Pro nuclear activism has been around for decades. I don’t know a single person that isn’t familiar with it. It doesn’t get anywhere. And I see no new ideas in this post to change that.
I was actually referring to a formatting thing that appears to have been fixed now. I think Bryan’s larger point about a lack of public education about **why** people are pro-nuclear is valid.
Bryan, the folks at the Breakthrough Institute have started a Build Nuclear Now initiative along the lines of what you're suggesting. Check out/Sign up for their weekly newsletter if you don't already:
As Robin Hanson recently pointed out, it's regulations that prevent fission power and there's no reason to think fusion power won't be stopped by the same regulations. (Exactly what is better about fusion has never been very clear to me.)
Most fission reactor designs are descended from those designed in the 1940s to produce materials for making weapons. New clean-sheet designs would be far better - many have been proposed, but regulation has so far strangled them in the crib.
I wonder if it's more than just greens who have been blocking nuclear power. It seems to me the fossil fuel industry has far more to lose from it than anyone else.
"Exactly what is better about fusion has never been very clear to me."
The products of fusion aren't radioactive. In theory, no radioactive waste. Not that I consider the radioactive waste coming from fission plants to be a huge problem, since its volume is so small and it can be embedded in glass and buried deep underground without much difficulty.
Has someone here suggested that oil companies are more anti-nuclear than coal or NG firms? I haven't seen anyone saying that. Clearly those with large sunk investments in industries that would be replaced by a successful nuclear industry have an interest in preventing such success.
Source for that? I am pretty old and remember a lot of hysteria around nuclear power, epitomized by movies like "The China Syndrome" in the late 70s. This was popular culture and anti-industrial sentiment from the environmental movement, birthed in the universities, not anti-nuke lobbying by fossil fuel companies. As far as I know, the "fossil fuel giants" you speak of are individual rich guys who may have made a fortune in fossil fuels, but now have adopted the leftist morality that says both nukes and fossil fuels are evil. A contemporary example is Tom Steyer, who lies about nuclear power, and touts wind and solar. Another example: Gavin Newsom's personal fortune is from fossil energy. It is not correct to say anti-nuke sentiment was created by some conspiracy of "fossil fuel giants."
So I read you and people like you and they say “solar and wind are inadequate”. Then I read people like Noah Smith, and they say “solar and wind are winning, generating more and more every year.” This really feels like an issue where people have their own base of “alternative facts”. It would be great if some well-informed scientist could give an in-depth explainer of the pros and cons of solar and wind, as of 2022. Or is this a game without referees?
I work in energy markets and it is really both. First off solar and wind are subsidized. Wind receives a $26/MWh tax credit for every unit it produces. That is in a market where the average market price can be $30/MWh. And Wind and Solar really are getting cheaper. Consequently there has been huge build outs in some states and countries.
But battery technology is still not economical and that means wind and solar's intermittency is a really problem. In markets with lots of wind the price becomes negative when the wind is blowing and can become really high when wind is lacking. And in a market like Texas the wind mostly blows during the lowest demand times. Wind is highest at night and in the late winter/spring but lowest in the summer during the day which is when the system hits its peak. Solar is better because it generates the most during the summer at noon but you still have the problem that it generates nothing at night.
Without massive battery storage I don't see how you ever get a system mainly of wind and solar (and maybe the land requirements make even that tough). Even if you get generation over half of the energy it would still require building back up generators that may seldom run which would be very inefficient for the system.
Just as with solar and wind, there is no one point at which batteries will be economical: for some applications they're economical right now; for others it will be challenging to get them there ever. So, for storing solar energy to meet power needs into the evening, in sunny places solar and batteries are economic right now. But, for an extremely reliable electrical grid you have to address the situation where all your intermittent sources stop producing at the same time, i.e., you need to have a great deal of energy standing by. The economics of that means you have to add the cost of the storage per unit of energy, divided by the number of times it will be emptied and recharged over its life (to over-simplify a bit). For that cost to be "economic" when the storage may be cycled only about 10 times in its economic effective life, the cost of the storage has to be very, very low - and in that application batteries may not be economic for a long time, if ever.
