We need to live in harmony with Nature. This kind of awareness (hard metrics) has to be fed back into our decision making to do it. I believe we can support current population density with ecological enrichment through "applied ecology", e.g. Permaculture, etc. but only if we are aware of the need and priority.
---
For example see David Blume's concept for small-scale organic alcohol fuel production integrated with Permaculture food production. http://permaculture.com/node/518
Not to give away (part of) the punchline, but the on-site extraction and distillation of the fuel retains all the trace elements, minerals, etc. The molecules in the fuel have come from the air and water, their energy-holding arrangement has been paid for by the Sun. The farm exports sunlight in fluid form.
As part of an integrated agriculturally-productive ecosystem alcohol fuel production just makes sense. The economics are totally different from large-scale ethanol, for instance.
I have read a few studies on alcohol fuel production, and none of the facilities studied have been a net-producer of energy. While the idea is an intriguing one, energy production is difficult. Has Blume actually shown an ability to produce fuel?
Note: I've always been a fan of using seaside solar-powered electrolysis to produce hydrogen fuel, though hydrogen storage has its own issues.
Yes, Blume has produced fuel. If I recall correctly at one point he had a number of people with fuel conversions on their vehicles who were buying his gas through a kind of CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) business. He's very practically oriented.
Part of what shifts the economics here is that the leftover byproducts of both fermentation and distillation are returned as inputs to the farm.
I also have to mention, at one point Blume had a contract with a donut bakery to collect and make fuel from all their old scrap dough. Sugar and carbs...
>We need to live in harmony with Nature. This kind of awareness (hard metrics) has to be fed back into our decision making to do it. I believe we can support current population
There does also exist other means of reaching this goal -- a lot of low hanging fruit, actually.
Public policy could do a lot more to provide incentives which reward for increasing sustainability, and punish for decreasing it.
For example, when I go camping here in the States, especially now in the summer months, I see a lot of people running generators, and sometimes this is even to run AC units.
I look at their rigs: A white roof could reduce heat. Generators and fuel adds weight to haul on the road, decreasing MPGs. Solar panels could add charge at reduced weight. It would be massively more efficient to have the solar panels that are located at solar powerstations, located on top of someone's RV, instead, but we don't do this.
The reason that does not happen is because the incentives for consumers don't line up. Fuel is cheap, and solar panels are expensive. Energy production must be subsidized with taxpayer dollars and heavy handed regulation to create solar generation facilities that then lose power as current is transmitted over the grid.
Still, the difference is close enough that a nudge from effective public policy would make a big difference. Some people do own their own panels. I own one that can charge my laptop and smart phone. It's great, actually.
The correct answer is not a system of carbon credits and tax incentives, creating more heavy handed regulation, bureaucracy, and power to government -- exactly what politicians want. The right answer is to do what America will never vote for: tax gasoline.
If gas taxes actually accounted for the externalities they produce: local pollution, global warming, noise, etc., people would think twice about investing in that solar panel. And the rest of us wouldn't have to live with the externalities.
Taxes will net you less of what you are taxing. Perhaps that doesn't sound so illuminating, but a person from another planet visiting earth would scratch their head looking at our choice to heavily tax things we always desperately want more of (employment), and to subsidize through world policy and military expenditure things we want less of (oil).
Just getting the economics of public policy right can have a big impact on our ability to live in better harmony with nature.
Yeah. And rainbows and unicorns. Unfortunately, 99.999% of the population have other things to do and cannot all tend to their farms. Let alone, it would be far from the first time that biofuel has left people starving on the same or other parts of the world, simply because fertile ground is now used for that instead of food.
Very nicely made tool, unfortunately they forgot that red/green colorblindness is very common, so I can't really see anything in their graphs.
Shouldn't be hard to add a little menu that allows you to choose the color themes, so color blind people can select one where they actually see a difference between the regions.
Have you tried the EnChroma color-blindness glasses? It would be an easier solution than designing data viz to avoid using color blindess color-combos or requiring dynamic options, IMO.
