You assume that coal is the only alternative to nuclear power (there are not only other energy sources, but also the option to use less energy), and that there is no way to use coal in a cleaner way.
I leave the judgement up to you, just wanted to point out some confirmation bias in your convictions.
Do you wash your clothes by hand, with water heated from solar? No? Then why are you suggesting that most of the women in the world should continue spending their lives doing such menial activity?
This idea that we need to use less energy is one of the most short-sighted examples of western cultural privilege that I've ever seen. The amount of energy the average person has available to utilize for day-to-day needs is one of the best correlations to social progress and freedom.
People that don't have to spend their days washing their cloths by hand have spare time to spend on things like getting an education or participating in a democracy. We should be using nuclear power to significantly increase the amount of power people use so the social benefits currently enjoyed by the "west" can reach more areas in the world.
I not joking or exaggerating when I say that if we let the amount of available energy per-person reduce significantly, society will start to revert back to old institutions like feudalism and slavery. Without energy, you don't have the free time to become educated. Without education, we lose institutions that depend on an educated population like democracy.
This would be a good argument if a high portion of a comfortable lifestyle energy consumption went to washing machine-level improvements to living standards. Instead energy is so cheap in first world countries that we waste it and use 10x more than we need.
The washing machine might eventually show up in the charts once we cut out enough of the big items from energy wasting cuplrits. Even then most of the electricity consumption goes to heating the water, but it doesn't even register enough to warrant hot water intakes in washing machines. Or heat exchangers in waste water systems for this and shower/dishwasher.
(You don't want to waste electricity on water heating when you could heat it with solar, CHP or waste water recovered heat)
I never said anything about my washing machine. Maybe you should try to watching that talk by Hans Rosling that I linked to.
Who are you to say that using less energy is an option, when you have the luxury of heating and energy-expensive transportation, and most of the world doesn't yet have the energy to wash their clothes?
> You assume that coal is the only alternative to nuclear power (there are not only other energy sources, but also the option to use less energy), and that there is no way to use coal in a cleaner way.
I suppose the GP is implicitly taking into the account following facts:
- there are no other energy sources that are a) green, and b) can scale up fast enough to replace fossil fuels for base load;
- we're running out of fossil fuels;
- there is no "option to use less energy", not under capitalism and probably not even within human nauture - that is, unless you're suddenly capable of solving coordination problems on a global scale (i.e. you're a god).
It's really frustrating. We have a very good way to generate tons of energy, that's clean, safe and scalable, and we're not using it because people's perceptions of safety and danger are completely backwards (and politicians listen to that).
Of course there is the option to use less energy. That's just silly. If you are an American, go to any other country to learn how to get by with less energy (ie smaller houses that require less heating, smaller cars that use less fuel, less commuting to begin with, smaller fridges,...).
In theory, there is such an option. In practice, no one will take it, because why should they? It's both a coordination problem and a short/long-term values problem. How do you convince an average Joe to reduce his quality of life now in order to secure some abstract better future later; a future, that will come to pass if and only if every other average Joe and Jane does the same? You can't, unless you're a god.
And that point itself is irrelevant anyway. I too recommend watching that TED video[0] 'pdkl95 linked. The first world can try and reduce their energy consumption all they want, while there's the remaining 2/3 of the population that is industrializing itself right now, who will need more energy for things like transportation and healthcare and washing machines and food production and entertainment, and that need will offset whatever we can save.
And while we the first worlders have privilege of worrying about climate change - after a hot meal and a hot shower, dressed up in clean clothes that were washed and dried by machines - most of the world won't care. They want their hot food and hot showers and washing machines now, to have time to go to school and to read books to their children. They will seek power sources they can get.
All this makes current anti-nuclear advocacy outright dangerous to survival of technological civilization[1]. We should be pushing nuclear for baseline and renewables on top for peak loads, and slowly phasing-out coal altogether (and maybe pouring some more money into fusion research as well). We should be doing it right now, gaining more experience with building and maintaining safe nuclear plants, so that maybe developing countries could even skip coal altogether and go straight for nuclear+solar. But instead, we got a lot of people irrationally afraid of nuclear power, thus endangering their own survival.
RE going to another country - I live in Poland, so I do have a perspective on how to live on less energy than an average American, though we still use a lot of power here.
