Lots of figures and numbers included at the link, which sum up the rosy scenario painted by the IPCC's best case study. It still adds up to keeping poor brown people in their place:
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued teasers ahead of an upcoming report into renewable energy.
The IPCC says that "close to 80 per cent of the world’s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century". However this is derived from the most optimistic possible scenario for renewables, and even then it requires most of the human race to remain in miserable poverty.
I guess that one defense for the environmentalists is that "math is hard", but that can't be right - after all, we're continually being told that these folks are quite simply the Smartest Kids In Class, and that we knuckle dragging rednecks are idjits and should sit down, shut up, and do what our Betters tell us. So they must understand these figures:
Unfortunately the entire rest of the human race has to share the remaining third of the global energy supply (and most of this goes to the relatively small numbers in the remaining industrialised nations). This means that the vast bulk of the human race use very little energy at all: half a billion in sub-Saharan Africa alone have no access even to intermittent grid electricity, for instance.
All those billions of people, reasonably enough, would like to have light at night, heat when it's cold, cooling when it's hot. They'd like to have functioning transport, safe food storage and cooking, hot baths or showers, laundered clothes. They'd like a decent proportion of jobs outside the subsistence farming sector, and a highly energy-intensive health industry along US or European lines. They'd probably even enjoy a few comparatively unimportant fripperies like some IT equipment and the odd jet flight.
And never mind that renewables cost three to five times as much as conventional power sources. Hey Third Worlders - living in squalor and seeing your babies die because you didn't have the power to boil the water is surely a small price to pay so that millions of environmentalists can feel good about themselves! It's a trifle, really.
Unfortunately for the IPCC report, seven billion people each using as much energy as two-thirds of a present-day European will need supplies of 770 exajoules, not 407 as the IPCC assumes. In a more realistic scenario where the human population continues to climb, energy demand in the industrialised nations continues to rise instead of falling enormously and (hopefully) the world's poor start to get a taste of the good life, supplies in the zettajoule (1000 exajoule) range will be required within decades.
Bearing in mind that the headlining IPCC figure of a possible maximum 314 exajoules from renewables in 2050 will have been massaged upward by every possible means – the other, lower-output scenarios are much more likely – we can see that renewables will be doing well to furnish 20 per cent of world energy supplies by the middle of this century.
Just don't get uppity. Remember your place.
Sherlock Holmes said that once you remove all the impossibles from the equation, whatever remains - no matter how improbable - must be the answer.
The Intellectual Left tells us that they are Smart, and worship at the Church of Smart. Smart uber alles - it cannot be that they simply are ignorant (or stupid), so it must be impossible that they don't know these figures.
The Intellectual Left tells us that they are Caring, so ever much more caring than us cold heartless libertarian types who eat babies for breakfast and chortle when Grandma opens her evening can of cat food. So it's impossible that they simply don't care that Third World babies will be condemned to a life that is nasty, brutish, and short because the environmental policies require that.
No, eliminate the impossibles, and the only thing left - improbably as it may seem - is that environmentalists think that this is the Way Things Should Be, with their SWPL selves at the top and the grubby wogs kept down. It's the natural order of things, old boy. Can't have the bloody darkies expecting clean water; next thing, they'll want hospitals or something. Bloody great bother all around. Why down at the
Can every environmentalist please just shut up right now? At least a century ago your type had the decency to at least mouth platitudes about the White Man's Burden. You can't even do that.
...the grubby wogs kept down...
ReplyDeleteNo, it's not like that at all. What they're doing is preserving the wise and sustainable practices of the traditional diverse cultures of people of color, who practice the beautiful craft of the handloom.
Of course we'll never be as sustainable as they are, but we can still strive to learn from them, by decorating our lofts with products inspired by their handicrafts, spending more mindfulness time at Whole Foods, and incorporating their spiritual practices in our labradoodle's yoga class.
You just don't appreciate indigenous peoples of diversity the way good swipples do, is all.
