9 ms·

When will the mainstream consider it acceptable to talk about reducing consumption (without confusing it with lowering the standard of living) and reducing the

by spodek 10y ago

When will the mainstream consider it acceptable to talk about reducing consumption (without confusing it with lowering the standard of living) and reducing the population (without confusing it with eugenics)? We waste incredible amounts and a lower population means more goods for everyone. I'm not saying they solve everything. I'm just asking when we can talk about these issues that are a lot easier to implement than splitting atoms.

DennisP 10y ago
We've been splitting atoms for 70 years. France has run its electric grid on 80% nuclear power. What's our track record on reducing consumption and population? Not saying we shouldn't do them all, but I don't think nuclear is the most difficult of these three.
- jat850 10y ago
  My thoughts too. I would go further and say that at our current point in time, splitting atoms is easier than reducing population, and maybe easier than reducing consumption.
- omegaworks 10y ago
  >What's our track record on reducing consumption and population? As for the latter, it's great actually. Lifting people out of poverty and keeping their kids alive lowers their birth rate.
  - DennisP 10y ago
    Globally we haven't reduced population, we've just reduced its rate of increase. Our success rate on actually reducing global population is zero. And generally, lifting people out of poverty has meant increasing their carbon emissions.
- smaddox 10y ago
  France was able to run at 80% fission because they were selling excess production at low domestic demand times to adjacent territories. If you want to use nuclear for more than base load, you run into similar storage/transmission issues to solar/wind. Either way, we need a larger and more capable grid, so that production and demand can be balanced over larger areas.
  - KVFinn 10y ago
    >Either way, we need a larger and more capable grid, so that production and demand can be balanced over larger areas. Yup. Larger power markets benefits every kind of power: wind, solar, and nuclear. There is a lot of resistance to this though. Every state would prefer wind sites build in their own state, rather than buying power from the windier state farther away. If you had a truly national sized grid then the power distribution between even just wind and solar is remarkably stable.
  - p0nce 10y ago
    Yes we have to support nuclear over-production during summer and store it with dams. Yet this winter we'll be under-capacity, lots of reactors are currently shutdown because of maintenance.
  - DennisP 10y ago
    Modern nuclear plants are able to load follow [1]. The main reason we use them for base load is that nuclear's cost is mainly fixed, so it makes economic sense to run them at full capacity and follow demand with fossil, which has lower fixed costs and higher variable costs. Molten salt reactors would be quite good at load following, because the reaction rate slows down so much as the fuel temperature increases. If you draw less power, you apply less cooling, so the fuel heats and the power output goes down. For example, the IMSR, likely the first MSR to be commercialized, is naturally a load-following reactor [2]. This doesn't mean it wouldn't make economic sense to, say, run nuclear for baseload, add solar for extra daytime demand, and use storage to smooth out the remaining demand mismatch. But that's a matter of economic optimization, not a technical limitation of nuclear. [1] http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/02/14/responding-to-system-demand/#sthash.VRgqQpEI.dpbs http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/02/14/responding-to-system-de... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSR#Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSR#Control
- thinkcontext 10y ago
  "What's our track record on reducing consumption and population?" EU28 and Japanese electric consumption is falling. Population is falling in Japan and is in some EU countries (Germany) and likely will on average in the EU in the not too distant future.
ams6110 10y ago
Proposals that are contrary to basic human nature rarely gain much traction.
- triplesec 10y ago
  'Basic human nature'is a phrase that assumes a lot of things. How would you characterise this phrase in more detail, as it pertains to this topic? And how would you justify such claims?
  - trevyn 10y ago
    The human drive to reproduce.
    - omginternets 10y ago
      First-world countries with ready access to contraception are facing a birth deficit, which is being eased by immigration. Sex-drive is hard to stamp out. Actual reproduction, not so much.
  - flukus 10y ago
    The desire to breed is pretty hard wired, species die without it. Sex is only fun because it rewards our desire to breed.
    - Retra 10y ago
      Sex is fun irrespective of it causing breeding. They are evolutionarily linked, but the have no moral relationship within the human brain. The desire to have sex and the desire to have children are for most people, completely independent desires. And for what it's worth, humans have no obligations to our evolutionary past. "How we evolved" has no direct bearing on what we want (or 'are meant') to do with our lives. It only determines what we are circumstantially capable of. EDIT: Here's a nerdy analogy for you. There is a relationship between the "programmer's intent" and the "binary program". But that relation has no bearing whatsoever on the relationship between the "binary program" and the "runtime behavior" of that program. These are independent relationships analgous to the relationship between "evolution" to "individual" and "individual" to "individual desires." (The feed-back which would link these -- from "runtime behavior" to "programmer's intent" -- only happens when the programmer is working, long before you end up with the binary you have when you run the program. In fact, this feedback is only ever employed to generate a completely new binary, never to modify the prior one. Thus ensuring that they cannot be co-dependent relationships, and thus evolution has no ability to determine individual behavior past the point of your DNA being fixed at conception.)
