Thatch @THATCH_ARISES
·
Here is some good news!

I already have to run things through my dishwaser twice because it is so "efficient" compared to the ones which only had to be run once.

Attorney General Andrew Bailey @AGAndrewBailey
BREAKING: The Fifth Circuit has sided with us in our lawsuit against Joe Biden's Department of Energy, stating "it is unclear how or why DOE thinks it has any statutory authority to regulate 'water use' in dishwashers and washing machines."
12:38 AM · Jan 9, 2024 //

Margot Cleveland @ProfMJCleveland
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Wait! Does this mean we'll be able to buy a dishwasher that doesn't take 3.75 hours to wash and dry?
1:22 AM · Jan 9, 2024

Mining in space might be less environmentally harmful than mining asteroids on Earth.

The trick to developing immunity to misinformation

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” ― Isaac Asimov, 1988 //

You’re probably thinking “it’s just a meme”, but it is illustrative of a wider problem where information is presented in this manner: as if the truth is subjective. I only need to open any social media app to see that ‘subjective truth’ seems to be everywhere, and every day there is new questionable information to think about (this assertion isn’t only anecdotal, but is also supported by research). //

As social psychologist Dr. Sander van der Linden points out in his book Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity, misinformation is not new. Previous large-scale examples of misinformation taking hold in populations include Nazi propaganda, which heavily relied on the printed press, radio and cinema, and misinformation campaigns that have been traced back to Roman times when emperors used messages on coins as a form of mass communication to gain power. //

Many vested interests and those who believe misinformation themselves use these biases to their advantage. If this was a war, I would argue that the other side is winning. Thanks to some of these people being convincing communicators, and using storytelling that plays on these biases to their advantage, they have been able to influence what wider populations believe on multitudinous topics ranging from gene-editing to nuclear energy to degrowth as a solution to climate change (it’s not). //

The greatest irony is that anti-nuclear activists have also been able to convincingly embed their unscientific position within environmentalism, even though nuclear energy is the cleanest and most environmentally friendly energy source available to humankind, with the smallest land footprint of all energy sources.

Slogans and stories are sticky, but they may not be true or helpful. Hence I’ve argued before that catchphrases and slogans used by activists are often convincing and successful, even when they are inaccurate. Stories, however, are essential to communicating scientific matters, and we need more people to tell them.

After all, it’s much easier and faster to respond with “what about the waste?” when I mention nuclear energy, than for me to explain why spent fuel isn’t the problem many people think it is, which takes time and isn’t as catchy or simple as the aphorism “what about the waste?” (I have covered the waste argument in detail in this article.) In my work tackling misinformation, I have honed some of these detailed responses to convey them through catchphrases that have also been popularised, such as “it’s only waste if you waste it” (in reference to being able to recycle spent fuel) and “meanwhile fossil fuel waste is being stored in the Earth’s atmosphere”, which is both true and a sticky idea. //

Although no one has studied it directly, I feel sure that coining and popularising terms like “nuclear saves lives”, “energy is life”, “nuclear energy is clean energy”, and “rethink nuclear” has helped to combat the misinformation we’ve heard about nuclear energy for so long. //

People often ask how I stay calm when countering constant ad hominem attacks, gish-galloping and sometimes outright insults. As Mr Spock once said, “Reverting to name-calling suggests that you are defensive and, therefore, find my opinion valid.” My answer is that I don’t take people’s biases personally - after all, I used to believe misinformation myself. We have all done so at some point in our lives, and we are all susceptible to believing misinformation in the future. While it’s worth learning to identify the few people who hold fundamental beliefs on a topic that simply cannot be changed, to save wasting your time debating them, remember that for most people these messages do have an impact. It took me years to change my mind from being against nuclear energy to being in favour of it, and every person who took the time to dispel the misinformation I believed, and provide better sources for me to read to counter my viewpoints, had an impact on my beliefs.

While it may not seem challenging to you, remember that when you engage with someone on a wedge issue, you are making a worldview-threatening correction. It is no different than learning that the Earth is spherical when you’ve grown up believing that it is flat. ///

Evangelism takes time and repetition.

