>The daily shower would be hard to sustain in a world without fossil fuels. >The shower doesn’t get much attention in the context of climate change. However, l

>The daily shower would be hard to sustain in a world without fossil fuels. >The shower doesn’t get much attention in the context of climate change. However, like airplanes, cars, and heating systems, it has become a very wasteful and carbon-intensive way to provide for a basic need: washing the body. Each day, many of us pour roughly 70 litres of hot water over our bodies in order to be “clean”. this is your brain on energy austerity. someone tell the author about this little thing called uranium fission. also what's with the scare-quotes around "clean"? >In principle, the energy for a shower could be generated by renewable energy sources. However, if eight billion people were to shower daily, total energy use per year would be 6,132 terawatt-hours (TWh). This is eight times the energy produced by wind turbines worldwide in 2017 (745 TWh). All (current) wind turbines in the world could provide only 1 billion people with a “sustainable” daily shower. Furthermore, the use of renewable energy sources doesn’t lower the water use of the daily shower. To be clear, renewable energy is part of the solution – solar boilers, biomass, heat generating windmills – but we also need to look at the demand side of washing in a post-carbon world. lmao, saying the quiet part out loud. spend trillions on global energiewende, and we can't shower once we get to the promised land. >A nine minute hot shower per day is by no means a basic necessity: it’s a treat. eat shit. this is what they want: the whole world locked into a permanently sub-21st century standard of living. renewables don't scale, so their ideology has to tell you it's a good thing to be poor, and that enjoying a hot shower is a sign of wickedness. no "treats" for bad pets. all the wonders of modernity happened because we figured out how to harness exponentially more energy per capita, first by coal, then by oil, then by fission. one day, God willing, we'll jump to fusion. but if the Devil gets his way and we let the degrowthers flatten the curve: that's it. our standard of living hits a ceiling and stays there forever. that's what they really mean by "sustainability".