

Perfect Storm: Energy, Finance, and the End of Growth - Goladus
http://tullettprebonresearch.com/2013/01/21/perfect-storm-report-now-live

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lsc
It seems to me like what we need is a massive pro-nuclear (power, not weapons)
political and advertising effort. "It's not perfect, but it's the best we've
got" or "hey, it kills fewer people than coal!" aren't particularly rousing
calls to action, unfortunately.

Without fission, the Malthusian doomers are, well, they are right. And that's
going to make for an unpleasant world to live in.

~~~
mikeyouse
>Without fission, the Malthusian doomers are, well, they are right. And that's
going to make for an unpleasant world to live in.

Isn't that a bit of a stretch? These long-scale predictions are always wrong.

We're on the very leading edge of many areas of energy research, any of which
could dramatically alter the energy landscape. With materials science, genetic
engineering, and nanotech all reaching some level of sophistication, the
chances of a 'big' success are increasing daily.

Additionally, the big breakthroughs in the past were largely discovered by the
~5% of the globe who had access to the best universities and labs. The
democratization of knowledge to literally billions of people has given earth
the potential to collaborate on big projects on a scale the never before seen.

Obviously, nuclear power is the lowest-hanging fruit if you aim to achieve
carbon-neutral energy security, but this pessimism about human ingenuity is
probably misplaced.

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sethrin
Absolutely! We can keep going until the waste heat from our energy liberation
melts the polar ice caps/melts lead/melts the earth's crust/is hotter than the
sun.</sarcasm>

This isn't about knowledge. We simply cannot indefinitely grow our
economy/energy usage. And no, we're not going to find a workaround for the
laws of thermodynamics. They are the most certain knowledge we have.

~~~
lsc
>This isn't about knowledge. We simply cannot indefinitely grow our
economy/energy usage. And no, we're not going to find a workaround for the
laws of thermodynamics. They are the most certain knowledge we have.

Well, in the long term, sure, you are right. (in the long term, we are all
dead.) But that's a long way off. In the short term? it is about knowledge,
partly, but more about what technologies we use.

Do we power our cities with hydrocarbons? or with nuclear power?

Realistically, that's the choice.

The thing is? we already are involved in resource wars over oil. We are
already suffering due to not having as much energy as we'd like, and
apparently we're altering the composition of our atmosphere with our waste
gases. This is a problem right now, not a billion years from now.

Fission isn't perfect; it has problems, it kills people sometimes, yeah, but
it kills fewer people, it has fewer problems than coal, which is the only
realistic medium-term alternative.

I do think, in the medium term, it is reasonable to expect that science can
bring us plenty to the point where we don't have resource wars.

