Notice this is because 80% of the energy obtained was from Hydroelectric power, which is a great energy source because it is reliable - unlike wind and solar which in this case provided 7% and 0.01% respectively and are not reliable. It frustrates me that so many environmentalists are still against hydro because it alters ecosystems when nature itself is inherently violent, dangerous and in a constant state of flux. I sometimes think they reject the idea that the whole point of existence is human flourishing and happiness. The biggest real problem with Hydro in the context of human flourishing is ensuring that the dams are well-constructed and nature proof i.e. hold up against natural disasters because if they don't downstream settlements and human lives can be at risk.
Nit: The inalienable rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is in the Declaration of Independence. None of those things are broadly recognized as rights in the Constitution. I have been unable to determine to what extent referencing the Declaration of Independence is permissible in questions related to constitutional law. I'm inclined to believe that it depends on the party involved. (Scalia certainly objects to Declaration of Independence having legal sway [1]. Surprisingly to me, Clarence Thomas goes the other way [2].)
I stand corrected, but in any case, the very founding of the country was, in stark contrast to basically every country on Earth that had ever existed to that point, declaring that the "pursuit of happiness" is of utmost importance.
That says something about what America was striving to be, and comments like the one that sparked this thread show how absurdly far from that goal America has slid.
Gross Domestic Happiness is enhanced by caring about things beyond human flourishing for many people. Many people care about the environment. GDH was in fact invented precisely to capture dimensions beyond that of human material improvement (more dams, more houses, etc.)
A clean environment is a luxury good most people didn't even know they wanted until economies advanced enough to make them an option. To see a present-day version of this difference, one need only look at China. That's how Americans viewed the environment before WWII.
If you watch the evolution of, say, the Sierra Club, its focus has shifted to reflect the changes in values over time It's very interesting. One of the really fun! things about Micheal Crichton's "State of Fear" is his curmudgeonly way of bringing out the denial of the nearly axiomatic assumption these days of environmental purity being a path to happiness.
You're confusing "didn't even know they wanted" with "took for granted". In the pre-industrial era with much lower populations, human-sourced massive environmental pollution wasn't common. Many people didn't even realize it was possible. Everyone wanted and most people had clean environments and only learned to make it an issue when the clean environments started to disappear in places.
John Adams and others much like him thought cities were just dens of iniquity and filth. Since he lost a son to drink, it's no small wonder. You can only imagine the filth, crime and degradation of those places then.
Even before the Romantics, people like Jefferson considered networks of small freeholders the only sustainable way to have people live.
No. "Didn't know they wanted." There has been a protracted and concerted propaganda effort to change consciousness about this subject. What makes a Theodore Roosevelt exceptional is that he listened to John Muir decades before that kind of thinking was commonplace.
I think there was a long span of time where you could set rivers on fire, cut the air in cities with a knife and become sickened or killed by drinking water from a pubic well. The Thames was a severe, dangerous public nuisance in the time of Samuel Pepys ( who happened to write about it ).
This became a "thing" only since WWII.
People used open-belt farm machinery. 90% of electrical linemen died on the job. You could buy machine guns at paint stores, or by mail. "Safety" as a discipline is quite recent. Environmentalism is even more recent. My Dad worked for a Bell company and was decades ahead of the general flow of safety, and we picked up our trash as we left campsites, when most didn't.
Of course the Boy Scouts had this as a practice, but it was otherwise not mainstream.
"The past is a different country; they did things differently there." - L.P. Hartley.
From my comment: "… pre-industrial … most people …" etc.
There's been probably as much or more protracted and concerted propaganda from industrialists (who have more wealth and power to spread their messages) as the environmental sort.
You're just fantasizing if you think there have been large populations of people who lived next to rivers on fire and horribly polluted air and water and litter and yet "didn't know they wanted" a clean environment. They may not have had the political terminology to talk about it, but basically nobody likes living in trash.
The whole failure of large populations not to pick up their litter etc. makes complete sense to anyone who understands social-psychology, game theory etc. It's in no sense evidence that people liked living with litter or didn't want an unlittered environment.
The environmental movement correlates strongly with the increasing amount of pollution and other environmental issues in the world. This is not arbitrary coincidence. It also involves things like increased understanding of the impacts of pollution from advances in scientific knowledge.
The fact that people lived close enough to observe rivers on fire might imply that they were willing to put up with it, for "progress" or "jobs." I don't think anybody lived right next to them.
Zappa lays claim[1] to the first use of the word "pollution" in any popular ( meaning non-academic ) media, by virtue of a song title, "Nine Types of Industrial Pollution." That's from 1969.
[1] no doubt erroneously - he just meant in his personal light cone.
I am actually saying - people can get used to anything, including living in trash. People went for centuries without bathing. My ( born around 1900 ) grandparents were once-a-week bathers. You're projecting the mores of the present on people who lived in the past - presentism, IMO.
We also have a heck of a lot more trash than people used to. They'd use fire barrels and dig middens to dispose of trash of they could. Trash trucks are also relatively recent. Obviously, those in concrete cities could not do that necessarily.
Of course people are adaptable and get used to whatever. Once-a-week bathing is not a big deal at all. I hope you didn't intend to equate that with poisoned rivers. There's even lots of evidence that without bathing people maintain a healthier and less smelly bacteria population than happens with a regular bather who then has a bath-hiatus. There are even products now to promote a healthy probiotic skin culture and stop bathing…
Of course there's relativity here. People who never had clean water won't complain about it the way those who had it and then saw it poisoned will. What's relevant is the change that the industrial revolution brought — including the WEALTH it brought that allowed people to be more secure and start caring about environmental issues since fewer of us worried about whether we would eat or whether we'd die of polio etc.
My point isn't that there's no environmental propaganda or that things things aren't complex. The point is that the environmental movement is based on real on-the-ground issues that were going to come up because of the issues. It's quite unreasonable to describe it as though it's just some sort of manufactured concern.
Good points, but be careful to understand that there is a difference between environmental problems that are "tangible" or directly affect our everyday experience, and environmental problems that are "abstract" or refer to imperceptible hazards or hazards predicted in the future.
When we're talking about the early days of environmental awareness, those problems with coal smoke, industrial smog, and dangerous infrastructure all fall into the first category. The push to break dependence on non-renewable energy falls into the second category (except where using non-renewable energy also has a perceptible effect on air quality).
Eudaimonia is more like "ethics for virtuous and stable society" rather than saying very much about human relationship with the ecosystem. in the ancient world the human relationship with the ecosystem was extremely different than it is now.
Right, but the core principle underlying all that is that human happiness is a good in and of itself, and a virtuous and stable society is good only in that it allows for the greatest potential growth of human happiness.
If your grandkids are less happy because you destroyed the environment in order to increase your happiness is that a negative or a positive in this philosophical framework?
it was unthinkable in the original Aristotelean framework. They had no notion of being capable of destroying the environment in the way that we can now.
I don't think that's true at all. They could have easily over-fished, exhausted the land through improper farming, or cut down all the trees in a particular area. And they had a very good idea that they could do this and screw over future generations.
I don’t think that model takes ignorance into account. You would be unhappy if you knew you were doing a disservice to future generations, but you might accidentally do something stupid that screws things up for generations to come.
Well I'd much rather have Advancement over Happiness. We can be happy our entire lives but if everyones dies before 100 and humanity never goes anywhere I wouldn't consider that a successful society. Happiness is masturbating 24/7 until you die. If you truly believe that is the goal of humanity I can't help but disagree.
I guess I'm coming from the wrong side. I think happiness for its own sake is really meaningless. I'd much rather struggle and advance than be happy doing nothing until I die, but I guess I'm in the minority. Happiness, to me, is a choice to not let negative things make you unhappy. You can acknowledge negativities and not be consumed by them.
Fighting for happiness is like fighting for peace. You win by not fighting anymore.
I'm sorry if this opinion somehow reads like satire.
I would argue advancement ultimately begets happiness, eg, you cure cancer, you save lives, which makes those lives, and the lives that love them, happy.
If the advancement does not serve a purpose that brings happiness, what's the point of advancing?
well, that's not what you said. you said "Advancement over Happiness". I think most people would agree with "to be happy, don't struggle for it, just be".
Your original post, the one that seemed satirical to me, sounded like it was endorsing some notion of material accumulation at the expense of human fulfillment.
I didn't get the impression that Advancement == material accumulation. Advancement could be making the world better, gaining knowledge, or maybe advancement to a depressed person is finding happiness. Pretty broad meaning. But the same could be said for happiness. Some people find happiness in gaining knowledge.