Those work best when your color-blindness is from your red/green cones being too close together in wavelength (most common form) and not for cases like me where color sensitivity is screwed up. The sensitivity problem can be solved by filtering the colors working correctly down to the level the bad color works at, but that doesn't work well indoors as you are effectively wearing sun-glasses.
The easiest way I found for data viz to accommodate color blindness is to make sure everything is separated in intensity by a fair amount and have a tool-tip on the color legend indicating which color it is so if the accompanying text is referring to parts by color it can be figured out which color on the graph is being referred to.
It's really not that hard to design for colorblindness, since there majority of colorblindness is one type. Blue/red instead of green/red is a pretty easy color swap.
Just wondering, how can a small country like for example the Netherlands, with no vast tree wildlife for example, get to a neutral or even positive foot print?
A trading nation by roots, is it even possible to get to 0 deficit?
Take a look at Germany, they are steadily increasing their biocapacity while reducing their ecological footprint (I wonder how they increase the biocapacity so steadily over such long period of time). So, you may not achieve a balance, but maybe at the scale of a region like Europe, we can achieve it.
They have not reduced their ecological footprint. They are relying increasingly on coal, especially as new bioenergy installations are slowing down and demand is only growing.
They have never burnt as much coal as nowadays. It accounted to 45% of their power in 2014 (couldn't find a more recent figure).
They are still building new coal plants and they need so much coal these days that they raze whole villages to dig it out.
I'm having trouble finding comprehensive sources but their CO2 emissions have been on the rise from 2012 to 2014 at least and they are set to miss their CO2 reduction goals of 2020 and 2030.
At this point in time, they are the biggest CO2 source of Europe.
This is largely untrue or inaccurate.
There has been a small uptick in lignite use for a couple of years, but it's been going down again. But that was not overall coal use, hard coal was in steady decline.
The last new coal plant constructions were started in 2009. This was an unfortunate and wrong decision, but it's been a while ago. Most of the investors of these plants regret that decision, because they aren't needed a whole lot.
That villages had to be removed due to coal mining is not something that's happening "these days", it's been happening for decades. However none of that has been decided lately. Goes all back to decisions made in the 90s. It doesn't make it better, but your comment makes it sound that this is a recent development. It's not. Recently some existing plans for lignite open casts were reduced and some villages will be saved.
Demand is not growing overall, it's been in decline for a couple of years (with occasional upticks, but that's to be expected).
Germany is the largest total CO2 source in the EU, but it's also the largest country. Per capita emissions are still relatively high though.
It's not all green in Germany, a lot could be better. I'm in full agreement that the huge lignite mines and plants are a terrible thing, but one should still stick to facts.
But despite all bads a lot is going in the right direction.
One of the stupidest things our government did (in my mind) was to introduce the accelerated moratorium of nuclear power (this wasn't planned at first but put into place after Fukushima, except that nuclear power station was built at the coast in an earthquake area, something the middle of Europe is not exactly known for). The short term demand will just be met with coal and a bit of renewables (which might have no local greenhouse gas emissions, but are still dirty to produce/consume rare earths). Oh, and there are lawsuits worth hundreds of millions of euros ([1] says there are estimated damages in double-digit billions of euros overall) in denied profits going on.
I'm really just waiting for fusion power to become viable and solve all of our earthly power consumption problems once and for all...
For me, it was the ultimate example of environmentalists shooting themselves in the foot. Always opposed to nuclear (scary!), wind (birds!), natural gas (fracking! CO2!), and as a result we keep burning coal, the worst of them all.
One also sees the little 1990 peak. That's when inefficient east-block power plants started to be turned off and be replaced by more efficient versions. Other countries did not have such an easy way to increase overall power plant efficiency.
Well, they're exporting their pollution to China and some of the other European countries, by switching to PVs and buying coal-produced electricity, respectively.
They have quite a vast network of turbines. During some of the most windy days of the year, they produce more electricity than they consume. I'd say they also tend to do much less shipping by truck than many other countries.
