I am getting more pessimistic about green technologies.
I am sure that at some point this century we will no longer use fossil fuels, but the question is whether that is 20 years or 50 years.
We currently have no silver bullet.
Wind, solar, hydrogen, nuclear and current battery storage all have advantages and disadvantages.
But then oil and gas have advantages and disadvantages and have a geopolitical price as the US learned in 1973 and Europe learned in 2022.
Maybe modular nuclear reactors will help, if people don't mind a nuclear reactor in their area!
Maybe space based solar will be great, one day.
So when will our deficient, but improving, green energy technologies become good enough?
On the optimistic side Stanford engineering professor and renewable energy expert Mark Z Jacobson tweeted in 2023, “Given that scientists who study 100% renewable energy systems are unanimous that it can be done why do we hear daily on twitter and everywhere else by those who don’t study such systems that it can’t be done?
But if that is the case then why is the UK government pushing measures that are then scrapped or deemed failures?
There was the idea of replacing natural gas boilers with hydrogen boilers in homes, yes I know some on here think it is a feasible idea, but nonetheless the government then scrapped this due to "safety and cost concerns".
Then they had the great idea that we should give grants for people to install heat pumps into their homes. From what I have read these can only be installed in houses with enough spare space for the heat pump (so a minority of UK homes) and many have claimed their heat pumps do not sufficiently heat the water.
So is this clown show due to inept politicians, or are the green technologies just not currently up to the job?
On the pessimistic side Sabine Hossenfelder tweeted in December her view;
"Yes, our climate targets will fail because plans to meet them are mostly empty words.
They are slightly slowing down the developments though, so still better than nothing.
Of course we should keep on trying, and of course activists will keep on insisting the impossible is possible and then complain that no one is listening to them.
The reason all this climate talk goes nowhere is that most climate activists misidentify the source of the problem. It's not a technological problem -- we have known how to avoid climate change since we've learned of it. The problem is that we have no system to convert this knowledge into collective action. The only global system that we have to aggregate information and coordinate actions to use resources are free market economies. And for those to work, we'd have had to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions. Which we did not. So for several decades now we have witnessed meetings and demonstrations and countless opinion pieces that amounted to very little.
It is not hard to predict what is going to happen from here on because the default mode of humans is simply to keep on doing what they've been doing. This is why Carbon Capture and Storage and Carbon Dioxide Removal (eg BECCS) will become increasingly widespread -- because they'll allow nations to keep on doing what they're doing.
I see in my mentions that some people insist I must be dumb for not understanding that CCS and CDR are costly, ineffective, and unlikely to scale. Well, yes, I am so dumb that I said this in a video two years ago. I am not saying it's a good solution. I'm simply saying it's how it will go because it's the closest we can manage to a market for carbon.
And fossil fuel companies know this full well. And since that is very unlikely to keep global warming below 3 degrees, we'll end up doing stratospheric aerosol injections. Again, a stupid thing to do. I'm not saying we should do it. I am merely saying this is what I think will happen. Why? Because it's cheap and we know how to do it and the more we think about it, the more appealing it will look.
If you want to know what I think we should do, well, I've said this before. Expand solar, wind and most importantly nuclear, CCS on fossil fuel plants, upgrade the electric grids, and stop wasting money on nonsense, like for example those COP meetings…"
I read today, on the BBC;
In January, the Copernicus Climate Change Service is expected to confirm that 2023 was the hottest year globally. The above average temperatures have been likely driven in large part by climate change but also by the natural weather phenomenon El Niño.
It is not known for sure how long the El Niño will last but it is expected it will run through the first half of this year. This will likely also make 2024 the world's hottest on record, and push the world past the key 1.5C warming milestone.
So if we reach 1.5C in 2024 then the Paris Agreement has failed.
I do not agree with the extremist "Doomsters" and have no doubt that we will transition from fossil fuels, just as we transitioned from whale oil and candles.
As usual the richest will do well. The poorest will not do so well.
Of course if LENR comes through then that might be the silver bullet solution.
Here is hoping for good news in 2024.