Oh, yeah I didn't mean it to sound that way. In that context I'd say that I believe that moving humanity forward provides more fulfillment than just being happy.
that's just it, ask 100 people what "advancement" and "Moving Humanity forward" and you'd likely get 100 different definitions. Same goes for hapiness.
I read it as totally sincere show of support for continuous technological advancement. My belief is that ultimately humanity will take full control of their existence. Science & technology is what will lead us there.
Alex Epstien, who is widely despised, has written, in The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels that to withhold cheap abundant energy, and the technology it enables, from the world's emerging populations is immoral and fundamentally anti-human. Supported by people who think this Earth would be a much better place if Man never set his filthy foot upon it.
If you'd like a more nuanced version of that argument, I'd suggest Vaclav Smil, who's written at length on the topic of humans' interactions with the environment. I'm wrapping up his Energy and World History right now, which makes a similar case that fossil fuels have tremendously improved quality of life ... for a small fraction of humans currently alive. The impacts for others range from markedly less to net negative. The larger problem is that the situation isn't long-term tenable -- it will last so long as those fossil-fuel sources are cheap and abundant, and the sinks for their and associated effluvia are capable of absorbing insult without returning injury. Neither condition can be reasonably argued. (Yes, Epstein argues for both, he's not reasonable, and incapable of credible reasoned thought.)
The ultimate problem with Epstein's argument is that, in the face of limits to growth, the lives made possible through increased fossil fuels will only add to the deaths and suffering removal of that energy subsidy will result in.
Yes, overpopulation and overconsumption are problems. Systemic dynamics make addressing this exceptionally challenging.
I have second-order Facebook contacts who are overt environmentalists. Some of them are self-consistent enough to actually admit that they think human population level is the root of all these problems. That is in itself probably true, but I can't quite be hypocritical enough to attack a phenomenon that supports my very existence.
To that:
"There are too many people."
"You first."
But they don't have good operating knowledge of population dynamics and current birth rates. It's rather that they bought prior exponential analyses of exponential human population growth and never fully discarded it. They also appear to know that fossil fuels are a part of this phenomenon.
theres also religious folks who believe the earth was created specifically for humans, and so everything here is for us and us alone.
I find it a rather disgustingly self centered ideology. To presume that one (or ones species) is the most important thing in the world (or universe) is basically the definition of narcissism
> To presume that one (or ones species) is the most important thing in the world (or universe) is basically the definition of narcissism
Humans are the most important things in the world. Why? Because I am a human. My family are humans. To me, and likely most people, humans are most important.
If I were an Otter and capable of self reflection I would likely think Otters were the most important things in the world.
Now this absolutely does not mean I don't value Otters. In fact I do. Otters are awesome! Just because I feel humans are the most important thing doesn't preclude me from having compassion to help other creatures. It's simply an order in which you find things important.
You've essentially manufactured a belief here (parent believes humans are most important therefore all others are in the way), projected it onto the parent and then became outraged by it.
> You've essentially manufactured a belief here (parent believes humans are most important therefore all others are in the way), projected it onto the parent and then became outraged by it.
> I said nothing about what the parent believes, i said that there are religious groups that have an ideology i find narcissistic at best.
So you brought up a point that is unrelated to parent's about what people who belong to a religion believe in? I...should that even be in this thread? I don't get it unless you're actually replying to the parent above you.
> Thats a significantly stronger statement than you allude to
It's not though. They didn't say to bulldoze all the things. Why wouldn't humans flourishing and having happiness be a goal to hit? I can't think of a single thing that we do, when we interact with nature, that doesn't affect the environment in at least some fashion. It's all about balances. If you can add a dam, reducing carbon emissions from other power sources, but it displaces animals within X square miles that needs to be understood. It may be very worth it. It may not it.
What I got from your comment was that the parent poster was bad and that you think most people are bad because they find themselves most important.
Im not sure if english is your first language, but my response makes perfect sense to who i replied to, and we are discussing a comment by the grand parent.
> Why wouldn't humans flourishing and having happiness be a goal to hit?
you are /immediately/ softening the language - how do you not see yourself doing this?
now its gone from 'the whole point of existence' to 'should be a goal to hit' I'm not even going to read the rest, because youre flat out being dishonest here.
> Im not sure if english is your first language, but my response makes perfect sense to who i replied to, and we are discussing a comment by the grand parent.
I really don't enjoy the passive aggressive insults here. I provided criticism to your comment because, to me, it sounded wildly off base. If you want to ignore that then that's fine but don't say it makes "perfect sense" when obviously it didn't if we're not on the same page.
> now its gone from 'the whole point of existence' to 'should be a goal to hit' I'm not even going to read the rest, because youre flat out being dishonest here.
The initial language wasn't "hard" in the first place as I already explained. I told you it wasn't as huge as you made it out to be and your response is I'm making it soft...then I guess? In the context of your understanding of it I am but I still think you're making a giant crater out of a little ant hill here.
>The initial language wasn't "hard" in the first place
Right, literally claiming to know the meaning of existence - totally an interpretable statement.
My qualm was never that someone would put humans needs before animals, but that that should be the only consideration made is extreme - that its the very nature of existence to do so is beyond extreme.
Your responses are all combative and (from my perspective) seemingly off base; meaning I have difficulty parsing your intended meaning from your statements.
He/she's trying to have a discussion and you're trying to win an argument.
>My qualm was never that someone would put humans needs before animals, but that that should be the only consideration made is extreme - that its the very nature of existence to do so is beyond extreme.
If your initial comment had been solely about 'that religion that thinks the world is solely for us and us alone', that would make some kind of sense, but given the following statement(from the same comment) I didn't interpret it that way.
>To presume that one (or ones species) is the most important thing in the world (or universe) is basically the definition of narcissism
^this is the sentence that people were responding to.^
On this point I also agree with other commenters; narcissism is excessive interest in oneself, not in one's species. I don't think it's narcissistic to say your species is more important than any other, especially given the dearth of evidence to back that assertion up(in this case).
I think it's definitely interesting that we as a species have been so successful that members of this species are quite literally advocating for it's demise.
We all have to build up our own framework of morality. If your framework says to save the animals at the expense of humanities advancement that's fine, but you won't have much company and from my perspective you're not a 'better person' for having done so. (I also don't think the people espousing this "humans are evil" narrative would _actually_ save more animals)
Replace "humans" with "white people" in your post, and you'll get a sense of how silly your beliefs seem to me. Not to say my beliefs are more right than yours -- to each his/her own.
I'd personally agree with the view that small, simple life-forms which prey on humanity -- or on other large, complex organisms -- can be destroyed with impunity.
The Green Party's original manifesto rejected this view; their position has some logical consistency, but I don't think that the continued existence of smallpox and rinderpest, or Guinea worms, or mosquitoes (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html), or Dutch elm disease (which doesn't really harm humans, but elm trees certainly suffer), is worth the suffering and premature death they cause.
So, I guess I could reduce my position to saying that if a species can only exist by causing harm or premature death to something more biologically complex than itself, it shouldn't exist. Do you think that this is reasonable?
I'd add two corollaries: that predation is natural enough that we shouldn't kill all predators; and that a species should only be wiped out if it has to cause this sort of harm in order to live -- if it's parasitic or infectious, or possibly (as with mosquitoes) if it's an extremely serious disease-carrier. And I'm not at all interested in driving mostly-harmless species to extinction for purely economic benefits...
Many would call my answer ("not sure") to the original question monstrous. It's all very subjective. That was my initial point. We all draw the line differently. And no one can claim to be right.
The consequence is you've destroyed a species and set a precedent and for what? One life?
While human life should be preserved whenever possible, there are situations where you must realize that human life is, from the perspective of our role as planetary stewards, cheap and disposable.
Sacrificing some lab animals, even thousands, to cure some obscure but crippling disease that affects a handful of people could be justified.
Wiping out an entire species to save a single person is atrocious, and completely insane.
If you're prepared to wipe out, say, otters to save one person then what's next? Elephants for another? What if it takes two or three species to save someone else. At what point do you stop?
Like would it be acceptable to kill all non-human life to save a single life? There must be some kind of line.
The "no consequence to humans" part is hugely subjective, but a case could be made that we're worse off than our ancestors because of how many species we've obliterated.
It is highly subjective but of utmost importance. Let's say X species of hamster gives no benefit except diversity and there is plenty of hamster species. And let's say wiping it saves 1 person. You would need to consider if this species brings enough hapiness to human to warrant one death.
What I'm trying to say is (like the parents I believe) that the only thing affecting my judgement is humans qnd what the action does to them.