Stepping back, though, one of the attacks against renewables tends to be some variant of "it can't solve the whole problem, therefore we shouldn't bother with it at all." But, renewables can solve most of the problem reliably and at affordable (and declining) cost: and if all we do is solve 85% of the problem, we'll have accomplished a great deal. We should not allow perfection to become the enemy of the good.
"More and more every year" perhaps from a very low base. Hydropower is still the largest source of renewable energy (and it's unpopular to disrupt environments by building dams).
I am very much not opposed to nuclear its cheap to run, reliable, safe, and the waste issue is totally solvable.
But since the 1970's nuclear is really really expensive to build. So much so that it really does not make sense. Sure you can say that it is all due to regulations and I am sure lot of it is. But at least some of those regulations are necessary. And even still nuclear plants of massive construction projects and those have proven hard to build for things other than nuclear as well. Also it is not like there are other countries with lower regulations building nuclear super cheaply or bring on tons of plants.
So far the only recent plants that have been able to be built have been highly regulated markets with captured customers that can be forced to cover the construction cost. The only recent plant to be built Vogtle 3&4 took 10 years to build and will come in way over budget,. And those required federal loan guarantees.
Maybe in some magical regulatory world nuclear plants could be built cheaply but I have zero faith in any plausible world that they can. It would be nice to be proven wrong.
"They know that solar and wind are currently a grossly inadequate substitute for fossil fuels." Is it? Sure, right now they are only a small part of the energy mix, but they (and batteries) are getting cheaper so fast!
It is. Industrial power demands are vastly more than can be supplied by anything but consistent, traditional power generation. Here's one way of looking at it: when wind turbines are being manufactured using only wind power, you'll know that it's a worthwhile replacement.
I don't think it would be very easy to manufacture steel, cement, and fiberglass using wind power, not to mention the need for coal(for steel) and gas-powered furnaces. I looked up the manufacturing processes for these materials, and every one of them requires a step with temps well in excess of 1000C. Plus, manufacturing facilities often run 24/7. I don't see solar and wind ever becoming the dominant form of power generation.
Yes, I think this article does undersell solar and wind (although I'm totally behind the idea that we should be using a lot more nuclear).
They're not particularly inefficient in terms of £/kWhr, and efficiency is improving. The main problem is reliability and storage. The UK's grid is about 20% solar/wind (mostly wind, given the UK weather). But the last 20% would be massively harder to convert to wind than the first 20% because of the intermittency problem. And of course, the national grid is only a part of total energy use- most industrial and almost all transport-related energy use is burning fuel.
The rest of the grid in the UK is about 20% nuclear and about 60% fossil and bio fuel.
So what's a numerate person to do? Quit their day job and bang their head against the political machine? I've written every politician I'm a constituent for and some I'm not - they all ignore it.
As I said in a previous thread, when the environmental activists start pushing nukes, I will take them seriously. If you claim to be pro-environment and anti-nuke, you have another agenda other than pro-environment.
So the answer to your question is, those people who are already activists need to change their activism.
What many miss with a co2 tax. You might be able to have your fossil fuels and no net co2 too.
An ideal CO2 tax raises no revenue and it might be cheaper to remove CO2 from the air,so shouldn't all revenue from a CO2 be paid out to firms/people that remove CO2 from the air?
Indeed, there is just no possible way to be CO2 neutral without removing CO2 from the air. And yes, all revenue should go to firms/people that remove CO2 from the air. If CO2 emittters had to pay to remove the CO2, they would have a clear incentive to invest in technology to cheaply remove CO2.
It really seems that a policy of "if you emit one ton of CO2, you must buy a carbon credit, which can only be sold by someone removing one ton of CO2" would get the incentives right. It could be phased in by only requiring the removal of x% of the emitted CO2, where x gradually increases from 0 to 100.
