"Just use less energy" arguments are insane. Even when we improve the energy efficiency of our processes, that just leads to said process happening more - not an overall reduction in energy use. Just look at historical energy consumption trends to see this.
Anything less than producing more energy more cleanly is missing the point. Long term energy usage trends do not go down.
This is my primary concern with fusion. I have a gut feeling that fusion existing could actually accelerate consumption and thus climate and environmental change. I have been trying to find research about this. I recently found the book Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism by Ozzie Zehner, which I think may be interesting.
I should note that I am not against fusion and absolutely think we should be doing it. However, it's my feeling and something that I'm trying to learn about that we should also be doing many other things. For example, conservation of land and habitats is no longer viable. We have got to be restoring these things as best we can if we have a chance against climate change. I think it should be renamed environmental change, because that's more accurate and paints the more serious picture. Climate change seems to phrase it in very human-centric terms. We also need another economic system whose end goal isn't corporate world domination. We need an economic model that drives innovation but also redistributes and is sustainable. What's interesting is that this is exactly what nature accomplishes. But humans have gone off the rails in terms of consumption. However, with our adaptability and technology, we have been able to continually consume more and more, whereas other animals (e.g., rabbit populations) cannot continually exist outside of some bounds and are checked. What's interesting is trying to understand where our bound or what our check is going to be. I have a feeling that our destruction will eclipse our adaptability and technology at some point. It will not be pretty when that happens.
As other commenters have pointed out, it's not just power usage that will increase. Because there is a huge amount of material and processes that will be mined, disposed of, exhausted, pollute, etc. in addition to drawing all that power.
There has got to be a nice graph that correlates power usage with these things, but I have yet to find it.
That’s possible. However there are also a huge number of things that would be great for the environment like really complete recycling, very land efficient agriculture, ocean cleanup, etc, that would become economically feasible if energy were really cheap.
> like really complete recycling, very land efficient agriculture, ocean cleanup, etc, that would become economically feasible if energy were really cheap
Do you have any resources on those topics? I'd like to learn more about that how cheap electrical energy enables those.
I think the YouTuber Isaac Arthur has a video (or possibly many videos) on that, but he does so many videos and they’re so long I don’t want to risk linking to the wrong one.
The TLDR summary for your quotation is: Complete recycling — with enough energy you can break everything into atoms; Very land efficient agriculture — the cost of glass and metal for greenhouses and desalination is mostly energy, likewise most of the stuff needed to make vertical farming worth considering.
(I don’t remember Isaac Arthur mentioning ocean cleanup, but that may just be flawed memory).
> As other commenters have pointed out, it's not just power usage that will increase. Because there is a huge amount of material and processes that will be mined, disposed of, exhausted, pollute, etc. in addition to drawing all that power.
These are all the things which allow us to live in a modern society with a high quality of life. More power is a more modern higher quality of life for more people, citing the last few hundred years.
We live in a closed system with limited resources. More power means more quick resource consumption and faster pollution. In other words the quality of our environment will degrade faster. During the last few hundred years humanity has reaped the benefits of indiscriminate resource consumption giving little thought to the consequences, in practice borrowing QOL from future generations and from the environment. Imho it's not a long-term sustainable practice though.
More power means the ability to do things less efficiently - to pollute less. Steel, concrete, liquid fuels could all be carbon free, and what has been emitted sucked out of the atmosphere. Nearly every process that pollutes could be made to not - it 'just' takes energy.
As for everything else, we've barely even scratched the surface of this rock we're standing on - to say nothing of the rest of the dist system.
Do you really intend to argue that the quality of life in just about anytime before the 1960's is better than it is now? Quite a lot of people were still stuck on the subsistence farming treadmill.
>Nor do I think that is a given fact. More people starve today than there were people alive a few hundred years ago
So no credit for feeding the billions who eat on the back of modern, energy intensive, fertilizer production?
> on the back of modern, energy intensive, fertilizer production
One of the very things destroying the environment and negatively affecting public health?
> So no credit for feeding the billions
This isn't school and human lives and people are not statistics. The question to ask is "at what cost?". Does feeding those billions suddenly do anything to help the 800 million or so starving in a world that has enough to feed them? What about the illions of animals and plants humans have destroyed over the past few hundred years? Again, at what cost?