It's still not worth doing. That precedent of removing a species completely starts the ball rolling.
Shit happens, sometimes people die, and while it's unfortunate, it doesn't give us the license to turn one potential death into the extinction of an entire form of life.
Let's turn this around: What if some powerful alien life form had one of their citizens dying but they realized they could cure that individual by harvesting one planet worth of organisms. Given there's billions and billions of planets with life on them, what's the harm in killing Earth to save one of their own, right?
I dont believe we (or aliens) require license for anything that has a net benefit for us/them. It seems morally acceptable (it would, imo, be morally unacceptable to hold animal life higher than the human's, except if they actually provided more value).
If the OP answers it is anecdotal of course, but I'll point out that there's a whole field of bio-economics that tries to find survey/public answers to these questions for the purpose of making policies. And the result is laws such as the Endangered Species Act which dictates how far society thinks you should go in this direction.
Atheism is the lack of a religious ideology. It’s strange to assign an ideology to a group of people simply because they reject all religious ideologies.
Our brains seek patterns in coincidences. It's evolutionary! We can't stop seeking causal explanations in things that we experience.
Nothing is a gift. Life is not fair. Universe doesn't care about us. :)
I find the awareness that the Earth is the only place on which humans, let alone modern civilisation, is likely to be able to exist and thrive, to well within the likely timeframe in which we might well eliminate some or all of that capability (say, the next 10, 100, or 1,000 years) makes for far more nuanced consideration.
What humans do to this world in the immediate now will have profound implications to what humans will be able to do anywhere, in any possible future.
We hardly have enough data to say that. In fact we've found nothing remotely similar to Earth in all the thousands of samples we've taken. So if there are any others at all, they number in the dozens?
Estimates say there are ~100 billion planets in the galaxy.
I'm also not sure that In fact we've found nothing remotely similar to Earth in all the thousands of samples we've taken. is reasonable.
Take Proxima b. It orbits the Sun's closest neighbor, is in the habitable zone (doesn't mean it is habitable, necessary but not sufficient) and is roughly earth sized. Sure, we don't know a whole lot more about it, so it is quite likely to not be a nice destination for humans, but it seems to be at least remotely Earth like.
No, he really didn't - he said specifically, "So many, many things can be wrong and make a planet uninhabitable".
What if Proxima B has chlorine in its atmosphere? Uninhabitable.
Proxima B is a tidal-locked eyeball planet - what if the equatorial stable zone still shifts enough to not provide a stable environment for life? Uninhabitable.
What if Proxima B encounters too much ionizing radiation? Uninhabitable.
You've managed to ignore the sentence in the post that I did reply to. You know, the other one.
You've also apparently not payed much attention to Sure, we don't know a whole lot more about it, so it is quite likely to not be a nice destination for humans, but it seems to be at least remotely Earth like. that I said above (surely my making that statement implies some use of my imagination prior to your suggesting it).
I think we're all on the same page here. Just because something is in a fortuitous orbit, there are still a thousand things that can make it miserable or uninhabitable. Even earth, aeons ago, we would have found uninhabitable. Its very likely we have evolved for exactly the earth we have. To find another anything like it is astronomically unlikely.
This whole thread is quite a bit tangential to the fact that Earth is the only habitat planet we can actually get to, and will remain so baring a significant change in technology. Rockets won't get us elsewhere.
A closer truth might be that life can only happen on a habitable planet so it's not really a coincidence or 'gift', just the way it must be if life is to exist.
Consider that the galaxy is 100,000 light years across so even if there are a couple of other habitable planets out there, we aren't likely to get there for millennia.
Without invoking abuses of either relativity or the rocket equation, current physical understanding more-or-less limits us to long-term 'generation ships'. There is some potential argument about cryogenic freezing/revival, but it may be more accurate to talk about human-descended life forms walking on exoplanets rather than homo sapiens sapiens per se.
This argument is flawed. If there's a gift, there must have been a giver, so why don't we ask the giver? Well the Christians already have, and they like the answer they got. Why don't you like it?
Well, im not the one who used the phrase gift, so this isnt the appropriate place to nitpick that.
Other than, 'some other group of humans told me this' what evidence do you have that the earth should be the birthright of humans more than that of any other thing on earth?
It's self-evident to me, but you might suspect I'm biased, being human and all. (Is this the right context in which to assume that everyone on the internet is a dog?) When the martians come to take the planet away from us, I'll volunteer for the Resistance.
A book I read earlier this year really bent my brain when it included characters working against humanity and for an invading alien intelligence. Seeing it in print was enough to convince me that it would totally happen, but I hadn't considered the possibility before.
Humans being the most important thing in the world by virtue of simply being human strikes me as a tautology and logically problematic. It makes no sense.
I think "species-ism" is both honorable and necessary. I think the opposite is misanthropy and that it's hard to be moderately misanthropic, so one extreme or the other will win out.
Well, for the most part, that's the accepted interpretation. We just don't value non-human well-being as much as human well-being (which I think given the current species involved is acceptable). The problem is the difference in how we value non-human well-being between different subsets of the population causes strife between those subsets. I believe very few think it's alright to torture an animal for no reason, but to kill an animal (preferably with little pain) for food is acceptable to the vast majority of people. The many levels in-between those are where most people start having problems with the actions of others.
And when it comes to non-fuzzy animals, the gloves come off. We have massive industries to exterminate insects, fungi, bacteria and so on. Even fish are hardly protected. If we could perform genocide on some of them, we would.
Sure. Generally because they have their actions have a negative effect on our happiness, and we value their happiness so lowly that our loss in happiness overwhelms any concerns we have about theirs. We allow the raising of animals for slaughter because it affects our happiness so positively that we ignore that we are actually killing them at the end, and placate ourselves with platitudes about them having a relatively easy life up to that point (which historically was true).
I feel this keenly, being a meat-eater myself. Affordable (and hopefully palatable) lab-grown meet can't come soon enough.
you seem to be fixated on the notion of consciousness as being "consciousness sufficiently similar to a human that I would interact with it as if it was a human". maybe some domesticated animals and particularly precocious apes and cetaceans meet those criteria.
In many religious and philosophical traditions though the principle of Panpsychism is the guideline. It means, approximately, that consciousness is an inherent building block of reality and some form of consciousness is an emergent phenomena of just about any sufficiently complex system. This posits the existence of many forms of consciousness that are utterly alien to human consciousness and that we could not readily interact with.
I don't understand how my cat reacts to a mirror. He notices me in a mirror, but how come he doesn't react to seeing himself, either "hey that's me" or "what's that other cat doing here!?!"
You don't need an objective measure. An approximate one is already better than just "optimising for human happiness".
And I guess you do what I proposed already anyways: The suffering of a dog or a horse is probably also - to some extent - your concern. The suffering of a piece of rock probably less so. Should we learn that rocks can feel pain, too (granted this is unlikely), we should update our morality. It's also part of most countries' laws to prevent unnecessary suffering of animals. And this is all based on the assumed degree to which they are able to suffer. You will get fined for torturing a dog; you won't for torturing a mosquito.
Careful - fancy thoughts: I could imagine that we will update our morality regarding plants one day (given that we see more and more evidence that they communicate with each other, send stress signals etc.).
That's a very nice sentiment, but aside from the obvious (dolphins, a few whales, some primates, and elephants) do you have any sort of proof or justification for this statement? "Many many" is a very strong claim.
You just named "many", as far as I'm concerned. How many proven examples do we need before we start to think that the only reason we don't know of 1000s more is because of lack of research?
You also forget cephalopods. Oh, and Magpies and some other birds.
Having a theory of mind is another one of those big ones. The problem is differentiating true awareness of the concepts of 'self' and 'other' from rote instinct - is a leopard stalking a gazelle aware of the gazelle as an entity and takes actions accordingly, or is it merely reacting to known sets of stimuli?
Exactly. Being able to discuss what constitutes consciousness meets criteria handily because having a clear concept of self and other as well as being able to reason about that are both prerequisites.
It's sort of like the old question of what constitutes pornography? The border is fuzzy and unknown (in this case because people have different standards), but it's fairly easy to construct a case where the vast majority agree it's on one side or the other.
I adopted this definition from Sam Harris (it was probably his TED talk on science and morals). What I mean by consciousness (and some people in this thread do not seem to have understood this) is not necessarily human-level consciousness, but the ability to suffer. And of course, there are different degrees to which animals are "capable" of suffering.
I did not expect this concept of morality to be controversial at all. I am surprised by the discussion.
> Why only human? Why not the well-being of all conscious creatures?
