Reducing Poverty Can Actually Lower Energy Demand, Finds Research (arstechnica.com) 196
An anonymous reader shares a report from The Conversation: As people around the world escape poverty, you might expect their energy use to increase. But my research in Nepal, Vietnam, and Zambia found the opposite: lower levels of deprivation were linked to lower levels of energy demand. What is behind this counterintuitive finding? [...] We found that households that do have access to clean fuels, safe water, basic education and adequate food -- that is, those not in extreme poverty -- can use as little as half the energy of the national average in their country. This is important, as it goes directly against the argument that more resources and energy will be needed for people in the global south to escape extreme poverty. The biggest factor is the switch from traditional cooking fuels, like firewood or charcoal, to more efficient (and less polluting) electricity and gas.
In Zambia, Nepal, and Vietnam, modern energy resources are extremely unfairly distributed -- more so than income, general spending, or even spending on leisure. As a consequence, poorer households use more dirty energy than richer households, with ensuing health and gender impacts. Cooking with inefficient fuels consumes a lot of energy, and even more when water needs to be boiled before drinking. But do households with higher incomes and more devices have a better chance of escaping poverty? Some do, but having higher incomes and mobile phones are not either prerequisites or guarantees of having basic needs satisfied. Richer households without access to electricity or sanitation are not spared from having malnourished children or health problems from using charcoal. Ironically, for most households, it is easier to obtain a mobile phone than a clean, nonpolluting fuel for cooking. Therefore, measuring progress via household income leads to an incomplete understanding of poverty and its deprivations.
So what? Are we arguing against the global south using more energy for development? No: instead of focusing on how much energy is used, we are pointing to the importance of collective services (like electricity, indoor sanitation and public transport) for alleviating the multiple deprivations of poverty. In addressing these issues we cannot shy away from asking why so many countries in the global south have such a low capacity to invest in those services. It has to do with the fact that poverty does not just happen: it is created via interlinked systems of wealth extraction such as structural adjustment, or high costs of servicing national debts. Given that climate change is caused by the energy use of a rich minority in the global north but the consequences are borne by the majority in the poorer global south, human development is not only a matter of economic justice but also climate justice. Investing in vital collective services underpins both.
In Zambia, Nepal, and Vietnam, modern energy resources are extremely unfairly distributed -- more so than income, general spending, or even spending on leisure. As a consequence, poorer households use more dirty energy than richer households, with ensuing health and gender impacts. Cooking with inefficient fuels consumes a lot of energy, and even more when water needs to be boiled before drinking. But do households with higher incomes and more devices have a better chance of escaping poverty? Some do, but having higher incomes and mobile phones are not either prerequisites or guarantees of having basic needs satisfied. Richer households without access to electricity or sanitation are not spared from having malnourished children or health problems from using charcoal. Ironically, for most households, it is easier to obtain a mobile phone than a clean, nonpolluting fuel for cooking. Therefore, measuring progress via household income leads to an incomplete understanding of poverty and its deprivations.
So what? Are we arguing against the global south using more energy for development? No: instead of focusing on how much energy is used, we are pointing to the importance of collective services (like electricity, indoor sanitation and public transport) for alleviating the multiple deprivations of poverty. In addressing these issues we cannot shy away from asking why so many countries in the global south have such a low capacity to invest in those services. It has to do with the fact that poverty does not just happen: it is created via interlinked systems of wealth extraction such as structural adjustment, or high costs of servicing national debts. Given that climate change is caused by the energy use of a rich minority in the global north but the consequences are borne by the majority in the poorer global south, human development is not only a matter of economic justice but also climate justice. Investing in vital collective services underpins both.
Land use. (Score:5, Informative)
Given that climate change is caused by the energy use of a rich minority in the global north but the consequences are borne by the majority in the poorer global south, human development is not only a matter of economic justice but also climate justice.
One doesn't need to be a rich nation to engage in deforestation.
One doesn't need to be a rich country to sell a rain forest. [theguardian.com]
Re: Land use. (Score:2)
Rich countries did all their mass deforestation in the past.
