No startup is going to do didly-squat about the climate. If you want to reduce CO2 you will need nation-state commitment to nuclear power. Nothing else matters.
We should try though, for example did you know that 1% of humanities global energy production (that is, our civilisations entire output) is sunken into producing nitrogen based fertilisers,
That’s why my startup is working on catalysis models, so that we can get some catalysts to dramatically decrease the energy requirements of these enormous industrial processes. Also things like green chemistry (another project we are working on) is going to remove the need for a petroleum based chemical and replace it with an organic one that comes out of discarded orange peels.
Yep sure, I’m not going to have a nation-state level of impact, but the discovery of the right catalyst can often change entire industries.
So I’m trying as hard as I can, every day, to push towards a sustainable future, if enough people do it, we might be able to start to move the needle
If you want to do fundimental new discoveries like this, then a lot - there's not a lot of open source code out there - most of what's on github is just students re-hashing methods from > 5 years ago. If you want to push the boundaries the best way is to read papers, practice implementing yourself, and befriend quantum physicists and computational chemists around the world that you can ask when you get stuck.
Chemistry is an enormous field too, you would have to concentrate on a much smaller section, I have been self studying for about 8 years now, (+ I have 20 years software development experience) and I think I'm getting to the point where I have complete understanding of the current SOTA and am pushing at the boundaries -- most of the ideas I am implementing are coming out in papers weeks or months later, so I feel like I'm at the edge.
Self study requires an enormous amount of discipline though, which is partially why universities exist - because most people do not have the discipline to stick at something for 3-8 years, and I am doing it 7 days a week, almost every day of the year - because I just love this stuff, it's not tiring, it's exhilarating!
I totally agree that a large commitment to green energy (which will have to include nuclear) is necessary. But not sufficient, imo.
> Nothing else matters
I assume you're writing this as hyperbole, but for readers who may not realize, this is definitely not true. Even if the entire grid was nuclear, there are still lots of other greenhouse emitting sources that need to be decarbonized. For example, building materials (like concrete) and livestock emissions account for ~10% of emissions alone [1]. Not to mention that many sources of transportation (16.2% of emissions) are currently not capable of running on just electricity (i.e. aviation) and need technology innovation. This problem is too complicated to be fixed by one single thing.
It’s actually worse. Even if we dropped our emissions to 0, global warming still keeps going because we’ve pumped so much greenhouse gasses into the air already.
I think OP is correct that we have to get behind nuclear in a big way. A way that we haven’t even started going down. You’re also correct that it’s not sufficient.
However. If you have a lot of nuclear capacity (and I’m talking a massive overbuild in capacity), suddenly spending gobs of it on CO2 recapture isn’t a big deal. That’s probably why OP is saying nuclear at this point is the only viable path forward. Because if you want to do recapture at scale (and you have to go try to even try to arrest the growth), nothing other than nuclear can provide the capacity needed.
Climate Change predictions are an aggregate of multiple models which have already proven unreliable. These models are made up of thousands of variables and parameters estimating things for which there is none to little real data.
For example, take a model of
aX + bY + cZ = m
X,Y,Z are known values
a,b,c are parameters
A parameter is usually selected as a mean value of a range of potential values, a statistical distribution. So the parameters form an N dimensional space representing their ranges. In the given example it is three dimensional.
When the parameter ranges are not well known the area of the N dimensional parameter space increases because a weak estimator requires a higher confidence interval than a strong one.
So the question in complex modeling, and climate modeling is highly complex, is how close is the parameterization selected to the real parameters?
Wide parameter spaces across high dimensions are really fragile because the space is so wide. Good models account for this by spanning the parameter space, i.e. taking all the combinations at intervals and running the models multiple times.
The problem is, climate models are so big, and and have so many parameters that you cannot calculate them all on a human lifespan timescale.
If we are in a worst case scenario with climate change then we should be thinking 100% in terms of mitigations. More green and sustainable pathways make more sense with longer timelines.
Under any condition it does not look like Russia, India, and China are willing to cut their carbon profile in the future which means we really should be focused on mitigation and sensible sustainability projects.
Modeling is a very useful and valuable tool but it's easily misused and manipulated, and policy decision makers generally do not understand it's frailties.