niels_olson 10y ago
I don't understand what you mean. What consumption shall we reduce? Less oil? Working on it (see: solar). Less food? Working on it (see: /r/progresspics, and all the science and journalism on this, soda bans, etc). Less cars? Working on it (see: Waze, Uber, Lyft, public transit, et al). Do you suggest that China didn't try population control at scale for generations? (1) What, exactly, do you mean? (1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-lifts-one-child-policy-amid-worries-of-graying-population/2015/10/29/207fc0e6-7e2b-11e5-beba-927fd8634498_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-lift...
- Taek 10y ago
  Less transportation, less devices (instead of upgrading every year, how about using the same phone 5 years in a row?), don't eat meat, generally just reduce consumption. It does not count as less consumption if you replace oil with solar. Replace it with a void. Whatever activities you were doing that required energy, just don't do those things. We could do a lot better if we just lived like the 1600s.
  - welly 10y ago
    "We could do a lot better if we just lived like the 1600s" Sure, nothing like a bit of plague and disease to thin out the population a bit.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  > Less oil? Working on it (see: solar). And failing at it, oil use is still going up > Less food? Working on it (see: /r/progresspics, and all the science and journalism on this, soda bans, etc). And failing at it, see worldwide obesity statistics > Less cars? Working on it (see: Waze, Uber, Lyft, public transit, et al). And failing at it, see the meteoric rise of motorization in developing countries > Do you suggest that China didn't try population control at scale for generations? Are you suggesting it was a success, and didn't cause a huge gender imbalance which is threatening to cause social strife?
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marcoperaza 10y ago
People = economic power. Consumption = economic power. It's very likely that China and/or India will eventually be the most powerful countries in the world. Why? The simple fact that they have the most people and will have the biggest markets. And anyhow, if we can sustainably support double or triple the current population, then why not?
- adventured 10y ago
  Very large populations will increasingly be a liability in the age of robotics + AI. China and India will suffer immensely because they're simultaneously extremely poor, extremely under-educated and overpopulated at exactly the wrong time. Their over-population will be a persistent drag on raising the standard of living for all of their people, leading to stagnation once their easy fill-in growth is done (China's ended years ago). There is no scenario under which either nation can substantially boost the economic output of their bottom ~800 million, the global economy will never grow fast enough to allow for it. For example, India's path forward on easy GDP growth is already blocked by the end of the manufacturing boom that China was riding for decades (and that regional competitors in east Asia are already deep into taking from China). India coming from extraordinary poverty, will find it very easy to maintain 5% & 6% type growth for years to come, the economic wall will show up as they try to leap toward the middle of nations economically. It's very likely that neither China nor India will ever become the most powerful countries.
DrScump 10y ago
reducing consumption (and) population Those goals don't conflict with a shift to nuclear.
- freehunter 10y ago
  They don't, but if we met those goals we may be able to get away with not using nuclear. Nuclear produces a lot of power with relatively low side effects, but solar and wind produce a smaller amount of power with no side effects. If we can globally bring our power consumption down to that smaller amount that can be met by solar and wind, we could get rid of the economic and political arguments that keep nuclear from taking off. Nuclear has such a bad name in so many countries that it'd be nice if we could consider it a dead technology. To do that, it would really help if we could cut consumption to not need the massive glob of power than nuclear is designed to provide.
  - DrScump 10y ago
    solar and wind produce a smaller amount of power with no side effects Actually, manufacture, transportation, and installation consume mostly fossil fuels, and manufacture has environmental impacts (including waste products). I'd consider that a "side effect".
    - freehunter 10y ago
      But that's true of nuclear as well. Building a power plant and disposing of waste (not to mention disposing of waste water, which is often an environmental challenge) have huge costs that are fed by fossil fuels as well. What's implied by "produce power with no side effects" is it does not take fossil fuels to keep them running, nor do they put out any harmful by-products. Even hot water discharged into a lake and steam discharged into the air is more of a harmful by-product than the literally nothing that solar and wind generators produce.