Not sure where you got that from but 'sustainable energy' production (includes more than just wind, but safe to say that in our country is mostly wind) was only 3.9% in 2009. The government set a goal of 20% by 2020. So no, we are still mostly reliant on other forms of electricity.
There is no technology available today that would allow an industrialised country like the Netherlands to get to a zero carbon dioxide footprint.
It sounds like sarcasm but the only realistic way to do this is to significantly reduce your population and have the remaining people live in mud huts or caves like our ancestors did many millennia ago. (which would be insane)
People had moved on from mud huts by the 1600's, and yet had a pretty small (though non-zero) carbon footprint.
I do agree that population, especially the population of people living a carbon-intense lifestyle, is a serious concern. Many people point a finger at poor nations with high population growth rates while failing to acknowledge that people in those countries tend to emit very little.
Human civilisation had burned through (or been climate-changed out of) several ecosystems by 1600. Europe was reaching the point of overexploiting its fuelwood resources. India and China were peaking as civilisations, reaching levels they'd not return to until the late 19th or 20th centuries in absolute level, and reaching relative standings among other nations and civilisations not since exceeded.
I'm currently reading Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History and the two volumes of Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power: How energy forges human history. They're impressive and sobering.
While there are a range of estimates, there are a substantial group of population theorists, largely grounded in ecology, who see the population levels of 1650, roughly 500 million worldwide, as a likely long-term maximum.
(The broader range runs from as few as 50 million, which still exceeds virtually all large land mammals, to several trillion. I find the lower bound potentially plausible, though pessimistic, the higher range delusional.)
They started with a surplus as everybody else and they run into a defict, like most of the rest of the world, including many large countries. Unsustainable growth except something like a technological miracle or a plague happen? Probably.
Deliberately managing the rate of growth of its population would reduce its global footprint, but we're unable to sustainably meet 0 deficit anywhere unless you commit mass genocide.
More like a strong economy == lots of energy use, and lots of energy use == lots of pollution, because the world uses lots of dirty energy.
The fact that one can guess some results ahead of time doesn't cast doubt on the results, any more than, after coughing blood and 40 years of smoking, a positive cancer diagnosis is suspect.
I rate this rhetorical tactic a 3: poor composition, not enough work either developing the implication of skullduggery or making it more subtle, missed opportunities for additional attacks on reporters' credibility.
The fundamental problem with Malthusianism is that it is static thinking. It projects on the basis of no change in technology, as if the present moment continues eternally. This is why all statements to date on running out of X or Y at time T in the future have proven false. What actually happens is that people look ahead, forecast increased prices for X, and then the more adventurous go and build a better way of getting X, or create a different resource X1 that can be used instead.
It is never different this time.
Arguably alarmism that fails to consider technological process is a necessary part of the signaling mechanism by which realistic price forecasts are established, an example of the market performing its usual strange alchemy in turning (often willful) ignorance into something useful, but that doesn't stop it from being frustrating.
The problem with your argument is that it assumes technical progress continuing eternally. For instance Malthus himself was mostly preoccupied with the idea, that the population might increase faster than the agricultural output. Through the use of chemical fertilizers there has been a breakthrough in how much food we can produce, so the malthusan catastrophe was averted. Agricultural output is still growing, but there are physical limits.
Malthus was aware of increasing agricultural progress, but the argument he made was that it would increase arithmetically (linearly f(x+1)=f(x)+c), whereas population would increase geometrically (exponentially, f(x+1)=f(x)*c).
It's a hugely important, contentious, and complicated issue (here's a thought: populations can't actually grow exponentially even given unlimited resources, with a loose, but strict, upper bound at the speed of light. The tight upper bound is unknown, probably multifaceted, but I don't see how anything beyond cubic growth is possible). Anyway. When speaking of grey whales, for instance, we say that the population is limited by the "carrying capacity." OK. But they aren't inventing new ways of getting fat nearly as fast as we are.
