Fossil fuels help humans live a better life so we should increase their use.
There is no good replacement for fossil fuels that will be available in the next 40 years.
The global warming caused by 40 more years of emissions is not an existential threat.
Any threat from global warming can be mitigated by increased fossil fuel use, what he calls "climate mastery".
Replacements for fossil fuels should be developed.
The best candidates for replacing fossil fuels are nuclear and enhanced geothermal.
I think he is being misleading or is ignorant. In the next 40 years there are obvious candidates for powering a decarbonized economy. Namely solar and batteries. New Solar is rapidly becoming cheaper than existing coal generation in large areas of the world. Battery production is scaling exponentially. While nuclear is the safest power option, it is never going to be the cheapest. Its technology iteration cycle is too slow. Solar power and batteries on the other hand both have fast iteration cycles. This makes them drop in price faster than nuclear. Even if you got rid of the unnecessarily burdensome nuclear regulations, its slow development cycle means it will not beat solar in cost per unit of electricity in the next 40 years.
Nuclear power plant technology is iterated roughly every 25 years, or twice in the lifetime of a plant. Many first generation plants are still operational, while few third generation plants have been commissioned, and fourth generation plants are still in the planning stage. Even if every design iteration was a factor of 10 better than the previous one, solar, iterating 50 times faster, could outdo this improvement over the same timescale with a mere 5% improvement per iteration. Since this is roughly the solar learning rate, we can now ask if each nuclear design iteration is 10x better than its immediate predecessor. Obviously not.
It is hard to separate the pace of development of nuclear from the regulatory barrier that makes advances less commercial.
But even then, Epstein isn’t arguing necessarily against a solar. Sure, he doesn’t think it will be feasible based on what he knows. But nothing in his book is suggesting we shouldn’t do solar if it works.
Is his thesis not fundamentally that we don't have a viable replacement for fossil fuels in the next fifty years so we should increase fossil fuel use? If the argument against his thesis is that solar plus batteries follow exponential curves that will be able to match government mandates for taking over transport and the grid how does that not obviate his hypothesis?
His argument is don’t ban fossil fuels because there is no reasonable replacement now. If solar development occurs at the rate suggested then the calculus changes.
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Notes -
Fossil futures seems to make several arguments.
Fossil fuels help humans live a better life so we should increase their use.
There is no good replacement for fossil fuels that will be available in the next 40 years.
The global warming caused by 40 more years of emissions is not an existential threat.
Any threat from global warming can be mitigated by increased fossil fuel use, what he calls "climate mastery".
Replacements for fossil fuels should be developed.
The best candidates for replacing fossil fuels are nuclear and enhanced geothermal.
I think he is being misleading or is ignorant. In the next 40 years there are obvious candidates for powering a decarbonized economy. Namely solar and batteries. New Solar is rapidly becoming cheaper than existing coal generation in large areas of the world. Battery production is scaling exponentially. While nuclear is the safest power option, it is never going to be the cheapest. Its technology iteration cycle is too slow. Solar power and batteries on the other hand both have fast iteration cycles. This makes them drop in price faster than nuclear. Even if you got rid of the unnecessarily burdensome nuclear regulations, its slow development cycle means it will not beat solar in cost per unit of electricity in the next 40 years.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-power-a-solution-to-climate-change/
It is hard to separate the pace of development of nuclear from the regulatory barrier that makes advances less commercial.
But even then, Epstein isn’t arguing necessarily against a solar. Sure, he doesn’t think it will be feasible based on what he knows. But nothing in his book is suggesting we shouldn’t do solar if it works.
Is his thesis not fundamentally that we don't have a viable replacement for fossil fuels in the next fifty years so we should increase fossil fuel use? If the argument against his thesis is that solar plus batteries follow exponential curves that will be able to match government mandates for taking over transport and the grid how does that not obviate his hypothesis?
His argument is don’t ban fossil fuels because there is no reasonable replacement now. If solar development occurs at the rate suggested then the calculus changes.
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