  - krzyk 10y ago
    > solar and wind produce a smaller amount of power with no side effects Without side effects? wind? Have you by any chance seen what wind plants do to birds? Or have you had the opportunity to live in a house near a wind plant? The noise is very annoying. Water plants looks much better than wind plants.
waynecochran 10y ago
Population would be declining in us w/o migrants entering the country. So the US is doing its part on population reduction. https://www.census.gov/popclock/ https://www.census.gov/popclock/
- oconnore 10y ago
  I don't think you read that right. The growth rate is still (net) 1 person every 24 seconds without migrants.
  - waynecochran 10y ago
    Oops your right. My bad.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      Immigrants and their children do account for most of the population growth in the US though.
panic 10y ago
What makes you say they'd be easier to implement?
appleiigs 10y ago
We can't even agree if there is global warming or not.
stellar678 10y ago
We're actually all over that, and it will only continue to get better. The US energy productivity (GDP per unit of energy) has gone up 58% in the last 25 years, and most other regions of the world have seen large gains as well: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27032 http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27032 Our energy use per capita also continues to decline.
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torpfactory 10y ago
This. Do we really need more stuff? I think the HN crowd is certainly beyond this sort of simplistic understanding. But what about non-physical things? Do we need more entertainment? We are without a doubt the most entertained people in the history of the world. Do we need better connectedness? (I think we do, but it's not the kind on offer by Facebook). I think writing letters and using snail mail is about the bandwidth limit for humans having deep conversations. Do we need more and better sensual experiences? I love amazing food, but I'm not sure I could build a fulfilling life through my belly. Maybe the best thing that global warming could do is force us to confront our choices. What is truly important? We probably don't need the consumption we currently maintain to have the really important things.
- visarga 10y ago
  While I like the sentiment, I think global warming won't make us consumption minimalists. New materials and automation will make production cheaper. Automation will also make earth cleaner and self-cleaning. We're not just on the cusp of AI, but also of nanotechnology (where we manufacture with DNA and proteins), nuclear fusion (see the amazing new REBCO tape superconductors), 3d-printing and probably a dozen other emerging tech trends. We don't, as a society, go the way of minimalism. Technology progress happens as if it has a will of its own, not dependent on individuals, governments and even wars going on. We're witnessing the birth of a new bootstrapped entity - we had the virus, the cell, the organism and now the machine. The moment we make a self replicating factory that only uses cheap local materials, we've seen the birth of this new life form. It will be the new cell, the bootstrapped, self-replicating, self-repairing, adaptive source of everything we need and capable of improving itself by continuous optimization. We can't stop the birth of technological life.
white-flame 10y ago
Population is a self-correcting system. As people (especially women) get broader education, success, and opportunity, reproductive rates decline. When life is tough, people pop out more children. Reducing consumption is a strange one. We keep making our devices more power efficient, but we pile on more of them. We have more efficient cars, but we seem to be driving them longer and more often. Busy-ness fills whatever space it's given, and that's a huge driver of consumption. Of course, the very notion of "start ups" as promoted by sites like this are all about increasing consumption, often with new and frankly superfluous service-based conveniences. Money flows when consumption increases, so it'd have to be a truly cultural shift of simplicity, not a legislative or business shift. While I do think energy consumption per capita in first world countries is probably decreasing, we haven't yet hit "peak population", and lots of people are moving up in poorer nations to be able to consume more.
- 6t6t6t6 10y ago
  For me, reduced consumption is about promoting different habits. In most of western countries, the society is set in a way that happiness is directly tied to consumption. Marketing and the society in general, makes people feel that the only way to fill their lives is by buying things. In some other countries, people may be able to achieve similar levels of happiness with lower consumption levels; for instance, by doing things instead of buying things.
adventured 10y ago
If you want to plug every car into the grid - and get rid of the combustion engines - in the next 20 years, then yes, we need a substantial increase in energy production and grid capacity. Want everyone to use autonomous Uber-type services instead of owning? They might; that's not happening in the next 20 years however.
jerkstate 10y ago
Sure. You first.
MichaelBurge 10y ago
A. Who exactly are you suggesting do something? B. What exactly are you suggesting they do?
unclebucknasty 10y ago
