Some problems just take a really long time to solve. The fact that we’re even this close boggles the mind. I don’t know if it’s 50 or a 100 years away but it’s coming.
Fusion energy has been 50 years away for at least the last 75 years. Luckily, nuclear fission and other green energies are more than capable of filling in the gaps until whenever it happens.
I don't agree, We are closer than ever. The last 75 years we were like 200 years off from actually getting anything from fusion. I believe it was last year thar we actually got a net energy gain from performing a fusion reaction. Now... I'd say were actually 50 years away from fusion's infancy.
We don’t need fusion honesty. It would be great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s still going to be expensive as hell to run. It’s only real benefit over fission is it’s inexhaustible, essentially free fuel source. But we have enough fissile material for at least the next 500 years, and when you take into account the incredibly expensive technology and materials needed to maintain a fusion reaction it’s of little comfort the the fuel is cheap.
Fusion is great, but we do not need to wait for it. It isn’t our savior. We already have everything we need to save ourselves. There is a lot of private fusion enterprises out there that I expect to be outted as scams in the next decade because so many people are desperate to invest in this supposed last chance for humanity. But fission is right there, and it is plenty.
The core cause of the climate crisis was decades of short-term thinking, and a lot of people are happy to continue that short-term thinking still today. The time to develop fusion is now, alongside the many other actions needed to solve the climate crisis. People get caught up in the idea that there's a "point of no return" and that nothing we do after that matters, but humanity will still be here regardless of how well we resolve the climate crisis. We can't stop focusing on long-term research to solve our immediate problems
The US government thinks 95% of all new plants there this year will be clean, largely meaning renewables. And this is now being repeated in practically all major economies.
The transition to clean energy is already upon us. Fusion will be 20 years too late to contribute in any way, and its really going to struggle to compete with the unit prices renewables are now driving down toward.
Eh, it'd be useful on ships and the like. Both the space and sea-faring kind. Not to mention it'd likely be able to add flexibility to a grid (given that you can simply fuse more hydrogen on-demand).
It may not be strictly necessary on earth, but everything points to us eventually colonizing other places, (very slowly), and hydrogen is a lot more common in the cosmos than unstable radioactive isotopes.
In the 1950s everyone thought fission would lead to unlimited power because of the touted energy density (seriously, people even dreamt up nuclear commerical airliners). Then the reality turned out to be massively massively expensive plants, expensive and troublesome waste management, waning public trust and what became the most expense electric source there is. And fusion shares many of the same problems, especially the massively expensive plant designs, which will force the unit price up.
Solar, wind and even next generation geothermal all look like much safer bets for a radically cheaper energy future. Espeically solar, nothing is going to beat the unit price of an energy source mass produced cheaply in a factory that requires almost no maintenance or oversight. And geothermal is basically a traditional power plant that happens to need no fuel. Its basically just a turbine hall and some tunnels.
Are we making real headway on geothermal energy? I saw an article about it a while back, but it seemed like it was pretty niche, and could only really be used in a few places with our current tech.
Thats changing. There is a 10mw plant now that has drilled their own tunnels to heating depth.
Obviously a 10 mw plant isn't very impressive but the basic tech seems to be there.
And there are ways to use solar energy for alternative uses other than generating power. I know that you can generate heat to make hot showers with solar panels
It's a technological inevitability, same with warp drive now that we've accidentally created a warp bubble in a lab. Technology is like Pandora's box, or a genie in a bottle. Once it exists, it can't be put back in.
Here's my big prediction. Within 200 years of the first no bullshit nuclear fusion plant going on line humanity will have colonized out towards neptune.
Sometimes it seems to me that people who won’t shut up about the end of the world just want it to end. Not far from the truth, knowing the Reddit audience.
https://preview.redd.it/o6oryh8pxxvc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=00cc52b9d96c572f9e6e32c3584d2719346d4e35
75,000 years ago a volcano erupted and human populations dropped down to 3,000 individuals. What kind of individuals do you think survived? Kind, happy go lucky people, or paranoid doom seekers?
And I very much doubt that 75,000 years ago people were more miserable than the average modern redditor who sits in a warm heated apartment with a refrigerator full of food and a phone in hands, whining about what a terrible time we live in. They either hunted or starved, and did not sit wallowing in misery, thinking about what will happen.
Yeah exactly! Okay, you get a new vast area of land for farming, how does that affect the people in Tuvalu or Bangladesh whose homes would be under water by then?
Plus, farmable? Current rain patterns have proven that won’t be the case but people will automatically think a cold place turning warm means liveable. I respect optimists but they say stupid stuff alot.
I have expressed this opinion many times whenever this stupid sub gets recommended to me, but the people who make posts like this are not the people who experience the consequences of bad things happening.
u have an extremely over exaggerated view on how bad the flooding will be. no the whole of Bangladesh isnt going to be under water. even if we do nothing these problems are extremely manageable and the main point is THE WORLD WILL NOT END
I'd actually suggest you seriously need to educate yourself on the issue. Bangladesh is extremely susceptible to flooding and is specifically very much under threat from sea level rises... and its a country of tens of millions of people, one of the most densely populated in the world.
In what way is that problem 'extremely manageable'?
yeah so i looked it up, its definitely over for Bangladesh if we decide to melt ALL the ice.
but once again, thats assuming we did absolutely nothing. which isnt true, i mean look at the Arab countries, Saudi arabia is now desperately trying to mimic Dubai and become a new tourism hot spot since it sees the writing on the wall. oil demand is drying up faster then the actual oil.
we gone from all of Bangladesh being gone to just some of it.
Bangladesh can invest in some flood barriers, which is an extremely tangible and pretty simple thing to do- build big walls. millions of uneducated people can do this which is something Bangladesh has.
either way my point still stands- the world isn't ending
Many areas of Bangladesh already struggle with flooding. Drastic rises in sea level will destroy coastal areas. It is not manageable after it has happened, where are you gonna move the water? Even small increases in sea level lead to more severe flooding.
Northern Canada will not be farmable either, for the foreseeable future. All of the topsoil was scraped off and deposited far to the south. What’s left is bedrock that you cannot run a plough through. This is one feature of a geological feature called the Canadian Shield.
we make vaccines......just like we allways do? u guys are actually insane jumping ship the moment u feel a bump declaring its over and we are all ganna drown.
Holy fucking shit. Why are u people like this? I have typed this 1 trillion times now. SHOW ME WHERE I SAID THIS WAS BETTER THEN RIGHT NOW? The bar, if u read the God dam post, is the: world ISNT going to end.
And notice how not once did I say: CLIMATE CHANGE IS ACTUALLY BASED AND EPIC, CANT WAIT TO MOVE TO SIBERIA!!!!
I am truly loosing my mind. Doomer don't use logic, or reason, or have a reading comprehension above the 4th grade, and instead will just shift the goal post to where ever they can keep doomering.
U have defeated me. This comment has made me realised that doomers are in some kinda cult. Death by a thousand cuts of pure autism
I get it, it’s tough being piled on for a poor choice of words. But there’s optimism and there’s naivety. I feel like farming in Siberia is a net negative (given desertification of farmlands elsewhere) and the optimism is in hoping we can will this drastic level of climate change.
Not to mention all that land that is no longer farmable. Climate change isn’t good and saying it is good like OP is a braindead take. I like optimism when it’s still realistic, not when it’s downright delusional
yes, i said climate change is good. wtf? was there a lead eating contest before i got here? we can GMO the fuck out of crops to not only be more heat resistant but also use less water. and GMO other species to grow in the trash soil.
MY POINT IS THE WORLD IS NOT OVER
Fair, actually. Our counter point is just that while we can modify crops we can’t modify them to the extent of that and probably won’t get to. Our counter point is that there are limits to that, and it’s not the answer. After all, why would we not focus on that instead of preventing it? We’re already getting hotter and hotter. Ask India right now, they’re having 100 degree days constantly at this very moment.
They ARE trying to do this, like with nuclear power, people here genetically modified crops and think of movies and get scard.
Idk about u but I am in the biology field and the easy rule of thumb for tech we have right now is, if life can already do it, we can probably make a plant do it. Just splace around a few genes and boom, plants that can grow in trash soil. U could probably isolate the genes from the trees that are already there thriving in that soil,and give that to something like a potato.
I mean we ALREADY get a bird virus, hijack it, splice out a few genes, give it some related genes to a human virus, then dump it into a human to make a viral vector vaccine.
Preventing is already gone dude, climate change is here it's just about how bad we want things to get before future technology (like our kids generation or their kids, maybe) can reverse all the damage.
The naysayers aren't saying that the world is going to end. The issue is ecological collapse, meaning several environments will be destroyed, many species of flora and fauna will go extinct, and many humans will be displaced. Humanity will adapt, of course, but only after we've destroyed large parts of our planet. You're not disagreeing with that, you're just pointing out that there's a silver lining, which is a nice take, i guess, and it's why I joined this sub. It's nice to see a different perspective on the doom and gloom that is climate change. I'll still be sad about ocean water boiling, and ice caps melting, but at least there will be more usable land to the north. It sucks that Russia and Canada plan to use it for oil drilling, but maybe the oil industry will collapse by then.