It boils down to there being a very real Malthusian limit on population. "History" (which is code for "1929 to 2007 or so" because for many economists history began that year, with a vague notion of there being time before that when Americans lived in some sort of Garden of Eden in which nothing ever happened), "history" proved Malthus wrong. Well, yeah, definitely, the food supply didn't grow linearly, which you figure it could have, nor did population increase exponentially, because it can't. But at any rate, he had a point in that there is a Malthusian limit at any given time, and there is a world population level at any given time, and humanity can move them up or down independently. And that's what the article is about, is unwittingly moving the limit down, by, say, turning whales into butter until they're barely any left. For much of the 20th century, we've been so successful at moving it up faster than the population level that we've come to think there is no such limit. And hey, what about Mars?
Just because we haven't hit the Malthusian limit recently doesn't mean it's not there.
I don't think people here (or anywhere) dispute that here is a hard upper limit on the maximum population the Earth can support at any given time. The dispute is in the proposition that population is fated (or probabilistically likely) to grow faster than agricultural production. That may have been true when pro-natalist dogma held sway and agricultural technology was stagnant, but that's no longer the case--people who advocate having as man kids as possible no matter are seen as crazy in most parts of the world today, and for good reason.
Birth control is likely and is effective if you don't try to actively suppress it.
Population growth is slowing down rapidly, there's even a chance that the global population will peak in the next century (and this is due to people living in industrialised countries having less than 2 children per woman, not due to any global calamity). We may have one more doubling of the global population, and then it's pretty much flat, even decreasing. Very, very far from exponential growth, that's for sure.
On the other hand, technological improvements aren't exactly stalling. In food alone there are huge benefits yet to be reaped from GMOs and hydroponics, just to mention two. It may not be exponential growth anymore, but there's little to suggest that it will just stop.
So no, the Malthusian limit may very well not be there at all.
At least in the US, the proportion of land needed to produce food is steadily declining.
For lack of a better metaphor, we have a race between galloping food supply and the propagation of the idea that smaller family sizes are a good thing. Given what I know now, I'd bet on human reproduction declining before food does.
The big monkey wrench is political instability. We have much less of an understanding of it than perhaps we should have.
>At least in the US, the proportion of land needed to produce food is steadily declining.
As an aside, I wonder how much more vulnerable this makes the food supply to shocks, coupled with the increased supply chain length and how many additional points of failure that introduces.
Not necessarily in terms of the frequency of those shocks increasing, rather the compounded impact of those shocks given the number of people being supported by smaller agricultural bases.
It all seems rather unlikely. There are all sorts of shocks, all the time in agricultural production but we have a hybrid system composed of subsidies ( that cause pretty significant overproduction ) and derivatives that lay off price risk. SFAIK, these are now deeply entangled.
It hardly perfect, but it's been polished and debugged over decades. The film "King Corn" does a good job of a layman's exposition of at least the subsidy system.
This is the problem with real-world Malthusian predictions. There are (obviously) hard limits on growth and carrying capacity for Earth, but extrapolating from some existing metric like food growth per human is an atrocious way to find them.
A convincing Malthusian argument needs to take one of two forms: either concede that it represents doom without engineering progress, or convincingly argue that it represents a physical boundary rather than an engineering one.
Yes, that's the point. But it's very hard to point to the effective engineering limit.
For example: the ultimate limit to computing power is Bremermann's limit, but that's only reached in the surface of a black hole. The effective limit of computation – how much you can compute in Baryonic matter – is going to be far lower. How low is a hard question to answer.
But computing power is at best a second-order productivity factor.
If you can apply it to a network system, you've got some options for increased efficiency. If you're applying it to an energy system, the improvement is far more likely in the 5-25% range.
Example: automobiles have made increasing use of computers since the 1970s. Computer performance has improved on the order of millionsfold. Automobile fuel efficiency has less-than doubled. A small compact of the early 1970s could achieve ~30 mpg, or 7.84 l/100km, a more useful measure of efficiency. Current models are in the 40 - 50 mpg range, let's take the upper limit, giving 4.70l/100km.
