8 ms·

Hot, crowded, and running out of fuel: Earth of 2050 a scary place

150 points by Steveism 15y ago

jamesaguilar 15y ago
That's a little more than the UN medium estimate of world population, but the absolute number of people doesn't seem like a huge problem. That's only 30% more than today. We have plenty of coal to get at least the electricity, and although oil might be a problem, I imagine that we can substantially reduce our consumption of that if governments get serious about pricing in externalities. The global warming aspect is very concerning though.
- jamroom 15y ago
  I agree about the global warming. My worry is that continued political pandering and posturing (at least in the US) will result in an effective "stalemate" that prevents anything from being done about it until it becomes undeniable to those who refuse to believe it is happening. As a father of 3 I really want to believe that their future is brighter than ever, but in my gut I worry that we're racing towards a cliff with no brakes...
  - guelo 15y ago
    Obama hasn't mentioned global warming since his 2008 campaign.
    - jamesaguilar 15y ago
      I don't know if this is true, but his administration is certainly working on the issue [1]. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/opinion/new-rules-for-new-power-plants.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/opinion/new-rules-for-new-...
      - simplefish 15y ago
        Um. I don't mean to be nit-picky, but that proposal isn't going to do anything. Let me explain. The proposal is to prevent new power plants from producing more than 1,000 pounds of CO2e per MW of power produced. Coal is around 1,600 pounds/MW, natural gas is around 800 pounds/MW. So what happens? 1) We build new natural gas plants, and burn all available natural gas at ~800 pounds/MW. Given newly discovered shale gas reserves, this is going to be a fuckton of gas, and hence, CO2e. (Note: This would have happened without the new regulation.) 2) We keep all the old ones around, and burn all available coal at 1,600 pounds/MW. Given known US coal reserves, this is going to be a fuckton of coal, and hence, CO2e. (Note: This would have happened without the new regulation.) All the new regulation does is ensure that all available coal is burned in old plants, instead of being burned in a mix of new and old plants. Since coal produces the same 1,600 pounds/MW either way, this is completely pointless. At best we're delaying the rate that we burn coal (with fewer coal plants, it'll take longer to chew through the coal), but the climate, sorry, couldn't care less about that. Either that carbon is in the ground or in the air, and if it's in the air, it's causing damage. If you want to have some impact on the climate, you need to figure out a path that leaves fossil fuels in the ground unburned. Tinkering with the rules about new power plants doesn't even help.
        jamesaguilar 15y ago
        I'm not informed enough to say whether this will do anything. I only used it to illustrate that the administration is putting effort into the problem.
- rayiner 15y ago
  Water is a huge problem. Even in the U.S. the southwest is already fighting over diminishing supplies of water, and global warming is only going to make that problem worse. The irony of the situation is that states like Arizona and Texas, who stand to lose the most from climate change and environmental damage, are politically the most intransigent about taking the measures to avoid it. When water supplies start drying up, people in those states are going to feel the pain far sooner than the dirty hippies in Washington and Massachusetts (though total pandemonium in the southwest isn't going to be good for anybody).
  - robryan 15y ago
    Interesting, we were going down a similar path in Victoria, Australia with falling water supplies. They build a very expensive desalination plant. Now it has turned around with 3 or 4 wet years so we are about to have this plant come online and not needed in the foreseeable future.
  - johngalt 15y ago
    Google Arizona v. California. It's the reason states like Arizona oppose 'environmental' legislation. Because it always seems like what's good for the 'environment' is whatever allows CA to steal more water for itself.
Steveism 15y ago
"...biofuels and renewable energy sources are all projected to increase steadily." That was the only happy thought I took away from that article. At some point the world will just run out of fossil fuels. Regardless of which side of the fence you're on regarding global warming one thing is for certain, we need new forms of energy.
- rosser 15y ago
  Depends on what they mean by biofuels. Many current biofuels are net energy losers, and specifically require more fossil fuel as (energy) input than they yield in energy output. Moreover, I'd expect the food-vs-fuel issue to become significantly more prominent as population increases.
cpeterso 15y ago
Are there any interesting advances in desalination technology on the horizon? Access to fresh water is already a critical health issue and it will become more challenging with population growth and global warming.
- Tuna-Fish 15y ago
  Desalination is a solved problem if you have energy. It's unlikely that the energy/liter of desalinated water will get much lower, so the big issue, as always, is producing more electricity.
- elorant 15y ago
  There are self sustained mobile desalination platforms. You can see one here, made by a Greek university: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTuh2wIz32M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTuh2wIz32M The platform which weighs 150 tons produces 70.000 liters of water daily and it costs around 700 thousand Euros. It’s not much but it’s a good start, I’m sure there are other advancements in this area.
error 15y ago
In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus predicted food shortages as population grows geometrically and food arithmetically. but here we are today with plenty of food :) in fact we have so much more that it causes us health problems... I think these predictions overlook technological advancements just like Malthus did.
- jamroom 15y ago
  This is what I really want to believe - that technology will ride in and save the day. I even think it is likely that new tech will emerge that can do it, but (and maybe this is my cynicism showing through) I believe powerful interests that stand to be harmed by the "new tech" will make sure it never gets off the ground. I sure hope I am wrong though!
  - rayiner 15y ago