In principle, if a country wants to be CO2 neutral, the only policy it needs is this: "If you import or produce fossil fuel, you must pay for the corresponding CO2 to be sucked out of the air". I.e., carbon capture companies would sell carbon credits that oil companies would be forced to buy if they want to sell their oil.
Under this policy, if carbon capture can be done cheaply, it will be. If it can't, then prices for fossil fuels will rise and make nuclear/wind/solar more competitive.
> Yet more thoughtful economists usually deem this an inadequate response. Since solar and wind are a grossly inadequate substitute for fossil fuels, no politically feasible tax will noticeably reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Instead, energy users will typically just pay the tax and continue on their merry carbon-emitting way.
That doesn't sound like a very economistic way of thinking. Aren't they supposed to think on the margin, recall that if you tax something you get less of it (while if you subsidize you get more of it?). Even if no alternative form of energy presents itself, a tax will at least encourage conservation & more efficient use of conventional fossil fuels!
1. Clearly define the problem of having a little more CO2 in the atmosphere. After all more plants will grow, and some places may get a tiny bit warmer. Also the question of how much human activity is causing it needs a real clear answer. i.e. does CO2 cause temperature or vice versa?
2. Read Fossil Future by Alex Epstein. His point is to talk up the real benefits of FF (prosperity & human flourishing) and stop only hysterically emphasising its negatives.
That's a crucial part of Bryan's statement. Climate change is "manageable" on average but given the (big) size of our ignorance(s) on this topic, it is all about extreme risk management.
This idea that more plants will grow with higher CO2 is only looking at the short term. Yes there is a temporary fertilization effect with increased CO2, but in the longer term we will see changes to the biomes caused by increased temperature, in particular desertification. Species that can't migrate or adapt will die out, leading to trophic collapses.
Combine this with rising sea levels leading to mass flooding (such as in Pakistan recently) and other extreme weather events and global warming is pretty bleak.
"Instead of searching for a magic new technology, we should massively multiply our effort to sell our magic old technology. We already have a cheap, safe, clean energy source; what we lack is the will to use it freely. Forget changing tech. Change minds instead."
Yes, right on. Clear the way for nuclear power! But while we are at it, why don't we also massively multiply our old magic technologies surrounding fossil fuels? You know, the ones responsible for modern civilization. The carbon dioxide demon is a straw man. CO2 is life-giving, the basis for nearly all life. More atmospheric CO2 helps plants grow and use less water as they grow. The current concentration of atmospheric CO2 is among the lowest known levels in geologic history. There were many periods in the past in which the earth's average temperature was much lower than today, even though CO2 levels were many multiples higher than today's. The logical extension of your suggestion (a good one) is to drop the fear-mongering around CO2. Clean up real pollutants, yes, but CO2 is not one of them.
I'm not very convinced by that medium article. The only two periods referenced where the climate was cooler than current are the late carboniferous/early permian and the late permian glaciation. In the late carboniferous, co2 concentrations were lower than today (some estimates suggest as low as 180ppm) and in the ordovician solar output was significantly lower than today.
I'll see if I can get a copy of the book you mentioned.
Great, I'm glad you're willing to consider facts that you might not have been aware of. I do hope you will read Alex Epstein's "Fossil Future." I'm pretty sure he'll cover issues and facts you haven't previously been exposed to. Happy Holidays!
I have no argument with anything you say but I do want to mention an interesting upside to fusion -- we will never run out of hydrogen (and therefore its isotopes). That means we will be able to build fusion reactors pretty much forever, which means the cost of building them will go down PMF, taking with it the cost of energy. For centuries. That seems pretty cool.
