Losing Earth:The Decade We Almost .......

[sendler]

We also knew about "The Limits To Growth" in 1972. And were also unable to implement any social change.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...aring-collapse
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Free market capitalism only functions with growth. With no growth there is no investment. There is no opportunity for the poor and middle class to ascend. So there is no motivation to work hard. Without growth. By the time we started to figure all of this out in 1970, we were already trapped in a flawed system that requires cornucopian access to increasing amounts energy and natural resources to keep from crashing. In the last 20 years we have grown world debt to a level far beyond what can ever be repaid due to physical limits on resources and energy.

[NeilBlanchard]

Originally Posted by RustyLugNut

Yet, the same people who believe in the cleanliness of solar and wind ignore the huge waste streams implied in the production and maintenance of these renewable sources.

And what would those waste streams be?

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Adding energy increases chaos.



Compared to the signatories trajectory heading up.

*We probably ought to specifically qualify where the energy was sourced from and where it was consumed.We can't escape the second law of thermodynamics,but we certainly have the means to minimize it.
*The signatories to the Paris accord will have to face themselves in the mirror.
I have no control over what they do.Some have gone on record,that their near term plans include abolishing internal combustion.The CIA probably thought that would have been a good idea in 1960.
Henry Ford was for the League of Nations taking over the planet,with a one-world government,abolishing all the flags and different currencies.Without any potential for war,we'd have money for nothing but 'butter.'
Heck,you could even enlist John Galt and his atmospheric, static electricity accumulator/amplification/power distribution technology.

[Vman455]

Originally Posted by sendler

We also knew about "The Limits To Growth" in 1972. And were also unable to implement any social change.
.
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...aring-collapse

This article makes a huge mistake that the authors of Limits to Growth warn about multiple times in the book: the World3 model is not a prediction machine. It is impossible to predict the future; what World3 does is spit out likely scenarios based on current and past trends. At no point do the authors point to specific years or decades as the time we "should" see some effect.

Free market capitalism only functions with growth. With no growth there is no investment. There is no opportunity for the poor and middle class to ascend. So there is no motivation to work hard. Without growth. By the time we started to figure all of this out in 1970, we were already trapped in a flawed system that requires cornucopian access to increasing amounts energy and natural resources to keep from crashing. In the last 20 years we have grown world debt to a level far beyond what can ever be repaid due to physical limits on resources and energy.

As the authors of Limits to Growth point out, we've been in overshoot since the 1970s. Of the four scenarios for future development they present, only two are still possible: retraction in population and resource consumption until we reach an equilibrium with the carrying capacity of the planet, or collapse. Collapse is more likely because of the significant delay in feedback (for example, it's taken hundreds of years of carbon dioxide pollution to raise atmospheric concentrations to a level high enough to have a noticeable effect). Since there are no immediate consequences to overshoot, and the consequences take decades or possibly centuries to come to fruition, we won't do anything about it. Heck, half the people on this thread don't believe there's anything wrong or that there's anything going on we can't solve in future.

[sendler]

It won't be centuries. Three decades at the most. Maybe one if world currencies start to fail one after the other due to debt overhang.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

That's what I was thinking too, but they probably didn't want anyone being able to listen in or recording everything they talked about, a good portion likely had nothing to do with saving the world. Probably had something more in the neighborhood of making the proletariat live off less and ensure those worthy of the conference and their handlers having more.

Yeah,to be a fly on the wall would have been enlightening!
Wealth and power must be the ultimate opiate.It's hard to imagine the dominant alphas to submit,or allow interlopers into their rarified demographic.
If the MATRIX's concept of us as 'copper-tops' is correct,then whatever happens to us really matters not.
Michael Crichton could have written an interesting ending.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by freebeard

On 20010911 we learned what happens when you ground all the airliners.

When you hear about the dangers of geo-engineering, think about the covert governmental programs to seed the atmosphere with chemtails of who-knows-what to combat anthropogenic global warming, when it's the only thing staving off the glaciers.

I just wanted to comment,that where commercial airliners fly,it's not uncommon for the outside temperature to be minus 68-degrees F.
Water vapor, liberated from combustion of the jet fuel, immediately freezes to form the contrails visible to us from below.
Other than un-burned hydrocarbons,and fuel system icing inhibitor,mostly what we see is water ice.
These 'clouds' both reflect solar radiation,and hold in infrared radiation trying to escape Earth.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by RustyLugNut

Yet, the same people who believe in the cleanliness of solar and wind ignore the huge waste streams implied in the production and maintenance of these renewable sources.

Nuclear power is in an infant stage. What? Yes, the power plants in the majority of the worlds nuclear collection are half a century old! Modern designs will be more compact and produce lower volumes of waste.

Much of the cost of construction is due to legislation and protest. If we could modularize and standardize components costs would come down drastically instead of a custom construct for each plant. Also, the costs of security could be better distributed if reprocessing of spent fuel was done on-site.

And waste? The fearful populace forces the governmental overseers to err on the side of overt caution. Chernobyl's fall out zone has radiation below background over most of the outlying fallout area. It is still a forbidden zone. And Chernobyl was a stupid design. Why has radiation fallen so low so fast if the nuclear waste lasts thousands of years? Just like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the really bad stuff is gone in a matter of years. Stuff like cesium and iodine are awful as they are ingested and retained. But, they have short half-life spans. 30 years or less. Modern nuclear power plants can avoid fission paths that minimize the more dangerous trans-uranics. The activated metals that make up the structure of a reactor can be simply simply stored on site until they "cool down".

For the giga-watts of power a nuclear reactor can produce in it's lifetime, the waste is small in comparison.

I dare you to find out the recycling costs of many square kilometers worth of solar cells and millions of wind and tidal generators and compare that to a few thousand tons of easily handled nuclear "waste".

And you can find a thousand years worth of nuclear fuel on most continents. Better yet, the ocean holds another thousand years or so of nuclear fuel dissolved in it's trillions of tons of water with the theorized replacement from undersea magma up-wellings from the earths core.

Practical fusion power may not happen in our lifetimes, but practical fission power should.

Over the years I've heard this argument and wandered if there is a specific reference to this data which you could share.
I was inside IBM in Austin,Texas for 18-months and worked for an environmental consulting firm and saw inside a variety of different manufacturing facilities,and never saw a lack of pollution controls or industrial hygiene monitoring oversight.
Hazardous waste facilities were under constant oversight by state and federal authorities.
The only violations I was ever aware of,was by Texas Utilities,who illegally dumped PCBs into Lake Worth,via outside contractors,and hydrocarbon contaminated pipeline pigging wastewater into creeks near China Grove.

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by sendler

We also knew about "The Limits To Growth" in 1972. And were also unable to implement any social change.

R. Buckminster Fuller published Utopia or Oblivion in 1969. He spoke about humankind exiting a period of 'permitted ignorance' and a Design Science Revolution that would make everyone wealthier (by his definition) than the richest today.

Else, you know, Copper-tops.

Also Ernest Callenbach published Ecotopia in 1975. I met him once at Cerro Gordo.

[Vman455]

Originally Posted by sendler

It won't be centuries. Three decades at the most. Maybe one if world currencies start to fail one after the other due to debt overhang.

"Therefore, when we constructed our formal world model, it was not to make point predictions, but rather to understand the broad sweeps, the behavioral tendencies of the system. Our goal is to inform and to influence human choice. To accomplish these goals, we do not need to predict the future precisely. We need only identify policies that will increase the likelihood of sustainable system behavior and decrease the severity of future collapse. A prediction of disaster delivered to an intelligent audience with the capacity to act would, ideally, defeat or falsify itself by inducing action to avoid the calamity. For all those reasons we chose to focus on patterns rather than individual numbers. With World3 we are engaged, we hope, in self-defeating prophecy.

To achieve our goals, we put into World3 the kinds of information you might use to understand the behavioral tendencies of thrown balls (or growing economies and populations), not the kinds of information you would need to describe the exact trajectory of one particular throw of one specific ball.

Because of the uncertainties and simplifications we know exist in the model (and others that we suppose it must contain, though we have not yet recognized them), we do not put faith in the precise numerical path the model generates for population, pollution, capital, or food production. Still, we think the primary interconnections in World3 are good representations of the important causal mechanisms in human society. Those interconnections, not the precise numbers, determine the model's general behavior. As a consequence, we do have faith in the dynamic behaviors generated by World3."

(Meadows, Donella, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows. Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update [White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004], pp. 140-141)

It's the trends that are important, and the trends are worrying. When we venture to predict collapse in a specific year or range of years and it doesn't happen, we risk generating the attitude of a significant number of posts on this thread, and one displayed by a shockingly high number of otherwise intelligent humans: past predictions of calamity didn't happen, so why should we believe the doomsayers this time? It's the trends that are important, and our response should be the same anyway--to reduce the ecological footprint of our species, yesterday.

But therein lies the problem: unless humans come face-to-face with the consequences of our actions, we won't change because our system behaviors are driven by our instincts (and even then, I don't believe our behaviors would change significantly). I fear the Limits to Growth authors will fail in their goal.