I don’t know where the idea that western style energy consumption is an issue, but the sun provides several orders of magnitude more energy than is needed.
The vast majority of the energy humanity uses is actually sunlight hitting crops. Our dependence on fossil fuels is mostly a question of costs and existing infrastructure. We have hundreds of millions of ICE cars and the infrastructure to keep them fueled. Swapping that to EV’s over 40 days is impossible, but doing so in 40 years is relatively easy.
Do you think solar panels are infinite? Have you looked at the price of lithium lately? It's been exploding and the only reason solar panels are economically viable is due to heavy gov't subsidization.
What happens when a solar panel dies out after ~25 years? We're already in an e-waste crisis. Less than 10% of panels in the US get "recycled" (and by that ofc we mean shipping them to 3rd world countries so we don't have to deal with it). There's only one facility in the whole world currently that has the capability to fully recycle a PV panel (Veolia in France). Every other place just takes the easy parts out and dumps the rest because the economics and risks to health aren't worth it
Not to mention rapidly ramping up production of stuff like EVs is going to have devastating immediate impacts on the climate. EVs are only more carbon-efficient than ICEs after a few years. The reason for that is because of the initial production of EVs produces almost twice as many GHG emissions as the production of an ICE. That's significant since initial production can be as much as half of a vehicle's lifetime GHG emissions
In practice they basically are. Panels are 90-95% silicon which makes up for around 28% of earths crust. That’s largely why they aren’t recycled, they simply aren’t made of partially valuable stuff.
The mounting brackets etc on the other hand are actually recycled.
But you are missing the point, getting lithium, mining in general, or other collecting practices require a lot of carbonized energy or have bad influence on ecosystems that actually are guarding against worse climate change
Using words like “a lot” is deceptive here, quantities can be large relative to individuals and minuscule relative to the environment. That said, mining can be done using 100% renewable energy just like anything else.
You are assuming that we have enough energy to harness all that energy from the sun. Extracting materials to harness all that energy costs energy, carbonized energy. Another issue is we don't really have 40 years anymore depending on how you look at it. So the issue still stands.
Crops do harness energy from the sun, but they can only do so at a certain pace which does not correspond to human pace, and in certain conditions, a stable given climate, which we are guaranteed to be leaving behind us now.
The issue is emissions not time. If you cut down emissions by say 75% then you have four times as long to hit the same amount.
Climate change isn’t some wall where X is absolutely fine and X + even 1% more is disaster. We are seeing negative effects today and they just get very slightly worse as emissions increase time the CO2 ppm increases by 1.
I mean, yes, that was implied, since we have not even starting decreasing the amount of carbon we let into the atmoshpere time = emissions. It's like I tell you I earn X$ dollars and month and then you tell me "Yes, but only if you go to work that month". I guess you are right but you're kinda missing the point. I really don't see emissions being reduced by 75% any time soon, so then, no, we don't have 40 years. Even if we stopped emitting carbon now, there would be bad consequences further down the road.
Exactly, this is not some wall and partly unknown territory, the thing is that this destabilization has inertia and we will suffer the consequences even after we have started actively removing carbon from the atmosphere if that ever happens. Another thing are self sustaining global warming mechanism that have been kicked off and that we don't know the effects of. So it won't get slighly worse, it is getting exponentially worse.
The US has dropped CO2 emissions by 15% since 2007. That’s a meaningful change.
Global numbers aren’t a rosy, but if you look at a developing country like China it produced 17.7% of their electric from renewables in 2008 and that jumped to 27.8% in 2019. While their economic growth more than offset that change, solar and wind adoption is currently much faster than economic growth both in China and around the world.
As to self sustaining global warming that’s not exponential. The current amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will result in a fixed amount of warming that hasn’t happened yet. It’s not an exponential increase just a lag between emissions and increases temperatures.
It's not just energy. You're responding to someone talking about how many things we buy and how much plastic we waste in general. Westerners need to learn that growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.
Even EVs are illustrating the problem. Rather than make transit efficient we're going to greenwash individual cars. Remind me where those EV batteries come from? Who cares about the externalities of lithium mining — just put multiple EVs in every home, widen the highways, add some interpasses. For people who don't have cars today (most of the world) will we be providing EVs as well?
