Consider that, if it were possible for wind and solar electricity to replace just half of the present FF use by 2030 (which would require that many difficult-to-electrify uses of FF actually become electrified), then the equivalent of ~1.1 times the total existing global stock of wind and solar installations would have to be constructed each year for the next nine years [4], i.e., wind/solar would require, every year, new energy and material inputs approximately equivalent to the entire quantity used by the sector in its entire history to date. Over the next nine years, until 2030, the demand for new energy and materials would be approximately ten times as much as has been consumed to date. This also assumes no growth on a planet projecting at least half a billion more people and a 27% increase in energy demand by 2030.
Caption for the above graph - so it covers 200 years as industrial civilization.
Overshoot is a potentially terminal condition, the only “fix” for which is significantly reduced consumption and populations, not ten-fold increases in demand for rare materials involving even further ecological degradation from the mining, processing, and refining of declining quality ore.
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/3/974
Fthenakis et al., side-step the fact that metallurgical grade silicon can be extracted only by smelting quartz (SiO2). This smelting process variously involves heating quartz, coal or coking coal, and charcoal/woodchip, clearly requiring large inputs of fossil and contemporary carbon. Coking coal is produced by heating coal in an oxygen-limited environment with wood to burn off impurities, leaving behind high-carbon coke (this process is nearly identical to that of making charcoal from wood). Smelting one ton of metallurgical silicon from about 2.5 tons of quartz typically consumes ~1.4 tons of coal and coke and an equivalent quantity of woodchips or charcoal [5]. This, of course, results in significant emissions.
Algae could capture those emissions.
At approximately 4% of the global primary energy, solar and wind have a long way to go, and time is running out.
yep. Algae is the future of life on Earth - one way or another.
We argue that the lust for wind and solar is a costly diversion that delays society’s acceptance of, and planning for, a low-energy, low-consumption, and low-population future.
Prior to the dawn of agriculture eight to ten millennia ago, humans accounted for less than 1%, and wild mammals 99%, of mammalian biomass on Earth. Today, H. sapiens constitute 36%, and our domestic livestock another 60%, of a much-expanded mammalian biomass, compared with only 4% for all wild species combined [9 –11 ]. McRae et al. [12] estimate that the populations of non-human vertebrate species declined by 58% between 1970 and 2012 alone. Freshwater, marine, and terrestrial vertebrate populations declined by 81%, 36%, and 38%, respectively, and invertebrate populations fell by about 50%
Mass Extinction of Species crisis is accelerating!
, 50% of all FFs ever burned have been consumed in just the past 30 years (as much as 90% since the early 1940s) as super-exponential growth has taken hold [13,14 ]...
"This means that between 1820 and 1950, the CO2 concentration rose by about 0.24 ppm
per year but between 1950 and 2023, it rose by 1.55 ppm per year, which is a 6–7-fold rate
increase. The rate of this CO2 increase has continued to rise and for the year 2023–2024, it
had reached 2.84 ppm/yr."
By 1997 (when annual consumption was 40% less than in 2021), humanity was
already burning FFs containing about 422 times the net amount of carbon fixed by pho-
tosynthesis globally each year [15 ]. Between 1800 and 2021, atmospheric carbon dioxide
concentrations increased by 48%, from 280 ppm to approximately 415 ppm
They found that about twice as much carbon sinks into the ocean per year than previously estimated.
The human enterprise now uses the bio-productive and assimilative capacities of 1.75 Earth equivalents [16].
Clearly, removing FFs from the agricultural system would result in significantly
reduced output. Even if a global one-child policy were enacted soon, we would still have
eight to 3.5 billion mouths to feed by the end of the century [91 ].
A reduction in energy means there will be a resurgence in demand for human muscle
and draft animals.
Plague outbreaks invariably end in collapse under the pressure of social stress or as crucial resources are depleted [104].
In many respects, this endeavor will resemble Polanyi’s [112 ] Great Transformation (about the emergent dominance of neoliberal market economics) in reverse, all contained within an envelope of ecological necessity.
Wow someone else actually read Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation book? I was just promoting it the other day!
In one momentous episode, a heterotrophic eukaryotic cell captured a cyanobacterium to create the first photosynthetic algal cell. This green alga was much larger and faster growing thanSo we're taking Earth back in time 800 million years ago!
cyanobacteria and was also the precursor of all of our land plants [25].
Over the next two billion years, as photosynthetic algae thrived and diversified, they
sequestered ever more carbon (some of which later accumulated as natural gas and oil
deposits as discussed below). These algae also released more oxygen in a second GOE
that further supported the evolution of large multicellular life forms, including the earliest
animals. By the end of the Proterozoic, about 800 million years ago, the increased rate of
biological carbon sequestration, mainly by algae, had lowered atmospheric CO2 levels to
about 1000 ppm. This value is not far from some of the climatic model estimates for likely
CO2 levels at the end of the current century [ 55 ,56 ].
In this section, we will focus on the much shorter time span of the Holocene, which only encompasses 0.00024% of the Earth’s history. Despite its short duration in terms of geological time, the Holocene has been highly
consequential for humans and, increasingly, for the rest of the Earth, both biotic and abiotic.
In particular, it has witnessed the development of agriculture and other technologies that
have perturbed the carbon cycle and are now having planet-wide effects
the formation of oil and gas from phytoplankton is less than 0.01% efficient.
the estimated efficiency of electricity generation from biomass (21%) is an intermediate
value from a range of estimates of the efficiency of current commercial technologies (Larson and Marrison, 1997