Re: Land use. (Score:2)
Personally I think if rich countries want to preserve the rainforest to a degree they usually don't even provide to their own few remaining primal nature they should pay for the full economic opportunity cost (lots of mining and drilling in remaining primal nature in the the west).
Which is to say the west should give the third world 10s of Trillions of dollars to buy their nature.
Re: Land use. (Score:3)
give the third world 10s of Trillions of dollars
How do we give it to them? To Bolsonaro and his cronies? They pocket it and the forests get cut anyway. To the indigenous tribes? They are nomadic hunter-gatherers who have no concept of land ownership. In 20 years, another tribe moves in and you have to buy the rights all over again.
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They are nomadic hunter-gatherers who have no concept of land ownership.
They often have a different one compared to the legal definitions we have, but since disputes over territory and resources amongst hunter-gatherers are relatively common to say that they have no concept would be inaccurate in general.
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disputes over territory and resources amongst hunter-gatherers
Just think. Put the word out that the occupants of such and such a plot of land on a certain date will be the recipients of many shiny trinkets, courtesy of the Guilty White Man.
Let the games begin.
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Forget about the UN for a moment and do it the old fashioned way ... money for sovereign ownership of land.
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Because I'm not. I am however not playing the finger-pointing game either and putting all of climate change on the "rich minority in the global north". Climate change has literally been going on for decades and has had many players over the globe.
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I am however not playing the finger-pointing game either and putting all of climate change on the "rich minority in the global north". Climate change has literally been going on for decades and has had many players over the globe.
Please name the players that were/are not part of the 'rich minority in the global north'.
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Australia is part of the "global north"? Really?
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Re:Land use. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your data is misleading. The chart only includes CO2 from fossil fuels.
It ignores CO2 from deforestation, poor farming practices, charcoal production, etc.
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If the same number of trees that gets cut down, also gets replaced and let to grow until they reach the same size, then it's part of the normal carbon circulation and thus balanced out.
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Re: Land use. (Score:2)
a 50 year old tree growing
Depending on the tree species, 50 (or maybe 100) years is about the right point to cut them down. And prevent them from dying and rotting or burning. Where they switch from being carbon sinks to being carbon neutral. But people will still need the energy and construction materials. So the overall process ends up producing CO2.
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burning them for cooking
In case this is a revelation for you, cooking is just a type of energy use. The same principles apply.
Watch your mom the next time she makes you your tendies.
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Forest fire vs using them for fuel.
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A living tree converts CO2 into oxygen, cleaning the atmosphere, killing the tree and letting it rot or burning it releases a quantity of CO2 into the atmosphere, but the lasting impact is the loss of tree to continue cleaning the atmosphere if it is not replaced.
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It ignores CO2 from deforestation, poor farming practices, charcoal production, etc.
Which are all zero in the USA, right?
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It ignores CO2 from [...] charcoal production, etc.
Seriously?
Since when does charcoal production produce more CO2 then the tree would produce when it dies naturally and rots in the forest?
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It ignores CO2 from [...] charcoal production, etc. Seriously?
Since when does charcoal production produce more CO2 then the tree would produce when it dies naturally and rots in the forest?
You're using wind and solar power to transport all those trees right...
And then the charcoal fairy delivers the charcoal to all the good girls and boys. Leaving a little under their pillows each night.
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Wow. You actually said that? It's like the only thing you worry about is CO2.
You realize that humans had a major hand in creating the Sahara desert [popsci.com], right?
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You realize that humans had a major hand in creating the Sahara desert [popsci.com], right?
That's not correct. First the Sahara was formed before humans left the rift valley in east Africa. Second, what you are meaning to say is that humans caused increased desertification in the Sahara. But there is another cause, global procession which causes the Sahara to grow and contract on an approximately 100,000 year cycle. We are talking about a climate here so there will almost never be a single cause. But I seriously doubt that early humans existed in large enough numbers to impact an area the si
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You realize that humans had a major hand in creating the Sahara desert, right?
That is wrong.
Desertification by humans however is happening at the edges.
