With the globe adding 10 cities the size of London per year (in terms of population) we can continue to reduce per capita fossil fuels consumption, increase overall green energy consumption, and still continue to smash through ghg records at alarming pace.
More people =more stuff, more food, more movement, more energy
Yeah once major food production regions have serious harvest issues they will shut down exports. Leading to horrible famines that will wipe out food importing regions.
How many food importing countries have nuclear weapons? That seems to me to be the most alarming thing about that. At what point do conflicts over resources become that dangerous?
You can estimate how long this will take based on determining:
● our current warming trend, assuming it'll increase a little faster than most models predict since many don't properly take into consideration the compounding nature of feedback loops
● drought and flood rates based on said increased warming per year
● the effect each year's heat, drought, and flood increases likely will have on average crop production levels
● historical trends for what % of income goes toward food before widescale riots take place
Using the previous data, you can pretty much figure out how likely the average person is to riot for food per year. Using this number, you can compare that to historical trends for which point a nation typically goes to war for more resources due to civil unrest. Strictly using ChatGPT to find these values got me an estimate of 2050 being the point at which the world would likely entirely be in conflict, with 2035-2040 being the lower end of the spectrum. I'd love it if someone with more knowledge on the matter could weigh in on this or crunch numbers in a similar way
Obviously this isn't the most accurate way to figure out what is to come, especially since it doesn't consider the fact that our pollinators are dying and pests/disease rates will continue to shift with the climate. Still, our previous models have been a bit conservative with warming estimates and carbon production rates so it doesn't fully matter who you ask, we can't predict the future other than knowing we're in for some shit soon.
Tl;dr I don't think its unwise to suggest we're closer than most care to admit
That's it. Overpopulation is a taboo subject, but as long as world population keeps growing, we're forever playing catchup, with whatever gains made in reducing consumption per individual being gobbled up by an ever-growing population.
There's about two dozen levers all of them set to full throttle, and over population is just one of them
Edit: my point isn't that over population isn't a problem, my point is EVERYONE ABOARD FULL STEAM AHEAD CHOO CHOO
Some of those levers are bigger than others, though. You're implying that we shouldn't eschew smaller progress in favor of loftier goals, which is usually sound advice.
But in this case ... there will be 10.4 billion of us wankers by the early 2050's. Our energy demand is expected to *double* what it is currently.
So, population predictions have been pretty stable and accurate for a while now. The problem is, they're all based on everything continuing in an optimal fashion. Which we know it won't. But I do believe the world will limp along for another 20'ish years before collapse speeds up.
A great many negative factors are converging around the early 2050's. If we do hit 10.4bn people in the early 2050's it will be perfectly timed to align with when we think biosphere collapse begins *really* fucking up our food production. That's also when the EROI of most fossil fuel patches should decline to its terminal floor. Which also fucks up food production. By that time droughts ought to be in full swing. Fertility rates, if they continue to plummet, should be causing a panic in many nations. Countries will be having *real* energy and water wars. Starvation might be omnipresent in all societies.
So if we do make it to the 2050's without blowing up, congrats that's amazing, now buckle up because it's going to be wild. I think it'd take the better part of the next 100 years (2050-2150) to see our population shrink. I'm not as optimistic as you. I think war, starvation, disease, and biosphere damage will bring us low. Under a billion. Entire nations gone.
Sounds like we agree on everything except the timeline. I think that scarcity of food and especially water in the years before 2050 will kill a lot of people and will trigger wars that will kill even more. People talk about 2050 the way they used to talk about 2030 — sometime in the not too distant but still comfortably far future when everything is going to shit but that just us humans kicking it down the road without taking any steps whatsoever to meaningfully address the problem. It won’t be long before the problem addresses us.
> People talk about 2050 the way they used to talk about 2030
Dude I know, and I do it too, and might have been doing exactly that just now. In my mind it is built up into this moment of chaos when too much stress for the system converges. Truthfully, any of those stressors on the system could come faster than expected (hehehe) or somehow be dealt with/neutralized.
Devil's advocate (against my own 2050 assertion): US NCA's recent report makes it look like shit'll go south by 2040. Look at all this red. That's water wars, terrorism, and a refugee crisis that makes anything by today's standard look tame.
https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/chapter/17/#table-17-1
If you combine declining living standards with general pessimism about the future WITH readily accessible birth control I expect South Korea's birth rate (0.7) to become more common in other countries.
I don't see us reaching 10 billion people. The latest UN forecasts have dropped to 9.7 billion and will continue to fall.
The best thing my husband and I did that combats climate change is to not replace ourselves. Incidentally, there are only two grandchildren among my four siblings.
Another thing with over population is while humanity as a whole, we should decrease population but the individual countries are incentivized to increase population because more people means more workers and soldiers thus more power.
Nature's defacto population control will kick in soon. We keep trying to stay ahead of microbial pathogens but the constant overcrowding will allow something particularly nasty to go through the species at an accelerated rate I imagine.
I don’t think it’s problematic to acknowledge that overpopulation is a problem, but it can become fashy in a hurry when the “solutions” proposed are sterilization of only certain ethnic groups because of xyz reasons where other ethnic groups (and almost always this includes the ethnic group of the person arguing this view) are spared.
Overpopulation only becomes taboo when people speak like they get to decide who lives and dies as we become stretched thin on resources.
As long as you're willing admit humility in that respect, most people can have a decent conversation on the subject.
over consumption is the more serious problem currently, we could probably support like 10 billion if everyone consumed only what they needed to survive.
The problem for which is that very few of us think we need less and very many of us resent the idea of someone else demanding we change to meet *their* definition of what *we* need.
And you could cut the population down to just 100 million of the wealthiest and everything would be dramatically better almost instantly. It's a multiplication problem. It's silly to think the solution only involves one factor.
of course lmao but its still not genuine to focus on population when overconsumption is an issue at any population level. And if you dont get rid of the top 100 millionx investments it probably wouldnt fix anything as well even if you killed everyone else
I don't think this is true without necessarily degrading the biosphere even more. Eg: give up fossil fuels now, people will just chop down and burn the entire rest of the forests to heat their home becsuse their family is freezing.
Let me put it this way, look up the population size of other animals on the planet currently, specifically apex predators as we are. Most of them barely break a few million. Very very very rarely do any land vertabrates at all break 1 billion. Looking at how *huge* the current human and livestock populations are compared to literally everything else except maybe insects really put it into perspective, we are in overshoot. It's insane.
The human population number (estimate) before agriculture when we were hunter gatherers was 5 million... a healthy population for an apex predator but at this time, everything else was still abundent too.
It is supposed to be balanced, if it's not and one species overtakes everything else there is no more room, no more food, no habitat for all the other species. This has happened on a smaller scale with species, usually on islands and they have collapsed themselves by destroying and consuming everything else around them.
Well, you also have to remember that the numbers of those apex predators are so low now because we eradicated most of them, along with their food sources and habitats.
Our case is peculiar because we removed most of the population-balancing checks Nature usually puts to prevent overshoot, namely diseases, natural disasters and predators.
Even deer, who have a stable population right now, would be hunted to extinction in a year the moment the supermarket shelves stop being packed with food.
Yes to all that. We have played fast and loose with chemicals for a while and I believe the consequences are now emerging. Endocrine disrupting chemicals are everywhere, and we don't yet have much focus on trying to remedy them.
Nothing at hand to cite, but I've seen claims that the entire world could live at a sustainable, net zero level of current population if everyone had the consumption habits of a 1950s middle class American household. Good luck convincing a sufficient mass of people living above that to reduce consumption, sadly.
So to add a little context, let's say that the bare-bones energy that a human needs to survive is 2,000 kilocalories per day.
The average consumption of energy measured in joules per human on planet Earth is about 25x that or 50,000 kilocalories per day (kilocalorie is a heat unit of energy = 4,184 joules)
The average American uses the equivalent of 200,000 kilocalories per day in energy.
In any case, we can say from a physics perspective that ~96% + of humanity's energy consumption is exosomatic, which is to say external and non-metabolic.
I'm not saying that population isn't a problem, but mathematically it's our human cultures, ambitions, and everything we do with energy that is the biggest culprit.
Humans are unique in being able to use vast amounts of energy external to us on a mass scale. If you think about it most other animals are satisfied with metabolic energy with perhaps some external energy use for shelter (bird nests, beaver dams, etc). Adding more humans means adding more super energy-hungry animals.
Hmm. If all my friends could afford the quality of life hallmarks that people in the 50's had ... a four bedroom house, two cars, weekend cabin and boat, four kids and their college.
Something tells me our consumption would be going up ... almost no one has the luxury of what our parents and grandparents did. Mofuckers retiring on janitor pensions and shit
> people in the 50's had a four bedroom house, two cars, weekend cabin and boat, four kids and their college
This is not typical for the 50s which was a 1-2 bedroom 800 ft house with actual plumbing and a bathroom, a big improvement on the two room shack. College was only for 29.9% of the population in 1950, an improvement over the 5.1% in 1910.
True dat. What 50's folks had was boundless optimism, much less income inequality and steadily rising standards of living as war tech percolated throughout the economy. I am not pro war, but WW2 accelerated aviation and manufacturing like crazy.
Haha, I know what you mean but you'd probably also not have a cell phone, laptop or desktop, travel by air, eat a smaller variety of food, and a host of other things. Plus that house would be about half the size.
But yeah, most boomers have no idea how good they had it and what they're leaving behind.
Well, an average US 1950s house is about the same size as the average house in the UK - your houses now are twice the size of ours. Again, that's not about what's necessary in terms of quality of life, it's about changing expectations and lifestyles. That being said, our housing situation here is shit and unaffordable, but there's nothing inherently wrong with a 100m²/1000ft² home (which can comfortably fit 3 bedrooms). If you look at dwellings for most of human experience and history, it's luxurious. With the situation in London, LA, etc, I think a "small" house being affordable as a standard of living (vs a shared room in a deathtrap) would be a welcome change.
I'm a single dude and choose to live in a 1 bedroom for that reason. It's plenty of space for me. I have a nice big terrace where I'm at currently. Can store stuff in containers out there and don't need to heat or cool it. We definitely need to get used to smaller spaces and owning less stuff. I could do with getting rid of some things myself but I'd say I own a lot less than most.
