World GDP growth and energy usage are closely correlated. With the advent of burning fuel to power machines, we've greatly increased our capacity to produce things. GDP will drop as I suspect the transition to alternative (non-subsidised) energy will not be supple as the infrastructure to get stored energy (like oil) from A to B is huge and not easily replaced.

Some things I consider likely:
There will be an increase in distributed energy production - a strong growth in solar cells for private individuals to try and meet their personal needs. Commuting will become expensive, so I suspect working from home will become more economically viable and therefore implemented by companies, possibly through more extensive use of VR.

3D-printing will further support the possibility to decentralize economic activity so I suspect an uptake there too.

Any technology that might come up that can be "dropped" into the existing oil infrastructure will be more successful than battery-powered cars. Biofuels or even CO2 capture and conversion to methanol/ethanol would be a life-safer. These ideas work in the laboratory but might not necessarily be economically viable at industrial scales. Not a certainty then but a possibility.

Nuclear power will become a necessity for many countries to support their way of life. Nuclear fission would be great if we can get it to work.

Rising prices will mean less holidays, less meat, lowering your heating, less new clothes; basically less of everything, as your income will not rise as quickly as energy prices (and therefore most every product) will. Your physical world will shrink as travelling will become prohibitively expensive, but with a bit of luck our devices will be efficient enough to stay connected.

My advice is to invest in local producers of products with a long life-cycle, with a low energy use for production.

Nuclear fission would be great if we can get it to work. — Benkei

Nuclear fission works quite well.

So do biofuels. I meant, of course, in a commercially, viable manner. ;)

So do biofuels. I meant, of course, in a commercially, viable manner. — Benkei

So long as you consider massive subsidies and destruction of primary forest habitats "commercially viable", which it certainly is if you are in receipt of the handouts.

Oh, and if you don't care about the increase in CO2 over simply burning coal.

I think he meant fusion.

I think he meant fusion. — Mongrel

Yup, my mistake.

So long as you consider massive subsidies and destruction of primary forest habitats "commercially viable", which it certainly is if you are in receipt of the handouts.

Oh, and if you don't care about the increase in CO2 over simply burning coal. — tom

Not in the manner you describe. The idea behind biofuels is to use biomass and catalytically convert it to fuels. the biomass is quickly replanted and regrown and therefore "captures" the CO2 released from burning the biofuels. In essence, nothing more than speeding up the process by which fossil fuels are created naturally. CO2 capture and catalytic conversion to methanol/ethanol is the same principle.

I believe shale methane hasn't reached peak yet. And last I recall there is something like 200 years worth for the US to run off in the country alone. Also, shale oil/gas is a US innovation that hasn't yet taken hold of the rest of the world due to limiting the tech to the US to benefit initially from it the most last I recall. — Question

Shale oil is not a US innovation. It predates the US by a couple of hundred years. ;)

Not in the manner you describe. The idea behind biofuels is to use biomass and catalytically convert it to fuels. the biomass is quickly replanted and regrown and therefore "captures" the CO2 released from burning the biofuels. In essence, nothing more than speeding up the process by which fossil fuels are created naturally. CO2 capture and catalytic conversion to methanol/ethanol is the same principle. — Benkei

I described the facts behind biofuels - increased CO2, forest and habitat destruction, subsidies, but forgot to mention the inevitable increase in food prices. What you describe is the fantasy.

e.g. The UK is the biggest importer of wood pellets in the world. Forests are destroyed in US, the wood chipped and kiln dried, made into pellets, shipped to UK and burned at Drax. All at extreme financial and environmental cost, and at increased CO2 emissions. Trees cannot grow that fast!

Shale oil is not a US innovation. It predates the US by a couple of hundred years. — Benkei

The UK also has vast stores of hydrocarbons that could be fracked - hundreds of years worth, but Scotland prefers to import US fracked gas.

Shale oil is not a US innovation. It predates the US by a couple of hundred years. — Benkei

Hah, I get the point. American exceptionalism at its best. Seems like the solution will have to be found from the same source of the problem, capitalism, and consumerism (as long as owning a green vehicle is a statement of status and being cool). Tesla seems to be dragging the competition in that direction, and hats off to him.

I described the facts behind biofuels - increased CO2, forest and habitat destruction, subsidies, but forgot to mention the inevitable increase in food prices. What you describe is the fantasy. — tom

I understand you're skeptical but the issues you raise are a consequence of the subsidies.

What I describe is hardly a fantasy and there is an the economic rationale that underpins the reason research was started in this direction. Bagasse, a waste product of cane sugar production, would be an excellent source for biofuels for instance but only if the refinery would be established very near to the source.

This is the main constraint for any biofuels plant; the net benefit of the energy won through catalytic processes and the energy cost of getting the base material to the plant reduces quickly over longer distances. These plants by necessity have to remain relatively small but the technology of catalytic cracking is robust, low temperature (low risk, easy to operate) and simple to maintain (regular decoking). It will be economically viable and be environmentally sound but not at the scale of current oil production; at maximum 10% but more probably at most 2-3%.

An interesting failure in this respect is Kior.

