Jonathan Blow explains how the climate change could be solved and what are the actual obstacles to achieving that goal. He also talks about the homelessness crisis in San Francisco. Tip me: ko-fi.com/blowfan Jon's Twitch: / j_blow
Something like: "it's not about solving the problem - it's about making a buck or a billion out of it" is THE answer to the overwhelming majority of questions about "why won't somebody do something" that I find ever more consistently throughout my life. It gradually comes to a point where it's not even funny anymore. But you seem to underestimate the stupidity we're dealing with. People go a lot further than just climate change on that... like WAR, for example, where you don't just have an inkling that "something's fishy with the air", but you ACTUALLY see people dying almost in front of your f-ing eyes. Or take something like simple greed. It's so profoundly irrational in the large scheme of things, but none the less all but rules hearts and minds... The world even! So, I wouldn't say that if someone wanted to solve something and took it seriously it would've been solved. Also, I would be cautious about categorical statements on any sort of solution (not that I claim you make any). First off, because the chain of "blame" might stretch a lot further than you think (i.e. society itself and the way it's structured) and secondly - you might step on a slippery slope of Dunning-Kruger (with the nuclear thing, I mean) and as far as I know, no one wants to be there or see their heroes there.
his, and also your take reminds me of smt. Yuval Noah Harari likes to say, that is, that we nowadays often times have a "engineer's way" of thinking of problems. It's a pretty good way to solve a lot of problems (also in programing for that matter), but social or societal conflicts do have more nuances and "pressure points" that need to be considered in order for a wholesome solution. One could also argue the exact other way around: If it were such a simple problem, it would have been solved a long time ago! For your own peace of mind: people aren't rational. Don't bother^^. Nobody is. It's a construct. A mind game. If you take into account the likely outcome of the prisoner dilema or nouomerous others, you can see that clearly. In that, and I really don't want to be condescending, it's seems almost kind of arrogant or narcistic to have an opinion, others cannot oppose or otherwise they're unrational. Hope I didn't offend you by the last sentence. I couldn't figure out a more positive way to formulate it.
@@davidzimmermann920 Oh, no I totally agree. Rationality is what happens AFTER you come to a conclusion... most of the time. A person is born as a contradiction of oneself and everything that's not "it." If you take into account how little of "self" is in that equasion you might even come to a total determinism and apathy. Might as well stop trying. That's what I attempted to grasp with my previous comment, but back then - failed. And that's what I dislike about John's position primarily - individualism. It's not about some one person or a small group realising and changing stuff - it's about All or at least some indeterminatly proportional critical mass of people doing it. And even then, when you (as a collective) come to blows with the world, it's not obvious that you'll succeed. It's complicated to purpousfully change things at all, let alone redefine the process of change itself! That's why the overwhelming majority of revolutions fail from the get-go or backslide into the status quo. The world is... too heavy...
@@arcuscerebellumus8797I think he addressed most of this by showing that our current "solutions" (i.e. throwing money around) aren't solutions and therefore we need to re-think what we're doing... compounding on that with media bandwagoning the proliferation of money over viable solutions, makes it even worse. So he's correct that no one right now, is actually advocating for solutions, they're just digging us deeper into debt, while also creating new ways to increase that debt. I don't necessarily agree with him that the only solution is Nuclear, but we need to stop the: "if we throw enough money at it, the problem will go away". His larger point was the fact that if this was actually a global threat to humanity, we would already have a solution, which means all of our most important and powerful institutions don't actually think this is as big a problem as it's been made to be, otherwise we would see real solutions being propped up, not sinkholes for money.
Yeah, this is a good sentiment, but he’s dead wrong about carbon capture. It doesn’t actually work. The energy requirements are insane. Just building out all of that infrastructure would pump out enough CO2 to kill us. So you first need 20 years to build all the nuclear plants and then you need 30 more years to build the actual carbon capture crap. And we’re all dead again. I understand that he just wants a “simple” solution, but this just ain’t it. Much easier to just build renewables and go electric straight away without 13 intermediate redundant steps.
First right comment. There are so many wrong assumptions he's doing in the video within a few minutes. Nuclear energy is neither cheap nor free of co2. The estimates for how much co2 is released per kwh for nuclear power generation varies from 3g CO2 per kwh to more than 100. The reason is, that it is not simple to calculate the number and it greatly changes if you consider things like how many power plants were started to be built but never made it onto the grid for many reasons (it's quite a lot). Often it's blamed on ecologists being afraid of nuclear power, but the truth is often, that it's turning out to be a bottomless pit when it comes to financing even before there's any power output, because it's not as simple as it initially looked like. That being said, renewable energy critics love to ignore the fact that the prices for energy from these sources got exponentially cheaper over the years while the amount of growth of wind and solar is still growing also exponentially. All that while nuclear stagnated. On top of that, if we switched to replace fossils with nuclear (which we can't unless the transport sector goes fully electric), that we'd quickly run out of the uranium used in reactors (the majority of uranium sources are in Russian hands btw). Of course the nuclear fan boys will say "just use thorium", but those reactors never took off and are still subject of research because, surprise, it isn't that simple - again! Another point where Jonathan is wrong, is how difficult and therefore expensive it is to capture co2. To get the full picture, imagine growing forests, harvesting them, producing coal from the wood and then bringing the coal underground for safe storage. It's the reverse of what we've been doing for a century now, and that's what we would need to do to reverse the mess we've started. I hope this picture helps to begin to understand the gravity of the problem, because it's freaking insane. I hate those overly simplified takes on the subject so much and blaming it on others.