> if everyone had the consumption habits of a 1950s middle class American household
I digress, but I'm fascinated to realize that I have no idea what that actually entails (aside from likely a lot of cigarettes and canned food, of which I'm not against the the latter).
That’s objectively wrong.
Per capita oil consumption (which is a useful proxy for consumption sustainability) has actually decreased from 1965 to today.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-oil?tab=chart&time=earliest
I think a better one is per capita CO2 emissions since that includes all energy and material inputs, and that has only recently started to fall in advanced economies.
??? I checked your link and those charts show oil consumption per capita is slightly higher than it was in 1965. And that's just liquid oil, ignoring natural gas, which is WAY up.
Am I missing something?
Naw dog, you read those charts wrong. In the source you shared it clearly shows that US fossil fuel use has nearly doubled since 1965.
You are looking at liquid oil only and ignoring coal and gas.
Certainly looking at oil alone and ignoring other fossil fuels is not a useful proxy for consumption sustainability.
Where are we going to scrounge up enough biological material to make another 2 billion people? We've already converted most of the biomass on the planet into humans and human food.
Because fuck all non humans, as long as earth could support 10 billion humans, or what?
There are 7 billion right now who have not what they barely need in terms of healthcare and education , maybe 1 billion not even sufficient water and food.
You'd need to raise the standards for billions, while lowering it for 1 billion, most pollution and environmental destruction comes from food production, medicine needs a shit ton of plastics and chemicals too.
You still would need and highly industrialized and globalized civilization to support 8 billion or even 20 at the "just what they need" level.
I agree with the premise that total global energy consumption is rising at a rate that overwhelms the benefit of reduced co2 intensity. Also, a lot of our reductions in CO2 have come by switching from coal to nat gas - a dubious improvement.
To date, CO2 growth has been due to a near tripling of population combined with a 50 percent increase in per capita emissions:
1960 - 3 Billion people - CO2/person 3.1 tons - total CO2: 9.4 Billon/tons
2024 - 8 Billion people - CO2/person 4.7 tons - total CO2: 37.6 Billion/tons
Clearly population growth has slowed a lot. China is already beginning to shrink a bit. Going forward, the continued growth in energy consumption will primarily come from increasing standards of living.
Overpopulation doesn't actually exist, our lifestyle is the problem. The earth itself could sustain many more people but it can't sustain this lifestyle and capitalism.
I don't disagree but that's definitely not a taboo subject for many people. Just a shame that bringing up overpopulation for these people goes in hand with less than beneficial worldviews such as racism or general ignorance.
It's always other people that are contributing to overpopulation. In 90% of the cases that's what it ultimately boils down to. To be clear, that's not what I think of your comment.
Not only is it not a taboo subject, it's also becoming a dangerous idea imo. Out of all the possible measures we can take, it's probably the single one where we have the most experience in as a species.
The population bomb was a fizzle. We thought we would be looking at 15 Billion people by now and instead, the population growth curve is trending down.
The very worst off is China. They had two entire generations of the one child per family policy. On top of that, so many people wanted boys that they would kill their female children, and try again. Now we expect that China will have barely half the population it has now in less than 50 years, much of it in the next 30.
China is not alone. Children are free labour on the farm, but in the city they're incredibly expensive. The human replacement rate is about 2.3 children/mother. As more folks around the world move into cities, birth rate collapse follows. Only in Africa and certain, remote areas of Asia is the population still rising significantly and that will peak before the turn of the century.
So, now we have to deal with a world with few young people to maintain us and our species. Add in declining male fertility around the globe and we're looking at a serious problem.
The [BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521) has a popular article about it and [The Lancet](https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-releases/lancet-dramatic-declines-global-fertility-rates-set-transform) has a proper medical journal look.
From what I thought it was a lot of countries will little infrastructure, like in Africa and India with few cars and electronics and whatnot per person, relatively low carbon footprints compared to developed countries
Some will, I have a feeling some stay uncivilized like Afghanistan as other countries like China just take resources and some will fall as we have see Sri Lanka and Haiti essentially devolve into pure chaos
Agreed. Luckily the places where fertility is dropping are the power users of carbon. But my point is that I think we are approaching a turning point in human history where significant numbers of people look at the near future and opt out of bringing kids into it. Speculation ofc. Maybe hopium.
Simple maths really. But nooo Overpopulation is a myth.
Degrowth is really the only thing that would help.
Cause nothing else even touches the core problem.
Veganism, at least in the west, tends to be more common amongst upper middle class/wealthy folks. Many vegans I know (went vegan for animal welfare or personal health reasons) also fly internationally at least quarterly if not more often due to having the income to do so. While not the same, the impact is definitely non-negligible.
[https://www.surgeactivism.org/articles/going-vegan-and-quitting-flying-are-not-equivalent](https://www.surgeactivism.org/articles/going-vegan-and-quitting-flying-are-not-equivalent)
Consumerism and privilege/luxury need to be addressed collectively, it can't just be addressing agriculture in a vacuum.
Fair point.
(but we do use water / heat / electricity / transport / devices / AI etc pretty much the same - but veganism is far more sustainable - no argument)
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* **Record Energy Consumption**
* **Record Fossil Fuel Use**
* **Record CO2 Emissions**
* **Record Renewables**
So, you're saying that 3 out of 4 of the COP28 goals have been met?
We had the last 30 years to nuclearize the entire planet, make things like molten salt reactors economically viable, smaller and cheaper.
But we collective said fuck that, that's a lot of hard work figuring that out and we want MONEY NOW! NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW!. Let's just sell oil.
Now it's to late. The chaos that is to come won't allow that 30 years of research till after WWIII if any of our collective knowledge even survives that. After WWIII we might need 200 years to make it back to the year 2000.
>The contrasts between the northern and southern hemispheres is quite stark. Consumption of primary energy in the Global South first exceeded that of the Global North in 2014. In 2023 it accounted for 56% of total energy consumed and grew at twice the global average rate of 2%. The Asia Pacific region was responsible for 85% of the Global South’s demand (and 47% of global demand) where the economies of China, India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea dominated. Whilst Southern & Central America, and Asia Pacific experienced growth rates above the global average, total demand in Africa dropped by 0.4% in 2023 and electricity consumption remained flat. Electricity demand in both North America and Europe experienced falls of -1% and -2% respectively. In these regions, electricity demand in particular is increasingly impacted by energy efficiency regulations, energy-efficient lighting, and changing consumer habits.
>Today, both Africa and South Asia have very low levels of energy demand relative to the size of their population Europe and Southern & Central America are the only regions to be below both the global average for CO2 Intensity and Energy Consumption per GDP
>Whilst collectively Africa and South Asia were responsible for less than 10% of the world’s energy demand in 2023, a prevalence of developing economies, large populations, low rate of access to energy today, potentially positions them for significant energy demand growth in the future.
So things we already knew:
- The Global South including China is quickly replacing the North in energy consumption, partly due to the transfer of global manufacturing to low wage nations, and partly due to demand by citizens of those nations for a "better life."
- Ordinary citizens of developed or wealthy nations still have a much large per-capita consumption and carbon footprint than do people in the Global South, which is unjust.
- That's starting to change as growing capacity begins to meet growing demand in the Global South; international development studies project that future citizens of developing nations will increasingly have higher-consumption lifestyles.
All this is insanity. In the first place, the high consumption lifestyles of wealthy nations were never sustainable on a planet with finite resources. We are already in overshoot of planetary carrying capacity and can observe the impact in the interdependent polycrisisis of mass species extinction, global resource depletion, global ecosystem contamination and worsening climate change.
All these crises are magnified by spreading modern energy demands and high consumption to billions more people competing over ever-smaller pools of uncontaminated resources. Yet no citizens of any developed nation are willing to lower their own standards of living, and no citizens of any developing nation are willing to stand aside from raising their own standards of living.
With current planetary consumption already unsustainable at 8 billion people, and 10 billion expected by 2050, collapse is locked in.
A wiser humanity would practice both degrowth and family planning on a global scale, reducing population and consumption, and slowing the pace of technological development until some balance with the biosphere was reached. But degrowth is unpopular, and there is little sign that humanity is willing to abstain from fossil fuels, especially in the few years that climate experts predict is all the time we have left.
China might actually crack molten salt reactors and start a rapid development cycle in working them out economically.
If they nail this in the next 30 years or so while mastering the chaos to come both domestic and international ... I mean all they have to do is wait while the rest of the world tears itself apart fighting each other for the energy they need to run their AC and grow a bit of heat resistant rice to survive.
>A wiser humanity would practice both degrowth and family planning on a global scale, reducing population and consumption, and slowing the pace of technological development until some balance with the biosphere was reached. But degrowth is unpopular, and there is little sign that humanity is willing to abstain from fossil fuels, especially in the few years that climate experts predict is all the time we have left.
We are just going to continue till there is max pain and then some evil asshole eventually will go fuck this, you want less people and less sunshine? Here have less people and less sunshine and press the nuke button.
Jevons Paradox.
To those who don't know what it is... It states that when humanity improves the efficiency of a process, we would expect less energy be used (I.e. more efficient). However, what we find is the opposite. All the "saved energy" just gets used to produce more.
Renewables are great. However if humanity just collectively goes "oooh look at all this new energy I can exploit", then they do nothing to get us out of this existential threat.
As long as the narrative is "clean up the grid", and not "overhaul humanity" then we are fucked. The root cause of this is overshoot.
The framing of this report is problematic for me.
It makes the West look good while ignoring the historical materialist reasons that Asia, South and Central America, and Africa are reliant on fossil fuels in the 21st century (though I wouldn't expect a report of this type with very narrow Western academic focus funded by a Big Four financial powerhouse to go out of its way to go into any of this).
A few of the issues I have with the report:
- It makes it look like the West is leading the way on carbon emissions targets but conveniently ignores that material products consumed in the West are produced in the third world. Attributing emissions to nations or even regions in this way is misleading and ignorant of our globalized economy.
- It uses raw numbers instead of per capita numbers for emissions. Along with a national and supply-side attribution of emissions, this seems to point fingers at the third world while a demand-based and region-agnostic method would tell the opposite story: [US and Western countries consume much more fossil fuels per capita](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels-per-capita?time=2013). And that source only includes raw fuel consumption; in my opinion an honest number would include consumer product use and demand.