    I was at Disney World last week, and they have this neat thing called the Carousel of Progress. It basically shows a household in the early 1900's through to present time. The interesting thing is how little has changed since then. There have been huge changes in communication, but other than that, the family of 100 years ago had an ice box, running water, etc. There were 130,000 cars in the country. We marvel at our advances in medicine, but the biggest advances in life expectancy, from relatively simple techniques combatting child mortality, are long behind us. Life expectancy at age 65 has increased only 4 years (from 12 to 16) in the last 100 years. In any given field, we see technology progress rapidly than plateau. Aerospace plateaued in the 1960's, for example. Even semiconductor technology, which has progressed at a breathtaking pace over the last half century, has improved markedly slower in this decade. I think the faith in technology to save the day is misplaced. Improvements in energy technology peaked in the 1950's with the invention of nuclear power. Indeed, we still get most of our electricity from coal power plants that aren't dramatically different than they were 100 years ago (the city of Chicago just shut down two coal plants that are 100+ years old). I have no doubt that technology will solve these problems, eventually. But the scenario in the article isn't something that might happen hundreds of years into the future. The projection is for 2050. I won't even have retired by then. We need a revolution to happen in the next 38 years, and I don't think one is forthcoming.
zanny 15y ago
I want to live next door to a Thorium power plant. I'd be perfectly safe because I know that it would just decompress and stop fissioning, but the land prices would be amazing. And while everyone else is dying and other nonsense I'd have electricity to last me a millennium. I easily see us using thorium powered desalination plants. Or my favorite, drop a giant turbine in the gulf stream and use that to power the East Coast + desalinate water to sell as a commodity.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  A thorium power plant gets its fuel when the thorium "is used as a nuclear fuel through breeding to fissile uranium-233." http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is-thorium-the-biggest-energy-breakthrough-since-fire-possibly/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is-th... (I think this article has been discussed on HN before; yes.) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2985173 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2985173 Now we've all heard of breeder reactors since decades ago if we are part of the Baby Boom. Indeed, in one of Paul Graham's essays, "After the Ladder" (August 2005), http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html we can read, "The big disadvantage of the new system is that it involves more risk. If you develop ideas in a startup instead of within a big company, any number of random factors could sink you before you can finish. But maybe the older generation would laugh at me for saying that the way we do things is riskier. After all, projects within big companies were always getting cancelled as a result of arbitrary decisions from higher up. My father's entire industry (breeder reactors) disappeared that way." What will make the breeder reactor (thorium reactor) industry reappear? Who will make decisions on behalf of that industry? How much investment cost are we talking about here? http://www.economist.com/node/21549098 http://www.economist.com/node/21549098
  - hcurtiss 15y ago
    China will: http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/07/21/china%E2%80%99s-nuclear-scientists-unveil-latest-breakthrough/ http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/07/21/china%E2%80%99... See also: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf17.html http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf17.html At a very fundamental level, when they're willing to displace 1.4 million people for a dam, http://waterfortheages.org/2007/10/15/three-gorges-dam-china-%E2%80%93-more-to-move-and-environmental-problems-acknowledged/ http://waterfortheages.org/2007/10/15/three-gorges-dam-china... and we're not willing to suffer a small water bottling plant in the Columbia River Gorge, http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/03/activists_ramp_up_opposition_t.html http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/03/acti... I fear we may be outpaced.
Lazare 15y ago
Let's quickly hit the three points they covered, and one they didn't. 1) Hot. Current models predict that 2050 will be warmer, but not much warmer. I believe the current best guess is around 2 degrees C by 2050, which it certainly noticeable, but perhaps not best summed up as "hot". (For people not following this subject, physical observations have produced lower amounts of warming than the models expected; as a result the estimate of the climates sensitivity to CO2 has been revised downward.) Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean that global warming is not real, and a big problem. But according to the IPCC models, it's also a very very slooooow problem. We shouldn't be complacent, but it's probably counter-productive to panic. 2) Crowded. Well, not really. We're talking about an overall increase of 1/3, which sounds a lot but keep in mind that this is just about as crowded as the world is ever projected to get. Further, the linked report says this will happen mostly via the less-crowded places getting more crowded, not increased crowding in the megacities. That's not so bad, really. I LIKE big cities, personally. 3) Running out of fuel. Again, this comes with a big caveat. We're suddenly finding huge amounts of fossil fuels - mostly gas, but also oil. (Or rather, we're figuring out ways of accessing the ones we already knew about. Remember that "reserves" are fossil fuels which are known, proven, economical to extract, and - in the US - legal to get to. A small rise in oil prices or - in the US - a change in law can lead to "reserves" multiplying without a single new survey.) We're really not going to "run out of fuel" by 2050, or even get close. Fuel may be significantly more expensive because what's left is hard to dig up, or we might decide to simply not dig some of it up (in order to fight global warming), but there's more than enough for the next few decades. And yes, that includes projections of increased Chinese consumption. 4) Richer. One of the reasons 2050 looks so hot, crowded, and out of fuel is because we have 38 years for small growth rates to compound. Small temperature changes can add up - but so does growth. We generally expect productivity to increase by at least 2% per year. If that continues then by 2050 we'll all be a little over twice as rich as we are now. True, it's not certain those trends will continue until 2050, but the same could be said of the first three trends too, and productivity growth looks like at least as good a bet to me. In short, the world of 2050 looks like it'll be almost unnoticeable warmer, small cities will be more like the Bay Area or New York, fuel will be more expensive but plentiful, and we'll all be twice as rich (and with MUCH more awesome tech). I'll take that deal. Got a time machine? :) Edit: Water is a much more major problem, and deserves a lot more attention than it's getting. However as other commentators have pointed out, thorium reactors should allow us to just brute force it via desalination plants. Fingers crossed...