Trees aren't that great at capturing carbon. It's not wrong to plant them, but technically we would need to harvest them every 20 years and bring the wood for safe storage somewhere - like the places we got all the carbon from in first place. It would actually be better if we stopped destroying existing eco systems, protecting and regrowing them. Next to that, we would need to stop or replace inefficient practices that pump out co2. It's a painful way, which is why people get attracted to these simple solutions.
I agree with he to trying to say but he has the fundamentals of climate change wrong just like a majority of people. The University of Stockholm, Professor Johan Rockstrom and his team outlined 9 processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system. They include: Greenhouse gas levels, Freshwater levels (Blue water- Water available for people and animals, and Green water- water available for plants), Biodiversity, Ocean Acidification, Ozone levels, Atmospheric aerosol levels, Biogeochemical Flows (Nitrogen and Phosphorus Cycle), Chemical Pollution and the release of novel entities (anything from plastics to a tree branch on the floor), Land use. Of all these things: Biodiversity, Land Use, Greenhouse gases, Green water, Novel Entities, Biogeochemical flows, Land use are all in at dangerous levels. Plus if we continue to increase CO2 ocean acidifcation will also be at critical levels because H2O + CO2 -> H2CO3 which is known as Carbonic Acid. Also there are a few other things to note. The main greenhouse gases include Fluorinated gases (Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), Nitrous oxide, Methane and CO2 (EPA). Fluorinated gases are up to 25k times greater than carbon dioxide (European Union commission for Climate action). HFCs - are used in various sectors and applications such as, refrigerants in refrigeration, air-conditioning and heat pump equipment, blowing agents for foams, as solvents and fire extinguishers (European Union commission for Climate action). PFCs - are used in the electronics sector (for example plasma cleaning of silicon wafers) as well as in the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industry and can be found in older fire protection systems (European Union commission for Climate action). SF6 - is used mainly as an insulating gas, in high voltage switch gear and in the production of magnesium and aluminum (European Union commission for Climate action). NF3 - used in the electronics industry and in high power lasers (New Jersey Gov). HFCs last about 12 years (NOAA) while PFCs, SF6s can remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years (European Union commission for Climate action) and NF3 last 550 years (NASA). At the moment we have no way of removing these from the atmosphere. Humans have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide by 50% in less than 200 years. As of April 2023 we are at 421 ppm (NASA). In 1896 Svante Arrhenius estimated that a doubling in CO2 would result in an increase of 5-6C. The IPCC predicts it to be 3C for doubling of CO2. But we have not reached that point right? Not exactly, because current climate forcing is at 4.1W/m^2 which is equivalent to a the doubling of CO2 which indicate all greenhouse gases have a combined PPM of around 560ppm. James Hansen and his team in the paper global warming in the pipeline predict that CO2 doubling would be 4C, and that long term would be 10C due to Paleolithic data . So why are we only at 1.2C of warming then? There are some climate terms to note in order so understand the basic concepts: Climate sensitivity: how much the Earth will cool or warm. Equilibrium is when energy in equals energy out. Adding greenhouse gases means energy in does not equal energy out. As a result the planets warms until energy in equals energy out. If the amount of Aerosols increase, we have the opposite effect. Energy in does not equal energy out and the Earth will cool. Earth System sensitivity: the temperature change including long term changes from the doubling of CO2. ECS (Earth's Climate sensitivity) = the temperature changed by by doubling of CO2, if ice sheets, vegetation and long-lived vegetation are fixed (Global Warming in the Pipeline). Climate forcing: the excess or lack of energy in the atmosphere. Positive forcing is when there is access energy in is more than energy out. Negative forcing in when energy in is less than energy out. Climate response time: the time it takes the Earth to attain equilibrium after a change in climate sensitivity. Basically what has happened is that while emitting greenhouse gases, the we have also been emitting high amounts of aerosols in the form of air pollution. As a result we have high amounts of greenhouse gases, with high amounts of aerosols in the form of air pollution. It is why when the majority of warming has started when the clear air acts during the 70s. Also carbon capture cannot even remove 1% of 2022s emissions and we need it to remove 200 years worth. THIS IS A VERY BASIC IDEA AND ONLY EXPLAINS GREENHOUSE GAS WHICH ARE JUST ONE PART OF THE MESS WE ARE IN.
Re: clean air acts in 70s. Didn't all the pollution just move to developing countries, thanks to globalisation (WTO etc.)? Is there data showing that global level of aerosols in the atmosphere has actually dropped since the 70s?
This is missing something HUGE. CO2 in the atmosphere makes up an extraordinarily small fraction of what the air is made of. That means if you want to pull it out of the air you need to move an outrageous amount of air through your system in order to get just a little bit of CO2. Moving air costs energy and because of the proportions we're talking about, it costs a LOT of energy. Direct air capture is not a solution, never was, and never will be. You would need to build 10x the power infrastructure we already have in order to do that in a reasonable timeframe, and it would all need to be 0 carbon.
> You would need to build 10x the power infrastructure we already have in order to do that in a reasonable timeframe, and it would all need to be 0 carbon. I think that's what he was saying between the lines - "it would be expensive".
Haha, the guy thinks we can put a nuclear plan in the desert and pretends being familiar with technology. Nuclear plants use water to create mechanical movement. And does he really think we can process all the atmosphere to take out the CO2? No one able to make back of the envelope calculation believe that.
it is an interesting take. not sure I concur on all points, but I do believe if there wasn't Chernobyl (and, to some extent, Fukushima), or if people were better informed on the benefits and casualty rates of different energy sources (nuclear being one of the safest even considering all of the mishaps), we would live in a different world now. look up the chart of worldwide nuclear power production by year -- it is pretty crazy, nuclear power output grew almost exponentially since the 60s until Chernobyl, and then it just flatlined. but people are trying to solve carbon emissions without nuclear power, and then it becomes a really complicated problem.