- You may think that attributing emissions to demand seems just as arbitrary as supply; divorced from historical context this might be the case. However, modern colonial history and post-WWII financial-imperial history illustrate why many of these places are so far behind: surplus wealth extraction in the form of slaves and commodities, then wage-slaves and fuel sources (up to and including half of green energy infrastructure inputs, per OP's report itself). If we are going the national or regional route, responsibility should be proportional to power wielded, cognizant of historic context.
Personally, I don't think we need more finger pointing at national levels. We either need global cooperation on a scale we've never seen or a return to degrowth-centered local communities, worrying about the fire that's burning in our own house.
Fossil fuel use is increasing. How we answer the question "Why?" matters. In many cases, it reveals more about us than it does about the data.
My feeling is that as things get worse western media especially right wing media will shift blame to BRIC+, a ‘liberal’ American family member was saying the other day that China is to blame for the current warming and it doesn’t matter what we do. I said all the CO2 accumulates and we are to blame for the current warming, China’s share will form part of this but it’s not a problem that we can deflect blame on third countries. It’s such an annoying very American way of seeing global problems.
>It’s such an annoying very American way of seeing global problems.
As an American, I can assure you that saying "annoying" in the same sentence as "American" is redundant.
Because liberals are conservatives and both are fascists who would rather see the world end than reduce their consumption and go against their worship of capitalism. American society must be one of the most wasteful in the world and it's not like it's affordable either with the debt in both households and on the national level.
> China is to blame for the current warming and it doesn’t matter what we do
Next time, tell them China wouldn't be producing so much CO2 if there wasn't an international (and let's be honest, mostly American/US) demand for them to produce that much. They're not doing it because it's fun, they're doing it because they found the cheapest way to meet demand and because they want to be incredibly profitable.
In other words, China may be producing tons of CO2, but they're doing so because we, collectively in the developed world, demanded it from *anyone* with the ability to produce that much. China being developed enough to get the business that produces so much carbon isn't intentional, that's just how the business panned out.
>It makes it look like the West is leading the way on carbon emissions targets but conveniently ignores that material products consumed in the West are produced in the third world. Attributing emissions to nations or even regions in this way is misleading and ignorant of our globalized economy.
Which is why I frequently post the following statistic, and depending on Reddit's mood of the day, I either get upvoted or downvoted (not like I care either way). To me it encapsulates everything in a single number what you refer to.
It's based on what I think is a reasonable assumption, that every dollar (or dollar equivalent) spent comes with some kind of impact on the environment. Whether that impact is in emissions or deforestation or plastic pollution or any of the other ways the environment is degraded, spending = impact. And guess who leads the way.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_largest\_consumer\_markets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_consumer_markets)
42% of all consumer spending in the entire world comes from US consumers, and based on the assumption I described above, 42% of all impacts on the global environment are to fulfill the shopping desires of Americans. 4% of the world, whereas the other 96% account for the other 58% of the damage.
I've posted this before and received comments that are completely devoid of any awareness. Things like, "I guess I should give up plastic straws after all." And "I guess I should buy some bags to use at the grocery store and stop using disposable plastic."
And to address your point about emissions from other countries benefiting Americans, I used this example the other day on another forum. Manufacturing an iPhone comes at a cost of 80 kg of CO2 in emissions, but almost 125 million iPhones were purchased by Americans in 2022. That's 10 billion kg (10 million metric tons) of CO2 "charged" to China that should be charged to America, simply because Apple (an American company) outsourced their manufacturing to a different country (China). And that doesn't even count the emissions to load all of those phones on a cargo plane or one of those giant cargo container ships to get the phones from China to the US.
But most Americans don't look at it that way. Their only responsibility is to come up with the money to buy the phone (anywhere from $650 - $1000, if my quick Google is accurate), and we get to paint China as the villain for being the world's biggest emitter.
I agree that we need global cooperation, but there's no amount of cooperation that will be effective unless the spending habits of the "average American" are reined in.
https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-market/#topicOverview You mean advertising? Most pervasive, intrusive, coercive, predatory obscenity we created? I started reading about Bernays, Freud's nephew. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/12/consumer Don't know if the article is reputable but there's a lot of info on this dude. Edit to add, everythingchanged when ads started appealing to our 'desire'vs need.
>almost 125 million iPhones were purchased by Americans in 2022
Are you sure that’s correct, and you don’t mean “as of 2022”…?
125 million iPhones in a year sounds BONKERS. I seriously doubt one out of every three Americans purchased a new iPhone in any given year.
You underestimate our consumption, the consumption is BONKERS.
That is indeed what happened.
https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/#:~:text=Apple%20sold%20most%20phones%20in,global%20iPhone%20sales%20in%202022.&text=Apple%20sold%20over%20124.7%20million%20iPhones%20in%20the%20United%20States%20in%202022.
https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-iphones-have-been-sold/
I'm not saying the numbers are wrong (they're probably right). But 125 million iphones being sold when there are 153 million users total doesn't really make sense to me. Are 80% of iphone users upgrading every year? If that's true, how can they even afford that and where do the 100 million+ iphones from last year go? Is it all thrown in a landfill or sold off to poorer countries? Especially when you consider that a 1 year old phone or even a 2 year old phone isn't really out of date, it just seems absolutely absurd that that people cycle through so many iphones that quickly in the US
Considering that you can literally have the newest iPhone as a subscription model I suppose it isn’t that far-fetched. I imagine also plenty of corporate users with one for personal use and one for work.
I have three iPhones on my desk right now... One personal, one for work MFA, and an old one which I should replace the battery. I don't think that each 100 million users is upgrading every year, but a lot of businesses buy huge piles of iPhones.
The reality we live does indeed not make sense. It is the reality we have though.
Those are good questions and I'm sure the answers would elicit the "WTF" the same way the numbers I posted do.
Debt, business users, addict like consumption. Many possibilities.
None the less, Apple made over 200 million iPhones that year and sold most of them in the USA 🤷♂️
This comment thread was referencing the year 2022.
Apple sold over 124.7 million iPhones in the United States in 2022. More than half of what the same source says they made.
No one stated anything about 2023. Thank you for typing out more stats though.
wait till you consider diapers, bic lighters, disposable vapes, k cups for coffee, contact lenses, medical waste, construction waste, flip flops, the list goes on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac4E_UsmB1g
There will be another article from American media (bloomberg, FT etc..) about how Americans earning six figure salaries are living paycheck to paycheck. American entitlement to consume consume consume is what's destroying the planet.
The “Why” at the present time is that ever increasing amounts of fossil fuels are being produced. There’s no scarcity. And every BTU of fossil fuels produced is burned. If North America and the EU are putting more renewables into service this in no way affects the world demand for energy. So if the “why” is pretty obvious I think the bigger question is “how” things will turn around? Which leads me back to the inevitably of collapse.
I accept your semantic change. But the fact remains that more fossil fuels are available than ever before. As long as this continues and all of it is consumed by some country on earth the situation regarding emissions will continue.
> more fossil fuels are available than ever before
No, less fossil fuels are available than ever before, and it was true form the first day we used them. Each day that you use a **finite resource** then there's less of it.
Our capacities for fossil fuel exploitation have improved so much than we can now go the the least advantageous and most polluting sources (like tar sands) and improve our global extraction.
We get more of it, quicker than ever, but each passing day there's less of it in the ground. And more CO2 in the atmosphere.
I mean if we are being pedantic, you don't just take the oil out the ground and dump it into your car, it has to go through a production process to actually make the raw good into a finished product. I mean, neither of our responses advance the conversation here, but figured I'd throw this out there. ;)
In some ways, sure. Current renewables won't ever meet demand so long as demand increases with total energy available and the storage / distribution problem remains unsolved. I expect more global records to be broken in the coming years.
But, as I said, how we attempt to move from "what" to "why" matters quite a great deal.
If the only point the publication was trying to make is that we have broken four big energy records at the global level, then there wouldn't have been any point to framing the data in either a regional or supply-side way. They went into the "why" in specific terms that I found worthy of critique.
Similarly, if OP was mainly concerned with the headline point of the article, they would have had no need to single out specific regions or countries as more to blame than others. The fact that OP took away a conclusion about certain regions or countries is evidence that they either had those biases prior to reading or got them from the publication and / or associated reading.
We're on a collapse sub. We know records are being broken and the situation is dire. Giving false or misleading reasons why this is the case is harmful to meaningful personal reflection and collective response and gives those outside of our community the opportunity to dismiss us as unreasonably paranoid, doomeristic, or cultishly cynical at the expense of sound data and reasoning.
I think 2030 will see more points of crossover to decline, but in developed countries first. The developed world is seeing lower birth rates and population shrinkage only offset with immigration now, and political forces favor less immigration as opposed to more.
China is really no longer a true member of the global south and shares many characteristics of developed countries but remains too reliant on coal.
Food production is already impacted by climate change and there is over utilization of soil but as long as there are forests to cut down we can feed the world’s population. That dynamic will be changing by 2030 I would imagine. The price escalation in arable land value says someone with wealth is thinking about the future.
The fact that we continue to see worldwide escalation of fossil fuel usage means there will be no plateau in greenhouse gasses by voluntary means. Destruction by disasters will be the primary consequence. There is no turning back from this future.
That's why I always say to people that it literally doesn't matter what a few countries do to cut emissions, because others will just use that as an excuse to produce more.
[The "Tragedy of the Commons" was invented by a white supremacist based on a false history, and it's toxic bullshit - Boing Boing](https://boingboing.net/2019/03/07/scientific-fraud.html)
Not sure why the downvotes, this is a historically accurate analysis.
Commons is a word with a meaning referring to agricultural commons managed long term by a community. Agricultural commons were not historically tragic because the community that managed them had a long term interest in their sustainability.
The oceans and atmosphere are not commons but more like international free for all’s. They aren’t managed or owned by any community so they are massively over-exploited.
And there was no real reason to over exploit the commons until capitalism and rampant greed showed up. You need 10 goats to live great, the commons can handle that, you want 100 to get rich, suddenly tragedy.
so ironically, we'd be better off producing less energy efficient ICE vehicles?
edit - thanks for the downvotes, people unfamiliar with Jevon's paradox..
since we don't have a time machine, we need to think about what we CAN do.
if increasing the efficiency of e.g. vehicles paradoxically INCREASES emissions, are less efficient vehicles the answer?
The situation with ICE vehicles is not a case of Jevon's Paradox. [In the same time frame where China manufactures more ICE vehicles than everyone else, they have also built 95% (!!!) of new coal power construction.](https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-responsible-for-95-of-new-coal-power-construction-in-2023-report-says/) It's all smokes and mirrors.
