The REAL problem is not energy from fossil fuel but too much energy use by humans in ANY form, clean, dirty, renewable or finite. Each "solution" ignores the elephant in the living room - downsizing. Instead of thinking of green cars realise that there is no car as green as the car which does not have to be built in the first place. There is no suburb as green as the suburb which does not need to be built in the first place. This is the unpleasant truth we need to face, that everything we love about our way of life has to be abandoned.
@@coleheketoa An oldie but a goodie. Muddy the waters of debate with non arguments like that. Maybe you could state how downsizing is not a solution. Regardless of whether I delete myself or not the problems of a growing human footprint enabled by delusions remain.
His notion of more electric ignores the environmental impact of more mining and shipping of minerals to battery manufacturers and then shipping those huge batteries to auto assembly plants and then shipping those assembled vehicles to market. .
It's all become necessary because people ignore the environmental impacts of their lifestyles: international travel, gas guzzling trucks, & addiction to "must have" consumer stuff (aka crap) etc etc. Electrification is an attempt to repair the damage enough to continue living on this rock for a few more decades.
I worked for a conservation district in the 1990’s and early 00’s, when carbon offsets were first being discussed and I can attest that our local farmers and soil agents didn’t believe carbon offsets were a real climate strategy-they were just a way to get a corporation to fund an on-farm project we already wanted to do.
I don't hear any despair in their voices, we may have 5 years left, exponential climate change is irreversible. Ecosystems are dying or dead, also our own ecosystem, industrial agriculture, is grinding to an halt.
it was good to hear the pushback for the bookkeeping shenanigans that even James Dyke accepts. many specialized sciences make glaring omissions in the aggregate calculations. net zero offsets don't account for fertilization, destructive harvesting, insane term definitions like biomass, etc, in general they all throw the externalities under the bus to cook the books.
In the middle ages it was called "indulgences" so that the sinner can can enjoy sinning and still be saved from hell. Carbon offsets are the same things.
The failures of "carbon saviour" solutions all fail because it is trying to bargain our way out of facing the reality we have to down size humanity, both population and economy. Bargaining is one of 5 stages of grief as described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and in context of global warming the grief is that of giving up our way of life. George H W Bush articulated this with his "The American way of life is not up for negotiation" at the 1992 global climate conference in Rio. Carbon capture fails for economic reasons but the economics reflect the energy flow. Too much energy released from fossil fuels need to be directed at scrubbing the carbon wasted. It's obvious from an entropic point of view. Always was.
Another wonderful and informative talk, much appreciated James' advert :) for Faculty for a Future sounds terrific and so overdue, something that should be enabled in all tertiary institutions, worldwide. I wish him well with that.
BIG blooper! He clearly said 50% of global energy is in the form of electricity, but every source I have seen puts it lower. For example, in a quick google search, wikipedia pops up with 22% of energy in the form of electricity. Now, maybe we burn half our fuel to produce that 22% of usable energy in the form of electricity, I haven't really looked at that, but if he wants to get 80% of our usable energy from electricity, that is an increase from 22% now, not an increase from 50%. Your guest is vastly underestimating the scale of his ambition. Over 60% of the world's, and America's, electric comes from fossil fuels, but I don't know how much of our fossil fuel supply is used to generate this electric power, although I imagine it is a considerable amount. If you are going to more than triple the share of energy provided by electricity, almost quadruple it in fact, and you want all of that increased electric power to come from non fossil sources, consider that 84% of the world's total energy was reported to come from fossil fuels in 2018. Not that many good hydroelectric sources left these days, so how fast to you plan to almost quadruple electric production using solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear? Trying to go all or mostly nuclear for that huge electrical increase would be extraordinarily challenging for reasons I will not go into, and which you may already be familiar with, and geothermal has a limited number of sites; so that leaves solar and wind to bear the brunt of the increased production. Why do you think solar and wind turbine plants NEVER rely on their own products to provide power for their production (even though it would be a great marketing tool)??? How will you make cement for the wind turbines without fly ash from coal? As you rapidly deplete minerals for these projects (and for batteries), you will need more and more energy for mining (which already uses 10% of the world's energy). A lot of this energy comes from oil for diesel fuel. If you can manage to switch entirely to electric for mining, you will need more and more solar and wind based power, which means more minerals, more depletion, and more solar and wind based power, and so on. And what will the increased energy output for mining do to the EROEI? What will storage or buffering do to the EROEI? Do you agree with Weissbach that we need a minimum EROEI of 7 to keep the power grid working? But these questions probably don't matter anyway, because it is very unlikely we will find enough concentrated mineral deposits to fuel the renewables revolution even if it were possible.
