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by Retric
3585 days ago
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Energy != electricity. Easily, 99.9% of all energy used by humans comes from sunlight just looking at farms. Plants store a tiny percentage the ~200+watts per meter of sunlight* average over 24 hours, but if you needed to grow them indoors it would take ridiculous amounts of energy. * You can approximate that from 4 pi R ^2 as surface area of a sphere / pi * r^2 surface area of a circle. So ~25% of 1050 W/m2 of direct sunlight on the surface. We don't farm above the arctic circle for example so that's just an approximation and most places have winters etc. So, really it's just a question of how and what we are counting. PS: ~200w average * 10,000 * 134,000,000 = 2,300,000 terrawatt hours. Oil and coal combined provide less than 40 terrawatt hours per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/medi... You can play with the numbers but we also depend on plankton to feed fish and of course enough sunlight to keep the earth from freezing. |
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If we are concerned about reducing CO2 emissions, energy usage is the important metric, not electricity.
However, this distinction doesn't matter much here, because, as I said:
> The exact percentage, whether it's 91.5% or under 60% doesn't even matter though, what matters is that fossil fuel burning is increasing in absolute terms[1].
Also, we burn fossil fuels to heat up houses. If we want to burn less fossil fuels for that, we need to generate more electricity, but we need to do it without fossil fuels. The only available ecological technology that exists today and has enough capacity is nuclear, and nuclear production is decreasing.
We burn a lot of fossil fuels. A big part for electricity, some other part to do other things (X). A big part (not all) of X can be done electrically too, but then we need a way to generate that extra electricity without fossil fuels.
> [something about plants and fish]
True, but I don't understand the relevance.