We can't slow down burning stuff for energy, this is politically untenable.

...so the answer is to accelerate the burning, but not for the sake of burning more, but to focus on getting to true clean energy sources which will allow us to economically unwind the mess before the whole house of cards collapses, i.e. fusion + global scale solar (maybe even space solar and microwave beam down) + boatloads of batteries.

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no_wizard 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Steady state nuclear power plus wind and solar would. In today’s world, make the grid more reliable and greener than ever.

Nuclear should not be off the table. It’s safe, it’s well understood, it’s reliable and is a very cheap way to create base load capacity that renewables like solos and wind can build out on top of

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Moldoteck 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

France and Sweden proved Renewables+Nuclear can decarbonize your electric grid almost fully and pretty damn fast - under 20y with old tech without any automatic welding and such... With proper policies the whole planet could do something similar in much less time...

The challenge still remains decarbonizing the rest/electrification

	▲	no_wizard 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The challenge still remains decarbonizing the rest/electrification A challenge that can be more easily addressed if it can scale first to handle induced demand only rather than base load. It’s a smaller problem that way.

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amanaplanacanal 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure where nuclear is very cheap, but it sure isn't in the US.

Of course, given the seeming inability of the US to do any kind of large projects any more, small and decentralized is probably the only thing that will work.

	▲	lostlogin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I'm not sure where nuclear is very cheap It’s always cheap and easy when mentioned here. I live in New Zealand where we have lots of wind, rain and sun and people occasionally suggest it for here too.

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mindslight 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Please explain how "accelerating the burning" is supposed to cause fusion and global scale solar to pop into existence.

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baq 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No idea, ask fusion scientists, they might have answers on what they need built a lot of and quickly and whatever it is it’ll take energy to do it.

I wouldn’t mind shortening e.g. the Iran war by a couple of days and redirecting the funding from that to fusion research and battery buildout.

	▲	mindslight 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So you agree that fusion power generation is not at the state where it can be straightforwardly built today, and you also have no idea what it might actually take to even research it to possibly get it there, but yet you're still asserting that "accelerating the burning" will surely cause whatever needs to happen to happen? Have I got that right?