[pfdietz]

What he is pointing out is the long history of doomsaying being wrong, because it implicitly depends on the assumption that technology has reached its peak and cannot further improve.

To get a real doomsaying argument, you have to base it not on details of current technology, but on hard physical limits that no technological improvement can evade. And it's really tough to do that. The population limit for Earth based on pure thermodynamics is somewhere around 1 trillion people.

> Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked.

This appears to be wrong. Population growth is inexorably declining, and with renewables charging hard energy prices are going to be declining, not increasing.

[IHLayman]

>> Our ever increasing population and consumption will cause the price of energy and materials to increase as the low-hanging fruit is picked.

> This appears to be wrong. Population growth is inexorably declining, and with renewables charging hard energy prices are going to be declining, not increasing.

I don’t agree with all of the article’s premises but this is not wrong. Population is still increasing, even if population _growth_ (first derivative) is declining. And energy usage is skyrocketing, according to the EIA (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/).

[pfdietz]

Population is continuing to grow, but that's because of demographic momentum as population age structure relaxes toward equilibrium (with fewer young people and more older people, particularly older people past their reproductive years.)

The long term problem will be population decline as the total fertility rate drops well below replacement.

Energy use is going up, because lesser developed countries are heading toward first world rates of energy use. But that plateaus or even starts to decline (due to efficiency) also.

[azornathogron]

Why would population decline be a problem?

If doomsday predictions about population growth are to be dismissed because technology has always kept up with the increasing needs of humanity, what is the argument against technology keeping up with the needs of a demographically shifted smaller population?

[throwaway6532]

>Why would population decline be a problem? If doomsday predictions about population growth are to be dismissed because technology has always kept up with the increasing needs of humanity, what is the argument against technology keeping up with the needs of a demographically shifted smaller population?

Is there not an aggregate level of people required to sustain the complexity of the technology required to keep all of it functioning below which critical links in the chain begin failing causing a chain reaction where it all completely breaks down?

Am I alone in thinking that? It's mildly obvious if you do a thought experiment where you reduce the population down to a ridiculously small number you can see such a scenario is indeed possible. The question is where exactly is that threshold?

I live in New Zealand and a good example of a weak link in the chain that got exposed by Covid when we completely shut our borders was that we couldn't get the seasonal workers required to operate some of the high tech farm equipment required for harvesting. I recall seeing on the news members of industry and government saying "it's not simply a case of just trying to hire more people locally as these machines are not simple to operate and require specific skills that take a non-trivial amount of time to train up on" etc. So, as we increase the complexity of the technology in order to boost productivity outputs it makes the system more and more fragile to such shocks. So, if we're relying on future technology we're by definition relying on even greater complexity meaning that critical threshold of people needed to maintain it goes up, which is a problem if the population is going down.

[bgroat]

Is there a historical precedent for having a technology that can largely offset these risks (fission and fusion) but not using them?

I don't want to say "this time is different" (because I don't know that).

But we do find our self in a situation where technology hasn't peaked, but we aren't using the new tech we have

[throwaway6532]

What about technology for fixing water shortages due to over-pumping? What about technology to address usages of sand? What about technology to replace synthetic fertilizers derived from natural gas, and or finite resources of phosphate rock?

I think there is a big focus on "fossil fuels" but they are not the only resources we're using in an unsustainable way.

[panax]

Erosion of top soil is a more significant problem than fertilizer. With respect to fertilizers and inorganic phosphate supply, it seems that these are not really necessary(they might actually be detrimental) as long as you provide the right soil microbiome for the crops which can outperform synthetic fertilization[1-2] (though I am very new to this and is outside my field and I am unsure of the validity of their claims).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO2nGHq40Xc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErMHR6Mc4Bk

[bgroat]

This is my understanding and what I'm trying to optimize for in my food forest

[pfdietz]

Fission (and likely fusion) ended up being too complicated and expensive to do the job. But renewables appear to be much better situated to push out fossil fuels over the next several decades.

[simonh]

The problem at the moment with renewables is they still don't provide reliable base load, and energy storage systems while useful locally are proving incredibly expensive at scale. The fact is the only option we have right now in many countries for reliable base load generation outside fossil fuels is nuclear. Some other options may eventually become viable, like geothermal or fusion, but there's no realistic prospect of that over the next few decades.

If we want to get serious right now about eliminating fossil fuels, the fact is the answer is a mix of renewables and nuclear.

