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Comment by alas44 | Hacker News Reader

Climate change has inertia so probably not solved by the time we have industrial scale fusion + would not solve the two other main anthropic activity related problems: biodiversity loss and depletion of natural resources

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with unlimited cheap energy you can pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, produce hydrocarbons and pump them back into the wells

I don't know what the math looks like here, but there is waste heat in this, right? We could lower CO2, but "unlimited cheap energy" at the scale required to make a dent in climate change surely gives off a pretty phenomenal amount of heat. I wonder what the equation looks like for the overall effect on the planet.

my understanding of chemistry is poor, but presumably if energy is liberated from combustion, reversing that reaction requires energy

(with some input to kick it off possibly)

regardless, the earth receives 173,000 TW of solar radiation from the sun

we have a way to go yet

better yet... you can kep current hydrocarbon economy factories, vehicles, etc in operation by simply producing fuels from air. Wil be cheap enough. Hydrocarbons are a great, usable source of dense energy.

I really don't think all we need is cheap energy, it's still an economically unproductive thing to do, so you need a govt to tax people and use the $ to perform sequestration.

You need to build out the sequestration plants, maintain and run them, only one of those inputs is cheap energy. You need to move the carbon to a safe storage facility etc.

It's still a huge undertaking, but would be way simpler if we had cheap electricity (which it seems like we will get via solar anyways, carbon sequestration could probably be turned on and off as needed for grid conditions)

> You need to move the carbon to a safe storage facility etc.

fortunately we already have millions of holes we drilled in the ground to get the stuff we burnt originally

Carbon tax + cheap energy = people starting carbon sequestration companies to sell credits to polluters. As long as the tax is high enough we can reach close to zero net emissions.

I agree, but also you really need regulation with teeth around what is a carbon credit. The voluntary market for carbon offsets is pretty sketchy right now.

Cheap energy doesn't need to come from fusion, wind and solar are getting quite cheap, I suspect it'll take a loong time for fusion to get as cheap even after it's wall plug positive.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

28 - 37 $/MWh for solar 26 - 50 $/MWh for wind

This includes the maintenance and operating costs.

Their estimate for maintenance costs of a pre-existing nuclear plant is 29 $/MWh. That means there are cases where it'd make financial sense to shutter a pre-existing plant to build a new solar array (obviously not all cases, the generation profile of nuclear is very nice for base load)

Fusion is 10 years away from being able to generate more energy than it consumes, how far away is it from being able to be cost competitive with solar & wind?

One could, but this is unlikely to actually be done unless there is an economic incentive, which is basically why everyone put the CO2 into the air in the first place despite knowing the consequences.

carbon credits and carbon trading were invented, what, twenty years ago?

Indeed, and look how effective they’ve been.

extremely effective indeed?

(where implemented)

with unlimited clean energy you'd be able to print carbon credits as a result of direct hydrocarbon sequestration

the economic infrastructure already exists today, but the cost structure doesn't work

Isn't the fact that they were not implemented part of the definition of their failure? Since it's supposed to be the backbone of the solution that allows the neoliberal model to continue without significant changes, the fact that it was not adopted is a clear indictment.

no?

my town's anti-dog fouling laws aren't a failure because there exist other towns that permit dog fouling

in terms of contribution to global emissions everything is dominated by Chinese growth

but that doesn't mean that it hasn't curtailed emissions significantly where implemented

That's not the point.

The fundamental appeal of these carbon schemes is that they can permit a theoretical decrease in greenhouse gases while keeping the current economic model alive and well. But despite being greatly amenable to the way things currently are, with few extra efforts or changes needed in comparison to other types of plans for the climate, they were not widely adopted at all.

The system these schemes were designed to save was unable to pick even the lowest-hanging fruit that could have potentially saved it.

So yes, it might work with unlimited clean energy, but if we have that we are already in a different arena altogether with entirely new problems and solutions and where carbon credits are unnecessary anyway.

The fact that the cost-structure doesn't work now is the indictment. Cost structures is how we got into all this mess to begin with. Saying carbon credits work is like saying a healthy lifestyle can prevent obesity. It's of course true on its own, but also fairly useless since the problem is that people are very resistant to adopting such a lifestyle.

> The fact that the cost-structure doesn't work now is the indictment.

given this entire thread is about a hypothetical future where we have unlimited clean energy I'm not sure why this is a problem

The subthread was whether the carbon schemes are effective. They are either ineffective because they do not fix the incentive problem, or effective in a context where they are no longer needed

it's my subthread, and it's explicitly about what I said.

Why, do we have unlimited cheap energy? Or the technology to pull out CO2 from the atmosphere at this scale yet?

IMO this is wishful thinking, and the wrong attitude to solve a problem that is right here right now.

We should focus on reducing emissions, not on hoping that a technology that is not yet proven will be available soon

EDIT: sorry for the tone, I just re-read what I wrote. Anyhow what I wrote still stands: we have no proof that fusion will ever bring unlimited cheap energy, if ever viable.

It poses many problems, from neutron activation of the blanket to energy extraction, problems that we don't know yet how to solve, to solve them in a economically viable AND with neutral carbon footprint... well seems just unfeasible to me (hope to be proven wrong). Therefore I might suggest to pursue more understood ways to mitigate the huge problem we have

Would depletion of natural resources be so much of an issue if we could use fusion to recreate them? (after all, they didn't come into existence by magic...) Biodiversity is a bigger problem given the sheer levels of complexity and our relatively poor understanding of exactly how we depend on the exact make-up of the biosphere. Most likely humanity could survive without it, but it would be a poor sort of existence - our bodies and brains evolved in tandem with the huge diversity of life around us and is optimised to thrive in that context.

Not all natural resources are renewable. Unlimited cheap energy would probably be more harmful to nature in the short term. Unrestricted mining, logging and human expansion.

This is why my primary donations are to bio diversity and endangered animal protection orgs instead of climate change.

My layman understanding tells me depletion of natural resources will be worse if we manage to find a sustainable source of energy.

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