elproxy

Fundamentally capitalism isn't about pricing things, it's about growth and extracting a profit.

Not on the right order of magnitude. We need to reduce our material consumption and energy consumption, even keeping them to the present level would not be sufficient, so for what you're talking about we'd need absolute decoupling, and that won't happen through efficiency gains, I'm willing to take that bet any day (and without even invoking Jeavons' paradox). https://eeb.org/decoupling-debunked1/ PS: this was this week's latest paper that helps comprehend what exponential growth means: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3010-5

In a productivist system that is... The issue is that the options we have on the table at this point are keeping such a system (possibly not keeping growth going anyway I may add) and we’re pretty much guaranteed mass death or coming up with some alternatives.

Surprised that nobody in the answers points to the levels of nitrous oxide emissions that nitrogen fertilizers brought along with them. At some point we have to decide which is worse: lower yields or hothouse earth...

There's still plenty of references and small but essential stuff. One notorious example that comes to mind is the KURL name that stuck: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/blink.git/+/maste...

I feel Oil, Power and War by Matthieu Auzanneau would deserve more publicity. (Edit: italicized)

Explained before the advent of computers as Jevons’ Paradox

Arguably, licensing revenue was a drop in the bucket for Nokia and they had a lot more to lose with the liability that came from commercial customers. It was a hard move to (at least partially) undo for the Qt Company.

https://www.qt.io/licensing/ Commercial, GPL or LGPLv3 are available, which means they are going after embedded customers who typically don't want to open up their hardware (TVs, Cars, etc). Anybody else is free to reap the benefits, even for developing a commercial app on desktop (granted, that's a tough enough market to crack already these days).

Considering we can't hold big oil accountable for burrying the lede on climate change, and electing to spread lies and cause confusion instead, I guess that's fair.

Some questions just shouldn't be asked if one is not willing to put in the effort to educate first. A recent poll in France found out that more than half of the people believed nuclear power was bad for the climate!

My point exactly, I refer you to the first sentence of the article, which I was criticizing: "Hydrogen, overlooked for decades by Germany’s energy planners, is gaining ground as alternative to fossil fuels as the nation scrambles to recover lost ground on its climate promises."

It’s not a technological or even a technical problem

Just gonna have to shower your enthusiasm a wee bit on the electricity prices in France: they are rising steeply, but this is mostly for political reasons, as this was to allow the private sector to make money from the public nuclear production in the name of "free and fair competition". It's explained reasonably well here (in french only though): https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/March%C3%A9_de_l%27%C3%A9lectr...

I refer you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_energy

Unlike fossil fuels, hydrogen is not a primary energy, so that article starts very poorly.

Don’t forget the PR aspect, and political cost. A lot of people in France believe nuclear power is carbon intensive because of the plume coming out of the towers.

I thought the cooling towers at Tricastin were only for the fuel enrichment part

The problem is regulations. If the river is already hotter than the max temperature allowed as output, then it’s not possible to operate, for regulatory reasons. Temperature delta is on the order of 0.1°C

Agree on most things except on the worst case scenario being constant with time. We should expect things to get worse and plan accordingly.

Also note that PV efficiency goes down with heat, so I fully agree with you that excessive AC reliance is a very real concern. Insulating buildings should be a big priority.

The problem is two-fold: maintenance scheduled in the summer when the demand is “usually” lower. And stations operating with a river for cooling, where they have severe restrictions on many parameters, including maximum output temperature, which the river itself now goes over during a heatwave, so they need to shut down. It is a paradoxical situation in which the combination of our use of fossil fuels worldwide and inadequate legislation bars us from using a decarbonized energy source.

ITER will most likely be a big net negative, and the cost is much higher. Should we cancel it without trying then? If you consider Superphenix as a prototype shut down prematurely for political and ideological reasons, the numbers aren’t that bad. Pretty sad that this wasn’t the last one built in Europe, long term thinking has gone out the window decades ago...

There's a lot of irrational talk on nuclear (which one could even be tempted to suspect was the result of astro-turfing campaigns by oil companies), I find this is a pretty decent starting point to question mainstream opinions and beliefs: https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/nuclear/discussin... Also, regarding accidents, it is not solely a property of nuclear power, see for instance the Banqiao dam catastrophe.

I think the key technology when looking at extending supplies is fissile breeding, so you probably want to look at fast neutron reactors, and since you quote the french wikipedia, I will follow suit: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superphénix If you are curious about these subjects and a french speaker, there's a series on energy with many aspects of Nuclear on the french speaking youtube channel "Le Réveilleur". Jean-Marc Jancovici has also written and talked a fair bit about Nuclear in the context of energy and climate.

I think orders of magnitude are in different leagues, a quick indication being the relative shares of fossil fuels and wind/solar in global final energy. Our best bet for carbon capture is probably to be found in the plant kingdom.

The CO2 we’re putting in the atmosphere from the combustion of fossil fuels will be there for 10000 years. Current nuclear waste is essentially harmless in a few centuries.

Your math is off on the current scale of wind and PV and the time it takes to get it anywhere significant. Plus you are forgetting storage and infrastructure costs due to the intermittent nature of these sources and the imposed load factor. See https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/renewables/100-re...

Hydro is finite... When you've harnessed 80%~90% of the potential, that's about it.

> ... to help pay for some the policies

Not quite. https://twitter.com/anatolium/status/1077225708659847168