[1] I initially wanted to write 'mankind', but humans are a resilient species and will no doubt survive even total civilizational collapse. Yes, there will be a world of humans. But it won't be a world any of us would like to live in. I like my pizza, showers, Emacs and an air-conditioned office, thank you very much.
Presumably then controlling population growth is another way to save energy. I took that "how many earths does your life style require" - the evil half of my brain thought "if my lifestyle requires 1,5 earths, then it would be sustainable with one third less people than we have not"...
Afaik China for example is trying to actively manage the population growth/consumption problem, and sometimes they managed to introduce some environment friendly things that took other countries decades (like making filters in car exhausts mandatory, making plastic bags illegal, and so on). Not that China is a model of environmentalism, just saying that it's not a given that third world countries have to take the same route to modern living as US+Europe.
As for why would anybody save energy: it doesn't always have to equate less convenience. For example, even if you gave me the biggest possible car, with some magic CO2-neutral power source and what not, I would still not like commuting. So a solution that involves less commuting could both save energy and be more convenient (for example cool new houses could be build that make it more attractive to live in the city - in fact less cars would make living in the city a lot more attractive).
In general it seems to me that if "convenience X" involves a lot of energy, it will also involve a lot of nuisance (machines that make noises or need a lot of attention - lots of energy passing through it means likely it will break down sooner).
Or better insulating your house could simply be cheaper than paying for the energy to heat it - why wouldn't you then choose to insulate the house?
I take it you still haven't seen that TED talk. A key point Hans Rosling makes (which he expands upon in greater detail in several of his other talks). In this talk, he explains
... there are two things that can increase the energy use. First, population
growth. Second, economic growth. Population growth will mainly occur among the
poorest people here because they have high child mortality and they have many
children per woman. ...
You may not have noticed, but China hasn't been very successful at legislating population growth. Meanwhile, some areas have slowed their population growth. Japan is actually concerned that they are losing population.
The way you control population is \to bring people up to a standard of living that no longer requires having large families (i.e. for farm work, etc). China knows this. They aren't stupid - they certainly understand the costs of allowing terrible ("equivalent to a pack/day cigarette habit") smog. China also understands that if they can stabilize their population by raising their lifestyle. Hence they are using incredible amount of coal as a short-term workaround while they work on the largest public-works infrastructure projects in the world (e.g. Three Gorges, their current breeder reactor project).
> some magic CO2-neutral power source
A nuclear power generator is not magic.
> save energy
You say this as if engineers aren't constantly creating new ways to make energy usage more efficient. Of course they have - engineers hate energy waste. We have been slowly improving efficiency. Obviously we should continue this process, but it will never be enough to significantly impact the the total energy used in the world.
> it seems to me that if "convenience X" involves a lot of energy, it will also involve a lot of nuisance
This is absolutely not true in general. Many things oonly become possible when you reach a minimum of energy.
> You may not have noticed, but China hasn't been very successful at legislating population growth.
The one-child policy was a targeted a population of around 1.2 billion in 2000. Actually population in 2000 was about 1.262 billion. I may not like the methods used by China, but calling it not very successful seems somewhat questionable.
> Meanwhile, some areas have slowed their population growth.
Like, say, China, which had a natural growth rate around 25 per 1000 when the one-child policy was adopted, dropped down to 11 and back up to around 16 in the mid 80s, then pretty consistently down since, to 7.58 in 2000, and around 5 for about the last decade.
I probably should have stated it more precisely, but that's more or less my point. China has made some impressive changes in the last few decades, with a lot more people having access to energy and the lifestyle improvements that it brings.
Without the ability to utilize energy, the China's population would be a lot further off from the 1.2B target. We still see this in some regions, as the one-child policy is harder to enforce the further you get from the metropolitan areas.
It's still a huge country with a lot of variation, of course, and I'm generalizing a lot.
I don't understand what you are trying to say. My point was that energy can be saved. I guess I tend to think more abstract than you. For example, population could be reduced by dropping a nuclear bomb - boom, energy saved. (I'm too lazy to go into details of population control here...).
That's of course not the solution I propose, it just abstractly proves the point that energy can be saved. In fact, as you mention with the washing machines example, the majority of people seem to get by on very little energy (even less than is required to power a washing machine).
All I said is that saving energy is another option, besides building more nuclear power plants or burning more coal.
And you seem to have missed that washing machines are not the major factor in power consumption that you make it out to be.