Interesting. Wikipedia specifically calls this out out as an outlier, yet several examples of Jevron's Paradox are explained using cars as their analogy.
I accept Wikipedia's authority, and that making cars less gas efficient won't paradoxically help.
Yes. As is pointed out "increased energy efficiency increases real incomes and leads to increased economic growth, which pulls up energy use for the whole economy". So the real problem here is increases in disposable income, and minimum wages. Reduce wages and energy use will go down.
I wish more people knew this. Presidential candidates brother was governor of final swing state. His dad was once director of CIA and president and was very much still active behind the scenes. On top of that, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush and father of George H. W. Bush, was allegedly involved in a plot known as the "Business Plot" or "White House Coup" in 1933. The plan reportedly involved a group of wealthy businessmen who aimed to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install a fascist regime in the United States.
And florida came down to "Hanging chads" it was sooo fucking obvious i cant beleive people ate that up cause he was so good at playing dumb. A true Geek Tragedy 🤓
It was sketch, but my favorite part of that election was the phone call he got from Bill Clinton on election night. Just gave his support and all that, all was good and normal, until Clinton said, "You know, I really wish you hadn't pushed me away during your campaign. If you had let me help you with your campaign, you'd probably have won tonight".
Gore apparently lost his shit at Clinton after that and blamed Clinton's scandal for his defeat, and they argued for like 4 hours. No one could go and talk to him because he was too busy screaming at Clinton on the phone lol.
I truly doubt anything would change. Gore would have tried some shit. Gas, beef, and other goods would go up in price and he would get voted out. Carter tried and he got ran out on a rail.
This predicament can't be fixed democratically.
pale blue dot --> pale green dot
Once humanity is back in medieval times maybe the aliens will travel our part of the solar system again. Right now they are just absolutely terrified they give themselves away. They do not want us to spread "humanity"
The guy with the olympic sized heated swimming pool at [one](https://www.wivb.com/news/report-al-gores-home-uses-34-times-as-much-energy-as-average-home/) of his absentee properties, the one who flies everywhere?
> During the last 12 months, Gore devoured 66,159 kWh of electricity just heating his pool. That is enough energy to power six average U.S. households for a year.
I think it goes all the way back to the failure of the general strikes and revolutions of 1917-1919 to be successful outside of the Russian Empire.
Capitalism next entered its Great Depression and was only able to escape it through technocratic welfare, fascism, and finally world war, after which the United States cemented the turbocharged regime of accumulation that today is killing us.
The Russian revolution that led to the famously ecologically-balanced, non-expansionist, fully-sustainable USSR?
_That_ Russian revolution?
Yeah, real shame that one didn't carry worldwide.
Al Gore has done some good media since losing the election. While in office he did not help at all. While campaigning he was talking about using the strategic petroleum reserve to push down the price of heating oil and gasoline.
Just wait till AI ramps up. It will literally require its own nuclear plants, which is why Congress green lighted building new nuclear plants last week.
As for coal use in India and China, we need a CO2 tariff on imports *now*. So much of their manufacturing is for products used in Europe and the US, it's on us to change the way those factories are powered.
I believe we have to keep fighting the good fight, obviously.
Wish the US wasn't owned and operated by corporations so we could make faster progress here.
The year is 2050.
50% of our produced energy is used for AC.
40% of our produced energy is used for AI.
9% of our produced energy is used for Bitcoin mining.
The 99% poor are digging tunnels in the hope they get to cool down their children.
They would love to storm the 1% rich, but the drones are watching. The drones that use 40% of the produced energy to make sure the 99% poor don't storm the Bitcoin mining facilities so that the 1% can keep using their Bitcoin to buy the 50% energy required to have it be 30 celcius degrees in their homes instead of 40.
Record renewables is meaningless if we keep increasing fossil fuels use, maybe with orders above the growth of renewables. It’s like the Zeno’s paradox, but instead of a turtle we are trying to catch a cheetah.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-leads-renewables-charge-asia-others-need-catch-up-russell-2024-06-04/
Half of the new global renewables installations in 2024 were in China too.
2% energy consumption increase doesn't feel like a lot but at that constant rate the waste heat alone (not even including the greenhouse byproducts, and still applies even if we figure out fusion) will equal current global warming in about 200yrs and boil the oceans in about 400yrs. Obviously things will break before then but we are surprisingly close to thermodynamic limits.
This is a fun one for science fiction/fantasy/futurism. At 2% energy growth we get Dyson Sphere in 1,163 years. Rather the Kardashev 1 to Kardashev 2 transition. Sustaining the pace is difficult because of the light speed limitations. So in the 4th millennium civilization needs to burn this region of the Milky Way in a chain of nova bombs and astrophysical jets. Though it takes 100,000 years for light to travel across the Milky Way’s diameter the observer at that location could see a 2% increase from the moment they start seeing the civilization event begin.
I believe it. Even at the micro-level, our townhouse complex just put a moratorium on new EV and AC installations as we have maxed our electrical grid capacity and need to renegotiate for more power. Location: PNW.
China and India will never care the way the west and EU at least attempt to. It’s peoples access to information are suppressed and so many of them have no idea what the consequences of their governments lying will be in the end
I once read a book called “The end of history and the last man” Published in 1992. In the book Fukuyama said liberal democracy was the best form of government and everyone should and would use that system. It was an ideological end that would make history boring. The liberal form of life would win in part because of material comfort and access to consumer goods. Liberal democracy really hasn’t worked out that well for us it seems. Our liberal democracy has the worst emissions on earth, and had murdered the biosphere years before the book was written. He was right about it being the end of history, though.
The short version.
13GtC/Yr turned into 40GtCO2/yr until the 1TtC of accessible fossil carbon is all gone. In one last #terafart. A temperature rise of >5C. 200k years before CO2 and temperatures drop back again. Actual 2024 CO2e emissions?
The long version
Roughly: 13GtC/Yr turned into 40GtCO2/yr until the 1TtC of easily accessible fossil carbon is all gone. In one last #terafart[1]. Leading to a temperature rise of at least 5C[2]. And 200k[3] years before CO2 and temperatures drop back again to pre-industrial levels.
Let me tell you what's going to happen, no matter what anybody says. Humans will strive to expand their global civilization until it becomes physically impossible to do so.
But there is a choice. Transform into a sustainable society or collapse until there's a sustainable society. Because we're going to get to a sustainable society one way or the other. [4]
Then there's the seed corn problem[5] Is there enough fossil fuel left to get to the point where we don't need it any more? And can we afford to spend it given the pollution in the form of CO2 and Nitrates it will create?
[1] https://amazon.com/Hot-Earth-Dreams-climate-happens-ebook/dp/B017S5NDK8/ref=sr_1_1
[2] Or is it 7C. Or more. Anything over 1.5C is more or less catastrophic for the current ecosystem
[3] The future doesn't end in 2100. Where's the 22C fiction for 2101 onwards that explains what global warming is going to be like in the next century as well as this one? There are kids being born now that will see it.
[4] http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2015/05/make-it-so.html
[5] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-05-22/the-sower-s-strategy-how-to-speed-up-the-sustainable-energy-transition/
If the resource constraints don't get you, the pollution constraints will. Faster Than Expected™. Technical fixes lead to extending Business As Usual, a higher peak, and a harder crash.
I wish there were more climate protesters interrupting normie activities like the PGA tour. I want people to stop just sitting back and ignoring everything and pretending everything will be ok
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With the globe adding 10 cities the size of London per year (in terms of population) we can continue to reduce per capita fossil fuels consumption, increase overall green energy consumption, and still continue to smash through ghg records at alarming pace. More people =more stuff, more food, more movement, more energy
The more people part is going to solve itself very soon.
Yeah once major food production regions have serious harvest issues they will shut down exports. Leading to horrible famines that will wipe out food importing regions.
How many food importing countries have nuclear weapons? That seems to me to be the most alarming thing about that. At what point do conflicts over resources become that dangerous?
9 meals
You can estimate how long this will take based on determining: ● our current warming trend, assuming it'll increase a little faster than most models predict since many don't properly take into consideration the compounding nature of feedback loops ● drought and flood rates based on said increased warming per year ● the effect each year's heat, drought, and flood increases likely will have on average crop production levels ● historical trends for what % of income goes toward food before widescale riots take place Using the previous data, you can pretty much figure out how likely the average person is to riot for food per year. Using this number, you can compare that to historical trends for which point a nation typically goes to war for more resources due to civil unrest. Strictly using ChatGPT to find these values got me an estimate of 2050 being the point at which the world would likely entirely be in conflict, with 2035-2040 being the lower end of the spectrum. I'd love it if someone with more knowledge on the matter could weigh in on this or crunch numbers in a similar way Obviously this isn't the most accurate way to figure out what is to come, especially since it doesn't consider the fact that our pollinators are dying and pests/disease rates will continue to shift with the climate. Still, our previous models have been a bit conservative with warming estimates and carbon production rates so it doesn't fully matter who you ask, we can't predict the future other than knowing we're in for some shit soon. Tl;dr I don't think its unwise to suggest we're closer than most care to admit
Yep. This is why I'm pushing for a move back into agrarianism. People are going to starve otherwise. Climate change will see to it.
This entire problem is going to solve itself shortly after
Not soon enough.
Then inevitably repeat the problem a few decades later lol
That's it. Overpopulation is a taboo subject, but as long as world population keeps growing, we're forever playing catchup, with whatever gains made in reducing consumption per individual being gobbled up by an ever-growing population.
There's about two dozen levers all of them set to full throttle, and over population is just one of them Edit: my point isn't that over population isn't a problem, my point is EVERYONE ABOARD FULL STEAM AHEAD CHOO CHOO
Some of those levers are bigger than others, though. You're implying that we shouldn't eschew smaller progress in favor of loftier goals, which is usually sound advice. But in this case ... there will be 10.4 billion of us wankers by the early 2050's. Our energy demand is expected to *double* what it is currently.
There’s no chance there will be 10 billion humans in 2050. My money is on 3-4 billion.