I think you're right that what the terminology conjures in the mind is important. And, it can be tricky to communicate some of these ideas positively. For instance, the phrase "reducing the population" is probably as unpalatable as "eugenics" for some. It does sound a bit callous; as if we are saying that we want/need people (i.e. members of the existing population) to die. Even phrases like "population control" and "population management" carry this negative connotation. There probably needs to be a new, friendlier term. Something positive-sounding like "right-sizing" or "harmonizing". In short, these ideas need better PR.
pdkl95 10y ago
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_... Hans Rosling has a very good argument that we need a certain minimum amount of energy usage if we want both social and population stability. Wasted energy in the developed world is an interesting discussion, but if we want to address climate change the focus has to be on the much larger population of the world that is trying to rapidly increase their energy needs. > without confusing it with lowering the standard of living That's precisely the problem. Any proposal that significantly reduces energy usage almost certainly involves telling a large portion of the world "no, you don't get a washing machine" or similar restrictions on the basic benefits of industrialization.
- fulafel 10y ago
  It's easy to imagine many proposals that don't restrict access to washing machines. For example a per capita progressive CO2 tax would be one. We generally have the mechanisms to implement binding international agreements about these things, it's just a question of political will.
  - CountSessine 10y ago
    We generally have the mechanisms to implement binding international agreements about these things Binding? Name one that doesn't involve nuclear weapon proliferation.
  - dispose13432 10y ago
    >For example a per capita progressive CO2 tax would be one You can't Carbon tax people by income (because people don't pollute directly). You'll target polluters. So you go to Apple and tell them that they emitted so many kg of CO2, pay ... tax, Which will undoubtedly find its way to rising phone prices, which means (poor) people don't get nice things.
    - fulafel 10y ago
      There are several alternative ways to address this, for example products bought by consumers might account toward their CO2 emissions. Or just apply the CO2 tax to companies directly. Anyway, let's not get lost in the details, I was just offering a trivial counterexample against the claim that > Any proposal that significantly reduces energy usage almost certainly involves telling a large portion of the world "no, you don't get a washing machine"
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sfifs 10y ago
Without large scale energy usage (eg. heating/cooling), large parts of the world (anything outside say +/-10 to 30 degrees of latitude) are practically unliveable for most parts of the year in modern standards of comfortable living. So you practically cannot reduce energy consumption without depopulating. In terms of population reduction, history suggests any culture that does not propogate will be pushed aside by one that does. It will be interesting to see if there will still be a Japan in 3 generations.
wahern 10y ago
Waste is a value judgment. A more constructive rephrasing is to ask when are we going to factor in the cost of externalities (emissions, toxins, etc) into the price of energy. The best way to reduce consumption, especially for a fungible product like electricity, is by increasing the price. The higher the price someone pays, the less they're going to "waste". The dilemma is gauging and factoring into the price of a product the cost of externalities, especially externalities that are remote from the consumption. Guaging the cost is difficult (we normally use free markets to do that for us), but factoring the cost into the price is easy. You can remove subsidies, e.g. for things like coal. You can tax generation, like a carbon tax. You can tax consumption, and even get fancy, like using progressive taxation (i.e. low base rate so people can operate their refrigerator, with an increasing rate as consumption grows). Another alternative is energy saving measures. California has very aggressive energy efficiency requirements for all kinds of products, not just cars. They lead by far every other U.S. state, the U.S. federal government, and even Europe. Most people are unaware of it. Conservative economists argue that it just shifts consumption to other uses. But in _reality_ it's been highly effective; it's a significant reason why California has the lowest per capita energy consumption in the country. The fact of that matter is that changes in consumption patterns are relatively inelastic (as are, notably, responses to energy pricing). So as long as California continues to impose and amend efficiency regulations, it can continue hastening more optimal, more economically efficient energy consumption compared to the "free market" laggards. The trick is that the energy efficiency standards very closely track the state of industrial manufacturing techniques, maximize efficiency gains while minimize manufacturing costs. It's a small example of "central planning" by technocrats gone right. It works because it's practical to quantify the costs (changes in technology and manufacturing methods) and benefits (fewer watts) with a high degree of accuracy; and because if there's a miscalculation and the burden imposed is too high, people simply won't buy new products and will continue using the older, more inefficient ones, so there's a strong signaling loop back to the technocrats. BTW, it's worth pointing out that we do _all_ of these things. At least, California does. So to answer the question of when we'll begin doing it, we already are, and have been for decades. The real question is, can we do better....

