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The current rate of electricity use in the western is not viable. The choice is keeping the lifestyle for the next few decades and excepting the fact that futur

The current rate of electricity use in the western is not viable. The choice is keeping the lifestyle for the next few decades and excepting the fact that future generations are fucked. Reality is that in the next decade or so even if the developed world brings down it's carbon output. The devolping countries which are 80% of the world population will be increasing theirs as they keep developing. Nuclear might be an option for the developed world but unless something drastically changes in world politics the majority of where the carbon use going to come from are not going to have access to it.

AmericanChopper 8y ago
>The current rate of electricity use in the western is not viable. This simply isn’t true. Nuclear and even hydro are fantastic renewable sources. Wind and large scale solar isn’t bad in many places either. The problem is that environmentalists (and others, especially NIMBYs) strongly oppose most of those options, especially nuclear and hydro. Any proposed solution that relies on mass lifestyle overhauls is a non-starter, and isn’t even required for renewables to be leveraged properly. At that point it just becomes idealism, and any idealist view of society that requires significant changes in behaviours and motivations, on mass, is really just navel gazing.
- mimixco 8y ago
  Nuclear is hardly renewable. Every uranium pellet has to be mined (a carbon-intensive and highly polluting process) and none of the reprocessing methods we've tried so far are viable (which is why we don't try it anymore.) Hydro? We gave up on that in the US a long time ago because of the environmental impact of screwing with the water flow. I did see something a few years ago about a new type of hydro that worked in-line with the water flow using small turbines alongside a river. It put the water back into the river after spinning the turbines so as to minimize the environmental impact.
  - AmericanChopper 8y ago
    >and none of the reprocessing methods we've tried so far are viable (which is why we don't try it anymore.) This is an outright lie. Fast reactors which produce negligible waste (and which can be fueled by existing stored waste) are proven to be viable, have been used in the past, and are currently in use now in some places. The reason they are not being widely developed is entirely political.
    - mimixco 8y ago
      Here's what Wikipedia says (source quoted there): In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries". In Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, breeder reactor development programs have been abandoned. Is there some economically viable breeder reactor that you know of? Where is it? Even the base plants aren't economically self-sustaining. If governments didn't subsidize nuclear, no company would be involved at all.
      - AmericanChopper 8y ago
        Russia has two commercial operating ones. There are numerous experimental ones around the world, and India and China are both currently building them. They can also be used to recycle nuclear waste from normal thermal reactors. The only reason they’re not being widely developed is misguided political opposition to them, the same reason traditional thermal reactors are no longer being built.
        mimixco 8y ago
        The two reasons new plants aren't being built are costs (in the US) and safety concerns (in the EU). Of course, these are the same issue. The industry doesn't like to have it pointed out that costs are out of control because of the attempts to make the plants safe.
        8y ago
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  >"Any proposed solution that relies on mass lifestyle overhauls is a non-starter" Too bad, because that is what we actually must do, in order to halt this disaster. The scale of our problems cannot be overstated, humanity is genuinely capital-F Fucked, unless we make drastic changes. We can't just coast along and hope for the best anymore. With the scale of what we're facing, we need big changes like moving to collective living rather than single-family housing, and scaling down our consumption drastically. We need to start sharing everything on a massive scale, instead of insisting on everyone having their own personal collection of junk that just sits unused 99% of the time. We need to stop shipping junk literally around the world for profit margins. We need to stop buying so much stuff to fill the emptiness in our lives. We need to cool off the incessant bull-headed drive for every bigger profits, ever more growth. We need to either put the brakes on capitalism itself, or kill it entirely. All of this is of course heresy of the worst kind to capitalists and other profiteers. And since these people sit on the majority of capital and basically own our politicians outright, it's one hell of an uphill battle. They would literally rather doom humanity than take the necessary steps to save us. You can write me off as a doomsayer or idealist, but simply put, the odds are that if humanity still exists by 2100, it will look massively different from today's societies, because we took the necessary steps to save ourselves.
  - AmericanChopper 8y ago
    This right here, aside from being wrong, is why a majority of the worlds population are completely disengaged with environmentalists values. You’re promoting a completely impractical solution as if it were the only one available, when it’s absolutely not, and your demonizing the very people you’re (presumably) hoping to reach. Telling people that they’re to blame, and that if they don’t change everything about their life then they’re going to die is a message you’re never going to be able to sell to people. I couldn’t even imagine a better method of getting people to disengage than that, you’re doing a far better job than any oil company PR department could even dream of. In addition to that you’re also demanding that the rug be pulled from beneath the entire global economy? None of that is required, and if you can’t see how dangerous this message is, then there’s nothing I could say that would help you.

