4 ms·

> the degrowth position is that people are inevitably going to lead worse lives than at present, but that we can choose between things getting kind of bad, by s

> the degrowth position is that people are inevitably going to lead worse lives than at present, but that we can choose between things getting kind of bad, by systematically pursuing degrowth, and things getting apocalyptically bad, which is what will happen if we continue pursuing growth I can't speak for others who advocate for degrowth, but that seems about right to me, with the caveat that I believe ecologically harmonious lifestyles would be more fun and fulfilling than what we have now. The challenge is to return to harmony with Nature while still enjoying the benefits of science and technology. - - - - > fourth, the most urgent environmental problem for human quality of life is global warming, and atmospheric carbon capture is necessary to solve it, a measure which will almost certainly require vast expansion of human energy exploitation and therefore economic growth (because you can have growth without increased resource exploitation, but probably not vastly increased resource exploitation without growth) Václav Smil has me convinced that atmospheric carbon capture on a scale great enough to counter-act our continued fossil fuel use is a pipe dream, pretty much for the reason you say: it takes too much energy to sequester the carbon. Here he is at Driva Climate Investment Meeting in 2019. It's a great lecture IMO, and he starts bagging on carbon capture around minute 39: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&t=2343s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&t=2343s

kragen 2y ago
i mostly agree with you, especially that 'the challenge is to return to harmony with nature while still enjoying the benefits of science and technology' vaclav's 10% goal is obviously not enough. we need to be able to capture more like 150% of current co₂ emissions, not 10%. his argument is very weak, though, so weak that he can't possibly be expecting to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with him; his argument is that the mass of co₂ you'd have to handle is 4 billion tonnes a year (because the total is 41.2 billion tonnes a year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions#Data_from_Global_Carbon_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions#Data_... if we only count co₂), and that's an implausibly large amount of mass for a new global industry to handle, because it's comparable to the amount of mass handled by the oil industry (82.8 million bbl/day according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ..., which does indeed work out to about 4 or 5 billion tonnes a year) this is a very weak argument because there are several industries that handle more mass than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#Construction_with_concrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#Construction_with_con... says about 7.5 billion cubic meters of concrete were being produced per year in 02006, which works out to about 20 billion tonnes; more recently, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand#Resources_and_environmental_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand#Resources_and_environment... says 9.55 billion tonnes of sand were consumed in 02007, and in 020222, 50 billion tonnes of sand and gravel, mostly for concrete. water withdrawals from freshwater sources, mostly for irrigation, are about 4 trillion tonnes per year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1258433/water-withdrawals-shares-worldwide-by-sector/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1258433/water-withdrawal... of which 13% are municipal. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_freshwater_withdrawal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_fr... agreees that it's about 3.90 trillion tonnes per year.) we can roughly estimate that those 500 billion tonnes of municipal-use freshwater produce 500 billion tonnes of sewage; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewage#Flowrates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewage#Flowrates says the average is 35–90 liters of sewage per person per day, which works out to 100 to 250 billion tonnes per year, which is a dismaying discrepancy from statista's unsourced figure, but still close enough to establish that we're not talking about a mere four billion tonnes of sewage per year so establishing a new industry that handles 60 billion tonnes a year of carbon dioxide (150% of current emissions) is a completely plausible thing to do, even at the current level of economic development. currently it's too big a job for any single country smil also implicitly expresses some skepticism about the idea that you can keep the co₂ in the ground once you pump it there. that's just because he's completely unfamiliar with the field; gas in natural gas deposits has kept its co₂ (a useless diluent) underground for tens of millions of years, and some of those gas fields are being used today for co₂ storage, but also it turns out in the recent experiments with mineral carbon sequestration that olivine-rich rocks deep underground serpentinize extremely readily when you pump concentrated co₂ though them, after which they are known to be able to retain it for billions of years. those rocks are available everywhere on earth now, keep in mind that these numbers are all at our current level of economic development. with ten or a hundred times as much energy, we'll be able to handle much larger volumes of material which brings us to your argument, which is a much stronger one than smil's: getting those 60 billion tonnes a year out of the atmosphere will require much more energy than getting the same amount of sand out of ancient seabeds, water out of rivers, gravel out of quarries, or sewage out of people's butts. i can't find my calculations at the moment, but plausibly it would require about 10% of world marketed energy consumption, a couple of terawatts. there are various high-tech scrubbing materials like synthetic zeolites and triethanolamine, but soda-lime would work fine and is much cheaper; it just has to be heated to a higher temperature to regenerate it i'm not sure why smil doesn't mention this, because it's a much better argument than his actual argument and he must have heard of it, but at least in the segment you pointed to, he doesn't. it's possible that he's too unqualified to understand why it's a better argument so that's why i think a lot of economic growth is needed in order to put atmospheric carbon capture into action
- carapace 2y ago
  Even if Smil is a goober telling just-so stories for fun, it still makes sense to try to reduce pollution, and we can also spin up a new global industry to clean the sky.
  - kragen 2y ago
    yes, i definitely agree there