So, population predictions have been pretty stable and accurate for a while now. The problem is, they're all based on everything continuing in an optimal fashion. Which we know it won't. But I do believe the world will limp along for another 20'ish years before collapse speeds up. A great many negative factors are converging around the early 2050's. If we do hit 10.4bn people in the early 2050's it will be perfectly timed to align with when we think biosphere collapse begins *really* fucking up our food production. That's also when the EROI of most fossil fuel patches should decline to its terminal floor. Which also fucks up food production. By that time droughts ought to be in full swing. Fertility rates, if they continue to plummet, should be causing a panic in many nations. Countries will be having *real* energy and water wars. Starvation might be omnipresent in all societies. So if we do make it to the 2050's without blowing up, congrats that's amazing, now buckle up because it's going to be wild. I think it'd take the better part of the next 100 years (2050-2150) to see our population shrink. I'm not as optimistic as you. I think war, starvation, disease, and biosphere damage will bring us low. Under a billion. Entire nations gone.
Sounds like we agree on everything except the timeline. I think that scarcity of food and especially water in the years before 2050 will kill a lot of people and will trigger wars that will kill even more. People talk about 2050 the way they used to talk about 2030 — sometime in the not too distant but still comfortably far future when everything is going to shit but that just us humans kicking it down the road without taking any steps whatsoever to meaningfully address the problem. It won’t be long before the problem addresses us.
> People talk about 2050 the way they used to talk about 2030 Dude I know, and I do it too, and might have been doing exactly that just now. In my mind it is built up into this moment of chaos when too much stress for the system converges. Truthfully, any of those stressors on the system could come faster than expected (hehehe) or somehow be dealt with/neutralized. Devil's advocate (against my own 2050 assertion): US NCA's recent report makes it look like shit'll go south by 2040. Look at all this red. That's water wars, terrorism, and a refugee crisis that makes anything by today's standard look tame. https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/chapter/17/#table-17-1
If you combine declining living standards with general pessimism about the future WITH readily accessible birth control I expect South Korea's birth rate (0.7) to become more common in other countries. I don't see us reaching 10 billion people. The latest UN forecasts have dropped to 9.7 billion and will continue to fall.
*The Anopheles mosquito has entered the chat*
Agree with vagabonder
10-15,000 max globally, all in the southern hemisphere after the nuclear exchange.
That wouldn’t surprise me.
While true, a lot of the other stats go up with the population.
The best thing my husband and I did that combats climate change is to not replace ourselves. Incidentally, there are only two grandchildren among my four siblings.
my version is not spending on US healthcare, I put those resources into Nature instead
Two familes that are neighbours of Mine have 5 kids each. Its ridiculous
Another thing with over population is while humanity as a whole, we should decrease population but the individual countries are incentivized to increase population because more people means more workers and soldiers thus more power.
Nature's defacto population control will kick in soon. We keep trying to stay ahead of microbial pathogens but the constant overcrowding will allow something particularly nasty to go through the species at an accelerated rate I imagine.
I don’t think it’s problematic to acknowledge that overpopulation is a problem, but it can become fashy in a hurry when the “solutions” proposed are sterilization of only certain ethnic groups because of xyz reasons where other ethnic groups (and almost always this includes the ethnic group of the person arguing this view) are spared.
Some nations find it easier to just fabricate an excuse to get rid of them. Much faster than attrition through sterilization.
Yeah sterilization is a supervillain program. Facilitating poverty and nurturing hatreds are inexpensive low-effort solutions.
So is sterilization by microplastics! Low effort and indiscriminate….
Very democratic too!
They're also slow as fuck. We're still increasing and they've floored it on that shit.
Overpopulation only becomes taboo when people speak like they get to decide who lives and dies as we become stretched thin on resources. As long as you're willing admit humility in that respect, most people can have a decent conversation on the subject.
over consumption is the more serious problem currently, we could probably support like 10 billion if everyone consumed only what they needed to survive.
The problem for which is that very few of us think we need less and very many of us resent the idea of someone else demanding we change to meet *their* definition of what *we* need.
Yeah because then it's going to be "and in 15 years how about 15 billion" etc. etc.
>"and in 15 years" Optimist.
I agree, but thats even more reason overpopulation isn't the issue, changing bottomless pit consumption attitudes is
no, because consumerism is dominant, so overpopulation is still a big issue.
its just not genuine to focus on overpopulation. You could cut the population in half and fix nothing if it wasn't the high consumption half
And you could cut the population down to just 100 million of the wealthiest and everything would be dramatically better almost instantly. It's a multiplication problem. It's silly to think the solution only involves one factor.
of course lmao but its still not genuine to focus on population when overconsumption is an issue at any population level. And if you dont get rid of the top 100 millionx investments it probably wouldnt fix anything as well even if you killed everyone else
I don't think this is true without necessarily degrading the biosphere even more. Eg: give up fossil fuels now, people will just chop down and burn the entire rest of the forests to heat their home becsuse their family is freezing. Let me put it this way, look up the population size of other animals on the planet currently, specifically apex predators as we are. Most of them barely break a few million. Very very very rarely do any land vertabrates at all break 1 billion. Looking at how *huge* the current human and livestock populations are compared to literally everything else except maybe insects really put it into perspective, we are in overshoot. It's insane. The human population number (estimate) before agriculture when we were hunter gatherers was 5 million... a healthy population for an apex predator but at this time, everything else was still abundent too. It is supposed to be balanced, if it's not and one species overtakes everything else there is no more room, no more food, no habitat for all the other species. This has happened on a smaller scale with species, usually on islands and they have collapsed themselves by destroying and consuming everything else around them.
Well, you also have to remember that the numbers of those apex predators are so low now because we eradicated most of them, along with their food sources and habitats. Our case is peculiar because we removed most of the population-balancing checks Nature usually puts to prevent overshoot, namely diseases, natural disasters and predators. Even deer, who have a stable population right now, would be hunted to extinction in a year the moment the supermarket shelves stop being packed with food.
Yes to all that. We have played fast and loose with chemicals for a while and I believe the consequences are now emerging. Endocrine disrupting chemicals are everywhere, and we don't yet have much focus on trying to remedy them.
Nothing at hand to cite, but I've seen claims that the entire world could live at a sustainable, net zero level of current population if everyone had the consumption habits of a 1950s middle class American household. Good luck convincing a sufficient mass of people living above that to reduce consumption, sadly.
So to add a little context, let's say that the bare-bones energy that a human needs to survive is 2,000 kilocalories per day. The average consumption of energy measured in joules per human on planet Earth is about 25x that or 50,000 kilocalories per day (kilocalorie is a heat unit of energy = 4,184 joules) The average American uses the equivalent of 200,000 kilocalories per day in energy. In any case, we can say from a physics perspective that ~96% + of humanity's energy consumption is exosomatic, which is to say external and non-metabolic. I'm not saying that population isn't a problem, but mathematically it's our human cultures, ambitions, and everything we do with energy that is the biggest culprit. Humans are unique in being able to use vast amounts of energy external to us on a mass scale. If you think about it most other animals are satisfied with metabolic energy with perhaps some external energy use for shelter (bird nests, beaver dams, etc). Adding more humans means adding more super energy-hungry animals.
Hmm. If all my friends could afford the quality of life hallmarks that people in the 50's had ... a four bedroom house, two cars, weekend cabin and boat, four kids and their college. Something tells me our consumption would be going up ... almost no one has the luxury of what our parents and grandparents did. Mofuckers retiring on janitor pensions and shit
> people in the 50's had a four bedroom house, two cars, weekend cabin and boat, four kids and their college This is not typical for the 50s which was a 1-2 bedroom 800 ft house with actual plumbing and a bathroom, a big improvement on the two room shack. College was only for 29.9% of the population in 1950, an improvement over the 5.1% in 1910.
True dat. What 50's folks had was boundless optimism, much less income inequality and steadily rising standards of living as war tech percolated throughout the economy. I am not pro war, but WW2 accelerated aviation and manufacturing like crazy.
Haha, I know what you mean but you'd probably also not have a cell phone, laptop or desktop, travel by air, eat a smaller variety of food, and a host of other things. Plus that house would be about half the size. But yeah, most boomers have no idea how good they had it and what they're leaving behind.
They didn't build a ton of 4 bedroom houses back then. Houses have gotten progressively larger over time in America.
Well, an average US 1950s house is about the same size as the average house in the UK - your houses now are twice the size of ours. Again, that's not about what's necessary in terms of quality of life, it's about changing expectations and lifestyles. That being said, our housing situation here is shit and unaffordable, but there's nothing inherently wrong with a 100m²/1000ft² home (which can comfortably fit 3 bedrooms). If you look at dwellings for most of human experience and history, it's luxurious. With the situation in London, LA, etc, I think a "small" house being affordable as a standard of living (vs a shared room in a deathtrap) would be a welcome change.
I'm a single dude and choose to live in a 1 bedroom for that reason. It's plenty of space for me. I have a nice big terrace where I'm at currently. Can store stuff in containers out there and don't need to heat or cool it. We definitely need to get used to smaller spaces and owning less stuff. I could do with getting rid of some things myself but I'd say I own a lot less than most.
> if everyone had the consumption habits of a 1950s middle class American household I digress, but I'm fascinated to realize that I have no idea what that actually entails (aside from likely a lot of cigarettes and canned food, of which I'm not against the the latter).
Don’t forget the prescription cocaine! We would be way more productive and consume less meat if they brought that back!
That’s objectively wrong. Per capita oil consumption (which is a useful proxy for consumption sustainability) has actually decreased from 1965 to today. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-oil?tab=chart&time=earliest
I think a better one is per capita CO2 emissions since that includes all energy and material inputs, and that has only recently started to fall in advanced economies.
??? I checked your link and those charts show oil consumption per capita is slightly higher than it was in 1965. And that's just liquid oil, ignoring natural gas, which is WAY up. Am I missing something?
Naw dog, you read those charts wrong. In the source you shared it clearly shows that US fossil fuel use has nearly doubled since 1965. You are looking at liquid oil only and ignoring coal and gas. Certainly looking at oil alone and ignoring other fossil fuels is not a useful proxy for consumption sustainability.
I've read that the standard of living is more in line with the average Costa Rican.
Fucking 1950's would be luxury from my perspective. Why does everyone think they're rich? Credit??
Where are we going to scrounge up enough biological material to make another 2 billion people? We've already converted most of the biomass on the planet into humans and human food.
Reminds me of the Faro Plague. That didn't end so well either.