The human race as a whole is still comfortable with snuffing out conscious human lives (death sentence, wars, 'collateral damage', etc). I think the other creatures should join the line...
By using the term 'conscious' I implied the ability to suffer. There is obviously a spectrum of the degrees to which a creature can suffer - and viruses are on the lower end, probably fairly close to rocks and water.
It was (arguably) the dominant way of looking at the world prior to the 1960s. It's possibly Biblical in its origins so it may have been around even before the Bible.
The problem with hydro is that they don't last forever, and when they get old you have to spend a fortune maintaining them, because you can't just "switch them off", especially if in the meantime they've built cities where the river used to be...
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/one-of-africas-bigges...
They can be switched off, depending on how they were built. During the building process you have to create a diversion tunnel, as the water has to keep flowing while you are building them. They should also have ways of draining the reservoir. Also in my state (Idaho, which is largely powered by dams) we have removed a some of the older ones. I don't have any source materials for you, but I had to go thru a ton of dam tours as a kid to learn how the dams worked. We have also had a dam burst (Idaho Falls with the Teton Dam). But every dam is unique, you certainly cannot account for all of them.
Also, dealing with the flood plain, which the dams protect against, that is another story.
Hydro is as reliable as the rain. When I was a child (and 97% of the power came from hydro) the newspapers would sometimes predict power shortage in the summer because there hadn't been much snow in the winter, and sometimes they predicted low power prices because of an abundance of snow.
In a way hydro is rather like solar power, which is as reliable as the sun, and wind, which is as reliable as the wind. I know of places where the sun shines reliably and there isn't much dust, and I know of places where it doesn't. I know of places where the wind blows fairly steadily from roughly the same direction most days, and I know of places where it doesn't.
No -- hydro is like solar, _if we had unfathomably large, incredibly cheap, low-leakage batteries_.
The US southwest is generating hydro power using water it saved up from 30 years ago, behind the hoover and glen canyon dams. That is MANY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE past what we can do with solar.
Come back to me when battery technology has gotten even close to that.
Also completely ignoring the fact that every joule provided by solar is one less joule that hydro needs to provide, which in turn extends their stored energy life.
Pumped-storage hydro is pumping water behind a dam.
You can TRY to hollow out the top of a mountain and put the water there (yeah, that's also suuuuuuper environmentally friendly), but it's incredibly difficult to do it at reasonable scale, and when it fails it wipes out towns.
You'll find the only reasonable way to store enough water to make a difference it is to put it in a valley, where the terrain helps you.
And in the end, you've just rube-goldberged your way to hydro power; to actually get scale, it has very comparable environmental impact to hydropower because it ends up being almost the same thing.
Let your factory sit partly idle sometimes and you increase the capital cost per unit of production.
If wind/solar depends on this sort of thing, then basically it's imposing an externality on factories, and we should account for that as part of their cost.
I'm all for preventing global warming, I just want to do it in the way that's most cost-effective for society as a whole, and that probably means including nuclear as part of the solution so we don't have to shut down factories when the wind doesn't blow at night.
In Chile, the mining companies in the North use a disproportionate amount of energy. They are located in one of the driest deserts in the world and could easily supply their power needs from solar with minimal impact. Instead they continually fight to build dams in pristine temperate rain forest in the South.
I would caution that deserts are some of the most sensitive ecosystems in the world. Covering up large areas of a desert with solar panels may be more harmful than you realize.
That said, I am a strong solar advocate; I simply believe we should start with the roofs of warehouses. These are huge areas of relatively flat space where the ecological damage has already been done.
I agree that we should use caution in setting up solar panels. That said the ecosystem in most of northern Chile is dirt. Not sagebrush or cactus with a few insects, or dormant seeds waiting for the next rain. Just dirt, sometimes rocks. If ever there was a place for solar panels it's northern Chile.
I don't mean to disagree, just share a fun fact: the Atacama is actually so dry, parts of it are barely an ecosystem at all. Obviously, the life that does exist there is quite sensitive, but there's large swathes of desert that are some of the only places on Earth where no life has been detected whatsoever; the land is literally just rock, without even bacteria living in it.
Covering up large areas of a desert with solar panels may be more harmful than you realize.
I've heard & use the term solar strip-mining.
Solar power maxes out at no better than 1kW/m^2 (sun at zenith, clear day, practically 100% efficient conversion), we're talking an absolute minimum of 1 sq km to match a baseline 1GW power plant ... and likely 100 times larger for real-world scenarios (10% efficiency, night/clouds, non-zenith air densities, dust, etc). So yeah, the net effect is "strip-mining" a vast area by removing all (or a seriously impactful percentage) natural power input and thus killing everything off.
Rooftop solar should indeed be the focus.
There's even solar panels intended as road/pavement surfaces, super-durable interlinked hexes grabbing power where we've already wrecked the natural surface.
If you start looking at effective achieved energy delivery from solar, 10% is exceptional. Consider that plants are lucky to return 1-10%. Algae, under exceptional conditions, may also reach 10%, but that takes some doing.
Insolation: 1 kW/m^2
Panel efficiency: 10-20%, nominally 17%. Maximum for a single-layer cell is 37% for quantum physics reasons, with an "infinite" layer panel, 87%.
Capacity factor is the amount of time a panel actually recieves sunlightlight. Typically 20-30%, with 30% as a peak.
Spacing factor. PV doesn't work if shaded -- the entire circuit cuts out. So you have to angle and space your panels. On net, this reduces availble area by about 50%. Less near the equator, more at high latitudes.
Degredation. For numerous reasons, solar panels degrade with time, mostly due to physical wearing (broken cells, wiring, hazing of panels, stone and hail damage, etc.) When nominal output falls to about 85% new, panels are deemed due for replacement. This is about 20 years based on multiple studies. So you're replacing 5% of your stock every year, and losing a few percent of output.
Inverter losses. Converting panel (DC) to transmission (AC) power costs about 10%.
Transmission losses. Another 6% or so for high-voltage transmission.
Multiply all that out, and your 1 kW/m^2 * 0.17 * 0.50 * 0.9 * 0.9 * 0.25 leaves you with 17 watts of 24/7/365 capacity per square meter. Or about 1.7% net efficiency.
This doesn't account for storage which can cut into that some more.
Uh, no. Chicago Midway happens to fit very nicely inside 1 mi² = 2.56 km². Its main runways (5 of them) with feeder ramps collectively take up at best ½ the space, so a single runway itself is not 1 km² but more like .2-.3 km².
Midway is an airport for ants. 10/28 at SFO is 2 sq km, and there are two of them, and 1/19 are 1.5 sq km, and there are two of them. Then you also have OAK and SJC.
Point: a square kilometer to generate 1GW peak of electricity would be an obviously excellent trade off, well within the cost parameters that humans are willing to spend on far less useful endeavors like runways and parking lots.
Wikipedia says that 10/28 is 3.618 km. For the runway itself to be 2 km², it would have to be 0.552 km wide. A quick glance at an aerial map indicates that a width of 0.552 km gives approximately the width of both runways, relevant taxiways, and the surrounding ground. Wikipedia says that the runways are in fact .061 km wide, for a total per-runway size of .221 km².
I picked Midway because it's a very conveniently sized airport, being almost exactly 1 mi² in a square-shaped with obvious meter marks (due to surrounding grid system).
Parking lots are dangerous to build over, for two reasons:
1) people cannot drive. The amount of dents or other damage from incompetent drivers done to a concrete-built park house is crazy, I don't want to imagine the damage they'll do to tiny aluminium/steel constructions holding the panels
2) people cannot drive. They underestimate their vehicle height all the time - just google for "can opener bridge". Just a couple days ago a truck driver massively damaged the lighting in a Munich tunnel because he forgot that the excavator on the flatbed was higher than the truck...
> They underestimate their vehicle height all the time
There's a simple way to fix that: Have a solid steel bar slightly lower than the max clearance at the entrance. People that can't drive will notice there without causing further damage.
Not to mention multi-level parking lots, which have height restrictions imposed by the structure itself. I'm sure most people wouldn't mind having the top level covered as well.
Here is a couple of square miles of solar panels in the Mojave Desert. If you zoom out, you'll find quite a bit more nearby. Whether or not you count this as large, the impact is not negligible.
EDIT: To be clear, I am not fundamentally opposed to such installations just as I am not fundamentally opposed to new hydroelectric projects, but we need to be aware of the impacts, and we need to make conscious decisions about when the costs are worth paying and when they are not.
