How much power does humanity use now - not just electric power but total power? And how much power is global warming putting into heating the Earth?
I seem to recall the latter is roughly 100 or 1000 times more: a testament to our brutal inefficiency. But I forget the number.
Humanity's primary energy consumption is roughly 20 TW.
Earth's energy imbalance is something like 0.95 W/m2, so less than 500 TW after googling surface area?
Final energy consumption (energy actually used) is fraction of primary energy consumption. If efficiency is 0.5, it would be ~10 TW.
I get 50ish times but 100 is fine for order of magnitudes.
@johncarlosbaez It's not so much more if you subtract the unnecessary power consumption of Bitcoin mining, AI training/operation and Internet traffic which has no useful application, like hackers, exploiters, scammers, spammers etc.
Of course it's more because we have electric cars now and other replacements where fossil fuels were used, like steel mills and stuff.
But much of it comes from renewable energy sources now so that's a good thing.
Too bad the USA is about to bail out of the change.
@Brokar wrote: "t's not so much more if you subtract the unnecessary power consumption of Bitcoin mining, AI training/operation and Internet traffic which has no useful application, like hackers, exploiters, scammers, spammers etc."
No, it's vastly more.
@geoffl - yes. My point is that the heating due to the Sun's energy being held in by greenhouse gases is much larger than the total power deliberately used by humanity.
To replace that with electricity, I estimated it would take 30% of all carbon free power sources on earth in 2009 (when I looked into it)
The power required to actually electrify industries is massive, and without the fossil fuels subsidy the whole way of life on most of the planet would need to fundamentally change.
@maxpool - thanks! I'll check your calculation. In 2024 humanity's primary energy consumption was about 18,000 terawatt-hours per year:
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
Terawatt-hours per year is a cursed unit of power: it equals a terawatt times an hour divided by roughly (24 times 365) hours. So 18,000 terawatt-hours per year is close to 2 terawatts.
Here Steve Easterbook, whom I know and trust, estimates the total power put into global warming was about 300 terawatts in 2013:
https://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2012/01/how-much-extra-energy-are-we-adding-to-the-earth-system/
(He actually says 300 terawatt-hours per hour, but I'll forgive him that sin.)
So, we get a factor of roughly 15 - or more if, as you note, we include ineffiencies in human power usage. I would like to use more up-to-date data on the global warming.
@maxpool - okay, this paper says
"In IPCC AR6, the total heat rate has been assessed by 0.57 (0.43 to 0.72) W/m² for the period 1971–2018 and 0.79 (0.52 to 1.06) /m² for the period 2006–2018 (Forster et al., 2021). Consistently, we further infer a total heating rate of 0.76±0.2 W/m² for the most recent era (2006–2020).
onsistently, we further infer a total heating rate of 0.76±0.2 W/m² for the most recent era (2006–2020)."
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/1675/2023/
Since the Earth's area is 510 trillion square meters, this says the total global heating is 390 terawatts.
The heavy industry, like ThyssenKrupp, is counting on H2 becoming produced more effectively and in larger quantities with renewable energy.
https://www.thyssenkrupp-steel.com/en/company/sustainability/climate-strategy/climate-strategy.html
At least they're trying.
I know, H2 production is ineffective, needs a lot of energy and yadda yadda.
But what's the alternative?
PS: that's not advertising (i have nothing to do with that company), that's just one company i know of doing it.
@johncarlosbaez @geoffl, no, some puny amount becomes radio and gravitational waves. :D
@johncarlosbaez
It's hard to keep up with global warming!
Your paper is from 2023, here is newer from 2024.
2011–2023 : 0.96 W/m² [0.67 to 1.26]
@maxpool - wow, that's a lot more (in part since I gave estimates over a long time span). I'll update my main post.
Aren't the greenhouse effects of carbon compounds nonlinear?
E.g. is the amount of energy reflected back to Earth by carbon compounds in the atmosphere a nonlinear function of the quantity of those compounds?
Yes, I realize that even asking a question like that may be an oversimplification, possibly a bad one.
@vnikolov - Yes, the power that goes into global warming is roughly logarithmic as a function of the CO2 concentration. That's very rough, but it's a lot better estimate than "linear".
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/35/13/JCLI-D-21-0275.1.xml
I would be careful with the "the whole way of life on most of the planet would need to fundamentally change." part.
I think that we need to be much more specific in order not to have people thinking of humans living again in caves and stuff.
The cruel thing is that maybe there wouldn't even be necessary so much change.
Especially not in quality of life.
We need definitely decrease hyperaccelerated consumerism via #degrowth. But consumerism is anyway not a source of real joy. More like a quick and shiny party drug that makes you an addict.
And the ephimeral, inefficient and unstable economies we built on fossil fuels? That's just one of many ways to organize society so that people know when they get up in the morning what they will work today and organizing the stuff they need.
Sure, people will have to mend their stuff again, share their stuff with other people, and swap most of the weird, unconnected bullshit jobs people are doing for meaningful work like artisanship, farming or caring for others. And deciding things in your community is also sometimes exhausting.