by spodek 10y ago

DennisP 10y ago

We've been splitting atoms for 70 years. France has run its electric grid on 80% nuclear power. What's our track record on reducing consumption and population? Not saying we shouldn't do them all, but I don't think nuclear is the most difficult of these three.

jat850 10y ago
My thoughts too. I would go further and say that at our current point in time, splitting atoms is easier than reducing population, and maybe easier than reducing consumption.
omegaworks 10y ago
>What's our track record on reducing consumption and population? As for the latter, it's great actually. Lifting people out of poverty and keeping their kids alive lowers their birth rate.
- DennisP 10y ago
  Globally we haven't reduced population, we've just reduced its rate of increase. Our success rate on actually reducing global population is zero. And generally, lifting people out of poverty has meant increasing their carbon emissions.
smaddox 10y ago
France was able to run at 80% fission because they were selling excess production at low domestic demand times to adjacent territories. If you want to use nuclear for more than base load, you run into similar storage/transmission issues to solar/wind. Either way, we need a larger and more capable grid, so that production and demand can be balanced over larger areas.
- KVFinn 10y ago
  >Either way, we need a larger and more capable grid, so that production and demand can be balanced over larger areas. Yup. Larger power markets benefits every kind of power: wind, solar, and nuclear. There is a lot of resistance to this though. Every state would prefer wind sites build in their own state, rather than buying power from the windier state farther away. If you had a truly national sized grid then the power distribution between even just wind and solar is remarkably stable.
- p0nce 10y ago
  Yes we have to support nuclear over-production during summer and store it with dams. Yet this winter we'll be under-capacity, lots of reactors are currently shutdown because of maintenance.
- DennisP 10y ago
  Modern nuclear plants are able to load follow [1]. The main reason we use them for base load is that nuclear's cost is mainly fixed, so it makes economic sense to run them at full capacity and follow demand with fossil, which has lower fixed costs and higher variable costs. Molten salt reactors would be quite good at load following, because the reaction rate slows down so much as the fuel temperature increases. If you draw less power, you apply less cooling, so the fuel heats and the power output goes down. For example, the IMSR, likely the first MSR to be commercialized, is naturally a load-following reactor [2]. This doesn't mean it wouldn't make economic sense to, say, run nuclear for baseload, add solar for extra daytime demand, and use storage to smooth out the remaining demand mismatch. But that's a matter of economic optimization, not a technical limitation of nuclear. [1] http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/02/14/responding-to-system-demand/#sthash.VRgqQpEI.dpbs http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2013/02/14/responding-to-system-de... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSR#Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSR#Control
thinkcontext 10y ago
"What's our track record on reducing consumption and population?" EU28 and Japanese electric consumption is falling. Population is falling in Japan and is in some EU countries (Germany) and likely will on average in the EU in the not too distant future.

ams6110 10y ago

Proposals that are contrary to basic human nature rarely gain much traction.

triplesec 10y ago
'Basic human nature'is a phrase that assumes a lot of things. How would you characterise this phrase in more detail, as it pertains to this topic? And how would you justify such claims?
- trevyn 10y ago
  The human drive to reproduce.
  - omginternets 10y ago
    First-world countries with ready access to contraception are facing a birth deficit, which is being eased by immigration. Sex-drive is hard to stamp out. Actual reproduction, not so much.
- flukus 10y ago
  The desire to breed is pretty hard wired, species die without it. Sex is only fun because it rewards our desire to breed.
  - Retra 10y ago
    Sex is fun irrespective of it causing breeding. They are evolutionarily linked, but the have no moral relationship within the human brain. The desire to have sex and the desire to have children are for most people, completely independent desires. And for what it's worth, humans have no obligations to our evolutionary past. "How we evolved" has no direct bearing on what we want (or 'are meant') to do with our lives. It only determines what we are circumstantially capable of. EDIT: Here's a nerdy analogy for you. There is a relationship between the "programmer's intent" and the "binary program". But that relation has no bearing whatsoever on the relationship between the "binary program" and the "runtime behavior" of that program. These are independent relationships analgous to the relationship between "evolution" to "individual" and "individual" to "individual desires." (The feed-back which would link these -- from "runtime behavior" to "programmer's intent" -- only happens when the programmer is working, long before you end up with the binary you have when you run the program. In fact, this feedback is only ever employed to generate a completely new binary, never to modify the prior one. Thus ensuring that they cannot be co-dependent relationships, and thus evolution has no ability to determine individual behavior past the point of your DNA being fixed at conception.)

