You know economics is about resources and there isn’t some magical system that gets around resource distribution, right?

Economics has been termed the dismal science for a reason. A permanent solution to the demographic problems of people living longer will either involve people accepting a lower living standard than they otherwise could have or having people work longer before retiring. Or maybe Logan’s Run? It doesn’t matter if it’s a capitalist society or a socialist society the problems are the same, large population not producing anything but still consuming resources.

But chill, as a great economist once said, in the long run we’re all dead anyway. There’s still a massive pool of people that want to live in our ever-growing populations. We just gotta stop letting people make us think immigration is a bad thing. It’ll be a long time before the entire world is living at the same standard of living we enjoy in the developed world, and with so many people getting suckered into making their countries backwards and authoritarian (thanks, Putin!) it doesn’t look like we’re going to run out of immigrants that will be willing to move to an affluent democracy any time in our lifetimes.

If we get to a point where we can no longer depend on attracting immigrants because every country in the world is an affluent democracy… well that’s a good problem to have, isn’t it?

As a friend who was going through the process of getting citizenship once said “I think Canada wants me as a citizen for the tax revenue.”

Yup. That’s the deal… immigration = more tax revenue. It’s actually way better than having more children. Society has to pay for the education and healthcare for children and doesn’t see a dime of tax revenue until the very earliest 18 years, and more likely >20 years. An immigrant that’s already educated immediately starts working and paying taxes.

Immigration is basically the cheat code for demographic problems.

The main problem is that boomers didn’t move out of their houses into nursing homes (or at least small apartments) as early as previous generations so we have some housing problems. But the boomers won’t live forever and when they die off, housing will be freed up.

I’m pretty sure forests exist where there aren’t salmon. You hate dams, but I hate coal power more than that. And I hate these endless forest fires caused by global warming more than you hate the relatively small area around a dam being affected by the dam.

“Somebody find a better way” doesn’t help. We gotta get past this NIMBYism and learn to accept that it’s not just the guys rolling coal in their F-350s that are going to need to compromise. You need to make compromises too. Global warming can’t just be used as tool to get whatever you want. The guy in the F-350 is gonna have to get an electric car and you’re gonna have to accept there’s going to be a dam in your forest.

Please try to look past the trees in your immediate surroundings to see the entire forest. It’s currently burning. And it’s not because of a dam it’s because there’s too many coal plants and not enough dams. You’re using a device right now that runs on electricity. That electricity comes from somewhere. Where that power is currently coming from is causing this: https://globalnews.ca/news/10574072/bc-wildfire-map-2024-live-today/ Are you really arguing a dam has a bigger environmental impact than this?

Wood wouldn’t be a good option for powering a city, obviously. Neither is coal though.

Global warming isn’t going to be solved by a single solution. Wood makes sense for building materials and for heating in rural areas. It’s not going to be good for producing electricity, but fortunately there’s other technology for that.

There’s a separate item for batteries on the list.

You can also store energy from wind and solar in a hydro dam by pumping water.

Energy can also be stored as Hydrogen, that should also be included on the list as an energy storage method.

In some senses the whole planet is storing a huge amount of energy underground.

But yeah I think in the context of this kind of discussion it’s would be a renewable energy source. While it’s probably technically not renewable, but there’s so much of it we’d never run out. I mean if you want to be super-pedantic, solar and wind aren’t renewable either because we don’t have a way to make a new sun when that thing burns out, but it’s like come on.

But probably not a storage solution, because why would you put energy into the Earth’s core? We worried about hell freezing over or something?

Nah it’s friction from rocks banging into each other when the Earth was being formed. The surface of the Earth cooled down, but you dig down deep enough it gets really hot. Hot enough to melt rocks, or as the pros call it… “magma”. Dump some water down there and you get steam and you can drive a turbine with that steam. Though actual geothermal energy implementations are probably a little more complicated than that. But that’s the gist of it.

Wood is a material that’s made from carbon that has been extracted from the atmosphere using an organic process.

You can make buildings and furniture out of wood and you’re sequestering carbon while having a nice place to live and some nice furniture.

You can also burn the wood for heat energy. This releases the carbon into the atmosphere, but the tree that got cut down makes space for a new tree to grow. When that new tree grows it pulls out the carbon that was added by burning the wood. So it’s carbon neutral.

Renewable doesn’t mean it’s instantly replaced. It means there’s a well understood process to replace it. It’s not popular among those that hate the lumber industry, but it’s one of the more environmentally friendly options considering global warming. Consider how trees used for building means using carbon extracted from the air for building things. Even burning wood is carbon neutral, so it’s better than most heating options.

As the image above indicates, hydro is not only an energy source, it can be used for energy storage. Run pumps to pump more water over the dam when you have an excess of power and let the water flow through the turbines when you need power.

So it’s like a giant battery. Except unlike most batteries there’s no toxic chemicals involved.

Given that most renewable energy doesn’t generate consistent energy (it’s not windy every day, it’s not sunny every day, it’s never sunny at night) there will be a huge need for energy storage. While we could spend a lot of money of making giant batteries with toxic materials to solve this, we need to also need to consider the environmental impact of that kind of technology. Also consider the time it would take to make these massive banks of batteries. The materials may be better used in replacing gasoline engines, so it may be awhile before we have the materials needed to make the energy storage needed for renewable energy to work, and that’s only if we want to make giant chemical batteries someday.

Sorry, but given the importance of hydro in a renewable energy grid, I don’t think it’s going away for a very long time. Consider the environmental impact of having forests that burn down every year. Gonna have to make some compromises so that doesn’t continue to happen forever.

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