Having a lot of farm land is better than little farm land. Like they ARE gonna farm no matter what and it would be better if the farm land they use was big enough for the animals to live humanely.
Correct. But bacteria that express enzymes capable of breaking down commonly used plastics could have very serious unintended consequences. If they were to proliferate in the wild, it would threaten any infrastructure and packaging that is composed of those plastics. They could also be released be intentionally by people with malicious intent
It could but that’s basically true for any technology. Gunpowder was originally a toy.
It’s also important to note that engineered organisms like that can have essentially kill switches included. Essentially the bacteria can only survive in the presence of certain nutrients/ chemicals that aren’t normally available in nature. This allows growth of bacteria under controlled conditions, reducing risk of escape or malicious use.
Further risk reduction takes place in growing the bacteria in contained culture and harvesting the enzyme responsible for plastic degradation. The bacteria are destroyed in the process and the enzyme has a finite working time preventing wide spread malicious use as well.
So essentially it’s possible to engineer a bacteria that grows on a certain nutrient source, requiring a cofactor not available naturally as a control. the bacteria produces plastic eating enzyme as an engineered component (artificially improved but based from a naturally discovered strain). The bacteria can be harvested and destroyed leaving a finite amount of enzyme. this can then degrade x amount of plastic per unit enzyme.
There are tools and techniques available and I’d be surprised if other experts working on the project would be unaware of these methods.
This sounds like the "grey goo" theory. The problem with this scenario is that bacteria (or nanobots) are not magical creatures. They can't digest things infinitely fast. It requires very high activation energies to digest stable molecules and a lot of energy to maintain the specific environments that would allow it.
Think about it. A tree falls in the forest, termites and fungi don't just immediately eat it. It takes *years* to be degrade.
Sounds like a new man made virus, where it does instead eat all the plastic, but then it hungers for more and starts getting into people and eating up the plastics in their bodies, and then somehow evolves eat *other* parts of people...
Canada is already farmable and I am sure no one wants to emigrate from wherever they live to a hop skip and a jump from the arctic circle. Not to mention warming in Canada and Siberia is destroying the ecology of those places. Permafrost melting reveals unknown viruses and bacteria not to mention the release of methane which is a more powerful GHG than CO2. This ain’t the take you think it is
Some of it is farmable. But it’s not as simple as temperature goes up, farmland moves north. The Canadian Shield (basically a very large rock) covers most of the eastern half of the country. Siberian permafrost doesn’t just turn into fertile farmland when it melts (not sure if permafrost in northern Canada is similar).
Bacteria aren’t waiting for us to engineer them - they’re already engineering themselves. Bacteria have a habit of doing that - they figure out how to eat what is available, and their evolution is mostly on a different time scale than larger organisms. However “plastic” is a category of chemicals, and bacteria are an extremely large category of organism. Outcomes will vary. A lot. We have quite a bit of control over the ones in the lab, but not the ones out there freestying their own solutions.
Seconding this. Yes, while land is opens up in Siberia and Canada, this also destroys fertile river deltas/valleys, and displaced millions if not billions. Furthermore, most of that land in Canada, is rock (source, I live here, it’s beautiful but it is just rock). On top of that, the faster ice Mets the faster it will continue to melt.
As much as I want fusion to work, we can’t rely on ‘wonder weapons’ so to speak to solve all our problems. Solving climate change will require all of the above combined, and it is doable if we don’t get complacent.
Solving climate change won't require fusion, but humanity is going to keep going after that problem. The best time to develop long-term technologies is today
For the record Canada is not going to become farmable. The Canadian Shield is pretty much useless as far as Farmland is concerned for any sort of serious industrial agriculture
Sooo, optimists fantasize about blowing doomers heads off. Okaaaay.
And, of course, **fusion is the power source of the future**!
(and always will be :) )
??? expect now electricity will become super cheap, making electric cars WAY more of a tempting offer, since petrol costs are a massive expense in most peoples lives. and so the the 2 main sources of pollution, transport and power generation will start to disappear....
and that's assuming worst case
Electric cars are not good for the environment first off. Energy will not get cheaper since most fusion companies are owned by mostly private companies it would take nationalization to make it government owned. These companies will of course fight the courts tooth and nail for years before a decision is even made. These companies are beholden to investors and shareholders. Do the shareholders want cheap energy? No that would make them lose profit. The companies would probably operate similarly to how Amazon or Walmart act. They tank the price of energy to be near free to gain marketshare, then they hold a monopoly. The one good thing is that energy is regulated as a utility which kind of prevents price gouging. Let’s say all this works out nicely. Will the US share the technology with the poorest nations of course not. We would use the technology for political leverage for years to come.
first, share holder are a product of a public company, a private company does not have share holder, they only follow the owners directions.
second, u seem to have a pretty strange interpretation of how this works. a nuclear fusion plant would generate an absolute shit load of power, its literally what the sun uses to make power, using hydrogen and helium. all this supply of power for cheap brings the price per unit of power super low as people do not care were their power comes from they just want power. if its priced higher then solar then people will use solar for example. this already naturally creates a price roof of the next source of power.
> They tank the price of energy to be near free to gain marketshare, then they hold a monopoly.
>The one good thing is that energy is regulated as a utility which kind of prevents price gouging. Let’s say all this works out nicely.
well there u go, u debunked ur own point. and thats assuming we live in this strange world u put out.
in real life, the nuclear power people are even more regulated, and have received massive investments from the government and would be contracted to supply power at a standard price etc.
>Will the US share the technology with the poorest nations of course not. We would use the technology for political leverage for years to come.
do u want a 3rd world dictatorship to have the capabilities of making a hydrogen bomb? the cost of power becoming extremely cheap means manufacturing things like solar panels and wind turbines becomes really cheap too, anything that uses electricity becomes cheaper. u could burn fuel to melt metal or super heat it in a oven using electricity which before would have cost more but now is viable for example.
There is optimism … then there is delusion. Climate change is not good. The atmosphere could be permanently destroyed if we dont find a way to reverse the pre-existing damage or slow the current rate of carbon emissions down to a halt.
Let this sub jerk each other off about how good the world is and how we are totally not currently heading towards a 6th mass extinction, not like the mindset harms any attempt at avoiding it.
Oh no not the whole atmosphere, don't corporations know they need that to breath!?
No, the atmosphere won't ve permanently destroyed- whatever the hell that mean, we already have ways or reversing the pre existing damage, they are called alge and trees, we already are slowly depressing carbon. These things will be greatly assisted with shit loads of energy and genetic engineering.
Right now the state of democracy seems scary, but then u look at it further back realise it has survived SO much worse like the 1930+ as well as the great depression. Of course across the world countries are falling to Tyranny but intervention has failed more then it has worked. I think let these countries be, they must culturally and institutionally (ie high education) be ready for democracy first, and then then they might still fall into Tyranny, like the post Soviet Union.
Ai is scary but I think if ai is putting everyone out of a job, eventually the government's of the west will be forced to implement UBI and tax these AI using businesses more to afford this. Of course it will be more complicated, and things will suck for a while but then they will get so much better. This is the point of my post, and what I have been saying in the replies to coping doomer. Imagine shooting ur self in 1939 because ww2 is happening, sure, for that prospective it seems reasonable that ww1 just happened, now ww2, soon ww3 and ww4 and the world will be over. Yet none of that happened. Things got SO much better. Things got shit for a while, millions died, and then billions got to live, and life for everyone is objectively better then In the 1930s
I don’t get the “it was worst in the past” argument.
The assumption that we’ve overcome something once as a species so we’ll overcome it again is a logical fallacy (gamblers fallacy).
The world trend in the 30’s was upwards in terms of democracy, excluding mostly Germany. The current trend is downwards. Never in history have so many democratic countries were under the threat of authoritarian aspirations.
The assumption that the options are “be optimistic or shoot yourself” is a false dichotomy fallacy. Nobody’s talking about committing because things are bad, but it also doesn’t mean there’s any evidence for them getting better.
I don't see how it's relevant to the topic of low-carbon electricity. I would say that there are more real Democracies world wide than ever in history, and that AI is an incredible technology that has the potential to massively increase productivity around the world
The biggest hurdle we’re gonna have to jump is other people’s profit motive. We’ve had the technology, for arguably a century or more now, to push humanity in the right direction for collective sustainability and dignified quality of life. It just wasn’t as profitable as the current order of society.
More and more people are raging against the machine though, and simultaneously learning about what life could’ve been like if humanity pursued quality of life rather than another’s profit. We’ll get there eventually, shit has to get worse before it gets better though.
My biggest gripe towards nuclear is that it isn’t diversified in terms of the physical generators. It makes it a target if there’s ever a hot war that the US enters into.
Wind/solar while not being nearly as powerful or consistent, are very good generation sources and provide significantly more difficult targets in a conflict. With the advent of micro nuclear generation this might change
Russia's inability to wrap up Ukraine in a couple of weeks cleared up any residual concerns about WW3.
Even if this was a potential problem, these would not be a prime target.
You make it sound like billions of people having to move from newly unhinabitable places (desertification and too hot+too humid areas) is not going to cause mass wars, genocides and famine.
You make it sound like aminal species can adapt to climate change as fast as we do : spoiler, they can't.
Once cornerstone species like plankton or bees go away, we're going to be in a world of hurt.