danneu 15y ago
Energy and water consumption projections seem to just take current per capita consumption rates and raise them against projected population growth. Then they ask the question of "how will energy producers cope with these demands?" and start guessing at which technology will swoop in to save the day. But that doesn't appear to be how things work in the world. I imagine a lot of us on HN live in a world where you can blast your AC all day and leave all your faucets running with no repercussions beyond a cheap marginal bill. Isn't it more likely that we'll encounter the economics of scarcity and an adaptive market instead of one day turning on our faucet and nothing comes out because, dang, we've run out? I hear stories of parts of America fighting over water access, but aren't they really just fighting over a supply that still lets people run their faucets all day? Perhaps, as the water supply becomes more and more jeopardized, it will stop being practically free. Like every other market in the world, its price will reflect and dictate nominal availability. And the introduction of new technologies will come, like most markets, when the price of water/energy hits a tipping point. In other words, if we start running out of fossil fuels, won't that just jack up the price until alternatives become cheaper? And the higher price of energy will mean we may have to be more deliberate about saving energy, for once?
- redwood 15y ago
  Here in Dhaka, Bangladesh I do sometimes wonder if we're experiencing the past (e.g. the industrial revolution) or the future. Hopefully it's the former. Check out my new project: www.smsdemandresponse.com
mooneater 15y ago
That article is like a giant danger sign saying, we should be putting our energy towards improving that 2050 picture. At that point my kids will be a bit older than I am now, and considering the future for their own kids. How the hell will that feel, can you imagine?? This picture is also optimistic in that it seems to assume there was no massive war or plague. What are we doing, if we arent focused on improving that bleak vision?
tokenadult 15y ago
I checked the other commments here before looking for the full report "OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050: The Consequences of Inaction" http://www.oecd.org/document/11/0,3746,en_2649_37465_49036555_1_1_1_37465,00.html http://www.oecd.org/document/11/0,3746,en_2649_37465_4903655... by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The Executive Summary of the report http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/oecd-environmental-outlook-to-2050/executive-summary_env_outlook-2012-3-en http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/oecd-environmental-... sums up the future challenges: "Over the last four decades, human endeavour has unleashed unprecedented economic growth in the pursuit of higher living standards. While the world’s population has increased by over 3 billion people since 1970, the size of the world economy has more than tripled. While this growth has pulled millions out of poverty, it has been unevenly distributed and incurred significant cost to the environment. Natural assets have been and continue to be depleted, with the services they deliver already compromised by environmental pollution. Providing for a further 2 billion people by 2050 and improving the living standards for all will challenge our ability to manage and restore those natural assets on which all life depends. Failure to do so will have serious consequences, especially for the poor, and ultimately undermine the growth and human development of future generations." In other words, a disastrous future is not a certainty, but a risk, and planning to minimize the risk is worthwhile. The long-term human trend, meanwhile, has been improving living conditions for people all over the world, ever since the ideas of science and personal freedom and democratic limited government have spread around the world. http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/readers-digest.aspx http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/readers-digest.aspx AFTER EDIT: Do any of you remember reading the book The Population Bomb (1968) by Paul Ehrlich in your youth? I was amazed last week to discover a friend a bit younger than I am (born in the 1960s, a few years before the book was published) had never heard of the book. I've been seeing gloom-and-doom predictions for my whole life, and so far there is still a lot of petroleum, lifespans are going up and health is improving all over the world except in pathological countries like Russia, and most of the disasters predicted during my youth have failed to occur. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb#Predictions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb#Predictions
- sampsonjs 15y ago
  "there is still a lot of petroleum"...... Thank Christ that will never run out.
brownbat 15y ago
Why Earth 2050 is going to be an awesome place: 1) Hot: shoot a tiny amount of sulfur dioxide into the arctic atmosphere, planet cools. See also #3. 2) Crowded: current upward global health trends will halt population growth naturally, and more people isn't necessarily bad anyway. Malthus was wrong to just consider resource consumption and ignore the benefits people provide to society. When you only have 100 people, they all have to look for food full time. When you have 7 billion, you get to siphon some off as scientific researchers and medical professionals, who pay back to others far more than they eat. (Lowly gas station attendants likely pay back more value than the raw resource cost it takes to sustain them too, but let's start with the low hanging fruit...) 3) Fuel: Solar's price is halving exponentially. 3b) Water: We're not really running out of low salinity water; we couldn't drain any of the world's large lakes if we tried. It's just a purification or transport issue. Limitless energy solves both. Most importantly: technology is going to be so cool! Heralds of optimism / references: 1) Caldeira.* http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-07/ff_geoengineering?currentPage=all http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-07/ff_g... 2) Rosling. http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth/ http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth... 3) Kurzweil. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfbOyw3CT6A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfbOyw3CT6A 3b) Kamen. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/colbert-and-kam/ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/colbert-and-kam/ * Caveat, Caldeira doesn't advocate the sulfur dioxide solution as a first stop for combating global warming, his research just confirms it would be worth using as a backstop.