niels_olson 10y ago

I don't understand what you mean. What consumption shall we reduce? Less oil? Working on it (see: solar). Less food? Working on it (see: /r/progresspics, and all the science and journalism on this, soda bans, etc). Less cars? Working on it (see: Waze, Uber, Lyft, public transit, et al). Do you suggest that China didn't try population control at scale for generations? (1) What, exactly, do you mean? (1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-lifts-one-child-policy-amid-worries-of-graying-population/2015/10/29/207fc0e6-7e2b-11e5-beba-927fd8634498_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-lift...

Taek 10y ago
Less transportation, less devices (instead of upgrading every year, how about using the same phone 5 years in a row?), don't eat meat, generally just reduce consumption. It does not count as less consumption if you replace oil with solar. Replace it with a void. Whatever activities you were doing that required energy, just don't do those things. We could do a lot better if we just lived like the 1600s.
- welly 10y ago
  "We could do a lot better if we just lived like the 1600s" Sure, nothing like a bit of plague and disease to thin out the population a bit.
kalleboo 10y ago
> Less oil? Working on it (see: solar). And failing at it, oil use is still going up > Less food? Working on it (see: /r/progresspics, and all the science and journalism on this, soda bans, etc). And failing at it, see worldwide obesity statistics > Less cars? Working on it (see: Waze, Uber, Lyft, public transit, et al). And failing at it, see the meteoric rise of motorization in developing countries > Do you suggest that China didn't try population control at scale for generations? Are you suggesting it was a success, and didn't cause a huge gender imbalance which is threatening to cause social strife?
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marcoperaza 10y ago

People = economic power. Consumption = economic power. It's very likely that China and/or India will eventually be the most powerful countries in the world. Why? The simple fact that they have the most people and will have the biggest markets. And anyhow, if we can sustainably support double or triple the current population, then why not?

adventured 10y ago
Very large populations will increasingly be a liability in the age of robotics + AI. China and India will suffer immensely because they're simultaneously extremely poor, extremely under-educated and overpopulated at exactly the wrong time. Their over-population will be a persistent drag on raising the standard of living for all of their people, leading to stagnation once their easy fill-in growth is done (China's ended years ago). There is no scenario under which either nation can substantially boost the economic output of their bottom ~800 million, the global economy will never grow fast enough to allow for it. For example, India's path forward on easy GDP growth is already blocked by the end of the manufacturing boom that China was riding for decades (and that regional competitors in east Asia are already deep into taking from China). India coming from extraordinary poverty, will find it very easy to maintain 5% & 6% type growth for years to come, the economic wall will show up as they try to leap toward the middle of nations economically. It's very likely that neither China nor India will ever become the most powerful countries.

DrScump 10y ago

reducing consumption (and) population Those goals don't conflict with a shift to nuclear.

freehunter 10y ago
They don't, but if we met those goals we may be able to get away with not using nuclear. Nuclear produces a lot of power with relatively low side effects, but solar and wind produce a smaller amount of power with no side effects. If we can globally bring our power consumption down to that smaller amount that can be met by solar and wind, we could get rid of the economic and political arguments that keep nuclear from taking off. Nuclear has such a bad name in so many countries that it'd be nice if we could consider it a dead technology. To do that, it would really help if we could cut consumption to not need the massive glob of power than nuclear is designed to provide.
- DrScump 10y ago
  solar and wind produce a smaller amount of power with no side effects Actually, manufacture, transportation, and installation consume mostly fossil fuels, and manufacture has environmental impacts (including waste products). I'd consider that a "side effect".
  - freehunter 10y ago
    But that's true of nuclear as well. Building a power plant and disposing of waste (not to mention disposing of waste water, which is often an environmental challenge) have huge costs that are fed by fossil fuels as well. What's implied by "produce power with no side effects" is it does not take fossil fuels to keep them running, nor do they put out any harmful by-products. Even hot water discharged into a lake and steam discharged into the air is more of a harmful by-product than the literally nothing that solar and wind generators produce.
- krzyk 10y ago
  > solar and wind produce a smaller amount of power with no side effects Without side effects? wind? Have you by any chance seen what wind plants do to birds? Or have you had the opportunity to live in a house near a wind plant? The noise is very annoying. Water plants looks much better than wind plants.

