Fossil Fuels Are Dead
antipope.org
antipope.org
It's not because Charlie is wrong, it's because ground based solar and storage batteries have gotten incredibly cheap and Wright's law is going to make them even more incredibly cheap in the future.
https://www.tsungxu.com/clean-energy-transition-guide/
The headline is right, though. fossil fuels are dead.
Agree with you. For the ones not familiar with Wright's law:
Pioneered by Theodore Wright in 1936, Wright’s Law aims to provide a reliable framework for forecasting cost declines as a function of cumulative production. Specifically, it states that for every cumulative doubling of units produced, costs will fall by a constant percentage.
Assuming that I'm wrong and it's still viable, what about the risk to the inhabitants of the Earth if/when the attitude control malfunctions and a directed energy beam incinerates a whole city?
That's energy (and heat) that would otherwise have passed by Earth, now entering Earth's biosphere. What would that do to the climate?
So generating additional heat (adding heat to the system) is not a current or future concern as long as heat retention stops growing
But, as Stross points out there is a 70% loss in transmission, and presumably most of that ends up as heat in the atmosphere. Now as to the question of how significant is the waste heat from that energy? I once did a ball-park calculation in which I determined that something like 4% of global heating comes not from greenhouse effect but from waste heat[1]. If that's right, then if we replace all of our energy usage with space-based solar of which only 1/3 makes it to earth and the rest is turned to waste heat we'd be be down to about 12% of current (combined green-house and waste heat) global heating. That's seems like a huge win, and we'd have enough energy to spare to start extracting CO2 from the atmosphere until we even compensate for that.
[1] I can't find my calculations right now, and I'd love for someone to independently check that.
Amount is a subjet of the methodology, but to understand that there is a significant amount of, essentially, heating up of the street someone doesn't even need a fancy IR camera.
Current governments are helping the big oil and coal lobbies more than trying to move to renewables. And probably the money behind oil and coal will try to obstruct the success of such competition in different ways. So no, not a lot of players will cooperate there.
And that, assuming that it will work as intended, that won't be accidents of any kind, that will be possible to actually do that massive launch, and other things that may not work in practice.
Yes, is a nice looking idea, we can buy the idea of giant shades floating in the sky generating clean energy for all the world. But humbler solutions may be within our reach, if we accept to slow down and change our lifestyle/economy/etc. Anything that try to sell us magic without changing the roots of the problem may be more a delay/distraction tactic than a solution at all.
Saying that, this is one of the most shocking blog posts by anyone I've ever read. Yes, it was a year ago now, but this is cilivization-saving level stuff, if Charlie is right and Musk makes it work.
"HOW CAN FOSSILS DIE IF THEY'RE ALREADY SKELETONS"
A big pushback against wind is "what about the birds?" which is a dubious argument at best. The microwave beam probably wouldn't be the death laser you would imagine, but it would still end up with significant pushback from those susceptible to petrochem propaganda.
Musk publicly called space based solar the stupidest thing in the world. His argument being you’re lifting solar panels into space to catch photons, where you convert them to electricity, —you then convert them BACK to photons and send them to the ground —where you convert them BACK to electricity.
It doesn’t matter if he’s right, if he thinks he’s right he’s not doing it.
Let me tell you of one of my pet pieces: space solar power. OK, the stupidest thing ever. And if anybody should think, should like space solar power, it should be me. I’ve got a rocket company and a solar company. I should be like – I should really be on it, you know. But it’s like super obviously not going to work because if you have solar panels … First of all it has to be better than having solar panels on Earth, right? Solar panel is in orbit you get twice the solar energy, assuming that it’s out of Earth’s shadow, but you have got to do a double conversion. So you are going to covert it from photon to electron to photon back to electron. So you got to make this double conversion. What’s your conversion efficiency? All in you are going to have a real hard time actually even getting to sort of 50 percent. (Side comment on conversion efficiency responding to remark from the audience.) Take any given solar cell, is it better to have it on Earth or better to have it in orbit? What do you get for being in Orbit? You get twice as much sun, best case, but you have got to do a conversion – you’ve got to convert it to photons, the energy to photons or you have incoming photons that go to electrons but you’ve got to do two conversions that you don’t have to do on Earth which is you got to turn it into photons and turn the photons back into electrons – and that double conversion is going to get you back to where you started, basically. So why are you bothering sending them to bloody space? And, by the way, electron to photon converters are not free and nor is sending stuff to space. Obviously, super (likely meaning space solar power) doesn’t work. Case closed.
https://today.yougov.com/topics/economy/explore/public_figur...
Mark Cuban or Warren Buffett are more popular if you measure by (positive - negative) rather than just number of people with a positive opinion. But any way you slice it, Elon Musk is generally popular.