The interesting thing is that the majority of republicans actually support nuclear power while only a minority of democrats support nuclear power. If more democrats supported nuclear power then we would already have nuclear power as it could get passed by the senate then.
@@mkd1964 money? it's about education. both sides of the population don't know that nuclear power isn't as dangerous as they think, but more democrats believe we have to do something about climate change. there are republicans who straight up still believe we're just going through a transition era or something. politicians have no excuse though, they are as stupid in both sides when it comes to discussing these topics (either that or they are grifters)
@@notuxnobux yes, "green energy" is a patron industry of the dems and fossil fuels/nuclear are a patron industry of the republicans in politics you help your friends and hurt your enemies. The climate change narrative helps the friends of the dems and it hurts the enemies of the dems. this is why even though they claim they want to fix it, they do not want to fix it
11:08 "fuck you, the end" - this is so brilliantly succinct and correct. Everything that has needed to get solved for humanities sake got solved immediately. Everything else got debated for decades, had books written and professionally giving speeches. It's the Problem Industrial Complex
as a chemist and an engineer with a training on physics there are two facts about global warming that scare the hell out of me: first, the fact that actually solving it requires an unprecedented amount of investment and level of coordination between actors and countries. the same countries and actors that havent done a thing in forty years and who cant be trusted to make any decision that dont render immediate benefits. casing point, the covid pandemic, which could have been easily avoided had there been immediate action by ANY authority,. second, the fact that climate is an extremely non-linear system, and the same previously mentioned idiots keep behaving as if they could take action at any moment to stop it. they can't. you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube without 1000x the time and effort it took you to squeeze it out. let's see how quickly they can fix the problem if/when the polar vortex makes middle America uninhabitable for one hundred million people. let's see how many resources are left for progress in any other human endeavor when climate action starts eating up a cumulative 2% per year of the worlds GDP. like that clown said "just sell your house and move elsewhere".
I agree, it is really scary. Climate change isn’t really a technological problem at this point, it’s a political one. The fossil fuel industry still holds an insane amount of power and lobbies any attempts for a swift green transition. The problem is even deeper than that, though. I think capitalism itself cannot solve the ecological crises we’re in and any system that is based on the profit motive and perpetual growth is psychotic and suicidal at this point.
What makes me pretty pessimistic is the simple fact that we've known of this issue for decades and nobody did anything, so realistically nothing will be done until it's too late. Humanity doesn't have a good track record of acting responsibly, and this time we have a problem that needs everyone to be on the same page, or in other words: we're fucked.
@@Bluesine_R > I think capitalism itself cannot solve the ecological crises we’re in and any system that is based on the profit motive and perpetual growth is psychotic and suicidal at this point. then explain why china is FAAAAAAAAAAAAAR more polluting per capita than capitalist governments, and see no signs of changing
@@dave7244 yeah the hockeystick model is so bs you can literally enter random numbers into the model and it gives you the same hockeystick and the predictive models are so bs their error bars are like 10x greater than the temperature increase they predict. the fact that almost nobody knows this is even more absurd. we live in a completely corrupt world of grifters research climategate for even more
@@yes-vy6bn Because china is both capitalist and ”communist” (no single country can actually be communist, only the world as a whole). China also has zero democracy. You shouldn’t think about China when talking about socialism, since socialism means both political and economic democracy.
I applaud your common sense. Just another demonstration of how people ruled by common sense stay far away from politics and those in charge are intellectually and morally bankrupt.
I think if a group of people were to propose a solution to our problems they will be quickly removed from public discourse, as we've seen countless times.
@@SiiKiiN So instead of the smartest businesses working against us we'll have the smartest AIs made by businesses working against us? AIs are not and will never be the solution to humans being incentivised not to solve a problem. Either the AIs are on the side of the rich or they'll be removed from the discourse like any human would be.
@@SiiKiiN I'd rather collect the fucking carbon atoms by hand than give an AI any sort of agency in solving this problem or any other problem in general
I think he's missing one very important factor when he says that we could fix it if we really wanted to. Most who say they want to fix it genuinely do want to fix it. The problem is that those people are up against the most powerful group of companies on the face of the planet. There are many very powerful companies that want things to stay exactly as they are. Right now, the world relies on these companies for energy and they want it to stay that way. They don't want to incur any additional costs researching or improving carbon capture technologies. It is cheaper to fund media companies to call climate change a hoax than it is to invest in carbon capture. So guess which of those options they choose to fund? Many people do want to solve this problem but the most powerful people would rather not. That's essentially what it comes down to.
I agree, it's not even a capitalism vs communism thing, the fact that companies are legally obligated to maximize profits or face legal action from their shareholders has lead to many of the bad long term decisions that were made in software. There's no financial incentive to solve issues so nothing gets done
The premise of the reasoning looks wrong. I couldn't find any carbon neutralization system based on electricity in any scenario, and I never heard of any prototype.
"If there is a comet heading towards earth, and we knew for sure it was going to hit us, would we say 'oh man, it's super expensive to build something to blow up that comet' " I don't know man... People seem pretty hell bent on dying. A lot of people out there straight up believe that the world ending is inevitable and so have no plan to attack the problem. I think the truth of the matter is that these problems are difficult to solve and the people who have the resources to solve them have lost touch. We are dealing with a lot of addicts. Logical, healthy, and balanced decision making need not apply.
Covid has taught me that the world won't unify for shit. I will put money down that if there was a comet for sure going to hit us, we'd be fucked because people would find a way to make it political.
