Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

NigeWick wrote: »

Children surviving. Once they all survive, couples generally only have an average of two.

Exactly. And whilst we had a long time to adjust from high birth rates as medicine and health standards slowly rose, other nations got the benefits far faster (but later) and have had to adjust rapidly.

Bangladesh is a great example, where thanks to education, especially trained women visiting rural communities, they've managed to reduce their birth rate from over 6 to close to 2 per woman in just 50yrs or so.

For anyone interested in the big picture I watched a great Ted talk some years ago, which goes into great detail:

DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population

Piddles wrote: »

I just watched this.

Fascinating.

I considered myself educated and well informed. But not so much right now.

If you haven't seen it, take an hour out to watch it. It may be the most valuable hour you've spent in a while.

Many thanks, and just to re-cap on some of my recent posts, we can no longer look for excuses to act, or for others to do it for us.

We have a responsibility to act on emissions as the science is solid and decided, questioning it, is a waste of everyone's time now. Hiding behind denials such as CO2 benefits for plants, or pretending the UK's (or any other country) part is smaller than it is, is just an excuse to avoid action. And hiding behind population growth is pointless*, the main issue - birthrate - is relatively solved now, so we have to accept the baked in growth from longer life.

This thread (and board) I believe is one to discuss solutions, not deny (nor hide from) problems. And personally I think the news is great, we just need to speed up deployment and integration.

* @Zeupater - no offence is meant against you, the way I initially read your post, and still do on on re-checking it, is that you are acknowledging population growth as a driver of increased demand, but pointing out that the problem is too many children per family. Points I agree on entirely.

zeupater wrote: »

Hi

But even that isn't the main problem .... moving backwards towards the root cause we have a level where governments spend tomorrow's earnings up front and then encourage population growth & inflation to balance their position, then there's the root cause .... population size & growth ...

If the future of humanity (not the planet as it will eventually recover!) is doomed then it's down to whoever replaces their own existence on more than a one-for-one basis ...

HTH
Z

It was the use of your post, and the implication that the issue is not being addressed, that I object too.

Piddles wrote: »

I've been mulling this over...

The assertion is that raising education, health and living standards around the world has meant the we have already reached "peak child" and that it's now longer life expectancy that is going to take the planet's population from 7 to 11 billion at which point population growth is expected to stop. That's still a 60% rise in just a few decades, but it seems conceivable that with new technology the planet ought to feed and water such a number (but no doubt to the detriment of all the other species).

However, that TED talk doesn't really factor in the environmental impact of those rising living standards. They referenced Mozambique quite a lot, where the per capita carbon footprint was 0.1 tonne in 2010. In the US it was 18.1 tonnes per person. source

Using China as an illustration, the massive economic growth has, for example, seen a not unreasonable equivalent massive demand for meat. It takes 20 to 30 buckets of plant calories to grow one bucket of beef calories.

Now if all this extra economic activity translates in the doubling of the world average carbon footprint from 4.6 to 9.2 tonnes, that means that we're not really talking about 11 billion people but the equivalent of 22 billion.

Now add a load of climate disruption from rising temperatures and even if the other G7 countries mirrored the UK's carbon neutral target by 2050, it starts to look like the predictions of world order breaking down around 2050 has credibility. :eek:

Yes - it's slightly terrifying, but there's good news.

Start from the top down, and look at 'fully' developed countries like the UK. We are reducing our carbon emissions and aiming for net zero by 2050. That means that zero carbon per capita is possible, and for a developed country.

From there, apply that out to all countries, why can't they all achieve this, and for developing countries, India is a great example I think, they can avoid the high CO2 per capita that we, the EU, US etc have by leapfrogging straight to low/zero carbon technologies.

I've always argued that the UK's investment in RE will be repaid less from our own CO2 reductions, and more from avoided CO2 emissions by developing countries as they go down the RE route instead. Back to India, at the start of this decade they had a massive coal buildout planned to meet their needs, but as wind and PV costs fell (due to early, and high cost investment by us, and other wealthier nations) they changed direction and started to rollout 10's of GW's of RE instead of some (not all) FF expansion.

So ....... and here comes the biggy ........ whilst energy demand is going to rise massively, I believe it can be met by non FF means.

And I don't think I'm dreaming, RE deployment does not have any scaling issues, purely as an example meeting all energy demand in 2030 can be done with little land (or sea) use, as shown in this old article:

TOTAL SURFACE AREA REQUIRED TO FUEL THE WORLD WITH SOLAR (or off-shore wind)

[Edit - since this article was written, PV efficiencies have risen and off-shore wind WT's gotten bigger. With silicon/perovskite PV we could be seeing 35% efficiencies v's the 20% used, and WT's already pushing twice the size given, and efficiencies approaching 50% v's the 40% used. M.]

Also worth noting that the technology needed to switch space heating, transport, storage etc, already exists, and costs whilst high(ish) are already OK, and falling.

Obviously, I'm not saying everything will be fine, and the work needed is massive, and the investment even greater, but I do believe that it is entirely doable already and affordable, and we have kinda, sorta started, though Trump has decided to go in the opposite direction, but even he and his efforts will pass eventually.

Edit - Couldn't leave it on a negative - the pushback by states against Trump's actions have been impressive, and despite his best efforts, coal is still slowly dying in the US.