5 ms·
Obviously zero deaths is a great target, yes. Obviously zero deaths is impossible. No energy production method causes zero deaths; even wind and solar have a de
by Lazare 6y ago
Obviously zero deaths is a great target, yes. Obviously zero deaths is impossible. No energy production method causes zero deaths; even wind and solar have a death toll (eg, from workers falling off things, construction accidents, manufacturing processes, etc), and yes, at the scale we're talking about that adds up.
Everything causes deaths when you're talking about thousands of TWhs. At most you can minimise the deaths.
> Deaths are not made acceptable because of energy production.
Nor are they acceptable because of food production, and yet food production causes deaths. Fishing boats are famously dangerous places; even farms have a lot of hazards (chemicals, large animals, heavy machinery). We could say the same about minerals, lumber (a friend of mine lost her father at a young age; he worked in forestry and a tree came down the wrong way), and more. And yet, we need all these things.
> Deaths per TWh was not a metric we measured. [...] nobody ever said deaths would be OK if only the numbers went up.
I don't doubt it. That is, after all, how we ended up in this mess.
Japan is currently building a large fleet of coal fired power plants (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukushima.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush...). Those plants will kill a horrifying number of people; many hundreds of times more than died from the Fukushima disaster.
That seems fairly clearly like the sort of decision you'd made if you weren't thinking about the obvious results.
- dane-pgp 6y agoThe buried lede from that article: > But Japan relies on coal for more than a third of its power generation needs. And while older coal plants will start retiring, eventually reducing overall coal dependency, the country still expects to meet more than a quarter of its electricity needs from coal in 2030. So this decade Japan's reliance on coal power will roughly drop from 33% to 25%. To provide even more context, Japan's energy consumption has been falling since before the 2011 disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Japan_energy_and_GDP.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Japan_energy_and_GDP.svg
- raxxorrax 6y ago> Japan's energy consumption has been falling since before the 2011 disaster That is really surprising. Can this be traced back to a cause. Some industry that closed down or did appliances and lighting got that more efficient?
- dane-pgp 6y agoIt's worth pointing out that the trend is seen not just in Japan but in other major developed economies too: https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/0784d9d63336606d4ca02540d22b765f05709d5f/a5204/exports/energy-use-per-capita_v1_850x600.svg https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/0784d9d63336606d4ca025... The usual explanation given is that these countries have outsourced their energy-intensive industries to other countries that have a corresponding increase in energy use, but there is reason to be optimistic even when factoring in "imported emissions" of CO2, in the UK, for example: "While UK carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions peaked in 1972, once we consider imported emissions – such as when the UK imports products that are manufactured abroad – UK emissions peaked in 2007."[0] Of course, peaking emissions isn't the same as peaking energy usage, but it does assuage some of the concerns about outsourcing our manufacturing to countries with "dirtier" energy like China. [0] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoraccounts/compendium/economicreview/october2019/thedecouplingofeconomicgrowthfromcarbonemissionsukevidence https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoracco...