We have more than enough food sources right now, humans also evolved as hunters-gatherers that means humans had to change places as they quickly ate everything in a distance around them, so I don’t see anything as unnatural or unique in human behaviour, medicine and other intellectual innovations made bigger populations possible, so we live with that, and live pretty comfortable.
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Don’t want to come across as misanthropic, but I think humans are less analagous to cats / dogs and more analagous to brewer’s yeast in a sugar-rich environment, especially looking at how we’re responding to climate change.
On an individual level, people can make better choices like vegetarianism/veganism, walking vs driving etc. Even so with small-medium groups, with things like reforestation and environmental activism, for example. Overall though?
I think a lot of the points brought up in Staying Optimistic are relevant. I think what makes humans unique vs. other animals is that we can see what’s happening and are capable of changing the outcome. Will we? Hopefully, my analogy is wrong and we don’t end up like the yeast, which in consuming everything, ends up poisoning itself as the alcohol concentation increases.
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Looking at my feed for water from The Guardian - England doesn’t seem to be coping well with the current drought / heat wave. Rivers are either running dry, or sewage, fish are dying. Small creatures like bats can’t take the heat either.
Climate refugees are on the most vulnerable edge. Long way to a tiny sub-Antarctic island if we evacuate Cape Town.
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I think it will be a blessing.
The fact is, it works. Think the Sun or Fusion bombs.
The difficulty lies in making the process controllable.
And it does not come with many of the problems that fission has. (The opposite nuclear process to fusion.)
It is still many years away from viability, but we’ll get there. Just because it doesn’t happen right away doesn’t mean we should give up.
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I hope that controlled, long-term, net energy production by fusion is developed in the next few decades. That will be great. (I’m not going to hold my breath waiting, though.) Fusion itself doesn’t produce greenhouse gases, which are causing current global warming, and doesn’t produce dangerous wastes.
The big questions will be how we use the energy, but those are the big questions we deal with now. Sigh.
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“Renewable energy” is a misnomer. As long as the turbines and batteries have to be made from mined minerals, they aren’t renewable. The generator in a wind turbine contains rare-earth magnets, and, well, just as the name suggests, rare-earths are in limited supply. Since fusion reactors require continuous refueling, the same limitation applies.
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Another article on the present state and perceived future of fusion power:
Why, you ask, should human emotions evolve, and along with it our reasoning? In the stone age the war fighting technology could at best (or worst) kill a few fellow humans. Today it can eliminate all life on earth. There is a statistical principle that if it can happen, it eventually will. If our emotions, and our reasoning, were evolved, we would not allow such human made technologies to exist.
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And when the sun isn’t shining?
The standard model of systems in which solar is a major contributor sees solar power generated when its sunny and stored for release into the system when loads on the grid peak or when its dark. The problem has been studied eight ways from Sunday and potential solutions aren’t terribly complicated or implausible.
I believe that the most comprehensive analysis of how to decarbonize the US economy was published last year by a group at Princeton University. It can be downloaded here: https://netzeroamerica.princeton.edu/?explorer=year&state=national&table=2020&limit=200 . It includes detailed study of issues associated with solar.
It’s a US study and carries assumptions that are particular to the US context. The thinking is generally applicable elsewhere, although the pathways will vary depending on the geography, economy and climate of the location. The principle constraints on doing this are political and sociological, not technological and economic.In general, political and sociological (i.e. cultural) constraints are harder to deal with.
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There’s also concentrated solar power (CSP) which uses an array of mirrors to heat some kind of thermal fluid, something like molten salt. This can operate for many hours after sundown (see: CSP doesn’t compete with PV - it competes with gas). It’s not as trendy or efficient as photovoltaic (PV), but it’s been around a long time; a well known one that’s often seen when driving/flying to Las Vegas, NV, US is Ivanpah Solar Power Facility for example.
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I personally don’t like CSP, due to birds catching fire when they fly into the beams. However, good point about working long after the sun sets.
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Definitely a problem with the tower-type CSP. I’m not sure if trough-type have this problem. I think their issue is lower efficiency and less storage than tower-type since the thermal fluid isn’t as hot.
yeah, that ivanpaw site absolutely destroyed some very ancient desert habitat too. I know something always has to give, and it always tends to be habitat, not someone’s profit, but i feel like we could do better with rooftop, parking lot, waste space (like brownfield NOT desert), etc solar plus the many storage strategies and some ag-field wind and microhydro, before massive solar desert-wreckers, huge dams flooding vast areas, ridgetop wind turbines in pristine forest, etc etc. I’m all for nuclear too, when done well. I know it hasn’t always been. But look into thorium salt and the smaller types of plants. Basically the type of nuclear tech that has been historically used is awful and there is much better available even before we get to fusion.
And no, nothing is impact free. But you gotta look at the severity of impacts, and fossil fuels, especially coal, rank very high on severity of impacts
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One thing that frustrates me about large-scale solar projects of all kinds is that people want to site them in good-quality desert, apparently not realizing western North America has millions of acres of overgrazed land with little ecological value that could be used for solar power projects.
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yeah exactly, heaven forbid they listen to ecologists, local people, indigenous communities, etc etc, nope its just plow right through
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Put the power source where the power is needed. On roofs in cities. Leave the desert habitat its small chance to survive. Desert does NOT equal wasteland.
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There’s no “if”. Our emotions and reasoning depend on physical processes of our brains, which are a material product of natural selection. The question to ask is this: what selection pressures have there been during the last few thousand years that could have resulted in significant changes in our brain functioning? Our precipitous reproductive success strongly indicates that we’ve already discovered a winning stategy using the behavioural traits we inherited - so why would natural selection act to change something that is already so clearly adaptive?
This is why it’s crucial to focus on precisely why we have been so successful. The burden of infectious disease has always been a very powerful factor is determining our long-term reproductive success. But recent medical advances have dramatically reduced that burden, thus greatly limiting the potential for natural slection to occur in our species.
But those technologies are clearly the principal source of all our success. We needed to evolve different tools, not different emotions. Where would we be today without those tools? No even in the Stone Age. The secret of our success is using tools to make better use of what Mother Nature has given us.
Mother Nature never thinks about the future, and doesn’t care about us. If the success of one organism (say, Yersinia pestis) kills off half the population of another organism (say, Homo sapiens during the Black Death) then so be it.
4 billion years ago there was no life on Earth at all. About 250 million years ago (at the end of the Permian Period), global geological events wiped out more than 90% of species on Earth. And yet here we all are.
Never underestimate Mother Nature.
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I thought CSP was cheaper than solar power till about 2009, Energy Wende in Germany which dropped Solar panels.
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I think historically, that’s true. Looking at this graph it looks like there’s been a huge price drop over time, per watt. In some cases, they’ve replaced CSP with PV, like the SEGS project. Unfortunately, at-home solar didn’t drop in price by the same amount since the biggest cost there is specialized labor.