But all this is not a "fundamental change". The fundamental change is what is to come (especially when the system continues like this)..
@earthworm @sj_zero @Brokar - indeed, massive fundamental change is coming, of a not very pleasant sort, if we attempt to continue on our present reliance on fossil fuels.
It's *true* that 3-5% of natural gas is used to make ammonia for nitrates in fertilizer. So we should be working on CO2-free ammonia.
https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/the-cost-of-co2-free-ammonia/
@johncarlosbaez can you point to a source? I don't see the link. I have heard that half of bunker fuel is used to ship oil, for example. But 25x sounds unrealistic.
@stevenbodzin - I said
"It turns out - see the conversation below."
@maxpool and I did the calculations, with sources to all the data.
We are so fundamentally reliant on the fossil fuel subsidy for virtually every single thing in our lives, that most people's view of how to decarbonize is insanely incomplete.
We are facing the famous Carl Sagan line: "to make an apple pie from scratch first you must invent the universe". A lot of people think that they can just drop in one technology and it's going to fix any given thing, the problem is that in our highly industrialized civilization the feedstocks for any given technology rely on fossil fuels. People go "well here's a plant-based substitute" for one thing or another, and they don't realize that farming today requires lots of fossil fuel based chemical feedstocks such as ammonia, and is highly mechanized, which doesn't just require fossil fuels to operate but to manufacture, to refine the materials used in manufacture, to mine the minerals used in manufacture, to transport all the materials used in manufacture, and all of these apply to the machines used to manufacture as well, as well as the machines used to manufacture those machines.
I want to make something perfectly clear: almost none of the decarbonization that we see today is actually removing carbon. The West has simply made a deal with the devil and made Asia the painting of Dorian Gray.
The Asian continent, and particularly India and China, burn a vast majority of all coal burned on earth. What do they burn it doing? Making shit for westerners so our countries can pretend we are "net zero" carbon use.
People hold up the way solar panels are way cheaper than they were 20 years ago. Some of that is legitimate technological progress, but much of it is moving production from jurisdictions with labor and environmental regulations to jurisdictions that don't. It's no accident that the region that produces most of the world's polysilicon is produced in the region of China with the most coal and the most coal fired power plants.
I could go on forever, but the bottom line is that on a fundamental level, without the fossil fuel subsidy, we are past the carrying capacity of the planet in terms of humans. Even in the best view of things we can't feed this many people without that subsidy, and at the worst view of things, we definitely can't support the lifestyles we have today.
What we eat will change. What we wear will change. Where we live will change. What our homes look like will change. Our jobs will change, and they'll likely pay a lot less and require a lot more manual labor. And some of it might be for the better on an individual level, but for the most part lives will get much harder because you don't take away all the energy a civilization uses and make lives easier.
Premodern civilizations before the industrial revolution drove humans to use fossil fuels lived fundamentally differently than we do today. Today, most people live in cities. In the past, most people lived outside of the cities because while the per person resource is lower in the cities, those regions don't produce any primary feedstock and thus rely on rural farmland for renewable resources and rural mining for non-renewable resources such as metals(which can still be extracted without using carbon resources, at much higher cost).
Premodern civilizations also made use of technologies we consider reprehensible today. The Roman and Greek empires relied extensively on slavery. Premodern Europe ceased using slavery, but feudalism was another form of forced labor to make use of human horsepower to keep civilizations running used throughout Asia as well.
Another major problem with decarbonization is that not everyone is going to do it, and that could be a huge problem. If China and Russia keep burning fossil fuels and the rest of the world gives it up, what exactly would stop Russia's invasion in Ukraine if they can produce far more tanks and feed far more people? Disregarding even that, the only reason we have frictionless global trade today allowing for example people in Canada to eat fresh oranges in January is the huge US military keeping the seas relatively safe. Even if we could resolve the problem of how to fuel the huge ships that bring oranges to Canada, we wouldn't be able to resolve the problem of how to keep those treasure troves safe from pirates without an absurdly large navy policing the seas.
Most of the people who talk about decarbonization have never had anything to do with making things industrially, so the scale of lovely sounding sentences like "Just stop using oil" isn't apparent. That sort of disconnect from reality won't be possible without fossil fuels doing our manual labor for us. In Aristophanes play "The councilwomen", there's one powerfully satiricial moment where after laying out a utopia where nobody ever wants for anything, one of the councilwomen ask "But who will do the work?" to which another answered "The slaves". We live in a civilization with a similar issue, but instead of the slaves, it's fossil fuels doing all the work, and people have no idea how much work it's doing because the scale is so massive.
Do we have to move off of fossil fuels? Undoubtedly. No argument there. Even ignoring man-made climate change, the fact is that fossil fuels are limited, and we've already burned through billions of years worth of compressed biomass that in some cases would never return even if we left the earth alone. As well, climate change is going to change our lives, and so is the increasing difficulty of finding fossil fuels to burn. However, multiple things can be true at once, and it's true that staying on our current path is going to mean a big change eventually in terms of our lifestyle, but it's also true that changing the path is going to mean a big change in terms of our lifestyle. That's just cold, hard, reality.
