Now and again some commentator will claim that we lack to resources to support our population sustainably -- either today or in the near future. But the fact is, even with current technology we have plenty of sustainable resources for our ~7 billion population and for the ~10 billion we expect in the future. What prevents this is not scarcity but folly and cruelty.
What are the constraints usually cited? There is soil and sustainable food production. But as I recently documented, we can feed ten billion sustainably if we choose to. There is freshwater, but as I documented, we have sustainable ways to deal with that as well.
What about energy? Right now we use about 14 terrawatts total primary energy world wide. The most conservative estimates of potential efficiency increases say we can double efficiency. And the most conservative estimates overlook stuff we are doing in some places at this very moment, including the potential for changes in material intensity and savings in thermal losses by producing electricity from mostly non-combustion sources.
But of course we are also going to have increased population and a lot of poor people who want to get richer. So it is not unreasonable to assume that a ten-billion-population world that consumes energy thriftily but lives a decent lifestyle with indoor plumbing, hot water, refrigerators, basic electronics, enough to eat, enough work, enough leisure, and plenty to do with that leisure will consume around 25 average terawatts worldwide.
About a quarter of this will be low-temperature needs for climate control, hot water, and perhaps refrigeration, 80% of which can reasonably be supplied by passive and active low temp solar thermal. That's around 4 terrawatts. Existing hydroelectric plus new generators in existing dams plus geothermal can supply another terrawatt. Somewhere between 1 and 3 terrawatts can probably be provided by biomass in the form of methanol, biogas, or diesel and gasoline produced by the Fischer-Tropp process without competing with food or drawing down the remaining wild part of the biosphere -- say, 1.5 terrawatts at a guess. If algae production becomes commercialized, we produce much more, but lets stick to proven technology that is less than double the current cost of fossil fuel.
That leaves 18.5 terrawatts to supply in the form of electricity.
According the Stanford Researchers, global commercial potential for wind is 72 Terrawatts at 80 meters, limited to sites with class 3 wind or better. Using about .29 percent of capacity on average, and allowing for transmission and storage losses, this would require about 3.7 million 5 megawatt wind generators. In contrast, the total number of oil and gas wells drilled worldwide is around 7 million.
Similarly, 18.5 terawatts generated via solar thermal in the desert would require about 3 percent of all desert land. Roads and parking alone require about a fifth of this.
Of course there is a great deal of other potential out there. Photovoltatics may soon become inexpensive enough that integrated cells on rooftops, south walls, windows, and so on can provide a significant percent of power. Geothermal, wave power, and various means of tapping ocean currents may soon improve radically. We may improve wind technology to the point where we can tap the jet stream. But even if none of the breakthroughs occur soon, it is obvious that wind (combined with major increases in efficiency), low-temperature solar thermal for domestic use (especially passive solar), and high temperature solar for electrical and certain industrial uses could easily meet all our needs through 2050.
Now, these are only some constraints. But the fact that we overcome these critical constraints sustainably is a strong indicator that we can overcome others as well.
That doesn't keep population outstripping resources from being a possible long-term problem. But it is not a short-term problem.
Comments
View as Flat
JMG Posted 6:17 am
10 May 2007
But my head jerked back when I got to here:
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But even if none of the breakthroughs occur soon, it is obvious that wind (combined with major increases in efficiency), low-temperature solar thermal for domestic use (especially passive solar), and high temperature solar for electrical and certain industrial uses could easily meet all our needs through 2050.
Now, these are only some constraints. But the fact that we overcome these critical constraints sustainably is a strong indicator that we can overcome others as well.
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How did this radical reorientation of the entire world's energy use become "could easily meet all our needs"?
And how did this sustainable paradise become a past fact indicative of our ability to overcome other constraints? Correct me if I'm wrong, but we didn't "overcome these critical constraints sustainably" yet, did we? It seems like you leapt from your conceptual broadbrush outline of an imagined sustainable future to an assertion that we had actually accomplished it.
