Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

Hillhater said:
Its obvious to anyone who bothers to check, (with an open mind ) , that Co2 is not the “control knob” of Global Temperature/Climate Change, Floods, Fires, Sea Level, Glacier melt, GBR Bleaching, earthquakes, etc, etc,..
Of course it's not the only knob. It's just one out of many. Unfortunately it's the only one we can turn, and we are turning it as high as we can.
It is Canute level thinking to believe that humans have any more influence over these natural events than the chooks in my back yard.
People used to say the same thing about CFCs and the ozone layer. People used to think we could put all the crap we wanted to into the air and water and nature would just "take it away." Pretty stupid of them, eh?
We do not even understand the basic factors involved sufficiently ( CO2 “cycle” is estimated) let alone begin to analyse the numerous interactions of the multiple inputs to our climate.
You may not. Of course, that's the same logic the flat earthers use to "prove" that the Earth is flat - or at least, no one can prove it's round.
The UN have stated that it is nothing to do with Climate,.. its all about Social and Economic restructuring .
...(with CO2 simply being the political weapon of choice )
When you have to lie to make your points, then your point is worthless.
 
Ianhill said:
I have to agree with hillhater on this one the problem is so widespread and ingrained we fool ourselfs that it can be fixed in 20 years or so.

50 years ago people believed that it was impossible to feed 8 billion people. Simply impossible.

Yet look at where we are now. There are more obese people in the world than undernourished people. Far from perfect obviously, but obviously the world is not starving to death.

Feeding 10 or 11 billion people is not even a challenge, it's the easiest thing to do even with todays food production. The grain harvest of densely populated Germany on just around 10% of its area could feed 200 million people.
It happens that we feed almost all of it to animals which usually turns 10kcal into 1kcal and it happens that we throw away 30% of our food and it happens that more than 50% of our population is overweight, many of those so much that it costs them many years of healthy life.

The same with energy. We do not have an energy problem, we do have a sink problem with CO2 and our atmosphere.

Germany is a heavy importer of fossil fuels and resources, but our CO2 import/export balance is more or less even (depending on data), because we are one of the largest exporter of machinery, tools, cars, chemical products in the world.

So if our society in a highly industrialized, wealthy and densely populated land with a rather cold and cloudy climate is able to get the CO2 emissions to net zero the rest of the world can do that easily, even with 10 billion or 11 billion people. Most countries have much better resources on renewable energies per capita than we do.

It's not a matter of technology, all we need is already invented, it's only a matter of will.

A recent study made an computer based optimizing on the lowest possible costs for a -95% reduction in CO2 emissions until 2050 (which would be compatible with the agreement of Paris 2015)

2019-10-31-energiestudie.jpg;jsessionid=D872C26DC064F03A64A051FA29FC634A


More details:

https://www.fz-juelich.de/iek/iek-3/DE/_Documents/Downloads/transformationStrategies2050_talk_detailedResults.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

It will cost 1,85 trillion Euro until 2050. (and includes the import of some hydrogen,because it is a cost optimizing system and its often cheaper to produce it elsewhere)

This sounds much. but in comparison isn't.

The refugees crises from 2015+ will cost us an estimated 0.5 to 0.8 trillion Euro in long term social costs (totally avoidable if people would stop fighting that shitty pointless wars for nothing)
The reunification from 1990 (similar time frame of 30 years) did cost around 3 trillion Euro
Energy imports of fossil fuels will cost us around 1 trillion Euro to 2050 anyway on todays low prices.

will it happen? I don't know.

At the moment there is very heavy opposition against new wind power plants and the CDU lead ministry for economics is trying to sabotage the entire projects and willing to kill 10,000 jobs while they promised subsidies of 2 million Euro for each single job in the remaining lignite industry.

This is very difficult to understand, but many things Homo sapiens does is difficult to understand.

If we fail, if the world fails, it is not because we are so many people and it is not because we didn't have the technology, it is only because we willingly destroyed our ecosystems for no real benefit at all.

the same as we fought hundreds or thousand pointless wars for nothing good at all. It's a fault in our brains or in our societies.

