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?
Oil and coal are literal fossils. This means 1) they must be burned, and thus must release carbon. It also means 2) our reserves are the capture of millennia of solar energy.
Uranium and friends solve 1) handily. They have no carbon to start, so they will not create CO2. Instead you get much worse material—in much smaller amounts, since nuclear energy is very, very dense.
They don’t deal with 2). Uranium is also finite…at least on Earth. But the aforementioned density helps a lot.
I should probably state that I'm well-aware of the advantages of nuclear--but I happen to see nuclear lumped in with fossil fuels, either from Republicans/conservatives defending it or it being treated as if it's just as bad as fossil fuels.
Look up the EU debate last year on declaring nuclear a "renewable" energy source for the purposes of regulation. It'll be entertaining even if it's not informative
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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?
It shouldn’t count.
Oil and coal are literal fossils. This means 1) they must be burned, and thus must release carbon. It also means 2) our reserves are the capture of millennia of solar energy.
Uranium and friends solve 1) handily. They have no carbon to start, so they will not create CO2. Instead you get much worse material—in much smaller amounts, since nuclear energy is very, very dense.
They don’t deal with 2). Uranium is also finite…at least on Earth. But the aforementioned density helps a lot.
I should probably state that I'm well-aware of the advantages of nuclear--but I happen to see nuclear lumped in with fossil fuels, either from Republicans/conservatives defending it or it being treated as if it's just as bad as fossil fuels.
Look up the EU debate last year on declaring nuclear a "renewable" energy source for the purposes of regulation. It'll be entertaining even if it's not informative
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