Re:Land use. (Score:5, Informative)
So if a country (China for instance) uses extremely dirty energy production to produce goods and are net exporters to the USA, it ascribes significant amounts of that carbon to us. We are NOT responsible for China's practices, although I understand why they adjusted the numbers that way.
A better chart IMO is on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. You can see US per capita usage dropping since 2000, to the point where we have dropped to 17th place. Still about 81 times sierra Leone though.
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We are NOT responsible for China's practices
Tacitly we are unless we require changes before buying the product.
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Richer nations can put a stop to much of it by refusing to buy products produced that way.
Richer nations' governments can put a stop to it by placing tariffs on products predicated upon environmental destruction.
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The EU has found RoHS to be quite effective at getting China to clean up too.
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Anyone can stamp RoHS on anything.
Good luck holding them accountable if they misuse the mark.
When I go to make solder repairs on RoHS-labeled stuff, sometimes it is suspiciously easy to solder to them with my vintage rat shack 60/40 and my equally ancient non-adjustable temp controlled weller WTCP. Normally it's hard to add classic lead solder to lead-free solder because its melting point is higher and flow characteristics differ.
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Modern lead-free solder is a lot better than the old stuff. While it's try that RoHS is somewhat reliant on people not misusing it, in practice there are random checks and the potential for hefty fines (on the companies that import and sell the stuff in the EU) so there is motivation to enforce it.
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Lead-free solder is prone to tin whiskers and dry joints. It's also a bitch to work with, especially for repairers and hobbyists. The environmental benefits are also questionable, especially given items made with LFS are more likely to fail and end up in landfill. See xbox 360.
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Sort of like Trump did with CCP imports...?
Sort of, except nothing like that. Trump's trade war with China involved specific industries, not the whole country, and it was specifically for the purposes of improving competition [piie.com], and sometimes blamed on "national security" — but that's obvious bullshit, if there's a security risk you don't place a tariff, you place a ban.
Literally zero of Trump's tariffs on goods from China were about human rights issues.
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So the world will be a better place if we stop buying goods from poorer nations? Sounds like a great idea. We'll stop buying anything from China until they stop building and start taking down coal-fired power plants...
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I didn't say that. I said goods produced in unsustainable ways.
As China has demonstrated, when required to comply with things like RoHS they comply and it brings the standard of many of their factories up.
Predictions (Score:2, Funny)
the consequences [of global warming] are borne by the majority in the poorer global south
That's...quite a prediction.
Contrary to the beliefs (Score:2)
of those who subscribe to the ideas of William Vogt, economic activity is a good thing.
While TFA is about the 3rd world (Score:2)
It also holds true here in the USA. Most of the houses I've seen with massive PV installations are in the more affluent parts of town.
Also, if you're not broke as shit, you likely can afford to upgrade to a newer vehicle that doesn't guzzle gas and belch smoke. File that under "gee, who would'a thought?"
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Also, if you're not broke as shit, you likely can afford to upgrade to a newer vehicle that doesn't guzzle gas and belch smoke
Can you even buy cars like that now?
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Just don't do maintenance and any car can burn more gas and puke out black.
Example, don't change the air filter, engine starved of air, eventually the computer can't adjust enough, catalytic converter gets plugged, buddy removes it (it is worth close to a grand) and replaces with a straight pipe and your burning way more gas and puking out black. Similar with the PCV valve, gets plugged and oil gets sucked into the intake to get burned. Both kill spark plugs as well, making the engine even more inefficient
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Sequestering only delays, not eliminate, the environmental impact of the sequestered carbon.
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It also holds true here in the USA. Most of the houses I've seen with massive PV installations are in the more affluent parts of town.
That's not how it works. Those homes still have energy usage requirements. They simply happen to produce more of the energy onsite.
A better first-world example is insulation retrofit. Poor people can't afford it, but if they could they'd save a lot of energy...
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A better first-world example is insulation retrofit. Poor people can't afford it, but if they could they'd save a lot of energy...
You, of course, are only talking about poor people who are rich enough to own their own home, but poor enough they can't afford proper insulation.
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Well, you want to be ironic.