waynecochran 10y ago

Population would be declining in us w/o migrants entering the country. So the US is doing its part on population reduction. https://www.census.gov/popclock/ https://www.census.gov/popclock/

oconnore 10y ago
I don't think you read that right. The growth rate is still (net) 1 person every 24 seconds without migrants.
- waynecochran 10y ago
  Oops your right. My bad.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Immigrants and their children do account for most of the population growth in the US though.

panic 10y ago

What makes you say they'd be easier to implement?

appleiigs 10y ago

We can't even agree if there is global warming or not.

stellar678 10y ago

We're actually all over that, and it will only continue to get better. The US energy productivity (GDP per unit of energy) has gone up 58% in the last 25 years, and most other regions of the world have seen large gains as well: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27032 http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27032 Our energy use per capita also continues to decline.

deleted 10y ago

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torpfactory 10y ago

This. Do we really need more stuff? I think the HN crowd is certainly beyond this sort of simplistic understanding. But what about non-physical things? Do we need more entertainment? We are without a doubt the most entertained people in the history of the world. Do we need better connectedness? (I think we do, but it's not the kind on offer by Facebook). I think writing letters and using snail mail is about the bandwidth limit for humans having deep conversations. Do we need more and better sensual experiences? I love amazing food, but I'm not sure I could build a fulfilling life through my belly. Maybe the best thing that global warming could do is force us to confront our choices. What is truly important? We probably don't need the consumption we currently maintain to have the really important things.

visarga 10y ago
While I like the sentiment, I think global warming won't make us consumption minimalists. New materials and automation will make production cheaper. Automation will also make earth cleaner and self-cleaning. We're not just on the cusp of AI, but also of nanotechnology (where we manufacture with DNA and proteins), nuclear fusion (see the amazing new REBCO tape superconductors), 3d-printing and probably a dozen other emerging tech trends. We don't, as a society, go the way of minimalism. Technology progress happens as if it has a will of its own, not dependent on individuals, governments and even wars going on. We're witnessing the birth of a new bootstrapped entity - we had the virus, the cell, the organism and now the machine. The moment we make a self replicating factory that only uses cheap local materials, we've seen the birth of this new life form. It will be the new cell, the bootstrapped, self-replicating, self-repairing, adaptive source of everything we need and capable of improving itself by continuous optimization. We can't stop the birth of technological life.

white-flame 10y ago

Population is a self-correcting system. As people (especially women) get broader education, success, and opportunity, reproductive rates decline. When life is tough, people pop out more children. Reducing consumption is a strange one. We keep making our devices more power efficient, but we pile on more of them. We have more efficient cars, but we seem to be driving them longer and more often. Busy-ness fills whatever space it's given, and that's a huge driver of consumption. Of course, the very notion of "start ups" as promoted by sites like this are all about increasing consumption, often with new and frankly superfluous service-based conveniences. Money flows when consumption increases, so it'd have to be a truly cultural shift of simplicity, not a legislative or business shift. While I do think energy consumption per capita in first world countries is probably decreasing, we haven't yet hit "peak population", and lots of people are moving up in poorer nations to be able to consume more.

6t6t6t6 10y ago
For me, reduced consumption is about promoting different habits. In most of western countries, the society is set in a way that happiness is directly tied to consumption. Marketing and the society in general, makes people feel that the only way to fill their lives is by buying things. In some other countries, people may be able to achieve similar levels of happiness with lower consumption levels; for instance, by doing things instead of buying things.

adventured 10y ago

If you want to plug every car into the grid - and get rid of the combustion engines - in the next 20 years, then yes, we need a substantial increase in energy production and grid capacity. Want everyone to use autonomous Uber-type services instead of owning? They might; that's not happening in the next 20 years however.

jerkstate 10y ago

Sure. You first.