Second, it seems there is something critical missing from all your analyses:
Don't we need to take wars and other forms of terrorism into account when discussing future requirements and capacities for energy, food, and water? Everything I read (whether it's your stuff or stuff from Les Brown, or Amory Lovins, or others) all seems to make two gigantic implicit assumptions:
a) that nations and subnational groups will, today (tomorrow at the latest) stop making wars --- using energy to break things belonging to other people and to kill other people and, therefore, that
b) all the sustainable life-supporting infrastructure we require for energy, food, and water can be built and will last for its design life and will never be intentionally destroyed by others.
I don't think either assumption makes very much sense right now.
Last I checked, the world's most miltarily powerful nation was spending trillions of dollars on weapons of mass destruction and on tools and technologies to target the civil infrastructure of other nations, and was practicing in using the latter while threatening to use the former (see "all options on the table" re: Iran). And in both of its attacks on Iraq (and during the sanctions years), this powerful nation specifically targeted and destroyed Iraq's life-support infrastructure for energy and water. And this is just one war in one place.
Modern warfare doctrine values civilian infrastructure as targets second only to the opponent's forces in being, because an opponent's ability to resist depends on that infrastructure. And modern non-state actors are getting increasingly good at using force and violence to kill people and break things as well. Is this likely to stop soon?
My point is, unless you can show that the nation states are going to stop funding and fighting wars and that subnational groups are going to stop funding and fighting using "terrorism," then there's a huge elephant that you're not talking about sitting in the middle of your spreadsheets.
Unless you factor in some level of annual use of energy to make war and some annual level of destruction of life-support infrastructure (for energy, food, and water), you're just painting hopeful word pictures. Nice ones, but it's hard to see how they apply to anything in the real world.
"An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."
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Nigel Goddard Posted 6:46 am
10 May 2007
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Gar Lipow Posted 7:23 am
10 May 2007
Take an alternative approach: stopping population growth before 2050. That is every bit as difficult as stopping war. If done without doing something about inequality you will meet massive resistance. Imagine telling a woman in Gabon: "you have less than a sixth the income of a USAian. You use less than one sixth the resources. You must have fewer children so there is enough left for us rich Americans to stay rich."
Try telling that to the entire world. The drastic social change associated with a world that tries to provide resources to everyone is less difficult that the social change I described. But it seems more radical to someone in a rich nation, because it requires changes in the way our countries run, instead of just asking those exotic others out there to listen to our wisdom on birth control.
A fairer world is ultimately more practical. Income equality and womens rights ultimately results in population stabilization (and even decline in some countries) by default.
Not an easy thing. I don't think our odds are particularly good; but I don't despair either. We still have some chance. We have seen other drastic changes take place quickly; and more rapid communications and transportation means history sometimes happens faster than in the past.
My point is not a Tinkerbell optimism that everything will be all right by itself; my point is that the solutions are physically and economically feasible--that we need to concentrate on the political and social changes to implement them.
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Billhook Posted 8:21 am
10 May 2007
your question "How fast can we make the necessary investment without dropping living standards to cause instability" - begs some clarification -
Causing an acceptable degree of instability is normal political practice - and at the other extreme, sufficient instability would fragament and terminate our high-tech gloal society.
So we are looking at the degree of destabilization that society faces,
be that intentionally in attempting to navigate past the hazards,
or be that imposed by the hazards themselves.
As JMG described, there is an Elephant in the spreadshheets which is the profitability of making war, with its vast and ongoing waste of life & resources.
Yet there are also two other pivotal threats, call them a Rhino & a Gnu, which need to be integrated into such an overview.
The Rhino is the full spectrum impacts of climate destabilization -
affecting food security, water security, mass migration, and a host of other interactive and iterative factors.
Among these is the foreseeable necessity of the Re-insurance industry withdrawing cover in areas prone to mass destruction by weather impacts.
At the local level, this is about domestic & commercial mortgages being called in due to the properties' uninsurability.
The shock of overnight loss of business collateral would be seismic. (See Florida housing bubble).
Plainly, the impact of reinsurers' contraction on investor confidence has yet to be properly considered in public fora.
