as an aside in the latest Trillbillies episode Terrence said that we need degrowth communism and it got me wondering what that means to everyone. to hopefully stifle any silly debates i'll clarify that i'm talking about the West, not underdeveloped/overexploited nations in the Global South.
an end to oil drilling, gas extraction, and coal mining will obviously be necessary to stop climate change. how much modern technology can we replicate without relying on those things or other ecologically violent resource extraction? what does an agriculture system that doesn't rely on petrochem-derived fertilizers and herbicides look like? how do we repair the immense damage that's already been done?
i'd really appreciate some book recommendations on this topic as well as everyone's thoughts
The book Half-Earth Socialism covers this very extensively as a global resource constraint problem. The sort of "default settings" would be:
The main limiting factor is land usage. If we want to preserve half the earth's landmass for the biosphere to do whatever the fuck it does to keep us all alive, and keep 85% of existing wild species from going extinct, we don't have a lot of land to work with. Land reserved for human use will be split into:
Needless to say the societal changes necessary to reach this state would make the cultural revolution look like child's play.
why not nuclear? it's way more space efficient, and solar panels need to be replaced every 20 years
You run out of efficiently mine-able uranium fairly quickly when trying to scale up to the electrification energy needs of an entire planet.
well yeah, I'm not saying the whole world should be powered by just nuclear. solar definitely has its own place as does wind, hydroelectric, and the like.
there is also alternative reactor types like thorium, and if research continues fusion (which will be more feasible under communism with a well resourced public research and energy sector)
Sure, I'm not really anti-nuclear generally. It is in the mix and will continue to be in the mix. However, I don't think it will be a linchpin.
People also talk about reactors taking a long time to build but all of this stuff will take a long time to build. We will overshoot. I have accepted this. All I can hope for is we don't double down and use solar radiation management to forever rob our children of a brilliant blue sky.
Takes too long, the stuff that could be useful doesn't commercially exist yet (SMRs and thorium reactors), too complex to scale
Solar panels don't need to be replaced every 20 years - efficiency degrades over time, so you would expect 80 percent of the output at 25 years compared to a new one (or total efficiency of 16 percent compared to 20 percent new).
It takes 15-20 years to build, we'll run out of fuel in a few years if you use it as the main energy source, and other renewables are already good enough.
Nuclear was a useful stop-gap when solar/wind tech wasn't developed. Nuclear as a main energy source is pretty much dead in the water today though.
What about floating solar and desert solar? The Saharan biosphere is mostly dead and empty and has constant sun. Same with a large portion of the Southwestern US and Australia. Also boat only travel for overseas transport of people and perishables seems impractical.
Can you expand on what you mean by impractical?
Slow and needing more logistics for food for the trip. I also didn't know if we have low carbon boat technology yet as a lot of these boats are diesel powered.
Trips will take longer although satellite internet continues to improve, so working remotely on the ship is viable for jobs where that is possible. Despite their terrible emissions ocean freight is still far, far more carbon efficient than any other form of transport, even rail.
Is satellite internet a priority? It's very expensive and difficult to make, the supply chains are very long and launches produce millions of tons of CO2. I wonder if more efficient jet (or even propeller) travel would be better in the long run.
For carbon emissions, every space launch ever done in history completely pales in comparison to the 10s of thousands of aircraft crossing the globe every moment of every day. It is just not anywhere near the same order of magnitude. A single cross country flight for a single person emits more carbon emissions than citizens of many countries do in an entire year.