- rayiner 15y ago
  I don't understand this faith in technology. We aren't any closer to going to another planet today than we were 50 years ago. Medicine has extended the natural limits of a human life a scant four years in the last century. Electric vehicles have been around for a century and still haven't gotten over the tipping point. In the time scale we're talking about for global warming, three to four decades, it is unlikely that we'll see any technological innovations that fundamentally change the math. Climate change is about as far into the future as the invention of C and Smalltalk are in the past.
  - 15y ago
uvdiv 15y ago
Completely wrong: The 80-percent increase predicted by 2050 translates to a total global energy consumption of 900 exajoules (EJ) per year (in other words 9 x 10^20 joules)—65 times the annual energy consumption of the US in 2009. 2008 primary energy consumption was about 100 quads [a] [1] in the US (~100 EJ), compared to 500 quads [1] for the world (or, ~20%). 900 EJ/year would be around 9 times the current US energy intensity. I'm pretty sure about the etiology of this error: (1/65th) of 900 EJ/year is the US electricity intensity, about 4,000 TWh(elec.)/year [2]. They're mixing different energy statistics (apples & oranges). Primary energy measures the heat energy of the fuel input in power generation, not the output (e.g. 3 joules coal => 1 joule electricity; primary energy is the 3 J). It also measures non-electricity energy uses (like oil for fuel or natural gas for heat), which put together are even bigger than power generation [3]. [a] (a "quad" is short for "quadrillion btu [british thermal unit]", which coincidentally is about the same as 1 exajoule) [1] http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/world.cfm http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/world.cfm [2] http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_1_1 http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm... [3] https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/ https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/
ctdonath 15y ago
Context which I never see addressed: http://donath.org/Photos/TempChange.PNG http://donath.org/Photos/TempChange.PNG
- zipdog 15y ago
  I'm not sure if you're suggesting that the Earth's temperature has a background variability ... .. or noting that if the Earth's average temperature warms by 5 degrees it will spike higher than any sustained period in the last 400,000 years.
  - ctdonath 15y ago
    Put 'em together, and perhaps that 5 degree increase will balance the we're-due-for-it 5 degree decrease.
uvdiv 15y ago
When someone suggests energy, fuel, fresh water are in danger of "running out", you should ask them to sketch what they think the supply curve is for those resources. They have something in common: a horizontal asymptote. With energy, it's a virtually inifinite supply at a price somewhere between 1-2x coal (nuclear fission) to a conservative 4-8x (solar) -- this for existing technology, today. For water, such an asymptote is desalination cost somewhere around 1-2x treated tap water. Similar stories for fuel -- EVs are one asymptote. In the left corner there's a short slope with a cheap, very limited resource (coal, petroleum, groundwater); then at a slightly higher price you have an infinite supply. I interpret this as saying, in the worst case, developed countries' crisis amounts to trivial negative economic adjustements ("trivial" compared to, e.g. everything else that happens through 2050...); and in the expected case, pretty unremarkable technology gains combine with massive economic growth give you far more, for far less. (The "optimistic" case is singularitarian...)
- nyellin 15y ago
  There are theoretical upper limits on energy consumption: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
  - uvdiv 15y ago
    I lost his reasoning somewhere between the astrophysical power output of a galaxy being ~10^37 watts, to the conflation of energy with economic utility, to the endorsement of deindustrialization and world socialism.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
- benmccann 15y ago
  My limited understanding of desalinization is that we avoid it not because of the expense, but because it's environmentally damaging to put a giant pipe in the ocean sucking up water that happens to bring a lot of fish and such with it.
insertnickname 15y ago
The future will be nothing like the past.
carguy1983 15y ago
From the article: > It predicts a world population of 9.2 billion people, generating a global GDP four times the size of today's Global domestic product is currently $63T. 2050 GDP = 4 * $63 = $252T. Current per capita GDP = $63 trillion divided by 6.8 billion = $9,264.70588 2050 per capita GDP = $252 trillion divided by 9.2 billion = $27,391.3043 So basically everyone will be 3 times richer, at a cost of "80% more energy" (less than 2 times the energy), which means energy efficiency will increase dramatically, probably due to the fact that we'll harness more solar and geo energy, which is delivered from the giant nuclear furnace in the sky, aka our sun.
jakeonthemove 15y ago
We'll just have to make a few adjustments (like shifting power generation to individual houses using solar, wind and other methods that will undoubtedly be affordable by then, if only because oil will be pretty expensive). Myself, I'd like to build a house (out of containers, maybe) somewhere near a mountain, powered by wind+solar, with a satellite or long range WiFi connection to the Internet (aka the rest of the world). I'd be happy to retire this way, hiking in the summer and snowboarding during winter :-), growing food (including farm animals) on a patch of land and a hydroponic farm... Also, make the images here your wallpapers - there's enough space and energy for everyone, even in 2050: http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127 http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127
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yelongren 15y ago
To think that the water I'm gonna drink today is the exact same water that soils, plants, animals have been drinking since the beginning of time, makes me feel connected...to dinosaurs! Our problem has never been quantity but recycling rate, and not realizing we are all in the same boat.
rajpaul 15y ago
"based on current global trends" Interesting bit of science fiction, but current trends never continue like that.