The most common argument is that wind and solar power are the cheapest clean energy sources and that nuclear power plants are the most expensive. Taken at face value, it is true that a single solar photovoltaic (PV) panel is cheap, and that a single wind turbine is cheap, while on the other hand, a single nuclear power plant costs billions of pounds. Technically, measured one-on-one, it is correct that wind and solar are cheaper. But is it useful to compare them in this way? //

To understand why people argue that wind and solar power are cheaper, we need to examine the basic economic metric for assessing a generating power plant: the Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE). This metric provides what is essentially a banker’s number that covers the total amount of power over the lifetime of an energy source, divided by the lifecycle costs over the lifetime of the same energy source.

But there’s a problem: LCOE is a terrible metric for assessing cost-effectiveness because it doesn’t include several crucial factors. For example, it ignores costs and benefits at an energy system level, such as price reductions due to low-carbon generation and higher system costs when extra interconnection, storage, or backup power is needed due to the variable output of wind and solar power.

Crucially, LCOE ignores the value of the plant’s output to the grid. For example, solar plants have a much more attractive production profile relative to wind farms because society needs most of the energy during the day when the sun is shining. So, even though the LCOE of solar power is higher than wind energy, it provides electricity that is more economically valuable. A paper found that ‘An LCOE comparison ignores the temporal heterogeneity of electricity and in particular the variability of VRE [Variable Renewable Energy]’. Therefore, the true economics of power generation can be very different to the ones predicted by the LCOE numbers.

Another issue LCOE ignores relates to different lifespans of technologies. Typically, a 20- or 30-year recovery period is accounted for, but what about when competing technologies last half a century or more? Then the comparison is faulty, as nuclear power plants can generate power for 60 to 80 years, sometimes longer.

Other factors that aren’t considered by the LCOE include:

• Cost of the land required
• Cost to the consumer
• Dispatchability, i.e. the ability of a generating system to come online, go offline, or ramp up or down, quickly as demand swings
• Indirect costs of generation, which can include environmental externalities or grid upgrade requirements
• Additional cost of integrating non-dispatchable energy sources into the grid
• Cost of disposal, which is usually built into the price of nuclear energy but excluded from the price of solar and wind power
• Subsidies and externality costs, such as the costs of carbon emissions
• The cost of backup or baseload power

Intermittent power sources like wind and solar usually incur extra costs associated with needing to have storage or backup generation available. LCOE ignores the cost of this unreliability, which can be as simple as keeping coal-fired power stations running in case they are needed to fire up and meet electricity demand when it becomes less windy or sunny. //

South Korea is our second example. In the mid-1980s the Korean nuclear industry decided to standardise the design of nuclear plants and to gain independence in building them. The country imported proven US, French, and Canadian reactor designs in the 1970s and learned from other countries' experiences before developing its own domestic reactors in 1989. It developed stable regulations, had a single utility overseeing construction, and built reactors in pairs at single sites.

The results were remarkable: between 1971 and 2008, South Korea built a total of 28 reactors. Due to the developments they made in 1989, their overnight construction cost fell by 50%. //

With nuclear energy, waste disposal and decommissioning costs are usually fully included in the operating costs, but they are not accounted for in wind and solar costs. Yes, a single solar panel is cheap. But what about disposing of it? Sadly, they often end up in landfill sites in poor countries abroad, where they leach toxic chemicals. Batteries are currently not recycled, and therefore this is another missing cost. Wind turbine blades face similar issues. And none of these elements will last more than thirty years before they need replacing. What will that cost? //

Oil and gas companies celebrate wind and solar power because they keep fossil fuels in business. Today, wind and solar are backed 1:1 by oil-and-gas-based generators, to fill the gaps when it isn’t windy or sunny, thus keeping the oil and gas industries in demand. In the future, solar purists propose mega storage, which means more batteries, and overbuilding (extra panels) as the solution. These extra costs aren't factored into LCOE. //