“I think it’s the coolest form of energy,” says Brazilian model, digital fashion designer, and the world’s first nuclear influencer, Isabelle Boemeke, otherwise known as Isodope. . . . Hijacking the free-floating eyeballs that lurk over Instagram’s Discover Feed or TikTok’s For You, Boemeke adapts familiar influencer tropes — the workout routine, makeup tutorial, or diet plan — redirecting attention to what should be commonly shared goals: clean energy and decarbonization. “It’s a bit of a rebellion on my end,” she says, “because it’s not what my agent or society expects a model who uses social media to make.”
Something’s going on at the tail end of the post here
Ya! What does Bryan actually want to end the post with!
Pro nuclear activism has been around for decades. I don’t know a single person that isn’t familiar with it. It doesn’t get anywhere. And I see no new ideas in this post to change that.
I was actually referring to a formatting thing that appears to have been fixed now. I think Bryan’s larger point about a lack of public education about **why** people are pro-nuclear is valid.
Should it get anywhere? Why do you think that is?
Bryan, the folks at the Breakthrough Institute have started a Build Nuclear Now initiative along the lines of what you're suggesting. Check out/Sign up for their weekly newsletter if you don't already:
https://buildnuclearnow.org/?utm_source=Breakthrough+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4c1ac2996e-Nuclear_Notes_11_22_2022&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_49b872540e-4c1ac2996e-387836265
Cheers!
Anders
As Robin Hanson recently pointed out, it's regulations that prevent fission power and there's no reason to think fusion power won't be stopped by the same regulations. (Exactly what is better about fusion has never been very clear to me.)
Most fission reactor designs are descended from those designed in the 1940s to produce materials for making weapons. New clean-sheet designs would be far better - many have been proposed, but regulation has so far strangled them in the crib.
I wonder if it's more than just greens who have been blocking nuclear power. It seems to me the fossil fuel industry has far more to lose from it than anyone else.
"Exactly what is better about fusion has never been very clear to me."
The products of fusion aren't radioactive. In theory, no radioactive waste. Not that I consider the radioactive waste coming from fission plants to be a huge problem, since its volume is so small and it can be embedded in glass and buried deep underground without much difficulty.
Yes, but the reactor itself becomes radioactive over time, and must eventually be disposed of.
And populist movements aren't big on quantitative reasoning.
Fossil fuel giants infiltrated the environmental movement early on, created the anti-nuclear sentiment and then provided huge amounts of funding.
Cool! Source?
Have a few from Google: https://atomicinsights.com/how-important-has-oil-money-been-to-antinuclear-movement/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement/?sh=7e99e7e97453
https://environmentalprogress.org/the-war-on-nuclear
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/02/oil-industry-fighting-climate-policy-states/606640/
Thanks. Sad to see my worst expectations confirmed.
Why would oil companies, rather than coal and Natural Gas companies go after nuclear and why would anyone believe them?
Has someone here suggested that oil companies are more anti-nuclear than coal or NG firms? I haven't seen anyone saying that. Clearly those with large sunk investments in industries that would be replaced by a successful nuclear industry have an interest in preventing such success.
The articles that Ian Miller linked to did.
Thanks!
Source for that? I am pretty old and remember a lot of hysteria around nuclear power, epitomized by movies like "The China Syndrome" in the late 70s. This was popular culture and anti-industrial sentiment from the environmental movement, birthed in the universities, not anti-nuke lobbying by fossil fuel companies. As far as I know, the "fossil fuel giants" you speak of are individual rich guys who may have made a fortune in fossil fuels, but now have adopted the leftist morality that says both nukes and fossil fuels are evil. A contemporary example is Tom Steyer, who lies about nuclear power, and touts wind and solar. Another example: Gavin Newsom's personal fortune is from fossil energy. It is not correct to say anti-nuke sentiment was created by some conspiracy of "fossil fuel giants."
Veto playing is very lucrative.
"Exactly what is better about fusion has never been very clear to me"
Yup I put it this way in theory fusion, if they get it, is about 10% better than fission and that is a big if and is just in theory.
