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.
I suppose this is somewhat off-topic, but I figure I might as well ask here: does nuclear energy count as a "fossil fuel"? I see nuclear grouped in with oil, gas, and coal, whether as a baseload energy source or as something regulated in a similar fashion. But uranium isn't really a fossil, no?
Uranium is definitely not a fossil fuel. Uranium is a base element--a heavy metal, specifically--with radioactive and (close to) non-radioactive isotopes. To generate nuclear energy, you purify the radioactive isotope, and then generate a nuclear chain reaction, accelerating the decay of the isotope and trapping the released energy as heat, usually by converting water to steam, which drives turbines that produce electricity.
Fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) are made of hydrocarbons, which are more or less chains of carbon atoms coated with a layer of hydrogen atoms. Sometimes other stuff gets mixed in, most often atoms of oxygen, nitrogen, or sulfur, but nearly all of the atomic content is hydrogen and carbon. These hydrocarbons are burned to release heat, etc. etc. as above. One way to look at the process of "burning" on a chemical level is "combining with oxygen." The hydrogen atoms are stripped off and stuck on oxygen atoms to produce water (H2O) and the carbon chains are broken up and the individual atoms hook up with oxygen to form carbon dioxide (CO2). This process releases a lot of energy, which is why fire is hot.
So while both processes produce heat, which is then converted through a couple of intermediate steps into electricity, the sources of the heat are very different. Nuclear power plants rely on the radioactive decay of uranium, while fossil fuel plants rely on burning hydrocarbons.
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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/
I suppose this is somewhat off-topic, but I figure I might as well ask here: does nuclear energy count as a "fossil fuel"? I see nuclear grouped in with oil, gas, and coal, whether as a baseload energy source or as something regulated in a similar fashion. But uranium isn't really a fossil, no?
Uranium is definitely not a fossil fuel. Uranium is a base element--a heavy metal, specifically--with radioactive and (close to) non-radioactive isotopes. To generate nuclear energy, you purify the radioactive isotope, and then generate a nuclear chain reaction, accelerating the decay of the isotope and trapping the released energy as heat, usually by converting water to steam, which drives turbines that produce electricity.
Fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) are made of hydrocarbons, which are more or less chains of carbon atoms coated with a layer of hydrogen atoms. Sometimes other stuff gets mixed in, most often atoms of oxygen, nitrogen, or sulfur, but nearly all of the atomic content is hydrogen and carbon. These hydrocarbons are burned to release heat, etc. etc. as above. One way to look at the process of "burning" on a chemical level is "combining with oxygen." The hydrogen atoms are stripped off and stuck on oxygen atoms to produce water (H2O) and the carbon chains are broken up and the individual atoms hook up with oxygen to form carbon dioxide (CO2). This process releases a lot of energy, which is why fire is hot.
So while both processes produce heat, which is then converted through a couple of intermediate steps into electricity, the sources of the heat are very different. Nuclear power plants rely on the radioactive decay of uranium, while fossil fuel plants rely on burning hydrocarbons.
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