The Gnu is an odder and still less mitigable a beast - it is the wholly unavoidable peak and subsequent decline of global oil & gas production, which even some rather conservative authorities suggest may be within a decade.
On their rising production the economic growth ideology has been built.
With their decline, global economic growth is no longer tenable.
The degree to which this will push our global society towards terminal destabilization is beyond any useful prediction.
While I've no more foreknowledge of what is to come than anyone else, having watched the corrupt negligence for over 3 decades shrugging off attempts at its ouster,
my time is now spread over two fields - campaigning for the Treaty of the Atmospheric Commons
(without which starvation seems quite a possibility)
and establishing a small college of traditional farming here in Wales
(without which starvation again seems quite a possibility).
So finally, in answer to the jist of your question, I'd say no,
it seems unlikely that we can make the investment fast enough to maintain this society's stability.
Regards,
Bill
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Bart Anderson Posted 9:01 am
10 May 2007
Bart
Energy Bulletin
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Delay And Deny Posted 5:27 pm
10 May 2007
When you think that 3% of the world's population controls 84% of the wealth, you really have to question all these "shortages".
Are they true shortages of supply, or are the 3% simply hoarding the lion's share of the Earth's riches for themselves?
The argument about the masses hungering for more and laying waste to the climate by burning a few hut fires really irks me.
No one points the cannon at the gargantuan carbon emitters like Richard Branson.
John Bailo, The "Denier Guy"
You Read It Here First
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amazingdrx Posted 12:44 am
11 May 2007
Think of life as not a contest between cultures or religions in order to see who can out populate the rest. But rather, life as art and art as life.
The right place for science and technology in this world view is as a tool to enhance the quality of life. Not as an excuse to further increase the human load on the already burdened living earth.
Think art and values instead of engineering.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GtoeOne Posted 3:28 am
11 May 2007
Can the soil sustain 10 billion people for a long time? Right now soil is enhanced with fertilizer from hydro-carbon sources. In a situation with constraints on hydro-carbon could the soil continue with enhancements from other sources?
The biggest constraint will be on kwHr/GDP per capita. As both population and GDP/capita grow one other the other will have to give. The fear of those of us that live in rich countries with high GDP is that prices will be forced so high that it will impact our life-style. I think we may be seeing some of that now.
The point that the amazing Dr. X is trying to make (I think) is that we don't want to approach resource constrained growth. It will not be pleasant and I don't want my children to grow up in a world that is a struggle for survival where the bottom 5% is starving off and everyone is struggling to stay out of the bottom.
We need as a planet to decide on what world population should be then start taking action to reduce family size in areas that are over the sustainability limit. Actions would be similar to China's one baby law. This is what we should do, but I see no possibility of this happening. There is no political will to take action and there won't be until there are shortages.
The costs of converting to wind/PV will be very large. I need to estimate the amount of iron, aluminum, copper and silicon that will have to be melted to build this infrastructure. To build a windmill takes 120 tons of steel at 19GJ/Ton (metric) multiply 120 tons* 19GJ/ton*3.7million windmills = 8.4x10^9 GJ to produce the steel to build the windmills. I don't have similar numbers for any other technology handy.
350,000 people are born each day, 150,000 die, net there are 200,000 more people each day.
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GRLCowan Posted 3:53 am
11 May 2007
... To build a windmill takes 120 tons of steel at 19GJ/Ton (metric) multiply 120 tons* 19GJ/ton*3.7million windmills = 8.4x10^9 GJ to produce the steel to build the windmills. I don't have similar numbers for any other technology handy.
Some of them are here.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
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Gar Lipow Posted 5:14 am
11 May 2007
In terms of fertility of the soil. One of the previous post I linked to deals with soil structure and fertility in depth. Agriculture can build soil structure and fertility instead of eroding and degrading it.
In terms of living in a resource constrained world. With the degree of inequality we have now, our world would be resource constrained even at population of two billion. The rich nations alone, the U.S. , Canada, the EU, Japan, Austrialia, New Zealand plus few other nations on their own consume and pollute more than is sustainable. This has nothing to do with population: it is a matter of waste , of massive inequality and of criminal indifference.
