this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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Collapse
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This is the place for discussing the potential collapse of modern civilization and the environment.
Collapse, in this context, refers to the significant loss of an established level or complexity towards a much simpler state. It can occur differently within many areas, orderly or chaotically, and be willing or unwilling. It does not necessarily imply human extinction or a singular, global event. Although, the longer the duration, the more it resembles a ‘decline’ instead of collapse.
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There is no longer any cheap and abundant energy source available. Fossil extraction is trapped in the narrowing triangle of doom of being too cheap for producers and too expensive for consumers. Current renewable is a multiplier of fossil and is not cheap if you require storage for dispatchability. It is slowly getting cheaper, with the caveat of necessary mineral resource extraction. There is no energy transition in the sense that there is no substitution, only addition. Fossil extraction is about to start falling rapidly even in terms of volume (the actually relevant metric is net energy, especially per capita) since most of it is now tight resources. It easy to see where this is going.
I disagree. Several countries are preemptively shutting down fossil fuel electrical generation in order to switch to low carbon sources. That is a transition, not an addition. 90% of my energy consumption today will be low carbon. On days I have to go somewhere by public transit I can take a natural gas bus just as easily as an electric bus, so I really don't care if fossil fuel extraction dips, my energy needs are met just fine (and getting cheaper every year).
If you look at the global primary energy use https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy , then the only transition you see is from coal and oil to natural gas.
If you think the bulk of your energy consumption is low-carbon you're sadly mistaken. If the fossil energy extraction dips significantly, billions of people will starve.
The LCOE of renewables has been decreasing so fast that they are now cheaper than fossil fuels. You might very well see that graph change drastically over the coming decades. The LCOE of fossil fuels has been decreasing as well, and contrary to what you said production has been increasing since the pandemic, despite the horrors it will do to the climate.
I really don't see why people would starve... Electricity is getting cheaper to produce independently of whichever method you use, more things are being electrified, and the current price of oil is a historical average when adjusted for inflation.
If your point is that soon it won't be profitable to extract oil, then I have a graph for you too: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-proved-reserves?tab=chart , when that graph decreases by at least half we can talk. Until then, I'd say 200B tonnes of economically extractable oil is more than enough, and we should be more worried about the climate change that oil will cause than with it not being enough.
You choose to see horrors present in a convoluted and esoteric set of cherry picked data. I choose to see the wonders like the GERD dam, which is giving people in Ethiopia access to cheaper, cleaner electricity. Higher quality of life without the constant need to extract more and more oil. A dam that will last generations.