150 points by Steveism 15y ago

That's a little more than the UN medium estimate of world population, but the absolute number of people doesn't seem like a huge problem. That's only 30% more than today. We have plenty of coal to get at least the electricity, and although oil might be a problem, I imagine that we can substantially reduce our consumption of that if governments get serious about pricing in externalities. The global warming aspect is very concerning though.

jamroom 15y ago
I agree about the global warming. My worry is that continued political pandering and posturing (at least in the US) will result in an effective "stalemate" that prevents anything from being done about it until it becomes undeniable to those who refuse to believe it is happening. As a father of 3 I really want to believe that their future is brighter than ever, but in my gut I worry that we're racing towards a cliff with no brakes...
- guelo 15y ago
  Obama hasn't mentioned global warming since his 2008 campaign.
  - jamesaguilar 15y ago
    I don't know if this is true, but his administration is certainly working on the issue [1]. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/opinion/new-rules-for-new-power-plants.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/opinion/new-rules-for-new-...
    - simplefish 15y ago
      Um. I don't mean to be nit-picky, but that proposal isn't going to do anything. Let me explain. The proposal is to prevent new power plants from producing more than 1,000 pounds of CO2e per MW of power produced. Coal is around 1,600 pounds/MW, natural gas is around 800 pounds/MW. So what happens? 1) We build new natural gas plants, and burn all available natural gas at ~800 pounds/MW. Given newly discovered shale gas reserves, this is going to be a fuckton of gas, and hence, CO2e. (Note: This would have happened without the new regulation.) 2) We keep all the old ones around, and burn all available coal at 1,600 pounds/MW. Given known US coal reserves, this is going to be a fuckton of coal, and hence, CO2e. (Note: This would have happened without the new regulation.) All the new regulation does is ensure that all available coal is burned in old plants, instead of being burned in a mix of new and old plants. Since coal produces the same 1,600 pounds/MW either way, this is completely pointless. At best we're delaying the rate that we burn coal (with fewer coal plants, it'll take longer to chew through the coal), but the climate, sorry, couldn't care less about that. Either that carbon is in the ground or in the air, and if it's in the air, it's causing damage. If you want to have some impact on the climate, you need to figure out a path that leaves fossil fuels in the ground unburned. Tinkering with the rules about new power plants doesn't even help.
      - jamesaguilar 15y ago
        I'm not informed enough to say whether this will do anything. I only used it to illustrate that the administration is putting effort into the problem.
rayiner 15y ago
Water is a huge problem. Even in the U.S. the southwest is already fighting over diminishing supplies of water, and global warming is only going to make that problem worse. The irony of the situation is that states like Arizona and Texas, who stand to lose the most from climate change and environmental damage, are politically the most intransigent about taking the measures to avoid it. When water supplies start drying up, people in those states are going to feel the pain far sooner than the dirty hippies in Washington and Massachusetts (though total pandemonium in the southwest isn't going to be good for anybody).
- robryan 15y ago
  Interesting, we were going down a similar path in Victoria, Australia with falling water supplies. They build a very expensive desalination plant. Now it has turned around with 3 or 4 wet years so we are about to have this plant come online and not needed in the foreseeable future.
- johngalt 15y ago
  Google Arizona v. California. It's the reason states like Arizona oppose 'environmental' legislation. Because it always seems like what's good for the 'environment' is whatever allows CA to steal more water for itself.

Steveism 15y ago

"...biofuels and renewable energy sources are all projected to increase steadily." That was the only happy thought I took away from that article. At some point the world will just run out of fossil fuels. Regardless of which side of the fence you're on regarding global warming one thing is for certain, we need new forms of energy.

rosser 15y ago
Depends on what they mean by biofuels. Many current biofuels are net energy losers, and specifically require more fossil fuel as (energy) input than they yield in energy output. Moreover, I'd expect the food-vs-fuel issue to become significantly more prominent as population increases.

cpeterso 15y ago

Are there any interesting advances in desalination technology on the horizon? Access to fresh water is already a critical health issue and it will become more challenging with population growth and global warming.

Tuna-Fish 15y ago
Desalination is a solved problem if you have energy. It's unlikely that the energy/liter of desalinated water will get much lower, so the big issue, as always, is producing more electricity.
elorant 15y ago
There are self sustained mobile desalination platforms. You can see one here, made by a Greek university: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTuh2wIz32M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTuh2wIz32M The platform which weighs 150 tons produces 70.000 liters of water daily and it costs around 700 thousand Euros. It’s not much but it’s a good start, I’m sure there are other advancements in this area.

error 15y ago

In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus predicted food shortages as population grows geometrically and food arithmetically. but here we are today with plenty of food :) in fact we have so much more that it causes us health problems... I think these predictions overlook technological advancements just like Malthus did.

