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The headlines absolutely do not help. They turn off people like me, who care deeply about sustainability, let alone your average reader. Nor do those promoting
by ppf 7y ago
The headlines absolutely do not help. They turn off people like me, who care deeply about sustainability, let alone your average reader. Nor do those promoting complex/high-tech solutions, or ideas like "you do your part if you buy an EV". The simple fact is - a sustainable, CO2 neutral civilization essentially only has the energy available daily from the sun to sustain itself (unless you include nuclear). This is orders of magnitudes less than our current energy usage. Unless you want another stone age, a compromise is necessary.
- layoric 7y agoI agree as a population we need to reduce our energy usage but I will point something out. > CO2 neutral civilization essentially only has the energy available daily from the sun to sustain itself (unless you include nuclear). This is orders of magnitudes less than our current energy usage. The solar energy hitting the earths surface (forgetting what is absorbed in upper atmosphere contributing to winds) is really quite large. An example is I grew up in a territory/state that is 1.421 million square KMs in area. Taking the global average [0] of solar radiation hitting the surface of the planet the amount daily energy hitting the ground in just that area is 1,421,000,000 (square meters) * 6kWh = 8,526,000,000 kWh or 8.562 TWh each day (on average) Yes we can only access a small percentage of this through technology and practical land/sea use but that is an awful lot of energy in a relatively small part of the globe (NT Australia). But while "those promoting complex/high-tech solutions" are not always promoting useful things, the history of renewable energy is one of incremental improvement and small gains to efficiency. I agree it won't happen over 10 years, and no single technology will hold the solution to all our problems, but I do believe a combination of social change and iterative technology improvements can work together to greatly reduce us making the problem worse over the coming decades. Better communication of the science and engineering of what is possible is absolutely needed, but so is communication of the science predicting how bad things can get if we don't do anything. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Irradiance_on_Earth%27s_surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Irradiance_on...