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Gar Lipow Posted 5:27 am
11 May 2007
Note that of course no one would put 3.7 million wind generators all at once, so that at some point most of the energy going into the steel used in wind generators would come from wind generators. (For non-recycled steel you still need some carbon, probably from charcoal, but 95%+ of the energy even in new steel can come from electricity. Both new and recycled steel can be made in Electric Arc Furnaces, but where recycled steel can use the carbon already in the scrap, new steel requires a carbon source added to the iron ore.)
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MarkUK Posted 6:04 am
11 May 2007
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caniscandida Posted 6:28 am
11 May 2007
<<
Last I checked, the world's most militarily powerful nation was spending trillions of dollars on weapons of mass destruction and on tools and technologies to target the civil infrastructure of other nations, and was practicing in using the latter while threatening to use the former (see "all options on the table" re: Iran). And in both of its attacks on Iraq (and during the sanctions years), this powerful nation specifically targeted and destroyed Iraq's life-support infrastructure for energy and water. And this is just one war in one place.
>>
And JMG gets even better, as she/he goes on.
The herd of fat-bellied, craven hadrosaurs in the room is of course the US electorate.
Congratulations to Billhook, for a couple of other interesting metaphors. Very well done!
Gar himself is the frantic, over-energetic dik-dik in the room, who would do much better if only he slowed down and took the time to write good, clear, grammatical and well-spelled English.
As for the manure-sweepers in the room, one hopes they are unionized, with full medical benefits reverting to their families ...
But really, JMG, you raise an issue of great importance, both for economists and for ethicists.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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vinbeazel Posted 4:13 pm
13 May 2007
Our group just completed a video contest for HAWG power, in cooperation with LiftportEnergy.com and GreenEnergyTV.com, to launch a video of an energy kite, carrying a wind generator to several hundred feet; the deadline was Earth Day 2007...the winner of the contest was Kite Gen dot eu, which launched their video on YouTube - search on kitegen.
Here is an article that we published today about building windfarms along our northern and southern borders, to create an energy production zone; we published on salon.com in response to an article about border security:
Why not build wind farms along our borders?
our energy education groups - American Windfarms would like to suggest that power plants on our borders, guarded by energy coops and land owners/leasing companies would provide much better security than fences, and could also provide home-grown energy to communities on both sides of the borders.
Having something to protect would bring value to the border regions, and make it easier to create employment and training opportunities on both sides. The energy contractors are capable of hiring security to guard their plants, and their could be energy contracts for wind solar and geothermal drilling - why not allow the drilling companies to bid on land, along with wind and solar developers?
All that the politicos want is a tug of war; americans in the north and south countries want solutions...stop waiting for the government. Let the energy contractors in other countries make a bid on leasing borderlands, and create energy production zones in this very large region of wilderness. All of the oil companies are getting into clean energy technologies; let them lease lands along our borders, and take the problems away from the government, with a free enterprise solution.
www.myspace.com/americanwindfarms
Renwable Projects Mission RPM
Tehachapi, CA
661-823-1463
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Pangolin Posted 7:23 pm
13 May 2007
In my town real-estate agents by the dozens accost anyone they suspect might be interested in purchasing a house. "Please let me help you," they say. Curiosly they have no interest in helping people without the wherewithal to lay down $370k for a 40 year old 3br/2ba, 1/6th acre lot.
Collectively, they could give a crap about anybody who fits into the bottom twenty percent of incomes. Except for voting for every concievable means of jailing more of them.
The earth will never support 10 billion people because the current system relies on the relative generousity of the wealthy to keep the poor alive during times of famine. Lately the wealthy have been showing no inclination to keep the poor alive during times of feast.
Christian Aid released a report today cited by the BBC saying that the world faces 1 billion refugees by 2050. One-seventh of the worlds population.
Faith is good but experience is more reliable.
Put the Carbon Back
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