[pfdietz]

The "renewables can't supply baseload" has been so well debunked that at this point I have zero respect for anyone (typically nuclear stans) still trotting out that argument. No, renewables damn well can supply baseload, and likely cheaper than fission. The question is exactly which renewable sources and storage technologies will end up being cheapest, not whether they can do it at all.

[throwaway6532]

Is this in theory or in practice?

At this point it's a race against the clock and we're losing it badly. If we can't transition to it before it's too late, then that we could do it in theory isn't worth a whole lot.

[hackerfromthefu]

For the benefit of us all, any sources and links to educate on this :)

[revscat]

> What he is pointing out is the long history of doomsaying being wrong, because it implicitly depends on the assumption that technology has reached its peak and cannot further improve.

This is a straw man. The arguments against humanity’s survival are not technological, but economic: we will not survive because our economic systems continue to poison the environment, to the detriment of all. Solutions exist, but because it is taken as a matter of faith that economics is more important than environmental impact, no technological solutions are implemented. Capitalists fight almost literally to the death to maintain the status quo of a fossil fuel driven society, and has shown no ability to change in ways needed to stave of doom.

[pfdietz]

But there are plenty of examples of changes, involving both changes in economic incentives and changes in technology, that greatly reduced pollution. To pretend there's some iron law connecting industry and pollution is simply dishonest.

[ahevia]

There isn’t, but that change is slow & constantly challenged. Any progress towards protecting the Earth, our environment, and our resources are extremely hard fought, sometimes poorly-implemented, or at risk of being revoked when the government changed hands.

It is difficult not to blame industry because they profit off continued pollution & resource exploitation. The markets have a larger short term incentive to maintain the status quo

[throwaway6532]

>or at risk of being revoked when the government changed hands.

This is happening now. Everyone is focused on getting to "net-zero" and switching to natural gas as a "transition" to cleaner, more sustainable energy sources. This has resulted in nuclear/coal going offline and being switched out for natural gas and natural gas prices shooting up like crazy, then war breaks out and natural gas imports are at risk and people still need power, so policy makers turn to "well maybe its time to switch the nuclear power plant back on?".

When things shift such that the short-term incentives shift away from the push towards the sustainable, renewable direction then it goes back the other way and it can and will happen.

[revscat]

How so? Saudi Arabia still exists. There is not a single country on Earth who has taken the necessary steps. Hell, the EU is being threatened existentially by a fascist Russia, and they barely even entertain the idea of reducing natural gas imports from the country that is threatening them. So while there may be sporadic examples of pollution reduction, human civilization as a whole is not taking the steps that are necessary to prevent collapse.

[lasc4r]

Not that your point is wrong, but the EU has plans to cut their gas and oil imports from Russia by two thirds in the next year. And I'm guessing cutting them off entirely in the next few years. It's not feasible to do much more than that I think, they will be making real sacrifices, like implementation of rationing in Germany.

[wiz21c]

The question is not "if" but "when". Sure renewables are becoming bigger every day but will we have enough of them before getting into climate catastrophe ? That's the question...

[pfdietz]

We're almost surely going to have substantial warming. But it's a stretch to go from that to doom. We may end up seeing albedo modification as a stopgap.

[southerntofu]

Beyond the warming, the consequences of climate change are very real. Hurricanes that used to be the feat of a decade are now an over-yearly occurrence.

Beyond climate change, the consequences of pollution are very real. Many water sources can't be drunk anymore, and the agro industry is killing bees/insects (necessary for vegetal life) on a wide scale and depleting the soil of its water/nutrients turning it slowly into a desert.

Extinction is far off, but "doom" is a very likely outcome at this point given that no government is doing anything, besides advocating for "green growth" which is the opposite of what ecologists have been preaching for decades (green degrowth).

[unique_other]

> Hurricanes that used to be the feat of a decade are now an over-yearly occurrence.

I couldn't find any data that proves this. Maybe you could share?

[southerntofu]

I don't have detailed that because it's not my field, but there's a lot of people studying this phenomenon. I found this to be a good introduction: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/07/how-climate-chang...

[wiz21c]

Climate change is real for me. Heat wave + asthma are sometimes really tough to endure; big winds and more frequent floods (and more extreme) have destroyed the budget of the some parts of the state I live in for a very long time: it means no more budget for other things such as helping those who need it, maintaining infrastructures for schools, sports, etc.

