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Originally Posted by Mathgod
??? What does this even mean? Sustainability isn't some consumer product that's bought, it's an attribute of a sane socioeconomic system.
Your statement is kind of ironic too, in the sense that if we allow a worst case climate scenario to happen, it will likely be an ultra-wealthy tiny sliver of the world's population that will be able to avoid the worst effects and survive, while the rest of us perish.
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Environmental sustainability, standard of living, affordability. Pick 2, because you can't violate the laws of thermodynamics. Thinking otherwise is merely hoping for a unicorn. Technology can narrow the magnitude of the tradeoffs though (e.g. lower cost nuclear could make available an incredibly dense, but green, energy source).
The concept is rooted in two principles:
1) Standard of living is directly correlated to the amount of energy consumed
2) Return on energy...the amount of energy you get out of something relative to the amount energy you put into getting it
The most efficient way to increase standard of living is with high return on energy sources. Unfortunately our highest return on energy sources are also those that have the most pollution (because of the incredible amount of energy in the C-H bond that turns into CO2 when you release that energy). You can see this through the types of energy used over history.
Biomass: You just need a few swings of an axe and lighter and, boom, you've got tremendous amount of thermal energy
Coal: You just need a few more swings of a shovel and a lighter and, boom, you've got even more energy.
Oil: Now you need to spend quite a bit more energy (exploration, drilling, piping, refining, distribution, build cars, etc.) to finally put it into our tanks to generate kinetic energy. But gasoline is an incredibly dense energy source so you still have a very high ROE.
Wind and solar: You need to expend quite a bit of energy to get the infrastructure built, and what you get out is relatively low density. They have much lower ROEs.
There's a reason pretty much every nation has lifted itself into the first world on the back of coal. Environmental sustainability, no matter how necessary it obviously is (I completely agree with you), is unfortunately a relatively first world problem. If you're living in a mud hut burning wood and walking a mile with a bucket to get water, you don't care about future environmental death and destruction consequences nearly as much as you do improving your own standard of living.
- Want affordability and high standard of living...well you're going to pollute
- Want affordability and environmental sustainability...well you better consume way less energy (i.e. grow your own veggies, walk everywhere, live in a mud hut, etc)
- Want a high standard of living and environmental sustainability...well then be prepared to pay for it because you have to build way more clean but low ROE infrastructure to deliver the same amount of energy.
This triad of choices is an incredibly difficult thing to resolve. Heck, I don't mean to sound crass, but the simplest path for society to address global warming might be a significant reduction in global population...because the world and its individuals are increasingly showing that they put sustainability behind affordability and standard of living.