Which problems? The fabricated ones the media keeps telling you about while providing no evidence? IPCC models aren't evidence, they're cheap propaganda.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. Some researchers also include the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills.
Not really. Making the impact of something less bad doesn't incentivize doing more of it. ie, people aren't incented to create more garbage because there are waste management companies. Or put another way, negative externalities can't have incentives created by limiting their negative effects. The incentives that exist are being addressed. Renewable energy generation is continually decreasing in cost relative to carbon emitting sources, and nuclear is heading in the same way. So this is a solved problem.
@@AndersonPaschoalon yes, even if nuclear power is used. the government will only pay for carbon capture as long as its needed. even if all used energy is nuclear, carbon capture companies will burn carbon based products purely so the government will continue to pay them to remove it from the atmosphere
@@GypsumGeneration what in specific did he say that you think indicates that he is a reactionary? reactionaries in the most general sense believe we should retvrn to the previous political state of society. based on this video i would categorize him as some sort of centrist/moderate ecomodernist. that does not make him a reactionary unless you are a leftist who thinks that everyone who is not a leftist is a reactionary.
@GypsumGeneration yes -- leftists, though not all of them, tend to erroneously think people are reactionary because it is convenient for them to think so and because of their ignorance. reactionaries do the same but inversed. this isn't a "centrist" position like you'll probably assume, i'm no centrist (or reactionary), it's just something you'll notice if you're paying attention at all and aren't poisoned by ideology. so do you have any actual idea what jblow or I (who heavily disagrees with jblow) have said that make us reactionary in the actual sense? or are you just using that word as a pejorative for all of your ideological opposition?
i dunno about climate change, but i can ensure jon is right about the homeless problem of SF. the shelters are prisons, isolated in some random terrible spot in downtown, next to liquor stores, staffed by people who are completely alienated from what's going on, most often hired far away from the city, similar to how the police are hired. prisons are businesses.
From a purely financial standpoint renewables are nowadays cheaper (especially onshore wind and solar PV, in average conditions, 50-80$ / MWh) than nuclear energy, around 100$ / MWh. The real advantage of nuclear energy is its reliability for grid balancing. We need nuclear as a base for our energy mix, while scaling up renewables which have still a huge potential. Renewables are great but won't be enough by themselves.
Renewables are not cost effective, as they only produce energy some of the time. To install Tesla batteries to back up current day energy use, it will cost $900 trillion. And then, of course, in ten years you will have to replace the batteries for another $900 trillion. This doesn't address the fact that only 1/4 the amount of lithium required to build these batteries is estimated to exist in the Earth. To build all these batteries is physically impossible.
That cost for nuclear really depends on the region you check (aka the regulatory burden). Nuclear it self isn't expensive. Public fear over nuclear makes it expensive en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Cost
@@thewhitefalcon8539 The issue with Chernobyl was a faulty reactor design. It has nothing to do with how hostile a government is with regulation. If you think total disregard for safety is what's made that Finnish powerplant one of the cheapest reliable sources of energy I don't know what to tell you
i appreciate the video, and i hope more people do think about these problems (e.g., nuclear should be/have been way more accepted by now), but, oh boy, is he oversimplifying basically the hardest problems in the world at the moment.
I don't think he is. Getting enough energy for mass carbon capture by building reactors is definitely a viable solution to climate change. The processes for doing this are complicated, but he never implied that they were simple.
Carbon capture technology is a scam, pure and simple. Any investment to carbon capture would be far better used on the green energy transition. Only once the whole world would be 100% green energy would CCS make some sense. Even so the real problem is capitalism, which is totally incapable of solving the myriad of ecological crises we are in.
@@AmorphicS No, it isn't. Countries that don't have elections in the first place don't solve problems either. It's a human problem, almost every system would otherwise work pretty well if people didn't behave like real people.
@@AmorphicSThe USA doesn't have real elections. Hell, you cant even say every election is rigged bc theyre fixed instead which us worse. How can the "people" be wrong for voting the wrong people into office, when their votes dont matter and their choices are non-existent?
During pandemic co2 emissions dropped in large part because people who were able to worked from home. So why not continue the work from home policy if it leads to a certain reduction to the existential climate crisis at no cost?
The Dunning-Kruger effect is defined as the tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability.
How is it a money grab to ban nuclear energy. Energy hasn't been solved because people want to destroy human life by forcing us to use unreliable energy. Reducing carbon and making money are the same thing if you allow for the construction of nuclear reactors.
Jonathan looks like the type of people I wouldn't agree with and get annoyed by, but I actually agree with everything he says and respect him a lot lmao
The vast majority of people the media now calls "right wing", think exactly the way he does. They're not right wing at all.. they're realists. That's why they're attacked.. because the bullshit excuses of bureaucrats and the insane narratives of the Left, don't stand up to good 'ole common sense.
Current nuclear power relies on uranium-235 which is quite scarce. If the whole world was powered that way, we'd run out in about 5 years. Breeder reactors could make use of the much more abundant uranium-238 and thorium, which wouldn't run out for at least a few centuries. But apparently the tech isn't ready yet, and it would be more prone to weapons proliferation than ever before.
238 and Thorium would not be worse for weapons proliferation. The reason 235 was used in the first place was because we were trying to find a fuel cycle that produced the material needed for the weapons.
@@calebvear7381 I heard that in a TED talk, but I also heard the opposite elsewhere. Some breeder reactors would make it a lot easier so "siphen off" some of the fissile materials being bred (such as U235 bred by U238) without a trace, which would make it easier to secretly build weapons. Maybe this risk could be avoided in some breeder reactor designs - not sure.
