> But the "floor" below which nobody in the U.S. can reach, no matter a person's energy choices, turned out to be 8.5 tons, the class found. That was the emissions calculated for a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters.
I think the statistic is useful. However, "telling people they have to live like a homeless person" isn't true, and the statistic needs that additional framing.
edit: Anyone care to explain the downvotes? The fact that we can't even discuss the possibility that "our way of life might not be sustainable" to me is a huge part of the problem facing us.
It's extremely misguided to think that we can maintain anything like our current standard of living and still reach anything like sustainable energy (or resource) use.
Our current lifestyle in the developed world is based on exploiting solar energy that has been stored millions of years ago. There is no pathway to a renewable energy system that anywhere meets the needs of global capitalism.
First off, renewables (45% of which in the US is just burning biomass) are serving more to supplement energy demands rather than replace fossil fuel usage. We also have no current path way to a majority wind+solar grid. The intermittent nature of these power sources requires energy storage or fossil fuel based "peaker" plants. There is no solution for energy storage on the grid at the scale that would be required to meet current energy needs, let alone the growth of energy demand.
But even if we completely solved the grid, we have no solution to the biggest part of the problem with is resource transportation. Transportation is vital to our current economic model and transportation requires high energy density fuels, otherwise your fuel becomes your cargo and you can't ship anything. Again, we have no solutions to these problems.
And most fundamentally, our economic model is predicated on borrowing against the future to pay for today. This requires that in the future we must always produce and consume more, which is impossible in a closed finite system.
The only realistic path toward actual sustainability is a considerable degradation in the quality of daily life. But very few people will even honestly discuss this fundamental reality, so we continue to move forward, using more energy, and more oil and producing more co2 each year than the last.
What you say is false. We are surrounded by far more energy than we need. We just have to continue solving difficult engineering problems in order to harness it. We are doing an OK job from a technical standpoint (especially in the last 20 years), but a god-awful job from a political standpoint.
You sound like you're quoting from the Limits to Growth or some equally pessimistic mutli-decade-old study.
> We just have to continue solving difficult engineering problems in order to harness it.
But that requires large amounts of cheap energy to do. The last 200 years haven't been an insane time of innovation just because we, as a species, got magically more brilliant. It's because we had unprecedented accessed to cheap energy.
That fuel became available because of the industrial revolution. Further technological advances will make other forms of energy cheaply available. As for intelligence, our civilization certainly has become more capable since technology and science build upon each other.
Address the grid storage issue? There's not enough lithium resources on the planet, for instance, to use lithium batteries to store even a day's worth of USA energy usage?
Your inability to imagine better energy storage technology is your justification for declaring that civilization as we know it is doomed?
What you're talking about is exclusively chemical storage. Check out thermal and mechanical storage. Those are likely the more promising large scale solutions and both are already used in a variety of different ways at industrial scales. I'm particularly partial to the use of heated salt via solar thermal plants as an affordable and scalable solution. Several such plants are already in operation.
Ignoring any future and ongoing discovery of lithium resources, yes, just like there wasn't enough oil to put us where we are now, there isn't enough lithium today for a day's worth of storage of all of US's energy needs. That is not a fair assessment, however.
>These basic services--including police, roads, libraries, the court system and the military--were allocated equally to everyone in the country in this study.
> But the "floor" below which nobody in the U.S. can reach, no matter a person's energy choices, turned out to be 8.5 tons, the class found. That was the emissions calculated for a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters.