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Living On a Carbon Budget: The End of Recreation As We Know It?
Lasrick writes Dawn Stover looks at unrealistic expectations and the distribution of limited energy resources: 'This is a question that should move from the fringes of the energy debate to its very heart. Economists and energy experts shy away from issues of equity and morality, but climate change and environmental justice are inseparable: It's impossible to talk intelligently about climate without discussing how to distribute limited energy resources. It's highly unlikely that the world can safely produce almost five times as much electricity by 2035 as it does now—which is what it would take to provide everyone with a circa-2010 American standard of living, according to a calculation by University of Colorado environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr. The sooner policy makers accept this reality, the sooner they can get to work on a global solution that meets everyone's needs. First, though, they need to understand the difference between needs and wants.' Not something most people even think about.
Having procreative sex is one of the most carbon expensive things we can do.
Another conclusion you can draw from this article is that everyone could live very well if we would pare down the population to 2 billion.
It would only take 60 years to do this
Instead, we'll probably breed right up to the edge of capacity and then die in billions when something unexpected happens.
Tragic.
Still, I also think they are ignoring fusion and solar. But... adding heat energy to the planet at the rate it's been growing since the 1600's will also result in a planet with a temperature equal to boiling water in 500 years. I'm not talking about global warming- just the amount of energy used and released that has to be radiated off into space.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'll play the asshole in this comic bit: Why should everyone in the world have 2010 American standard of living? We're wasteful, bigoted, conspicuous consumers at (or near) the top of the consumption food chain. This is like expecting everyone to be a 1%er (in American parlance), somehow, or for all of us to be above average drivers. We can't all be rich and good looking. Remember - when everyone is special, no one is special. We need classes just to keep the system churning.
Of all the possibilities, striving for the American 2010 standard makes no sense on so many levels.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"It's highly unlikely that the world can safely produce almost five times as much electricity by 2035 as it does now"
In the 7 years I have lived in my house, I have reduced my electricity consumption by 50%. There is nothing magical about what I've done. Insulation, replacing AC units with energy efficient ones as they wore out, LED light bulbs, energy star appliances. I used a "TED" (The Energy Detective) to figure out what my big users of electricity were. These upgrades have already paid for themselves in lower energy bills. Last year the addition of solar PV and a solar water heater have further reduced my electric demand by 2/3. These upgrades will pay themselves back in about 12 years.
My overall demand is 1/6th of what it was 7 years ago and I have sacrificed no enjoyment of life to get it. If anything, my house is more comfortable and better lit and my appliances work better. And there are still planned improvements that will further reduce my demand, probably by 1/2 over the next few years. I live in a 75 year old 3000+ sq ft house and my energy usage is lower than the median energy usage in Florida, while being 50% larger than the median house size.
I agree it's foolish to try to increase global electricity production by a factor of 5. What we should do is relentlessly pursue efficiency until we reach the threshold of diminishing returns.
Close enough that we have to DO SOMETHING NOW!, but far enough that no one will ever be called to account for being wrong, but not so far away that it's not in our life time and can be ignored. Having lost track of the number of such deadlines for the point of no return that have already passed in my life time let me just say I am a little skeptical.
And you know the Indians, the Chinese, and many others could care less and are going right on growing their populations and carbon production and there is no chance they will do anything but grow for the next 30 years. So if the author is right and we have only that long before we have irrevocably ruined our environment, then the choice for those of us in the industrial world is clear.
Enjoy all the vacations and recreational activities you can now. No seriously, if they are right then we are doomed, so you might as well enjoy it while you can, and they are wrong then you will have the last laugh while they sit around entertaining themselves doing the crossword puzzles, while they suffer without air conditioning.
-jon
Actually you only need to pear the population down by about 20 million. The top 2% of the world's population consume something like 90-95% of the resources, they are extremely expensive to have around. Remove them and everyone's standard of living jumps significantly.
The problem with the general idea of reducing the population is that the people who consume the most would be the least likely to actually be impacted by such programs, it would probably eat from the middle out.
Having procreative sex is one of the most carbon expensive things we can do
The big purple elephant in the room that everyone pretends to ignore.
Total Resources = Population x Individual Resources
Increase resources, reduce population, or reduce standard of living. It's a simple if difficult choice.
Individual people can be reasoned with. Unfortunately, groups of people are stupid and haven't progressed passed the roman gladiator spectator mobs. They'll demand more resources, defend religious teachings to have yet more kids, then wonder why they make less money each year.
(hourly median salary in the USA has been stagnant the last 40 years - actually, if you take into account productivity gains, it is half of what it was 4 decades ago.)
I'm always confused by this objection to "central planning". For example, I've argued that the US should build up the train system, and have been told that it's a terrible idea because it's an example of "central planning". The government building up the train system requires that it assumes to know what's good for us, where we will want to travel, and it can't possibly know with perfect forethought.
Meanwhile, some of these same people will support the building an maintenance of the highway system, government support of the American auto industry, and gasoline subsidies. Somehow all of those things represent "freedom" because it means I get to feel good about myself when I buy a cool car.
Or the government can't build Internet infrastructure, because "central planning". Meanwhile, it's fine for Verizon to run most of the vital infrastructure. I guess that's fine because Verizon is too incompetent to plan anything?
Essentially what I'm getting at is, whenever I hear this objection to "central planning", the real issue always seems to boil down to "rich people might not make enough money."
Increasing the standard of living decreases population growth, especially when women get a piece of that action. Despite your claims, most of the western world actually has sub-replacement birth rates. If your life is awesome, you don't want/need a bunch of kids to feel important and you've got better things to do with your life than just pump out kids.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
You forgot "or increase technology." Surely you can agree that (for example) lighting your house with LEDs and doing your computing on something like a Haswell laptop is not a lower standard of living than lighting your house with gas lamps and doing your computing on a PDP-11... but it uses a whole lot less energy!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
>And would it not be much more fair to look at per-capita numbers? i.e. stop harping on China/India, start worrying about Europe / NA
That's a good question. At first glance, per-captita consumption seems like the thing to focus on. Honestly, it's probably a good place to star; however, as that gap closes things get more subtle.
Consider 4 people, entitled to equal carbon emissions. They form 2 couples and the first decides to have 2 kids, while the second decides to have 6. Are the resulting families entitled to equal emissions, or is each person still entitled to equal emissions?
- It's unfair that children born into a large family should have less then those born into a small family
- It's also unfair that the actions of a couple choosing to have a large family should slice the environmental pie more thinly, reducing the share of those who chose to have a small family. Furthermore, the first option leads to the question of what's a fair baseline and basic human rights, while the second leads to a tragedy of the commons or lowest-common-denominator scenario.