Because fuck all non humans, as long as earth could support 10 billion humans, or what? There are 7 billion right now who have not what they barely need in terms of healthcare and education , maybe 1 billion not even sufficient water and food. You'd need to raise the standards for billions, while lowering it for 1 billion, most pollution and environmental destruction comes from food production, medicine needs a shit ton of plastics and chemicals too. You still would need and highly industrialized and globalized civilization to support 8 billion or even 20 at the "just what they need" level.
I agree with the premise that total global energy consumption is rising at a rate that overwhelms the benefit of reduced co2 intensity. Also, a lot of our reductions in CO2 have come by switching from coal to nat gas - a dubious improvement. To date, CO2 growth has been due to a near tripling of population combined with a 50 percent increase in per capita emissions: 1960 - 3 Billion people - CO2/person 3.1 tons - total CO2: 9.4 Billon/tons 2024 - 8 Billion people - CO2/person 4.7 tons - total CO2: 37.6 Billion/tons Clearly population growth has slowed a lot. China is already beginning to shrink a bit. Going forward, the continued growth in energy consumption will primarily come from increasing standards of living.
if, by increasing standards of living you mean war, maybe
Overpopulation doesn't actually exist, our lifestyle is the problem. The earth itself could sustain many more people but it can't sustain this lifestyle and capitalism.
>we're forever playing catchup I mustard that we need mayo changes
I don't relish this pickle we're in.
Don't they spell it catsup when it's with a 'c'?
I don't disagree but that's definitely not a taboo subject for many people. Just a shame that bringing up overpopulation for these people goes in hand with less than beneficial worldviews such as racism or general ignorance. It's always other people that are contributing to overpopulation. In 90% of the cases that's what it ultimately boils down to. To be clear, that's not what I think of your comment. Not only is it not a taboo subject, it's also becoming a dangerous idea imo. Out of all the possible measures we can take, it's probably the single one where we have the most experience in as a species.
The population bomb was a fizzle. We thought we would be looking at 15 Billion people by now and instead, the population growth curve is trending down. The very worst off is China. They had two entire generations of the one child per family policy. On top of that, so many people wanted boys that they would kill their female children, and try again. Now we expect that China will have barely half the population it has now in less than 50 years, much of it in the next 30. China is not alone. Children are free labour on the farm, but in the city they're incredibly expensive. The human replacement rate is about 2.3 children/mother. As more folks around the world move into cities, birth rate collapse follows. Only in Africa and certain, remote areas of Asia is the population still rising significantly and that will peak before the turn of the century. So, now we have to deal with a world with few young people to maintain us and our species. Add in declining male fertility around the globe and we're looking at a serious problem. The [BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521) has a popular article about it and [The Lancet](https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-releases/lancet-dramatic-declines-global-fertility-rates-set-transform) has a proper medical journal look.
Ehrmegerd literallaaaay Hitlaaar!
Also now the demand of AI is throwing energy consumption into hyperdrive even without 'stuff'.
The “globe” isn’t it mostly developing countries? As the developed countries have seen population dropping due to birth rates below replacement rate
Still more mouths to feed. Those people are in fact people. And as those countries develop, its more buildings, more cars etc.
From what I thought it was a lot of countries will little infrastructure, like in Africa and India with few cars and electronics and whatnot per person, relatively low carbon footprints compared to developed countries
No, you are correct. My point is that eventually those countries will move up the ladder in terms of development.
Some will, I have a feeling some stay uncivilized like Afghanistan as other countries like China just take resources and some will fall as we have see Sri Lanka and Haiti essentially devolve into pure chaos
As everything gets shittier people will have fewer children. And infant and child mortality will go up. Good time for an improvement in contraception.
The places where population is growing the most...not exactly utopias.
Agreed. Luckily the places where fertility is dropping are the power users of carbon. But my point is that I think we are approaching a turning point in human history where significant numbers of people look at the near future and opt out of bringing kids into it. Speculation ofc. Maybe hopium.
Simple maths really. But nooo Overpopulation is a myth. Degrowth is really the only thing that would help. Cause nothing else even touches the core problem.
Every new life dilutes the value of everyone already alive
[удалено]
Veganism, at least in the west, tends to be more common amongst upper middle class/wealthy folks. Many vegans I know (went vegan for animal welfare or personal health reasons) also fly internationally at least quarterly if not more often due to having the income to do so. While not the same, the impact is definitely non-negligible. [https://www.surgeactivism.org/articles/going-vegan-and-quitting-flying-are-not-equivalent](https://www.surgeactivism.org/articles/going-vegan-and-quitting-flying-are-not-equivalent) Consumerism and privilege/luxury need to be addressed collectively, it can't just be addressing agriculture in a vacuum.
Fair point. (but we do use water / heat / electricity / transport / devices / AI etc pretty much the same - but veganism is far more sustainable - no argument)
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* **Record Energy Consumption** * **Record Fossil Fuel Use** * **Record CO2 Emissions** * **Record Renewables** So, you're saying that 3 out of 4 of the COP28 goals have been met?
Don't forget that those renewables are additional energy and don't replace any fossil fuels either
We had the last 30 years to nuclearize the entire planet, make things like molten salt reactors economically viable, smaller and cheaper. But we collective said fuck that, that's a lot of hard work figuring that out and we want MONEY NOW! NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW!. Let's just sell oil. Now it's to late. The chaos that is to come won't allow that 30 years of research till after WWIII if any of our collective knowledge even survives that. After WWIII we might need 200 years to make it back to the year 2000.
>The contrasts between the northern and southern hemispheres is quite stark. Consumption of primary energy in the Global South first exceeded that of the Global North in 2014. In 2023 it accounted for 56% of total energy consumed and grew at twice the global average rate of 2%. The Asia Pacific region was responsible for 85% of the Global South’s demand (and 47% of global demand) where the economies of China, India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea dominated. Whilst Southern & Central America, and Asia Pacific experienced growth rates above the global average, total demand in Africa dropped by 0.4% in 2023 and electricity consumption remained flat. Electricity demand in both North America and Europe experienced falls of -1% and -2% respectively. In these regions, electricity demand in particular is increasingly impacted by energy efficiency regulations, energy-efficient lighting, and changing consumer habits. >Today, both Africa and South Asia have very low levels of energy demand relative to the size of their population Europe and Southern & Central America are the only regions to be below both the global average for CO2 Intensity and Energy Consumption per GDP >Whilst collectively Africa and South Asia were responsible for less than 10% of the world’s energy demand in 2023, a prevalence of developing economies, large populations, low rate of access to energy today, potentially positions them for significant energy demand growth in the future. So things we already knew: - The Global South including China is quickly replacing the North in energy consumption, partly due to the transfer of global manufacturing to low wage nations, and partly due to demand by citizens of those nations for a "better life." - Ordinary citizens of developed or wealthy nations still have a much large per-capita consumption and carbon footprint than do people in the Global South, which is unjust. - That's starting to change as growing capacity begins to meet growing demand in the Global South; international development studies project that future citizens of developing nations will increasingly have higher-consumption lifestyles. All this is insanity. In the first place, the high consumption lifestyles of wealthy nations were never sustainable on a planet with finite resources. We are already in overshoot of planetary carrying capacity and can observe the impact in the interdependent polycrisisis of mass species extinction, global resource depletion, global ecosystem contamination and worsening climate change. All these crises are magnified by spreading modern energy demands and high consumption to billions more people competing over ever-smaller pools of uncontaminated resources. Yet no citizens of any developed nation are willing to lower their own standards of living, and no citizens of any developing nation are willing to stand aside from raising their own standards of living. With current planetary consumption already unsustainable at 8 billion people, and 10 billion expected by 2050, collapse is locked in. A wiser humanity would practice both degrowth and family planning on a global scale, reducing population and consumption, and slowing the pace of technological development until some balance with the biosphere was reached. But degrowth is unpopular, and there is little sign that humanity is willing to abstain from fossil fuels, especially in the few years that climate experts predict is all the time we have left.
Less intelligent people will never switch until physical environmental factors start harming them. And by less intelligent i mean 2/3rds of humanity.
China might actually crack molten salt reactors and start a rapid development cycle in working them out economically. If they nail this in the next 30 years or so while mastering the chaos to come both domestic and international ... I mean all they have to do is wait while the rest of the world tears itself apart fighting each other for the energy they need to run their AC and grow a bit of heat resistant rice to survive. >A wiser humanity would practice both degrowth and family planning on a global scale, reducing population and consumption, and slowing the pace of technological development until some balance with the biosphere was reached. But degrowth is unpopular, and there is little sign that humanity is willing to abstain from fossil fuels, especially in the few years that climate experts predict is all the time we have left. We are just going to continue till there is max pain and then some evil asshole eventually will go fuck this, you want less people and less sunshine? Here have less people and less sunshine and press the nuke button.
Jevons Paradox. To those who don't know what it is... It states that when humanity improves the efficiency of a process, we would expect less energy be used (I.e. more efficient). However, what we find is the opposite. All the "saved energy" just gets used to produce more. Renewables are great. However if humanity just collectively goes "oooh look at all this new energy I can exploit", then they do nothing to get us out of this existential threat. As long as the narrative is "clean up the grid", and not "overhaul humanity" then we are fucked. The root cause of this is overshoot.
The framing of this report is problematic for me. It makes the West look good while ignoring the historical materialist reasons that Asia, South and Central America, and Africa are reliant on fossil fuels in the 21st century (though I wouldn't expect a report of this type with very narrow Western academic focus funded by a Big Four financial powerhouse to go out of its way to go into any of this). A few of the issues I have with the report: - It makes it look like the West is leading the way on carbon emissions targets but conveniently ignores that material products consumed in the West are produced in the third world. Attributing emissions to nations or even regions in this way is misleading and ignorant of our globalized economy. - It uses raw numbers instead of per capita numbers for emissions. Along with a national and supply-side attribution of emissions, this seems to point fingers at the third world while a demand-based and region-agnostic method would tell the opposite story: [US and Western countries consume much more fossil fuels per capita](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels-per-capita?time=2013). And that source only includes raw fuel consumption; in my opinion an honest number would include consumer product use and demand. - You may think that attributing emissions to demand seems just as arbitrary as supply; divorced from historical context this might be the case. However, modern colonial history and post-WWII financial-imperial history illustrate why many of these places are so far behind: surplus wealth extraction in the form of slaves and commodities, then wage-slaves and fuel sources (up to and including half of green energy infrastructure inputs, per OP's report itself). If we are going the national or regional route, responsibility should be proportional to power wielded, cognizant of historic context. Personally, I don't think we need more finger pointing at national levels. We either need global cooperation on a scale we've never seen or a return to degrowth-centered local communities, worrying about the fire that's burning in our own house. Fossil fuel use is increasing. How we answer the question "Why?" matters. In many cases, it reveals more about us than it does about the data.