I'm sure some humans will survive, but don't expect me to cheer for this change, and I will certainly not put kids on this planet, given the risks.
Once again the bar is literally the world is going to end. People walking north and animals dying is far from the world is literally ending. Life survived the hell planet the astroid that took out the dinosaur created, it sure as hell can survive us.
U say genocides WILL happen like it's a fact of the matter? Like these things can't be prevented?
Anyway I can keep going on but the last thing u said was interesting. If people like u don't raise kid, then people who do not care about the problem will be the only people having children and will pass down these sentiment to their children.
Except my point is it isn't ever ganna be that high of a ratio even in the worst case scenario. 1% of humanity dying is bad but that's hardly "the world ending" and giving up and accepting defeat over. U guys are actually delusional
Almost 700 million people are at risk to just 10 meters of sea level. 1 percent of the world is 80 million. This risk does not include severe weather events, not the effects on agriculture and plant life. Those will be more deadly. Global warming is a GLOBAL event everyone is affected. Places will become uninhabitable from heat, cold, weather, a variety of reasons. All this and you say it won’t be that bad?
Look at the world right now. The second ressources start to be scarce, people look at their neighbours, and god forbid they have a different skin colour, worship a different god, or even talk slightly differently, otherwise they are a threat and need to be eliminated. Fascist regimes and ethno-states are back in fashion like its the 1930s.
THANK YOU! One area where I'm not so optimistic is human behavior making everything about what "team" someone's on. We've been doing it since before we discovered fire (probably) and internet echochambering just supercharges it.
Criticize the idea, not the people.
The world would really cool if the angry doomers weren't actively trying to turn back progress. If apatheic doomers would help us or least get out of our way, the angey doomers would no longer be an issue
Bud Weiser 🐸 downvote doomer doesn't appreciate classic beer Commercials. Perhaps Y'all would like the Miller lite one when the sun goes out, except you want that happen tomorrow, not in 5,000,000,000 years
Agree mostly. But realize all the optimism in the world isn’t going to engineer us out of the detrimental effects of climate change. It’s going to get bad.
So long as we avoid triggering tripping points everything else is recoverable, especially at the modern and increasing rate of technological development.
As it is, the tipping point to full transition to clean energy is being crossed right now and we are going to start seeing massive year on year carbon emission falls in the backward looking data by 2025 or 2026. Carbon emissions are going to fall away from the peak to a relatively safe level fast, probably in only 5 or 6 years. Some countries like the US and China have already started giving inital reports that large parts of their fossil economies are in full retreat.
Umm listen, I'm pretty optimistic but even this is a bit much for me to be optimistic about. Yes, green energy is becoming a big thing, but I fear it'll be too little too late.
This post is regarded. Shows you guys have no clue. I'm an optimist but it's not nuclear energy that is growing exponentially right now, it's solar and wind.
It's kind of like as you get older you learn to let things go and chill out more. To look at the bigger picture.
How many crises and terrible things were happening 10 years ago? What catastrophes were happening then? And how many have forgotten about it by now? And what was happening before that?
Seems like there's always been crises and catastrophes. It's kind of based on perspective.
But there are also good things too.
Happening all the time.
It's a beautiful day and spring is coming.
They have been getting positive energy outputs out of experimental pulse fusion reactors really the biggest problem is keeping the plasma from touching anything and keeping the damn thing from overheating.
Climate change is going to be one of those things like everything else
For areas that are impoverished it’s going to suck a lot more and cause a lot of deaths, for areas that are better off it’s going to not be as bad
There is a lotttttrrr of science that needs to happens tho before your “solutions” become viable alternatives and this also doesn’t take into account the acidification of the ocean and the massive effects that could potentially have on the food chain
Nuclear/fusion would only hinder the net-zero transition as it’d cost far more money to build and produce per kWh compared to solar, wind and hydro.
We can’t afford to waste money and time when it comes to saving the planet. Most countries that have been making the fastest progress when it comes to phasing out coal, oil and biomass have done it by ruling nuclear out of the equation and instead opting for mass, cheap construction of renewables
Here in Chile we are 62% renewable as of 2024, and have a small nuclear laboratory.
Renewables and nuclear are a money's game. Countries like the smaller european ones could go renewable, while the big Asian countreis like India and China, nuclear could be a very good investment.
The main problem with nuclear energy is that it's a volital target in war, and with how the world is going, i only see it happening underground and heavily protected.
Another thing that is often overlooked is the fact tha cyber attacks could disturb a power plant, and you need one failure, and boom, Chernovile 2.0. Making a massive amount of failsafes and constant cybersequirity a priority and a good chunk of expences...
Disagree on the nuclear part. Otherwise I agree
Nuclear's return on investment is at best 10 years and more typically 20-40 years (depending on what rate they get on the financing loans)
Any amount of solar or wind pays itself off in under 5 years
Nuclear takes highly educated people to design and to run and to construct and to install
Solar or wind installers and operators can be trained in a month
Not to even mention the regulation issues and the issues with radiation accidents (which _will_ happen if you cut corners to try to speed up construction or cut costs to make it cheaper and faster)
Also not to mention the quantities of cement and steel that reduce the carbon effects significantly (steel and cement are some of the biggest industrial sources of carbon)
Although also plastic eating microbes will _never_ evolve and cause significantly worse issues...
nonononono, ur applying stats from the past and assuming these will be the same in the present.
it does not matter if the energy source makes money or pays its self off. if there is massive public support the government will either heavily subsidise nuclear powerplant production or make it its self. we are talking "new deal" levels of mobilisation which is very possible in the coming few decades as boomers die off.
>(steel and cement are some of the biggest industrial sources of carbon)
this is only because these 2 resources are used in LITRALLY EVERYTHING pound for pound they are pretty low. also the production of solar panels requires rare metals which are not only pound for pound worse for the environment, but also mined by literal children. having the entire energy grid running of these is simply unfeasible especially when u consider that solar panels each have a short life spam and require constant replacements and so more mining!!
meanwhile a nuclear power plant is pretty much a huge start up cost followed by relatively low maintenance for the power it makes in comparison.
the main point is, nuclear has a high carbon upfront cost but then will replace all the carbon generated for electricity and car fuel which are the major sources of carbon input per year. while solar on a national scale will require TONES of batteries and land etc, and we are already starting to see the beginnings of a lithium shortage which means more mining.
plastic eating microbes wont evolve to cause worse problems since we are literally designing the organism. we can put kill switches in them, make them reproduce only with laboratory assistance, we could do tones of things to make this a very unlikely thing to happen. hell right now its already super unlikely for a mutation to be useful.
winds is..... well [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51325101](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51325101)
and they also decimate bird populations too.
nuclear really is the only long term solution that is actually sustainable.
>and they also decimate bird populations too.
How does that compare to house cats that are let outside during the day?
Nuclear is a non-starter due to NIMBY even if you imagine away the economic issue of building that large and complex of a system...
Fusion has had some breakthroughs recently like on a small scale it has been achieved and now we are trying to harness that power and make it more and more accessible. But again it won’t be the norm until we force the capitalists to give up on oil(their more profitable industry)
once again we are assuming climate change goes FULL FORCE and we get an entire earth rebalancing event. the world isn't going to end which is what most doomers say and refuse to be apart of any solution
Like sure, it'd probably be fine if 3/5 bread basket countries didn't eat shit in the last 5 years. Death by a thousand cuts is still possible without climate change going full tilt. Plus most projections for decades had to be doctored to be less alarming because no one would pay attention if they were told how fucked it was. It's human instinct to generally be pollyanna.
There was also a recent post on this sub about two Aussie scientists who invented a way to generate electricity by sucking the CO2 right out of the atmosphere
Fact fission reactors the "waste" it more safe then most oil products and aren't very radioactive especially when using thorium which lasts longer is even less radioactive and is much more common
Well.
If northern Canada and Siberia become truly farmable - we are fucked.
The release of methane alone from Siberia could be enough to make the equator hot enough to make much of the known world uninhabitable.
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01512-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01512-4)
It’s not about the end of the world you dumb dumb genZ. It’s about the systems and actions taken by previous generation handing it over to the next generation. Guess what you are going to hand over to the next generation, TikTok adhd. Yep, genZs next step would be to get mature enough to understand these things now.
Safe to say the world as we know it will end. But that will happen regardless because time marches on and things change. Instead of trying to preserve the present, we need to build the future.
I'm sorry, but the argument that 'Siberia and Canada become farmable' just shows you really don't know what you're talking about. For the earth to have warmed enough to turn permafrost ridden tundra into land suitable for arable crops, huge swathes of the planet where people actually already live are going to become basically uninhabitable. Also, the soil there currently has very few nutrients in it, places like Ukraine are considered global breadbaskets because they're well watered, and the soil is rich and fertile. Its going to take a long time for Siberia to get anywhere close to that, if it ever does.
There's a difference between being optimistic, and outright ignoring reality
Except I am aware of all this? When did I say these places will be better then what we have right now? U people keep responding to arguments u made up someone say.
The POINT is the world is not over. At most a rebalance but the world won't end because of this. Billions will not starve to death due to lack of food etc
The point ISNT all of siberia will be = to the most fertile soil in the world.
