Restoring nature is our only climate solution
(www.resilience.org)
soloA review of available techno-fixes leads to two unavoidable conclusions. First, our problem is not just carbon emissions per se; it’s also how we humans inhabit our planet (too many of us using too much stuff too fast). And second, we need non-technological ways of addressing the climate crisis.
A big part of deforested land is used for animal agriculture. Watch how many people instantly tune out when the topic is brought up, though.
Stop eating animals.
A more nature-based society will feature fewer people living closer to the land, with a throughput of energy and materials far smaller than is the case in industrialized nations today. We will be less urbanized, more rural.
Oh, that's bad. Whenever you have people move out of cities and into nature, they build wide 1 story buildings, have lots of kids, cut down all the trees, and those kids grow up to build more 1 story buildings for their families.
We need people building tall structure in urban settings, so we can scale up without cutting down the trees in between our homes.
Yeah, this article is really fucking strange.
I fully agree with the seeming goals - restore nature, reduce human footprint, smarter use of resources - all valid, noble, and needed. But some of the proposed methods are simultaneously counterproductive and scientifically ignorant.
'Wind is intermittent so it can't be used' therefore we need 'household bike generators'...
'Wind is intermittent so it can't be used' therefore we need 'household bike generators'...
Human power cannot come anywhere close to our energy needs.
We'd be lucky to get 1000 kcals per day of useful locomotion from a human powered generator. That's basically the equivalent of a very fit person biking for 20 miles (32 km) per day, into a machine that captures that energy with perfect efficiency. That would translate into about 1.1 kWh per person, per day.
Compare that to actual electricity consumption per capita. The world total is 3.9 MWh/year per capita, which translates into 10.6 kWh/day. Developed/Western countries use even more: North America uses 36.6 kWh/day/person, Europe uses 16.8 kWh/day/person. And that doesn't include direct combustion of fuels (biofuels, fossil fuels) for heating or transportation, either, and only represents grid electricity usage.
Human power cannot come anywhere close to our energy needs
Tell that to the article author and their rather unhinged view of our energy future.
To be clear, I completely agree with you. I was responding to the article itself which starts out as reasonable-sounding directives to re-wild ecosystems to build climate resilience and then devolves into this strange science-denying anarcho-ecologism.
The bike generators are suggested seemingly seriously and are such a glaringly implausible idea that it sullies the entire piece.
I wasn't disagreeing with you, just backing you up with some calculations.
Anyone who has ever done the "hmm I wonder if a human in a hamster cage could power human energy needs" thought experiment very quickly runs into the answer "no, and it's not even close."
‘Wind is intermittent so it can’t be used’ therefore we need ‘household bike generators’…
This sentence never appears in the article, and it's content is never implied. So what are you talking about?
The verbatims:
The first climate-tech category consists of low-carbon energy generating machines, including solar panels, wind turbines, and nuclear power plants. These energy sources produce electrical power with minimal carbon emissions. However, they are not problem-free or risk-free. Wind and solar power are intermittent, requiring energy storage (e.g., batteries) and a major grid overhaul.
And further down:
If solar, wind, and nuclear electricity generators won’t solve the climate problem, and fossil fuels have to be quickly phased out, where will we get our energy?
Next paragraph:
Instead, we can use energy from sunlight, wind, and flowing water, not just in high-tech ways—via photovoltaics, wind turbines, and hydroelectric dams—but in low-tech ways that entail less usage of mined materials. Low-Tech Magazine explores these options, including human-powered air compressors, sailing ships, practical household bike generators
Bit of a far cry from 'the content is never implied'.
You turned human-powered air compressors into household bike generators.
One is a manual tire pump that has existed for generations, the other is a person-sized hamster wheel for the purposes of charging an e-bike.
You missed some words when reading, please try again
Thank you, precisely my point. Nowhere does it say anything like or implying, the combination you mention, which was ‘Wind is intermittent so it can’t be used’ therefore we need ‘household bike generators
In relation to the 3 segments you provide:
- Wind is intermittent, nobody denies that by itself. It doesn't say not to use it for this reason
- Then a question?
