There are still a lot of obstacles to solve with going to base solar power. But I agree we should still be investing into it. However nuclear power is an all but completely solved problem and it has huge benefits in scaling with additional nuclear industries, where as solar has (perhaps minor, perhaps not) obstacles towards massive scaling. If we wanted to guarantee clean energy production into the future, I still think nuclear is a right choice. Maybe in 30-40 years solar will have solved all its problems and be built enough to stand on its own and we don't need any more nuke plants built, but we don't really know that will be true.
It is always best to plant the trees now and then not need to harvest them later rather than not plant them now and then not have them when you do need them.
The problem with nuclear is the price. As someone else already brought up[0], nuclear is about four times as expensive as solar - and that's pretty much the best case scenario. Try to use nuclear as a peaker plants and it's going to be closer to forty times as expensive, simply because the cost of nuclear is dominated by the construction loan.
A lot of solar's problems magically disappear when you apply a nuclear-level budget to it. Less output during cloudy days? Build twice as many panels and you've solved it while still remaining cheaper than nuclear. What about night? Build wind turbines, hydro storage, and batteries Windless, dark winter nights? You've got a massive budget for a handful of 99.9%-idle fossil peaker plants with carbon capture.
Nuclear is a technological solution to an economical problem. It's sexy, but it doesn't solve anything.
You can have a pretty good simulacrum of a forest using only two tennis courts worth of land (a pittance in most US cities that have 30% reserved for parking).
4. Third places are money making establishments now rather than community focused. So people save up to go to the ones that they'll remember. So there's competing money for these attractions, and the experience undergoes enshitification.
Solutions?
- lower the cost of community space so more people can enjoy them.
- social etiquette needs be enforced through culture. Conformity has its benefits. We don't need planes to land because Johnny had too much to drink.
that's why i enjoy going to hackerspaces. they are not free of drama, but generally welcoming and give the freedom to do a lot of things, including sitting in a corner in front of your computer ignoring everyone, giving you the freedom to join in whenever you feel comfortable.
Why do you say that? Typical fuel consumption values for passenger aircraft are 2.5-4 liters per 100km per passenger. So if you fly 1,000km, you'll use 25-40 liters of fuel. At current prices (around 60 cents per liter), that's $15-25 worth of fuel.
A liter of jet fuel contains 35-38 megajoules of energy, which is around 10 kilowatt-hours. Assuming 5% efficiency of using CO2, water, and cheap solar electricity (3 cents per kwh) to synthesize fuel, the cost of input energy per liter would be around 60 cents, which is the same as current fuel prices. The actual cost would be higher because you need to pay for the plant, workers, consumable catalysts, transporting the fuel to airports, etc. But real world efficiency would likely be higher than 5%. Also solar panels are still getting cheaper and more efficient, so 3 cents per kWh may be considered expensive in a decade.
Even without electric aircraft, there's no reason in principle why aviation needs to be expensive or bad for the environment. If demand for petroleum causes prices to increase enough, synthesized fuels will become economically competitive.
I believe that by 2050 synthetic hydrocarbons made from carbon dioxide and clean electricity will be deliverable at a real (inflation adjusted) cost less than than 3x current oil prices, on an equivalent-energy-content basis. That could more than double the costs of a transatlantic flight, but still wouldn't price it out of reach of the upper middle class.
Synthetic methanol made with renewable energy has already been commercialized on a modest scale:
At 10-15% conversion efficiency, you're burning 85-90% of your energy just making the damn fuel, requiring 6-7× more renewable infrastructure than direct electrification. Current production costs are $15-25/gallon (not the fairy tale $2-3/gallon of jet fuel), and the physics won't magically improve to hit their "3× oil prices by 2050" fantasy. To replace global aviation fuel would demand a staggering 32,000 TWh of new clean energy generation – that's roughly equivalent to building 900 nuclear plants just to make luxury jet fuel while the rest of the grid still burns coal.
You've not actually addressed the cost points he makes. You seem to bediscounting the sheer cost effectiveness of renewable power because if an ideological opposition to it.
The wonderful thing about looking at how much something actually costs is you don't need to do all the work yourself - just look at the expense of the inputs and calculate your output. Solar panel electricity is absurdly cheap.
In any case it's obvious that current direct electrification is not feasible using current battery tech, so alternatives need to be explored. Unless we find a battery tech with 10x energy density batteries aren't likely to be viable in the air.
Just build more nuclear power plants. There’s absolutely no reason why modern civilization still needs to rely so heavily on hydrocarbons. Unlimited electric energy, with a electrified rail network, public transportation and EVs for commuting, should take care of most use cases, except maybe a few where the energy density doesn’t make sense.
And don’t even get me started with the “our grid cannot handle it” nonsense. If it cannot, then make it so that it can. When this country started off, we didn’t say “our roads cannot handle the cars”, instead we built them, quite a lot of them. We can do that again.
Sure, nuclear too. I'm fine with any low-emissions energy source. Electrification can take care of most terrestrial transportation. I still think we'll eventually use synthetic hydrocarbons for long range flights and a few other niche applications like rocket launches.