You should be made aware of this guy, who I feel is doing good work: https://substack.com/profile/64587069-jack-devanney https://gordianknotbook.com
Scaling up nuclear energy is not difficult. France did this quickly in the 1960s, so since we have 60 years technological advantage on them and some large multiplier of wealth, the only thing preventing us from doing this again is our own idiocy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#/media/File:Electricity_in_France.svg
So I read you and people like you and they say “solar and wind are inadequate”. Then I read people like Noah Smith, and they say “solar and wind are winning, generating more and more every year.” This really feels like an issue where people have their own base of “alternative facts”. It would be great if some well-informed scientist could give an in-depth explainer of the pros and cons of solar and wind, as of 2022. Or is this a game without referees?
I work in energy markets and it is really both. First off solar and wind are subsidized. Wind receives a $26/MWh tax credit for every unit it produces. That is in a market where the average market price can be $30/MWh. And Wind and Solar really are getting cheaper. Consequently there has been huge build outs in some states and countries.
But battery technology is still not economical and that means wind and solar's intermittency is a really problem. In markets with lots of wind the price becomes negative when the wind is blowing and can become really high when wind is lacking. And in a market like Texas the wind mostly blows during the lowest demand times. Wind is highest at night and in the late winter/spring but lowest in the summer during the day which is when the system hits its peak. Solar is better because it generates the most during the summer at noon but you still have the problem that it generates nothing at night.
Without massive battery storage I don't see how you ever get a system mainly of wind and solar (and maybe the land requirements make even that tough). Even if you get generation over half of the energy it would still require building back up generators that may seldom run which would be very inefficient for the system.
Thank you. What is happening to the battery cost curve? Is it steadily falling towards the point where it will be economical? Or is that far away?
Just as with solar and wind, there is no one point at which batteries will be economical: for some applications they're economical right now; for others it will be challenging to get them there ever. So, for storing solar energy to meet power needs into the evening, in sunny places solar and batteries are economic right now. But, for an extremely reliable electrical grid you have to address the situation where all your intermittent sources stop producing at the same time, i.e., you need to have a great deal of energy standing by. The economics of that means you have to add the cost of the storage per unit of energy, divided by the number of times it will be emptied and recharged over its life (to over-simplify a bit). For that cost to be "economic" when the storage may be cycled only about 10 times in its economic effective life, the cost of the storage has to be very, very low - and in that application batteries may not be economic for a long time, if ever.
Stepping back, though, one of the attacks against renewables tends to be some variant of "it can't solve the whole problem, therefore we shouldn't bother with it at all." But, renewables can solve most of the problem reliably and at affordable (and declining) cost: and if all we do is solve 85% of the problem, we'll have accomplished a great deal. We should not allow perfection to become the enemy of the good.
"More and more every year" perhaps from a very low base. Hydropower is still the largest source of renewable energy (and it's unpopular to disrupt environments by building dams).
Noah simply never addresses the intermittency issue directly and throughly.
I am very much not opposed to nuclear its cheap to run, reliable, safe, and the waste issue is totally solvable.
But since the 1970's nuclear is really really expensive to build. So much so that it really does not make sense. Sure you can say that it is all due to regulations and I am sure lot of it is. But at least some of those regulations are necessary. And even still nuclear plants of massive construction projects and those have proven hard to build for things other than nuclear as well. Also it is not like there are other countries with lower regulations building nuclear super cheaply or bring on tons of plants.
So far the only recent plants that have been able to be built have been highly regulated markets with captured customers that can be forced to cover the construction cost. The only recent plant to be built Vogtle 3&4 took 10 years to build and will come in way over budget,. And those required federal loan guarantees.
Maybe in some magical regulatory world nuclear plants could be built cheaply but I have zero faith in any plausible world that they can. It would be nice to be proven wrong.
Other places can build cheaper. You can read about the sources of high nuclear costs in this series: https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction
"They know that solar and wind are currently a grossly inadequate substitute for fossil fuels." Is it? Sure, right now they are only a small part of the energy mix, but they (and batteries) are getting cheaper so fast!