People whining about having a wind power plant within their view, people whining about electricity costing 2ct more per kWh, people whining because the need to recharged when they make that 1000km tour once every 3 years. Whining about nothing at all.
And those same people are just shrugging when it comes about destruction of the worlds ecosystems, when they talk about mass scale genocide. ("world can not support so many people, they(sic!) all have to die") They simply don't care, they even deny the problem and are willing to actively sabotage any solution.

We live in a world where 1 billion people have become to fat to move and where 1 billion people go to bed hungry. We are a perverted species and I'm sure that we are able to destroy the very ecosystems that keep us alive.

We don't need to. Change for better would actually be very easy. It's just a matter of will.


Thunderfoot has a video up showing just how much of a pointless gesture 20 million trees are to the co2 situation, U.S alone needs to plant 40 million a day just to cover their own daily pollution

This is rivial.

If biomass could consume as mich CO2 as we produce there would be no need for any fossil fuels, we just would burn the wood. As it happens that did't even work 100 years ago.

Photosysnthesis with it's real efficiency of around 0.1% will not save our lifestyle, but photovoltaics with its efficiency of 10% will do.

Planting trees is very good for other reasons, but so far we are burning them and cutting the down on large scales in most countries.

Ianhill said:
The true answer to all this ? Money needs careful looking at it's not helping equality, political agenda tied into business development for the rich has to stop we can not allow the rich to have control of the money sector much longer, country's have negative interest rates poverty is increasing there's more and more protesting yet media cover what suits their political alignment it's all horse shit in all the developed country's same old bullshit sold over and over.

To which class do you belong?

To the poor or to the rich?

I'm rich. I have a nce warm flat for myself, I can eat whatever I need and if I would I could turn myself into a 200kg bobble of fat easily, I do easy work, I get health care, people like me probably will live 90 years and for most that die earlier its their own fault. I don't own a car but I could change that in one day and I could even buy two or three cars if I wanted to do so.
Hell, I own 6 electric bicyclces which is a hobby of course, but a bit off the reasonable and sane path (at least it takes to make 100 electric bicycles to consume the resources of building a single car). I am able to travel around the world and can see almost any place I want to see. My life is frocking good. I live a life kings couldn't have dreamed about just 200 years ago.

If I'm not one of the rich people in this world, who would be?

You are telling me you are a poor guy in this world?

What does your life lack that "the rich" take away from you?
 
Hillhater said:
? ..do they understand the role of Carbon in Cement and Steel making ?
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Steel can made with green hydrogen, which is exactly what Sweden plans to to with ALL of its steel production, see project Hydrit.

Cement can also be produced with greatly reduced CO2 emissions, Heidelberg cement is working on that.

But obviously you need people to pay higher prices for that or you have to make a fair playing fied with a reasonable worldwide price on CO2. Because that is unlikely I hope that sooner or later EU will place a CO2 tax on imported products from countries that have lower or no CO2 prices.
 
Yes, steel and cement production are difficult industries to decarbonise because their emissions are not just from the huge amounts of energy they require, but because the very chemical reactions used to form them release CO2 but there are viable alternative processes (steel more so). They will cost more (at least in the short term) but they are both very cheap materials to begin with. Intelligent architecture can easily reduce the use of both and/or incorporate more wood for a viable reduced carbon and cost neutral solution.

Together steel and concrete production and responsible for half of all industrial emissions. Small improvements go a long way.

Streaming online videos is currently reponsible for 1% of global emissions and is set to rise rapidly. This will soon put it on par with flying at 2.5%.

Cephalotus is right, we need carbon pricing. In addition to a general principle of "polluter pays". The normal free market principles will then work to give us more efficient and less wasteful ways of living our lives.
 
"A more subtle and less talked about issue is that of resource depletion. True, Malthus warned the world of this 200 years ago during a time when energy resources in the form of wood were being depleted.Then we discovered coal, then oil, and the industrial revolution sparked a new level of development and environmental destruction on a level Malthus could never have foreseen. The issue is that while technology has kept the price of raw materials from increasing dramatically, metals like copper, and energy sources like oil and gas are finite. The deeper we have to mine or drill and the more complex the extraction process, the smaller the final product derived from the energy expended to get the material. When oil was first discovered it took roughly one barrel of oil’s worth of energy to extract 100 barrels. Now that one barrel might get us 10 barrels. The costs are multiplied throughout the system. In other words if it now takes 3 times as much energy to mine a ton of copper as it did 50 years ago, because the high quality and easily extracted ore are gone, and that energy is derived from oil which itself requires 10 times more energy to extract, then the two factors multiply the real cost of the copper. In our example it now “costs” the equivalent of 30 times more oil to produce a ton of copper. Again, we run into limits."
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https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-11-19/the-need-for-a-greater-vision-recognizing-reality/
 
Cephalotus said:
50 years ago people believed that it was impossible to feed 8 billion people. Simply impossible.