At some point it will be too late and people will experience a rapid decline in quality of life (it's already happening if you look at lifespan) with no recourse. Easier to be in denial about that than to, say, not eat meat every single day. Or not have same-day and two-day free delivery in a country where 80% of product transportation is done by truck.
It would be nice to have a silver bullet, but the reality is people will have to make adjustments willingly or have it done for them by the biosphere. The Earth is going to be just fine. Whether or not we will remains TBD.
I don't know how this is downvoted, other than people's reflexive distaste to being told they need to consume less. Say what you want, but you can't cheat science. The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rising rapidly, and people are changing little in terms of the quantity they consume. Those goods are still being shipped around the world. It's simple math, if we consume roughly the same resources we will continue to produce the same amount of waste. Obviously technologies like nuclear power or widespread solar use would change this situation-- but adoption isn't fast enough to outrun global warming. People are desperately hoping for some revolutionary invention that will break this equation and allow us to consume without consequence. I hope so, but honestly there's a real chance that won't happen.
Because it doesn’t line up with reality. The US and Europe has dramatically reduced CO2 emissions and increased consumption. The US is down 15% from 2007 to now and that tend isn’t stopping. Global warming emissions is currently being driven by developing economies but they are going to be investing in the cheapest technology which is renewable energy.
Just look at say China’s electric grid and it’s percentage of Coal vs Wind and Solar or it’s EV adoption. That change is based on cold hard economies.
Plastics covers a wide range of different materials some are roughly as damaging to the environment as wood.
I don’t want to get into the rest of your post, but I would recommend digging a little deeper before you declare something a problem rather than a tradeoff.
I have a problem with such a claim. When measuring how "damaging to the environment" something is, what are we looking at? Compostable plastics, for example, might seem more eco when looking at the waste, but the truth is that just means they're breaking down into micro-plastics faster
How do we measure the impact of those microplastics? Is it by how expensive a micro-plastic clean-up would cost taxpayers? Is it by the (admittedly marginal, but very widescale) increases in health care costs to people that are impacted by it?
I think if we actually took a full-scale assessment of these sorts of impacts, we'd have a lot of trouble making such a claim
Beyond saying that growth for the sake of growth is bad, you're saying that having nice things is actually bad. Same-day or two-day shipping is nice. Automobiles are nice. Not having those things is already a rapid decline in quality of life; why wait for a climate catastrophe to do that, when you can just make nice things illegal to have?
If we all lived like cavemen, we wouldn't need to worry about our carbon emissions.
Let's lift everyone up to the "westerner's" standard of living, instead of the other way around.
>Not having those things is already a rapid decline in quality of life; why wait for a climate catastrophe to do that, when you can just make nice things illegal to have?
No offense but this is a really selfish point of view. The point is in one situation only we are uncomfortable, and in the other situation almost every creature on the entire planet is uncomfortable possibly for the rest of human history. The truth is we live unsustainable lives and people have to come to terms with that. If we can't, eventually we'll be forced to. Even if you don't want to.
Also, I honestly think life isn't that much worse without 2 day shipping. People literally lived without it for millennia. We know that we can be happy even with fewer conveniences. Giving those up is another story.
I was just on holiday in a city where having a car was a necessity in order to go anywhere fast. Now I’m back in Belgium where I can use a bike.
I had an app where I could order a car for some occasions and the app is nice. But I do not think it’s superior to a more efficient city: better public transport and bike infrastructure.
I agree with you that having nice things isn’t immediately bad, but especially Americans tend to confuse the things they’re used to for “nice things”, fault of not having tried the better alternative yet.
Your comment shows total ignorance or unwillingness to care about the global threat that climate growing instability represents to the whole human race. Reading comments like that now is truly terrifying to me You are either old and don't care because you may not live long enough to live through the consequences or are in total denial of what's happening.
The vast majority of the energy humanity uses is actually sunlight hitting crops. Our dependence on fossil fuels is mostly a question of costs and existing infrastructure. We have hundreds of millions of ICE cars and the infrastructure to keep them fueled. Swapping that to EV’s over 40 days is impossible, but doing so in 40 years is relatively easy.