There has never been an energy transition
There has never been an energy transition
Some sobering truths about energy and the economy.
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The absolute rate didn't go down, but the proportional rate did. Because our energy consumption has increased.
It's kind of like arguing that there are more pirates today than there were 400 years ago. Yes, technically correct in absolute terms. In fact there's more of everything today. But that doesn't mean we are living in the age of piracy (the naval kind). And it shouldn't mean the current deployment of renewables is making no progress.
Except there is the same amount of Earth that was before & even less biodiversity & (wild) biomass.
Any increase in environment effects like that (even a local level) by a single species would be considered an infestation.
You sure can make the case that humans are an invasive species, but the fact is that we are the overwhelmingly dominant species on this planet, so it is what it is.
There's a lower limit of 20 quadrillion ants on earth, so I'd say their species(es) are dominating us. Don't even get me started on bacteria, they're just puppeting us for their own benefit. I think even chickens are like 3:1 with humans.
Maybe by technology though, we definitely have the best cars, guns and microplastic.
I’m judging dominance by influence, not numbers.
No, every other animal, bacteria, fungi, plans, aliens that visited earth, have microplastics in them as well. It will probably remain a forever mystery how it all got everywhere.
The current planetary events will be marked by a distinctive line of plastics in the sediment rock (the 'F-U boundary' as the future crab historians will be calling it).
Hopefully we fuck it enough to permanently delete us. It will take millions of years, but the biosphere will recover eventually.
Yes, but dominant (especially "intelligent") does not need to mean destructive. Nor to multiply beyond sustainable levels (ie until we hit hard walls, at the end of the current extinction event).
dude, we should have gotten to 0 emissions yesterday to prevent global ecological collapse. Any year in which we keep emitting at this rate, it's millions of preventable deaths in the years to come.
What is happening is that any renewable development slightly lowers the price of energy and so energy consumption increases, because there are no meaningful degrowth policies in place. This is a complete failure for the ideology of transition and for humankind as a whole.
The pirate example would be more accurate if there was a static, critical number of pirates that the world could handle before triggering a global catastrophic event. (I guess maybe that's technically already true?)
Global temperatures aren't going to reduce because we're putting 'proportionally less' CO2 into the atmosphere.
It's kind of like arguing that there are more pirates today than there were 400 years ago. Yes, technically correct
citation needed