21–30 of 86 posts
In the 60s France started switching to nuclear power because it worried about the depletion of oil wells in the areas it controlled. It is wrong to say nuclear power can't power more than 10% of a country.
Solar power and batteries have come a long way, but there's still little political will to change things. Nuclear power could progress a lot further too, but again no political will. There's no economic forcing function either since coal and gas remain on average the cheapest and easiest to deploy and manage sources of energy, and that won't change unless there's enough investment in alternatives to get them over the…
Why in the world is this comment being downvotes? There is nothing in this comment that I see is incorrect, and if you’re going to vigorously down vote because “I don’t like things that make me feel bad!” you at least ought to comment as to what could be wrong here.
China is often mentioned as adding new coal power plants, but even there coal fell from 80% of electricity generation in 2010 to 57.7% in 2019.
Natural gas on the other hand has become more popular, but it also produces significantly less CO2 per kWh.
I think he was clearly too pessimistic about the potential of nuclear.
> Today, the US gets about 8 percent of its total energy from nuclear power...
Note this is of all energy including the gas in your car. Obviously we are reliant on electrification if our transport system to tackle that, which doesn’t seem considered here. Possibly he didn’t foresee the potential to electrify transport hence the pessimism. No one is expecting solar, wind, or nuclear powered cars. They’re expecting solar, wind, and nuclear powered electricity grid charging batteries in cars, third rails, and overhead catenary.
Nuclear is ~20% of all electricity output on that grid today in the USA. And in France it’s ~70%.
It’s clear it can go to much higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
Back to seriousness - the author claims there are limits to nuclear, wind, and solar, but does not state what those limits are. The limit on nuclear is not clear to me - France gets something like 75% of its energy from nuclear. It seems the main limit on nuclear has been public sentiment, which must be weighed with public sentiment on climate change.
This strikes me as a very defeatist and Malthusian take on the world, and, frankly, too US-centric. While the US hasn’t managed the political will for significant climate reform, we are far from the majority of the world, and even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation, it’s unlikely that this would be enough to avert climate change. The developing world wants modern l…
People thought that obviously, all countries would see the common interest in protecting Earth's climate. There was ONE major rogue nation in this big plan: USA. G.W Bush was the one who presented climate change denial as a respectable policy. I am not sure people measure the impact of this position.
Most other advanced countries cut down their emissions, much more than the US did (no, it is not a matter of density, distance between cities or so on: even if you remove all emissions due to vehicles, USA is still way above EU).
> The developing world wants modern life, and if they have to burn fossil fuels to catch up, they will.
China will peak at a much lower level of CO2/capita than the US currently has. Given the current trajectory, it is quite possible that China will never in its history emit more CO2/capita than the US.
> Extraordinary visionary leadership in the right place at the right time
Give me a break. Listening to the consensus of experts, both international and domestic experts, on issues that threaten the whole ecosystem, is not "visionary leadership". It is called "not electing a cartoon villain in office".
> even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation
You would also need to nuke Bhutan and Suriname, two carbon-negative countries.
It's amazing how long we have known about the impact CO2 would have on the climate. We're now talking about human lifetimes, and yet look at where we are in the public debate. We are still mostly ignoring the issue or debating its reality.
Only in the US is there a political debate about climate change denialism. Thanks to you it is coming to other countries, but before GWB it was a fringe position everywhere.
This strikes me as a very defeatist and Malthusian take on the world, and, frankly, too US-centric. While the US hasn’t managed the political will for significant climate reform, we are far from the majority of the world, and even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation, it’s unlikely that this would be enough to avert climate change. The developing world wants modern l…
The downsides are secondary environmental effects (e.g. ocean acidification), the hesitancy of a single country to make a climate altering decision for the rest of the world, and the general bad optics of sweeping the problem under the rug for future generations. All that being said, up until now the tangible costs of climate have so far been relatively mild. If nothing big enough gets done on the carbon side, which seems increasingly likely, then warming will reach the point where it starts imposing major economic and humanitarian costs.
At that point, it's nigh inevitable that at least one major power will bite the bullet and start pumping the stratosphere full of sulfur dioxide.
> Agriculture may have set us humans on an unsustainable path, but fossil fuels broadened that path to a superhighway.
We need to put the "agriculture was our biggest mistake" trope to bed. Sustainability is an illusion. Nothing is sustainable in the cosmos, it just looks that way when you constrict the time horizon enough. Pre-agriculture, Homo Sapiens were on the constant brink of extinction, just like every other animal. The earth provides no safe comfort to any being. (The fact that we've created a society which provides for me to type this screed without glancing over my shoulder once is a miracle.)
Humans are unique, and agriculture was a monumental step in our epic journey. Without agriculture, the dunes of Mars would crumble in darkness and countless stars would radiate for no conscious creature to marvel at and wonder.
Fossil fuels were a tremendous gift: cheap energy. Without it, who knows how far behind our society would be? We almost certainly wouldn't yet have commercial air travel, 4+ billion people globally connected on the internet, or mRNA vaccines.
Yes, no gift comes for free. But let's not treat this like some deal with the devil. It is up to us to manage the costs (and they are real!) We don't master plan this stuff, but I'll bet on humans to figure it out every time.
So, is it any surprise that someone that calls agriculture "the biggest planning failure in human history" would have this conclusion?
> Without planning, this is what will most likely happen: we’ll fail to produce enough renewable energy to power society at the level at which we want it to operate. So, we’ll continue to get most of our energy from fossil fuels—until we can’t, due to depletion. Then, as the economy crashes and the planet heats, the full impacts of our planning failure will finally hit home.
If you're going to be a doomsaying pessimist (which, mind you, every era of history has had in droves), at least put some effort into it.
This strikes me as a very defeatist and Malthusian take on the world, and, frankly, too US-centric. While the US hasn’t managed the political will for significant climate reform, we are far from the majority of the world, and even if we magically had a green revolution and became the worlds first zero-emission nation, it’s unlikely that this would be enough to avert climate change. The developing world wants modern l…
My sincere guess is that we'll kludge the problem with relatively low-tech geoengineering solutions. Primarily stratospheric aerosol injections. The technology is very well understood and fully mature. We know with certainty, from historical volcano eruptions, that a large enough dosage will lower global temperatures near instantly. And the cost is low enough that even a single mid-size economy could afford to unilat…
And I’m not anti science. I’m a former scientist and almost all my experiments usually ended with me realizing I don’t know what I thought I knew, especially when I took something from a simple system I understood and added it to a complex system (the earth in this scenario).
Well hello Mr. Malthus! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus Back to seriousness - the author claims there are limits to nuclear, wind, and solar, but does not state what those limits are. The limit on nuclear is not clear to me - France gets something like 75% of its energy from nuclear. It seems the main limit on nuclear has been public sentiment, which must be weighed with public sentiment on climat…
If we believe the Titanic is sinking, why are we being picky about the lifeboat?
Anything beyond averting disaster is an over-optimization.