What I have tried to do here is trigger a thought experiment by illustrating how complicated these assessments are, that it is not a case of comparing one panel to one plant, and that the LCOE fails on all counts. Ultimately, the full cost of nuclear energy is an upfront investment for a long-lasting, reliable form of energy, which is not the cost people consider when arguing that solar panels and wind turbines are cheaper. Nuclear energy can get cheaper, or it can get more expensive, depending on how it is approached. //

I am of the opinion that we should build everything we need to bring down greenhouse gas emissions and reduce deaths from air pollution. Yet it is clean energy advocates who only like wind and solar power who argue against nuclear energy based on the myth that the latter is too expensive. //

Every time a nuclear power plant is replaced with fossil fuel generation, people die from the resulting air pollution, and more fossil fuel waste is stored in the Earth’s atmosphere. Every time a grid is made to support more wind and solar power without the baseload power to support them, fossil fuels win as they have to fill the gap. Every time a nuclear power plant isn’t built on the supposed basis of cost, the environment is further harmed and human progress takes a step backwards. Every time someone quotes the LCOE, they are either being misled, misleading others, or both.

“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be… This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.” – Isaac Asimov //

There is no argument for our complacency that is better represented than the current social movement against producing energy, which perhaps began with Boomers, but is now being led mostly by Gen Z, also known as ‘the sustainability generation’, and also to some degree by Millennials. The irony is that these generations have been the most comfortable of all (and –full disclosure – I am a Millennial); unlike my parents who grew up in poverty in India, and were then manual labourers in Britain, we have had it easy. We haven’t suffered through truly gruelling labour, we don’t need to know how electricity grids work, and most of us have never stepped foot in a mine or experienced electricity blackouts. The divide between what it takes to maintain a high quality of life and the understanding of this has also widened over generations; //

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Thanks to years of development and growth, we live in a time of prosperity, facing fewer core challenges than past generations. //

The problem is that thanks to all of this, a disconnection has occurred between our lifestyles and what it has taken to get us here. The lack of understanding of the skilled labour, need for industries, and mining for raw materials that enabled these lifestyles, and the fact that the toll those things took on the environment was inevitable, but not permanent, has repercussions for society. I was once part of the problem, fighting to forge a society that would be independent of fossil fuels, without thinking about our continued and growing need for reliable electricity and fighting for the alternatives. My argument was the standard traditional environmentalist argument: that we need to live with less. I was wrong.

Now, the argument has gone so far that activists argue that we should just stop oil overnight. But can it be done without causing immense harm to people? //

About 45% of a typical barrel of crude oil is refined into gasoline, and an additional 29% is refined into diesel fuel. The remaining 26% is used to make plastics and other products. There is good news in these figures, as it means that we can reduce a lot of our dependence on oil by making the switch from petrol and diesel cars to electric vehicles, which is a trend that is taking place in many countries already. //

Instead of going ahead anyway and virtue signalling that they are now plastic-free, Lego has ditched plans to switch to PET, since doing so would have had a greater impact on the environment.

Of course, many anti-oil activists would argue that Lego should stop making the bricks altogether. They would argue that they are unnecessary and wasteful. But I disagree. I recall many years of constructing large and complicated architectural designs with my brother when we were children; he was fascinated by the way things work and are put together, and he later trained to become an engineer (a field he now holds a senior position in). This link between playing with Lego and developing engineering skills has been well-documented elsewhere. The irony of wanting to just stop oil is well represented in the idea that we don’t ‘need’ Lego. We don’t ‘need’ to build housing, railways, or power plants either – if we are happy for society to stagnate and for future generations to suffer.

Let’s ignore the idea of an immediate transition, then, and consider what can be done to stop oil eventually. //

This brings me back to a point I’ve been making for years: we should be aiming for energy abundance.