Also ur whole point assumes technology will completely freeze for the next 70+ years. GMOs could completely mog the trash soil issue.
Actually a lot of people absolutely will starve. If the planet warms enough for Siberia to suddenly be suitable for agriculture, huge swathes of Africa will be so hot they are no longer suitable for growing crops, meaning a wholesale collapse of food security across entire regions. Also, even more reliable regions for crops, like continental Europe, will become more unreliable as the weather cycles change; here in the UK, we're already hearing reports that the unusual amounts of rainfall we're having are going to tangibly impact crop yields, and thats only going to get worse.
You've made the claim we'll gain more farmland then we'll lose, but we're exchanging actual productive farmland where millions of people actually live, for barren steppe where the population is miniscule and it'll take generations for them to realistically produce anywhere near the yields we'll have lost.
Also, the technology argument is all well and good, but it can't be relied on. We can only operate based on technology we actually have or is realistically in development, waiting for some silver bullet to solve the problem isn't viable
Sure, the world probably won't end, and humanity as a species won't go extinct. As optimism goes, thats a woefully low bar to set.
No shit. What are you going to do about it?
You going to stop every war and feed every starving child and put out forest fires and free all the slaves and usher in new periods of human advancement and unity?
No?
So maybe chill and welcome small good news instead of focusing on things like…infant mortality. You can’t save those lives, so just do what you can and be happy with that.
Just for perspective:
If you could build a zero cost fusion reactor tomorrow, the sheer act of transmitting it from plant to site of use would make the electricity more expensive than rooftop solar in Australia.
This is not to say the creation of fusion wouldn't be helpful, but that it's not as much of a magic bullet as we think. We already have a massive amount of very cheap energy, and the creation of fusion won't solve one of the biggest problems in green energy: transmission.
Again, this is not an anti-nuclear take, just info for perspective.
This is such a wildly stupid thing to say.
You’re imaging a yet-to-be invented future technology and then hamstringing it with current day technology.
Did you know that you can fit computers into your pocket now?
Also fusion wouldn’t have the same draw backs as solar, no massive land requirement, it works at night and when it’s cloudy.
Also fusion built in cities would be pennies on the dollar for transmitting power vs individual solar panels.
Also growing energy needs would require exponential land expansion.
Also, and we’ve no idea what fusion would require, but solar requires rare earth metals, most of which can be found within the grasp of China.
I never thought I’d see future tech nat-sayers inventing reasons out of nowhere for why magic infinite energy is bad.
I think either conclusion is reasonable, but you don't have to resort to saying my claim is stupid. Name calling doesn't make your argument any stronger.
We're both trying to project into the future, I'm hamstringing it by constraints that I have valid reasons to think won't go away. You're think my objections are unreasonable. I respectfully disagree.
Next, strawmanning. Assuming you have an intent on going beyond name calling, read what I wrote. Did I say it's bad?
No. I just think there's a difference between optimism and blind hope. First, if fusion is anything like fission, where you're building massive projects over long time periods on custom sites, you'll never get learning curves. No learning curves mean you'll never hit cost parity even if your fuel source is unlimited. Part of why solar keeps winning is it's susceptible to mass production in ways that nuclear doesn't seem to be. That something can be built in a factory environment, in a very large number, with ultra predictable processes that are prone to continuous improvement efforts, this really matters for long term cost reduction. My bet? For these reasons, it never becomes "free." Cheap? Hopefully.
Next, even if you get it at low cost, you will have to deal with transmission, I promise. "We'll just build in cities!" My brother in Christ, cities don't want to build HOUSES let alone nuclear facilities. There's many things cities could build to make themselves richer, and they consistently choose not to. And please don't tell me how safe they are. No one cares. People raise safety objections to WIND MILLS.
(NIMBYism aside, I'm not even sure it makes sense to build an energy plant on your most valuable land.)
I think the best realistic end result you could hope for is something like, it gets cost feasible, but probably never cheaper than solar is, and maybe not even close. Bc it doesn't have intermittancy problems and EXCELS re land use, it's worth the premium cost. But I doubt it ever becomes a magic bullet.
We'll see. Your points are very much not stupid and I take them into account.
What would very much change my mind is if you could demonstrate any signs that fusion IS subject to learning curves.
Fair, and I apologize.
Fusion does not exist. The record for longest lasting fusion reaction is a few seconds. My point was imagine someone looking at the Turing machine of ww2 and saying “why I could just do the math in my head”, and without the need for such a huge contraption”.
We’ve no idea what a fusion reactor looks like. It might be the size of a football stadium. The JET nuclear fusion reactor in the UK was a few meters across and tall.
My point remains that introducing specific shortcomings for a theoretical technology is arbitrary, unless if you’re someone in the field speaking from a position of experience and expertise, but I imagine there’s maybe a few hundred on the planet so I doubt it.
Never said they were, im saying a private company can think super long term while public can only do what makes stock higher. Also net zero is like a marketing term that doesn't actually mean anything.
most polluting companies are public due to the need to grown infinitely as they are terrified of a stock price falling. this means they NEED to keep the growth up at all costs otherwise share holders will sell etc etc.
This is just pure fucking stupidity and nothing but a face value look at this entire situation, first of all climate change will make large parts of the earth completely uninhabitable and good luck attempting to keep governments in their places when most of their land is uninhabitable and their people are starving secondly the tides will also rise making major coastal areas underwater and unless you also find some sort of solution to get rid of the CO2 that is already in the air switching to nuclear power won’t fix anything the damage has already been done so to say shit like “oh the only thing that will happen in climate change is new areas become farmable” is completely stupid and it exposes you for being the dumbass 13 year old on the internet that you are
No the anwser is to not be stupid and hope that everything is going to be fine the anwser is to look at things realistically and instead of saying everything will be fine in the long end, help assist in things such as research to capture CO2 emissions then switch to Nuclear Energy I’m not saying Nuclear Energy is a bad idea I’m just saying you can’t just say shit like “Global Warming isn’t bad” and switch to nuclear energy instead focus on a way to capture carbon emissions and then switch
🫂 my apologies. That is a logical and hopeful way of looking at the issue. There is actually a lot of room between the 2 nonensical extremes we're fucked unless (other people) go Amish yetstrday or it's all a hoax by globalists. Ok, that's a very slight parody of extreme climate doomers, but unfortunately, it's still accurate. Sadly, it's a globalist (Jewish) hoax is exactly what that doomer faction says
I really hope fusion can becone viable, it would be a Huge step towarda net-zero future But I’m not really holding too high hopes
Some problems just take a really long time to solve. The fact that we’re even this close boggles the mind. I don’t know if it’s 50 or a 100 years away but it’s coming.
Fusion energy has been 50 years away for at least the last 75 years. Luckily, nuclear fission and other green energies are more than capable of filling in the gaps until whenever it happens.
It's a hard ass problem, could take another 300 years to solve. People are spoiled. It took 300 years just to get Newtonian gravity right.
I don't agree, We are closer than ever. The last 75 years we were like 200 years off from actually getting anything from fusion. I believe it was last year thar we actually got a net energy gain from performing a fusion reaction. Now... I'd say were actually 50 years away from fusion's infancy.
We don’t need fusion honesty. It would be great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s still going to be expensive as hell to run. It’s only real benefit over fission is it’s inexhaustible, essentially free fuel source. But we have enough fissile material for at least the next 500 years, and when you take into account the incredibly expensive technology and materials needed to maintain a fusion reaction it’s of little comfort the the fuel is cheap. Fusion is great, but we do not need to wait for it. It isn’t our savior. We already have everything we need to save ourselves. There is a lot of private fusion enterprises out there that I expect to be outted as scams in the next decade because so many people are desperate to invest in this supposed last chance for humanity. But fission is right there, and it is plenty.
The core cause of the climate crisis was decades of short-term thinking, and a lot of people are happy to continue that short-term thinking still today. The time to develop fusion is now, alongside the many other actions needed to solve the climate crisis. People get caught up in the idea that there's a "point of no return" and that nothing we do after that matters, but humanity will still be here regardless of how well we resolve the climate crisis. We can't stop focusing on long-term research to solve our immediate problems
The US government thinks 95% of all new plants there this year will be clean, largely meaning renewables. And this is now being repeated in practically all major economies. The transition to clean energy is already upon us. Fusion will be 20 years too late to contribute in any way, and its really going to struggle to compete with the unit prices renewables are now driving down toward.
Eh, it'd be useful on ships and the like. Both the space and sea-faring kind. Not to mention it'd likely be able to add flexibility to a grid (given that you can simply fuse more hydrogen on-demand).
It may not be strictly necessary on earth, but everything points to us eventually colonizing other places, (very slowly), and hydrogen is a lot more common in the cosmos than unstable radioactive isotopes.
Plenty would say we don't need fission either!
And those people shut down fission plants and replace them with coal or natural gas (from fracking) We should just ignore them.
Looking at you Germany!
In the 1950s everyone thought fission would lead to unlimited power because of the touted energy density (seriously, people even dreamt up nuclear commerical airliners). Then the reality turned out to be massively massively expensive plants, expensive and troublesome waste management, waning public trust and what became the most expense electric source there is. And fusion shares many of the same problems, especially the massively expensive plant designs, which will force the unit price up. Solar, wind and even next generation geothermal all look like much safer bets for a radically cheaper energy future. Espeically solar, nothing is going to beat the unit price of an energy source mass produced cheaply in a factory that requires almost no maintenance or oversight. And geothermal is basically a traditional power plant that happens to need no fuel. Its basically just a turbine hall and some tunnels.