The key here is to nail your feet to the ground and look at and talk about the reality of your options, rather than pretending if only our stupid leaders would listen to us then utopia is around the corner. The reality is that a lot of slow moving things are going to have to happen, and it's going to look different in the future than today. Transition too quickly, then the whole project will collapse and you don't get a choice in the end.
https://lotide.fbxl.net/posts/6006
It lays out my hypothetical conversation of 3 key process industries and how they compared to global energy sources that lack a marginal carbon cost.
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@sj_zero @Brokar @johncarlosbaez Not just energy and critical industrial purposes, natural gas is used as a source of hydrogen atoms to make ammonia which is NH3, which is directly used as a nitrogen fertilizer or to make solid types of that.
Which are necessary to get proteins into our food system, and it's very topical to point out this is also the feedstock for explosives. How WWI Germany was able to fight after the Royal Navy cut off its supply of guano (based) nitrates and the like.
@sj_zero @Brokar @johncarlosbaez Also worth mentioning in the US and I believe beyond, our ruling trash put the people into an energy poverty regieme. We can already see the results in general poverty, look at US economic statistics which become discontinuous around 1971.
Which does also include the Nixon Shock moving off the foreign gold standard ("closing the gold window." but energy is a large part of it. And it's all forms of non-human manual energy, see the crusade against nuclear power, or how the usual suspects wigged out during the early days of the cold fusion mirage.
@sj_zero @Brokar @johncarlosbaez Only read the beginning but you seem to accept we're entirely planet bound. [Insert HHGttG description of how big space is.]
We've got an effectively unlimited nuclear fusion source 149597870700 meters away, plus on the earth we could get sane about fission again and for example use either or both sources to capture carbon and turn it into fossil fuels, use electrolysis for hydrogen for ammonia etc. etc. etc.
Jerry Pournelle wrote a great deal about this, nonfiction as well as fiction in the 1970s in opposition to the bogus Limits to Growth types.
Since 2009 I've softened on my stance that we require fewer people imminently, but if we are to make decisions today, it needs to based on reality today. A lot of 1970s opposition to growth was proven wrong because we were able to turn energy into opportunities, so it all starts with energy.
One set of decisions is definitely to use fission (as well as hydroelectric and geothermal, two proven long term base load technologies), to pursue fusion and space based energy, but they don't exist until they exist. We were wrong in the 1970s about what technology would look like today, after all.
I think it is a good idea to sit down and calculate things like the energy requirements of cement, steel and ammonia production. And I agree with you in that there is no "business as usual with just another energy source".
That said, this is somehow your argument is built on. It is totally true that in the current industrial system, fossil fuels can't be substituted. Green capitalism is a lie that they are telling us to continue to do business as usual (maybe using a little bit of hydrogen here and there or electricity for another process), but that this transition is much more difficult than anticipated can be seen in the last two years when many projects became delayed (this corresponds also to a decrease in public pressure).
However: I strongly suggest you to read about degrowth. There's a lot of hubris and hyperbole, and greenwashing, too. But the core idea is to restructure society in a way that promotes efficiency and sufficiency on multiple levels. Just think, the proportion of concrete used to construct things that cover real human needs and not corporate/governmental bullshit is probably in the single percentage digits. We have to renovate buildings instead of building new ones. To stop building new roads, there are already too many (at least in the rich countries).
Similar goes with steel. There is almost no marginal benefit for producing these huge mountains of stuff.
The idea is to cover human needs.
And even ammonia. Industrial agriculture is productive, that is true. But the current agrifood system is grossly inefficient.
"Currently, only 47% of the reactive nitrogen added globally onto cropland is converted into harvested products, compared to 68% in the early 1960s, while synthetic N fertilizer input increased by a factor of 9 over the same period." [1]
Let me not start with diet. Almost half of arable land is used to produce animal food for industrial livestock [2].
Then, around 25% of all food is lost (on-farm) or wasted (supply chain/consumers) [3].
And I could continue for several steps more.
Of course, if going to a farmers market and making food with regional and seasonal vegetables is a fundamental change of a way of life, maybe we need to talk more about definitions.
I agree that there are hardships (especially regarding healthcare. On the other side, realizing that currently only a fraction of the population has access to all these high-tech wonders ). But I think that without being ingenuously optimistic, a solarpunkesque scenario is much more appealing and thus more likely to engage people to do at least something. Therefore, although it might come harder than expected (the happy-hippie-degrowth scenarios are more resilient against fascism, but looking at geopolitics, ugly things can happen).
I want to add also that we discuss collapse frequently from a rather "rich western country perspective". The world is huge and things might happen differently in different places.
1: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/9/10/105011
2: https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
3: https://www.wri.org/insights/reducing-food-loss-and-food-waste