jamroom 15y ago
This is what I really want to believe - that technology will ride in and save the day. I even think it is likely that new tech will emerge that can do it, but (and maybe this is my cynicism showing through) I believe powerful interests that stand to be harmed by the "new tech" will make sure it never gets off the ground. I sure hope I am wrong though!
- rayiner 15y ago
  I was at Disney World last week, and they have this neat thing called the Carousel of Progress. It basically shows a household in the early 1900's through to present time. The interesting thing is how little has changed since then. There have been huge changes in communication, but other than that, the family of 100 years ago had an ice box, running water, etc. There were 130,000 cars in the country. We marvel at our advances in medicine, but the biggest advances in life expectancy, from relatively simple techniques combatting child mortality, are long behind us. Life expectancy at age 65 has increased only 4 years (from 12 to 16) in the last 100 years. In any given field, we see technology progress rapidly than plateau. Aerospace plateaued in the 1960's, for example. Even semiconductor technology, which has progressed at a breathtaking pace over the last half century, has improved markedly slower in this decade. I think the faith in technology to save the day is misplaced. Improvements in energy technology peaked in the 1950's with the invention of nuclear power. Indeed, we still get most of our electricity from coal power plants that aren't dramatically different than they were 100 years ago (the city of Chicago just shut down two coal plants that are 100+ years old). I have no doubt that technology will solve these problems, eventually. But the scenario in the article isn't something that might happen hundreds of years into the future. The projection is for 2050. I won't even have retired by then. We need a revolution to happen in the next 38 years, and I don't think one is forthcoming.

zanny 15y ago

I want to live next door to a Thorium power plant. I'd be perfectly safe because I know that it would just decompress and stop fissioning, but the land prices would be amazing. And while everyone else is dying and other nonsense I'd have electricity to last me a millennium. I easily see us using thorium powered desalination plants. Or my favorite, drop a giant turbine in the gulf stream and use that to power the East Coast + desalinate water to sell as a commodity.

tokenadult 15y ago
A thorium power plant gets its fuel when the thorium "is used as a nuclear fuel through breeding to fissile uranium-233." http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is-thorium-the-biggest-energy-breakthrough-since-fire-possibly/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is-th... (I think this article has been discussed on HN before; yes.) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2985173 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2985173 Now we've all heard of breeder reactors since decades ago if we are part of the Baby Boom. Indeed, in one of Paul Graham's essays, "After the Ladder" (August 2005), http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html we can read, "The big disadvantage of the new system is that it involves more risk. If you develop ideas in a startup instead of within a big company, any number of random factors could sink you before you can finish. But maybe the older generation would laugh at me for saying that the way we do things is riskier. After all, projects within big companies were always getting cancelled as a result of arbitrary decisions from higher up. My father's entire industry (breeder reactors) disappeared that way." What will make the breeder reactor (thorium reactor) industry reappear? Who will make decisions on behalf of that industry? How much investment cost are we talking about here? http://www.economist.com/node/21549098 http://www.economist.com/node/21549098
- hcurtiss 15y ago
  China will: http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/07/21/china%E2%80%99s-nuclear-scientists-unveil-latest-breakthrough/ http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/07/21/china%E2%80%99... See also: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf17.html http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf17.html At a very fundamental level, when they're willing to displace 1.4 million people for a dam, http://waterfortheages.org/2007/10/15/three-gorges-dam-china-%E2%80%93-more-to-move-and-environmental-problems-acknowledged/ http://waterfortheages.org/2007/10/15/three-gorges-dam-china... and we're not willing to suffer a small water bottling plant in the Columbia River Gorge, http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/03/activists_ramp_up_opposition_t.html http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/03/acti... I fear we may be outpaced.

Lazare 15y ago

Let's quickly hit the three points they covered, and one they didn't. 1) Hot. Current models predict that 2050 will be warmer, but not much warmer. I believe the current best guess is around 2 degrees C by 2050, which it certainly noticeable, but perhaps not best summed up as "hot". (For people not following this subject, physical observations have produced lower amounts of warming than the models expected; as a result the estimate of the climates sensitivity to CO2 has been revised downward.) Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean that global warming is not real, and a big problem. But according to the IPCC models, it's also a very very slooooow problem. We shouldn't be complacent, but it's probably counter-productive to panic. 2) Crowded. Well, not really. We're talking about an overall increase of 1/3, which sounds a lot but keep in mind that this is just about as crowded as the world is ever projected to get. Further, the linked report says this will happen mostly via the less-crowded places getting more crowded, not increased crowding in the megacities. That's not so bad, really. I LIKE big cities, personally. 3) Running out of fuel. Again, this comes with a big caveat. We're suddenly finding huge amounts of fossil fuels - mostly gas, but also oil. (Or rather, we're figuring out ways of accessing the ones we already knew about. Remember that "reserves" are fossil fuels which are known, proven, economical to extract, and - in the US - legal to get to. A small rise in oil prices or - in the US - a change in law can lead to "reserves" multiplying without a single new survey.) We're really not going to "run out of fuel" by 2050, or even get close. Fuel may be significantly more expensive because what's left is hard to dig up, or we might decide to simply not dig some of it up (in order to fight global warming), but there's more than enough for the next few decades. And yes, that includes projections of increased Chinese consumption. 4) Richer. One of the reasons 2050 looks so hot, crowded, and out of fuel is because we have 38 years for small growth rates to compound. Small temperature changes can add up - but so does growth. We generally expect productivity to increase by at least 2% per year. If that continues then by 2050 we'll all be a little over twice as rich as we are now. True, it's not certain those trends will continue until 2050, but the same could be said of the first three trends too, and productivity growth looks like at least as good a bet to me. In short, the world of 2050 looks like it'll be almost unnoticeable warmer, small cities will be more like the Bay Area or New York, fuel will be more expensive but plentiful, and we'll all be twice as rich (and with MUCH more awesome tech). I'll take that deal. Got a time machine? :) Edit: Water is a much more major problem, and deserves a lot more attention than it's getting. However as other commentators have pointed out, thorium reactors should allow us to just brute force it via desalination plants. Fingers crossed...