But simple houses in US are poorly build - so they lack sophisticated insulation.
However they are cheap enough that simple people can afford them, but can not afford insulation.
As in such third world countries, insulation costs more than the house.
Perhaps you missed the power failure disaster in Texas. People were not even able - or smart enough - to go into the basement and shut the water supply. So when the freezing stopped, the broken pipes flooded the buildings. No idea, what
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You, of course, are only talking about poor people who are rich enough to own their own home, but poor enough they can't afford proper insulation.
The rate of home ownership in the USA was 65.8 percent in 2020, but 90 percent of American homes are underinsulated [prnewswire.com].
We also have to take rentals into account; people are paying their rent, landlords are profiting from them paying their rent, but landlords aren't losing money from the inefficiency costs of their rented buildings so they are unlikely to install supplemental insulation.
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Also, you can afford to take care of your trash.
Used oil, refrigerants, toxic waste, etc... All these nasty stuff need do be disposed of properly, and it costs money. Professionals are required to have special equipment, which you also pay for, indirectly. It is cheaper to dump your used oil in nature, and if you are poor, you may be tempted to do just that. You may be hit with a heavy fine if you get caught, but you can't pay either way, so you take the risk. More generally, the more you care about your ow
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It also holds true here in the USA. Most of the houses I've seen with massive PV installations are in the more affluent parts of town.
Wow, insightful. Any idea why that might be?
First, poorer neighborhoods tend to have residences stacked, multiplying the power needs for a given plot of land compared to single-family homes more common in the "more affluent parts of town". (Putting solar cells on top of a 25 story apartment building is a pointless gesture that only becomes more meaningful as the size of the structure shrinks to a two family duplex.)
Second, homeownership is a pre-requisite to install solar cells - landlords aren't interested
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Solar installations have nothing to do with the rent.
The power is piped into the Grid. You recoup the money invested by selling the power - either to the grid or the renters.
And your example of 25 story building makes no sense either. You would plaster the sides of the building, which have a suitable angel to the sun. That actually would be a money maker.
A slight edit. (Score:5, Informative)
In addressing these issues we cannot shy away from asking why so many countries in the global south have such a low capacity to invest in those services. It has to do with the fact that poverty does not just happen: it is created via interlinked systems of wealth extraction such as government corruption, seizing the bulk of the value of both local production and resources along with any foreign aid and delivering it to the government operators and their cronies .
FTFY
How was it measured? (Score:2)
I mean if you eat out all the time, live in a big house, have a big car, etc. those capital energy costs might not have been included. I mean a poor person in Zimbabwe might not even own a car. How much energy does it take to build a car? How about providing cell phone service and produce the entertainment that people may spend money on? What the energy consumption of that?
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I mean a poor person in Zimbabwe might not even own a car.
Your insight into the plight of the average Zimbabwean is truly stunning.
That a "poor" American owns a car would cause the average Zimbabwean to question your use of the descriptor "poor" to describe them.
(BTW, there are about 1 million private cars in Zimbabwe [1], out of a population of about 15 million. [2])
[1] https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
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Your insight into the plight of the average Zimbabwean is truly stunning.
So is yours. Zimbabwe is a highly corrupt, quazi socialist state with a failed economy and currency. It is sending 100,000s of folks running for its neighbors so much so that it is starting to destabilize South Africa (but not Botswana which is far richer). While I'm sure there are 1,000,000 "private" cars in Zimbabwe, I suspect most were bought with public money and are in the garages of government officials (the public sector is huge in Zimbabwe like most African countries). Most of the population how
"justice" (Score:3)
The moment this word enters a paper, it's no longer a scientific product but a polemic.
Disagree?
Please objectively define "justice" then.
Easy (Score:4, Informative)
Equal treatment under the law.
But that's not how it's being used in this paper.
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I daresay there are very few people in the current context throwing around the word justice that mean they want (only) equal treatment under the law - ie blind, objective application of the laws on the books.
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The moment this word enters a paper, it's no longer a scientific product but a polemic.
Disagree?
Please objectively define "justice" then.