That's a 40% reduction in fuel use. Even before considering countervailing offsets via the Jevons Paradox.
Google have recently similarly claimed a 15% efficiency improvement in data center energy management, again resulting from massive increases in compute efficiency. That is, the end-point energy use impacts aren't much changed.
There's more to this, and the story is complicated. But while computing has very high potential increases, the end-point impacts (worker productivity, economic efficiency, even technical capabilities) are often oddly muted.
To put another twist on this: the Apollo lunar missions had a few hundred pounds of computer assembled in a ring around one of the higher (IIRC above the 3rd stage) boosters. Swapping out that compute capacity for an equivalent mass of modern tech would have very minimal impact on the mass, range, or accuracy of the system as a whole. The main advantage is that an equivalent compute capacity -- sufficient for the mission, could be provided in vastly less mass, which is critical for Earth-based rocket launches. But the improvement then is based on the reduction in the physical requirements for providing compute capacity, not the increased performance of massively more compute capacity itself.
Precisely, thanks. I can get an upper bound on Earth's carrying capacity with (volume of earth / volume of a human), but it's going to be way harder to calculate the number that will actually matter.
A better way to read this map: countries in the deep red are places where people have tamed this inhuman, unforgiving Earth, and people can lead happy and self-defined lives.
Countries in the deep green are where people are at the mercy of nature and die of 20th century causes.
People in the former complain that it is too "antiseptic" or "artificial", occasionally gawk at the latter and chastise everyone for not living in misery, always from the comfort of a city where the vast infrastructure that supports their lives is perfectly out of sight and out of mind.
> People in the former complain that it is too "antiseptic" or "artificial", occasionally gawk at the latter and chastise everyone for not living in misery, always from the comfort of a city where the vast infrastructure that supports their lives is perfectly out of sight and out of mind.
You do realize that there is a sliding scale here, right?
Great visualisation. It's good to focus on the stocks instead of the flows.
"to feed the continued growth in industrial output there must be ever-increasing use of resources. But resources become more expensive to obtain as they are used up. As more and more capital goes towards resource extraction, industrial output per capita starts to fall [...]
As pollution mounts and industrial input into agriculture falls, food production per capita falls. Health and education services are cut back, and that combines to bring about a rise in the death rate" [1]
"Broadly stated, most ecological problems reduce to a single problem of balancing supply and demand." [2]
"Ideal" growth of an economy is 3%. Growth takes resources(fossil fuels, ore, etc). Compound growth takes more and more resources over the whole planet. Free market fundamentalism means we're not investing so heavily into alternative sources but burning what we've got. Compound that 3% and it's just a metter when we'll be fucked unless things change a lot.
This is simply wrong. We produce vastly more GDP per unit of energy than we did a century ago, and will do the same a century from now.
The size of an economy is a measure of what people will pay for a good. It's not a measure of how big a pile of steel you can make. The most expensive goods nowadays, services and computing, do not take vast piles of resources. In fact, the most expensive computers use the LEAST energy per unit of computation.
While GDP/energy ratios have improved in some countries:
1. Total energy usage has increased.
2. There's been significant increased inequality within those nations. Particularly the US, also major industrial countries (G-7, OECD, etc.).
3. Many of these countries are exporting heavy manufacturing, with energy and other resource utilisation, and pollution generation, particularly to China and India.
"The material footprint of nations ", Thomas O. Wiedmanna, Heinz Schandl, Manfred Lenzenc, Daniel Moranc, Sangwon Suhf, James Westb, and Keiichiro Kanemotoc.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1220362110. PubMed ID24003158.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/28/1220362110
"The true raw material footprint of nations ", September 3, 2013. "The study, involving researchers from UNSW, CSIRO, the University of Sydney, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, was published today in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It reveals that the decoupling of natural resources from economic growth has been exaggerated."
Three percent shall be the number thou shalt grow, and the number of the growing shall be three. Four shalt thou not grow, neither grow thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.