danneu 15y ago

Energy and water consumption projections seem to just take current per capita consumption rates and raise them against projected population growth. Then they ask the question of "how will energy producers cope with these demands?" and start guessing at which technology will swoop in to save the day. But that doesn't appear to be how things work in the world. I imagine a lot of us on HN live in a world where you can blast your AC all day and leave all your faucets running with no repercussions beyond a cheap marginal bill. Isn't it more likely that we'll encounter the economics of scarcity and an adaptive market instead of one day turning on our faucet and nothing comes out because, dang, we've run out? I hear stories of parts of America fighting over water access, but aren't they really just fighting over a supply that still lets people run their faucets all day? Perhaps, as the water supply becomes more and more jeopardized, it will stop being practically free. Like every other market in the world, its price will reflect and dictate nominal availability. And the introduction of new technologies will come, like most markets, when the price of water/energy hits a tipping point. In other words, if we start running out of fossil fuels, won't that just jack up the price until alternatives become cheaper? And the higher price of energy will mean we may have to be more deliberate about saving energy, for once?

redwood 15y ago
Here in Dhaka, Bangladesh I do sometimes wonder if we're experiencing the past (e.g. the industrial revolution) or the future. Hopefully it's the former. Check out my new project: www.smsdemandresponse.com

mooneater 15y ago

That article is like a giant danger sign saying, we should be putting our energy towards improving that 2050 picture. At that point my kids will be a bit older than I am now, and considering the future for their own kids. How the hell will that feel, can you imagine?? This picture is also optimistic in that it seems to assume there was no massive war or plague. What are we doing, if we arent focused on improving that bleak vision?

tokenadult 15y ago

I checked the other commments here before looking for the full report "OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050: The Consequences of Inaction" http://www.oecd.org/document/11/0,3746,en_2649_37465_49036555_1_1_1_37465,00.html http://www.oecd.org/document/11/0,3746,en_2649_37465_4903655... by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The Executive Summary of the report http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/oecd-environmental-outlook-to-2050/executive-summary_env_outlook-2012-3-en http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/oecd-environmental-... sums up the future challenges: "Over the last four decades, human endeavour has unleashed unprecedented economic growth in the pursuit of higher living standards. While the world’s population has increased by over 3 billion people since 1970, the size of the world economy has more than tripled. While this growth has pulled millions out of poverty, it has been unevenly distributed and incurred significant cost to the environment. Natural assets have been and continue to be depleted, with the services they deliver already compromised by environmental pollution. Providing for a further 2 billion people by 2050 and improving the living standards for all will challenge our ability to manage and restore those natural assets on which all life depends. Failure to do so will have serious consequences, especially for the poor, and ultimately undermine the growth and human development of future generations." In other words, a disastrous future is not a certainty, but a risk, and planning to minimize the risk is worthwhile. The long-term human trend, meanwhile, has been improving living conditions for people all over the world, ever since the ideas of science and personal freedom and democratic limited government have spread around the world. http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/readers-digest.aspx http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/readers-digest.aspx AFTER EDIT: Do any of you remember reading the book The Population Bomb (1968) by Paul Ehrlich in your youth? I was amazed last week to discover a friend a bit younger than I am (born in the 1960s, a few years before the book was published) had never heard of the book. I've been seeing gloom-and-doom predictions for my whole life, and so far there is still a lot of petroleum, lifespans are going up and health is improving all over the world except in pathological countries like Russia, and most of the disasters predicted during my youth have failed to occur. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb#Predictions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb#Predictions

sampsonjs 15y ago
"there is still a lot of petroleum"...... Thank Christ that will never run out.

brownbat 15y ago

Why Earth 2050 is going to be an awesome place: 1) Hot: shoot a tiny amount of sulfur dioxide into the arctic atmosphere, planet cools. See also #3. 2) Crowded: current upward global health trends will halt population growth naturally, and more people isn't necessarily bad anyway. Malthus was wrong to just consider resource consumption and ignore the benefits people provide to society. When you only have 100 people, they all have to look for food full time. When you have 7 billion, you get to siphon some off as scientific researchers and medical professionals, who pay back to others far more than they eat. (Lowly gas station attendants likely pay back more value than the raw resource cost it takes to sustain them too, but let's start with the low hanging fruit...) 3) Fuel: Solar's price is halving exponentially. 3b) Water: We're not really running out of low salinity water; we couldn't drain any of the world's large lakes if we tried. It's just a purification or transport issue. Limitless energy solves both. Most importantly: technology is going to be so cool! Heralds of optimism / references: 1) Caldeira.* http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-07/ff_geoengineering?currentPage=all http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-07/ff_g... 2) Rosling. http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth/ http://www.gapminder.org/videos/what-stops-population-growth... 3) Kurzweil. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfbOyw3CT6A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfbOyw3CT6A 3b) Kamen. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/colbert-and-kam/ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/colbert-and-kam/ * Caveat, Caldeira doesn't advocate the sulfur dioxide solution as a first stop for combating global warming, his research just confirms it would be worth using as a backstop.

