Indeed, there's never been a positive correlation between saving energy and improving human progress. If there will be, now is not that time.
We truly need clean, plentiful energy, too cheap to meter. We will still research power-savings techniques, but not so that we can save on energy, but so we can pack compute machinery denser.
My personal sci-fi imagination/dream is that we gain enough energy that we start beaming waste energy into space, if only because it'd be a really cool problem to have :) If we could start actively cooling the planet where needed.
Apparently building more wind or solar, the cheapest source of energy in history, is too easy, or too normie for our author, he needs more methane for some reason.
> That energy needs to be generated in ways that don’t re-create the problems it’s solving, but that is entirely within our grasp. Modern nuclear reactors are different beasts than their more-than-50-year-old ancestors. And uranium is not the only energy source below our feet: Thanks to advances in drilling technology, geothermal energy has made massive leaps. Perhaps most heretically, not all fossil fuels are equally bad as short-term bridges to other energy sources. Natural gas is abundant and produces far less carbon and other pollutants per unit of energy than coal or oil. [1] Longer term, fusion power can enable us to build miniature suns and space-based solar can tap into more of the actual sun’s power than land-based installations.
Should I doubt his actual commitment to cheap energy? Or is he just really confused and ignorant, but with his heart in the right place?
We truly need clean, plentiful energy, too cheap to meter. We will still research power-savings techniques, but not so that we can save on energy, but so we can pack compute machinery denser.
My personal sci-fi imagination/dream is that we gain enough energy that we start beaming waste energy into space, if only because it'd be a really cool problem to have :) If we could start actively cooling the planet where needed.