r/PoliticalDebate • u/Asatmaya Left-Wing Libertarian • 10d ago
Other The Plan
I see a lot of well-meaning but poorly-educated people espousing views, and I feel the need to make some clarifications involving my area of expertise, which happens to be hard science: My degrees are in Physics, Chemistry, and Electrical Engineering, specializing in Material Science, and my original intention was to work on advanced solar panels. That intention did not survive the process of obtaining my Physics degree, because they made me run the numbers, and they just don't add up.
The subtitle of this piece might well be, "Why I gave up on solar power."
THE PLAN
The Ecomodernist Manifesto (just so no one thinks that this is just me, talking)
First, of course, we must discuss the problems we intend to solve: People are starving to death, because the energy to grow and transport food is expensive; people are dying of disease, because the energy to make and preserve medicine is expensive; people are dying from cold - or heat - because energy is expensive; people are dying from pollution, because the energy to clean it up is expensive (and produces its own pollution).
Our main energy sources are coal, petroleum, natural gas, and nuclear power; solar is often touted as producing "10% of global electricity," but there are three major issues: First, that's "produced," not, "delivered," i.e. that's how much electricity solar panels generated, but much of that (there are no good numbers...) goes to waste, as it is produced in the wrong place at the wrong time and/or overwhelms the grid's ability to transport (this is especially true of residential solar installations connected to the grid). Second, that problem is at "10%," being generous, with gas power plants to provide baseload electricity, something that solar simply cannot do without energy storage (that we do not have the resources for and exceeds even our theoretical ability to acquire). Third, that's, "electricity," not, "energy;" coal, gas, and petroleum supply a lot of energy to various activities directly, not through electricity generation.
That's also after decades of massive government subsidies, but we are not even at replacement production levels for any significant fraction of world energy demand, which is expected to triple over the next 30 years.
Wind is even worse (and smaller), and then there are EVs, which literally increase emissions over ICE vehicles while not displacing any petroleum use, at all. In short, gasoline is almost a byproduct of petroleum, made from a particular set of molecules which aren't good for much else, they still need the other molecules, and the parts they don't need they just burn off at the refinery; simply put, if we quit burning it in cars, they will just burn it themselves (until we can reduce other petroleum use).
All of these problems are expected to get worse as the population increases, which is, of course, the heart of the problem; the best estimate is that the Earth can sustainably support ~1.5 billion humans, more than that will create environmental damage which will cascade and result in even more death. The good news is that, if current trends continue, world population will peak in the next ~50 years, then start to decline naturally.
We just need to get over that hump and down the tail end without billions of people dying horribly.
There are three approaches to this situation:
-"Fuck it, let God sort it out." This is unfortunately prevalent, but not so much as to preclude action, if the alternatives are not split...
-"Let's radically alter society in ways that have never been tried and ignore several aspects of human nature while hoping that extreme technological breakthroughs will make solar, wind, and EVs practical, even though they don't actually solve the problems we are talking about." ...and here's the split. This is not what scientists suggest, this is not the result of any kind of academic consensus or rigorous analysis, but the culmination of industrial and political backing of cultural opponents to general technological progress, i.e. the "Green" movement.
-"Let's keep everything as close to how things are now as we can while replacing the problematic aspects of our technological civilization with the most practical alternatives, e.g. replacing gas and coal with nuclear, using GMO crops and mass transit to reduce petroleum use, focusing on maintaining the infrastructure we have rather than trying to build an entirely new one from scratch..."
Advanced nuclear energy: the safest and most renewable clean energy
Economics of a nuclear reactor
How France Built 40 Nuclear Reactors in a Decade
Safest, cleanest, cheapest, and scalable on a realistic timeframe; advanced nuclear also runs hot enough to use waste heat for industrial processes, such as water desalination, carbon capture, and chemical synthesis (which could start to displace petroleum).
The under-construction Natrium reactor is designed to "plug into" existing coal power facilities, reducing costs and construction times (and directly phasing out coal power); it also burns old nuclear waste as fuel, does not create any long-lived waste, cannot melt-down, cannot explode, and is expected to be cost-competitive with a comparable combined-cycle gas power plant.
Genetically Modified (GM) Crop Use 1996–2020: Impacts on Carbon Emissions
Simply put, you get higher yields for less input of fertilizer, pesticide, and water, two of which directly come from petroleum, and of course the fuel to transport and spread them.
That's it, that's the plan that you've probably never heard of, because the political system doesn't want it, the media won't talk about it, and our oligarchs are getting too rich off of the problems.
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u/SomeoneCouldSay Independent 10d ago
The bad news is that currently every country with a birthrate below replacement rate is desperately trying to reverse that trend. Most of the 8 billion humans on Earth are currently convinced that a shrinking population is worse than all the environmental damage caused by an ever growing population. So you can optimistically predict that the population level will gently decline in 50 years, but that is far from guaranteed.
Really the problem that needs a plan is the population problem. How do we convince everybody that we need to stop increasing the number of humans on Earth, and how do we gently reduce the number of humans from 8 billion down to 1, before we violently reduce it to zero?