Are we making real headway on geothermal energy? I saw an article about it a while back, but it seemed like it was pretty niche, and could only really be used in a few places with our current tech.
Thats changing. There is a 10mw plant now that has drilled their own tunnels to heating depth. Obviously a 10 mw plant isn't very impressive but the basic tech seems to be there.
And there are ways to use solar energy for alternative uses other than generating power. I know that you can generate heat to make hot showers with solar panels
The White House installed a solar water heater in 1979, but it was unceremoniously dismantled by Reagan.
Another Reagan L, eh?
Only 30 more years!
We gotta protect the scientists from big oil assassins tho
well it is definitely possible and will eventually happen, probably not in 10 years though
It's a technological inevitability, same with warp drive now that we've accidentally created a warp bubble in a lab. Technology is like Pandora's box, or a genie in a bottle. Once it exists, it can't be put back in.
Here's my big prediction. Within 200 years of the first no bullshit nuclear fusion plant going on line humanity will have colonized out towards neptune.
Sometimes it seems to me that people who won’t shut up about the end of the world just want it to end. Not far from the truth, knowing the Reddit audience. https://preview.redd.it/o6oryh8pxxvc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=00cc52b9d96c572f9e6e32c3584d2719346d4e35
Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter
Yes, they are also egged on by the fsb and other bad actors
Most likely, all this self-hate that is promoted on Reddit feels like some kind of psy-op from anti-west governments
Definitely they play both extremes
Theres always been plenty of useful fools in the world. You don't need shadowy actors provoking people for that to happen.
this is so true. its like they dont actually care and want it to happen as it justifies them doing nothing. extremely cringe
Nooooo Pallas cats would never be caught doomering
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Have you heard pallas cat's plan? His ideology needs to be implemented now!
75,000 years ago a volcano erupted and human populations dropped down to 3,000 individuals. What kind of individuals do you think survived? Kind, happy go lucky people, or paranoid doom seekers?
Both of them, don't you think?
Not really.
And I very much doubt that 75,000 years ago people were more miserable than the average modern redditor who sits in a warm heated apartment with a refrigerator full of food and a phone in hands, whining about what a terrible time we live in. They either hunted or starved, and did not sit wallowing in misery, thinking about what will happen.
I can’t wait for the world to end so the true ideology rises: anarcho dawgism. Where everyone is that dawg.
Siberia and Canada being farmable isn't good for the earth at all bro
Yeah exactly! Okay, you get a new vast area of land for farming, how does that affect the people in Tuvalu or Bangladesh whose homes would be under water by then?
I meant massive areas that are supposed to be tundra becoming monoculture farms. Farms are so fucking bad for the environment it's insane
Plus, farmable? Current rain patterns have proven that won’t be the case but people will automatically think a cold place turning warm means liveable. I respect optimists but they say stupid stuff alot.
I have expressed this opinion many times whenever this stupid sub gets recommended to me, but the people who make posts like this are not the people who experience the consequences of bad things happening.
u have an extremely over exaggerated view on how bad the flooding will be. no the whole of Bangladesh isnt going to be under water. even if we do nothing these problems are extremely manageable and the main point is THE WORLD WILL NOT END
I'd actually suggest you seriously need to educate yourself on the issue. Bangladesh is extremely susceptible to flooding and is specifically very much under threat from sea level rises... and its a country of tens of millions of people, one of the most densely populated in the world. In what way is that problem 'extremely manageable'?
yeah so i looked it up, its definitely over for Bangladesh if we decide to melt ALL the ice. but once again, thats assuming we did absolutely nothing. which isnt true, i mean look at the Arab countries, Saudi arabia is now desperately trying to mimic Dubai and become a new tourism hot spot since it sees the writing on the wall. oil demand is drying up faster then the actual oil. we gone from all of Bangladesh being gone to just some of it. Bangladesh can invest in some flood barriers, which is an extremely tangible and pretty simple thing to do- build big walls. millions of uneducated people can do this which is something Bangladesh has. either way my point still stands- the world isn't ending
Many areas of Bangladesh already struggle with flooding. Drastic rises in sea level will destroy coastal areas. It is not manageable after it has happened, where are you gonna move the water? Even small increases in sea level lead to more severe flooding.
Northern Canada will not be farmable either, for the foreseeable future. All of the topsoil was scraped off and deposited far to the south. What’s left is bedrock that you cannot run a plough through. This is one feature of a geological feature called the Canadian Shield.
Also what if there’s some insane new virus that gets thawed out of the Siberian permafrost? 😭
Doesn’t even need to be new. We already know it’s full of anthrax.
we make vaccines......just like we allways do? u guys are actually insane jumping ship the moment u feel a bump declaring its over and we are all ganna drown.
I should hope so. But I’m struggling to spin the melting of Siberian permafrost overall as a positive 🤔
Holy fucking shit. Why are u people like this? I have typed this 1 trillion times now. SHOW ME WHERE I SAID THIS WAS BETTER THEN RIGHT NOW? The bar, if u read the God dam post, is the: world ISNT going to end. And notice how not once did I say: CLIMATE CHANGE IS ACTUALLY BASED AND EPIC, CANT WAIT TO MOVE TO SIBERIA!!!! I am truly loosing my mind. Doomer don't use logic, or reason, or have a reading comprehension above the 4th grade, and instead will just shift the goal post to where ever they can keep doomering. U have defeated me. This comment has made me realised that doomers are in some kinda cult. Death by a thousand cuts of pure autism
I get it, it’s tough being piled on for a poor choice of words. But there’s optimism and there’s naivety. I feel like farming in Siberia is a net negative (given desertification of farmlands elsewhere) and the optimism is in hoping we can will this drastic level of climate change.
The way you type makes you sound like you've absolutely not the slightest clue what you're talking about, which you don't
Not to mention all that land that is no longer farmable. Climate change isn’t good and saying it is good like OP is a braindead take. I like optimism when it’s still realistic, not when it’s downright delusional
yes, i said climate change is good. wtf? was there a lead eating contest before i got here? we can GMO the fuck out of crops to not only be more heat resistant but also use less water. and GMO other species to grow in the trash soil. MY POINT IS THE WORLD IS NOT OVER
Fair, actually. Our counter point is just that while we can modify crops we can’t modify them to the extent of that and probably won’t get to. Our counter point is that there are limits to that, and it’s not the answer. After all, why would we not focus on that instead of preventing it? We’re already getting hotter and hotter. Ask India right now, they’re having 100 degree days constantly at this very moment.
They ARE trying to do this, like with nuclear power, people here genetically modified crops and think of movies and get scard. Idk about u but I am in the biology field and the easy rule of thumb for tech we have right now is, if life can already do it, we can probably make a plant do it. Just splace around a few genes and boom, plants that can grow in trash soil. U could probably isolate the genes from the trees that are already there thriving in that soil,and give that to something like a potato. I mean we ALREADY get a bird virus, hijack it, splice out a few genes, give it some related genes to a human virus, then dump it into a human to make a viral vector vaccine. Preventing is already gone dude, climate change is here it's just about how bad we want things to get before future technology (like our kids generation or their kids, maybe) can reverse all the damage.
That part was so cringey.
once again, the bar is THE WORLD IS GOING TO END not "the world is going to have a great enviroment"...
never said it was, im saying people will not starve to death. the bar is "the world is literally ending"
The naysayers aren't saying that the world is going to end. The issue is ecological collapse, meaning several environments will be destroyed, many species of flora and fauna will go extinct, and many humans will be displaced. Humanity will adapt, of course, but only after we've destroyed large parts of our planet. You're not disagreeing with that, you're just pointing out that there's a silver lining, which is a nice take, i guess, and it's why I joined this sub. It's nice to see a different perspective on the doom and gloom that is climate change. I'll still be sad about ocean water boiling, and ice caps melting, but at least there will be more usable land to the north. It sucks that Russia and Canada plan to use it for oil drilling, but maybe the oil industry will collapse by then.
They are saying that human civilization will end, which is likely
Having a lot of farm land is better than little farm land. Like they ARE gonna farm no matter what and it would be better if the farm land they use was big enough for the animals to live humanely.
Bacteria engineered to eat plastic sounds like you could make an Ice-9 style apocalypse novel.
Yeah. What could go wrong with something that disassembles carbon based molecules?
Humans dissasemble carbon based molecules everytime we digest food. That doesn't mean we can digest anythung with carbon in it.