- Using renewable energy, not just in high-tech ways, but also through low tech approaches to avoid mining is very different to what you claim they say
Edit: Several, to make things clearer @skibidi@lemmy.world
To my knowledge deforestation does not take place because people move out of cities and into nature.
That chart only shows a breakdown of foods.
It's missing development for real estate.
But, yeah, animal agriculture is worse. But even if we all became vegetarian (we should!), that won't stop deforestation from humans building homes.
That chart doesn't (and can't) account for deforestation caused by rural migration and/or sprawl caused by single-family homes.
There was a week during covid up here in Canada where even the main street was empty during "rush hour" and it was quiet like being in the forest. I remember thinking that this gives a chance for the earth to breathe for a bit and I swear I could feel it healing.
When I lived in Taipei, Taiwan, there was a military exercise in that area with civilian curfew for a whole day. Finally the constant traffic roar went silent and I could keep my windows open and listen to birds and insects. A pleasant curfew.
Yeah, that was one of the best weeks of my life.
I was praying humanity would see how calm it was when we turned off the capitalism machine, and we'd decide collectively to keep it off. Unfortunately, humans are dumb
It's rather simple really. Either we restore nature, or nature will do it herself. She will not do so gently.
Hard to take the article seriously when it dismisses renewable energy in favor of household bike generators of all things.
This is in no way practical. Restoring ecosystems is a very important task for building climate resiliency and mitigating some of the damage, but we'd effectively lose the ability to do anything by hampering energy production to such a degree. Hard to make a bunch of pyrolysate to regen the soil when the ovens are pedal-powered.
I'm glad to see pushback on this article. I expected, frankly, knee-jerk reactions, but i'm pleased to see that people see through a lot of the bullshit.
The aspect I wanted to discuss: We're not losing our forests. At least not in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forests_of_the_United_States
We started out with a billion acres of forest in the US before Europeans came. We've lost about a quarter of that, but most of that was before a hundred years ago - for various reasons, it's pretty stable, and we're not only growing new wood for the most part instead of chopping down old growth, we're gaining forest instead of losing it.
I think we're - overall - doing a not bad job on the forestry front.
We need to keep moving away from petrochemicals (i.e. not just oil/gas/coal for power/transportation, but working towards finding replacements for all this damn plastic, too), and keep improving alternate energy sources.
I have some hope on that front - for a tiny example, studies have looked at electric vehicles with higher miles, and the batteries are lasting much better than was feared (90% after 90k miles is not bad), and with new battery tech we should be able to better store wind/solar energy for use when it's needed. There is some great news along those lines.
We need to get rid of regresive politicians who are keeping polluting energy alive (along with shitting on human rights), and to do that we need to focus on getting rid of our oligarchs powering that system.
But on the actual "nature" frnt, things are not bad in many ways (while not being great in others, sure).
The US has pushed it's deforestation onto other countries though. It gets most of it's building lumber from Canada for example, and food products imported from the south like palm oil drive deforestation in far more vulnerable ecosystems.
Wait now, if you're going to have ONLY ONE solution to global warming affecting climate, it's obviously to stop or reduce the production of fossil fuels. Don't anyone skip that. Carry on.
Of course reducing and then stopping the extraction of fossil fuels is something we can't do without. Still, if you take a look at the article you will understand what it's about:
In this article, we will see why there is no viable techno-fix to climate change, and why trees, soil, and biodiversity are our real lifelines.
Techno-fixes are all ways to maintain our lifestyle with less effects on the environments. If we're going to clean a wine stain, the first thing to do is to stop pouring wine on the stain.
If we ban meat consumption, we get a lot of land back. Seems doable.
The article makes the point several times that the oceans have greater capacity for carbon capture than land.
So, yes, you're right that we need to ban meat and reforest those spaces.
And also, we desperately need to ban fishing to get that carbon sequestration capacity back from the oceans.