A related aside: when humans originally started to utilize agriculture in the beginning of human history, the overall affect was a net negative in health, life expectancy, and efficiency (i.e., time spent working).
The number of people in extreme poverty today — defined as less than $1/day income adjusting for inflation relative to 1996 — was about 733 million in 2015 vs. 965 million in 1820. Likewise, the estimated number of people globally who are systematically going hungry is between 720 and 820 million.
The world population in 1820 was about 1093 million.
One of the absurd things about longtermism is that they assume that no matter how high the quantity of humans is and no matter how contrived the method of increasing the quantity is, they assume their proposed system will result in people living lives worth living so simply increasing the number of people is a net good, when it is entirely plausible that they also create unimaginably high numbers of unhappy people but their complete earth surveillance program simply eliminates them before they can cause a rebellion and destroy the wet dream of 10^58 people living in a tiny room with a permanently attached matrix like VR setup.
I think there’s a straw man somewhere here. It’s not like utility monsters/demons and the “mere addition paradox” (AKA the repugnant conclusion) aren’t already a well known issue from the philosophy studies of utilitarianism.
It's not just the usage of fossil fuels that causes damage to the environment. More energy from fusion will allow more precious resources to be mined, more wasteful stuff to be made, more trash to throw out.
I'm not against fusion at all, but it is important to remember that carbon dioxide isn't the only problem harming the planet.
>We also need another economic system whose end goal isn't corporate world domination.
We have economic democracy, participatory economics and good old Freiwirtschaft (can be translated as free (as in freedom) economics by Silvio Gesell.
>What's interesting is that this is exactly what nature accomplishes
Capitalism only allows for growth, whenever the economy isn't growing, people get fired and you have an economic recession or depression. Freiwirtschaft simply allows for both growth and decay. There is no discontinuity i.e. recession and no unemployment when the economy isn't growing. People will keep working to maintain their existing capital, that includes restoring nature.
Do you have a source? How is that calculated? I suspect it's a rather complicated calculation. Questions like what defines a person in this context, what defines electricity usage, where did it go or come from if it did change, etc. seem like important ones to answer.
3887 TWH in 2010 / 309.3 million people = 12.57 MWH per person.
3954 TWH in 2019 / 328.3 million people = 12.04 MWH per person.
3930 TWH in 2021 / 331.9 million people = 11.84 MWH per person.
And that’s with over a million electric cars added.
Likewise if one looks at total energy consumption in the US:
2000: 98.7 quadrillion BTU / 281.4 million people = 350 million BTU/person/year
2019: 100.5 quadrillion BTU / 328.3 million people = 306 million BTU/person/year.
On the other hand, increased use of global manufacturing and reliance on ocean transport is concealed by this metric. Still, it doesn't look like overall things are getting worse.
For the CO2 metric:
2000: 20.9 tonnes per capita
2019: 15.7 tonnes per capita
According to the below EIA article, things are getting worse worldwide.
> Global electricity consumption continues to increase faster than world population, leading to an increase in the average amount of electricity consumed per person
Well, sure. You have developing countries... developing, in addition to the (difficult to quantify) outsourcing effects that I mentioned above.
Note that I really want electricity usage to go up a lot, too. It's just overall primary energy usage that we want to stay level or go down. That's why I used the primary energy usage metric. After all, moving to an electric car or replacing natural gas heating with a heat pump "increases electricity usage."
But that energy also serves way more people than before. Chinas energy use went up a lot, but their standard of living also went up a lot and is now comparable to cold war USA/Europe. You can't leave that out.
We've had basic heating, insulation, and lighting efficiency improvements. Also, population has moved from colder to warmer climates. You can probably count up your personal energy usage and see that it's reduced. LED lighting, CRT televisions obsolete, vehicle efficiency, and so on.
Meanwhile, people mostly use a couple devices with high energy efficiency that are used for basically everything, instead of twenty lower quality devices...
Anything less than producing more energy more cleanly is missing the point. Long term energy usage trends do not go down.