Traditional power stations aren't exactly small, either. In fact, people will think you're a lunatic if you start talking about nuclear or coal in "per square meter of land" terms.
Think I point out is there is a perception issue. When people thing 'power plant' they think of a large concrete building with a bunch of machines in it. But they don't think of all of the supporting infrastructure. (Comment I've heard about nuclear power in France is on hot days it's partly limited by the need to avoid dumping too much waste heat into the rivers. Coal fired plants seem neat and tidy until one thinks of the strip mines. Gas fired, the massive network of pipes needed to extract the gas and move it to where it'll be burned.
For context: my local nuclear power station is about 600 W/m^2, unless you count the purpose-built lake it relies on for cooling water, in which case it's 50 W/m^2. The 17 W/m^2 estimate above for solar doesn't look as bad as I would've guessed.
"could easily supply their power needs from solar with minimal impact."
I would really like to see some data backing up that claim. I mean this. It would be amazing, if there were a cheap, reliable way to sustain all energy via solar - since the world leaders in solar energy production can only manage around 7% from solar.
If that were true then solar panels really aren't that cheap. Having to run your mines inefficiently should be counted as a cost when comparing the two. Doesn't mean that solar panels isn't still the best thing, of course, just that his assertion that they're super cheap for the power companies is false.
They are starting to ramp up solar only in the last year or two. Endesa, the main hydro company, recently gave up fighting to construct 5 dams in the south due to persistent opposition over the last several years. Hopefully this will accelerate the solar deployments even more. The main mining company CODELCO is state owned. Endesa and CODELCO basically try to do whatever they feel like unless there is enough grass roots opposition. There is also a huge potential for wind generation in Chile which they are only starting to use.
I think the power cost breakeven point has only recently been passed for solar vs hydro there. Nonetheless, they do need a 24 hour supply for a lot of operations, especially pumps and lighting.
Dams are an ecological disaster, just as much as burning fossil fuels. Dams have directly caused or are causing the extinction of several species around the world, that is not counting all the permanent environmental impacts a dam creates.
Hydro is a green energy source if you define green as simply not burning fuel.
Every energy source needs to be looked at with a cost-benefit analysis. The materials for wind and solar are not impact-free, and neither is their use. Before we condemn dams, we should compare them to alternative energy sources that would have been used instead (at the time of building), and assess whether the damage is less or more. Dams may be causing the extinction of a few species (which I assume implies they may yet be saved), but we can't assume that an increase in coal or nuclear power would be impact free in overall climate health or the health of individual species (nuclear has a fairly good track record by plant, but statistically having more plants built in the past may have yielded a disaster, and it only takes once to drastically change the averages for nuclear to significantly worse).
The question is, can new dams be built in ways that reduce or eliminate the problems we've encountered so far?
But the big difference is that the effects are almost completely local and not anywhere as threatening on a global scale compared to burning stuff and causing everything to heat up. This is actually a decisive point because whoever builds the dam will also lookout for the effects it causes and be more reasonable.
On top of that I think that the extinction of species is really not comparable to global warming, which will probably cause mass extinctions on a scale that has not been seen before in human history.
Actually, if mhurron is referring to what I think they are, then it can be fairly global. Think fish migration and spawning, such as with Salmon. Global Salmon population is very susceptible to being disrupted by blocking rivers. That said, I believe there are modern ways to address this problem.
Poorly built dams can damage the environment. Except you know, its 2016 and we've figured out how to preserve the environment while providing clean energy now.
Salmon, as an example, turn out to be a major component of nutrient transfer mechanisms returning fertilisers from sea environments to littoral watershed regions.
This is akin to saying that stepping on a nail is just as bad as walking into an industrial meat grinder, since they will both hurt your foot.
I don't think anyone is arguing that dams are zero impact. They can and do negatively impact local ecologies, and have the potential to impact animal populations at a broader scale. These problems can theoretically be offset to some degree with good planning and management, but thus far management has been uneven and middlingly successful.
I'm not being flippant and dismissing extinctions and the disruption of food chains as "breaking a few eggs": they are tragedies, but they are extremely small-scale tragedies compared to the ongoing disasters all other forms of reliable energy generation are inflicting on us. Hydro isn't above criticism, but blanket declarations that it's just as bad as fossil fuels is incredibly dangerous misinformation.
If your point of view is that any energy generation that in any way negatively impacts the environment are anathemas and that we should all be living in caves, then okay, but I don't know how you're powering your computer. Otherwise, you're being hyperbolic and enabling regressive and catastrophic ideas and practices.
A large part of the reasoning behind building many of the dams in the U.S. was flood control. In fact, I think the Hoover Dam was built for flood control reasons, and the hydroelectric part was the means to pay for it.
Enabling consistent river flows, which enables human settlement and farming in otherwise desert areas is definitely an environmental impact, but it's not clear that it is a bad impact.
And not burning fuel is certainly a positive in the eyes of global warming. All that fuel burning could result in rather permanent environmental changes of its own as sea levels rise, etc. If global warming is caused by CO2, then if we got all our power from dams instead of burning fuel, that seems like a place we'd like to get to right about now.
They can't rely 100% precisely because hydro is unreliable. A dry season and it runs down (which it did).
And dams - isn't Mosul going to be destroyed soon because its dam requires constant maintenance (a clay curtain pumped into the porous bedrock) which hasn't happened since Desert Storm?
"They can't rely 100% precisely because hydro is unreliable." True in an absolute sense but in comparison to solar and wind hydro is extremely reliable, and can be used to power the grid when all other energy sources fail [1,2]
As far as Mosul I'm unsure, maybe someone else more informed can chime in on the actual state of affairs there since wikipedia/google turned up multiple contradicting results for me.
Mosul is hardly an example of a well engineered dam though built in 1984 and falling to pieces. The Hoover Dam was built in 1933 and is not in need of pulling down.
If maintenance were interrupted (social upheaval) then Hoover too would fail. It take maintenance to keep it running - in particular mussels would foul and stop the turbines in a few seasons.
> If maintenance were interrupted (social upheaval) then Hoover too would fail.
Probably not in your lifetime let alone in a generation. Mosul's an issue because the substrate is not suitable for dam building (it's soluble gypsum, so it just keeps eroding because dam foundations kind-of tend to be around water) so the dam has to be continuously grouted to prevent it from failing.
They're not really comparable are they? It's not whether the turbines in the dam will continue to generate electricity, but whether or not the dam itself is structurally sound. My limited understanding is that the Mosul dam is not, while Hoover will outlast us.
It depends on where the dams are. I live in the North Eastern USA. Most of this part of the country (and eastern Canada) are powered by hydro. Niagara Falls doesn't turn off. Neither do dams, really. Even in the winter (-30F) and during summer droughts, they have water passing over the turbines. None of the dams in my area have needed maintenance in the time I've been alive (about 30 years).
It's cleaner and more reliable than any other kind of energy production on the planet including coal and oil. Nothing is 100% reliable, but hydro is the closest we're likely to get.
Everything requires maintenance. Solar panels have to be cleaned or replaced if they get scratched. You have to clean the bird carcasses out of the windmills. Nuclear requires constant supervision. There's no maintenance-free option.
The biggest real problem with hydro is proper assessment of impact of local climate change and damage on ecosystems. You can find some readings about the effects of big hydropower projects in Siberia or Middle Asia. In the latter construction of hydropower plant may even become a casus belli due to deficite of water and impact on agriculture of the countries down the river.
> nature itself is inherently violent, dangerous and in a constant state of flux
beware the anthropic fallacy. nature itself just is. violent is a human value judgment. danger is subjective and situational. "constant flux" is itself a contradiction in terms. some ecosystems are long-term stable, others change rapidly even in the short term, and others get suddenly disrupted by unpredictable events.
Energy investor here with a pretty large wind portfolio (1GW) under management. This geographically dispersed portfolio idea doesn't really work. Due to different wind patterns, and wind types, a wind portfolio cannot be relied on for stable power generation... this is ignoring power curves, availability, transmission losses, network balancing, node bottlenecks, etc.
Take as an example the entire wind capacity in Ireland, and the curtailment issues this generates.
Are you looking into storage as well? The engineer in me says caching is the way to convert an intermittent source to a steady load. I'm really curious what a wind investor is thinking about this!
Have we looked at it, yes. Are we investing in battery storage, no. It's too early for us to invest in this technology. This should be interesting for energy investors with a slightly higher risk appetite.
Ah, that makes sense. It's a very early market. I'm excited for the possibilities, though. If storage can solve the intermittency issue, solar/wind can become baseline load sources more easily, and we'll need far less actual generation in place to maintain the grid. I firmly believe the way out of our power dilemma is just make wind/solar cheaper per kwh than fossil fuels.