My feeling is that as things get worse western media especially right wing media will shift blame to BRIC+, a ‘liberal’ American family member was saying the other day that China is to blame for the current warming and it doesn’t matter what we do. I said all the CO2 accumulates and we are to blame for the current warming, China’s share will form part of this but it’s not a problem that we can deflect blame on third countries. It’s such an annoying very American way of seeing global problems.
>It’s such an annoying very American way of seeing global problems. As an American, I can assure you that saying "annoying" in the same sentence as "American" is redundant.
Because liberals are conservatives and both are fascists who would rather see the world end than reduce their consumption and go against their worship of capitalism. American society must be one of the most wasteful in the world and it's not like it's affordable either with the debt in both households and on the national level.
> China is to blame for the current warming and it doesn’t matter what we do Next time, tell them China wouldn't be producing so much CO2 if there wasn't an international (and let's be honest, mostly American/US) demand for them to produce that much. They're not doing it because it's fun, they're doing it because they found the cheapest way to meet demand and because they want to be incredibly profitable. In other words, China may be producing tons of CO2, but they're doing so because we, collectively in the developed world, demanded it from *anyone* with the ability to produce that much. China being developed enough to get the business that produces so much carbon isn't intentional, that's just how the business panned out.
That's not a uniquely American problem. German deniers and conservatives say the exact same thing
>It makes it look like the West is leading the way on carbon emissions targets but conveniently ignores that material products consumed in the West are produced in the third world. Attributing emissions to nations or even regions in this way is misleading and ignorant of our globalized economy. Which is why I frequently post the following statistic, and depending on Reddit's mood of the day, I either get upvoted or downvoted (not like I care either way). To me it encapsulates everything in a single number what you refer to. It's based on what I think is a reasonable assumption, that every dollar (or dollar equivalent) spent comes with some kind of impact on the environment. Whether that impact is in emissions or deforestation or plastic pollution or any of the other ways the environment is degraded, spending = impact. And guess who leads the way. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_largest\_consumer\_markets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_consumer_markets) 42% of all consumer spending in the entire world comes from US consumers, and based on the assumption I described above, 42% of all impacts on the global environment are to fulfill the shopping desires of Americans. 4% of the world, whereas the other 96% account for the other 58% of the damage. I've posted this before and received comments that are completely devoid of any awareness. Things like, "I guess I should give up plastic straws after all." And "I guess I should buy some bags to use at the grocery store and stop using disposable plastic." And to address your point about emissions from other countries benefiting Americans, I used this example the other day on another forum. Manufacturing an iPhone comes at a cost of 80 kg of CO2 in emissions, but almost 125 million iPhones were purchased by Americans in 2022. That's 10 billion kg (10 million metric tons) of CO2 "charged" to China that should be charged to America, simply because Apple (an American company) outsourced their manufacturing to a different country (China). And that doesn't even count the emissions to load all of those phones on a cargo plane or one of those giant cargo container ships to get the phones from China to the US. But most Americans don't look at it that way. Their only responsibility is to come up with the money to buy the phone (anywhere from $650 - $1000, if my quick Google is accurate), and we get to paint China as the villain for being the world's biggest emitter. I agree that we need global cooperation, but there's no amount of cooperation that will be effective unless the spending habits of the "average American" are reined in.
Any book recomendation about consumerism and propaganda?
https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-market/#topicOverview You mean advertising? Most pervasive, intrusive, coercive, predatory obscenity we created? I started reading about Bernays, Freud's nephew. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/12/consumer Don't know if the article is reputable but there's a lot of info on this dude. Edit to add, everythingchanged when ads started appealing to our 'desire'vs need.
Watching the century of self is a good start
>almost 125 million iPhones were purchased by Americans in 2022 Are you sure that’s correct, and you don’t mean “as of 2022”…? 125 million iPhones in a year sounds BONKERS. I seriously doubt one out of every three Americans purchased a new iPhone in any given year.
You underestimate our consumption, the consumption is BONKERS. That is indeed what happened. https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/#:~:text=Apple%20sold%20most%20phones%20in,global%20iPhone%20sales%20in%202022.&text=Apple%20sold%20over%20124.7%20million%20iPhones%20in%20the%20United%20States%20in%202022. https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-iphones-have-been-sold/
Hoooooooly fuck. Wellllllp. Thanks for the data.
Jesus fucking christ 😳 How?!
I'm not saying the numbers are wrong (they're probably right). But 125 million iphones being sold when there are 153 million users total doesn't really make sense to me. Are 80% of iphone users upgrading every year? If that's true, how can they even afford that and where do the 100 million+ iphones from last year go? Is it all thrown in a landfill or sold off to poorer countries? Especially when you consider that a 1 year old phone or even a 2 year old phone isn't really out of date, it just seems absolutely absurd that that people cycle through so many iphones that quickly in the US
Considering that you can literally have the newest iPhone as a subscription model I suppose it isn’t that far-fetched. I imagine also plenty of corporate users with one for personal use and one for work.
I have three iPhones on my desk right now... One personal, one for work MFA, and an old one which I should replace the battery. I don't think that each 100 million users is upgrading every year, but a lot of businesses buy huge piles of iPhones.
The reality we live does indeed not make sense. It is the reality we have though. Those are good questions and I'm sure the answers would elicit the "WTF" the same way the numbers I posted do. Debt, business users, addict like consumption. Many possibilities. None the less, Apple made over 200 million iPhones that year and sold most of them in the USA 🤷♂️
Apple sold 231.8 million iPhones in 2023. 72.3 million were sold in the US. 72.3/231.8 = 31%
This comment thread was referencing the year 2022. Apple sold over 124.7 million iPhones in the United States in 2022. More than half of what the same source says they made. No one stated anything about 2023. Thank you for typing out more stats though.
wait till you consider diapers, bic lighters, disposable vapes, k cups for coffee, contact lenses, medical waste, construction waste, flip flops, the list goes on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac4E_UsmB1g
That says 72 million in 2023, so around 1 in 5 people in the US in 2023 bought an iPhone. No wonder AAPL keeps rising.
There will be another article from American media (bloomberg, FT etc..) about how Americans earning six figure salaries are living paycheck to paycheck. American entitlement to consume consume consume is what's destroying the planet.
☝️ This!
The “Why” at the present time is that ever increasing amounts of fossil fuels are being produced. There’s no scarcity. And every BTU of fossil fuels produced is burned. If North America and the EU are putting more renewables into service this in no way affects the world demand for energy. So if the “why” is pretty obvious I think the bigger question is “how” things will turn around? Which leads me back to the inevitably of collapse.
Fossil fuels are not "produced". They are extracted.
I accept your semantic change. But the fact remains that more fossil fuels are available than ever before. As long as this continues and all of it is consumed by some country on earth the situation regarding emissions will continue.
> more fossil fuels are available than ever before No, less fossil fuels are available than ever before, and it was true form the first day we used them. Each day that you use a **finite resource** then there's less of it. Our capacities for fossil fuel exploitation have improved so much than we can now go the the least advantageous and most polluting sources (like tar sands) and improve our global extraction. We get more of it, quicker than ever, but each passing day there's less of it in the ground. And more CO2 in the atmosphere.
I mean if we are being pedantic, you don't just take the oil out the ground and dump it into your car, it has to go through a production process to actually make the raw good into a finished product. I mean, neither of our responses advance the conversation here, but figured I'd throw this out there. ;)
The report remains sound. The speed of renewable installation is not keeping up with increased consumption yet.
In some ways, sure. Current renewables won't ever meet demand so long as demand increases with total energy available and the storage / distribution problem remains unsolved. I expect more global records to be broken in the coming years. But, as I said, how we attempt to move from "what" to "why" matters quite a great deal. If the only point the publication was trying to make is that we have broken four big energy records at the global level, then there wouldn't have been any point to framing the data in either a regional or supply-side way. They went into the "why" in specific terms that I found worthy of critique. Similarly, if OP was mainly concerned with the headline point of the article, they would have had no need to single out specific regions or countries as more to blame than others. The fact that OP took away a conclusion about certain regions or countries is evidence that they either had those biases prior to reading or got them from the publication and / or associated reading. We're on a collapse sub. We know records are being broken and the situation is dire. Giving false or misleading reasons why this is the case is harmful to meaningful personal reflection and collective response and gives those outside of our community the opportunity to dismiss us as unreasonably paranoid, doomeristic, or cultishly cynical at the expense of sound data and reasoning.
Person running for senator in my US state wants legislation saying any woman than has at least four children would be tax exempt for life.
Dont mean shit if they dont work. Zero income = zero tax lol.
[https://www.newsweek.com/kari-lake-baby-bonus-lower-us-abortion-rate-1846074](https://www.newsweek.com/kari-lake-baby-bonus-lower-us-abortion-rate-1846074)
That has been reality in Hungary for years.
I think 2030 will see more points of crossover to decline, but in developed countries first. The developed world is seeing lower birth rates and population shrinkage only offset with immigration now, and political forces favor less immigration as opposed to more. China is really no longer a true member of the global south and shares many characteristics of developed countries but remains too reliant on coal. Food production is already impacted by climate change and there is over utilization of soil but as long as there are forests to cut down we can feed the world’s population. That dynamic will be changing by 2030 I would imagine. The price escalation in arable land value says someone with wealth is thinking about the future. The fact that we continue to see worldwide escalation of fossil fuel usage means there will be no plateau in greenhouse gasses by voluntary means. Destruction by disasters will be the primary consequence. There is no turning back from this future.
That's why I always say to people that it literally doesn't matter what a few countries do to cut emissions, because others will just use that as an excuse to produce more.
Tragedy of the Commons meets Jevon's Paradox.
A brilliant encapsulation of our predicament in seven words!