It is. Industrial power demands are vastly more than can be supplied by anything but consistent, traditional power generation. Here's one way of looking at it: when wind turbines are being manufactured using only wind power, you'll know that it's a worthwhile replacement.
sure, do we have reason to think this can't happen?
I don't think it would be very easy to manufacture steel, cement, and fiberglass using wind power, not to mention the need for coal(for steel) and gas-powered furnaces. I looked up the manufacturing processes for these materials, and every one of them requires a step with temps well in excess of 1000C. Plus, manufacturing facilities often run 24/7. I don't see solar and wind ever becoming the dominant form of power generation.
I think hydrogen is going to be vital for decarbonising steel production. For that, renewables are quite well placed.
probably undersells it a bit but there's some significant problems, in particular the duck curve
Yes, I think this article does undersell solar and wind (although I'm totally behind the idea that we should be using a lot more nuclear).
They're not particularly inefficient in terms of £/kWhr, and efficiency is improving. The main problem is reliability and storage. The UK's grid is about 20% solar/wind (mostly wind, given the UK weather). But the last 20% would be massively harder to convert to wind than the first 20% because of the intermittency problem. And of course, the national grid is only a part of total energy use- most industrial and almost all transport-related energy use is burning fuel.
The rest of the grid in the UK is about 20% nuclear and about 60% fossil and bio fuel.
batteries are not getting cheap enough to ever solve this?
Yeah probably, though I’m not sure about the timeframe
So what's a numerate person to do? Quit their day job and bang their head against the political machine? I've written every politician I'm a constituent for and some I'm not - they all ignore it.
As I said in a previous thread, when the environmental activists start pushing nukes, I will take them seriously. If you claim to be pro-environment and anti-nuke, you have another agenda other than pro-environment.
So the answer to your question is, those people who are already activists need to change their activism.
The new Miss America is a Nuke Engineer and is going to use her Miss America tour to push Nuclear Energy.
So, umm, yeah, we have that going for us.
What many miss with a co2 tax. You might be able to have your fossil fuels and no net co2 too.
An ideal CO2 tax raises no revenue and it might be cheaper to remove CO2 from the air,so shouldn't all revenue from a CO2 be paid out to firms/people that remove CO2 from the air?
Enhanced weathering might do it.
Indeed, there is just no possible way to be CO2 neutral without removing CO2 from the air. And yes, all revenue should go to firms/people that remove CO2 from the air. If CO2 emittters had to pay to remove the CO2, they would have a clear incentive to invest in technology to cheaply remove CO2.
It really seems that a policy of "if you emit one ton of CO2, you must buy a carbon credit, which can only be sold by someone removing one ton of CO2" would get the incentives right. It could be phased in by only requiring the removal of x% of the emitted CO2, where x gradually increases from 0 to 100.
In principle, if a country wants to be CO2 neutral, the only policy it needs is this: "If you import or produce fossil fuel, you must pay for the corresponding CO2 to be sucked out of the air". I.e., carbon capture companies would sell carbon credits that oil companies would be forced to buy if they want to sell their oil.
Under this policy, if carbon capture can be done cheaply, it will be. If it can't, then prices for fossil fuels will rise and make nuclear/wind/solar more competitive.
> Yet more thoughtful economists usually deem this an inadequate response. Since solar and wind are a grossly inadequate substitute for fossil fuels, no politically feasible tax will noticeably reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Instead, energy users will typically just pay the tax and continue on their merry carbon-emitting way.
That doesn't sound like a very economistic way of thinking. Aren't they supposed to think on the margin, recall that if you tax something you get less of it (while if you subsidize you get more of it?). Even if no alternative form of energy presents itself, a tax will at least encourage conservation & more efficient use of conventional fossil fuels!
Two things Bryan.