Carbon outsets. The modern form of the medieval practice of buying indulgences, such that the congregant church goer can continue to sin and still be saved.
The work of Tim Garrett reveals (a) Nuclear power generation needs to be expanded at the rate of 10 GW per day for the next 30 years just to replace the current electrical power and heat generation system. (b) Only 10% of the world has the kind of wealth we enjoy : multiply the nuclear expansion by a factor of 10 to give everyone the desired standard of living (c) Once (a) and (b) are achieved, synthetic fuel generation, using carbon dioxide as a source. No chance of converting the billion plus vehicles, many of which are over 10 years old. Note 1. Only molten salt reactor types will have nuclear fuel conversion efficiency needed. 2. Only 1 generation is left before fossil fuel is exhausted as a power source.
Harvard Professor Dr Ye Tao of the meet reflection project suggests that current direct capture technology would take 6000 years to work. Maybe have him as a guest. Your show is a great source of information for us nobodies. Would you take guest suggestions from the general public.
The problem is that we cannot grasp that it’s not the number of people that ultimately matter. We are the ones that determines what the future remembers and what it forgets
One of the things that keeps coming up in the discussions is the need to reduce the population. The host scarily, for want of a better description injects the conspiracy fact of eugenics. First we say it's a small proportion of the population uses the greatest portion of energy probably 20/80 but yet to achieve this energy balance you need to get rid of some of the population and they are not talking about the 20% portion. What I am also realising is that while the rich get the majority of their wealth by extracting the energy of the masses they think now they can get rid of the masses and still make a lot of money. The guests skirt around the issue that it is the incentive of raking in money that keeps the system going and the psyco/sociopaths who hold on to the reigns of power cannot see that without the masses to feed off, like a cancer cell they themselves will eventually cease to exist.
😢 the 15 trillion spent on infrastructure and money for pharmaceutical billionaires all makes sense now. Our world in data , says academics are useless, can’t do math. One in one million. Truckers were right.
The solution that will allow civilization to continue in its present form and its further development will require a transition to a much more abundant source of energy than oil, coal, water, wood, etc. At present, only nuclear fusion is an option, which would be the energy source for the production of synthetic fuels from CO2, CO2 capture and a higher rate of recycling of materials.However, it is almost certain that solving the energy scarcity with nuclear fusion would only delay and therefore amplify other problems that threaten civilisation, analogous to climate change.
Hemp is one of the best biomass products we could use. From hempcrete to paper to meds to clothing and local production reducing transporting them on carbon producing freighters.
The problem with hemp is it requires land and water to grow, and the industrialised nature of farming will determine deforestation and co2 pollution in order to plant adequate hemp to replace plastics. Plastic is a very good option, given all the materials in the world. We need to rethink our relationship with it.
@@PlanetCritical Currently, plastics are endocrine disruptors. Can healthy plastics actually be produced? The soil all over the world is coated with a thin layer of microplastics (which you cannot see with the naked eye), and no one knows what if any the consequences of this will be as it works its way into the food chain. Hopefully, microbes will evolve the ability to digest it, or we will bioengineer such organisms to speed the process up.
I'd say the science is hardly settled with climate change, although it would be difficult for any academic to get tenure if they opposed the AGW consensus. The scientists who oppose it have good credentials but are getting on a bit, when they die I suppose the science will be even MORE settled!
Capitalism eh? Was it capitalism that shut the last three remaining nuclear reactors in Germany? As to just cutting fossil fuel consumption by ten percent a year, straightforward enough professor, just shrink the economy by ten percent a year. And you Sir, can lead the way by cutting your own income by ten percent right now. And doing the same next year. And the year after.
To all you anti capitalists out there, socialism is just as enamored of growth as capitalism is, just not as good at producing it. Economic growth is basically a function of energy availability. In a future age when there is no longer enough surplus energy to fuel economic growth, we will still need to produce and distribute goods and services, and capitalism does this better than any other system. Nor does capitalism result in as much inequality as pervaded feudal or other economic systems that are usually labeled pre capitalist. (Some degree of capitalism is as old as civilization, but it was present at lower frequencies, with most of those economies dominated by largely self sufficient landed estates worked by peasants or slaves.)
