Stuff that makes me optimistic about the future and stuff that does not.

Last edited Fri Jul 26, 2024, 12:43 PM - Edit history (2)

Just rambling here.

Stuff that makes me optimistic:

Vegan, vegetarian, and low meat diets.

We talk about fossil fuels so much we forget that agriculture is the other way humans are destroying the natural environment. This includes turning crops into fossil fuel substitutes like ethanol, biodiesel, or supposedly "green" jet fuels. I oppose factory farm meat and dairy production. It's bad for the environment, it's bad for the workers in those industries, and it's especially bad for the animals.

My wife eats a vegetarian diet, approaching vegan. I'm mostly vegetarian as a means of reducing my environmental footprint. I've learned to cook without meat, and have found good substitutes for meat and dairy products in all my cooking.

I look forward to a time when the most popular burger at the local fast food places are not made of meat. I can already buy such burgers at many of our local fast food places, including McDonalds.

Three positive and proven ways of halting human population growth.

These three ways are the economic and political empowerment of women, easy access to birth control, and realistic sex education. Regressive forces in human societies oppose all three. Pushing back against these forces is the most effective sort of activism any environmentalist can engage in.

Dam removals

Dam removals and the restoration of formerly wild rivers makes me happy.

Maybe someday soon we can tear down the dams at Hetch Hetchy and Glen Canyon instead of leaving them as potential time bombs for future generations to deal with.

Alas there are some people who would build even more dams to support their renewable energy follies.

Important technologies

Plastic pipe is one not often talked about. With that we can bring clean water and indoor plumbing to everyone in the world. We can also carry away wastewater. There are eight billion people on earth. Other forms of plumbing, especially copper, have huge environmental footprints.

Nuclear power is the only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely. High temperature reactors would be well suited to the synthesis of nitrogen fertilizers and plastics with neutral, or even negative, carbon dioxide emissions. We've probably passed the point where organic farming can feed all eight billion of us. That doesn't mean we currently use the nitrogen fertilizers we produce using fossil fuels wisely. Nuclear power can also be used to desalinate water.

Electric high speed rail can replace fossil fueled airliners for trips of less than 500 miles and its a lot more comfortable too.

Stuff that does not make me optimistic about the future.

And then there are the ugly, the "green" distractions that will only prolong our use of fossil fuels and further damage whatever is left of the natural environment as we know it:

- Electric cars.

This planet cannot support a car for every adult human, no matter what those cars are powered by. It's not just the cars, it's the expensive infrastructure that supports our car cultures as well. We ought to be rebuilding our cities, turning them into attractive affordable places where car ownership is unnecessary.

- Large scale wind and solar developments on previously undeveloped land.

These will not "save the world" as they are entirely dependent on fossil fuels for their economic viability and will only prolong our use of them. "We had to destroy the environment in order to save it!" is not an ethical position.

East of Denver, Colorado, I've noticed the scars left on the land by wind development look pretty much the same as the scars left by gas development.

The wind, solar, and natural gas industries coexist in a morbid symbiosis. The wind and solar enthusiasts like to pretend this isn't so.

- Fusion power

For various reasons, some of them still unknown, fusion may never be a practical energy resource. The world burns as we wait for some miracle that never comes

- Batteries.

Even if batteries were as cheap as dirt the number of them required to support a modern electric grid at even 99% reliability through times of no sun and no wind is entirely ludicrous. (And 99% is more than three days a year without electricity.)

Wealthy people might live unattached to the electric grid with their huge solar arrays, battery packs, wood stoves, and stand-by fossil fuel generators, but they never explain how all eight billion of us could do that. The problems of wind and solar power are largely the same at any scale, from a tiny house to a national electric grid.

- Conservation

Try explaining that to someone who can't afford shoes, let alone a bicycle. If we choose to avoid a great die-off of the human population we'll need more energy, not less.