Energy production is the easier part. Storage is the harder part. It seems like renewable electricity storage is just now getting to the point of maturity that solar electricity production was 10-15 years ago. [1]
The model Westerner in question is someone more like the median Dane than the median Texan. [2]
Some forms of consumption are going to be limited by constraints other than CO2 emissions from energy. Ruminants emit too much methane for everyone to eat beef like Australians. There are not enough redwood trees for the world's populations to install redwood hot tubs like Californians used to. There is not enough usable space in Luzon for most of the population to have a large detached house even if there were clean energy for all those houses.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20595698
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co... https://www.eia.gov/state/rankings/
The other popular perspective is that those figures really "belong" more to the end consumer than to the producer. I don't agree, for reasons both philosophical and pragmatic.
Pragmatic: it is easier to track what happens in large production facilities than to track the ultimate retail fate of every gallon of gasoline coming from Louisiana refineries. Trying to trace production to millions of consumers instead of monitoring dozens of primary producers is a recipe for getting much less actionable data.
Philosophical: producers are (IMO) more responsible for the efficiency/pollution of production than consumers are. A consumer has no way of telling at the point of sale how efficiently/cleanly the aluminum in a laptop or plastic in a bucket was produced. Primary producers reap the profits and make those process choices about production; it's also producers who should most face the criticism for wasteful or polluting practices.
I don't think people appreciate what that means.
Do you mean to imply that productivity increases when your standard of living does? I'd agree with that (for a definition of productive that isn't so narrowly defined as production of wealth for a private entity like a company.)
If not, we need to deal with the fact that "productivity" doesn't directly correlate with your standard of living, unless your definition of the word is just the rate at which you accumulate capital.
And on the subject of energy storage: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-the-...
That's because it's framed deliberately by bad-faith energy-industrial proponents, and repeated by "useful innocents".
If you are going to run an aluminum smelter, you need a lot of power. An area where they don't have those, doesn't need anywhere near the amount of power per capita. But somebody has to produce aluminum if society is going to have it.
That's better compared to, say, per-country emission goals.
From my seat, the Western World brought us to this brink and isn't doing enough right now.
And China is actually investing far more into clean energy than richer countries, both in absolute as well as relative terms. One of the reasons is the catastrophic pollution from manufacturing. Others are fuel independence and the goal of becoming a leading manufacturer.
The same applies to the seas on which fossil fuels are shipped across the world. In June, Trump unleashed a tweeted torpedo at the Carter Doctrine when he questioned the U.S. Navy’s role in ensuring freedom of navigation, especially for oil tankers.
Followed by:
Absent the U.S. Navy policing sea lanes, it’s debatable whether oil-importing countries would have allowed themselves to rely on barrels shipped from the Middle East and other hot spots.
It does seem strategically questionable when posed this way.
> A central argument for fossil fuels’ continued dominance is that humanity will surpass 10 billion at some point, and all those people will want something like the Western living standards built over the past 100 years on the back of coal, gas, and oil. Yet what a poverty of imagination this betrays, especially in light of climate change, which hits the poorest hardest. How can that be the pinnacle of civilization? What even constitutes “higher living standards” in a world where the costs of our existing technologies are so transparent? Far from securing hydrocarbon dominance for another 100 years, the needs and aspirations of future generations demand it give way to something more sustainable.