Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => The Environment => Topic started by: EvaH on 07/09/2020 09:46:01
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Emma wants to know:
If the whole world suddenly switched to sustainable and environmentally friendly business practices, would there be enough skilled and unskilled jobs to employ those who work in them currently? What kind of jobs would arise or be discontinued in this future?
What do you think?
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Because renewable resources tend to be more "diffuse", you need a much more distributed energy collection industry.
- Instead of a few large power stations situated near coalmines, you might have...
- Very many rooftop solar panels in residential areas
- Many solar "farms", with a field of solar panels. Because they are not polluting (and not tied to coal mines), you can locate them near cities (but no so close that the real estate becomes prohibitive)
- Many windmills spread around the countryside
- Dams of various sizes with hydroelectricity
- Maybe a few large tidal flow projects...
This will generate more jobs at the "retail" end of the industry.
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Sustainability at a reasonably aspirational standard of living depends on reducing the population to a level where we can generate at least 5 kW per capita of controllable power from reliable and inexhaustible sources. This cannot be achieved with more than about 2,000,000,000 people on the planet, so the first task is to persuade people to breed below replacement level for a few generations.
This will result in a redeployment of education, healthcare and police personnel, away from youth and towards adult and elderly services, with an immediate reduction in youth unemployment rates (there being fewer youths to unemploy) but no particularly novel jobs.
Generation of said power will require an initial capital and labor input which will redeploy a number of people into "different but similar" construction tasks and create a few additional jobs, and the labor pool will of course decrease at the same time that these projects move from construction to maintenance.
For completely different reasons I think half the "retail" industry will disappear - everyday durables and consumables will be increasingly purchased online and distribution will become more efficient, but the hospitality side of retail business will flourish once we have replaced politicians with a competent system of government and eliminated COVID.