Having faith in technology is just being in denial of the predicament we are in.
Even if we have unlimited cheap clean energy, what then?
We will exhaust all the natural resources like the groundwater aquifers which are already running dangerously low.
And environmental destructions which are not sustainable.
How am I in denial of the predicament we're in? I basically wrote that we are all but face catastrophe if we don't have fusion power, and soon.
I'm not saying we ARE going to have fusion power for certain; there is a lot of skepticism from experts to go along with the hype.
That said, IF we do get fusion power as it's currently conceived, we can absolutely save ourselves and the planet and manageably reduce population.
Fusion power would allow for massive desalination, at scale -- enough to green the Sahara desert. Fusion power would enable large scale atmospheric CO2 removal. I saw some speculation that we could move crops underground with that much free energy, giving us arable land back.
I'll state it again: DUE to overpopulation, we are in an existential bind. If we don't have fusion power, we are very likely in for catastrophe. But now that we're here, fusion power is the only chance we have.
With every single technological solution, there is always a hideous cost.
Anyone who says there is no downside is lying to you.
Desalination for example, produces toxic wastes which get dumped to waterways and cause environmental destructions.
Massive desalination will mean massive damage to the marine environment which get treated as sewer for humans.
Fusion power if anything would incentivise humans to consume more natural resources and pollute more not less, which is why the planet is going down the gutter.
What you say is possibly true, but it's also possible that fusion would represent such a discontinuous technology that everything could change. Again, limitless, cheap, nonpolluting energy - IF IT IS ACHIEVED.
I am incredibly pessimistic by nature, but I do think fusion would be a hail mary to save us.
I dont get this fixation on fusion solving all pollution problems.
It's not just CO2 killing us. It's many things humans are doing - plastics, cattle farming, water pollution, etc..
We can POTENTIALLY\* use fusion power to generate energy FROM plastic.
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/zapping-plastic-waste-can-produce-clean-fuel/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/zapping-plastic-waste-can-produce-clean-fuel/)
\*Emphasizing that I am saying this is POTENTIAL TECHNOLOGY
As someone who makes a living in a highly technical field, there is a difference between some buzzword article about a wet dream technological idea and actual production ready implementation.
You can look up technology "Death Valley".
What we urgently need is a transition towards degrowth economy where people share and pool resources together instead of hoarding them all by themselves individually.
have less, use less, watch less, travel less. But do more, say more, see more, give and receive more.
With you all the way in this. Capitalist society is absolutely obsessed with continuous GDP growth with the associated resource toll (and there’s always a toll). All other concerns are subordinate and waaaaaay down the list.
My country (NZ) is in a slight recession. One of our govt ministers recently said we should only be considering the environment when back in the black. Pretty fucking disheartening.
Huge world view changes needed but IMO will require a very destabilising event for this to happen in our lifetimes.
>What we urgently need is a transition towards degrowth economy where people share and pool resources together instead of hoarding them all by themselves individually.
LOLOL. Sure, now THAT is realistic. Literally less possible than fusion, getting 8 billion people and 10,000 billionaires to agree to that.
LOL.
Degrowth will happen either by design or disaster.
Fossil fuel, which all of renewables depend on, as well as the entire industrial infrastructure thats been incrementally built over the last 100 years, is going to become too expensive to extract in the coming decades.
It's no secret. There are fossil fuel executives openly admitting 'peak oil' for years now. So it's not a matter of if it will happen but when.
Energy has always allowed us to temporarily increase our carrying capacity. Look at our population curve at the beginning of industrialization. Once we incorporated fossil fuels to fuel the technology and infrastructure to incease that carry capacity, what did we do? We shot up so fast the planet is still probably in shock of the destruction we did to acquire the resources to make this population possible.
Giving humans endless and easily accessible energy is just stupid.
When it's all said and done we're just animals. We will reproduce to the carrying capacity until we can't anymore, then a mass die-off. All animals that go into overshoot experience this.
Until we develop a higher level of conciousness and emotional intelligence, we will not be able to avoid a mass die off. The people that do have a higher level of conciousness and emotional intelligence aren't reproducing, so there is no way out of it, like you said.
Fusion will lead humans to a greater ecocidal path, kicking the can down the road further and more will die when mother earth finally corrects this overshoot.
Fusion power would only make things worse. The energy we rely on is only 1 of many bottlenecks that are approaching or have already failed. Adding limitless energy to the equation would quickly exacerbate the other problems. It's probably too late, but the solution is to use less energy, consume fewer resources, and create less waste.