It depends. Actual justice (like people getting what they deserve, what the word has always meant until five minutes ago)? Or "social" justice?
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While I agree with you that there's very much a distinction here, even with your originalist definition the word "deserve" is pretty damned slippery to define.
Thus my point: a scientific paper is generally about presenting an hypothesis and then either proving or disproving it (let's be honest, there are nearly no papers out there that don't prove the hypothesis somehow). What is "deserved" belongs in neither.
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Justice is not a scientific term.
from the summary:
Given that climate change is caused by the energy use of a rich minority in the global north but the consequences are borne by the majority in the poorer global south, human development is not only a matter of economic justice but also climate justice. Investing in vital collective services underpins both.
That is a very non-scientific conclusion, which, by the way, would want to get the poor off wood-burning stoves but still keep them poor enough that they can't afford A/C or televisions...
The rich need less. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is those with upfront money can get the advantage, while those who need a loan are at a disadvantage.
So Lets just use the United States.
If my Electric Bill is $300 a month. If I had say 20k on hand that I could spend, I could get my house some solar panels with battery reserve, and cut my electric bill to $10 a month. In less than a decade, the amount of money I had saved in my power bill has covered the cost of getting the Solar panels installed.
Now I could probably get the solar panels on a loan, but that might take me 15+ years to cover my costs.
If I am poor, and cannot get a loan, then I am stuck paying the $300 a month without a way out. So I am spending more money over all because I am poor.
Now if were forced to live without electrical power, due to extreme poverty, I may be collecting wood, trash, or anything I can get my hand on to create a fire. In which a lot of energy is wasted for the heat I wanted.
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You need to check your numbers.
Saving $290/month on electricity it would take you 6 years to recover your investment.
A poor person who oddly owns their own home (with mortgage) and has less than $20K in home equity to tap would have to borrow the $20K, but it shouldn't take anywhere near 15 years to recover their investment absent simply abusive credit terms.
But the greater point is, even the rich person with an "extra" $20K to spend on solar panels & battery won't see a financial benefit from their inv
First, redefine poverty (Score:3)
The article starts out by stating an alternate definition of poverty. Then it proceeds to offer a pie in the sky solution to their own personal definition of poverty that requires some magic to make the root cause of poverty magically disappear.
Extremely poor countries won't solve the problem until corrupt politicians are dealt with first. Otherwise the magic cures (a.k.a. wealth transfer) cannot happen.
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Makes no sense (Score:2)
If ultra poor people use 1% of the national average, then when given money use 50% of the national average, how exactly is that going to reduce the national average?
We will be in a wealth economy (Score:5, Insightful)
When desperately poor become just plain poor their energy usage gets lower.
However from this point onwards the the energy usage gets higher if they raise their living standards.
In conclusion, lets make everyone on the planet poor, like the globalist agenda mandates.
The problem isn't energy use, it's where the energy comes from. You know that.
Production of real wealth is currently exponential, starting from about the industrial revolution. The UN estimates of climate change indicate that by the end of the century (about 80 years) the impact on the economy will be less than 10% - meaning that it's the same as if we missed two or three years - and by that time the wealth of the world will be so great that no one will notice the difference. (Maslow's hierarchy: once needs are met, further wealth does not make people more happy.)
Studies indicate that when income rises above a certain level, people start devoting their efforts to the environment. This implies that one way to fix climate change is to bring the global standard of living up above this level.
We have technologies today that didn't exist 20 years ago: wind, solar, BEV cars, and grid-scale batteries weren't a thing in the year 2000, and we don't know what new technologies we will have 20 years from now. People are experimenting with carbon sequestration, and if our energy production goes up high enough and the global wealth gets large enough, we might be able to reverse the carbon in the atmosphere.
Also the world is getting greener. The sahara desert has shrunk 8% over the last three decades, reforestation is ramping up, and our land masses are generally growing more foliage due to all the excess CO2.
Bjorn Lomberg [lomborg.com] has a site that keeps track of all this. There are some 20 major world indicators that imply that the world is getting better at an astonishing pace. We're getting rid of poverty, fixing pollution, and controlling our population much faster than initial UN estimates.