@@PlanetCritical That was not always true. History is replete with famines (and pestilence I could add). You even read about them in the Bible. There were also lots of people, even in relatively good times, who had just enough resources to keep them alive, but not much more. In the Christian era, one frequently reads of efforts made to raise alms for the many poor people. (Undoubtedly there were many poor people before the appearance of Christianity, but fewer expressions of concern for them. Julian the Apostate, while trying to turn the population back to paganism, complained of the difficulty of turning people back to the old gods when Christians were feeding not only their own widows and orphans, but those of the pagans as well.)
@@michaels4255 Of course it wasn't always true, progress is not linear and it's certainly not universal. I agree capitalism and fossil fuels provided an incredible boom of innovation, lifting many out of poverty. However, I don't believe it's the correct economic framework going forward,. Have a listen to the interview with Steve Keen, it's very enlightening.
@@PlanetCritical I have listened to Steve Keen expound his theories on numerous previous occasions. I do not agree with him, but I cannot explain why in a short comment, since the necessary critique is too complex for that.
The REAL problem is not energy from fossil fuel but too much energy use by humans in ANY form, clean, dirty, renewable or finite. Each "solution" ignores the elephant in the living room - downsizing. Instead of thinking of green cars realise that there is no car as green as the car which does not have to be built in the first place. There is no suburb as green as the suburb which does not need to be built in the first place. This is the unpleasant truth we need to face, that everything we love about our way of life has to be abandoned.
good comment....aint gonna happen, but yes a true answer
So how many people do you want to murder?
in fact the REAL problem is to many humans that wanna be filthy rich. 😃
You lead the way. Eliminate yourself to create more room for others.
@@coleheketoa An oldie but a goodie. Muddy the waters of debate with non arguments like that. Maybe you could state how downsizing is not a solution. Regardless of whether I delete myself or not the problems of a growing human footprint enabled by delusions remain.
His notion of more electric ignores the environmental impact of more mining and shipping of minerals to battery manufacturers and then shipping those huge batteries to auto assembly plants and then shipping those assembled vehicles to market. .
It's all become necessary because people ignore the environmental impacts of their lifestyles: international travel, gas guzzling trucks, & addiction to "must have" consumer stuff (aka crap) etc etc. Electrification is an attempt to repair the damage enough to continue living on this rock for a few more decades.
I worked for a conservation district in the 1990’s and early 00’s, when carbon offsets were first being discussed and I can attest that our local farmers and soil agents didn’t believe carbon offsets were a real climate strategy-they were just a way to get a corporation to fund an on-farm project we already wanted to do.
I just found your channel I found your interviews very engrossing and enlightening, thank you for your work!
I don't hear any despair in their voices, we may have 5 years left, exponential climate change is irreversible. Ecosystems are dying or dead, also our own ecosystem, industrial agriculture, is grinding to an halt.
it was good to hear the pushback for the bookkeeping shenanigans that even James Dyke accepts. many specialized sciences make glaring omissions in the aggregate calculations. net zero offsets don't account for fertilization, destructive harvesting, insane term definitions like biomass, etc, in general they all throw the externalities under the bus to cook the books.
In the middle ages it was called "indulgences" so that the sinner can can enjoy sinning and still be saved from hell. Carbon offsets are the same things.
The failures of "carbon saviour" solutions all fail because it is trying to bargain our way out of facing the reality we have to down size humanity, both population and economy. Bargaining is one of 5 stages of grief as described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and in context of global warming the grief is that of giving up our way of life. George H W Bush articulated this with his "The American way of life is not up for negotiation" at the 1992 global climate conference in Rio. Carbon capture fails for economic reasons but the economics reflect the energy flow. Too much energy released from fossil fuels need to be directed at scrubbing the carbon wasted. It's obvious from an entropic point of view. Always was.
That was Dick Cheney who said that, not Bush.
Yet you're benefiting from fossil fuels directly and indirectly. Hypocrite
Talk to Nate Hagens from Great Simplification, he is at the edge of current state of affairs in those topics
4:50 📢15:00 📢
22:00
35:10 EU 38:10
49:22 📢
1:02:40
1:07:00 📢💥
Another wonderful and informative talk, much appreciated
James' advert :) for Faculty for a Future sounds terrific and so overdue, something that should be enabled in all tertiary institutions, worldwide. I wish him well with that.
