Will Culturally Inappropriate Prosperity Doom Us All?

[james_davis_nicoll]

As pointed out in email

Spun right, this could a population bomb for the 21st century:

The basic story is: growth, but not evenly distributed growth. Developed countries are expected to plateau in population and energy demand, but developing countries are expected to grow like gangbusters:
[snip]
What kind of energy will satisfy all that new demand? While renewables and natural gas are expected to grow faster than ever before, and oil and coal are expected to substantially slow their growth, there will nonetheless be more oil and coal burned in 2030 than in 2011:

[Poll #1754119]

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Send the developed world back to a preindustrial tech level to compensate?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Let the OECD nations Transcend into non-corporeal forms in a Vingean Singularity through special ablative birthinghel crematoria.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Send them back to their place as cheap labor for the developed world.

Coffee plantations everywhere, say I! Banana, tea, and opium are also acceptable.

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

Of course, rather than *developing* the new energy source, it would be easier to steal it from mean aliens or to be gifted it by benevolent aliens. But aliens need to figure in there somewhere.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

Perhaps trade the new energy source for the populations of the developed countries to be used as slave labour (or food, or both) by the aliens.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Commercialise a way to turn baby seals into a biofuel source. All that high-calorie blubber... and 100% green, too!

-- Steve thinks it's reasonable to see the developing world leapfrog over the nasty bits of the power-generating learning curve, as they did with telecommunications.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yes, learning from our mistakes (or just experience; to be a "mistake" the consequences needed to be forseeable and the alternatives needed to exist at the time the decision was made) would be a good thing for others to do. Even for us to do, really.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm a science fiction fan; how can I possibly be expected to resist Dark Matter windmills?

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

You may need to move those into the purely science fantasy realm from the hard scifi section. There may be no stinkin dark matter. ;)

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26912/

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I know! That's what sold me on that option. I have no idea what they are but they sound so cool.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Anyone who says "Dark Energy windmills" gets my stern disapproval.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

One theory of dark matter I've seen holds that antimatter was preferentially sequestered into droplets of unconfined antiquark matter at the QCD phase transition (thereby also explaining the apparent prevalence of matter in the universe without requiring total baryon number to be nonzero.) In this theory, there could be lumps of ultradense antimatter (with mass in the range of tons) sailing through the solar system all the time.

One could imagine these being detected somehow, tracked down, be given an electric charge, then towed back to Earth orbit to be used as fuel in annihilation reactors. Even at nuclear density, they would produce huge amounts of energy immersed in a gas of normal matter at reasonable pressures.

[jeffreyab.livejournal.com]

Also this: Encourage more efficient use of conventional energy sources in the developed world

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Since you insist on using radio buttons rather than ticky boxes, I will have to insert (X)CATS! into the comments.

[redbird]

s/developing/developed for choice 3 and maybe 2: I like my comfort, but who is going to accept "stop developing so we can keep our much lifestyle which is much nicer than we're asking you to stop at"?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

People living thousands of miles away across water, without access to modern weapons, might end up de-facto accepting it.

I do not urge this as ethical behavior, of course.

[jamiam.livejournal.com]

DARK MATTER WINDMILLS.

....Dude, I'm sitting in Germany right now, and it's raining. It was raining yesterday; it rained the day before that; it will rain tomorrow and likely the day after that. If GERMANY can make solar power work, practically anybody can.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Rain-mills!

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

I selected 2 because it's most expedient, but would have chosen 4 also with checkboxes.

[death4breakfast.livejournal.com]

Atomic power is missing from the list. Some of the Europeans may be shutting down their power plants, (And likely buying their power from the French, who haven't.) but the Chinese aren't letting it stop them, and I suspect many developing countries won't either when they start getting to that point.

I also strongly suspect that when there start getting to be brown-outs, or "rolling blackouts" due to lack of electricity, and the accident in Japan has faded a bit from people's awareness, that the nuclear power, (Possibly built by the Chinese.) will be back on the table again.

[(Anonymous)]

Yup. The Indians are going ahead, too. With China, that's a third of the human species building out nuclear.

And that's without all these other smaller countries, like Vietnam -- Vietnam! -- making noises about planning to build between twelve and twenty reactors by 2030. Simultaneously, the South Koreans have undercut France's Areva by contracting to build four reactors in the UAE, due online in 2010, for substantially less than the French: the South Koreans may become the new international industry leaders, in fact.

If the Germans can really make renewables work, more power to them.

In the meantime, though, they're burning more coal even as indications exist that the global warming thing may be about to get more non-negotiably real. (Methane release; global harvest problems; etc.) Hence, the world may not be so happy with German coal-burning in 5-8 years.

Mark Pontin

A modest proposal

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Discover that brown people, when properly compressed, are wonderful sources of He-3?

[felila.livejournal.com]

I don't like being forced to choose between increasing energy efficiency and developing carbon-neutral energy sources. If you look at a graph of costs for adoption versus energy savings, increasing efficiency gives you the most reduction in carbon emissions for the least cost. The best strategy is to increase efficiency AND invest in carbon-neutral sources with the money you've saved.

[lostwanderfound.livejournal.com]

Bingo.

Getting out of the climate-change hole with our arses intact isn't going to be a matter of choosing between solution A and solution B; we're going to need to throw everything we have at it. Efficiency, renewables, nuclear, adaptation; they're all necessary. And, even with all that, it's still a helluva risky thing.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Whatever we do, unless we're willing to give up our comforts, we have no right to ask others to.

Which is why chose "I would like to complain about this poll" with side orders of "I don't believe in unobtainium" and "we're all doomed." [sigh]

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Geoengineering to cope with all that CO2!

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

other: don't know.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Go into Space!

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

[*insert appropriate Portal/2 meme here*]