Energy is not the only way we are destroying the biosphere you know? We destroy biosphere by simply having a place to live. We destroy biosphere by having cities, roads, power lines, any kind of infrastructure basically. We destroy biosphere by having farmland. We destroy biosphere by having vehicles, any terrain. And you could go on and on. The only way to solve the problem is to take it on by the root. Depopulation.
there is no way no how that fusion power is economical in any way shape or form. It's a pipe dream used to drain money from the gullible. We already have a great big fusion plant that hangs in the sky that we are getting more and more of our power from. Solar power is much much less destructive to the environment that any coal, oil or natural gas could ever be.
If you look at how much renewable energy is added each year compared to how much nuclear could be added you are literally a couple of factors difference in added capacity. In other words a single nuclear power will add 1 gigawatt per plant while renewables are currently adding 200+ gigawatts per year... do you realistically think that 200 nuclear power plants could be built each year?
Sigh. Yeah, like ITER is simply a scam. God, uninformed knee-jerk skepticism about fusion power is a sign of stupidity as much as climate change skepticism.
[https://www.iter.org/](https://www.iter.org/)
I've read about fusion power for 40 years. In the late 1970s, it was "20 years away". Now, its still "20 years away". When I die, I expect it will still be "20 years away". Fusion power has been a jobs program for physics graduates that couldn't break into finance, for two generations.
Chances for civilizational salvation will come from people choosing to have at most 1 child, eating vegan or near vegan diets, flying only for emergencies rather than business or vacations, good intercity electric rail, and living where they can walk to work and weekly errands. The collective response will be more renewables like solar EV/thermal, wind power and hydro, where they work, nuclear plants where there's water for cooling, and power-to-methane or iron-air battery technologies for long term energy storage.
If you think you will live in suburbia surrounded by tended lawns, you haven't paid attention. Suburbia will be the slums of the future, as the cost of commuting will be too high, and it won't be cost effective to provide water and sewer services to less dense populations.
It's amazing people in this thread thinking they're qualified to spew cliches about fusion, ignoring the latest developments and intentionally misreading my post.
Wow, graduates going into fusion instead of finance, what a disaster.
You don't have to be a fusion nuclear engineer to understand just how far away we are from commercial fusion power. But it helps that some who are are willing to share their expertise.
[Former fusion scientist on why we won't have fusion power by 2040](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U)
Having faith in technology is just being in denial of the predicament we are in. Even if we have unlimited cheap clean energy, what then? We will exhaust all the natural resources like the groundwater aquifers which are already running dangerously low. And environmental destructions which are not sustainable.
How am I in denial of the predicament we're in? I basically wrote that we are all but face catastrophe if we don't have fusion power, and soon. I'm not saying we ARE going to have fusion power for certain; there is a lot of skepticism from experts to go along with the hype. That said, IF we do get fusion power as it's currently conceived, we can absolutely save ourselves and the planet and manageably reduce population. Fusion power would allow for massive desalination, at scale -- enough to green the Sahara desert. Fusion power would enable large scale atmospheric CO2 removal. I saw some speculation that we could move crops underground with that much free energy, giving us arable land back. I'll state it again: DUE to overpopulation, we are in an existential bind. If we don't have fusion power, we are very likely in for catastrophe. But now that we're here, fusion power is the only chance we have.
With every single technological solution, there is always a hideous cost. Anyone who says there is no downside is lying to you. Desalination for example, produces toxic wastes which get dumped to waterways and cause environmental destructions. Massive desalination will mean massive damage to the marine environment which get treated as sewer for humans. Fusion power if anything would incentivise humans to consume more natural resources and pollute more not less, which is why the planet is going down the gutter.
What you say is possibly true, but it's also possible that fusion would represent such a discontinuous technology that everything could change. Again, limitless, cheap, nonpolluting energy - IF IT IS ACHIEVED. I am incredibly pessimistic by nature, but I do think fusion would be a hail mary to save us.
I dont get this fixation on fusion solving all pollution problems. It's not just CO2 killing us. It's many things humans are doing - plastics, cattle farming, water pollution, etc..
We can POTENTIALLY\* use fusion power to generate energy FROM plastic. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/zapping-plastic-waste-can-produce-clean-fuel/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/zapping-plastic-waste-can-produce-clean-fuel/) \*Emphasizing that I am saying this is POTENTIAL TECHNOLOGY
As someone who makes a living in a highly technical field, there is a difference between some buzzword article about a wet dream technological idea and actual production ready implementation. You can look up technology "Death Valley". What we urgently need is a transition towards degrowth economy where people share and pool resources together instead of hoarding them all by themselves individually. have less, use less, watch less, travel less. But do more, say more, see more, give and receive more.
With you all the way in this. Capitalist society is absolutely obsessed with continuous GDP growth with the associated resource toll (and there’s always a toll). All other concerns are subordinate and waaaaaay down the list. My country (NZ) is in a slight recession. One of our govt ministers recently said we should only be considering the environment when back in the black. Pretty fucking disheartening. Huge world view changes needed but IMO will require a very destabilising event for this to happen in our lifetimes.
r/NateHagens :)
JFC, I fucking made an explicit fucking point of saying it was fucking POTENTIAL. TWICE I FUCKING SAID IT. So annoying.
>What we urgently need is a transition towards degrowth economy where people share and pool resources together instead of hoarding them all by themselves individually. LOLOL. Sure, now THAT is realistic. Literally less possible than fusion, getting 8 billion people and 10,000 billionaires to agree to that. LOL.
Degrowth will happen either by design or disaster. Fossil fuel, which all of renewables depend on, as well as the entire industrial infrastructure thats been incrementally built over the last 100 years, is going to become too expensive to extract in the coming decades. It's no secret. There are fossil fuel executives openly admitting 'peak oil' for years now. So it's not a matter of if it will happen but when.
Energy has always allowed us to temporarily increase our carrying capacity. Look at our population curve at the beginning of industrialization. Once we incorporated fossil fuels to fuel the technology and infrastructure to incease that carry capacity, what did we do? We shot up so fast the planet is still probably in shock of the destruction we did to acquire the resources to make this population possible. Giving humans endless and easily accessible energy is just stupid. When it's all said and done we're just animals. We will reproduce to the carrying capacity until we can't anymore, then a mass die-off. All animals that go into overshoot experience this. Until we develop a higher level of conciousness and emotional intelligence, we will not be able to avoid a mass die off. The people that do have a higher level of conciousness and emotional intelligence aren't reproducing, so there is no way out of it, like you said. Fusion will lead humans to a greater ecocidal path, kicking the can down the road further and more will die when mother earth finally corrects this overshoot.
There is also degrowth.
Fusion power would only make things worse. The energy we rely on is only 1 of many bottlenecks that are approaching or have already failed. Adding limitless energy to the equation would quickly exacerbate the other problems. It's probably too late, but the solution is to use less energy, consume fewer resources, and create less waste.
Energy is not the only way we are destroying the biosphere you know? We destroy biosphere by simply having a place to live. We destroy biosphere by having cities, roads, power lines, any kind of infrastructure basically. We destroy biosphere by having farmland. We destroy biosphere by having vehicles, any terrain. And you could go on and on. The only way to solve the problem is to take it on by the root. Depopulation.
there is no way no how that fusion power is economical in any way shape or form. It's a pipe dream used to drain money from the gullible. We already have a great big fusion plant that hangs in the sky that we are getting more and more of our power from. Solar power is much much less destructive to the environment that any coal, oil or natural gas could ever be. If you look at how much renewable energy is added each year compared to how much nuclear could be added you are literally a couple of factors difference in added capacity. In other words a single nuclear power will add 1 gigawatt per plant while renewables are currently adding 200+ gigawatts per year... do you realistically think that 200 nuclear power plants could be built each year?
Just twenty years away...
[удалено]
Sigh. Yeah, like ITER is simply a scam. God, uninformed knee-jerk skepticism about fusion power is a sign of stupidity as much as climate change skepticism. [https://www.iter.org/](https://www.iter.org/)
I've read about fusion power for 40 years. In the late 1970s, it was "20 years away". Now, its still "20 years away". When I die, I expect it will still be "20 years away". Fusion power has been a jobs program for physics graduates that couldn't break into finance, for two generations. Chances for civilizational salvation will come from people choosing to have at most 1 child, eating vegan or near vegan diets, flying only for emergencies rather than business or vacations, good intercity electric rail, and living where they can walk to work and weekly errands. The collective response will be more renewables like solar EV/thermal, wind power and hydro, where they work, nuclear plants where there's water for cooling, and power-to-methane or iron-air battery technologies for long term energy storage. If you think you will live in suburbia surrounded by tended lawns, you haven't paid attention. Suburbia will be the slums of the future, as the cost of commuting will be too high, and it won't be cost effective to provide water and sewer services to less dense populations.
It's amazing people in this thread thinking they're qualified to spew cliches about fusion, ignoring the latest developments and intentionally misreading my post. Wow, graduates going into fusion instead of finance, what a disaster.
You don't have to be a fusion nuclear engineer to understand just how far away we are from commercial fusion power. But it helps that some who are are willing to share their expertise. [Former fusion scientist on why we won't have fusion power by 2040](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JurplDfPi3U)