bootstrapped, self-replicating, self-repairing, adaptive source of everything we need and capable of improving itself by continuous optimization.
We can't stop the birth of technological life.
We waste incredible amounts and a lower population means more goods for everyone.
I'm not saying they solve everything. I'm just asking when we can talk about these issues that are a lot easier to implement than splitting atoms.