Thank you, Peter! Sorry for the delay in responding. Thanks for your support.
Rachel's questions were great!
Thank you, James. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Direct Air Capture? We attempt to suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere? Absurd. You would end up producing more CO2 doing that.
BIG blooper! He clearly said 50% of global energy is in the form of electricity, but every source I have seen puts it lower. For example, in a quick google search, wikipedia pops up with 22% of energy in the form of electricity. Now, maybe we burn half our fuel to produce that 22% of usable energy in the form of electricity, I haven't really looked at that, but if he wants to get 80% of our usable energy from electricity, that is an increase from 22% now, not an increase from 50%. Your guest is vastly underestimating the scale of his ambition. Over 60% of the world's, and America's, electric comes from fossil fuels, but I don't know how much of our fossil fuel supply is used to generate this electric power, although I imagine it is a considerable amount.
If you are going to more than triple the share of energy provided by electricity, almost quadruple it in fact, and you want all of that increased electric power to come from non fossil sources, consider that 84% of the world's total energy was reported to come from fossil fuels in 2018. Not that many good hydroelectric sources left these days, so how fast to you plan to almost quadruple electric production using solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear? Trying to go all or mostly nuclear for that huge electrical increase would be extraordinarily challenging for reasons I will not go into, and which you may already be familiar with, and geothermal has a limited number of sites; so that leaves solar and wind to bear the brunt of the increased production.
Why do you think solar and wind turbine plants NEVER rely on their own products to provide power for their production (even though it would be a great marketing tool)??? How will you make cement for the wind turbines without fly ash from coal? As you rapidly deplete minerals for these projects (and for batteries), you will need more and more energy for mining (which already uses 10% of the world's energy). A lot of this energy comes from oil for diesel fuel. If you can manage to switch entirely to electric for mining, you will need more and more solar and wind based power, which means more minerals, more depletion, and more solar and wind based power, and so on. And what will the increased energy output for mining do to the EROEI? What will storage or buffering do to the EROEI? Do you agree with Weissbach that we need a minimum EROEI of 7 to keep the power grid working? But these questions probably don't matter anyway, because it is very unlikely we will find enough concentrated mineral deposits to fuel the renewables revolution even if it were possible.
42:28 UBI. Simply combine a carbon tax with UBI, and you have what you want.
Carbon outsets. The modern form of the medieval practice of buying indulgences, such that the congregant church goer can continue to sin and still be saved.
Thankfully we’re not in need of being “saved.” So much lunacy all around us.
We are still increasing CO2 and 2023 has been terrible.... worse is to come.
The work of Tim Garrett reveals
(a) Nuclear power generation needs to be expanded at the rate of 10 GW per day for the next 30 years just to replace the current electrical power and heat generation system.
(b) Only 10% of the world has the kind of wealth we enjoy : multiply the nuclear expansion by a factor of 10 to give everyone the desired standard of living
(c) Once (a) and (b) are achieved, synthetic fuel generation, using carbon dioxide as a source. No chance of converting the billion plus vehicles, many of which are over 10 years old.
Note
1. Only molten salt reactor types will have nuclear fuel conversion efficiency needed.
2. Only 1 generation is left before fossil fuel is exhausted as a power source.
Harvard Professor Dr Ye Tao of the meet reflection project suggests that current direct capture technology would take 6000 years to work. Maybe have him as a guest. Your show is a great source of information for us nobodies. Would you take guest suggestions from the general public.
I interviewed him recently! His episode will be out in the coming weeks. Please do suggest anyone you think would be a great guest for the show.
The problem is that we cannot grasp that it’s not the number of people that ultimately matter. We are the ones that determines what the future remembers and what it forgets
One of the things that keeps coming up in the discussions is the need to reduce the population. The host scarily, for want of a better description injects the conspiracy fact of eugenics. First we say it's a small proportion of the population uses the greatest portion of energy probably 20/80 but yet to achieve this energy balance you need to get rid of some of the population and they are not talking about the 20% portion. What I am also realising is that while the rich get the majority of their wealth by extracting the energy of the masses they think now they can get rid of the masses and still make a lot of money. The guests skirt around the issue that it is the incentive of raking in money that keeps the system going and the psyco/sociopaths who hold on to the reigns of power cannot see that without the masses to feed off, like a cancer cell they themselves will eventually cease to exist.
