[Marha01]

For example: the current societal problem of not doing enough against climate change would disappear if we developed cheap fusion power and/or very cheap grid-scale batteries that would remove the intermittency issue from renewables. Such power sources would quickly replace fossil fuels simply due to better economics, no need to change society to care about climate change anymore.

[marcta]

May I interest you in Jevon's paradox: if a thing becomes cheaper or more efficient, usage tends to go up.

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

[Marha01]

How will increased energy use from *carbon-neutral sources* cause climate change?

[bayindirh]

You know, the laws of thermodynamics. Every machine generates heat. For example datacenters generate megawatts of it.

Even though you do have less greenhouse gases to trap the heat, you will be pumping more of that heat into the atmosphere, seas and oceans, warming everything up.

You're removing one aspect of climate change but not all aspects of it, still affecting the climate and ecosystems.

Also, for example, we still can't fly passenger and cargo planes with electricity for now, so you won't be able to remove all greenhouse gases, yet.

Look at the data [0]. Yes, energy production and heating is the biggest contributor, and even if you manage to remove it completely with the transportation sector via electrification, half of the emissions are still there.

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

[Marha01]

> Even though you do have less greenhouse gases to trap the heat, you will be pumping more of that heat into the atmosphere, seas and oceans, warming everything up.

The amount of heat pumped out by humans this way is so miniscule compared to natural flows that this is a complete non-issue on a global scale, and will be for a very long time.

[cwmoore]

Sure, so then what does society do with all of the cheap energy? Human nature is still there. Among other things, leads directly to discarding even more plastic junk wherever it’s convenient and no one complains too much.

[bayindirh]

Recently Animats replied to one of my comments and brought "Megawatt Racks" to my attention.

I work at a datacenter. We provide compute resources to researchers, and while our datacenter is not small or low energy, one of our systems have Green500 certification and we try to do things as efficient as possible.

When I look at our racks, some of them are DLC BTW, and imagine each of them can pack a MW system now, I shudder. Not because of us, but what AI datacenters gonna do with that energy density and how much heat will these systems put out.