"people on the far left like extinction rebellion and greta" lol no, they're liberals. Carbon capture is a terrible solution; its very inefficient and very expensive. It should be used only for unavoidable carbon emissions (like cement production) and at the point of production. Electric cars are not a solution either, because the problem with cars is their general resource inefficiency, not just the fossil fuel consumption. The general idea, however, is correct: the solution is simply to switch to other sources of energy, whatever is available (nuclear, solar, eolic, etc). The problem is that the people with the power to solve the problem (governments and multinational corporations) don't want to solve it, they simply want to turn a profit, so they will simply delay action until things become so dire that people are forced to overpay for the solutions. They know that, even in the worst possible case, they can just retreat to their walled gardens and leave the rest of humanity to die; the added desperation will make the labor market more competitive! Isn't that nice?
Switching to other sources of energy will NOT solve global warming issues, because CO2 is not the driving force for warming. Using Nuclear / Fusion / Solar / Geothermal to push carbon back into the ground will only accelerate the heating of the Earth... It is basic thermodynamics... using energy generates heat. You cannot "remove" heat by using more energy. At best you can just move it around. PERIOD. So, if you add 10 nuclear plants ... to recover Carbon, all you will do is add 10 nuclear plants worth of heat load back into the Earth. This is made all the more difficult by the fact that the Earth is in a vacuum, so we can't just get rid of heat easily. You want to cool the Earth? The ONLY good way to do that is to block the sun or reflect it.. (Good luck with that).
The idea that you can just switch the power sources is ridiculous. If you could get free power people companies would be the first to do it because cutting costs is something most companies like to do. Solar is just stupid, wind doesn't work, and nuclear has multiple problems that make it hard to do on the large scale.
Extinction Rebellion are literal terrorists and have blood on their hands, they are partly responsible for deaths in England and Germany. They are agents who terrorize normal people to push the globalist agenda, whether they know it or not. You are naive.
His whole point is "I'm so tired of people not thinking like me. The solution to this enormous multifaceted problem is so simple and anyone who doesn't see it my way doesn't actually want to fix things."
this is not what he said in the video at all, he is not demanding that you think like him or use his solution, he is saying that if anyone actually believed that the world was going to end as they say, then we would be doing something about it instead of doing nothing about it like we are now.
Maybe he does think that way, but that doesn't make him wrong. He's far more correct than he is wrong. It's really simple. These things don't get fixed because someone doesn't want them fixed. You always have to ask yourself , "Cui Bono?".
I agree with you in a way, but to be fair, while this may not solve everything, he is right that nuclear currently does work, and would reduce co2 emissions significantly, so why does the group that complains the most about co2 doesn't want this partial solution.
I think this is a very naive take. The situation isn't black and white like he describes at all. If a company dumps waste into the ground, which they know will eventually seeps in the water table, which will eventually give some percentage of the population health problems of varying degrees when they are in their 40s+... Many companies will likely do it. The cause and effect are so disconnected, especially by time. Now repeat but at a planetary scale. Companies feel so what if some people in some regions of the world experience insane heat waves and people who would have survived otherwise die of heat stroke, or other conditions now become unlivable. So what if some communities somewhere have to relocate because of rising water levels.... in 20+ years. Especially if the harm you put in at first doesn't seem that bad, but gets progressively worse. I agree with Jblow here that we have the solutions. I don't agree it's easy for people to see we should act now, or even connect the dots that our actions today will have real consequences. We have always exploited human lives, is it so hard to imagine we would exploit people we don't even know yet? People who may not even be alive yet? But yes, make more Nuclear already people, this is really dumb.
There are a few conflicting takes here. He supposed a lot of people are deluded about the issues but that he isn’t one of them. You talk like people definitely should have done more by now, but that kind of thinking is in line with alarmist rhetoric that the world will be an unrecoverable wasteland in 10 years. It’s always 10-20 years and has been for 60 years. It’s not even obvious what effect our interventions will have. So many interventions have exactly the opposite effect we intend. We have been doing things steadily that have improved things. He’s right that nuclear power would go a long way in addressing at least grid power generation, but that’s a proven technology as implemented, and we know what the waste situation is like.
I agree and disagree, yes we have the tech more or less to completely solve climate change, but I don't think carbon capture is one of them. Nuclear as a base/backup for the grid, more interconnections between countries grids (when it's night time or less windy in one country, another country can fill in the gaps) and then loads of solar and wind. The issue as Jon correctly stated, is that their vested interests in continuing the status quo, "energy credits" and other bullsh*t schemes are made to make it seem like things are being done when they just aren't. Electric cars, while really cool technology, actually don't produce that much less C02 over their lifetime. There's also the whole issue with the single-use economy, why are we expected to buy new phones every year or two? Or laptops? Planned obsolescence, enforced through regressive software "updates" is another major issue, again due to vested interests of companies who claim to be "green".
Just curious, but what are your criticisms of the "energy credit" system? The idea is that in order to develop and incentivize investment in building green technology which is currently not profitable, you tax things you want to discourage, and use the revenue to help fund the development of things you want to encourage for a better society. However, adjusting the rate of that tax via law is slow due to the need for consensus, and may not keep pace with the rising or falling amount of market conditions. So instead, you use a "credit" which can adapt to market conditions faster than a legislature or appointed agency. Even as someone who is pro-regulation, this method seems to have many advantages.
