Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019

> the degrowth position is that people are inevitably going to lead worse lives than at present, but that we can choose between things getting kind of bad, by systematically pursuing degrowth, and things getting apocalyptically bad, which is what will happen if we continue pursuing growth I can't speak for others who advocate for degrowth, but that seems about right to me, with the caveat that I believe ecologically harmonious lifestyles would be more fun and fulfilling than what we have now. The challenge is to return to harmony with Nature while still enjoying the benefits of science and technology. - - - - > fourth, the most urgent environmental problem for human quality of life is global warming, and atmospheric carbon capture is necessary to solve it, a measure which will almost certainly require vast expansion of human energy exploitation and therefore economic growth (because you can have growth without increased resource exploitation, but probably not vastly increased resource exploitation without growth) Václav Smil has me convinced that atmospheric carbon capture on a scale great enough to counter-act our continued fossil fuel use is a pipe dream, pretty much for the reason you say: it takes too much energy to sequester the carbon. Here he is at Driva Climate Investment Meeting in 2019. It's a great lecture IMO, and he starts bagging on carbon capture around minute 39: ▶ this video

> the ability to dramatically reduce world hunger is a direct consequence of humans' capacity to improve crop yields such as rice and corn through breeding and engineering. Not through "breeding and engineering", through artificial nitrogen fertilizer. We have been turning oil into people . > prevented the starvation of millions of people. That delayed the starvation of millions of people and now we are facing the prospect of the starvation of billions of people. FWIW, I do applauded Maddie and her team, and I wish them luck and hope they succeed. But the only way we are going to avert disaster is to stop taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the air. That's it. Here's a fascinating talk by Václav Smil at the Driva Climate Investment Meeting in 2019, where he makes the point better than I ever could: ▶ this video - - - - edit: i'm rate limited at the moment. Replying to HWR_14 below Dwarf wheat was generated through selective breeding, same as the last N-thousand years. And it was only necessary due to the defects of using artificial nitrogen fertilizer: > Taller wheat grasses better compete for sunlight, but tend to collapse under the weight of the extra grain—a trait called lodging—from the rapid growth spurts induced by nitrogen fertilizer Borlaug used in the poor soil. To prevent this, he bred wheat to favor shorter, stronger stalks that could better support larger seed heads. link Anyway, my point isn't that science doesn't work or isn't good, it's that engine

Here's a fascinating talk by Václav Smil at the Driva Climate Investment Meeting in 2019: ▶ this video Bill Gates calls him "one of my favorite thinkers" and reviews his recent book "Growth": > Vaclav Smil ... reaches the ... conclusion: Earth is fragile and “before it is too late, we should embark in earnest on the most fundamental existential [task] of making any future growth compatible with the long-term preservation of the only biosphere we have.” link

On the other hand 1/2 of world looks more or less the same - rural Africa, india, china... If you believe we are highly adaptable and new technologies will 'save us' somehow check this presentation : ▶ this video ...it's eye opening

I recall Vaclav Smil saying batteries are consistently about 2-3% per year over the long haul. It's not a Moore's law scenario, but a very slow crawl. "Miracles might happen," he says, "but would I bet on a miracle happening? No." This link is to the point in the video where he says this, but the whole talk is quite interesting. ▶ this video Edit: here's a more recent video of Smil talking about energy density of batteries and the problems there, specifically mentioning the unlikelihood of flying on battery anytime soon. link

Use less energy. Here's Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called "Investing in a changing climate – what we can learn from historic energy transitions". ▶ this video The conclusion is sobering: "Only absolute cuts in energy use would work." ( ▶ this video ) We can do this and most of the technology needed is already invented and available, we just have to get our act together as a species and start using our tech efficiently. We don't have to endure a lower quality of life, just eliminating waste would get us most of the way there.