"it will never be enough to significantly impact the the total energy used in the world"
People will simply use all the energy they can get (even if you build lots and lots of nuclear power plants). That doesn't imply that they couldn't get by with less.
> population could be reduced by dropping a nuclear bomb
Some of us are trying to discuss solutions, not fantasies of genocide.
> All I said is that saving energy is another option
And I'm saying the only reason you say that is because you're living an incredibly privileged life. For most of the world, "less energy usage" means hard decisions like if they have enough food to eat. For someone who claims to think abstractly, you seem to have a serious problem thinking about energy from any other point of view than what is presumably your own ethnocentric perspective.
> And you seem to have missed that washing machines are not the major factor in power consumption that you make it out to be.
Do you know how I can tell you still haven't watched Hans Rosling's explanation of this problem?
Washing machines (and related basic-standard-of-living technology) is probably going to account for about 1/3 or 1/2 of the increase in energy usage of the world in the next several decades. Energy expensive technologies (e.g. airplanes) are not relevant, because only a small number of people will gain access to the necessary wealth in the same time period.
To be very explicit, the energy saving that are possible - which should still be done - form the tiny number of people with enough privilege to regularly pay to waste energy is tiny.
> they couldn't get by with less
Go watch that video. Look really hard at what it's like to waste your days washing your cloths instead of, say, getting an education.
What specific energy use is being wasted? What "optional" thing should they stop doing?
What, exactly, should most of the women in the world (who are currently in this situation) do to reduce their energy use?
Assuming you are not a terrible personj that says they should have to stay living in poverty or simply be bombed (your other "option"), where specifically should these people - that is, the 3-4 billion people currently living under these conditions get their energy? (there are only 3 options: nuclear, coal/gas, or "they don't get to enjoy an industrialized lifestyle")
Hopefully, answering these questions should reveal to you why "lower energy use" is not an alternative.
> People will simply use all the energy they can get
That may be true for you, but you shouldn't project your beliefs onto others.
So I finally watched that talk to the end (had only watched the beginning). I generally like Rosling, but that talk seems a bit low on details. Your interpretation seems wrong - washing machine people only use 2 units of energy, the rich use 6 units. So there seems to be a lot of potential to save right there. While more people will move up to washing machine level, at the same time things could get more efficient and more green energy could become available (it's not clear where Rosling gets his projections from...).
Rosling seems to be angry at some economics students who he claims wanted to deny the world washing machines. You adopted his anger and now you think everybody who says "save energy" wants to deny people washing machines. There is simply no basis for that (and I wonder if those selfish economic students actually exist - Rosling is a cool guy, but also a show man, perhaps he invented them for a good story).
Washing machines are actually not that sophisticated, by the way. I think the first ones even operated without electricity. It's basically a drum spinning in a bowl of water, with some fancy chemicals added to the mix. Perhaps somebody should invent a "3rd world washing machine" to help all those women out.
The point you are missing is that these articles create a bias against nuclear power, but by rights there should be a deluge of articles documenting the ongoing tragedy of using coal.
But there are not.
And the result is that people have developed a fear of nuclear power while having an undeveloped fear of coal power. Coal is not the only alternative to nuclear, certainly, but coal has absolutely replaced some nuclear power around the world. And that's a tragedy because it represents people taking the wrong lessons to heart, being motivated by fear of the unknown, and making choices that lead to more tragedy and death, not less.
In fairness there's no shortage of articles on climate change calling out fossil fuel burning, and literally nobody advocating coal as the miracle energy source of the future (notwithstanding the fact that plenty of coal plants are being built in rapidly-industrialising countries with scant regard for the environment)
I'll grant that perhaps too much of the criticism of coal power links it vaguely to global climate change rather than specifically to the effect of exhaust gases and coal dust on people living downwind of the plant, but I think that obsession with massive future change rather than respiratory diseases and cancers of today is a more general problem in environmental reporting.
IMO, that has always been the problem with environmental issues. For the past thirty years or so everything has been focused on this massive yet fuzzy future catastrophe rather than the real, specific, less "critical" damage being done now. Thing is, addressing the latter will pretty much address the former as well.
Activists insist on framing their message in terms of the former, though, even going so far as to claim focusing on immediate local effects is "missing the big picture".
Then what you can do is writing articles documenting the ongoing tragedy of using coal (though I think there's already many), rather than dismissing others' work.
I leave the judgement up to you, just wanted to point out some confirmation bias in your convictions.