The Intellectual Left loves humanity. It's just that they can't stand people and have zero empathy for them. They love causes, rallies, position papers, and most of all, bumper stickers. Actually solving problems? Too much work. Taking responsibility when their plans go awry? Nah, it's the Rethuglicans fault!
ReplyDeleteAs P.J. O'Rourke said "Everyone wants to clean up the world, but no one will help Mom with the dishes"
ReplyDeleteRenewables can provide 80% of the world's energy needs...
ReplyDelete...provided the global population is about half a billion. You know, I've been as hard on Kunstler as anyone has, but he only wants half of us dead (and the rest living in those Bauhaus-with-gingerbread-and-latte-stands the New Urbanists are peddling).
I'm with Retardo ... The fact that you'd like The Little People to someday enjoy a standard of living like ours just proves how culturally insensitive you are.
ReplyDeleteNo, eliminate the impossibles, and the only thing left - improbably as it may seem - is that environmentalists think that this is the Way Things Should Be, with their SWPL selves at the top and the grubby wogs kept down.
ReplyDeleteWell, some environmentalists think that way -- the ones who are leftists first and environmentalists second. Always remember that rhetoric notwithstanding, the original goal of the Western Left was to re-create the feudal aristocracy, but with themselves as the aristocrats instead of those damned snobby hereditary nobles.
There are some of us Out Here who consider ourselves environmentalists, but want no truck with liberalism.
I don't think they give a d*** what color you are or where you live. You're a Believer - or not. If so, you've seen the Light (don't turn it on though). If not, suffer the consequences.
ReplyDeleteI work in the biz. The "research" is designed to fit the conclusion - which is stated in the proposal to get funding for the "experiment".
The 80% assumes the human population at "well below the maximum carrying capacity of the planet." Unspoken but still present is the implied "without intensive agriculture."
ReplyDeleteThink 1850, forever, with a maximum population of between five million and one billion; depending on climate. If we are on the verge of another ice age, the carrying capacity of the planet will be very small.
And think of a world essentially without technology. There will not be enough people to make much of anything that is not hammered out of the scraps of the present civilization. Pencils will probably be impossible to make, while computers will be beyond comprehension. But automobile leaf springs will make wonderful swords.
And, given the deep dislike the "greens" have for our current civilization, there probably will be very few palefaces in the "brave new world."
Stranger
Borepatch, you're on a roll here. This is excellent stuff!
ReplyDeleteYou're hardly the first to notice this.
ReplyDeleteIn certain hipster circles there is much reverence for the late Robert Anton Wilson, an unreconstructed old acidhead beatnik of small-L libertarian leanings who wrote some crypto-erudite conspiracy theory novels back in the 70s.
And even back then, he was noting with alarm that when somebody says the world is "overpopulated," what they really mean is, "there are too many goddamn people and we're going to have to get rid of a few billion of them." And this mindset, however popular among all the right people, reminded him uncomfortably of certain other people back around the middle of the century who also felt that there was a crying need to get rid of millions of surplus people, and who were willing to roll up their sleeves and get down to it rather than dancing around the rhetorical bush late into the night.
He also said that when people speak in terms of "overpopulation," "shortage," "crisis," they're likewise on the same trip, so to speak, as certain mid-twentieth-century folks who reasoned from first principles, "there's not enough STUFF for everybody, some must be poor and go hungry, but we're gonna demonstrate that we're the Master Race by seizing what we want by force, daring the rest of humanity to do anything about it, and successfully defending it from all comers. In this way we will prove our worthiness to BE the Master Race and decide for all the rest of you mongrel scum--the ones we decide to let live, anyway--what your ration of flour and meat and lamp oil will be this month." Grab the last cookie and stomp on everyone else's face with your hobnailed jackboots and prove you're tough enough to deserve the last cookie.
And that the appropriate response from free men, who respected our tradition of ordered liberty, to think instead of terms of scientific progress, of working harder, of devising new means, of producing more, of creating new tools and new methods, that will make all the world richer and freer. Make more cookies and share the recipe with the world.
And perhaps I am naive, perhaps I am not cynical enough, but I know which world I prefer to live in, and which method I prefer to solve the problems at hand.