I don't think you even need to invoke such a controversial argument as "all non-human lives don't matter". Drastic climate change is likely to impact every species. Considering the vast amount of cheap, safe, carbon-free power that's available from hydro, it's probably the right call for salmon to take one for the team here.
I live in the heart of the PNW and most of my power comes from COAL. The rest; natural gas. It's insane. We could power three states by damming a few rivers. I'm not an expert, but I also think it's more than possible to do that in a way that still let's salmon spawn, depending on how well things like fish ladders and run-of-the-river actually works. I'm pretty sure BC get's the majority of their power from hydro, and from how much time local fishermen spend up there, the salmon are doing just fine.
At least regarding the Columbia and its tributaries, British Columbia is much further upstream away from the ocean, so the salmon impacts of building dams there are less. At least that's my understanding. Also, I expect their dams were built later and thus with fish ladders. (Grand Coulee has no fish ladders whatsoever, being built mostly in the 1930's.)
It's not just about the salmon, although I believe they're worth considering in and of themselves. It's also about the cultures and practices, the foods, etc., that have diminished since the dams interfered with the salmon run. Fish ladders are vastly better than nothing, but even then the rates of passage are significantly less than on an undammed river.
As far as generating mix, it really depends where you live. East of the Cascades there's plenty of wind, plus the Columbia and Snake rivers for hydroelectric. Not to mention a bit of nuclear. Pretty cool map here: http://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WA#tabs-1
My understanding is that even if we were dam up all the rivers in the world, the power generated wouldn't come close to covering the current global demand
Dams have an issue with methane emissions (a potent greenhouse gas)[1]. If I remember right, the type of dam also matters, and there are numerous problems with megadams in particular.
All Adam Curtis films are thought-provoking ( he's as easy to disagree with as he is to agree with ) but the one that covers this is "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace".
This film "accuses" modern environmentalism of being an artifact of systems-think that arises from the computer industry. It thinks that the whole idea of a perfect environmental equilibrium comes from that.
It also marries "computer perfectionism" to Neoliberalism in interesting ways. I don't recall if he brings up Adam Smith's "Man of System" as a "villain" here but that seems obvious enough.
I think it rather ignores people like John Muir but it's an interesting idea and worth chewing over.
Obviously, I suffer deeply from this same bias myself :)
I have solar at home and it's extremely reliable. For the last 11 years, it has generated electricity 100% of the time the sun was shining. Oh, maybe you meant something other than reliable?
Something that works only during certain times of day and weather is not reliable from the perspective of generating electricity.
The fact that your solar installation is in good working condition means it works reliably but that doesn't make it a reliable source of electricity.
Whether or not something is a reliable source of electricity or works reliably are two separate things and OP is talking about the latter. Can I flip a light switch at any time and reasonably expect solar to provide me electricity? No. Then it's not reliable source of electricity.
Where I live, the number of sunshine hours in December varies between 6 and 49 (years 1981-2010), average is 26 hours. That means a bit under one hour per day on average, but sometimes there's a week when the sun doesn't show up at all.
Not really a great place to use solar when you need most electricity, although on the average we get more sunlight hours than Central Europe. We just get them when there is less need for electricity.
Probably reactive or controllable. Wind, solar, gas, nuclear etc. cannot be controlled to the degree that opening the gates can. So it can respond better to the energy demands based on time of day.
Pulling out control rods or cranking up the gas turbine are presumably pretty quick. Helping this is the fact that humans aren't all that difficult to predict in terms of energy usage.
As I've said many times on hackernews, hydro power isn't carbon free. Land and trees are flooded to support dams. That means a reduction in carbon uptake, less room for bambi and lots of other issues. It's akin to clearcutting a forest, but at least after a clearcut the forest grows back.
It all depends on what type of area you flood. Empty desert is one thing, coastal rain forest another. Better than coal, but not perfect.
The power output of a hydro dam, relative to the lost land and its plants, is many orders of magnitude improvement. It's a massive win in terms of carbon footprint.
> .. energy obtained was from Hydroelectric power, which is a great energy source because it is reliable.
Is that assumption always true in the age of climate change? New Zealand gets about 50 to 60% of its energy from hydro and there have been concerns about the viability of it during periods of drought.
Hydro not just alters ecosystems. It also kills a lot of people in construction and maintenance accidents.
As you point out, it's vital they're well-constructed, but so far we've not done very well in that respect. E.g. nuclear is far safer per unit of energy output.
> I sometimes think they reject the idea that the whole point of existence is human flourishing and happiness.
Whether or not someone agrees with your idea of the purpose of life is not the only cause they have for decision making. Even the very idea of "human flourishing and happiness" means something different to everyone. Personally I cannot imagine myself flourishing or being happy in world were we have destroyed the beauty around us. Here is an excerpt from the book "A Last Chance to See" by Douglas, which does a much better job than explaining the ideas of conservation.
> "In every remote corner of the world there are people like Carl Jones and Don Merton who have devoted their lives to saving threatened species. Very often, their determination is all that stands between an endangered species and extinction.
But why do they bother? Does it really matter if the Yangtze river dolphin, or the kakapo, or the northern white rhino, or any other species live on only in scientists' notebooks?
Well, yes, it does. Every animal and plant is an integral part of its environment: even Komodo dragons have a major role to play in maintaining the ecological stability of their delicate island homes. If they disappear, so could many other species. And conservation is very much in tune with our survival. Animals and plants provide us with life-saving drugs and food, they pollinate crops and provide important ingredients or many industrial processes. Ironically, it is often not the big and beautiful creatures, but the ugly and less dramatic ones, that we need most.
Even so, the loss of a few species may seem irrelevant compared to major environmental problems such as global warming or the destruction of the ozone layer. But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we're driving.
There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos, and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.”
Studying nature shows us just how resilient plants and animals have been to the intense changes in environment and finding and endless stream of ways to survive. However, it has become increasingly even more so since this passage was written that the human race may be the one hurdle life on earth may not be able to overcome. Human flourishing and happiness itself is reliant on the very planet we currently occupy and it's no longer enough to try and temper our environmental impact. We need to minimize it. I'm not well informed enough to have an opinion on hydro verse solar, but I can say its incredibly valuable and important there are people who hold different ideas on the importance of conservation.
nature is inherently violent yes, but the effect of humans on the rest of the species on the planet is equivalent to extinction events that are rare on geologic time scales (already!) and some people want to keep making that worse so we can populate the world with even more sheeple who have even more iphones.
"...some people want to keep making that worse so we can populate the world with even more sheeple who have even more iphones."
That sentence is horrible. We're talking about living, breathing, thinking human beings not "sheeple". And to equate people who have dreams, hopes, and aspirations to a lot of mindless animals whose only desire is to destroy the planet and play on iphones is an egregious misrepresentation of reality.
If we want to make our planet better for all its inhabitants we need to be clear and honest about the facts and our goals. I happen to think our primary goal should be human flourishing, self-actualization and happiness. If you think our primary goal should be the elimination of species extinction or something else - I don't want to put words in your mouth - we could discuss that...
Ecological protection is not necessarily mutually exclusive with human development. And human beings are massively reliant on those ecosystems in subtle and important ways. Your point seems like a false dichotomy. We just need to approach problems in an environmentally literate way.
It's not a false dichotomy, because the above poster isn't presenting a dichotomy at all. We'd all like to see human flourishing AND ecological protection. Sometimes those goals interfere with each other, and sometimes they don't. In the cases where they do, we can ask: which is our _highest_ priority? If we had the choice between saving the human species and nuking the planet, or going extinct to save the extant ecosystem on Earth, which should we choose?
That's the point being made. Nobody's trying to say that all actions live on a 1-D spectrum between "environment preserving" and "human promoting". That's obviously untrue. I don't think anybody needs reminding that humans can't flourish if the Earth is a barren desert.
If you take out the sheeple statement, then he has a strong point. Look at any graph of the human population or energy use and you'll see the former skyrocketing in the last 300 years and the latter rising even faster than that.
This is unsustainable. But on an individual human level, we don't want to sacrifice the lifestyle we have. And many religious people will not use birth control.
If this was a graph of any asset in a market, would you take a long or short position?
Habitats are being destroyed through everything from logging to overfishing to melting ice. This is a serious planet-wide risk. Already the number of species gone extinct is larger than in the previous million years combined, I believe.