Don't believe the fatalism. We're actually fixing things.
Re: We will be in a wealth economy (Score:2)
I myself find his stuff interesting, but I don't agree. Some of his thinking is based on plan-economy. It's like he is not realizing that technology doesn't appear unless there is a market. His research should be supported as a "third" opinion instead of being starved.
Re: We will be in a wealth economy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: We will be in a wealth economy (Score:4, Informative)
No, Bjørn Lomborg is treated that way because he is a contrarian charlatan who profits (personally and financially) from the publicity he gets from spreading FUD about people who have actually made these solutions happen. He's using misleading quoting to discredit what he opposes, while not getting the facts correct on his proposed solutions. In essence, he's whataboutism incarnated.
He did get explicit funding for some years by a Danish government - until they got fed up with his lack of results. They also saved him from getting the final seal of scientific misconduct by obstructing the scientific misconduct committee.
Know that there are charlatans out there - beware!
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that technology doesn't appear unless there is a market.
That is nonsense.
Technology appears.
Then a market is created.
Or do you think Apple made iPads because the people were rioting in the streets shouting: "we want iPads"?
Or wind turbines?
Or mRNA vaccines?
Some of his thinking is based on plan-economy.
And what is wrong with that (if it is even true)?
Do you think the green revolution on Germany is run by "the market"?
It is run by legislation. The people want green energy, and same time exit from nuclear po
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The problem isn't energy use, it's where the energy comes from. You know that.
Yes and no. Even the most green energy source is not green in its project execution, so you can never have a completely perfectly environmentally energy source. It is however environmentally perfect to reduce energy consumption within reason.
The OP's fatalism however is not on point. You want to compare quality of life, maybe look at Europe vs America. It's hard to argue that our quality standards are both extremely high. Sure they are big places and we have examples of good and bad in both, but generally q
Sahara Shrinking? (Score:4, Informative)
I've never heard about the Sahara shrinking but I've heard plenty about it getting substantially bigger in the last 100 years https://www.livescience.com/62... [livescience.com] , https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... [sciencedaily.com] . Where are you getting this 8% decrease number?
Fairly recent study (Score:2)
It's a fairly recent study, search for:
Venter, Z.S., Cramer, M.D. and Hawkins, H.-J. 2018. Drivers of woody plant encroachment over Africa. Nature Communications 9: 2272, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04616-8.
Focusing on the region of sub-Saharan Africa, Venter et al. (2018) examined three decades of satellite reflectance data in an effort to identify changes in fractional woody plant cover over the period 1986-2016. Their results indicated, as shown in the figure below, that woody vegetation cover increased by eight percent during this period, which findings, in the words of the authors, "confirm global greening trends.
Based on your post, a quick search leads me to wonder if this paper is correct, or if the sahara is growing, or maybe some political cherry-picking of news reports is going on. One of your links was published in 2018, the same year the Venter study was published and states the opposite result so... who knows
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I'm afraid you've been getting bad information from somewhere. Let me clear up some of the mistakes.
Also the world is getting greener. The sahara desert has shrunk 8% over the last three decades, reforestation is ramping up, and our land masses are generally growing more foliage due to all the excess CO2.
This is just false. Worldwide forest coverage is continuing to shrink. In some places like North America there's a net gain in forest cover, but globally it's still moving in the other direction. There's a lot of controversy and conflicting data about exactly how quickly it's moving, but pretty much everyone agrees it's shrinking, not growing. This article [yale.edu] gives a good discussion of the different dataset
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The claim about CO2 increasing plant growth is popular in certain circles, but unfortunately it's also wrong. To a very limited extent, increased CO2 can lead to increased growth, but usually some other factor (sun, water, or nutrients) is the limiting factor on growth
It's not necessarily wrong so much as incomplete, due to the limits noted. Also not all thrive in warmer temperatures, so that's another limit. More to the point, there are different photosynthetic pathways and the ones that the most vital staples for humans (grasses) are more vulnerable to temperature increases compared to what they particular type is best adapted to. At the very least it may mean different types need to be grown at higher latitudes, but at lower ones, it might mean that none will. If you
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Production of real wealth is currently exponential, starting from about the industrial revolution.