Yet look at where we are now. There are more obese people in the world than undernourished people. Far from perfect obviously, but obviously the world is not starving to death.

Feeding 10 or 11 billion people is not even a challenge, it's the easiest thing to do even with todays food production. The grain harvest of densely populated Germany on just around 10% of its area could feed 200 million people.
It happens that we feed almost all of it to animals which usually turns 10kcal into 1kcal and it happens that we throw away 30% of our food and it happens that more than 50% of our population is overweight, many of those so much that it costs them many years of healthy life.

The same with energy. We do not have an energy problem, we do have a sink problem with CO2 and our atmosphere.

Germany is a heavy importer of fossil fuels and resources, but our CO2 import/export balance is more or less even (depending on data), because we are one of the largest exporter of machinery, tools, cars, chemical products in the world.

So if our society in a highly industrialized, wealthy and densely populated land with a rather cold and cloudy climate is able to get the CO2 emissions to net zero the rest of the world can do that easily, even with 10 billion or 11 billion people. Most countries have much better resources on renewable energies per capita than we do.

It's not a matter of technology, all we need is already invented, it's only a matter of will.
So you are blaming the remaining 80% (6% less than the world average. Nice job.) of Germany's energy that it still produces via fossil Carbon, on everyone else that imports it's finished products? By that way of thinking China must be a net Carbon sink many times over.
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Cephalotus.

I'm far from rich I live in poverty the area I'm from has very little investment available and job prospects are few and far between.

You say your rich but are you just well off and lucky to be in right place at right time to make a honest buck or are u part of the financial service system that places bets on business, by up unprofitable business cut the wages and workforce to make a few quid and sell it on.

I get there's honest people out the making a honest life have wealth and really care about our future but it's not the case in most situations the filtly rich don't want a NHS system any benefits no hand outs at all while they take the tax payers coin and laugh the times we live in are not encouraging equality there's more lies driven by the media to hide the fact the world is bent top down not bottom up.
 
sendler2112 said:
"A more subtle and less talked about issue is that of resource depletion. True, Malthus warned the world of this 200 years ago during a time when energy resources in the form of wood were being depleted.Then we discovered coal, then oil, and the industrial revolution sparked a new level of development and environmental destruction on a level Malthus could never have foreseen. The issue is that while technology has kept the price of raw materials from increasing dramatically, metals like copper, and energy sources like oil and gas are finite.
That's definitely an issue. However, given that metals like copper are not destroyed after the product they are used in is discarded, I am much less worried about ore depletion.
 
billvon said:
That's definitely an issue. However, given that metals like copper are not destroyed after the product they are used in is discarded, I am much less worried about ore depletion.

The important point is that despite recycling,(Which is never 100% and each time through there is some mechanical "entropy" of the elements) ore grades are declining at the same time that the required liquid fueled mining equipment costs of fuel that are needed to get them are also increasing which places decreasing ER/EI on everything we do as we try to rebuild all infrastructure. The financial system of spinning plates that we have been accustomed to for the last 50 years had been based on a much smaller portion of our societal surplus being required to build what we need. There is now less and less left over to go around.
 
sendler2112 said:
The important point is that despite recycling,(Which is never 100% and each time through there is some mechanical "entropy" of the elements) ore grades are declining at the same time that the required liquid fueled mining equipment. . .
Right. So what has to happen is:

1) Recycling gets better as mining gets harder and
2) We move away from liquid fueled mining equipment.

Those are difficult but not insurmountable problems.
 