rayiner 15y ago
I don't understand this faith in technology. We aren't any closer to going to another planet today than we were 50 years ago. Medicine has extended the natural limits of a human life a scant four years in the last century. Electric vehicles have been around for a century and still haven't gotten over the tipping point. In the time scale we're talking about for global warming, three to four decades, it is unlikely that we'll see any technological innovations that fundamentally change the math. Climate change is about as far into the future as the invention of C and Smalltalk are in the past.
- 15y ago

uvdiv 15y ago

Completely wrong: The 80-percent increase predicted by 2050 translates to a total global energy consumption of 900 exajoules (EJ) per year (in other words 9 x 10^20 joules)—65 times the annual energy consumption of the US in 2009. 2008 primary energy consumption was about 100 quads [a] [1] in the US (~100 EJ), compared to 500 quads [1] for the world (or, ~20%). 900 EJ/year would be around 9 times the current US energy intensity. I'm pretty sure about the etiology of this error: (1/65th) of 900 EJ/year is the US electricity intensity, about 4,000 TWh(elec.)/year [2]. They're mixing different energy statistics (apples & oranges). Primary energy measures the heat energy of the fuel input in power generation, not the output (e.g. 3 joules coal => 1 joule electricity; primary energy is the 3 J). It also measures non-electricity energy uses (like oil for fuel or natural gas for heat), which put together are even bigger than power generation [3]. [a] (a "quad" is short for "quadrillion btu [british thermal unit]", which coincidentally is about the same as 1 exajoule) [1] http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/world.cfm http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/world.cfm [2] http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_1_1 http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm... [3] https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/ https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/

ctdonath 15y ago

Context which I never see addressed: http://donath.org/Photos/TempChange.PNG http://donath.org/Photos/TempChange.PNG

zipdog 15y ago
I'm not sure if you're suggesting that the Earth's temperature has a background variability ... .. or noting that if the Earth's average temperature warms by 5 degrees it will spike higher than any sustained period in the last 400,000 years.
- ctdonath 15y ago
  Put 'em together, and perhaps that 5 degree increase will balance the we're-due-for-it 5 degree decrease.

uvdiv 15y ago

When someone suggests energy, fuel, fresh water are in danger of "running out", you should ask them to sketch what they think the supply curve is for those resources. They have something in common: a horizontal asymptote. With energy, it's a virtually inifinite supply at a price somewhere between 1-2x coal (nuclear fission) to a conservative 4-8x (solar) -- this for existing technology, today. For water, such an asymptote is desalination cost somewhere around 1-2x treated tap water. Similar stories for fuel -- EVs are one asymptote. In the left corner there's a short slope with a cheap, very limited resource (coal, petroleum, groundwater); then at a slightly higher price you have an infinite supply. I interpret this as saying, in the worst case, developed countries' crisis amounts to trivial negative economic adjustements ("trivial" compared to, e.g. everything else that happens through 2050...); and in the expected case, pretty unremarkable technology gains combine with massive economic growth give you far more, for far less. (The "optimistic" case is singularitarian...)

nyellin 15y ago
There are theoretical upper limits on energy consumption: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
- uvdiv 15y ago
  I lost his reasoning somewhere between the astrophysical power output of a galaxy being ~10^37 watts, to the conflation of energy with economic utility, to the endorsement of deindustrialization and world socialism.
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benmccann 15y ago
My limited understanding of desalinization is that we avoid it not because of the expense, but because it's environmentally damaging to put a giant pipe in the ocean sucking up water that happens to bring a lot of fish and such with it.

insertnickname 15y ago

The future will be nothing like the past.

carguy1983 15y ago

From the article: > It predicts a world population of 9.2 billion people, generating a global GDP four times the size of today's Global domestic product is currently $63T. 2050 GDP = 4 * $63 = $252T. Current per capita GDP = $63 trillion divided by 6.8 billion = $9,264.70588 2050 per capita GDP = $252 trillion divided by 9.2 billion = $27,391.3043 So basically everyone will be 3 times richer, at a cost of "80% more energy" (less than 2 times the energy), which means energy efficiency will increase dramatically, probably due to the fact that we'll harness more solar and geo energy, which is delivered from the giant nuclear furnace in the sky, aka our sun.

jakeonthemove 15y ago

We'll just have to make a few adjustments (like shifting power generation to individual houses using solar, wind and other methods that will undoubtedly be affordable by then, if only because oil will be pretty expensive). Myself, I'd like to build a house (out of containers, maybe) somewhere near a mountain, powered by wind+solar, with a satellite or long range WiFi connection to the Internet (aka the rest of the world). I'd be happy to retire this way, hiking in the summer and snowboarding during winter :-), growing food (including farm animals) on a patch of land and a hydroponic farm... Also, make the images here your wallpapers - there's enough space and energy for everyone, even in 2050: http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127 http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

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yelongren 15y ago

To think that the water I'm gonna drink today is the exact same water that soils, plants, animals have been drinking since the beginning of time, makes me feel connected...to dinosaurs! Our problem has never been quantity but recycling rate, and not realizing we are all in the same boat.

rajpaul 15y ago

"based on current global trends" Interesting bit of science fiction, but current trends never continue like that.