This thread has evolved into a "don't rain on my parade with reality" rant.
I agree completely.
This thread has evolved into a "don't rain on my parade with reality" rant.
Overshoot is not just a function of not enough energy. Carrying capacity is determined by the least abundant necessity. Liebig's Law.
Unlimited energy in a finite world still has limits.
Maybe I should start the worse "post of the week"?
Dezakin wrote:No it doesnt. Unlimited energy means you're not living in a finite world anymore, as everything becomes a function of energy.
MonteQuest wrote:This poll simply makes no sense.
orz wrote:There are no limits to our growth given a large and long-lived enough energy source.
Ibon wrote:Environmentalists and ecologists do not trust energy sources that add supplemental energy to human endeavours since humans act like all other critters and just multiply using this supplemental energy.
orz wrote:
There's more places to live in this universe than "Mother Gaia" if one has sufficient energy to build the tools to get there and inhabit the area.
orz wrote:
And in any case you seem to still be running under the faulty assumption of infinite exponential population growth, which simply isn't the only(or even most likely) scenario.
EnergySpin wrote:Your attitude is that we need to have less energy in order to be in harmony with nature because we will never behave in an ethical manner. Wasn't this the main thrust for the Prohibition?
Connect the dots ... did Prohibition work? One cannot make people behave ethically by illegalizing/wiping out our "vices". It did not work with booze, it clearly does not work with drugs and it will not work with energy.
Ibon wrote:EnergySpin wrote:Your attitude is that we need to have less energy in order to be in harmony with nature because we will never behave in an ethical manner. Wasn't this the main thrust for the Prohibition?
Connect the dots ... did Prohibition work? One cannot make people behave ethically by illegalizing/wiping out our "vices". It did not work with booze, it clearly does not work with drugs and it will not work with energy.
Thank you for acknowledging that energy is a potentail vice. I find your analogy very compelling concerning drugs, alcohol and energy. They all have great benefits for health and recreation and can easily be abused. That is the reason they are regulated and we have a whole moral legal system that addresses the issue of their abuse. Isn't that exactly what we are saying here in regards to our usage of energy? That is anything but some outdated 60's eco philosophy. I do agree with you that completely discarding nuclear as an option is perhaps an extreme position as in prohibition. But holding ourselves to the highest "moral" standard in regards to energy would certainly be the goal of renewables meeting our energy needs. And our history of abuse and not holding ourselves to limits certainly justifies the question if we need to develop an energy source that will allow us unrestrained growth. It is exactly the potential "high" of nuclear that makes one caution.
To follow your analogy one step further. Ramping up renewables as we decline with fossil fuels is like alcohol and pot, soft drugs. Nuclear can play on the environment like heroin. It is highly addictive in giving humanity a rush toward ramping up their population and consumption. We do control these highly addictive substances that we cant seem to manage. That is a form of prohibition as you say. For good reason.
Doly wrote:Ibon wrote:Environmentalists and ecologists do not trust energy sources that add supplemental energy to human endeavours since humans act like all other critters and just multiply using this supplemental energy.
I can see the logic here. But there is a problem with the concept: what is supplemental energy? To put a clear example, if fusion was developed, it would be extracting energy from stuff that is plentyful and I don't think it could be exhausted easily.
Even fission is something I'm not quite sure if it could be called "supplemental". Breeder reactors look like they could be working for a long, long time. Perhaps enough to bridge until fusion is developed.
Daryl wrote:I don't think the nuclear advocates on these boards are necessarily starry eyed optimist growth advocates in the Corsi mode. The transition is going to be very difficult. I think energy is going to get expensive and scarce. I doubt nuclear will be able to fuel a new growth boom. It's going to be part of a new era of limits, in the best case. The nuclear advocates on the board are arguing that it has the ability to prevent collapse and die-off, unlike say solar and wind power.
MonteQuest wrote:
This thread has evolved into a "don't rain on my parade with reality" rant.
Thank you for acknowledging that energy is a potentail vice. I find your analogy very compelling concerning drugs, alcohol and energy. They all have great benefits for health and recreation and can easily be abused. That is the reason they are regulated and we have a whole moral legal system that addresses the issue of their abuse. Isn't that exactly what we are saying here in regards to our usage of energy? That is anything but some outdated 60's eco philosophy. I do agree with you that completely discarding nuclear as an option is perhaps an extreme position as in prohibition. But holding ourselves to the highest "moral" standard in regards to energy would certainly be the goal of renewables meeting our energy needs. And our history of abuse and not holding ourselves to limits certainly justifies the question if we need to develop an energy source that will allow us unrestrained growth. It is exactly the potential "high" of nuclear that makes one caution.
To follow your analogy one step further. Ramping up renewables as we decline with fossil fuels is like alcohol and pot, soft drugs. Nuclear can play on the environment like heroin. It is highly addictive in giving humanity a rush toward ramping up their population and consumption. We do control these highly addictive substances that we cant seem to manage. That is a form of prohibition as you say. For good reason.
Oh, and if we could just "tap" all that energy. However, sustainability is not just about energy. Perhaps we have considered the Big Picture.
We could live beyond sustainable limits even on just the received solar flux. Population, arable land, water, loss of biodiversity, topsoil, etc.
Ludi wrote:I calculated to replace our fossil fuel plants in Texas with nukes, we'd need to build 21 new reactors, at least.
Where the heck would we build these, I wonder?
I don't see this happening.
GoIllini wrote: The fact of the matter is that we will have plenty of time to figure out another way to destroy ourselves before we hit peak nuclear, which is likely hundreds, if not thousands of years off.
Ibon wrote:FatherOfTwo wrote:If so, then why on earth do you insist on bashing nuclear? Why are you not seeing the big picture in this case?
I'll answer for myself this question. Is nuclear putting out an immediate fire but planting the seeds of a greater inferno? I don't mean bombs here either.
Nuclear is an energy we can harnass that supplements the energy alreadly falling on the planet from solar flux. Fossil fuels did basically the same thing in that we pulled out of the ground stored solar energy like a battery to supplement the total available energy during the past 150 years. This supplemental energy permits us humans to develop societies that live beyond their carrying capacities since we don't know how to manage or design on our own limits to our growth. This is the bigger picture Father of Two and inherant in the nuclear solution are the seeds of this greater inferno. Using renewable energy sources forces us to live within the sustainable amount of energy that falls on the planet and avoids these imbalances.
FatherOfTwo wrote:I understand and agree wholeheartedly that we must learn to live off only the solar flux.
But we cannot go from where we are now to sustainability in one fell swoop. It isn't doable, and the resultant chaos will be too much to overcome. We must have a bridge to get us there and that bridge is nuclear. We must learn to crawl and walk before we can run.
Daryl wrote:GoIllini wrote: The fact of the matter is that we will have plenty of time to figure out another way to destroy ourselves before we hit peak nuclear, which is likely hundreds, if not thousands of years off.
Sure, we pretty much stamped out TB. It's allowed us to live long enough to get killed by cancer and heart disease.
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