Cephalotus you aren't rich, you are describing lower middle income for a developed nation. There is no reason that 2 billion people couldn't live entirely at that standard or better. But not if the top 1% are allowed not only 90% of the wealth but also 90% of the political influence as they are now.
Envisioning a future with +10 billion wage slaves living just below middle class while the upper 1% slowly accumulate every last thing of value isn't progress, it's accepting terms of surrender.
 
Grantmac said:
Cephalotus you aren't rich, you are describing lower middle income for a developed nation. There is no reason that 2 billion people couldn't live entirely at that standard or better. But not if the top 1% are allowed not only 90% of the wealth but also 90% of the political influence as they are now.
Envisioning a future with +10 billion wage slaves living just below middle class while the upper 1% slowly accumulate every last thing of value isn't progress, it's accepting terms of surrender.

My income is upper middle class here in my country, my live style may be lower, but I don't need more. Personally I'm very happy with my financial situation. Yes there are poeple who own more than myself. There always are, no matter how much you have. Why should I care about that?

Actually I'm planing to reduce my working time from 40h/week to 30h/week ate 3/4 my actual wage because its more than enough for me. I hope to increase my holiday times from the actual 6 weeks to maybe 12 weeks plus some long weekends here and there. Would like to make 1 or 2 long trips with an ebike and you need time for that.

We do not need a solution for 2 billion people but a solution for 10 billion people.

"Slave wages" can be found in many places of this planet and also really poor people that are only able to live from day to day with no chance to change anything about their misery. Those are the poor.
I doubt that there are many poor people or salves posting in this forum about electric vehicles.

if you feel poor or a working slave because you don't own 3 cars or your swimming pool is smaller than your neighbors or because you are buried in credit card dept this is a different story, but I wouldn't blame the rich for that life.

The whining here is concentrated on cheap energy. Lufthansa now offers the option to compensate for your flight.

Here an example for rankfurt -> New York

https://compensaid.com/contribute/split?flights=22820ce8-bcda-440b-a216-96c107bef9f3

"Tree planting" does cost 9,35€ extra which is more or less a hoax in my opinion

Flying with CO2 neutral produced kerosin does cost 194€ which seems to be a more realistic price from the technical perspective imho.

So is paying 200 Euro extra for a transatlantic flight really to much? Are you to poor to pay for that?

And intercontinental flights are more or less one of the highest bars to climb when getting CO2 neutral.

I believe that this is quite doable and paying that amount of money will not make us poorer. Still the middle class will be able to fly around the world. So what do you fear?
 
sendler2112 said:
So you are blaming the remaining 80% of Germany's energy that it still produces via fossil Carbon, on everyone else that imports it's finished products?

No I don't.

Germany now is emitting around 800Mt of CO2e/year.

If you take import and export of goods into account that number stays more or less at 800Mt CO2e/year, so in our case you don't need to add imports into to the CO2 calculation. It can be very different for other countries.

Of course imported fossil fuels that are burnt here do count as our CO2 emissions. CO2 emissions from extracting that fossil fuels is added to the country where that happens.

If a car is manufactured in Germany the CO2 emissions while building that car are counted as ours, even if the car is exported to the US. The emissions from making the steel for the car in China and importing it adds to the CO2 emissions of China.
 
I dont own a car I share one, I don't own anything with a value over £1500 and thats my ebike second hand value I only got that through luck that one turned up second hand from a trails centre and some prior saving as money don't come easy I respect it all the more.

Local library's schools, fire stations are shutting policing is reducing just to name a few issues all while London grows stronger than ever it's just a joke shop that doesn't fail to deliver.

I get your well off but if you have a limited hours contract, unpaid dinner breaks and the days you have off are dictated from week to week by agency's that provide cheap workers that gives no stability or possibility of a mortgage then the amount of people that fall through the cracks and end up pennyless is far from a joke the system is broken in different ways all over the world if I was you enjoy your security while u have it and plan in advance becuase without a big shake up wealth is being swallowed daily funneling one way new scheme all the time being from Germany you should know with negative interest rates and encouraged risk free lending to the rich.
 
Cephalotus said:
If a car is manufactured in Germany the CO2 emissions while building that car are counted as ours, even if the car is exported to the US. The emissions from making the steel for the car in China and importing it adds to the CO2 emissions of China.