Humans have flourished too much; we're killing the planet. If anything, we should focus on constraining ourselves. What took millions or billions of years to evolve is in the process of begin destroyed in a few hundred years. On a geological timescale we're the equivalent of a bomb going off.
" its per capita electricity consumption is about one-quarter of, say, France or Belgium."
Its in the bottom quartile worldwide I believe.
Also the recommendations for the USA are way off. The "only way" to reach this goal is apparently to build lots of wind and solar. No mention whatsoever of nuclear, which is by far the more practical solution. And far less ecologically damaging.
> No mention whatsoever of nuclear, which is by far the more practical solution. And far less ecologically damaging.
I vaguely follow developments in this area, and this seems to either outdated or simply untrue information.
The people building traditional nuclear don't seem to be able to do so economically, even when they punt on insurance and eventual disposal.
The people building the new nuclear which is going to eat up all the old nuclear waste don't seem to be making much progress, even in China where you'd assume they'd quite happily take a chance if this was anywhere near a viable state.
Meanwhile, solar and wind are here today and prices continue to plummet. Any sensible economic or ecological assement would take into account the fact you can have solar up and running and contributing money/carbon savings on very short timescales, and do so in a distributed fashion, whereas you're talking potentially decades for nuclear which arrives all at once in a big lump.
The ecological damage is not outdated info. Solar farms are essentially clear-cutting the land. No sun - no life. The ecosystem under the panels is completely disrupted. Not unlike strip-mining.
You make it sound like solar farms are blocking off 100% of the solar radiation over the areas they cover. Have you actually seen any large solar installations? At the ones I've seen in the Mojave desert and Central Valley of California, the actual panels never cover 100% of the surface and a lot of backscatter light gets in even in the shade. I am not an ecologist but it seems like the effect would be more like having a bunch of trees in the desert.
They do tend to remove the underbrush from around the panels, probably because it's easier to install/maintain that way. You could make a case for allowing more vegetation around/under the panels.
"Fatalities per kw" is terrible risk management. I really wish nuclear activists would stop making crappy arguments.
Risk analysis has two axis - likelihood, and impact. The maximum potential impact of solar/wind plant failure is negligible - what's it going to do, fall over on someone? Meanwhile, the maximum potential impact of virtually any civilian nuclear plant is massive - release of toxins and carcinogens over large residential areas, rendering them uninhabitable.
Any respectable risk analysis requires looking at impact, not just likelihood.
The long term data (over decades) shows that nuclear kills fewer people than other forms of power generation. Maybe that will change over time (fewer people falling off of roofs when installing solar).
That data includes "high impact" events, including things like Fukushima, which evidently has not resulted in any radiation-related fatalities.
I'm not just measuring fatalities. I'm measuring economic costs. A nuclear accident can render a city uninhabitable, even if no one dies.
edit: An additional risk is that a nuclear plant is much more complex and expensive than a solar plant. A major accident, if nothing else, wrecks the plant, taking away a key resource that could take a decade and billions of dollars to rebuild (if it's politically possible to rebuild at all). Solar and wind, made up of collections of small units, can't suffer the same kind of unrecoverable catastrophic failure. Again, economic risk.
And yet another risk... because of the potential destructive nature, nuclear plants are obvious targets for terrorists and military action. This ties back to the ability to disable a plant and its impact. Even if it doesn't cause fatalities, taking a nuclear plant offline and forcing evacuations isn't that hard. High, high economic risk.
This is another example of your original mistake. You're narrowly focusing, and not doing a solid risk analysis. Nuclear power is riskier than solar, because the potential impact of failure is much higher.
> release of toxins and carcinogens over large residential areas
Thought experiment: how big of a nature-only walled-off preserve would we need around a nuclear plant in order to protect against that? And if that amount of area were instead covered with solar panels, how much energy would that produce?
My impression given the efficiency of nuclear is that it'd still win, plus you get a sweet nature reserve out of it.
I'm all for investment in nuclear but it would take a really bloody colossal nature preserve. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is only 2,600 km^2 but about 3,900,000 km^2 of Europe - about 40% of it's total land mass - was contaminated with caesium-137 after that disaster and about 2% of Europe was contaminated to 'high' levels. Even as far away as the UK there are restrictions on hundreds of farms related to that radiation.
The fear is irrational, but so is the cost. Nuclear always comes in over budget and with far greater construction delays than any other generation type.
Even if you were to start on new reactors today, it would take a decade to complete them; a whole lot of wind and solar are going to be deployed in a decade.
This again. For some reason the ecosystem of the desert is assumed to be worthless, and undeserving of preservation. This is an armchair ecologist idea that won't die.
In fact the desert ecosystem is more sensitive to sunlight changes. Which makes sense when you think about it.
There are numerous parking lots and parking structures, I'm gathering from your comment these are not big enough to make maintenance cost-effective compared to dedicated farms? Is anyone working on the problem of remotely-performed maintenance of multiple solar panel installations to reduce the maintenance labor footprint at each site?
The problem with nuclear is that we can't trust the people running it to follow instructions without failure for decades in a row. Sooner or later a politician shows up and demands an experiment to be done, or maintenance to be postponed.
Failures are rare, but the failure mode is catastrophic.
The biggest problem with nuclear is that it's too expensive. Even after massive subsidies, it's more expensive than unsubsidized renewable alternatives would be.
And the worst part for nuclear is that while solar and wind are getting significantly cheaper, nuclear is getting more expensive.
Finally, the major costs for solar/wind at the moment is storage. With electric cars, and the fact that nearly every consumer company is spending money towards cheaper electricity storage, it's just a significantly better bet at the moment.
Indeed, hydro has pretty bad faikure mode. Still, we're not talking about massively irradiated fallouts, the impact is contained booth in space and in time.
Angela Merkel didn't decide to shift to wind and solar. The Atomaustieg (the decision to abandon nuclear power) was made in 2000 by a coalition of the social democrats and the greens. The movement that lead to this decision goes back to the 70s, the green party actually stems from that.
Merkel slowed down that process at a time where it stopped being that much of an issue and the process was put back on the initial schedule after Fukushima happened.
Merkel is merely going with popular opinion on this.
> Angela Merkel (relevant: probably the only physicist head of state)
That's actually fascinating. She was a physical chemist research scientist, not just undergraduate [1]. I wonder how many other scientist heads of state there have been.
Margaret Thatcher was a research chemist (food scientist) [2], but that's the only other one I know of.
Edit: she was the first British Prime Minister with a Science degree [3].
I'm not up-to-date with nuclear. Is waste storage and disposal now a solved problem? Last I heard it had to be stored in hollowed-out mountains, walled in with concrete.
Thorium reactors may have little waste, with a short halflife. Any modern design will work better than the decrepit plants that are responsible for so much regulation and fear.
Unfortunately it isn't exactly endless. Even if you ignore the decreasing amounts of water at many dams due to climate change, eventually dams fill up with sediment. Lake Powell and Lake Mead already have about 10% less capacity than they did when built due to sediment infill.
Dams aren't endless, but no human artifact is. It is totally within design parameters to have to drain and excavate (and perhaps patch the cracks in the dam) every hundred years or so. The rain will still fall.
Actually one expects that aquatic sediment-removing robots will eventually be created to obviate this basic maintenance task, but that sort of assumes that humans will want dams in future. It's possible that they'll develop cheap energy without the drawbacks inherent in hydropower, and decide that rivers are better than artificial lakes.
You might RTFA, which points out that it "would never work" because it's already working—the US has already tapped most of its available hydroelectric power.
Costa Rica also sits on the Ring of Fire like I do here in East Java, so geothermal is accessible there.
Costa Rica did not have to maintain a standing army to protect its borders thanks in large part to relying on treaties and understandings with the US. This frees up some of their GDP for R&D into sustainable energy.
I wonder what the demand for electricity is in Costa Rica today compared to when I was last there in 1993. I was going to buy land then, but I was a bit wary of new laws on foreign-owned properties. It would have cost me a lot to bribe/pay my way to getting power distributed to my land. I was going to use a generator and solar panels anyway. Many people kept guns to defend their property from bandits in my travels there back then. I'm sure it has changed a lot. Selva Verde was my first 'eco-tourist' experience, and I remember talking to some of the worker's there, and the owner's daughter. I am glad to see the business model took off. It's a beautiful country.
>Costa Rica did not have to maintain a standing army to protect its borders thanks in large part to relying on treaties and understandings with the US.
As a non-american, I never understood what's up with this. Is it voluntary? Are they an independent nation?
It's a completely independent country that simply chooses not to have an army. 60 years ago they decided that money would be better off being invested in their population, and now they are a posterchild for stable democracy, the wealthiest centroamerican country, and consistently ranked one of the happiest countries in the world.