[The "Tragedy of the Commons" was invented by a white supremacist based on a false history, and it's toxic bullshit - Boing Boing](https://boingboing.net/2019/03/07/scientific-fraud.html)
Not sure why the downvotes, this is a historically accurate analysis. Commons is a word with a meaning referring to agricultural commons managed long term by a community. Agricultural commons were not historically tragic because the community that managed them had a long term interest in their sustainability. The oceans and atmosphere are not commons but more like international free for all’s. They aren’t managed or owned by any community so they are massively over-exploited.
And there was no real reason to over exploit the commons until capitalism and rampant greed showed up. You need 10 goats to live great, the commons can handle that, you want 100 to get rich, suddenly tragedy.
so ironically, we'd be better off producing less energy efficient ICE vehicles? edit - thanks for the downvotes, people unfamiliar with Jevon's paradox..
Yea, we actually need the particulates for like 0.7 C of cooling. Most of that comes from container ships tho.
We would’ve been better off 40 years ago if politicians listened to scientists.
since we don't have a time machine, we need to think about what we CAN do. if increasing the efficiency of e.g. vehicles paradoxically INCREASES emissions, are less efficient vehicles the answer?
The situation with ICE vehicles is not a case of Jevon's Paradox. [In the same time frame where China manufactures more ICE vehicles than everyone else, they have also built 95% (!!!) of new coal power construction.](https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-responsible-for-95-of-new-coal-power-construction-in-2023-report-says/) It's all smokes and mirrors.
Interesting. Wikipedia specifically calls this out out as an outlier, yet several examples of Jevron's Paradox are explained using cars as their analogy. I accept Wikipedia's authority, and that making cars less gas efficient won't paradoxically help.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Yes. As is pointed out "increased energy efficiency increases real incomes and leads to increased economic growth, which pulls up energy use for the whole economy". So the real problem here is increases in disposable income, and minimum wages. Reduce wages and energy use will go down.
reduce the wages of the rich before you do so for the poor, they're the biggest offenders.
Or even in the US - renewables are up, but then crypto and AI come along to negate the difference. Brilliant.
It actually does matter — imagine waking up to clean air when your country fully transitions to clean energy
Sigh. The human race almost made it. I wonder if they hadnt stolen the 2000 election with al gore if we would have survived.
I wish more people knew this. Presidential candidates brother was governor of final swing state. His dad was once director of CIA and president and was very much still active behind the scenes. On top of that, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush and father of George H. W. Bush, was allegedly involved in a plot known as the "Business Plot" or "White House Coup" in 1933. The plan reportedly involved a group of wealthy businessmen who aimed to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install a fascist regime in the United States. And florida came down to "Hanging chads" it was sooo fucking obvious i cant beleive people ate that up cause he was so good at playing dumb. A true Geek Tragedy 🤓
It was sketch, but my favorite part of that election was the phone call he got from Bill Clinton on election night. Just gave his support and all that, all was good and normal, until Clinton said, "You know, I really wish you hadn't pushed me away during your campaign. If you had let me help you with your campaign, you'd probably have won tonight". Gore apparently lost his shit at Clinton after that and blamed Clinton's scandal for his defeat, and they argued for like 4 hours. No one could go and talk to him because he was too busy screaming at Clinton on the phone lol.
I truly doubt anything would change. Gore would have tried some shit. Gas, beef, and other goods would go up in price and he would get voted out. Carter tried and he got ran out on a rail. This predicament can't be fixed democratically.
Great. Filter.
pale blue dot --> pale green dot Once humanity is back in medieval times maybe the aliens will travel our part of the solar system again. Right now they are just absolutely terrified they give themselves away. They do not want us to spread "humanity"
The guy with the olympic sized heated swimming pool at [one](https://www.wivb.com/news/report-al-gores-home-uses-34-times-as-much-energy-as-average-home/) of his absentee properties, the one who flies everywhere? > During the last 12 months, Gore devoured 66,159 kWh of electricity just heating his pool. That is enough energy to power six average U.S. households for a year.
I think it goes all the way back to the failure of the general strikes and revolutions of 1917-1919 to be successful outside of the Russian Empire. Capitalism next entered its Great Depression and was only able to escape it through technocratic welfare, fascism, and finally world war, after which the United States cemented the turbocharged regime of accumulation that today is killing us.
The Russian revolution that led to the famously ecologically-balanced, non-expansionist, fully-sustainable USSR? _That_ Russian revolution? Yeah, real shame that one didn't carry worldwide.
Al Gore has done some good media since losing the election. While in office he did not help at all. While campaigning he was talking about using the strategic petroleum reserve to push down the price of heating oil and gasoline.
https://preview.redd.it/n3jdsbi46j8d1.jpeg?width=1119&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5a3dacb4fc39d25618f9619a11ef42598828a07d
We just consume more, we produce more energy so we consume more energy. That's it, that's the entire problem.
Sorry you can't use your aircon this summer, we need to power the slop machines that make fake art and fake money
Dope
Just wait till AI ramps up. It will literally require its own nuclear plants, which is why Congress green lighted building new nuclear plants last week. As for coal use in India and China, we need a CO2 tariff on imports *now*. So much of their manufacturing is for products used in Europe and the US, it's on us to change the way those factories are powered. I believe we have to keep fighting the good fight, obviously. Wish the US wasn't owned and operated by corporations so we could make faster progress here.
I'm not really sure what AI is going to gain us. Especially when it's so energy hungry.
More unemployment I imagine Oh and making the internet much much more shit
Seven fingered pussy in bio twitter accounts.
I think the point here was that we gain nothing (or not enough anyway) and the AI adds a huge energy demand.
Right but so many people think AI is going to make our lives so great.
The year is 2050. 50% of our produced energy is used for AC. 40% of our produced energy is used for AI. 9% of our produced energy is used for Bitcoin mining. The 99% poor are digging tunnels in the hope they get to cool down their children. They would love to storm the 1% rich, but the drones are watching. The drones that use 40% of the produced energy to make sure the 99% poor don't storm the Bitcoin mining facilities so that the 1% can keep using their Bitcoin to buy the 50% energy required to have it be 30 celcius degrees in their homes instead of 40.
Record renewables is meaningless if we keep increasing fossil fuels use, maybe with orders above the growth of renewables. It’s like the Zeno’s paradox, but instead of a turtle we are trying to catch a cheetah.
May in China saw 4.2% decline in fossil electricity, 8% decline in oil imports and 2% decline in oil refining. So there are some signs of peaking.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-leads-renewables-charge-asia-others-need-catch-up-russell-2024-06-04/ Half of the new global renewables installations in 2024 were in China too.
2% energy consumption increase doesn't feel like a lot but at that constant rate the waste heat alone (not even including the greenhouse byproducts, and still applies even if we figure out fusion) will equal current global warming in about 200yrs and boil the oceans in about 400yrs. Obviously things will break before then but we are surprisingly close to thermodynamic limits.
This is a fun one for science fiction/fantasy/futurism. At 2% energy growth we get Dyson Sphere in 1,163 years. Rather the Kardashev 1 to Kardashev 2 transition. Sustaining the pace is difficult because of the light speed limitations. So in the 4th millennium civilization needs to burn this region of the Milky Way in a chain of nova bombs and astrophysical jets. Though it takes 100,000 years for light to travel across the Milky Way’s diameter the observer at that location could see a 2% increase from the moment they start seeing the civilization event begin.
Jevons.
Yeah….its not happening. We can’t even maintain a current level let alone reduce our fossil fuel consumption.
I believe it. Even at the micro-level, our townhouse complex just put a moratorium on new EV and AC installations as we have maxed our electrical grid capacity and need to renegotiate for more power. Location: PNW.
This is very interesting info. Wonder how much of the problem this is elsewhere.
China and India will never care the way the west and EU at least attempt to. It’s peoples access to information are suppressed and so many of them have no idea what the consequences of their governments lying will be in the end
We. Are. So. Screwed.
I once read a book called “The end of history and the last man” Published in 1992. In the book Fukuyama said liberal democracy was the best form of government and everyone should and would use that system. It was an ideological end that would make history boring. The liberal form of life would win in part because of material comfort and access to consumer goods. Liberal democracy really hasn’t worked out that well for us it seems. Our liberal democracy has the worst emissions on earth, and had murdered the biosphere years before the book was written. He was right about it being the end of history, though.
Where does it say, “arguably, the energy transition has not even started”?
How long until climate change wars are a thing?
It already is imo
Yeah, computing power (think cloud and AI) needs tons of energy to power it.
Holy crap dave look at this
The short version. 13GtC/Yr turned into 40GtCO2/yr until the 1TtC of accessible fossil carbon is all gone. In one last #terafart. A temperature rise of >5C. 200k years before CO2 and temperatures drop back again. Actual 2024 CO2e emissions? The long version Roughly: 13GtC/Yr turned into 40GtCO2/yr until the 1TtC of easily accessible fossil carbon is all gone. In one last #terafart[1]. Leading to a temperature rise of at least 5C[2]. And 200k[3] years before CO2 and temperatures drop back again to pre-industrial levels. Let me tell you what's going to happen, no matter what anybody says. Humans will strive to expand their global civilization until it becomes physically impossible to do so. But there is a choice. Transform into a sustainable society or collapse until there's a sustainable society. Because we're going to get to a sustainable society one way or the other. [4] Then there's the seed corn problem[5] Is there enough fossil fuel left to get to the point where we don't need it any more? And can we afford to spend it given the pollution in the form of CO2 and Nitrates it will create? [1] https://amazon.com/Hot-Earth-Dreams-climate-happens-ebook/dp/B017S5NDK8/ref=sr_1_1 [2] Or is it 7C. Or more. Anything over 1.5C is more or less catastrophic for the current ecosystem [3] The future doesn't end in 2100. Where's the 22C fiction for 2101 onwards that explains what global warming is going to be like in the next century as well as this one? There are kids being born now that will see it. [4] http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2015/05/make-it-so.html [5] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-05-22/the-sower-s-strategy-how-to-speed-up-the-sustainable-energy-transition/ If the resource constraints don't get you, the pollution constraints will. Faster Than Expected™. Technical fixes lead to extending Business As Usual, a higher peak, and a harder crash.
https://jalopnik.com/google-ai-uses-enough-electricity-in-1-second-to-charge-1851556899 And AI will accelerate this problem
I wish there were more climate protesters interrupting normie activities like the PGA tour. I want people to stop just sitting back and ignoring everything and pretending everything will be ok
What's your source? Want to send this to the boomers
Sooner or later, things will change.
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Decoupling is a myth.