Climate Letter #1020

How important is economic growth?  Here is an article that makes a strong case for removing the existing emphasis on economic growth as the main objective of human societies, using Costa Rica as a model.  Apparently Costa Ricans are just as healthy and happy as people living in societies that have five times higher income per person, which at least suggests that such a condition is possible.  Their society is organized in a different way, reducing the feeling of need to either consume more goods or build greater wealth.  The article also takes note of the problems that high growth rates cause for mitigating climate change, because of the way growth adds to demand for energy.  That keeps raising the bar for efforts to replace old and dirty sources of energy with clean new sources.  The effort is making good progress but with such a long way to go toward completion it would help greatly to have a more stationary target, or better yet a target that was shrinking toward the level on display in Costa Rica.  We would then be there in almost no time!  .

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How did we get get to where we are?  Perhaps because of some cultural habits and traditions that are deeply rooted in the past.  This article has a heavy bite that makes it hard to read, and can be faulted for making some obviously lopsided judgments, but it contains quite a bit of truth about certain common elements of human behavior that cannot be ignored.  They keep showing up in different forms, motivated by different kinds of desire for exploitation.
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Open ocean wind farms have huge potential in the North Atlantic.  The amount of energy that can be intercepted by turbines is said to be five times greater than that available to turbines on land.  There is theoretically enough to power the whole world in wintertime.
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Batteries built with sodium can be used as cost-effective alternatives to lithium for large-scale applications.  Researchers at Stanford believe they have resolved any questions about future performance.  The low cost of materials and absence of doubt about future availability of supplies should assure deep market penetration.  Lithium will still be favored where battery size is a constraint.
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A new study claims that coal formation 300 million years ago nearly led to total global glaciation.  The CO2 level at that time is believed to have fallen to about 100 ppm because so much plant matter became buried in the earth instead of decaying.  Before that process began there was much more carbon in the atmosphere than we have today, estimated at about 700 ppm by the author, and the planet would have been much warmer.
Carl

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