| > look at the number: most likely we won't replace. We will just compensate for some of the loss. If you are referring to the current political situation, in which nuclear is at a huge disadvantage for irrational reasons, then I would agree that we won't start building serious nuclear capacity unless and until that political situation changes. But that will need to happen for any solution to work. > Did you ever stop to check how many nuclear plants we would need to replace all fossil fuels? About as many as we currently have of fossil fuel plants, since the replacement, at least for large base load electrical plants, is more or less one to one. There is no technical reason why we can't build that number of plants; your apparent belief to the contrary is simply uninformed. The obstacles are purely political. > That's just about the narrative. No, it isn't, it's about basic facts: poverty kills people. "Poverty" for most of the world does not mean "can't afford the Disney channel" or "can't afford wasteful overconsumption". It means "can't get enough to eat", "can't get basic health care", "can't afford basic control over your life". Telling people that they just have to suck it up and accept that because of your "degrowth" narrative is not going to work. Nor is it necessary. You and I are posting here in a medium that requires an industrial civilization, and doing that does not imply wasteful overconsumption. I have had the computer I'm writing this post on for ten years. I've had my current phone for three (and it would be more except that my last one broke--I had that one for about seven or eight years). I've had my current car for six, and my wife has had her current car for ten. I think there are many more people living in first world countries who are like us, than who are wastefully overconsuming. We don't need "degrowth". Nor will it be forced on us by running out of fossil fuels. If it is forced on us, it will be by stupid politics that refuses to adopt an obvious alternative that has been staring us in the face for decades. |
Either you misunderstood me, or that's bad faith. I said that we need sobriety: we need to stop consuming too much energy (and increasing the rate at which we consume it).
I also said that if we don't get our act together and control the transition to a world without fossil fuels (and hence with less energy), then it won't be sobriety, it will be poverty. Obviously, nobody wants poverty, and I know we do agree on that. Don't make me say what I haven't.
Now the thing is that you seem to vastly underestimate the power of fossil fuels and the difficulty of nuclear power. Do you even know how one would "reverse the chemical reaction that takes place when fuels are burned"? Sounds to me like you don't have much knowledge in chemistry, do you. Note that I am not a chemist myself, I just had a specialization in environmental chemistry at university. But what's for sure is that reversing a chemical process is not always easy, and this one surely isn't.
You can't just throw ideas out there about "reversing chemical reactions" without having a clue how much energy it takes to do that. Energy is not infinite, it's not that hard to grasp, is it?