Quote:
Originally Posted by niky
See, that's the debate we should be having in this thread.
I'm of two minds about it. Basic physics and economics say mitigation/elimination is impossible without economic upheaval.
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Exactly. We have a much bigger problem than climate change. Which is man made. And is a big problem.
Energy underpins everything. Every service or goods starts with an energy input which is many hundreds of times the human energy input. If world per capita energy availability declines, world economy declines. And fossil fuel depletion happens. Oil has 35-50 years before it's price goes 4X and up. Gas for heat, 70 years. Except that we are now burning it up as fast as we can for electricity also. But our whole world economy is based on more, more, more.
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Nuclear with water can only be walk away safe for a few days. If society crashes and workers don't show up for a month, the cores will explode and the cooling ponds will burn.
Molten fuel reactors can be built to be passively air cooled and walk way safe indefintely and would buy us an energy bridge for a couple hundred years to get the population back down to sustainable levels and develope a new and equitable non-growth world economic system that can function on much smaller and more intermittent energy from solar panels with a much gentler speed bump during the transitions.
Fossil fuel has built gigantic cities and populations all over the Northern hemisphere above 40*N which will be impossible to maintain with renewables and batteries after oil and gas begin to slip away. How many people lived on local food and biomass heat in Moscow in 1800? It will have to be closer to that many again by 2150. Certainly nowhere near the current population levels will be viable. Chicago, Tornoto, Montreal, Boston/ NYC/ Phili, ect will all be forced to suffer the same steady mass desertion to correct back to levels that natural solar flows can sustain without the immense added stored solar energy from fossil fuels.
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Before any of the wishful thinkers reply that we just need to build more than more solar and wind, please understand that if you really start to run the numbers of the immense consumption that we are addicted to, there is no way that it can add up to what we need to replace all of this.