1. Clearly define the problem of having a little more CO2 in the atmosphere. After all more plants will grow, and some places may get a tiny bit warmer. Also the question of how much human activity is causing it needs a real clear answer. i.e. does CO2 cause temperature or vice versa?
2. Read Fossil Future by Alex Epstein. His point is to talk up the real benefits of FF (prosperity & human flourishing) and stop only hysterically emphasising its negatives.
He wrote a post called "Read Fossil Future" last month: https://betonit.substack.com/p/read-fossil-future
"especially extreme tail risk"
That's a crucial part of Bryan's statement. Climate change is "manageable" on average but given the (big) size of our ignorance(s) on this topic, it is all about extreme risk management.
This idea that more plants will grow with higher CO2 is only looking at the short term. Yes there is a temporary fertilization effect with increased CO2, but in the longer term we will see changes to the biomes caused by increased temperature, in particular desertification. Species that can't migrate or adapt will die out, leading to trophic collapses.
Combine this with rising sea levels leading to mass flooding (such as in Pakistan recently) and other extreme weather events and global warming is pretty bleak.
"Instead of searching for a magic new technology, we should massively multiply our effort to sell our magic old technology. We already have a cheap, safe, clean energy source; what we lack is the will to use it freely. Forget changing tech. Change minds instead."
Yes, right on. Clear the way for nuclear power! But while we are at it, why don't we also massively multiply our old magic technologies surrounding fossil fuels? You know, the ones responsible for modern civilization. The carbon dioxide demon is a straw man. CO2 is life-giving, the basis for nearly all life. More atmospheric CO2 helps plants grow and use less water as they grow. The current concentration of atmospheric CO2 is among the lowest known levels in geologic history. There were many periods in the past in which the earth's average temperature was much lower than today, even though CO2 levels were many multiples higher than today's. The logical extension of your suggestion (a good one) is to drop the fear-mongering around CO2. Clean up real pollutants, yes, but CO2 is not one of them.
When was the climate cooler than today with higher CO2?
Hi Tim. This information is widely available. Here is one example (including a good graphic presentation) that shows the history:
https://medium.com/@ghornerhb/heres-a-better-graph-of-co2-and-temperature-for-the-last-600-million-years-f83169a68046
For more perspective, I recommend a couple of good sources: "Fossil Future" a new book by Alex Epstein.
Also: https://co2coalition.org/teammember/patrick-moore/
Patrick Moore is the former founder of GreenPeace. He now educates the public on the beneficial effects of carbon dioxide.
Merry Christmas!
I'm not very convinced by that medium article. The only two periods referenced where the climate was cooler than current are the late carboniferous/early permian and the late permian glaciation. In the late carboniferous, co2 concentrations were lower than today (some estimates suggest as low as 180ppm) and in the ordovician solar output was significantly lower than today.
I'll see if I can get a copy of the book you mentioned.
Great, I'm glad you're willing to consider facts that you might not have been aware of. I do hope you will read Alex Epstein's "Fossil Future." I'm pretty sure he'll cover issues and facts you haven't previously been exposed to. Happy Holidays!
I have no argument with anything you say but I do want to mention an interesting upside to fusion -- we will never run out of hydrogen (and therefore its isotopes). That means we will be able to build fusion reactors pretty much forever, which means the cost of building them will go down PMF, taking with it the cost of energy. For centuries. That seems pretty cool.
“I think it’s the coolest form of energy,” says Brazilian model, digital fashion designer, and the world’s first nuclear influencer, Isabelle Boemeke, otherwise known as Isodope. . . . Hijacking the free-floating eyeballs that lurk over Instagram’s Discover Feed or TikTok’s For You, Boemeke adapts familiar influencer tropes — the workout routine, makeup tutorial, or diet plan — redirecting attention to what should be commonly shared goals: clean energy and decarbonization. “It’s a bit of a rebellion on my end,” she says, “because it’s not what my agent or society expects a model who uses social media to make.”
https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/isabelle-boemeke-interview/