@@CianMcsweeney I don't understand what you mean. The credit system creates a method of "taxing" the externality of producing vs. sequestering carbon emissions that takes market forces into account. In what sense is that "shirking" versus the government taxing emissions and then allocating grants?
to be fair i dont know many people on the left who is against nuclear power. that seems to be more of a vague general attitude on a fraction of the population on both sides of the spectrum, at least in Europe. either way, a quick back of the envelope calculation will show we cant magically build 25x the amount of nuclear power we currently have, much less in time for it to have the expected effect. while nuclear is definitely a part of the solution, it turns out there are already other technologies in place that can substitute a good fraction of fossil fuel use. another important aspect of the conversation is energy consumption, which to an American might sound almost blasphemous, but in Europe is seen from the angle of increasing efficiency. wasting energy due to bad industrial processes, poor thermal insulation. and urban planning is just fucking dumb no matter how you slice it. the only reason Americans haven't paid as much attention to this as they should have is because most of the energy sector in the US is heavily subsidized by the government by both direct and indirect ways, keeping prices artificially low.
All you have to do is check the policies of the Left-most mainstream party in your country. Here in Australia it's The Greens, who are anti-nuclear in a way that is not negotiable at all.
Many people on the left are against it. These fools can barely solve a highschool physics problem yet believe themselves to be qualified to speak on what energy source we should be using. Based on the midwit take you have, I'm guessing you're in that group. Nuclear fission is absolutely the number one energy source we should be pursuing. That is what the back of the envelope calculations show. If you've paid attention to the state of nuclear research at all, you'd know how far behind the current SOA most running reactors are. Plus, in USA and abroad, leftists work to kill of what few reactors we currently have. Building reactors isn't "magical", it's a real technology we have today. It's also the only obvious one. It's not "part of the solution", it's *the* solution. Solar panels, windmills, and other nonsense are cute toys, they aren't the answer.
Solar panels are actually the solution. There are materials that allow to both get the electricity and convert CO2 into O2. It's just not that developed yet.
I dont get it how are we still stuck on zeroth order logic, everyone is talking about how expensive it is to process fuel and run plants. No one is asking or conjecturing why. I mean its not like a certain government body is imposing unreasonable regulation and taxation on such an industry, and even if they were it wouldn't be politically motivated. Right guys???? Actually nope scratch all that here's my argument: chernobyl bad fukushima bad, just think of the children and stop them from building more dangerous nuclear plants that could kills thousands. also btw entire humans gonna die of climate apocalypse lol. the only way forward is renewable dog feces steam engines. thank you for listening
"It's not so much an existential threat as is being claimed". Ok, but as he pointed out, no-one is actually solving this problem, and the problem is getting worse. So it is absolutely an existential problem, and will continue to be until the people with power start to take it seriously.
6:05 definitely not niche. The whole fossile fuel industry has gotten used to people depending on it and during the pandemic made more profit (not just revenue) than ever before. Adjacent you have politicians and media outlets that get sponsored by this very lucrative branch. Alone the military complex needs burning energy to function.
It's a problem all societies have always had to deal with. You pay profit motivated problems solvers more the more problem there is and the problem mysteriously gets bigger.
People are bad at factoring the downsides of something with such a delayed impact such as climate change. By the time we start really feeling the effects its way too late. We needed to be working on this problem decades ago. But we still have half the country fighting against it tooth and nail. Using fossil fuels is a bit like choosing to use a garbage collected language for your game ;) Solar panels are cheaper than nuclear. Maybe if we had been building nuclear reactors for the past 40 years this wouldn't be true. But that ship has already sailed. In this timeline, nuclear is the most expensive form of power generation. Thanks Russia! You can't build nuclear "anywhere" either, it needs access to a large amount of water - this is why they're always coastal or next to rivers. You could literally stick a bunch of solar panels in a desert connected to carbon capture and it would be OK. You can't do the same with nuclear. Yes, other countries will pollute. But you also need to lead by example.
what I find interesting was the screaming from the roof tops "global warming" then the change to climate change. It is a method to redirect tax dollars into pockets which then advocate support for the hand that is feeding them.
the latter is dumb because world hunger is largely an issue of distribution rather than supply, but the energy crisis really is as simple as building nuclear reactors. the complexity comes from actually organizing people into doing that.
@@Jaximous Obviously it is not the solution because building nuclear reactors have been tried since the 50s and that did not solved climate change, to the contrary emissions continued to increase.
@@danielsan901998 nuclear has never fully replaced fossil fuels or even replaced a sizeable portion of its share of energy production globally. 10% of global power being nuclear is not the same as 75% of global power being nuclear.
All the environmental problems can be solved in more than one ways, like jon said the soultions already exist and so does the technology. But nothing is being done about it which brings us to another problem, which why were here in the first place. We don't take feed back as a society, we dont understand the world around us. We're still reacting only dealing with problems as they arise and even then if it doesn't feel immediately threatening we ignore it. I hope the climate criss becomes the thing that gives us some kind of a shift to look at ourselves and how we operate as a collective. And makes this planet that we live on shared context, becuase we all have sides before we're human beings and that doesn't help.
@@dootie8285 You don't know what ambiguous means, also most videos don't hit the 3 million mark if nobody does something this 1% will increase each year.