There are various technologies that can provide energy and/or liquid fuel: coal made into gasoline; biomass made into gas or liquid; nuclear; solar; wind; hydro; etc. The problem with all of these is that can not provide the huge output of chemicals and energy at a price or in volume that petroleum has provided. The world uses 96 million barrels of petroleum per day. That's 4 billion gallons. I don't see any sustainable alternate energy source that can do that. The world also uses huge amounts of natural gas every day.

What the alternates (aside from nuclear energy) can do is provide methane for limited use, and modest output of energy. These outputs will be lifesavers for small areas that have these systems in place when oil becomes too expensive to use for fuel. Turning animal waste, garbage, plant waste, etc. into methane for cooking can be done quite easily, but in fairly limited quantities. Solar and wind would make a major difference to a small population with no other source of electrical energy. For very large populations, solar and wind probably won't produce enough.

Using alternative fuels for 7 billion people (and rising) is a non-starter.

The whole modern world economy is a result of inexpensive oil, and there is nothing that can "fill its shoes".

The whole modern world economy is a result of inexpensive oil, and there is nothing that can "fill its shoes". — Bitter Crank

There certainly isn't, but don't discount the worlds fastest growing source of energy, which nearly matches oil in terms of energy production - coal.

Natural gas, is also keeping up with oil in terms of growth rate.

OOps! Hydropower now proved to cause dangerous global warming. Officially no longer "green".

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/11/949/2754271/Greenhouse-Gas-Emissions-from-Reservoir-Water

“The new study confirms that reservoirs are major emitters of methane, a particularly aggressive greenhouse gas,” said Kate Horner, Executive Director of International Rivers, adding that hydropower dams “can no longer be considered a clean and green source of electricity.”

Yeah, sorry, uranium.

Apparently there's an alternative nuclear technology based on thorium (I think it is) which is said to be a lot less polluting. But, it's never going to get up in Australia, the politics are against it.

The study concludes that "careful siting of new reservoirs" is required. Kate Horner, on the other hand, is an anti-dam activist.

This brings up a question that I have long had about allegedly "clean" or "renewable" energy sources. There is no free lunch, so we are always redirecting energy that otherwise would have gone somewhere else. Solar, wind, waves, whatever - taking that energy out of the environment must have some kind of effect. What (if any) studies have been done to gauge this and confirm that the overall outcome it is net positive relative to burning fossil fuels?

allegedly "clean" — aletheist

that kind of expression plays right into the hands of petro-chemical industry scare-mongering.


Today's news from Australia - 'Disastrous': Australia's carbon emissions jump as coal-fired power ramps up

During the brief period of time that the ill-fated Australian Carbon Emissions scheme worked, emissions really did fall. The scheme was torpedoed for purely political reasons, with the above effects, and now there is talk about 'clean coal' and 'carbon capture and storage', which according to many of the commentators, is far from ready for production.

In short, we're going backwards.

There will be a reckoning and it will likely not be pretty, given humanity's propensity to 'party on' until the fact that something is wrong can no longer be ignored.

No one knows when that reckoning will be, how precipitous it will be, or what exact form it will take. No one knows the future, in other words, as much as our insecurities might cause us to wish we did. My advice would be to "be alert, but not alarmed", and remain relaxed, otherwise incipient neuroses may become actualized.

Good question, here's the short:

An acre of solar panels probably absorbs and stores more light and heat than an acre of rain-forest. We will never dent the environment this way (would take too many panels) in the foreseeable future, but if we did, it would probably have a net cooling effect.

Wind turbines slow the movement of air that was set into motion by mostly atmospheric pressure changes (which comes from heat). If we covered the entire world in windmills I don't know what the effect would actually be. The weather might be made calmer, but it might become more erratic as well if slowing the air allows it to absorb more heat energy from the sun. (but again we will never have enough turbines to see such a global effect).

Hydro-electricity is quite "clean". Every time precipitation happens the sun is lifts an extraordinary amount of water, and there's no input/output cost to that system if we happen to make some of it turn a turbine on it's way back down to earth. That energy would have been wasted anyway. Big Dams can fuck up local ecosystems, but if done right they can create new ones too.

Nuclear energy is filthy. It's "renewable" because it lasts a long time but it's not "clean" at all. We actually sometimes use the word "dirty" (the very opposite of "clean") to describe the inevitable waste products from using uranium as a fuel source. It leads to waste-dumps, wastelands, radiation sickness, and cancer. Only waste-dumps are a guarantee, but we've already lost the latter three dice-rolls more than once.

If nuclear fusion works we could be laughing all the way to the bank of limitless energy. There is no waste in fusion so far as I know. In fact we might actually be able to use it to destroy our existing waste. This is not something we can bet the future of humanity on yet, so it's on the social back-burner while the nerds do us a solid plasma favor by figuring out if it will work.

Of all the "green" technologies, nuclear is really only considered as much because of... Well....:

that kind of expression plays right into the hands of petro-chemical industry scare-mongering. — Wayfarer

The point is that "clean" and "renewable" are buzzwords implying that anything that avoids burning fossil fuels is inherently and unquestionably less damaging to the environment. I am not convinced that we know this to be a fact at this moment in history. For one thing, no form of energy is literally renewable; it is different energy that we capture over time from the sun, wind, waves, etc.; not the same energy over and over.