For most of human prehistory and history, the rate was closer to 0.01%. It had progressed mightily between 1500 and 1750 to 0.17%. Rates of growth over 1% per year weren't known until after the advent of the Industrial Revolution (1800). There's no compelling reason to believe they're sustainable, and multiple compelling reasons to believe they're not.
Migration to Mars would require such an enourmous amount of energy that it would make the problem worse - each person moved to Mars would use far more than an average Western lifetime's worth of energy in the move.
This has never made sense to me. Why people think terra-forming Mars and moving 10Bn people there would be a better decision than just cleaning up the current planet we have? The amount of effort to rebuild our forests would be a blip next to what would be required to move to a new planet.
Exactly, we need to focus on things that last a long time, not gizmos. From a current HN thread on hacking into thermostats:
"Yes your $20 Honeywell lasted three decades and a new one would last three more decades, but this $200 IoT thermostat simply won't be supported in a large number of months and the end users need an economic plan to replace it, say, annually, rather than a couple times per century."
I understand the IoT thermostat has the potential to save even more ecoresources, but can't we do that in a way that doesn't mean it needs to be replaced every year?
A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars as a place where we could expand in foreseeable future. Maybe someone knowledgeable could chime in?
Closer. Easier to repair (parts are not billions of miles/months away) and resupply.
As a destination Mars is less hospitable than say the top of Mt Everest. And far harder to get to. For an easier visualization, imagine an orbiting space habitat vs a Mt Everest peak habitat.
> A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far superior to Mars...
Interesting...did he work at NASA working with real space habitats? I was a summer hire at NASA many moons ago in the medical/habitat programs and there sure wasn't much their that looked superior to anything.
The question is: Do you really want to leave earth, the only habitat for us humans (and other species) that is accessible to us? Live will change and evolve under other conditions; as such, earth is our home, and unique.
I propose saving this planet, and not messing up another one.
Because the habitat can be a great place to live. With all the comfort we are used to have here on Earth, but all the resources collectable at space.
And if they are discriminatory, you gather an asteroid and build another one. More than 99% of the difficulty is gone just by the fact that you are not on a planet's surface.
We are, of course, far from being able to build such things.
These days people prefer to live either in suburbia in Mediterranean climate or in old capitals (think Paris and London). That's a definite trend - we no longer have colonization of new spaces, we instead have consolidation in known good places.
One can perhaps start a commune in a forest or on an island even today, with handpicked people, but it doesn't happen.
Wanting to flee from Earth with all its problems is understandable, but I fear that we'll repeat a lot of bad stuff in habitats. Think totalitarian cults, slavery, plain old totalitarism.
Think about a place with a terrain build to be perfect for living, with perfectly planned ratios to water and land (perfectly distributed), controlled temperature into what the community decides is best (with the possibility of temperature zones), and finely controlled rain, wind and "sun" incidence so that it can be sunny on your pool area but still raining on the crops just near it. Oh, and also think about something reasonably big.
No idea how we may get people there, neither socially of physically, but this is what is possible. I'm also in no rush to get there, but we will someday, because it is just too tempting. (More because of energy availability than any of the above paragraph.)
Can you please elaborate on the resources in space? There is better solar energy but what else? I intuitively would have expected resources to be far better on Mars.
The huge theoretical bottleneck on life is energy. This is the only one you need to "expend" on some way, any other resource you just need "enough".
But for the others, with just a reasonably low delta-v and some patience you can get into cubic kilometers of unclaimed raw resources for extending your habitat. You just have to know how to use them (what we currently don't).
You'll certainly get a bigger density of material resources on any planet, but then you will be trapped inside a gravitational wheel and must spend all that delta-v again to break free from it once it's completely claimed. For the short term (to the point that any timeframe is "short" in this discussion) small moons and big asteroids are probably the best places to colonize.
Raise standards of living through the existing GDP growth regime, then wait for population to control itself. Trying to force it through controls will most likely backfire.
I'd recommend going back to his 1977 Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, which is one of the best distillations of the ecological and limits arguments, and one of the very few extensions of that to political space, I've seen.
