4 ms·
It's sustainable in the short term (for a very long definitoon of short term) though, which is what really matters wrt migrating off of fossil fuels. We could p
by foota 2y ago
It's sustainable in the short term (for a very long definitoon of short term) though, which is what really matters wrt migrating off of fossil fuels. We could pull many times humanity's energy consumption from the earth for a century and it would still be a drop in the bucket.
Now, some of these hot spots might not be renewable (in the sense that we drain too much ehat from them and they don't have sufficient heat flux to sustain as much extraction as might seem), but I don't think there's any risk of cooling the core.
See e.g., https://www.wired.com/story/how-long-will-earths-geothermal-energy-last/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-long-will-earths-geothermal-...
- spacemark 2y agoYeah the scale of thermal energy contained in the earth makes this fear (prematurely cooling the earth) irrelevant. The entire global consumption of energy is less than 2% of earth's thermal heat flow from the core.
- itishappy 2y agoWe're at about 40%. Current energy use is 20 TW per year, and the heat capacity of the earth is about 50 TW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt#Terawatt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt#Terawatt
- spacemark 2y agoWhoops, thanks for the correction. I was looking at end-user electricity consumption so it didn't include all the losses involved. That's staggering at first glance. So much energy! But then, I wonder how much it would really matter if we were harvesting that energy to move objects around on earth and turn on LEDs vs letting it dissipate into space. So I'm still skeptical of the concern.