If we ban meat consumption, Republican penises will shrink, and we can't have that!
This article makes a lot of good points, but
Wind and solar power are intermittent, requiring energy storage (e.g., batteries) and a major grid overhaul. Building these energy sources at sufficient scale to replace our current energy usage from fossil fuels would require enormous amounts of materials, some of them rare, and mining those materials destroys habitat and pollutes the environment.
It's obvious the author isn't very educated on renewable energy.
Energy storage isn't batteries. Renewable energy storage is hydroelectric dams. Solar and wind during the day, and hydroelectric dams operate only at night. If your hydro is running during the day, you've done fucked up and need batteries
Do it right, and no batteries are needed, which drastically alters the rare earth materials needed.
But, yeah, we do also need to reduce our energy usage and our population too.
Energy storage isn’t batteries. Renewable energy storage is hydroelectric dams.
Batteries are energy storage. Dams tend to be extremely damaging to river ecosystems.
We can't really expand on hydroelectric dams; we already have dams in just about all locations where they make sense. If there's no convenient hydro dam near you you're probably going to have to go with something else for storage.
Also, those dams are usually used for power generation; for storage it's more common to use pumped hydro where you store energy by pumping water to a higher reservoir and release it by letting it flow to a lower one. A major downside is that pumped hydro only works in select locations; not every hill is suitable for installing a pair of large cisterns.
Another option is compressed air energy storage, which stores energy by compressing lots of air in large tanks and then releases it by letting the air back out. Cleverly designed implementations can even make use of the thermal changes the air undergoes at its density changes. They also need specific local conditions; huge high pressure tanks are hard to build so we usually use things like salt caverns as tanks. One interesting option is to use depleted natural gas fields.
There's also other options like flywheels, which should be a bit less picky about location.
And lastly, not every battery needs lots of rare earth metals. Sodium batteries are currently starting to hit the market; they are more stable and less reliant on rare materials than lithium batteries. They are also bulkier but that's not much of a concern for a grid-level storage facility.
You missed my point. If the dams are running during the day, you done fucked up.
Why? Plenty of dams are perfectly capable of producing power 24/7. It may not even be possible to let the reservoir fill up during the day and drain it during the night, especially during a drought or flood period where the amount of incoming water very much dictates what you do with your dam and when.
You make a lot of assumptions about how dams are operated. Those assumptions aren't always true.
Renewable energy storage is hydroelectric dams.
*cries in alluvial plain*
energy storage (e.g., batteries)
Energy storage isn't batteries.
The phrase "e.g." means "for example" and is used to describe a subset of the previous term. It doesn't need to mean the exact same thing.
We can say things like "humans consume resources (e.g., fresh water)" and that would be a valid sentence.
Plus it's fair to expect that in the next 10 years, the vast majority of grid scale energy storage worldwide is going to be electrical batteries. Gravity storage just can't compete except in very limited geographical and geological circumstances.
There is no climate solution. The planet's own dynamics now dominates. Stopping burning now (we won't) won't make a difference. Better luck next species.
The widespread use of biochar and parolysate materials could also capture significant amounts of carbon. In their book Burn: Igniting a New Carbon Drawdown Economy to End the Climate Crisis, authors Albert Bates and Kathleen Draper suggest that the amount of carbon that could theoretically be sequestered in buildings, roads, and consumer products is in the range of hundreds of billions of tons.
How would burning organic material capture carbon more than releasing carbon?
Pyrolysing is different from combustion. In pyrolysis, oxygen levels are kept very low so the substance does not burn, it merely loses a lot of volatile content and rearranges.
Charcoal is the result of the pyrolysis of wood, and it is formed in small amounts when wood is burned in open air. Pyrolysing a lot would turn the entire thing into charcoal, which the author suggest could then be used in building materials to trap the carbon.
Humans are nature.
Nature created us. Nature will destroy us. Nature will carry on long after us.
Life...finds a way. Every physical science will tell you that a balance is always met.