If you listen to what the BRICS+ nations are discussing it's not COP and IPCC topics. There is a lot of dependence on petroleum both as an energy source and a revenue generator. They show no evidence of movement on zero carbon absent free money from the west.
Even if we started building thousends of new nuclear power plants:
- we dont have enough trained staff to build and operate them
- it takes 5-10years to build one
- we dont have infrastructure to supply them all with fuel and dispose waste (even new ones that can run on previous waste MSR)
- we are too divided as a spiecies and too occupied with worthless disputes (are you pink or blue? Yada yada)
Ppl at the top realized that they cannot stop changes, so instead are preparing for alternatives. We cannot stop it nor reverse, so all we can do is adapt.
There is not much place left to run to, so better get trained now to defend yourself and your family.
Ps. Yes, millions if not billions of ppl will die. Top does not care. It wont be them.
Ps2. To recapture CO2 we have all energy we need provided by sun. All we need is to reforrest half of the land globe.
I have no interest in being part of a death cult. The best time to plant a forest is a decade ago. The second best time is now. I find this attitude particularly toxic because it’s basically “too hard. Don’t do it” and is just as bad as all the FUD against nuclear.
How about this. It’s ok to declare nuclear a failure once we actually make a serious attempt to do it in the first place.
> The best time to plant a forest is a decade ago. The second best time is now.
The best time to focus on developing already invented renewable technology was over a decade before the first fission reactor. The second best time is now.
Nuclear has had trillions of public money and countless lifetimes of research spent on it. And cost trillions more in externalities. A tiny fraction of that investment that finally started getting spent in earnest in 2010 has overtaken 70 years of nuclear construction with the buildout mostly happening in the last five years.
It's not "too hard, don't do it" it's "stop trying to hold back the thing that's working to chase a failed dream".
Nuclear has seen a dearth of investment for about 40 years since everyone went into a crazy panic over Three Mile Island (non event) and Chernobyl (legit issue but addressable). Fukushima provided a final topper. Even though with each accident designs incorporate more and more security features so that safety is automatically passive. At the same time, governments increase regulations and permitting complexity which drives costs up DESPITE increasing safety standards negating the need for that.
Renewables like solar and wind don’t work at grid scale to supplant base load provided by fossil fuels without batteries. Regardless of the details, batteries have only just started to be able to be used for that, primarily due to smartphones and now electric cars increasing demand. You were never going to get there faster. And batteries, still, have terrible displacing base load because they’re not energy dense compared with fossil fuels. Oh, and batteries are NOT renewable, requiring strip mining precious metals that will get more and more expensive as easily accessible resources are depleted.
I have no problem with renewables and we SHOULD be investing in it. Unlike fossil fuels, nuclear can turn generation on / off pretty quickly without issue. So the more renewables are able to provide, the less we run the plants (it changes the unit economics of course, but we should be ok running nuclear at a loss, and yet we insist it must be profitable). But we should be honest about the reality and the consequences of going down the route of renewables without nuclear. Battery technology is great and improvements go faster than nuclear. That’s for sure. But
a) it’s still veeeeery early days for grid scale batteries
b) batteries are tiny bombs with potential for runaway chemical reactions. As density increases and larger battery installations are made, those are essentially massive bombs and fire risks. I’m not sure that’s less risky vs nuclear unless it’s in the middle of nowhere. I would personally feel more comfortable living to a nuclear plant than a massive battery (eg look at why fly wheels aren’t used even though they have insanely better density than lithium ion and as battery density increases, I suspect you’ll just approach flywheel behavior). Radioactive materials by comparison are more stable outside the reactor.
Look. I don’t disagree that nuclear had challenges to handle. However, to me they seem solvable because necessity is the mother of invention and we know that nuclear can meet all the every needs of earth many many times over. That seems harder with batteries because it starts way further back and requires meaningful R&D advances to make renewables viable to maybe take on current energy needs.
Finally your point about meeting the world's needs many times over is also blatantly wrong. Existing designs run out of fuel almost immediately at a few TW, and the more burner reactors you build the longer your fictional breeder fleet takes to start.
One theory was that global warming would increase the quantity of clouds in the air. And the question was whether it would act more as a sun rays shield, or more as a warmth shield.