MichaelBurge 10y ago

A. Who exactly are you suggesting do something? B. What exactly are you suggesting they do?

unclebucknasty 10y ago

I think you're right that what the terminology conjures in the mind is important. And, it can be tricky to communicate some of these ideas positively. For instance, the phrase "reducing the population" is probably as unpalatable as "eugenics" for some. It does sound a bit callous; as if we are saying that we want/need people (i.e. members of the existing population) to die. Even phrases like "population control" and "population management" carry this negative connotation. There probably needs to be a new, friendlier term. Something positive-sounding like "right-sizing" or "harmonizing". In short, these ideas need better PR.

pdkl95 10y ago

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_... Hans Rosling has a very good argument that we need a certain minimum amount of energy usage if we want both social and population stability. Wasted energy in the developed world is an interesting discussion, but if we want to address climate change the focus has to be on the much larger population of the world that is trying to rapidly increase their energy needs. > without confusing it with lowering the standard of living That's precisely the problem. Any proposal that significantly reduces energy usage almost certainly involves telling a large portion of the world "no, you don't get a washing machine" or similar restrictions on the basic benefits of industrialization.

fulafel 10y ago
It's easy to imagine many proposals that don't restrict access to washing machines. For example a per capita progressive CO2 tax would be one. We generally have the mechanisms to implement binding international agreements about these things, it's just a question of political will.
- CountSessine 10y ago
  We generally have the mechanisms to implement binding international agreements about these things Binding? Name one that doesn't involve nuclear weapon proliferation.
- dispose13432 10y ago
  >For example a per capita progressive CO2 tax would be one You can't Carbon tax people by income (because people don't pollute directly). You'll target polluters. So you go to Apple and tell them that they emitted so many kg of CO2, pay ... tax, Which will undoubtedly find its way to rising phone prices, which means (poor) people don't get nice things.
  - fulafel 10y ago
    There are several alternative ways to address this, for example products bought by consumers might account toward their CO2 emissions. Or just apply the CO2 tax to companies directly. Anyway, let's not get lost in the details, I was just offering a trivial counterexample against the claim that > Any proposal that significantly reduces energy usage almost certainly involves telling a large portion of the world "no, you don't get a washing machine"

deleted 10y ago

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sfifs 10y ago

Without large scale energy usage (eg. heating/cooling), large parts of the world (anything outside say +/-10 to 30 degrees of latitude) are practically unliveable for most parts of the year in modern standards of comfortable living. So you practically cannot reduce energy consumption without depopulating. In terms of population reduction, history suggests any culture that does not propogate will be pushed aside by one that does. It will be interesting to see if there will still be a Japan in 3 generations.

wahern 10y ago

Waste is a value judgment. A more constructive rephrasing is to ask when are we going to factor in the cost of externalities (emissions, toxins, etc) into the price of energy. The best way to reduce consumption, especially for a fungible product like electricity, is by increasing the price. The higher the price someone pays, the less they're going to "waste". The dilemma is gauging and factoring into the price of a product the cost of externalities, especially externalities that are remote from the consumption. Guaging the cost is difficult (we normally use free markets to do that for us), but factoring the cost into the price is easy. You can remove subsidies, e.g. for things like coal. You can tax generation, like a carbon tax. You can tax consumption, and even get fancy, like using progressive taxation (i.e. low base rate so people can operate their refrigerator, with an increasing rate as consumption grows). Another alternative is energy saving measures. California has very aggressive energy efficiency requirements for all kinds of products, not just cars. They lead by far every other U.S. state, the U.S. federal government, and even Europe. Most people are unaware of it. Conservative economists argue that it just shifts consumption to other uses. But in _reality_ it's been highly effective; it's a significant reason why California has the lowest per capita energy consumption in the country. The fact of that matter is that changes in consumption patterns are relatively inelastic (as are, notably, responses to energy pricing). So as long as California continues to impose and amend efficiency regulations, it can continue hastening more optimal, more economically efficient energy consumption compared to the "free market" laggards. The trick is that the energy efficiency standards very closely track the state of industrial manufacturing techniques, maximize efficiency gains while minimize manufacturing costs. It's a small example of "central planning" by technocrats gone right. It works because it's practical to quantify the costs (changes in technology and manufacturing methods) and benefits (fewer watts) with a high degree of accuracy; and because if there's a miscalculation and the burden imposed is too high, people simply won't buy new products and will continue using the older, more inefficient ones, so there's a strong signaling loop back to the technocrats. BTW, it's worth pointing out that we do _all_ of these things. At least, California does. So to answer the question of when we'll begin doing it, we already are, and have been for decades. The real question is, can we do better....