This is obviously an outdated method of determining the Carbon responsibility for any given product. The final destination of the Carbon fuel, goods, or raw materials, must take credit for the Carbon.
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The USA has a radical new bill that is moving through congress. Studied by Columbia University, HR763 would tax Carbon right where it comes out of the ground domestically (it ideally needs to be a world level law eventually but these types of world level things are still almost impossible). Since it is a USA law, any additional embodied Carbon that comes into the country, whether actual fuel or content embodied in goods or materials , gets taxed at the border to keep an even playing field in the market for local manufacturers. Ideally, exports would have the Carbon taxed again at the destination country and reimbursed to the manufacturer. to keep the market level on a global scale.
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https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/763/text
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https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/11/bipartisan-carbon-tax-columbia-study/601897/
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sendler2112 said:
This is obviously an outdated method of determining the Carbon responsibility for any given product. The final destination of the Carbon fuel, goods, or raw materials, must take credit for the Carbon.

It will when the price of imported goods includes carbon pricing to cover the emissions of manufacturing them.

sendler2112 said:
"Malthus warned the world of this 200 years ago during a time when energy resources in the form of wood were being depleted.Then we discovered coal, then oil, and the industrial revolution sparked a new level of development and environmental destruction on a level Malthus could never have foreseen...In other words if it now takes 3 times as much energy to mine a ton of copper as it did 50 years ago, because the high quality and easily extracted ore are gone, and that energy is derived from oil which itself requires 10 times more energy to extract, then the two factors multiply the real cost of the copper. In our example it now “costs” the equivalent of 30 times more oil to produce a ton of copper.

Sorry, but this is rubbish. It doesn't even pass the basic sniff test.

* Thomas Malthus was concerned over food production/famine/disease. Specifically the geometric growth of population vs. the arithmetic growth of agriculture. I can find no mention of anything to do with wood depletion.

* Both coal and oil were discovered and exploited as fuel >1000 years ago.

* The industrial revolution, powered by coal, started over 250 years ago, shortly before Malthus was born.

* You claim energy and the economy are inextricably linked, so are you claiming that copper costs 30 times as much, in real terms, as it did 50 years ago?
 
Punx0r said:
Both coal and oil were discovered and exploited as fuel >1000 years ago.

* The industrial revolution, powered by coal, started over 250 years ago, shortly before Malthus was born.

* You claim energy and the economy are inextricably linked, so are you claiming that copper costs 30 times as much, in real terms, as it did 50 years ago?

The Industrial Revolution was powered initially by water and wood. Which they will eventually return to in a few hundred years. Widespread use of coal engines was instituted in the mid 1800's.
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per-capita-consumption-of-various-fuels_line.png

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I stumbled on this image at another good article on the excellent site Our Finite World
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https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/per-capita-consumption-of-various-fuels_line.png?w=448&h=270
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The price of any good or service is set by supply and demand in the market. The fracked oil plays in North Dakota have all been running at a slight loss to their investors at $55/ barrel but they are subsidized anyway to "create jobs". Fossil energy prices have historically been so cheap and dense that their value to processes are not appreciated in the price. But the energetic remoteness of all raw materials is inexorably slipping higher since we use resources according to the best, first.
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Peak Copper in 10 years?
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sendler2112 said:
Peak Copper in 10 years?

I have a poster in my office from 1995 that showed all the predictions for peak oil. The peaks ranged from 1998 to 2015. At that point, oil production would peak and then decline, and no amount of effort could reverse the decline. A dozen scientists, economists and industry analysts agreed, according to the poster. And the absolute latest that was going to happen was 2015.

Then tight oil happened.

In 1970, Paul Erlich predicted that "population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” He also claimed that between 1980 and 1989 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

Then modern farming happened.

In 1970, ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable" and "in a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution.”

I was in high school in 1980 living near New York City. I don't remember any gas masks.

In 1970, NAS scientist Harrison Brown studied metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. He had a chart like yours and everything. He also claimed that lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

Then we mined some more. And copper is now in everything, in ever-increasing amounts.