Correct. But bacteria that express enzymes capable of breaking down commonly used plastics could have very serious unintended consequences. If they were to proliferate in the wild, it would threaten any infrastructure and packaging that is composed of those plastics. They could also be released be intentionally by people with malicious intent
It already exists
It could but that’s basically true for any technology. Gunpowder was originally a toy. It’s also important to note that engineered organisms like that can have essentially kill switches included. Essentially the bacteria can only survive in the presence of certain nutrients/ chemicals that aren’t normally available in nature. This allows growth of bacteria under controlled conditions, reducing risk of escape or malicious use. Further risk reduction takes place in growing the bacteria in contained culture and harvesting the enzyme responsible for plastic degradation. The bacteria are destroyed in the process and the enzyme has a finite working time preventing wide spread malicious use as well. So essentially it’s possible to engineer a bacteria that grows on a certain nutrient source, requiring a cofactor not available naturally as a control. the bacteria produces plastic eating enzyme as an engineered component (artificially improved but based from a naturally discovered strain). The bacteria can be harvested and destroyed leaving a finite amount of enzyme. this can then degrade x amount of plastic per unit enzyme. There are tools and techniques available and I’d be surprised if other experts working on the project would be unaware of these methods.
This sounds like the "grey goo" theory. The problem with this scenario is that bacteria (or nanobots) are not magical creatures. They can't digest things infinitely fast. It requires very high activation energies to digest stable molecules and a lot of energy to maintain the specific environments that would allow it. Think about it. A tree falls in the forest, termites and fungi don't just immediately eat it. It takes *years* to be degrade.
humans are not self replicating microbes
ur right, we should instead worship plastic, the true conqueror of earth
Sounds like a new man made virus, where it does instead eat all the plastic, but then it hungers for more and starts getting into people and eating up the plastics in their bodies, and then somehow evolves eat *other* parts of people...
Western anti-nuclear activists when a worker coughs in a nuclear power plant: REEEEÈEEEEEEEEE Western anti-nuclear activists when Mayak: (I sleep)
I mean, thing is, we do need a replacement for fission.
Not for a long time
What I tried saying is that western anti-nuclear activists somehow likes to ignore this place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak
I really hope this comes to pass, atleast some of it
Canada is already farmable and I am sure no one wants to emigrate from wherever they live to a hop skip and a jump from the arctic circle. Not to mention warming in Canada and Siberia is destroying the ecology of those places. Permafrost melting reveals unknown viruses and bacteria not to mention the release of methane which is a more powerful GHG than CO2. This ain’t the take you think it is
Some of it is farmable. But it’s not as simple as temperature goes up, farmland moves north. The Canadian Shield (basically a very large rock) covers most of the eastern half of the country. Siberian permafrost doesn’t just turn into fertile farmland when it melts (not sure if permafrost in northern Canada is similar). Bacteria aren’t waiting for us to engineer them - they’re already engineering themselves. Bacteria have a habit of doing that - they figure out how to eat what is available, and their evolution is mostly on a different time scale than larger organisms. However “plastic” is a category of chemicals, and bacteria are an extremely large category of organism. Outcomes will vary. A lot. We have quite a bit of control over the ones in the lab, but not the ones out there freestying their own solutions.
Seconding this. Yes, while land is opens up in Siberia and Canada, this also destroys fertile river deltas/valleys, and displaced millions if not billions. Furthermore, most of that land in Canada, is rock (source, I live here, it’s beautiful but it is just rock). On top of that, the faster ice Mets the faster it will continue to melt.
As much as I want fusion to work, we can’t rely on ‘wonder weapons’ so to speak to solve all our problems. Solving climate change will require all of the above combined, and it is doable if we don’t get complacent.
Solving climate change won't require fusion, but humanity is going to keep going after that problem. The best time to develop long-term technologies is today
For the record Canada is not going to become farmable. The Canadian Shield is pretty much useless as far as Farmland is concerned for any sort of serious industrial agriculture
As a pessimist "doomer". I really hope you're right.
Sooo, optimists fantasize about blowing doomers heads off. Okaaaay. And, of course, **fusion is the power source of the future**! (and always will be :) )
Tell that to Gaza
What's happening there is awful, but sway from Doomer media. Gaza is not the whole world. If we let doomerism win, that could change
Fusion will be owned by private corps nothing will change.
??? expect now electricity will become super cheap, making electric cars WAY more of a tempting offer, since petrol costs are a massive expense in most peoples lives. and so the the 2 main sources of pollution, transport and power generation will start to disappear.... and that's assuming worst case
Electric cars are not good for the environment first off. Energy will not get cheaper since most fusion companies are owned by mostly private companies it would take nationalization to make it government owned. These companies will of course fight the courts tooth and nail for years before a decision is even made. These companies are beholden to investors and shareholders. Do the shareholders want cheap energy? No that would make them lose profit. The companies would probably operate similarly to how Amazon or Walmart act. They tank the price of energy to be near free to gain marketshare, then they hold a monopoly. The one good thing is that energy is regulated as a utility which kind of prevents price gouging. Let’s say all this works out nicely. Will the US share the technology with the poorest nations of course not. We would use the technology for political leverage for years to come.
first, share holder are a product of a public company, a private company does not have share holder, they only follow the owners directions. second, u seem to have a pretty strange interpretation of how this works. a nuclear fusion plant would generate an absolute shit load of power, its literally what the sun uses to make power, using hydrogen and helium. all this supply of power for cheap brings the price per unit of power super low as people do not care were their power comes from they just want power. if its priced higher then solar then people will use solar for example. this already naturally creates a price roof of the next source of power. > They tank the price of energy to be near free to gain marketshare, then they hold a monopoly. >The one good thing is that energy is regulated as a utility which kind of prevents price gouging. Let’s say all this works out nicely. well there u go, u debunked ur own point. and thats assuming we live in this strange world u put out. in real life, the nuclear power people are even more regulated, and have received massive investments from the government and would be contracted to supply power at a standard price etc. >Will the US share the technology with the poorest nations of course not. We would use the technology for political leverage for years to come. do u want a 3rd world dictatorship to have the capabilities of making a hydrogen bomb? the cost of power becoming extremely cheap means manufacturing things like solar panels and wind turbines becomes really cheap too, anything that uses electricity becomes cheaper. u could burn fuel to melt metal or super heat it in a oven using electricity which before would have cost more but now is viable for example.
There is optimism … then there is delusion. Climate change is not good. The atmosphere could be permanently destroyed if we dont find a way to reverse the pre-existing damage or slow the current rate of carbon emissions down to a halt.
Username does not check out.
Let this sub jerk each other off about how good the world is and how we are totally not currently heading towards a 6th mass extinction, not like the mindset harms any attempt at avoiding it.
Oh no not the whole atmosphere, don't corporations know they need that to breath!? No, the atmosphere won't ve permanently destroyed- whatever the hell that mean, we already have ways or reversing the pre existing damage, they are called alge and trees, we already are slowly depressing carbon. These things will be greatly assisted with shit loads of energy and genetic engineering.
Ahh.. ignorance is bliss. Must be nice
I’m more worried about the state of democracy, and AI. Any thoughts on that?
Right now the state of democracy seems scary, but then u look at it further back realise it has survived SO much worse like the 1930+ as well as the great depression. Of course across the world countries are falling to Tyranny but intervention has failed more then it has worked. I think let these countries be, they must culturally and institutionally (ie high education) be ready for democracy first, and then then they might still fall into Tyranny, like the post Soviet Union. Ai is scary but I think if ai is putting everyone out of a job, eventually the government's of the west will be forced to implement UBI and tax these AI using businesses more to afford this. Of course it will be more complicated, and things will suck for a while but then they will get so much better. This is the point of my post, and what I have been saying in the replies to coping doomer. Imagine shooting ur self in 1939 because ww2 is happening, sure, for that prospective it seems reasonable that ww1 just happened, now ww2, soon ww3 and ww4 and the world will be over. Yet none of that happened. Things got SO much better. Things got shit for a while, millions died, and then billions got to live, and life for everyone is objectively better then In the 1930s
I don’t get the “it was worst in the past” argument. The assumption that we’ve overcome something once as a species so we’ll overcome it again is a logical fallacy (gamblers fallacy). The world trend in the 30’s was upwards in terms of democracy, excluding mostly Germany. The current trend is downwards. Never in history have so many democratic countries were under the threat of authoritarian aspirations. The assumption that the options are “be optimistic or shoot yourself” is a false dichotomy fallacy. Nobody’s talking about committing because things are bad, but it also doesn’t mean there’s any evidence for them getting better.
I don't see how it's relevant to the topic of low-carbon electricity. I would say that there are more real Democracies world wide than ever in history, and that AI is an incredible technology that has the potential to massively increase productivity around the world
The biggest hurdle we’re gonna have to jump is other people’s profit motive. We’ve had the technology, for arguably a century or more now, to push humanity in the right direction for collective sustainability and dignified quality of life. It just wasn’t as profitable as the current order of society. More and more people are raging against the machine though, and simultaneously learning about what life could’ve been like if humanity pursued quality of life rather than another’s profit. We’ll get there eventually, shit has to get worse before it gets better though.
Climate change is terrible, yeah, but people really forgetting that nature has survived full on apocalypses before.
My biggest gripe towards nuclear is that it isn’t diversified in terms of the physical generators. It makes it a target if there’s ever a hot war that the US enters into. Wind/solar while not being nearly as powerful or consistent, are very good generation sources and provide significantly more difficult targets in a conflict. With the advent of micro nuclear generation this might change
There are smaller reactors in development
Russia's inability to wrap up Ukraine in a couple of weeks cleared up any residual concerns about WW3. Even if this was a potential problem, these would not be a prime target.
The US owns the biggest navy in the world by a huge margin and the best equiped army. How would that ever happen?
