We're going to need a lot of solar panels

> There are many chemical plants synthesizing chemicals in large quantities: ammonia, ethanol, etc.

There sure are. Zero of them, however, produce gasoline or kerosene from air.

Many, many substances cannot be produced in chemical plants currently.

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> Until 10 years ago, the cheapest primary fuel was all fossil fuel based

It still is, by leagues. The only reason that isn't showing up in the market is a blend of tax and subsidy (which I agree with.)

Notice what they use on the ocean, where there aren't laws.

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> making synthetic fuels from fossil fuels is simply a loss in efficiency.

This would be true if anyone had ever actually made it work at scale.

We're much earlier in that process than you seem to believe. The processes that people are talking about are things you can demonstrate in a beaker. These are not things that have even been industrialized at small scale, let alone at large scale.

There's decades of work involved in figuring something like that out. You don't just go "here's the money, build one."

It might be a good idea to watch some of those old Nova specials about Percy Lavon Julian, one of the greatest American chemists in history. Not only are the social angles interesting - he was a black man in the 1950s, but also a source of great wealth to an American dynasty, so you had various factions of old white people fighting over whether or not to be racist - but also his story is crucially informative here.

Mr Julian did invent and discover some plastics and other synthetics, yes, but that wasn't his important work.

His important work was taking "yeah this should be possible" and turning into "yes, we can do this cheaply at scale."

The reason he was so valuable is that that is much, much more difficult than the primary research.

I agree, the primary research has been done.

The things that people are bringing up aren't even the best examples; MIT's solar trees from 2002 do rings around this stuff in efficiency and productivity both per pound construction and per acre construction, and can be built relatively easily from already commercialized parts.

The problem is, once we're done being Cory Doctorow and being blown away by what should be possible, someone has to actually sit down and do the hard work of figuring out how to do it at scale, and then raising the money to do so, and then building several generations of factory until they get it right.

And yes, this will get done, sure.

But there's a /time/ /limit/ here.

Climate change is already putting island nations underwater, putting salt into major city aquifers, has been forcing the Army to relocate Louisianans for 30 years and now it's four states. Our water situation is getting to states suing each other and talking about piping seawater into Middle America to keep lakes wet.

I love the process you're describing, and I agree that it will eventually succeed, but I do not believe there is any realistic chance it will succeed in time for this specific challenge.

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> instead of raging at people

(sigh)

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> your own definition of "real"

"Has existed" is the common, dictionary definiton of real.

Why aren't vampires real? They haven't existed yet.

Why isn't strong AI real, even though it seems like it should be possible given the simulation argument? It hasn't existed yet.

Why aren't consumer jetpacks real, even though working jetpacks have been on demo for 100 years? Nobody's made them yet.

You know that 30 foot tall robot that some guy in Japan made for a TV show? Why isn't the American response to it real, even though we have all the same technology that one guy in a garage has? Because nobody's made it yet.

Why isn't a man with one son's daughter real, even though he can have children? Because knowing that something is possible doesn't make it real.

It's very strange to me that you think this is somehow "my definition."

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> its not "not real" in the same way perpetual motion is not real.

I never said anything about perpetual motion.

Methanol can also explode (and set things on fire). In terms of a fire hazard they're both very bad.

Is that not energy

The issue is that it's ridiculously expensive. You have to pay an inflated price for an existing, perfectly fine home. Then you have to pay to have it demolished. Then you have to pay to build a brand new home. It's going to cost >2x what the resulting home is actually worth.

When the old homes decay to the point that they need to be torn down, then they will be. But destroying perfectly good houses is just too expensive in this market.

Back when I had a class in power engineering as part of my EE program there was about a week discussing transmission line loss. The example we worked on was Hoover Dam which sends its electricity 266 miles over transmission lines to LA where the University was. It was remarkable how much energy was lost both in what are called "i2r" (I squared R) losses (that is just the transmission wires losing energy as heat) and radiation losses where the power lines are essentially very long antennas. There are lots of strategies that are employed to mitigate both kinds of losses, those strategies have their own limits as well. It is all rather more complex than just hooking a wire from point A to point B, as such things are.

The other advantage that Casey's scheme has is power generated during the day doesn't need to be consumed right away if it is stored in Methane. This is true of Nuclear power as well.

The efficiency argument weakened still further if you compare the full cost of drilling, extracting, transporting, and then burning existing "fossil fuel" sources of methane because that not only damages the environment with the contaminated ground water from fracking or other extraction methods, but adds to greenhouse gasses in the the air.

The efficiency here is that your take zero (or nearly so) carbon foot print energy generation to create fuel that has net 0 impact on warming gases in the atmosphere (it takes the CO2 out of the air which is then re-released back into the air when it is burned). For things that can't be electrified, or are better served by heat combustion. Those things are, jet fuel, heating homes, baking, etc.

The other advantage is it re-uses existing infrastructure. So on a dollars per ton reduction of CO2 it is much more efficient than existing solutions, whether you use solar or nuclear.

Like most things, efficiency is a measure of some metric with respect to two choices to achieve the same result.

The choice presented by Casey is "How do you get methane for things that use it?"

If your metric is greenhouse gas emissions you get more gas with has a much lower greenhouse gas impact. On that basis it is much more efficient whether you use Nuclear or Solar as your energy input.