If we covered the entire world in windmills I don't know what the effect would actually be. — VagabondSpectre

This is really the only point that I wanted to make. We do not (yet) know the global effects of widespread implementation of various "alternative" energy sources. We just assume that since they do not involve burning fossil fuels, they are automatically better/cleaner.

It's certainly true though that we would need so many windmills to have some kind of effect in this manner that what we're talking about is potentially 1000's of years away. What we do know is windmills don't shit out greenhouse gasses or other pollutants. The localized environmental impact of their initial installation and the on-going impact of maintenance basically covers it all.

The point is that "clean" and "renewable" are buzzwords implying that anything that avoids burning fossil fuels is inherently and unquestionably less damaging to the environment. I am not convinced that we know this to be a fact at this moment in history. For one thing, no form of energy is literally renewable; it is different energy that we capture over time from the sun, wind, waves, etc.; not the same energy over and over. — aletheist

I think 'avoiding burning fossil fuels' should unquestionably be a major policy goal. Solar and wind power are certainly less polluting, the only real issue being their suitability for base-load power, that is, providing power when the sun is down and the wind isn't blowing.

As to the meaning of 'renewable' - solar energy is in principle unlimited and produces no by-products. In fact, all fossil fuels are, is captured and stored solar energy, but utilising it in that form releases many by-products, of which CO2 and methane are two (along with soot and other particulate matter).

I think 'avoiding burning fossil fuels' should unquestionably be a major policy goal. — Wayfarer

I worry about anything that is characterized as "unquestionable," especially in the realm of public policy. But I also drive a hybrid vehicle, and believe that we should be good stewards of the planet - after all, so far it is the only one we have.

I worry about anything that is characterized as "unquestionable," especially in the realm of public policy. — aletheist

But it is unquestionable, it's beyond doubt. The whole problem in this area is that various interests have created the FUD factor - fear, uncertainty and doubt - just so as to get everyone thinking 'hey, maybe the switch from carbon fuels isn't such a good thing'. And I think that's what is being reflected in the debate. As far I'm concerned the time for debate is settled, it is action that is required.

I mean, the 'climate change' news at the moment is really staggeringly awful. Here in Australia, large areas of the Great Barrier Reef are under threat, directly from changes in sea temperature. The Antarctic and Artic polar ice caps are grossly effected by rises in sea temperature. 2016 was the hottest year on record. What is it going to take?

The whole idea that renewable energy is a kind of 'green conspiracy' that is a 'threat to the world economic order' is what I would call a vicious meme. It is unfortunate that many of the green parties in the Western democracy are unreasonably leftist in their policy views - I have actually handed out How to Vote cards for the Australian Greens in the past, but I never will again, for that reason. But the fact of 'climate emergency' ought to be beyond debate, the fact that it has become politicized is one of the very worst things that has happened.

It's really a matter of economics. Once solar is below the parity level of coal oil and gas, then you will see inevitable economic forces making decisions instead of policies. That's just how things work. I just don't know if solar and other renewables can get to that point soon enough.

Wind turbines slow the movement of air that was set into motion by mostly atmospheric pressure — VagabondSpectre

True. So do hills, mountains, tall buildings, and big trees. "A turbine's 116-ft blades atop a 212-ft tower for a total height of 328 feet sweep a vertical airspace of just under an acre. The air above 328 feet (all the way up for miles) is sublimely indifferent to windmills, even if there were 1 million of them.

Nuclear energy is filthy — VagabondSpectre

It's "clean" in terms of carbon dioxide (though it isn't 100% pure on that front either.

Nuclear energy could be better (safer) IF we standardized parts (the way the French have).

Nuclear power would be safer if we took the dangers more seriously. The design of the Fukushima nuclear plants put the storage pool for very radioactive and thermally hot fuel rods on an upper floor of the plant. The same design is used in many other nuclear plants. The nuclear reactors themselves are not in a melt-proof bottle. When things go wrong with a nuclear reactor, things can get very bad very fast.

Nuclear power would be safer if we buried the waste very deeply in very long term storage. Can we build long term storage? Sure we can, but "the perfectly safe" storage cavern is impeding the progress of the extremely safe storage cavern (like Yucca Mountain). So instead of burial, we have it piling up on the grounds of nuclear plants. Not good, Kemosabe.

No method of sequestering nuclear waste will last forever, but then, highly radioactive isotopes don't last forever, either. Most of them last a lot longer than we can plan for, however. Who knows what shape human culture will be in 200 years from now? 2000? 20,000? However we put it there, it has to stay stable without further attention for what...25000 years, give or take a few millennia or two.

Australian Greens — Wayfarer

Boil the greens until tender.

I also drive a hybrid vehicle — aletheist

Driving a hybrid is better than driving a gas guzzling highway behemoth, for sure. But... the model of halo you get for driving a hybrid vehicle is made out of cheap yellow plastic. It never glows--even in bright light--and you have to hold it over your head yourself.