Batteries are not a great idea. E.g. an electric car should use alcohol fuel and a small generator rather than fancy batteries. You can grow sugar crops, convert them to fuel (reclaiming the non-fuel parts), and then use that to power your infrastructure. It's carbon-neutral, environmentally sound (waaaaaaay more than batteries), and you can do it today. No sea mines required. The only downside is that you have to live within your solar power budget, but we have to do that anyway to counter global warming (until cheap fusion becomes a thing.) Here's a video of Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called "Investing in a changing climate – what we can learn from historic energy transitions". ▶ this video The presentation is IMO very interesting, and the conclusion is sobering: "Only absolute cuts in energy use would work." ( ▶ this video ) We are going to have to use less energy. We don't have to endure lower QoL but we do have to achieve our Quality of Life more efficiently .

> “Moore’s Law for everything” should be the rallying cry of a generation whose members can’t afford what they want." Ugh. Moore's law doesn't apply to everything, and in fact doesn't apply to most things, and wishing it did won't change that. I think Vaclav Smil did an effective diagnosis of this at the Driva Climate Investment Meeting: ▶ this video

Small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated into regenerative agriculture. (This is different from large-scale industrial ethanol production.) You grow e.g. sugar beets, convert them to alcohol and some byproducts (that go back into the farm as feed and fertilizer), use the alcohol in generators and vehicles. You're operating within your solar budget, the atoms that make up the alcohol came from water and air so all your nutrients and trace minerals stay on the farm and the fuel is carbon-neutral (all the carbon released when you burn the fuel originally came from the air in the form of carbon dioxide, not from underground fossilized carbon), and it can be done with simple off-the-shelf tech that has been around for literally thousands of years. You don't have to scrap your ICE cars and trucks, you can modify them to work with alcohol as fuel (some cars it's a software mod!) and the exhaust is not poisonous. - - - - Here's a video of Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called "Investing in a changing climate – what we can learn from historic energy transitions". ▶ this video The presentation is IMO very interesting, and the conclusion is sobering: "Only absolute cuts in energy use would work." ( ▶ this video ) We use too much power. And when I say "we" I mean mostly the USA but the rest of the world is ramping up rapidly. Unless there's a miracle (like clean fusion generators that kids can make in the garage out of chicken wire, tires, and ducktape) th

Vaclav Smil (among others) has pointed out that this really just means going back to a 1960's level of energy use for the USA, and that's really not much of a hardship or downgrading of quality of life. Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 ▶ this video We have the technology to keep up or improve QoL while we reduce emissions. Just curbing our waste energy would get us halfway there, something like that. (E.g. insulating houses, plugging drafts, better grid management, etc.)

"Germany’s economy and climate ministry will present a package of measures to speed up the expansion of wind energy, documents reviewed by Reuters showed on Wednesday, as the country turns to renewables to cut its use of Russian fossil fuels." A reminder that Vaclav Smil has called wind turbines 'the perfect embodiment of fossil fuels' : ▶ this video (Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019)

Vaclav Smil says something like "Would it be so bad, going back to a 1960's level of energy consumption?" in the context of energy usages (and therefore roughly CO2 emissions) of Western and particularly American lifestyles. (I'm paraphrasing: Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 ▶ this video ) > hedonic adaptation pretty much guarantees that no matter what our position we will always want more There's an Indian holy man, now deceased, who said we need to learn to practice "ceiling on desires". It may be that only the expression of our higher values can clear this logjam? > so how this could happen without damage to the environment One thought that occurs to me is if we could create a kind of split-level economy. There would be a real-world ecologically-informed economy that met basic needs as efficiently as possible. On top of that substrate we would have a computer-mediated virtual economy where there were no (or very few) effective limits on hedonistic adaptation (or status-symbol seeking, or whatever). It seems like we're seeing something like that emerge "naturally" anyway, eh? NFT & "crypto", in-game purchases, whatever FB's metaverse becomes, etc. Eventually, people might submit voluntarily to enter "the Matrix": your physical body kept perfectly safe, and the only limits are your imagination? Not my cup of tea, but not insane on the face of it, eh?