As we shift towards electrifying everything, switching from gas boilers to heat pumps, and diesel cars to electric vehicles, much of our demand for oil will be replaced naturally. But the alternatives will require more electricity, and unless the electricity grid is supplying us with clean power, we have a problem. //

As I’ve explained before, we can build all the wind and solar power people want, but we will still need baseload power to back them up, and historically this has always either come from fossil fuels or nuclear energy. Although the upfront costs for the alternatives appear to be cheaper than for nuclear, this is incorrect when the figures are viewed in context. As well, we need to be aware of shift-loading the costs of wind and solar power onto ordinary working people. I’ve also seen NGOs arguing for building wind and solar in less wealthy countries, and I find this tactic appalling. Intermittent energy is not what we in the wealthy West used to escape poverty. We burned a lot of fossil fuels to develop. We don’t get to deny other countries of that now. //

The truth is that I am a shill. I am a shill for the human race. I want to see the end of needless suffering and death from preventable diseases. I want to see all poverty eradicated. Apart from a few specific war-mongers, who doesn’t want to see the end of all war? I want all life on this planet to thrive. I want to see the best of humankind during my brief presence on this pale blue dot that we are so fortunate enough to inhabit. I want us to live long and prosper.

Humans are capable of solving immense problems and achieving great things, through forging strong values and working together. I am a shill for progress because I want to see what we do next, once the immediate – and entirely solvable – problems like air pollution, poverty, and climate change have been solved.

JUST STOP OIL

JUST START NUCLEAR

With all the technological advances humans have made, it may seem like we’ve lost touch with nature—but not all of us have. People in some parts of Africa use a guide more effective than any GPS system when it comes to finding beeswax and honey. This is not a gizmo, but a bird.

The Greater Honeyguide (highly appropriate name), Indicator indicator (even more appropriate scientific name), knows where all the beehives are because it eats beeswax. The Hadza people of Tanzania and Yao people of Mozambique realized this long ago. Hadza and Yao honey hunters have formed a unique relationship with this bird species by making distinct calls, and the honeyguide reciprocates with its own calls, leading them to a hive.

Because the Hadza and Yao calls differ, zoologist Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge and anthropologist Brian Wood of UCLA wanted to find out if the birds respond generically to human calls, or are attuned to their local humans. They found that the birds are much more likely to respond to a local call, meaning that they have learned to recognize that call. //

How did this interspecies communication evolve? Other African cultures besides the Hadza and Yao have their own calls to summon a honeyguide. Why do the types of calls differ? The researchers do not think these calls came about randomly. //

HiggsForce Ars Praetorian
9y
501
Subscriptor
The article describes the calls honey-seeking humans use to get the attention of a honeyguide.

But the reverse also often happens. A hungry honeyguide who's located a beehive will seek out nearby humans and tweet at them to prod them to follow the honey guide to the beehive and safely (for the honeyguide) extract tasty food for themselves and the honeyguide. Do the honeyguides' own calls differ regionally?

An algorithm can spot beaver ponds from satellite imagery. //

Corwin’s beaver obsession met a receptive corporate culture. Google’s employees are famously encouraged to devote time to passion projects, the policy that produced Gmail; Corwin decided his passion was beavers. But how best to assist the buck-toothed architects? Corwin knew that beaver infrastructure—their sinuous dams, sprawling ponds, and spidery canals—is often so epic it can be seen from space. In 2010, a Canadian researcher discovered the world’s longest beaver dam, a stick-and-mud bulwark that stretches more than a half-mile across an Alberta park, by perusing Google Earth. Corwin and Ackerstein began to wonder whether they could contribute to beaver research by training a machine-learning algorithm to automatically detect beaver dams and ponds on satellite imagery—not one by one, but thousands at a time, across the surface of an entire state. //

According to Fairfax, EEAGER’s use cases are many. The model could be used to estimate beaver numbers, monitor population trends, and calculate beaver-provided ecosystem services like water storage and fire prevention. It could help states figure out where to reintroduce beavers, where to target stream and wetland restoration, and where to create conservation areas. It could allow researchers to track beavers’ spread in the Arctic as the rodents move north with climate change; or their movements in South America, where beavers were introduced in the 1940s and have since proliferated. “We literally cannot handle all the requests we’re getting,” says Fairfax, who serves as EEAGER’s scientific adviser.