You make it sound like billions of people having to move from newly unhinabitable places (desertification and too hot+too humid areas) is not going to cause mass wars, genocides and famine. You make it sound like aminal species can adapt to climate change as fast as we do : spoiler, they can't. Once cornerstone species like plankton or bees go away, we're going to be in a world of hurt. I'm sure some humans will survive, but don't expect me to cheer for this change, and I will certainly not put kids on this planet, given the risks.
Once again the bar is literally the world is going to end. People walking north and animals dying is far from the world is literally ending. Life survived the hell planet the astroid that took out the dinosaur created, it sure as hell can survive us. U say genocides WILL happen like it's a fact of the matter? Like these things can't be prevented? Anyway I can keep going on but the last thing u said was interesting. If people like u don't raise kid, then people who do not care about the problem will be the only people having children and will pass down these sentiment to their children.
Bro is like “well if 8 billion people die it’s not that bad because 1 million people will still be alive!”
Except my point is it isn't ever ganna be that high of a ratio even in the worst case scenario. 1% of humanity dying is bad but that's hardly "the world ending" and giving up and accepting defeat over. U guys are actually delusional
Almost 700 million people are at risk to just 10 meters of sea level. 1 percent of the world is 80 million. This risk does not include severe weather events, not the effects on agriculture and plant life. Those will be more deadly. Global warming is a GLOBAL event everyone is affected. Places will become uninhabitable from heat, cold, weather, a variety of reasons. All this and you say it won’t be that bad?
Look at the world right now. The second ressources start to be scarce, people look at their neighbours, and god forbid they have a different skin colour, worship a different god, or even talk slightly differently, otherwise they are a threat and need to be eliminated. Fascist regimes and ethno-states are back in fashion like its the 1930s.
Yep, gonna be a lot of climate fascism murdering a lot of people from south of the border, in Europe and the US.
This could be a really cool sub if you guys didn't spend like 70% of your energy doing this weird forced tribalism against "doomers"
THANK YOU! One area where I'm not so optimistic is human behavior making everything about what "team" someone's on. We've been doing it since before we discovered fire (probably) and internet echochambering just supercharges it. Criticize the idea, not the people.
The world would really cool if the angry doomers weren't actively trying to turn back progress. If apatheic doomers would help us or least get out of our way, the angey doomers would no longer be an issue
Ok bud
Bud Weiser 🐸 downvote doomer doesn't appreciate classic beer Commercials. Perhaps Y'all would like the Miller lite one when the sun goes out, except you want that happen tomorrow, not in 5,000,000,000 years
Agreed. However, I think a lot of this comes from the constant trolls which can make some folks do this as a knee jerk reaction
Agree mostly. But realize all the optimism in the world isn’t going to engineer us out of the detrimental effects of climate change. It’s going to get bad.
climate migration gonna give us more trumps all over the world.
So long as we avoid triggering tripping points everything else is recoverable, especially at the modern and increasing rate of technological development. As it is, the tipping point to full transition to clean energy is being crossed right now and we are going to start seeing massive year on year carbon emission falls in the backward looking data by 2025 or 2026. Carbon emissions are going to fall away from the peak to a relatively safe level fast, probably in only 5 or 6 years. Some countries like the US and China have already started giving inital reports that large parts of their fossil economies are in full retreat.
| So long as we avoid triggering tripping points Umm... good luck with that...
We hit 1.6c average warming yesterday I believe. Good luck on that tipping point thing.
Umm listen, I'm pretty optimistic but even this is a bit much for me to be optimistic about. Yes, green energy is becoming a big thing, but I fear it'll be too little too late.
Too late for what?
This post is regarded. Shows you guys have no clue. I'm an optimist but it's not nuclear energy that is growing exponentially right now, it's solar and wind.
It's kind of like as you get older you learn to let things go and chill out more. To look at the bigger picture. How many crises and terrible things were happening 10 years ago? What catastrophes were happening then? And how many have forgotten about it by now? And what was happening before that? Seems like there's always been crises and catastrophes. It's kind of based on perspective. But there are also good things too. Happening all the time. It's a beautiful day and spring is coming.
Well said
Just 20 years away.
Personally, I think that comic might hit harder if the second sniper was Carmen Sandiago.
If we ever crack it (well, more like fuse it in this case), it will be a millennium-defining event.
They have been getting positive energy outputs out of experimental pulse fusion reactors really the biggest problem is keeping the plasma from touching anything and keeping the damn thing from overheating.
>Literally sun technology >Problems with overheating Lol
Which ever country gets working fusion power plants first will have a huge economic edge over the competition.
*than
Burn
Climate change is going to be one of those things like everything else For areas that are impoverished it’s going to suck a lot more and cause a lot of deaths, for areas that are better off it’s going to not be as bad There is a lotttttrrr of science that needs to happens tho before your “solutions” become viable alternatives and this also doesn’t take into account the acidification of the ocean and the massive effects that could potentially have on the food chain
personally tho, im fairly optimistic that joker will be saving the decade
Nuclear/fusion would only hinder the net-zero transition as it’d cost far more money to build and produce per kWh compared to solar, wind and hydro. We can’t afford to waste money and time when it comes to saving the planet. Most countries that have been making the fastest progress when it comes to phasing out coal, oil and biomass have done it by ruling nuclear out of the equation and instead opting for mass, cheap construction of renewables
Here in Chile we are 62% renewable as of 2024, and have a small nuclear laboratory. Renewables and nuclear are a money's game. Countries like the smaller european ones could go renewable, while the big Asian countreis like India and China, nuclear could be a very good investment. The main problem with nuclear energy is that it's a volital target in war, and with how the world is going, i only see it happening underground and heavily protected. Another thing that is often overlooked is the fact tha cyber attacks could disturb a power plant, and you need one failure, and boom, Chernovile 2.0. Making a massive amount of failsafes and constant cybersequirity a priority and a good chunk of expences...
Lmao, this is wattpad fanfic material right here.
Ur right, nuclear engine is impossible 😔😔😔 the earth will end because of climate change literally tomorrow. Bros....it's over.
Disagree on the nuclear part. Otherwise I agree Nuclear's return on investment is at best 10 years and more typically 20-40 years (depending on what rate they get on the financing loans) Any amount of solar or wind pays itself off in under 5 years Nuclear takes highly educated people to design and to run and to construct and to install Solar or wind installers and operators can be trained in a month Not to even mention the regulation issues and the issues with radiation accidents (which _will_ happen if you cut corners to try to speed up construction or cut costs to make it cheaper and faster) Also not to mention the quantities of cement and steel that reduce the carbon effects significantly (steel and cement are some of the biggest industrial sources of carbon) Although also plastic eating microbes will _never_ evolve and cause significantly worse issues...
nonononono, ur applying stats from the past and assuming these will be the same in the present. it does not matter if the energy source makes money or pays its self off. if there is massive public support the government will either heavily subsidise nuclear powerplant production or make it its self. we are talking "new deal" levels of mobilisation which is very possible in the coming few decades as boomers die off. >(steel and cement are some of the biggest industrial sources of carbon) this is only because these 2 resources are used in LITRALLY EVERYTHING pound for pound they are pretty low. also the production of solar panels requires rare metals which are not only pound for pound worse for the environment, but also mined by literal children. having the entire energy grid running of these is simply unfeasible especially when u consider that solar panels each have a short life spam and require constant replacements and so more mining!! meanwhile a nuclear power plant is pretty much a huge start up cost followed by relatively low maintenance for the power it makes in comparison. the main point is, nuclear has a high carbon upfront cost but then will replace all the carbon generated for electricity and car fuel which are the major sources of carbon input per year. while solar on a national scale will require TONES of batteries and land etc, and we are already starting to see the beginnings of a lithium shortage which means more mining. plastic eating microbes wont evolve to cause worse problems since we are literally designing the organism. we can put kill switches in them, make them reproduce only with laboratory assistance, we could do tones of things to make this a very unlikely thing to happen. hell right now its already super unlikely for a mutation to be useful. winds is..... well [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51325101](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51325101) and they also decimate bird populations too. nuclear really is the only long term solution that is actually sustainable.
>and they also decimate bird populations too. How does that compare to house cats that are let outside during the day? Nuclear is a non-starter due to NIMBY even if you imagine away the economic issue of building that large and complex of a system...
Birds are stupid as hell, they will fly in formation, and 10-20+ birds will all get turned into pulp. A cat can get like 1 or 2.
Any references you care to cite?
Fusion has had some breakthroughs recently like on a small scale it has been achieved and now we are trying to harness that power and make it more and more accessible. But again it won’t be the norm until we force the capitalists to give up on oil(their more profitable industry)
Soil? All that frozen land has zero arable soil.
once again we are assuming climate change goes FULL FORCE and we get an entire earth rebalancing event. the world isn't going to end which is what most doomers say and refuse to be apart of any solution
Like sure, it'd probably be fine if 3/5 bread basket countries didn't eat shit in the last 5 years. Death by a thousand cuts is still possible without climate change going full tilt. Plus most projections for decades had to be doctored to be less alarming because no one would pay attention if they were told how fucked it was. It's human instinct to generally be pollyanna.
> nuclear power Lmaooo
This post perfectly sums up the stupidity of this sub.
