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OldHand2018

I gave this a little bit of thought. I agree with the decision, but not at all for the reason that San Bernardino County cites.

We have (and California/Western States especially) drastically reduced per capita water consumption over the past few decades. Almost nobody has noticed.

This same approach needs to happen with electricity and other forms of energy. We shouldn't build any net new large-scale generation facilities (replacements are ok). To really make a difference, we must consume less. Consuming the same or more is no longer an option, even if it renewable or carbon-free.

Thoughts?

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No, generating less solar and wind will mean burning more natural gas and coal. Fossil fuels don’t get charged for their pollution externalities so their price on the energy market is artificially low, and demand artificially high.

Also, you just claimed that consuming more energy is not an option with making any arguments to support that claim. In fact, consuming more energy is an option every household has, and if we ban solar and wind then that energy will come from fossil fuels.

We could also split more atoms, which is carbon free and has really small impact in terms of land, mining, carbon, death, pollution, etc.

If it is completely sustainable, why not? There is no need to force uncomfortable, or what amounts to irrelevant, lifestyle changes on anyone if they can live thus without harm. We have the technological capacities to live well without harming the environment, we just choose, or at least have chosen, not to implement them.

On the practical level, we never consume anything, just change its state. So even the most energetic human activity can quite readily be a net neutral activity as long as it is planned with a cyclical reuse in mind.

I see no virtue in reduce if recycle is working well. They are both just practical means to an end. So we should go all in on sustainable systems since they are far, far easier to build than a new psychology and some level of hardship for all society, throughout the entire world - even if that hardship is small.

It doesn’t really matter how much electricity you consume if it’s coming from the sun. 1J of energy is 1J of energy. If the sun just hits the desert floor, it’ll heat up the earth immediately. If you collect the energy and convert (some of) it to electricity, whatever’s converted successfully won’t heat up the planet immediately, but it’ll end up back in the form of heat eventually.

There’s really no benefit to decreasing consumption of electricity. There’s no difference between decreasing demand by 1W and increasing solar output by 1W.

> There’s really no benefit to decreasing consumption of electricity. There’s no difference between decreasing demand by 1W and increasing solar output by 1W.

This ignores the sunlight that reflects back into space, and if conversion into electricity and slow return to heat actually increases the amount of energy that the planet can effectively absorb.

At some level, it's just a question of if the planet would heat up by painting the deserts black -- and I suspect that the answer is "yes".

Interesting point. I’m not sure there’s really any way I can estimate the difference there.

> 1J of energy is 1J of energy. If the sun just hits the desert floor, it’ll heat up the earth immediately. If you collect the energy and convert (some of) it to electricity, whatever’s converted successfully won’t heat up the planet immediately, but it’ll end up back in the form of heat eventually.

This is also true for water. I'm not sure exactly what you're saying.

I’m not seeing how water is relevant here. OP seems to think decreasing demand is better than increasing supply. I’m not convinced that it is, though another reply comparing it to painting deserts back does raise a fairly good point.

What is your 1W of electricity going to do though? It going to power something, lets say a phone, so the phone needs building in a factory, with materials mined and pumped from the ground.

Electricity use implies 'stuff'. Our production of 'stuff' is nowhere near being environmentally sound.

So 1W hitting the desert floor is nothing like 1W hitting a solar panel.

If I have my house in the middle of nowhere and I put solar on my roof that more than covers my power usage. So much that I can run air con 24/7. Even when not home. This is obviously over consumption but I have an abundance of energy raining down on my roof. What difference does it make that I run my air con all the time when that energy was already wasted heating my roof.

If it’s renewable and carbon-neutral, why isn’t it an option to consume more?

I guess an argument could be that the distribution of electricity still costs money. For example, if households use more electric power, we can either increase the electric current or the voltage. For the former we may have to replace transmission lines to be thicker; for the latter we may have to reconfigure or perhaps rebuild the local transformers. In either case, there are other costs involved that do not involve the cost of electricity itself.

There’s nothing wrong with increased costs per se. If people are willing to pay it, let them! The problem is when there are substantial externalities not reflected in the price, as is the case with electricity sourced from fossil fuel.

> reduced per capita water consumption

Immigration though, and also electric cars etc will need more energy.

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