FISSION IS TOO SLOW Nuclear power advocates can be broadly described in two categories: nuclear realists and nuclear utopians (annoying 14 year olds on the internet who think nuclear energy is like a video game you build energy plant and boom magic energy). Currently, the total global power consumption is about 15 terawatts. Let’s assume that the conversion of nuclear thermal energy to electricity is 100 percent efficient. Now imagine a world where 15 terawatts is supplied by 15,000 1-gigawatt reactors. Lets look at some problems #1 Site selection Today there are about 430 commercial nuclear reactors worldwide. Expanding that to 15,000 reactors requires finding locations away from densely populated areas and natural disaster zones, and near massive bodies of coolant water. Taking into account not just the footprint of a nuclear power station but also its exclusion zone, associated enrichment plant, ore processing, and supporting infrastructure. Mark Z. Jacobson (2009) has shown that each nuclear power plant draws upon a total land area of as much as 20.5 square kilometers. Another factor to consider is land re-use after decommissioning. It may take decades before the land is available for re-use. And in the case of decommissioning by entombment, or at the site of an accident, the land may not be available for re-use at all within a given century. People have done the math, there isn't enough space. #2 Metal degradation All forms of nuclear power emit neutrons that irradiate metal surfaces inside the reactor vessel. Over time, these metal surfaces develop cracks due to neutron embrittlement (Murty and Charit, 2008), causing the nuclear vessel to degrade with age. Power output decreases overtime. Neutrons are not necessarily the only source of embrittlement. In thorium reactors that use components made of a nickel-based alloy called Hastelloy-N, for example, both neutron and alpha particles react with the boron and nickel in the alloy-creating helium bubbles that cause helium embrittlement. Also, tellurium fission products cause intergranular cracking of the alloy (Rodriguez, 1981). Aging caused by embrittlement is an inevitable consequence of any form of nuclear power. Particle bombardment of metal surfaces is not the only degradation mechanism in the nuclear vessel. The metal structure is also subject to everything from corrosion and thermal creep to fracture, radiation-induced segregation, and cavitation (Murty and Charit, 2008). These aging factors, all acting together, unavoidably lead to plant losing 90 percent efficiency after 10 years and a necessity to shutdown after 40 years of operation. If nuclear stations need replacement every 40 years on average, producing 15 terawatts of nuclear power would mean building one new nuclear power station-and decommissioning another-somewhere in the world every day. This is impossible, given that nuclear stations today typically take 6 to 12 years to build (Ramana, 2009) and 20 to 50 years to decommission. #3 Radioactive waste After more than 60 years of nuclear technology, there is still no universally accepted mode of disposal (Pickard, 2010), and nuclear waste still raises heated controversy. It would appear irresponsible to leap toward 15,000 reactors before the waste problem is settled. Spent fuel is not the only problem; there is also the question of where to put thousands of decommissioned reactor vessels. Burial might result in radioactive leakage into groundwater due to unforeseen geological movement. If thousands of reactors were to be commissioned across the planet, waste management over such a wide geopolitical spectrum would give rise to high levels of uncertainty. #4 Uranium supply As high-grade uranium ores become depleted, the trend is to move to ores with lower concentrations of uranium. The energy required for mining and milling the uranium ore then increases, as it does for low-grade ores of any mineral (Mudd, 2010). A typical figure for total energy consumed in mining uranium is 0.2 gigajoules per kilogram (Mudd, 2010). To break even, an ore concentration of about 340 parts per million is needed.9 Allowing latitude for some variance in the figures and the possibility of more-energy-efficient mining, this figure would nevertheless suggest that concentrations below 100 parts per million would not be worth the energy required for extraction. This consideration sets a limit on the viable uranium ore resource available with current technology. The World Nuclear Association (2011) conservatively projects 80 years of economically extractable uranium at the current rate of consumption using conventional reactors. The 2010 figure for installed nuclear capacity worldwide is 375 gigawatts. If this were to be scaled up to 15 terawatts, the 80-year uranium supply would last less than five years. #5 Not enough exotic materials What materials make up a nuclear vessel and core? It turns out that a host of exotic, rare metals are used to control and contain the nuclear reaction. For example, hafnium is a neutron absorber; beryllium is a neutron reflector; zirconium is used for fuel cladding; and many other exotic metals, such as niobium, are used to alloy steel to make the vessel withstand 40 years of neutron embrittlement. An examination of the relative abundance of chemical elements in Earth’s crust shows that many of the metals used for nuclear containment are in low abundance (Abbott, 2011). What is alarming is that the annual growth rates in consumption of these metals (typically in the 10 to 20 percent range) are enormous compared with, say, the growth rate for consumption of crude oil-which has dropped below zero in recent years (Abbott, 2011). If we were to scale up to 15,000 reactors, we would either rapidly exhaust these materials. NUCLEAR FISSION IS NOT HAPPENING. The current model of civilization where every single person of billions of people on earth needs 2 phones 2 cars 1 house 8 appliances a drone and dozens of devices tons of food waste tons of fuel heating and cooling waste tons of other waste from luxury living is SIMPLY NOT SUSTAINABLE FOR BILLIONS OF PEOPLE. 7 billions to date and soon to be double that. NOT SUSTAINABLE SORRY!
Nuclear utopia was not tried for a reason. It's not because we nuclear scientists are just too dumb to do it. It's not because our industrialists were getting bribed by bad oil man with an evil looking mustache. It's because to do it REAL engineering problems have to be solved! This is not a video game where you click your mouse and a building producing power is instantly manifested into reality with the millions of engineering details completely absent. No! How are you going to build and replenish reactors with the hard physics problem of neutron embrittlement? How will you solve the hard scarcity problem of not having enough naturally occurring exotic materials on this planet? Nuclear energy is not magic and everything I outlined above assumes 100% efficiency in power conversion. Mass consumerism IS killing the planet and killing our potential to be a great civilization. 7 billion people and they all must live like kings by churning out a mass quantity of useless crap for them.