I think you are discounting their dependence on the US and other countries to protect them; they didn't decide without these assurances in place.
The US forgave a lot of their debt in 2007 in exchange for protecting their rainforests. The US is their largest trading partner.
Mess with Costa Rica, and the US Armed Forces 'will most likely' stand against you.
The US Coast Guard can operate off their shores because of the Drug War and an agreement with Costa Rica.
They'd still have to hold the country, but actually that happened to a city in the next country north, when a William Walker decided to be president of Nicaragua:
Very good, this is a great step, but just a thing to be remembered: hydroelectric energy is renewable, better than coal, oil, etc, but it still kills a lots of animals and flood great areas, disappearing with waterfalls and changing landscapes.
While a minor but noticeable uptick in radiation-induced cancer is unacceptable for humans, animals don't especially seem to mind. The areas around Chernobyl have become a superb wildlife reserve, and Fukushima is probably on its way to a similar state. Compared to the area submerged by a dam -- where the habitat is, without hyperbole, utterly and completely annihilated -- I have difficulty seeing how you can prefer that.
They do mind, they mind a lot, it's just that for the vast majority of wildlife humans (land alterations, activity and presence byproduct) have an even larger effect than a touch of long-term radiation-induced lethal disease.
I think the point was more that nature seemed to adapt very quickly to the fallout from Chernobyl. Instead of a nuclear wasteland it's a pretty thriving ecosystem with a lot of new life, and even large mammals seem to be doing just fine.
I caught a documentary while on a transatlantic flight about the Wolves of Chernobyl [1], and it discusses how the wildlife seems to be thriving with few to no ill effects.
This isn't me suggesting that irradiating the land with nuclear waste is good - far from it. But it does seem that nature is pretty resilient to it.
Wildlife does thrive in the exclusion zone, but again that's not because wildlife is somehow immune to radiations[0] it's because radiation-induced morbidity is lower than humanity-induced morbidity.
[0] they're not, though r-strategist will tend to be pretty resilient
Well, no, I agree, and I don't think I suggested that at all.
In fact, though you said it much more intelligently with terminology I was unaware of, I was more suggesting that nature is more resilient in the face of nuclear waste/damage than one might expect, and I think that's what the parent is suggesting as well.
No more, no less. We should still be very cautious because there is undoubtedly a limit (perhaps even known?) as to how much punishment an environment can take. But Chernobyl's ecosystem does seem to show that when you take humans out of the equation, Nature can be pretty darn tough.
>I was more suggesting that nature is more resilient in the face of nuclear waste/damage than one might expect
you're talking about the whole nature instead of the individuals. Place a bunch of humans near Chernobyl for several generations (30 years for wolves would be like 200 years for humans) and enforce the rule of quickly killing off any ill individual - natural thing in nature - and 200 years later you'll have a thriving human population there, and some alien would naturally conclude that humans "is more resilient in the face of nuclear waste/damage than one might expect".
They are inhabitable zones for humans now and have a bad effect on a lot of other organisms. I think humanity has done harm to the whole ecosystem (including humans themselves) by beginning to use atomic energy.
I'm guessing you mean uninhabitable (as in "humans can't live there").
That seems to be an excellent way to preserve the landscape.
> have a bad effect on a lot of other organisms.
Which, if the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is any indication, is significantly lower than the effect humans have on most of these organisms.
> I think humanity has done harm to the whole ecosystem (including humans themselves) by beginning to use atomic energy.
Whereas I think humanity has done harm to just about everything by beginning to use fossil energy, and much larger civilian application of atomic energy would have been a significant improvement at pretty much all levels, including (and possibly especially because of, though they've really been much too rare for that) the odd nuclear accident.
Your inherent hatred for humanity fascinates me.
I still have to grasp it. So Costa Rica is living on renewable energy now, strongly reducing any harm on any living beings, and you, at least that's what one could read in it, don't like it because this doesn't eliminate the space for humans as a good nuclear accident would do. Did I get it right?
> Your inherent hatred for humanity fascinates me.
One doesn't need to hate humanity to recognize humans as the apex predator and being really really really really high on the list of causes for habitat destruction and stock depletion for a number of species, and the value of nature preserves and other low/no human zones for helping reduce the harm of such things.
> and you, at least that's what one could read in it, don't like it
You could read it that way, but I think that's likely an inaccurate reading and can't recommend it.
Renewables and nukes both have their drawbacks. Ignoring them isn't productive. Overstating them is also not productive. Trying to correct such perceived mistakes doesn't mean anyone likes or dislikes either.
In-context, hydro isn't available everywhere, and I'd rather see some of the safer nuke tech than coal - but Fukushima seems to be heading towards more coal instead. Perhaps you think that's better?
If you do, you either think the harms of nuclear tech much greater than I do, or the harms of coal much fewer. If you don't think that's better, perhaps you can see why others would wish to encourage the fair treatment of nuclear power.
It's not hatred for humanity; it's objectively looking at the data.
For example, with comparative similar power output, wind power plants will kill way more birds, than Chernobyl did. And that's just at the power generation/operation stage. It's impossible to argue that it will reduce harm to any living being; some "green" power generation techniques increase the harm to them.
> Your inherent hatred for humanity fascinates me.
Now what are you talking about?
> you don't like it because this doesn't eliminate the space for humans as a good nuclear accident would do. Did I get it right?
You know you don't have to make stuff up right? I haven't given any opinion on the Costa Rican situation, I have only replied to your inane comments on nuclear energy.
Not really. They're uninhabitable only because of not-always-rational fear of radiation. People were fleeing from Japan because of Fukushima, and when doing so some of my countrymen returned here, where the natural background radiation is higher than in the affected area they ran away from.
When coming here, they went to an airplane which was high up in the sky and momentarily gave them an even higher dose of radiation.
Fukushima exclusion zone is a social phenomenon created by human fear, not physiological created by radiation.
If you think that, then of course the responsible thing to do is explore the issue with repeatable experiment and research to determine whether your thoughts reflect reality.
Interesting to see people pick apart what constitutes renewable and base loads etc. It is an interesting milestone that some part of the planet can be lived in with electricity that is only from renewable sources. That's pretty neat, you can live there after civilization collapses (assuming you can displace whomever is already living there :-)
Its a huge boon for a nation state to reach the crossover point of 100% renewables. Then they can start to grow it from there. It is much harder for a nation-state to simply lose access to imported energy sources, then there is the whole rioting and anarchy until enough population dies off that the remaining start seeing the others as necessary for survival not a threat to it.
Future 100 day update: We got 99 days before we had to fall back on non-renewable resources for a day. That's only a 99% fuel saving, which is not enough and means renewables are terrible and we should never try to use them again.
I think you misunderstood my comment. This article has been posted before when it was about 50 or 60 days. Now it appears again at 76 days. Why does the number of days matter?
I meant to reference the common (uneducated) perception that if there's ever any way that renewable resources fall short, that means they're useless. It's the same mindset that says that an electric car "only" has a range of 300-450km and takes a while to recharge, and therefore is useless as a vehicle because it can't do nonstop cross-country road trips.
As great as this is and large step for other countries very soon, decarb can only be achieved through transport efforts. transport makes up over 1/3s of emissions so why residential/commercial consumption energy efficiency is great, it is a tiny fraction of achieving overarching goal
Feels like the article was written by a pro-renewable reporter and edited by an oil-company exec. "Yeah they did it but you should be discouraged instead of hopeful."
It shows both sides and they're important to consider. You don't need to be in favor of oil or any fossil fuel to see that there remains a vacuum that needs to be filled somehow.
>"Yeah they did it but you should be discouraged instead of hopeful."
Probably because a tiny, relatively poor country that happens to have access to geography suitable for hydro power isn't particularly impressive in my eyes. Especially considering that, according to the article, just 2 years ago they experienced a drought and had to up their usage of diesel generators. Where were these reports then?
Geothermal, as with solar power, taps into an extant energy flux, rather than, as with fossil fuels and nuclear fission, stocks which are depleted with time.
There's a long discussion of this, dating to the late 18th century, though it's long been ignored and/or suppressed within mainstream economics. You'll find a healthy discussion in ecological or environmental studies circles, however.
Vaclav Smil in general does some of the better quantitative treatments of the problem.
Geothermal also produces radioactive waste! Water gets pumped into the ground, becomes steam, the steam rises, and is used to generate power. The steam brings with it toxic sludge, which needs to be disposed of. Not sure why, but they don't wanna pump the sludge back into the ground.