I'm still planning on writing a proper review (https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius, eventually), but strongly recommend all his books.
Plato's Revenge updates a few particulars of the argument and extends it toward a solution space. What I appreciate most about him is that he writes not from a prescriptive "here's how to solve this" but an expository "here are the dimensions of the problem and possible frames of resolution".
William R. Catton, Jr.'s Overshoot is also excellent.
Oddly while it's closer I think it takes more energy to get to Venus then Mars. Something to do with orbital dynamics revolving around the relative speeds of Earth and the place you're trying to get to. That said the Venus exploration concepts I've seen look really interesting.
I'm not a fan of either Venus or Mars as alternatives to Earth. But Venus's far thicker atmosphere allows for aerobraking, which tremendously reduces the fuel requirements (tyranny of the rocket equation) for stopping once you get there.
Unless all you plan to do is enjoy the view on the way down.
I 100% personally believe that population control is the best answer. However, I would probably not support it going into law, because I believe it would end up just moving into a form of Eugenics that preys on the poor. Not to mention the international political doors it would open to non-trustworthy nations.
Many of the countries marked deep green (having higher biocapacity than ecological footprint) have been trending downwards for the past twenty years. The rate at which the biocapacity is diminishing appears to be slowing. But it makes me wonder if there is a way to visualize rates of decline as well.
I also wonder if there is a way to divide this up into spatial buckets so we could see say, the footprint of a metropolitan area versus other parts of the country. While national policies have affect on this, ecological impact is not necessarily confined to political borders.
One of the issues with ranking by percentage is it biases in favor of smaller nations because they're more likely to be anomalous. Notice how the countries at the top and bottom are both small.
The population growth rate is steadily declining. The last hundred years, is not going to be reflective of the next hundred. http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growthrate As the bigger countries like India get more and more industrialized, they will level off too.
Edit: I forgot to mention we have French Guiana which is essentially untouched forest and which offsets most comparison maps (biodiversity is a famous example).
Everyone would probably also prefer to spend the weekend with their high-rolling free-spending uncle, who will be bankrupt in a year but will guarantee you a great time in Las Vegas, than with their budget-conscious boring aunt who will reliably save money away for all the kids' college educations.
There's no science that suggests that the first world can continue to use up resources and emit carbon at their current rates without eventually both destroying the environment and depleting the resources.
Sure, things could change, like the uncle could suddenly learn to be responsible.
Seriously? Did you not see Canada, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia. For me it was relatively balanced and mainly the US really throws it off. There are also some red countries that I would seriously not want to live in.
The only context where Argentina can be in the same sentence as Australia is in a list of countries in the Southern Hemisphere, or countries whose names start with an 'A'.
I'm pretty sick of all that hype around Tesla for example, pretending to be the real solution for independence of oil and gas. That is simply not the case. Tesla hasn't solved any of those issues so far, they only shifted the problem once again. Of course they design very beautiful electronic cars, but this isn't a solution for our energy and resource problem either.
How is it not a solution? It decouples transportation from fossil fuels. Yes, the energy can still come from fossil fuels, but it no longer has to. The entire transportation fleet could now be nuclear powered, for example.
Because it doesn't address the ridiculous amount of energy and resources spent on private transportation to begin with.
I see many people excited about the fact that electric cars can be powered by renewables, and efficiency gains automation can bring, without acknowledging the downsides of an auto-dominated society.
What it does not solve is:
* The energy spent producing a 2000kg+ car (there's 255 million cars in the US alone, 797 for every 1000 people) [1]
* That that 2000kg+ car in the US is moving on average less than 2 people per trip [2]
* The energy spent moving single commuters on hour long commutes (average of 25minutes each way [3]). I see many comments discussing how drivers will be productive on long automated commutes, while not addressing the inefficiency of that commute to begin with
* The destructive and wasteful development patterns of auto-oriented cities - (sprawl, destroyed agricultural lands, the enormous health costs of sedentary lifestyles)
* The resources required and pollution generated for the production/maintenance/powering of all these vehicles, renewable or not - renewables only produced ~13% of all electricity in 2015 [4]
I totally agree that it's be nicer if we could eliminate cars and build more pedestrian friendly cities. A cultural shift like that is much harder to pull off than a simpler technical solution. Don't let your idealism blind you to the fact that this is a large improvement to the status quo.