Actual comprehensive high speed rail networks would reduce the overall carbon footprint of travel by a huge factor, while still permitting a high overall degree of affordable mobility.
I think most of the public would choose the second option. And this is a 500km long trip. Anything longer, and planes win by even larger margin.
If you're talking about the US, there's more about its rail networks density than unwillingness of Americans to build new railroads. It's also because people... don't really like using trains for long-distance transit?
I'm not saying it'll cost the same, I'm saying it'll still be accessible. (Also, comfort level on a train is typically much better.)
And it'll properly price in externalities, which is not currently the case.
Also, just to quibble, I think the _total_ travel time is actually not that different considering you're supposed to get to the airport at least an hour early, and how accessible airports are to population centers relative to train stations.
If you had to catch a cab either two or from the airport, but could avoid it with a train, the costs you cite are suddenly about the same.
Chill, biofuels or gas synthesis will be fine and carbon neutral for big jets. Once solar or fusion produces the primary power cheaply the conversion loss isn't a huge deal.
I think we'll see the global rich (western middle class) continue to fly well past the onset of the famines and refugee waves.
Without a single family detached house and a regular vacation flight most "middle class" people would have no idea why to get up in the morning. Our whole culture is built around lauding and striving toward that pattern as the good life. It will have to be taken from them, they will not give it up willingly.
They may not have been alluding to violence; perhaps something like democracy itself would be enough to take that lifestyle away from the middle class. If billionaires consolidate enough power & resources and push the tax burden onto the middle class which makes yearly vacations unaffordable
People drive to work anyway. A vacation or two every year is probably not even a double digit percent of a person’s total fossil fuel usage, and gives them a lot of happiness and reason to work and do things that are good for society.
Why is there a segment of the population that wants to live in poverty and squalor?
How much pollution is okay? Why not argue for efficiency standards rather than bans?
Everything could be said to “harm people”. Banning travel could make some people depressed and who knows what that could lead to? Or it might lead to a less connected world and less familiarity with people in other places, and maybe makes wars more likely?
Except here in Germany, at least the restaurants (but the art of cooking has declined too, favoring frozen pizza and similar foods). Especially since COVID. Our restaurant food is not good, and will still get five stars in the restaurant reviews all the time.
After COVID it got even worse. In my major city I saw food in well-known central restaurants become really bad, despite significant increases in price, and I mean "bad" and not just "it is not as tasty as I would like".
What is thriving are Döner (kebab shops) - often using questionable "meat", dirt-cheap Asian places (nowadays often with "Sushi", at very low prices), and burger shops. Italian restaurants focus on pizza and pasta - the cheapest-to-prepare easy-carbs-focused options.
I miss the Bay Area and its food options (I used to live there for quite a few years).
There's an aspect of "have to", as well, in many larger cities. I mean, I suppose if you were morally opposed to walking maybe you could spend a couple of hours a day in traffic and rent parking somewhere... Many offices, even offices in which very affluent people work, would not necessarily have parking, and if they did it would not be enough for everyone. I work for a big multinational in Dublin, in an office that has about 500 people and I think about 30 or 40 parking spaces. This is the first office I've worked in that had parking at all (mostly a consequence of it being from the 1970s), and Ireland is one of the _more_ car-oriented European countries.
And Dublin isn't exactly a huge city. If you take the likes of London or Paris, most affluent people are going to be commuting by public transport; driving just isn't really practical.
I'd be curious whether NYC, which has some aspects of this, has longer life expectancies than elsewhere in the US.
But longer-term/bigger-picture I think I'd argue it is that way because that's the culture.
If we wanted to drive everywhere we'd see (over time) more suburbs springing up devoid of high streets and new town centres, with parking facilities near to existing centres, or as brownfield developments on the sites of former walkable residences.
You more or less have to. If you're very wealthy I guess you could travel everywhere on a sedan chair or something, but the US thing where you drive to everything can't work in many parts of Europe.
In very high density areas they don't want private motor vehicles so they're just banned, there's maybe public transit but you'd really have to be unhurried to take public transit over a distance that's say a 10 minute walk.
In very low density areas nobody bothered adding a road. Why not just walk? I mean you could use a serious off road vehicle (no the fact your "truck" says it has AWD does not mean it will work) but even in places where that's legal why not just fucking walk?
I'm quite ambivalent about nuclear power. On the one hand it's been proven that nuclear power isn't the answer to the energy transition question (https://sppga.ubc.ca/nuclear-is-not-the-solution/) - on the other hand - it makes up waaay more of my current carbon free energy.
For southern states, or states that get a lot of solar power, they shouldn't have nukes.
For areas that have plenty of wind, they shouldn't have nukes.
For areas with lots of people, they shouldn't have nukes.
Areas of seismic activity, they shouldn't have nukes.
Research needs to be done on how to lower the cost of interconnect and installation of solar power... like billions of dollars of research rivaling nuke research.