The beaver deceiver Penz and Ricci built Tuesday aims to be a more permanent solution. The contraption pipes water through the center of the dam — tricking the beavers so water keeps flowing even as they continue to build the dam higher.

“Public works, they’re happy to have the beavers as long as they don’t do damage,” Penz said. “There are a lot of beavers in Summit County. So if they trapped them out of a given pond, there will be more back in a year or two. It isn’t a long-term solution to trap them. It isn’t a long-term solution to keep ripping the dam apart.”

Colorado is home to a robust beaver population. The rodents are habitat engineers, cutting aspens, willows and other trees, and their dams slow water, which recharges groundwater, reduces erosion, provides a barrier to wildfires and provides other ecological benefits, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife. But those dam-building skills can also cause conflicts with humans, blocking culverts and flooding roads and other property.

For the past five years or so, Frisco has not been trapping and relocating beavers but instead has been working to coexist happily with the creatures, Johnsen said. The grounds foreman said he has forged something of a friendship with Penz and Ricci while they have helped deal with the beaver community over the years.

What is the replacement plan for plastic, rubber, cement, steel, and the millions of products they create?

Wind and solar make electricity — albeit inefficient, unreliable, intermittent, and expensive. But fossil fuels do so much more, and the Biden administration and environmental leftists pretend to ignore it. For example, the Biden administration passed the so-called Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which threw over a trillion tax dollars at, among other things, “rebuild[ing] crumbling road [sic] and bridges.” But at the same time, a government agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, is restricting the very oil, gas, and coal needed to accomplish this. //

Every call to eliminate fossil fuels is a call to slowly, incrementally raise the price of all these products making them cost-prohibitive for the masses. Yes, cement and steel are vital to our economy and our quality of life, but so are the millions of affordable, daily-life products like laundry detergent and aspirin.

I always carry a handkerchief (because my dad did), but most people prefer disposable tissues. When fossil fuels are gone, tissues are gone. Disposable diapers are gone. Yoga mats and plastic water bottles are gone. Do climate change activist suburban moms know that? Do you think Starbucks can survive without fossil fuels? What about that salad from Whole Foods in a plastic container or even the plastic packaging for meat and produce? Cologne, deodorant, perfume, bathroom cleansers, Swiffer pads, paper towels — sure, that mom may think disposable products are “bad for the Earth,” but a lack of hygiene is far worse for her and her family. //

What is at stake is much deeper: human dignity — a dignity that elevates us above the harshness of nature and cruelty of illness or allows us to cleanse ourselves from the sweat of labor.

We do not talk about the “then what” after fossil fuels are eliminated. But I assure you, life as we know it would be absolutely, categorically impossible without them.

Mostly because they don't know

When I give talks I am frequently asked a variation of the following question: how do we stop consumption and development to protect the planet?

My answer always draws blank faces. Stopping growth is not the solution to addressing climate change, I tell concerned environmentalists and anxious climate activists. We do need to decarbonise and move to cleaner technologies, but fighting development won’t save the planet, and nor has it been shown to reduce emissions. //

We have also repeatedly been told that we are the problem, and therefore the solution is for there to be fewer of us. But all of this is wrong.

It may seem unbelievable that continuing on our current trajectory will solve anything, but the evidence shows that environmental progress is being made in many areas and that growth is the only thing that is working in terms of lowering emissions and improving air quality.

If we want to save the planet, we need to understand what works.

We know how to reduce resource consumption without reducing growth

It’s true that for the past 200 years, economic activity has led to an increase in carbon emissions. More recently, however, since the 1980s and largely thanks to the use of nuclear energy, many countries have been able to reduce emissions while continuing to increase GDP. Investment in renewables has also driven this growth further. In 2016, 70 countries experienced a growth in GDP while also experiencing a run of at least five years in which emissions decreased.

