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1. Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 10-Dec-2021 12:36:44 UTC Cory Doctorow

   In *Electrify*, the MacArthur prizewinning engineer Saul Griffith offers a detailed, optimistic and urgent roadmap for a climate-respecting energy transition that we can actually accomplish in 10-15 years.

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   • Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​ (dredmorbius@toot.cat)'s status on Friday, 10-Dec-2021 12:36:37 UTC Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​

     in reply to

     @pluralistic Looking up ocean shipping stats a few years back, I was stunned that one third of all shipping tonnage was oil tankers.

     That's down from the 1970s when it was roughly 1/2.

     Oil is big business.

   • Tagomago (tagomago@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 10-Dec-2021 12:36:37 UTC Tagomago

     in reply to

     • Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​

     @dredmorbius @pluralistic I recently read somewhere (or watched on TV) that almost 90% of global commerce is made by sea, so, yeah, probably is the biggest business (at least in terms of product volume)?

   • Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 10-Dec-2021 12:36:39 UTC Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Griffith starts with some very good news: the US's energy budget has been wildly overstated. About *half* of the energy that the US consumes is actually the energy we need to dig, process, transport, store and use fossil fuels. Renewables have these costs, too, but nothing near the costs of using fossil fuels. An all-electric nation is about twice as efficient as a fossil fuel nation. That means that the problem of electrifying America is only half as hard as we've been told it was.

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   • Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 10-Dec-2021 12:36:41 UTC Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Then he gives you the knobs and dials to play with these figures - this kind of activity, plus this kind of renewable, requires this much raw material and space, and presents the following advantages and disadvantages.

     The remarkable thing about MacKay's book is that it becomes abundantly clear that while an energy transition is a lot of work, it's eminently possible. MacKay's book spawned a whole line of "Without the Hot Air" titles from UIT Cambridge.

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   • Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 10-Dec-2021 12:36:41 UTC Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The latest, last year's "Food and Climate Change Without the Hot Air," is an excellent continuation of MacKay's legacy:

     https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day

     Griffith's popular engineering book is also part of MacKay's legacy (in case there's any doubt, Griffith namechecks him). Electrify is far more concrete and granular than MacKay's book, focusing on the US context to understand what is possible, what is necessary, and what stands in the way.

   • Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 10-Dec-2021 12:36:43 UTC Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     There are a lot of popular science books out there, but the world really needs more popular *engineering* books - books that set out the technical parameters of our problems and the various proposed solutions, sorting the likely from the plausible to the foolish, and laying out a practical range of plans to accomplish the best of them.

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   • Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Friday, 10-Dec-2021 12:36:43 UTC Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     McKay describes the upper and lower bounds of the Earth's estimated carbon budget - how much CO2 we can emit. Then he looks at the energy budget for a variety of human activities - buildings, transport, food, and so on - decomposing each into a variety of subcategories. Then he looks at the maximum theoretical renewable energy generation available to us, by category - how many solar photons strike the Earth every day? That's your absolute solar limit.

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   • Tagomago (tagomago@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 10-Dec-2021 19:54:37 UTC Tagomago

     in reply to

     • Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​

     @dredmorbius @pluralistic

     2018: 80%
     2021: 90%

     And rising, according to the OECD. Sources seem legit:

     https://unctad.org/webflyer/review-maritime-transport-2018#:~:text=Maritime%20transport%20is%20the%20backbone,are%20handled%20by%20ports%20worldwide.

     https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/global-shortagof-shipping-containers/

   • Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​ (dredmorbius@toot.cat)'s status on Friday, 10-Dec-2021 19:54:38 UTC Doc Edward Morbius ⭕​

     in reply to

     • Tagomago

     @tagomago I'm pretty sure that the rise in containerised cargo has a lot to do with this, and would like to see the relative and absolute trends over time.

     In the context of @pluralistic's toot, though, the point is that a lot of our energy consumption is about energy consumption. Note that this somewhat counts against the EROEI of fossil fuels in the sense that there's a lot of unacknowledged energy expenditure in their utilisation.

     (How this comares against other energy regimes I'm not entirely sure. Keep in mind that a major utilisation of metabolism in living systems is in supporting metabolic activity: sensing, finding, appropriating, digesting, and exreting food.)