😢 the 15 trillion spent on infrastructure and money for pharmaceutical billionaires all makes sense now. Our world in data , says academics are useless, can’t do math. One in one million. Truckers were right.
Save Our Planet
The solution that will allow civilization to continue in its present form and its further development will require a transition to a much more abundant source of energy than oil, coal, water, wood, etc. At present, only nuclear fusion is an option, which would be the energy source for the production of synthetic fuels from CO2, CO2 capture and a higher rate of recycling of materials.However, it is almost certain that solving the energy scarcity with nuclear fusion would only delay and therefore amplify other problems that threaten civilisation, analogous to climate change.
How about a look at energy from garbage and its release of CO2 and the effectiveness of scrubbing the CO2 from those emissions?
Hemp is one of the best biomass products we could use. From hempcrete to paper to meds to clothing and local production reducing transporting them on carbon producing freighters.
The problem with hemp is it requires land and water to grow, and the industrialised nature of farming will determine deforestation and co2 pollution in order to plant adequate hemp to replace plastics. Plastic is a very good option, given all the materials in the world. We need to rethink our relationship with it.
@@PlanetCritical Currently, plastics are endocrine disruptors. Can healthy plastics actually be produced? The soil all over the world is coated with a thin layer of microplastics (which you cannot see with the naked eye), and no one knows what if any the consequences of this will be as it works its way into the food chain. Hopefully, microbes will evolve the ability to digest it, or we will bioengineer such organisms to speed the process up.
42:20 , that’s what we want to hear. There’s enuf for everyone !! We all gonna die.
49:00 greed and not wanting to rock the boat that yields them the life style they CURRENTLY have.
I'd say the science is hardly settled with climate change, although it would be difficult for any academic to get tenure if they opposed the AGW consensus. The scientists who oppose it have good credentials but are getting on a bit, when they die I suppose the science will be even MORE settled!
substantive choice
Sure hope Jame can turn things around since he decided to bring children into the mix
he said toilet paper. Humanure composting is really the foundation of the whole problem - or the lack of it.
We grew up with iffy people's we so ready if they bring it , not good , but don't ask if u don't want it ! 💝🚴
U would think, people's would learn not to hate on others , but they haven't, dern u know , y we here , oop's! 💝
Hemp products can replace plastics.
human nature.
Capitalism eh? Was it capitalism that shut the last three remaining nuclear reactors in Germany?
As to just cutting fossil fuel consumption by ten percent a year, straightforward enough professor, just shrink the economy by ten percent a year. And you Sir, can lead the way by cutting your own income by ten percent right now. And doing the same next year. And the year after.
To all you anti capitalists out there, socialism is just as enamored of growth as capitalism is, just not as good at producing it. Economic growth is basically a function of energy availability. In a future age when there is no longer enough surplus energy to fuel economic growth, we will still need to produce and distribute goods and services, and capitalism does this better than any other system. Nor does capitalism result in as much inequality as pervaded feudal or other economic systems that are usually labeled pre capitalist. (Some degree of capitalism is as old as civilization, but it was present at lower frequencies, with most of those economies dominated by largely self sufficient landed estates worked by peasants or slaves.)
This is a very Western-centric view; people all over the world had resources to feed themselves before capitalists landed on their shores.
@@PlanetCritical That was not always true. History is replete with famines (and pestilence I could add). You even read about them in the Bible. There were also lots of people, even in relatively good times, who had just enough resources to keep them alive, but not much more. In the Christian era, one frequently reads of efforts made to raise alms for the many poor people. (Undoubtedly there were many poor people before the appearance of Christianity, but fewer expressions of concern for them. Julian the Apostate, while trying to turn the population back to paganism, complained of the difficulty of turning people back to the old gods when Christians were feeding not only their own widows and orphans, but those of the pagans as well.)
@@michaels4255 Of course it wasn't always true, progress is not linear and it's certainly not universal. I agree capitalism and fossil fuels provided an incredible boom of innovation, lifting many out of poverty. However, I don't believe it's the correct economic framework going forward,. Have a listen to the interview with Steve Keen, it's very enlightening.
@@PlanetCritical I have listened to Steve Keen expound his theories on numerous previous occasions. I do not agree with him, but I cannot explain why in a short comment, since the necessary critique is too complex for that.
Boring
We’re in a grand solar minimum, in fact.
substantive democracy choice for God instead of federal processing choice for others
human choice decentralization, God's kingdom central aurhority