Using historical data, researchers have calculated that nuclear energy has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions. They find that:

“On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000–7.04 million deaths and 80–240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces. By contrast, we assess that large-scale expansion of unconstrained natural gas use would not mitigate the climate problem and would cause far more deaths than expansion of nuclear power.” //

As countries become richer, they become more environmentally friendly. Air quality improves, water use becomes more efficient, and fewer natural resources are required. This is true across developed countries, where the population has increased but resource consumption has fallen, including timber, water, metal, minerals, and energy. //

Although cars still carry an environmental cost, not having them would also have had a significant impact on the planet. The Horse Association of America calculated that 54 million acres of US farmland was spared by the automobile in the 1930s, as the land was not needed for meadows for grazing horses. The US population has nearly tripled since then, yet hundreds of millions of acres of forests were saved from being cut down to make room to feed horses and to store waste horse manure.

Cars are not an isolated example – consider your Smartphone. Again, the innovation of phone designs has significantly reduced material use. In the recent past, a single person would have owned a GPS device, a calculator, a camera, a landline telephone, an alarm clock, and so on. Now, you only need one device instead of all of these items. Yes, phones still require resources, but the amount required is significantly less than when multiple items are no longer needed to do the same job. Resource use often becomes significantly reduced as the technology becomes more efficient. //

Building more clean energy is also key to cleaner air, tackling emissions, and reducing resource consumption. When it is built in Britain, the nuclear power plant Sizewell C will produce 3.2 GWh of electricity. Compare this with the 2.6 GWh produced by the Drax power station by burning 27 million trees every year. The alternative to building Sizewell C would be burning 33 million trees a year. That’s more than one tree per second.

Drax, which is classed as ‘renewable’ but shouldn’t be, is the UK’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. Burning wood creates 18% more CO2 than burning coal. Instead of relying on polluting fuels that may be classified as green, we need to build nuclear power plants, which allow us all to breathe a little easier.

As a result of Germany’s nuclear power phase-out, they are now burning coal again, and a study found that the air pollution resulting from the nuclear phase-out is now killing an extra 1,100 people a year. ​Japan also shut down their nuclear power plants (although they recently reversed this decision), and a study found that if both countries had reduced fossil fuel power output instead of nuclear energy, they could have prevented 28,000 air pollution-induced deaths and 2400 MtCO2 emissions between 2011 and 2017. //

Traditional environmentalism was founded based on the myth of overpopulation. In 1798, the English economist Thomas Malthus predicted that (so-called) ‘overpopulation’ would lead to famine as there would be too many mouths to feed.

He was wrong. There was no population ‘bomb’, no famine due to increased numbers of people. Instead, life improved for many millions of people, thanks to the innovation and development that they initiated. This largely relates to agriculture and the productivity of land, where labour and capital have increased more than proportionately to the increased number of humans. Thanks to agricultural improvements and technological advances, which required the input of many people and the use of many hands, we have experienced an outcome of more food rather than less. Thanks to the mechanisation of The Green Revolution, we have seen greatly increased crop yields and agricultural production, improved food supplies, and increased economic development in underdeveloped nations. Sadly, many environmentalists are still in denial about this and see such food security as a bad thing. //

There is an argument to be made that increased population has led to more environmental progress, through greater human capital. In November 2022, the world’s population hit 8 billion. Across history, exceptional people have led us to technological and cultural masterpieces. The past 200 years have shown exponential growth in technical development and innovation. In 1823 there were just over 1 billion people in the world. We now have 8 billion people from whom pioneering new science, art, medicine, and other technologies are emerging daily. A bigger pool of human capital is therefore not inherently a bad thing, but may yield immense benefits – so long as many of these people are also freed from the chains of poverty so that they can live fulfilling lives and contribute to global progress.

I cannot make this argument more clearly than the late statistician Hans Rosling, who gave a talk on the reduction of extreme poverty, where he also goes into the difference that owning a washing machine made for his (financially poor) family:

“My mother explained the magic with this machine the very very first day. She said, ‘now Hans, we have loaded the laundry, the machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library. Because this is the magic. You load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines. Children’s books.’ And mother got time to read for me. She loved this. I got the ABCs, this is why I started my career as Professor, when mother had time to read for me. And she also got books for herself, she managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language… We really loved this machine. And what we said, my mother and me, ‘thank you industrialisation. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station, and thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books’!”