What is real wealth? If it's with respect to extraction of primary resources with low rates of regeneration (coal, oil are obviously not renewable, but even things like aluminium are not infinitely recyclable as there are inevitably losses that cannot be recovered) then obviously it cannot continue to be exponential indefinitely as resources will run out. If energy consumption increases exponentially, even it is all from renewables then eventually the oceans will boil. It may have been exponential thus far,
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However from this point onwards the the energy usage gets higher if they raise their living standards.
Actually no.
The rich are the idiots who put one piece of cloth into a washing machine or start a half full dishwasher or sit in front of an open fridge and eat strawberries in winter that where flown in from a different country.
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Yeah I'm such an idiot when I put the dishwasher on a day early instead of letting food dry on. Oh what will I do without that 8 cents I just wasted? Buy one less strawberry I guess.
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From your link:
Cumulative carbon dioxide (CO) emissions represents the total sum of CO emissions produced from fossil fuels and cement since 1751, and is measured in tonnes. This measures CO emissions from fossil fuels and cement production only – land use change is not included
Cumulative since 1751?
Only considered fossil fuels and cement production?
Specifically excluded deforestation?
Kinda seems skewed against developed countries where we enjoy the benefits of cement and favors nations engaged in wholesale deforestation...
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The biggest factor is the switch from traditional cooking fuels, like firewood or charcoal, to more efficient (and less polluting) electricity and gas.
You didn't even need to read it past the first paragraph.
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You don’t cite sources to support your claims that burning wood is carbon neutral, so I won’t comment on that. But I will point out that burning wood puts *much* more particulate pollution in to the atmosphere. Especially if this is being done because the people doing this live in the open, or in poorly insulated homes that lack electricity and therefore lack viable alternatives to burning
Re:I Call Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
As a consequence, poorer households use more dirty energy than richer households, with ensuing health and gender impacts. Cooking with inefficient fuels consumes a lot of energy, and even more when water needs to be boiled before drinking.
The study is being shoehorned into CO2 clickbait.
Wood and charcoal are carbon neutral, but not very healthy to be around. And not as easily turned on an off like electricity and gas.
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Wood and charcoal are carbon neutral
They are closer to carbon neutral, but often not totally so. If you are harvesting your coppice at a rate of N tons per year and growth is N tons, then things aren't too bad, but if it the net CO2 output of transport is equivalent to N/20 tons, then you are not neutral. You could plant enough extra to get the N/20 back, but you eventually run out of land, unless you are deriving the transport fuel from its own part of the coppice or you are using other renewables. It might be that you can harvest wood gas,
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If you're chopping down trees for firewood I don't see how that's carbon neutral.
Then read a book about biology.
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So the best option is to find a way to power a hot plate, right? Let's see, a hot plate uses 1200 Watt-hours. Let's assume it's used for an hour a day. Then that needs about two car batteries to run it, and about 150W of solar over 8 hours to charge it. But let's call it 3 car batteries and 200W to be safe. So that's:
$10 for a cheap hot plate
$40 for an inverter
~$75 for three used car batteries at half-price
$160 for the cheapest 200W of solar I could find
Or about $300 for a solar-powered electric cookto
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In theory, a solar cooker is even more efficient. In practice, cooking in the night is vital to many of us who work long hours.
Re:I Call Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Burning wood ... is essentially carbon neutral. It comes from a tree that likely was grown sometime in the last 20-50 years and releases carbon that was captured during that time, which will then be recaptured by new trees and repeat the cycle. In-fact burning the trees is going to release the same amount of carbon as when they topple over from old age and just rot there on the ground.
Burning wood can be carbon neutral, but only when viewed over a span of 50+ years or so. Burning the wood releases the carbon now, and it can take up to 50+ years for a replacement tree to re-capture all that CO2. Plus, if the wood is harvested using clear-cutting techniques, the ground biomass of leaves exposed to additional sunlight also emits CO2, accelerating the problem. If you add in the additional CO2 needed for harvesting and transporting heavy timber, wood is far from carbon neutral. https://www.smithsonianmag.com... [smithsonianmag.com]
Charcoal is just wood that is burned twice. Once in an oxygen-deprived process to produce charcoal, then again later to produce heat and flame. However, this process is very inefficient and produces additional problems with carbon monoxide in closed environments. About the only upside is it's much easier to transport.
