Day Zero is closer than it looks. A new study maps when and where drinking water shortages could hit first.
For the TLDR crowd:
-Cape Town, South Africa (pop. 5.1 million), Chennai, India (pop. 12 millions) and Los Angeles, USA (pop. 13 million) have all already come close to their water reservoirs running completely dry.
-In many places in Africa, southern Australia, northern China, India, and parts of North America are likely to run out of water within the next four years - particularly those regions that depend on water from lakes.
-753 million people - about one person in 11 - could face the prospect of not having a reliable source of potable water.
-This all triggers when we hit a 1.5 degree Celsius increase in global average temperatures - a line we may have already crossed.
Time to get some rain barrels!
Since it looks like we've already hit the 1.5 degree Celsius increase in global average temperatures, here's a handy chart explaining what's going to happen. Full article here.
Kingsmill Bond explains why the global march of "electrotech" has moved beyond the reach of US political interference.
This podcast interview with energy futures strategist Kingsmill Bond is chock-loaded with truth bombs about the absurd futilities of fossil fuel energy generation & why anyone resistant the total electrification of the energy sector is a fucking caveman.
Highlights:
-the evolution of solar and wind power + the emergence of EVs, heat pumps, and electric light + vast improvements to battery storage options, cabling, and smart energy management tech are all combining to make the complete replacement of burning fossil fuels to harvest energy a fiscal inevitability.
-The evolution of battery storage now has us at a place where we are now storing about 10% of the energy generated by solar and wind power (400gWh), and are within range of storing all the renewable energy we need in batteries by 2045.
-The cost of solar batteries has been falling by 10%-15% per year.
-in order to access 1000kWh of energy from a fossil fuel, you need to expend about 666kWh of energy mining the fossil fuel, transporting it to a refinery, refining it, then transporting it to a retail outlet, then having the consumer burn it - wasting the last bit of energy in the expended heat.
-if we're specifically talking about extracting oil to create gasoline to fuel cars, it's even worse - about 80% of the energy in that tank of gas will have been expended getting the gas into the car's fuel tank or lost when it's burnt up in the engine.
The global cost of the energy wasted in using fossil fuels? About $4.2 trillion annually!
-contrast this with solar power. In order to access 1000kWh of energy from a solar panel, you need to expend about 100kWh to get the power from sunshine to its end use. Solar power is remarkably more efficient than burning fossil fuels.
In fact, because it's so much more efficient, you don't need to replace 100% of the energy used by burning fossil fuels, but just 50%-60%, since so much less energy is wasted in the process.
-Globally, we burn 16 billion tons of fossil fuels annually. The entire buildout of a completely non-fossil fuel based energy system around the world would require burning one billion tons of fossil fuels, once.
-You have to move 100 billion tons of materials to extract coal and oil from the Earth. Mining the minerals required to build a solar-powered energy system to generate the same amount of energy would require moving 10 billion tons of materials.
-Once you burn through a barrel of oil generating energy, you then need to burn another barrel of oil to keep generating energy. If you burn two or ten or a hundred barrels of oil to build solar panels, an inverter, a battery, and wiring you don't have to do it again for the lifetime of the system, which will typically be 20-30 years.
-Renewable energy solutions is getting rapidly cheaper as the technology improves and scales. SOLAR POWER IS NOW THE CHEAPEST SOURCE OF ENERGY IN THE WORLD!!!
This is the opposite with fossil fuels, where we've already extracted the cheapest & easiest energy sources and we're increasingly left with fossil fuels that are incredibly difficult, energy-intensive, and expensive to extract.
Case in point: the Alberta, Canada tar sands, where one barrel of oil requires 4-5 barrels of clean water to extract and 15 barrels of toxic waste is produced in the process. See also: fracking. Sunshine and wind do not get more difficult to harness to produce energy because they are limitless.
Because of this contrast in costs, the total electrification of our energy use is inevitable because renewable electrical generation is cheaper than burning fossil fuels.
-The Earth has the capacity to provide as much energy in five days of the sun shining as the entirety of all known oil reserves.
-The solar energy potential on Earth is 100x greater than the amount of energy we currently generate from all other sources combined.
-90% of growth in global electrical generation is now coming from renewables.
-75% of people in the world live in countries that import fossil fuels. But most countries have vast untapped renewable energy potential - in 92% of countries, that potential is roughly 10x the amount of electricity they are currently generating.
-About 30% of China's energy production now comes from renewable sources and its continuing to is electrify its energy production at the rate of approximately 1% per year.
-Two-thirds of countries with emerging markets now generate more solar power than the US. Pakistan, for example, now has enough solar panels to generate 40% of its total energy demands, accomplishing this in just two years.
-30% of vehicle sales in Vietnam are now EVs. In Nepal, 75% of new car sales are EVs. 90% of new cars on Norwegian roads are now EVs.
-75% of total global energy demand can now be met with renewably-generated electricity.
-Demand for fossil fuels in industry peaked in 2014. For buildings, it peaked in 2018. For transportation it peaked in 2019. Now in decline, we can expect the fossil fuel industry to decline rapidly over the next few years, unable to compete with renewable alternatives. By 2030, with 1000gWh of additional solar power coming online every year & with 90% of vehicles in China being EVs, this will become patently obvious.
Nothing to see here, just a 2020 study that examined the findings of a 1972 study whose main finding was that continuing our path of pursuing limitless economic growth = the collapse of civilization and the systems supporting human life. In the 2020 reboot, it found the data from 48 years before all held up and we are now 48 years closer to that grim conclusion, which the new paper predicts will come some time this century.
2087
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