[Street Pharmacist]

Originally Posted by Frequitude

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

Number 1 isn't really true in any sense. In Canada we use over 100,000 kWh or equivalent and Denmark uses about 30. Their standard of living is higher. So is Switzerland at 30. Would you say Qatar or Trinidad and Tobago have twice the standard of living as Canada?

Your number 2 also isn't correct. Return on energy invested (EROI) is not a useful metric for really anything, and the current way it's calculated ignores a lot of inputs and outputs that would make it useful. To compare a finite resource that requires much more investment as time goes on (ie fossil fuels) vs investment on infinite resources is a metric without any useful units. Besides, I'm not sure how it's relevant to any conversation about the future. The technology exists now, at the price it exists, and will continue to get significantly cheaper.

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.

Gonna need a citation here. The way standard of living increases is by increasing services delivered to citizens. And while, yes, that requires energy, there's no reason that has to start at biomass and work it's way through. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

There's a reason pretty much every nation has lifted itself into the first world on the back of coal.

Yes! The reason was there were no other better options! It's 2023 this year. The industrial revolution was quite a while ago.

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.




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.

I guess I just don't see it that way. The technology exists (at least to the extent to get 80-90% there), the money exists to get it done, and will is getting there. We need more people pushing the will than having more people say "well wadda ya do. It's hard".

When looking at transition costs, no one said "it'll be expensive to build all these gas stations, oil tankers, oil wells, refineries, pipelines, etc. No. The market was there, government policy made it attractive to do it, and here we are. The wealthier world can absolutely afford to help grow energy wealth in the right way in emerging countries.