I live in a place where the largest sources of electricity are nuclear, wind, and hydro power, simply because they're cost effective for the region. So electric cars here shift not only to an easier problem, but to a largely solved problem.
As in math, transforming one problem into another is often just as good as finding a direct solution.
2. It achieves greater efficiency per unit energy input than combustion-based systems, if using non-thermal (nuclear-excepted) fuel. Carnot's Law limits heat engines to ~20 - 45% efficiency, max.
On the negative side:
1. Tesla doesn't fundamentally change the dynamics of land-use which lead to massive amounts of personal transit being necessary.
2. Thermal energy (coal, gas, oil, biomass, and even nuclear, though without the CO2 emissions) still has a peak generating efficiency of only about 45%.
3. It's possible that synfuels might prove a better route for portable energy storage. Carbon-neutral synthetic petrol, kerosene (jet fuel), deisel, and methane would be infinitely miscable with current fossil-based liquid and gas fuels, and would require no replacement of extant transport, refining, dispensing, or utilisation capital. (The cost would be higher, though there's an accounting argument to be made there as well.) Energy densities (by volume and weight), handling properties, safety, and very, very long-term storage capabilities (tens to hundreds of millions of years, proven) make this attractive.
4. The entire system is predicated on economical sources of lithium (or other battery substrate). Lithium is not an abundant mineral, and present recycling rates are low. Even with 90% recovery, the stock of material would fall by 80% in 15 generations. Most metals see recycling rates of closer to 30%, if that.
Where I live, the majority of electricity sources are renewable (or nuclear). Powering a home without fossil fuels is a semi-solved problem.
Powering a car without fossil fuels, by contrast, is not on the table for most people. Quality, budget electric cars stand to 'shift' the resource problem over to one we've already dealt with, which sounds like a huge win to me.
Even if every Tesla was 100% powered by coal power plants, it would still be an improvement since it's much easier to control efficiency and emissions at a single 4GW plant than in a fleet of 40000 100kW cars.
> A national ecological deficit means that the nation is importing biocapacity through trade, liquidating national ecological assets or emitting carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere.
Before we had this trade and industrial activity that outputs all of this carbon dioxide waste life spans of humans were 3 times shorter than today.
And by the way the world population was also 8 times smaller, meaning that we today by altering the ecosystem of the world can feed a population that was unfathomable a 100 years ago.
I'm not a proponent of producing waste that harms us without any limits or regulations, but these people that simply cannot accept that human activity changes the worlds ecosystem for human benefit seem like fanatics to me.
If we give in to this then I can assure you that we in the West will be conquered by others and rightly so, because our culture has become retarded to a degree that it inhibits our ability to develop technologically, economically and culturally.
I'm pretty sure the Chinese will not stop developing to save some frogs, if we go down this path they'll simply slaughter us. (not physically but from an economic and technological perspective)
The impact of that pollution is felt much wider, even primarily, by those outside of the countries producing the pollution.
See: Chernobyl fallout carried west on the wind across Europe, and sea-level rises caused by human-accelerated global warming disproportionately impacting poor island nations not responsible for said global warming.
There are of course still very local, direct harms from pollution, but the most severe, long-term effects eventuate globally.
---
For example see David Blume's concept for small-scale organic alcohol fuel production integrated with Permaculture food production. http://permaculture.com/node/518
Not to give away (part of) the punchline, but the on-site extraction and distillation of the fuel retains all the trace elements, minerals, etc. The molecules in the fuel have come from the air and water, their energy-holding arrangement has been paid for by the Sun. The farm exports sunlight in fluid form.
As part of an integrated agriculturally-productive ecosystem alcohol fuel production just makes sense. The economics are totally different from large-scale ethanol, for instance.