AmericanChopper 8y ago

>The current rate of electricity use in the western is not viable. This simply isn’t true. Nuclear and even hydro are fantastic renewable sources. Wind and large scale solar isn’t bad in many places either. The problem is that environmentalists (and others, especially NIMBYs) strongly oppose most of those options, especially nuclear and hydro. Any proposed solution that relies on mass lifestyle overhauls is a non-starter, and isn’t even required for renewables to be leveraged properly. At that point it just becomes idealism, and any idealist view of society that requires significant changes in behaviours and motivations, on mass, is really just navel gazing.

mimixco 8y ago
Nuclear is hardly renewable. Every uranium pellet has to be mined (a carbon-intensive and highly polluting process) and none of the reprocessing methods we've tried so far are viable (which is why we don't try it anymore.) Hydro? We gave up on that in the US a long time ago because of the environmental impact of screwing with the water flow. I did see something a few years ago about a new type of hydro that worked in-line with the water flow using small turbines alongside a river. It put the water back into the river after spinning the turbines so as to minimize the environmental impact.
- AmericanChopper 8y ago
  >and none of the reprocessing methods we've tried so far are viable (which is why we don't try it anymore.) This is an outright lie. Fast reactors which produce negligible waste (and which can be fueled by existing stored waste) are proven to be viable, have been used in the past, and are currently in use now in some places. The reason they are not being widely developed is entirely political.
  - mimixco 8y ago
    Here's what Wikipedia says (source quoted there): In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries". In Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, breeder reactor development programs have been abandoned. Is there some economically viable breeder reactor that you know of? Where is it? Even the base plants aren't economically self-sustaining. If governments didn't subsidize nuclear, no company would be involved at all.
    - AmericanChopper 8y ago
      Russia has two commercial operating ones. There are numerous experimental ones around the world, and India and China are both currently building them. They can also be used to recycle nuclear waste from normal thermal reactors. The only reason they’re not being widely developed is misguided political opposition to them, the same reason traditional thermal reactors are no longer being built.
      - mimixco 8y ago
        The two reasons new plants aren't being built are costs (in the US) and safety concerns (in the EU). Of course, these are the same issue. The industry doesn't like to have it pointed out that costs are out of control because of the attempts to make the plants safe.
        8y ago
KozmoNau7 8y ago
>"Any proposed solution that relies on mass lifestyle overhauls is a non-starter" Too bad, because that is what we actually must do, in order to halt this disaster. The scale of our problems cannot be overstated, humanity is genuinely capital-F Fucked, unless we make drastic changes. We can't just coast along and hope for the best anymore. With the scale of what we're facing, we need big changes like moving to collective living rather than single-family housing, and scaling down our consumption drastically. We need to start sharing everything on a massive scale, instead of insisting on everyone having their own personal collection of junk that just sits unused 99% of the time. We need to stop shipping junk literally around the world for profit margins. We need to stop buying so much stuff to fill the emptiness in our lives. We need to cool off the incessant bull-headed drive for every bigger profits, ever more growth. We need to either put the brakes on capitalism itself, or kill it entirely. All of this is of course heresy of the worst kind to capitalists and other profiteers. And since these people sit on the majority of capital and basically own our politicians outright, it's one hell of an uphill battle. They would literally rather doom humanity than take the necessary steps to save us. You can write me off as a doomsayer or idealist, but simply put, the odds are that if humanity still exists by 2100, it will look massively different from today's societies, because we took the necessary steps to save ourselves.
- AmericanChopper 8y ago
  This right here, aside from being wrong, is why a majority of the worlds population are completely disengaged with environmentalists values. You’re promoting a completely impractical solution as if it were the only one available, when it’s absolutely not, and your demonizing the very people you’re (presumably) hoping to reach. Telling people that they’re to blame, and that if they don’t change everything about their life then they’re going to die is a message you’re never going to be able to sell to people. I couldn’t even imagine a better method of getting people to disengage than that, you’re doing a far better job than any oil company PR department could even dream of. In addition to that you’re also demanding that the rug be pulled from beneath the entire global economy? None of that is required, and if you can’t see how dangerous this message is, then there’s nothing I could say that would help you.