Classifying wood burning as a carbon neutral source was first proposed in 2018 and has not been subsequently supported by new studies.
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50+ years to make a tree is several orders of magnitude faster than the time it takes to make coal from scratch!
And even when you ignore the timescales, pellet stoves are much more CO2-efficient at producing heat locally than resistive electric heaters powered by coal or any other kind of combustion process. Does it make sense to use "green" electricity to heat anything?
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Does it make sense to use "green" electricity to heat anything?
Correction, it doesn't make sense to use electricity to make heat (going to ignore heat pumps here). It is very inefficient, as in ~10%. It does make sense to use synthetic gas made from renewable sources but that is hard and inefficient unless you scale to huge amounts of energy at one site which you probably can't do with renewables unless you converted to energy first at which point you are still using electricity to make heat. So unless you want to use Gen IV nuclear to make synthetic fuel, you are S
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Burning wood and charcoal (NOTE: CHARCOAL not COAL) is essentially carbon neutral. It comes from a tree that likely was grown sometime in the last 20-50 years and releases carbon that was captured during that time, which will then be recaptured by new trees and repeat the cycle.
Only if it magically creates itself from wood and magically puts itself in your hearth. It might have a smaller overall, long-term carbon footprint than coal, but it's not zero unless you replant more than you harvested to take into account the energy that came from some other source for transport. Unless you envisage production and transport all by renewable sources, right down to the iron ore mined to make the steel to make the axe.
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I didn't need to read any of it to know
This is why you can't learn stuff.
Going from extreme poverty to just poverty can decrease your energy use. Right before you keep getting richer and using even more energy than before though. They found a local minimum for energy use at "just the right amount of poor".
But you're probably "too smart" to have learned this. Even when spoon fed to you.
Thanks for your input though. It was most unhelpful.
You're welcome.
We're talking real poverty like having no phone (Score:2)
no facebook account or no instagram account.
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Indeed. Figure 4 of the paper [iop.org] clearly shows total energy use increasing as income increases (though not so much among the most impoverished). Why does Marta Baltruszewicz make it sound like the opposite is true? I have no idea.
The text goes on to look at the "household" energy use (Figure 5) which seems to be a breakdown of only the teal "housing" bars in Figure 4. In this figure, energy use decreases with increasing income in Nepal and Vietnam, but increases with increasing income in Zambia (apparently
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Or, alternatively, produce solar cookers for rich western backpackers, and charge 2.5x what it costs to build them, while giving away half of the production to the poorest of the poor in the developing south (much of which, being close to the equator, do in fact get a large amount of free energy beamed at them every day).
Pair it with another solar panel charging a 65 WH battery, and you'd have energy to spare for both running an LED light for the house and charging that all important cell phone that you're
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No, that's not what Joce640k said - not even remotely.
There are, for the sake of this discussion, four types of people being considered:
Poor, inefficient cooking means (wood, charcoal)
Poor, efficient cooking means (electric, oil)
Wealthy, inefficient cooking means (wood, charcoal)
Wealthy, efficient cooking means (electric, oil)
The "discovery" is that poor people that are rich enough to afford more efficient means of cooking use less energy than people that use less efficient cooking means. Pretty surprising,
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The problem is that you consider people that can use electric and oil "poor". For all intents and purposes, those people are wealthy in comparison with the entirety of human history
Yes, and the other problem with today, just not enough cholera and plague. (Obviously I am being sarcastic).
Just because people aren't starving doesn't mean we should stop development, more that we should seek a combination of even more efficiency and measures to ensure that Jevon's Paradox doesn't eat all the improvement. The big issue is CO2 output.
If you look at many Western nations, even if you include outsourced production, there was been a total reduction in CO2 output by nation in the last 30 years