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My fundamental hope for humanity is that someday, rather than having to confront social challenges around distribution of resources (who gets more water? who ge
by aftbit 10y ago
My fundamental hope for humanity is that someday, rather than having to confront social challenges around distribution of resources (who gets more water? who gets more land? who gets more oil? do we need to raise energy costs to capture the extrinsic costs of polluting the air?), we will just have enough and more of everything.
The Central Arizona Project and the Navajo Generating Station are my favorite examples of this. The Navajo Generating Station is a giant coal-fired power plant, which provides energy used primarily to pump water up into Arizona. The station substantially degrades air quality in the surrounding areas, and the water that is "stolen" from the Colorado is a part of the West's growing water concerns. Right now, there are two sides to the issue: those who think it is worth the cost to bring water to Arizona, and those who believe the environmental issues are too big. We could solve that like a social problem, using politics and ethics to try to make the decision... or we could just get on making energy cheap and clean, and suddenly a huge part of the cost disappears. If there was no fly ash issue, no NOx issue, no CO2 issue, then we're back to just worrying about the water flow. But if we have cheap energy, desalination suddenly looks a lot more palatable, which would reduce a lot of water pressures in the US. Los Angeles could switch to 100% desal water and the Colorado river would have a surplus of water again.
Cheap (and preferably clean) energy, solving climate change, and cheap access to space (this one is more dubious) would all broadly boost the quality of life for humanity.
- nixos 10y ago> Cheap (and preferably clean) energy This is the difficulty. Right now, the only cheap and clean energy somewhat on the horizon is fusion, which is 50 years in the future for the past 50 years.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoYou're talking about Arizona. Hello, solar...
- atemerev 10y agoNuclear is clean. Cleaner than solar, at least.
- ch4s3 10y agoclarify please. Are you referring to construction, mining, installation, storage, or just trolling?
- motoboi 10y agoNuclear is very clean. What most people came to hate is the waste, which is surprisingly little (per kW). Also the danger in case of failure, which is massive.
- nixos 10y agoAlso, there's literally no way to clean it up in case of accident and you have to keep it out of harms way for thousands of years. Theoretically, we can put CO2 back in the bottle. Practically, we can do it now, just not with enough efficiency and scale to make it worth it.
- dpark 10y agoWe have no practical way to clean CO2 from the atmosphere and we don't need catastrophe for it to be a problem. We're poisoning the planet with real carbon dioxide while we fret about the hypothetical risks of hypothetical nuclear waste.
- nixos 10y ago>hypothetical nuclear waste. Chernobyl isn't hypothetical. And neither is Fukushima. And those weren't as bad as they could have been. And we still don't know what to do with all the waste we have.
- closeparen 10y agoWe could replace coal with nuclear yesterday if the anti-nuclear activists would stand down. Instead, they have fought to continue a status quo whose death toll we start couting at 25,000 people per year lost to black lung [0]. No serial killer or terrorist could dream of effecting mass casualites as efficiently as the proponents of this viewpoint do when they take action that results in the continued and expanding operation of coal power generation, despite an alternative which is actually viable in every respect but their opposition. Yes, nuclear power has problems. But even if it killed 24,000 people per year, blocking the replacement of coal by nuclear would still be a willful choice to cause the deaths of 1,000 people (it's getting really hard not to say murder). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalworker's_pneumoconiosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalworker's_pneumoconiosis
- legulere 10y agoThere is no reason to believe fusion will be cheap. It has the same problem of nuclear power plants that building things is expensive.
- pitaj 10y agoHaha what? It doesn't have nearly the same issues. Building a nuke plant is easy, it's the safety measures that make it expensive.
- moyta 10y agoLos Angeles could also recycle its water for a much lower cost than desalination, but due to campaigns that claim it is unsanitary (ass to glass, etc) it is not an option politically. Another angle on this is why are we scrutinizing only where 10% of California's water usage is, while ignoring 90% (farms)? Why do California's farmers have the right to the majority of the water while paying next to nothing for that water as compared to the rates the other users of water pay?
- cestith 10y agoI grew up in a town along the Mississippi River. It's "ass to glass" all the way from Minnesota to Louisiana. Basically every city, town, and village on both banks treats its drinking water and its wastewater, then releases its treated wastewater downstream. Are the farmers paying so much less for treated, potable tap water delivered through municipal water mains? I think you'll find the cost of the water itself is pretty small. You may find that treating it, transporting it, and distributing it pretreated to all those people are the real economic costs even during most stages of a drought.
- JoelBennett 10y agoFunny thing is, most waste water treatment plants I've seen - the water coming out of the waste treatment plant is cleaner than the water removed from the river for drinking (which is then treated). Wait until people learn that they air they breathe has likely already been breathed by someone else...
- tonyarkles 10y agoOr that it's got particles from other peoples' farts!
- SticksAndBreaks 10y agoSorry, Sir, but we got to dialyse your blood- there is t-rex urine in it
- sskates 10y agoWe've done it with food thanks to the Green Revolution in the 70's. The need to "not waste food" is an artifact from before food was abundant. I'm hopeful like you that we can do it for energy as well.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoThis is not true, there are many people in my neighborhood who can't always afford food when they need it.
- fulafel 10y agoThe ingredients of food are nearly free, the US average income per capita buys 700+ kg of wheat per day. The distribution/availability problem is political.
- verbify 10y agoWheat doesn't have proteins and fats - those are more expensive. And processing wheat is fairly laborious, you'd have been better off comparing it to flour (about 12kg of flour a day for the median US income after taxes). And there is also the other costs of living - like shelter (more costly if you want shelter with access to jobs). Food costs can be quite cheap and still be nutritious with the right choices, but not 700kg of wheat a day cheap.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoYou can't really eat ingredients. It's not just distribution there is other labor, equipment, facilities, and resources involved.
- SilasX 10y agoThe problem is that once you make it free (or underpriced relative to replacement cost) people find new uses for the water, and your previous assumptions about how much people need, become huge underestimates. Without those prices, you're back in the commissars dilemma of either a) restricting people to a one-size-fits-all amount or b) maintaining a master list of acceptable uses, either of which have absurd consequences. There's a similar fallacy in thinking that energy efficiency tech by itself is enough to reduce fossil fuel usage. In reality, people just keep finding (It would be more correct to say that improved energy efficiency will make the required e.g. carbon taxes less painful to implement.)
- adamsea 10y agoAs our ability to extract resources has risen, over time, so has our perceived "requirements" of consuming those resources, i.e. America's current rate of consumption (of electricity, fossil fuels, etc), is required by nothing else other than a series of collective choices. TL;DR - Technology will never eliminate Politics, People are inherently Political.