With the fires in LA it’s hard to feel optimistic about the future. I want to be reminded that all is not lost, we need to do a lot that likely won’t be done but there are still things to do.
So let’s say Climate Stalin became Supreme Leader of the World or just President of the United States tomorrow. Whats next? What steps do we take to stop climate change getting worse and mitigate the damage we’ve already done?
Two massive projects have to happen in parallel:
Replace or retrofit everything single device and industrial process that uses any type of fossil fuel as an input and replace it. That means every single IC motor, every single gas powered heating element, every single chemical process that uses fossil fuels as an input - every single one of those in the world needs to be replaced.
Start spamming out nuclear power plants, cover every single roof in solar panels, and build tons of new transmission lines. We could eventually decommission nuclear plants (I’m sympathetic to the proliferation and waste concerns), but we need them as a stop-gap solution.
Bringing up Stalin in this context is useful actually, because it demonstrates that this scale of thing is possible to do, and has in fact happened in history.
Plans for waste are greatly exaggerated and haven’t there been new scientific advancements that help make them more recyclable?
Kind of sort of. The main thing with nuclear is it can take 15 years to build a plant. It was the answer 2 decades ago. At this point we need something NOW and with increasing efficiencies of batteries and solar I personally think we’d be better off leap frogging the majority of nuclear projects.
We can do both. We are limited in input materials for solar and wind, and those materials don’t overlap much with what nuclear power plants need.
Nuclear waste storage is nonexistent for political reasons, not technical ones. It’s much cheaper to dump it in Africa than to hollow out Mt. Yucca.