kragen 2y ago

i mostly agree with you, especially that 'the challenge is to return to harmony with nature while still enjoying the benefits of science and technology' vaclav's 10% goal is obviously not enough. we need to be able to capture more like 150% of current co₂ emissions, not 10%. his argument is very weak, though, so weak that he can't possibly be expecting to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with him; his argument is that the mass of co₂ you'd have to handle is 4 billion tonnes a year (because the total is 41.2 billion tonnes a year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions#Data_from_Global_Carbon_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions#Data_... if we only count co₂), and that's an implausibly large amount of mass for a new global industry to handle, because it's comparable to the amount of mass handled by the oil industry (82.8 million bbl/day according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ..., which does indeed work out to about 4 or 5 billion tonnes a year) this is a very weak argument because there are several industries that handle more mass than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#Construction_with_concrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete#Construction_with_con... says about 7.5 billion cubic meters of concrete were being produced per year in 02006, which works out to about 20 billion tonnes; more recently, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand#Resources_and_environmental_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand#Resources_and_environment... says 9.55 billion tonnes of sand were consumed in 02007, and in 020222, 50 billion tonnes of sand and gravel, mostly for concrete. water withdrawals from freshwater sources, mostly for irrigation, are about 4 trillion tonnes per year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1258433/water-withdrawals-shares-worldwide-by-sector/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1258433/water-withdrawal... of which 13% are municipal. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_freshwater_withdrawal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_fr... agreees that it's about 3.90 trillion tonnes per year.) we can roughly estimate that those 500 billion tonnes of municipal-use freshwater produce 500 billion tonnes of sewage; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewage#Flowrates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewage#Flowrates says the average is 35–90 liters of sewage per person per day, which works out to 100 to 250 billion tonnes per year, which is a dismaying discrepancy from statista's unsourced figure, but still close enough to establish that we're not talking about a mere four billion tonnes of sewage per year so establishing a new industry that handles 60 billion tonnes a year of carbon dioxide (150% of current emissions) is a completely plausible thing to do, even at the current level of economic development. currently it's too big a job for any single country smil also implicitly expresses some skepticism about the idea that you can keep the co₂ in the ground once you pump it there. that's just because he's completely unfamiliar with the field; gas in natural gas deposits has kept its co₂ (a useless diluent) underground for tens of millions of years, and some of those gas fields are being used today for co₂ storage, but also it turns out in the recent experiments with mineral carbon sequestration that olivine-rich rocks deep underground serpentinize extremely readily when you pump concentrated co₂ though them, after which they are known to be able to retain it for billions of years. those rocks are available everywhere on earth now, keep in mind that these numbers are all at our current level of economic development. with ten or a hundred times as much energy, we'll be able to handle much larger volumes of material which brings us to your argument, which is a much stronger one than smil's: getting those 60 billion tonnes a year out of the atmosphere will require much more energy than getting the same amount of sand out of ancient seabeds, water out of rivers, gravel out of quarries, or sewage out of people's butts. i can't find my calculations at the moment, but plausibly it would require about 10% of world marketed energy consumption, a couple of terawatts. there are various high-tech scrubbing materials like synthetic zeolites and triethanolamine, but soda-lime would work fine and is much cheaper; it just has to be heated to a higher temperature to regenerate it i'm not sure why smil doesn't mention this, because it's a much better argument than his actual argument and he must have heard of it, but at least in the segment you pointed to, he doesn't. it's possible that he's too unqualified to understand why it's a better argument so that's why i think a lot of economic growth is needed in order to put atmospheric carbon capture into action

carapace 2y ago
Even if Smil is a goober telling just-so stories for fun, it still makes sense to try to reduce pollution, and we can also spin up a new global industry to clean the sky.
- kragen 2y ago
  yes, i definitely agree there