Imagine a world with fewer people like Hans Rosling in it. It would be a much poorer world without such invaluable contributions to human knowledge and progress. We would all be impacted by this loss. //

Let’s give people a break. For too long we have been sold the myth that we should be concerned about so-called ‘overpopulation’, but this has been proven to be nonsensical fearmongering. Instead, population decline is occurring in almost every country in the world, and it is already having negative impacts on ageing populations and the future generations who have to support them. Not only do ageing populations impose costs on society as we struggle to pay for healthcare and pensions, but in some countries like Japan there simply aren’t enough younger people to physically support older generations, which poses serious problems for the country. //

But it’s telling that underpopulation has not led to a moral panic the way that false ideas of population growth have done so for many years. Arguably, underpopulation will have a far greater and more negative impact than the old worry of having more mouths to feed. For example, China, whose economy has long benefited from the sheer number of people in its workforce, is forecast to lose almost half of this population by 2100, plunging from more than 1.4 billion to 771 million inhabitants. Many of our goods come from China – including solar panels. The Chinese One Child Policy, which was so concerned with ‘overpopulation’, has proven to be short-sighted and damaging in ways that Chinese leaders did not foresee. Unfortunately, Germany, South Korea and Russia are not far behind on the underpopulation trajectory, and Europe's population as a whole will begin to decline as early as this decade.

Population growth was never really the problem. Lack of foresight, and forming policy based on myths over data, have been the real problems for the planet. //

Evidence shows that we are capable of solving the world’s problems. The fool’s trick is to make out that predicting an apocalyptic future is somehow smarter than pointing out optimistic scenarios; when in reality, being pessimistic is simply the easier and lazier option thanks to human negativity bias. Yet many factors, some of which I have covered here, show that in many areas we are on a positive trajectory.

We are capable of decoupling growth from emissions. We are capable of improving air quality, which makes us healthier and makes our children taller, less violent, and smarter. We are capable of tackling climate change as well as eradicating poverty. We are capable of hitting net zero targets – as I wrote in a recent article, we may even be on track to keep under 1.5°C of warming. No one is going to shout any of this from the rooftops; it is not headline-grabbing news. But humans are capable of solving immense problems, including problems we have created, and we have been doing so for many years now. To place all our bets on failure does humankind a disservice; but also, no one has ever fixed a problem by fixating only on the problem. Let’s fight to implement evidence-based solutions instead so that we can build the cleaner, healthier world that we are all so keen to live in.

A 2022 paper by Kelly Senecal of Convergent Science and other scientists compares greenhouse gas emissions from plug-in, battery-powered electric vehicles with emissions from hybrid vehicles, which combine internal combustion engines with small battery packs.

The conclusion: Pure plug-in battery-powered vehicles can create more emissions than hybrids and even more than some traditional internal combustion engine vehicles—whose fuel delivery, air delivery, and ignition systems have improved over the past 20 years, increasing overall vehicle gas mileage.

Here’s why. //

Research shows that electricity for battery-powered vehicles is coming from coal and natural gas rather than renewables. //

Seventy percent of the world’s electric batteries are produced in China, and 83% of China’s energy comes from fossil fuels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The longer the range of the battery, the more carbon is used in the production process. Senecal has calculated that carbon emissions to produce a battery for a Nissan Leaf were equivalent to driving a gasoline-powered BMW 320d for 24,000 miles. For a larger Tesla Model S battery, carbon emissions used in production are equivalent to driving the BMW 320d for 60,000 miles. //

Those concerned about greenhouse gas emissions may also be worried about the negative effects on the environment of mining for battery components. Such mining, which itself creates emissions, disrupts the land in low-income countries, such as cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where abuses of mine workers and significant pollution from mining have been documented by Amnesty International.

Lithium is another crucial component of batteries, and China, Chile, Argentina, and Australia are home to potentially damaging lithium mines, according to the Institute for Energy Research.