[Retric]

Many boats are going electric. Home heating, industrial processes, trains, mining, etc the vast majority of energy use you can swap without issue.

Rockets and big boats can swap to hydrogen with minor issues. Really aircraft are the odd man out, but remove bio fuels from other applications and you can largely replace aviation fuel.

After we drop CO2 emissions by 99% using existing tech we'll have decades to hit 100%.

[palata]

> the vast majority of energy use you can swap without issue.

Then you completely misunderstand the scale of the problem.

> Rockets and big boats can swap to hydrogen with minor issues.

Say they can if they have the hydrogen, then you have to produce a whole lot of hydrogen and transport it for them. Do you know how inefficient that is?

Because you make it work for one does not mean that you make it work for the whole world. Your reasoning seems very naive.

> After we drop CO2 emissions by 99% using existing tech we'll have decades to hit 100%.

Except that the only way we drop CO2 emissions by a lot is with a ton of sobriety.

[Retric]

> scale of the problem.

Saying we don’t have the infrastructure is meaningless when building infrastructure is part of my argument. The only question is if we have the technology, and yes we do.

For scale, 350 gigawatts of PV was installed in 2023 that’s enough to meet ~3% of the words 25,000 TWh annual electricity demand (after accounting for capacity factor) and the rate of PV installed per year has been accelerating. Battery manufacturing capacity is already at weeks of global electricity demand per year. Utilities haven’t been building grid scale energy storage because they don’t need it, but it’s ready when they want it.

Over the next 20+ years a great deal of current infrastructure will need to be replaced simply because of age. What replaces it could be very green without significant issue.

[palata]

> Saying we don’t have the infrastructure is meaningless when building infrastructure is part of my argument.

Again, you don't understand. I am not just saying that we don't have the infrastructure. I am saying that the size of the infrastructure we would need is a whole lot bigger than what you must imagine if you think that renewables can produce 99% of the world's energy.

You just vastly underestimate the problem. Saying "look, I went from selling 10 devices last year to 100 this year, so this proves that in 10 years I will be selling 1000000000000 devices per year" is the kind of reasoning you use in a startup when talking to a VC. But when you're being serious about solving a problem, it doesn't work like that.

Let me repeat it one last time: we will go away from fossil fuels, it's not a choice (they are limited in nature). We will need as much fission and renewables as we can get to compensate for as much as we can, but that won't remotely be enough (again, think about a real big merchant boat and tell me how it travels around the world without fossil fuels - not the startup way, but with a real solution).

So on top of fission and renewables, we need sobriety. A ton of it. And it means clever engineering across the board. So instead of wasting talents doing AI or polluting more with SpaceX, they should work on solving the actual problems we have for tomorrow.

[Retric]

3% of the worlds electricity per year isn’t several orders of magnitude from solving the problem. When I say that’s on pace to hit 100% carbon free grid before 2050 I’m not assuming crazy growth in anything.

We’re past the crazy exponentials. Global demand is still increasing every year by ~2.2% but that already includes the EV and Heat pump transition.

350GW last year, 356GW in 2024, 362GW in 2025 etc and before you know it we are done. Except 2024 is on pace to massively exceed that estimate, ~500GW looks more likely.

[palata]

Again it's all startup talk. I never mentioned orders of magnitude, I mentioned complexity. You keep focusing on what already uses electricity, ignoring the fact that 80% of the energy we use is NOT electricity.

And you still haven't answered my question: how do you power a big merchant boat with electricity? Do you realize it doesn't work with batteries, or not? And do you realize that the merchant boats ARE globalization? We don't have a technical solution for that, not even as a proof of concept. And most certainly not with renewables.

[Retric]

> 80% of the energy we use is NOT electricity

99% of the energy used by mankind is sunlight, but obviously we aren’t aiming for accuracy here.

Your 80% as fossil fuels is half (coal, natural gas) which are mostly used to make electricity and therefore goes away on a renewable grid on its own. In essence you are double counting the inefficiency of fossil fuels as if it was somehow a positive. People do use some natural gas for heating and cooking, but there’s direct swap in replacements that use electricity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum....

“40%” is oil though again that’s what’s pumped out of the ground not what’s actually used as fuel. Subtract EV’s and year really talk about 10% “of the worlds energy” used in boats and aircraft.

> big merchant boat with electricity.

New boats can run 100% hydrogen out of the gate.

Container ships don’t actually last that long, but you can also retrofit existing engines to run 85% on hydrogen fairly easily.