I'm very much a layman when it comes to this area, but I once read that livestock emissions are exaggerated when it comes to climate change. I.e. it's true they account for a large amount of emissions, but that the missions aren't as harmful as was previously thought. Is there truth to that, or was it just hearsay?
> Why the misconception? In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a study titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which received widespread international attention. It stated that livestock produced a staggering 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The agency drew a startling conclusion: Livestock was doing more to harm the climate than all modes of transportation combined. This latter claim was wrong, [...]
In any case, meat production's externalities go far beyond direct emissions.
> Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. [...]
> There is also a highly unequal distribution of land use between livestock and crops for human consumption. If we combine pastures used for grazing with land used to grow crops for animal feed, livestock accounts for 77% of global farming land. While livestock takes up most of the world’s agricultural land it only produces 18% of the world’s calories and 37% of total protein.
Also a layman but my understanding is the issue is 'percent of emissions' part of the fact. The emissions are methane, which are 'worse' than CO2 - so some statistics normalize for this and result in a high % of emissions. I think it's semantics and bad-faith actors use the wording that helps them the most, which muddies the waters.
Only nuclear? That seems more like a political attitude than a considered stance. Especially with the amazing progress that has been made with wind and solar.
Not just political gridlock. Is a political identity.
Oh wow, what an amazing coincidence that the only thing that will work is directly tied to keeping the specific people in power and universally subscribing to their tax plan.
Yeah, destroy those ecosystems. Most tree planting projects are either scams or leave the local area worse off than when it started, unless it's replanting efforts on burned areas. And even then when done at a large scale to accommodate the feel-good goals of some startup, tree diversity is also not valued, and so again the ecosystem gets worse than when it started.
"In the last week I've started to receive inquiries from people running tree planting programs wanting my help. I am suggesting that they shut down their programs. Here I will explain why:" - [0]
Not if you’re a for-profit VC firm looking to invest in an area with changing regulation, which could lead to trillions of dollars of economic opportunity.
Yes. Commit to a method that will run out of fuel in under a decade before even solving half of the problem and has had well over half a century of work spent on it instead of the thing that has already eclipsed it after a decade of actually trying.
If there are going to big investments in nuclear, then it'd make sense to invest in R&D to improve nuclear power. The same goes for any other renewable energy technology.
"Big Industry" matters a lot, but personal transportation is also a large part of emissions. Especially for people that fly intercontinental more than once a decade.
It's wrong to assume that you can just convince people to give up their fossil fuel SUVs, but that means another mechanism has to be used to make them, not that aggregated personal choice doesn't have a huge impact.
This campaign promoted an inefficient mechanism, fully knowing it wouldn't work, but that doesn't mean that peoples lifestyles don't matter.
Arguing that only industry needs to change is also a cheap cop-out, belying the scale of the problem.
The point is simple. CO2 emissions suffer from tragedy of the commons. The person taking individual positive action can only suffer from it. Tragedy of the commons requires government action like carbon taxes and subsidies. This is easy to implement. Making snide comments on online forums does nothing, nor does making individual personal sacrifices that obviously don't scale.
I bought an EV not because I have any delusions that my purchase of an EV would save the planet. I bought it because California offered me free car pool lane access that would get me back 20 minutes every day on the commute. With the subsidies etc, TCO worked out to be the same as a Camry.
When 100 million EVs are sold we will see some meaningful impact.
Individual sacrifices (I would rather say individual lifestyle changes) do scale somwhat (for example meat consumption has gone down in germany by almost 10% over the last 10 years and it's not because meat is expensive or had disincentives attached to it), but not to the degree needed.
Saying we only need nuclear power is obviously not true and in this case the snide comment points to the fact that the lifes of individuals will also need to change and pushing all needed change away to the industry is wrong. Peoples lifes will need to change, encouraged and enforced by legislation.
And I do think people also hava a individual responsibility (especially for stuff that can't be decarbonised in the near future with good alternatives like meat consumption or flying, but also for buying unneeded large cars or wasting energy), even though it doesn't work for change on a larger scale.
> for example meat consumption has gone down in germany by almost 10% over the last 10 years and it's not because meat is expensive or had disincentives attached to it),
Any citations to show that this reduction was through altruistic individual action for climate change?