So while I agree we are heading in the wrong direction (no economy on a finite planet can grow forever, nor can we burn fossil fuels forever) I can't take "peak oil" "peak copper" etc predictions seriously. That chart you posted will be every bit as accurate as the peak oil poster in my office.
 
billvon said:
I can't take "peak oil" "peak copper" etc predictions seriously.

does the same go for you for "peak demand"?
https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fuhenergy%2Ffiles%2F2017%2F06%2Fritchie55.jpg

In ancient Greece, vessels were made in great quantities and in diverse materials, including terracotta, glass, ivory, stone, wood, leather, bronze, silver, and gold. The vases of precious metals have largely vanished because they were melted down and reused, but ancient literature and inscriptions testify to their existence.
once copper & other metal is mined we don't have to mine it again, it don't evaporate.
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/agbv/hd_agbv.htm
 
Many of the prognosticators have been wrong by a few decades. The charts from the Limits To Growth computer simulations are still holding up surprisingly well to the current actual data 50 years later.
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So if technology proves them to be off by 30 years does that prove that peak oil and peak Copper and Phosphorous will never happen? Is that really much help for them in 50 years? How long do you think humanity should expect to survive. What time frames do you consider? We have been anatomically stable for 200,000 years. Another 50 years (the current financial system might not make it 10) is nothing.
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Your poster argument is leading you to put forward a false story of techno salvation eternal growth.
 
sendler2112 said:
Many of the prognosticators have been wrong by a few decades. The charts from the Limits To Growth computer simulations are still holding up surprisingly well to the current actual data 50 years later.
Agreed. And Hubbert's graphs held up very, very well - until they didn't.
Hubbert_Upper-Bound_Peak_1956.png

So if technology proves them to be off by 30 years does that prove that peak oil and peak Copper and Phosphorous will never happen?
No, it will most likely happen when something better replaces it - which is the same thing that caused peak horse, and peak locomotive, and peak coal (at least in the US.)
Is that really much help for them in 50 years? How long do you think humanity should expect to survive. What time frames do you consider?
Depends on the topic. In terms of resources, probably 50 years. Not because humanity won't survive beyond that, but because the environment will be so different in 50 years that our current concerns will likely no longer be valid.
Your poster argument is leading you to put forward a false story of techno salvation eternal growth.
Nope. The one thing that can't happen is infinite growth in economy/debt/population/energy usage/fossil fuel usage. Those are mathematically limited. What CAN happen is:

100% recycling for (example) copper. We are close to that now for lead car batteries - which is why mining for lead is declining.

Increasing efficiency. It takes zero energy to transport someone from New York to LA in 45 minutes (but the infrastructure costs for that are insane.) We will continue to get the things we want (heat, light, transportation) for less and less input energy.

Population limits. Educating women brings births per woman down dramatically, and could stabilize the population in 50 years.
 
billvon said:
No, it will most likely happen when something better replaces it - which is the same thing that caused peak horse, and peak locomotive, and peak coal (at least in the US.)

So sorry to keep hearing this from you. Classic Chicago school economics. Was only ever true during this one time bolus in an empty world with vast untouched fossil carbon and mineral resources.
 
sendler2112 said:
So sorry to keep hearing this from you. Classic Chicago school economics. Was only ever true during this one time bolus in an empty world with vast untouched fossil carbon and mineral resources.
Has been true dozens of times in dozens of areas - from construction materials to energy to transportation to communication. Imagining it will all stop dead is silly.
 
Access to energy and resources does not have to stop dead to be catastrophic. It only needs to peak over the top in a few strategic areas which will constrain economic growth. It only takes going from +2%, to -2% to start the complete collapse of the debt based world financial system. Weaker countries are already being cut off from further IMF payments and are forcing austerity on their masses. Leading to riots all over the globe.
 
sendler2112 said:
The Industrial Revolution was powered initially by water and wood. Which they will eventually return to in a few hundred years. Widespread use of coal engines was instituted in the mid 1800's.

You say the world was about to fall into a Malthusian Trap in 1800, when the population was ~1 billion, because of a lack of wood and you also say in 2200 the world will be powered by wood again. Yet you also claim you're not a doom-monger? I don't want to live in your dystopian future - hopefully I'll get to go in the great die-off you're predicting...

The industrial revolution was enabled by coal. The first commercial steam engines for pumps were in use pre-1700. Coal is also what enabled indutrially-useful quantities of cast iron to be manufactured.
 
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