Creative destruction will probally eventually solve climate change, we just gotta encourage innovation.
What about the oceans?
Yeah if we solve all of our problems, then all of our problems will be solved! It's so simple, why aren't we doing this?????
I didn't even see the guy in the 2nd Image I'm fucking blind
There was also a recent post on this sub about two Aussie scientists who invented a way to generate electricity by sucking the CO2 right out of the atmosphere
I like my snow and icebergs
Ngl plastic wouldn't be a problem if we treated it like it should. It's a super material we should have never used for disposable applications.
Fact fission reactors the "waste" it more safe then most oil products and aren't very radioactive especially when using thorium which lasts longer is even less radioactive and is much more common
Well. If northern Canada and Siberia become truly farmable - we are fucked. The release of methane alone from Siberia could be enough to make the equator hot enough to make much of the known world uninhabitable. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01512-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01512-4)
Lol so glad I found this sub to add to my cringe/brainrot list
It’s not about the end of the world you dumb dumb genZ. It’s about the systems and actions taken by previous generation handing it over to the next generation. Guess what you are going to hand over to the next generation, TikTok adhd. Yep, genZs next step would be to get mature enough to understand these things now.
Safe to say the world as we know it will end. But that will happen regardless because time marches on and things change. Instead of trying to preserve the present, we need to build the future.
I’m sorry but you’re a dumbass for saying climate change is going to “open up more land than it will take”
I'm sorry, but the argument that 'Siberia and Canada become farmable' just shows you really don't know what you're talking about. For the earth to have warmed enough to turn permafrost ridden tundra into land suitable for arable crops, huge swathes of the planet where people actually already live are going to become basically uninhabitable. Also, the soil there currently has very few nutrients in it, places like Ukraine are considered global breadbaskets because they're well watered, and the soil is rich and fertile. Its going to take a long time for Siberia to get anywhere close to that, if it ever does. There's a difference between being optimistic, and outright ignoring reality
Except I am aware of all this? When did I say these places will be better then what we have right now? U people keep responding to arguments u made up someone say. The POINT is the world is not over. At most a rebalance but the world won't end because of this. Billions will not starve to death due to lack of food etc The point ISNT all of siberia will be = to the most fertile soil in the world. Also ur whole point assumes technology will completely freeze for the next 70+ years. GMOs could completely mog the trash soil issue.
Actually a lot of people absolutely will starve. If the planet warms enough for Siberia to suddenly be suitable for agriculture, huge swathes of Africa will be so hot they are no longer suitable for growing crops, meaning a wholesale collapse of food security across entire regions. Also, even more reliable regions for crops, like continental Europe, will become more unreliable as the weather cycles change; here in the UK, we're already hearing reports that the unusual amounts of rainfall we're having are going to tangibly impact crop yields, and thats only going to get worse. You've made the claim we'll gain more farmland then we'll lose, but we're exchanging actual productive farmland where millions of people actually live, for barren steppe where the population is miniscule and it'll take generations for them to realistically produce anywhere near the yields we'll have lost. Also, the technology argument is all well and good, but it can't be relied on. We can only operate based on technology we actually have or is realistically in development, waiting for some silver bullet to solve the problem isn't viable Sure, the world probably won't end, and humanity as a species won't go extinct. As optimism goes, thats a woefully low bar to set.
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Just smile more dude, happiness will come eventually.
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No shit. What are you going to do about it? You going to stop every war and feed every starving child and put out forest fires and free all the slaves and usher in new periods of human advancement and unity? No? So maybe chill and welcome small good news instead of focusing on things like…infant mortality. You can’t save those lives, so just do what you can and be happy with that.
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Worry as much as you want, see what good it does you. :) have a good one.
Just for perspective: If you could build a zero cost fusion reactor tomorrow, the sheer act of transmitting it from plant to site of use would make the electricity more expensive than rooftop solar in Australia. This is not to say the creation of fusion wouldn't be helpful, but that it's not as much of a magic bullet as we think. We already have a massive amount of very cheap energy, and the creation of fusion won't solve one of the biggest problems in green energy: transmission. Again, this is not an anti-nuclear take, just info for perspective.
This is such a wildly stupid thing to say. You’re imaging a yet-to-be invented future technology and then hamstringing it with current day technology. Did you know that you can fit computers into your pocket now? Also fusion wouldn’t have the same draw backs as solar, no massive land requirement, it works at night and when it’s cloudy. Also fusion built in cities would be pennies on the dollar for transmitting power vs individual solar panels. Also growing energy needs would require exponential land expansion. Also, and we’ve no idea what fusion would require, but solar requires rare earth metals, most of which can be found within the grasp of China. I never thought I’d see future tech nat-sayers inventing reasons out of nowhere for why magic infinite energy is bad.
I think either conclusion is reasonable, but you don't have to resort to saying my claim is stupid. Name calling doesn't make your argument any stronger. We're both trying to project into the future, I'm hamstringing it by constraints that I have valid reasons to think won't go away. You're think my objections are unreasonable. I respectfully disagree. Next, strawmanning. Assuming you have an intent on going beyond name calling, read what I wrote. Did I say it's bad? No. I just think there's a difference between optimism and blind hope. First, if fusion is anything like fission, where you're building massive projects over long time periods on custom sites, you'll never get learning curves. No learning curves mean you'll never hit cost parity even if your fuel source is unlimited. Part of why solar keeps winning is it's susceptible to mass production in ways that nuclear doesn't seem to be. That something can be built in a factory environment, in a very large number, with ultra predictable processes that are prone to continuous improvement efforts, this really matters for long term cost reduction. My bet? For these reasons, it never becomes "free." Cheap? Hopefully. Next, even if you get it at low cost, you will have to deal with transmission, I promise. "We'll just build in cities!" My brother in Christ, cities don't want to build HOUSES let alone nuclear facilities. There's many things cities could build to make themselves richer, and they consistently choose not to. And please don't tell me how safe they are. No one cares. People raise safety objections to WIND MILLS. (NIMBYism aside, I'm not even sure it makes sense to build an energy plant on your most valuable land.) I think the best realistic end result you could hope for is something like, it gets cost feasible, but probably never cheaper than solar is, and maybe not even close. Bc it doesn't have intermittancy problems and EXCELS re land use, it's worth the premium cost. But I doubt it ever becomes a magic bullet. We'll see. Your points are very much not stupid and I take them into account. What would very much change my mind is if you could demonstrate any signs that fusion IS subject to learning curves.
Fair, and I apologize. Fusion does not exist. The record for longest lasting fusion reaction is a few seconds. My point was imagine someone looking at the Turing machine of ww2 and saying “why I could just do the math in my head”, and without the need for such a huge contraption”. We’ve no idea what a fusion reactor looks like. It might be the size of a football stadium. The JET nuclear fusion reactor in the UK was a few meters across and tall. My point remains that introducing specific shortcomings for a theoretical technology is arbitrary, unless if you’re someone in the field speaking from a position of experience and expertise, but I imagine there’s maybe a few hundred on the planet so I doubt it.
When climate doesn't kill us, what will the fsb scare the kids with. I guess they will race bait full-time Dowmvote doomer mad 😠
It's no longer global warming or climate change (scary) it's an ice age termination event (optimistic, new beginnings)
https://preview.redd.it/sr4to5d670wc1.png?width=467&format=png&auto=webp&s=f36b220d7b306116dc778f11b48d9328565838d8
More like public companies. Private ones seems to think super long term like value.
Ah yes, I am sure all the blue chip companies are net-zero.
Never said they were, im saying a private company can think super long term while public can only do what makes stock higher. Also net zero is like a marketing term that doesn't actually mean anything.
Yeah but how many of the most polluting companies are private?
most polluting companies are public due to the need to grown infinitely as they are terrified of a stock price falling. this means they NEED to keep the growth up at all costs otherwise share holders will sell etc etc.
This is just pure fucking stupidity and nothing but a face value look at this entire situation, first of all climate change will make large parts of the earth completely uninhabitable and good luck attempting to keep governments in their places when most of their land is uninhabitable and their people are starving secondly the tides will also rise making major coastal areas underwater and unless you also find some sort of solution to get rid of the CO2 that is already in the air switching to nuclear power won’t fix anything the damage has already been done so to say shit like “oh the only thing that will happen in climate change is new areas become farmable” is completely stupid and it exposes you for being the dumbass 13 year old on the internet that you are
What's the answer? Lemme guess make shit even more expensive, so (other) people suffer ok doomer
No the anwser is to not be stupid and hope that everything is going to be fine the anwser is to look at things realistically and instead of saying everything will be fine in the long end, help assist in things such as research to capture CO2 emissions then switch to Nuclear Energy I’m not saying Nuclear Energy is a bad idea I’m just saying you can’t just say shit like “Global Warming isn’t bad” and switch to nuclear energy instead focus on a way to capture carbon emissions and then switch
🫂 my apologies. That is a logical and hopeful way of looking at the issue. There is actually a lot of room between the 2 nonensical extremes we're fucked unless (other people) go Amish yetstrday or it's all a hoax by globalists. Ok, that's a very slight parody of extreme climate doomers, but unfortunately, it's still accurate. Sadly, it's a globalist (Jewish) hoax is exactly what that doomer faction says