Sure, it's not your Hollywood catastrophe, but the burden will become heavier on all of us. And if the rich (which I'm part of, sort of) can get out of it, they'll have to live with more social unrest...

[8bitsrule]

Beyond limited fossil fuels and biomass, the only reliable permanent and least toxic source of energy needed to make use of existing resources is the Sun. We might as well get very good at it ASAP. It will take only a few percent of sunlight to supply today's world energy demands.

It's clear that we can't, as the author suggests, "begin to run low of coal in the centuries to come".

[marcosdumay]

Define "catastrophe".

Are we already in one?

I do expect our emissions to get almost halved during this decade, and for carbon capture to become a practical thing on the next one. But depending on what you want, even this isn't enough.

[wiz21c]

I won't define catastrophe, but :

> I do expect our emissions to get almost halved during this decade

That's really good news ! I mean it's so far away from what I know that I sure have missed something. Could you give a few pointers that illustrate your expectation ? (honest question)

[marcosdumay]

I am more optimist than normal here. Most people take different conclusions from the same data.

But I do expect electrification to increase a lot this decade, and for renewables to take over the electricity generation so completely that other sources will only be able to compete with batteries, not with original renewable electricity.

If you extend our current trends, you will get into more than half of the energy being non-polluting. But most of it being new consumption, instead of replacing older sources.

Most sources on electricity agree to an unsettling level, so they are probably repeating each other. Here's one as good as any:

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/electricity-g...

For vehicle electrification, it's harder to find data, but everything has a huge rate of growth that will probably saturate on this decade:

https://www.iea.org/articles/global-ev-data-explorer

What will change on this decade that people usually don't take into account on their conclusions is that wind to a small extent and PV for a huge extent are already cheaper than most electricity sources, and getting cheaper by the day. The limits on PV price are so low we probably won't even be reach them this decade.

That places a real force on every process that heavily uses energy to take advantage of that cheap PV energy, or get outcompeted. Or in other words, the economic reality that have always got in the ways of renewables are now getting in the way of fossil fuels. So I expect the fossil fuel infrastructure to become obsolete and that new renewable energy that we will get to replace it instead of adding to it.

Notice that this is already happening on that data above. On a linear trend it's not fast enough to replace half of our emissions this decade, but on an exponential trend, it's more than fast enough. Well, the change into renewables has been exponential for decades already, that's how immature technologies work. Given that the limits on PV price are so low, I still don't expect it to change this decade.

[wiz21c]

Thx for this answer, it's quite convincing. I'll look at the trend in electrification instead of the trend of CO2 emission !

[louky]

Source for 1 trillion humans estimate? That's 1,000 Billion humans. There's ~8 billion now.

Sure without regards to any other than food organisms and pulling a "puppeteer" world (Ala Larry Niven) I don't see it. And I won't either way.

[pfdietz]

I can't find the specific reference, but that was the upper limit set just by thermodynamics; i.e., when the waste heat from human activities becomes large enough to heat the Earth too much. Insolation on Earth is about 100,000 terawatts, or 100 kW/person; a few kW per capita would be a few % of this, arguably close to that upper limit. That 1 trillion population would live in a very artificial environment, more like a space colony than a planet. All wastes would be recycled, including exhaled CO2, and food would be manufactured artificially rather than by agriculture (because photosynthesis is so inefficient.)

(I think it's referenced in J. E. Cohen's 1996 book "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" but I don't have a copy of that in front of me.)

This is not at all to say that this would be a desirable situation, or that human population is a metric that should be maximized at the expense of any other metric.

[bmitc]

What about the argument that technological growth and developments are the cause, or at least a catalyst, of all our problems rather than some part of the solution?

[throwaway6532]

Looks like you're getting downvoted, but it seems kind of obvious this is the case. Technology has allowed more people to exist, and more people are using more energy and more resources.

I think it causes cognitive dissonance in that people want the current world and lifestyle to be sustainable because they like it due to it having a lot of fun and comfortable things, and don't wish to consider the idea that it may just may be fatally flawed.

[bmitc]

Nail on the head.

It's an uncomfortable feeling realizing we're basically doing it wrong.

[pfdietz]

It sounds like guilt by association and ignores the importance of incentive structures. Economies that allow actors to foist pollution costs on others will have more pollution than is economically optimal. This isn't because of the industry creating the pollution, it's because of the economic structure allowing the negative externalities.