Solving homelessness is really easy: Give everyone an appartement. Expropriate the big urban development companies if you need to, but just make sure everyone has an appartement to stay at. The US has enough space and resources to give everyone a house. We talk big talk about "human rights" and "democracy" when the US invades Iraq or Vietnam but then we can't see the blatant human rights violations going on a massive scale in places like LA. We are ideologically blinded to not see the simplest solutions to our problems. Everyone makes up excuses like "Uh that's socialism or uh that's gonna disincentivize companies building new houses". Companies are incentivised to do one thing. Maximize profits. If that does lead to people not being able to afford a home, then there is something wrong. We ignore it or put some bandaid on with like the $800 for all the homeless. We are literally blinded by these silly excuses. After everyone has a home, we will ask ourselves: Why didn't we do this earlier? I hate using "we" in this context because "We" as "We the people" probably see this solution and have probably thought about it ourselves, it is the structures like the government who try to hijack that word "we".
As far as I know, to run the existing carbon capture technology you need to generate so much energy that the CO2 produced is greater than the said technology can capture. So, the technology is only viable if you run it only on excess/free power.
"you need to generate so much energy that the CO2 produced is greater than..." you don't have to produce CO2 to generate energy. we choose to do that but it's not necessary.
@@Anon.GHe underestimates what 'expensive' means. Resources needed for such massive undertaking might be so excessive and such a drain, that civilisation will collapse under economic pressure and if there will be civilizational collapses anyway, then who cares from what? That's one side's solution. The opposition are quietly preparing tools for economy(and population) reduction to cushion the blow(heh😏). It seems, any way you cut it, there will be human-made disaster.
The current best nuclear power plants are around 1.6 GW in output. To capture 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide in two years, we would need to remove around 2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per day. This would require around 3.300 of the best nuclear power plants currently available. building 3.300 nuclear power plants to capture the required amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in two years would cost between $16.5 trillion and $33 trillion, not including the ongoing operating costs and maintenance expenses. And the time needed to build them and the carbon emmitions in the process. Add to that the insane logistics of the process and the political conflict between countries and how they want the other to pay more. still feasible though if it was a true threat. "Since then, humans have generated an estimated 1.5 trillion tons of CO2 pollution..." Until we start doing the cleaning process we can go much beyond 1.5 T tons plus there is other worm gasses we emmit.
Where are you getting the 3 trillion tons number? You would need to remove 35~40 billion tones a year to offset the amount released a year. You would just need to have a balance not remove it completely from the atmosphere.
@@FilipCordas from the web, initially those where my numbers but i doubled them initially to not be optimistic,. But those are the actual numbers you can do your research.
Blow said we need to cover 5% of the land area of Earth with solar power, so let's do the math. The total land area of Earth is about 149 million km2. Five percent of that is 7.4 million km2. A solar power farm can generate about 0.25 GW / km2, so about 1.9 million GW. Since the typical output power of a nuclear reactor is on the order of 1 GW, we would need one million nuclear reactors. There are currently less than 500 globally. This is actually a gross overestimation though, the real number is more like 1000 reactors, so the 5% figure has to be wrong.
You’ve completely messed up the units. A high quality solar farm can generate 250 megawatt HOURS per year worth of energy for 1km2. A single nuclear reactor generates 1 gigawatt per hour which means in a year it generates 8.7 million megawatt hours worth of energy.
@@Andrew-ht7rf I'm talking about power, not energy. "A single nuclear reactor generates 1 gigawatt per hour" this is a nonsensical statement, GW has dimensions of energy/time, GW/hour is s a range of change in power, it's not what you mean. As for the actual numbers, 0.25GW is 250W / m2 which yes of course isn't the average power. If you use your 250 MkWh / year, then yes you do get something on the order of a few hundred reactors.
"it's not even that expensive"... uh, tell that to the companies that are building reactors that went from estimates of $5 billion for a reactor to currently realizing it'll at least cost $60 billion. Blow's whole premise is wrong - reactors are neither cheap nor fast to build. It's not that they're useless, but they're definitely not fast enough to change our carbon issue in time.
The US is heavily regulated for every industry, especially nuclear. Nuclear reactors that take 15 years to build in the US only take 4 years in South Korea.
It's only expensive and time consuming because someone wants it to be. The Chinese can tear down a freeway overpass and have new one built by the next morning. The Hoover damn, including the power plant attached to it, took 5 years to build -- in the middle of the great depression. The Empire State building took 1 year and 45 days.. also in the middle of the great depression.
I've seen the video of by Jonathan on programming languages not being as productive anymore becuase we've moved more away from the lower level languages and have introduced a lot of abstractions which is supposed to make things easier but ends up complicating stuff and adding more steps to get stuff done. And i think that's the same things that's happend to human beings, we identify more with groups and ideologies as a society and have forgotten who we really are. Our hardware, so to speak is deeply integrated with nature. This planet is a place that we have evolved in! And we are the way we are as a concequnce of it. So what am trying to get at is that the climate criss is a symptom and also an opportunity that can allow us to go back a bit and undersrand who we really are as a collective, like the fundamentals what it is to be human and sort of work from there. Becuase we could use nuclear power plants to solve carbon bur there's so many more problems and we wont stop there, we're just getting away with destroying our home for short term gains. So we should opereate differently with feed back loops to our actions and gradually do a better job in the long term.
it depends on overton windows, in america it would be fair to characterize her as far left. actual communists and socialists are so scarce as to be completely irrelevent, if you want to stick to traditional definitions of the left, then there is no left in america.
@@derpapottamus Is not up to you, but the left to change those definitions, and show me data on what you said not just what you think is the reality. You want to critique liberals, call them LIBERALS otherwise you're exaggerating at best...
@@IgorGuerrero its not up to the left actually, its up to society to define words, not small special interest groups. and in the american society left means democrat/liberals. the same way that libertarians are dumb for calling themselves "classical liberals", they dont get to define the word, society does.
Not getting solved because the goal is total control over what you consume, where you live and how far and when you travel. Also, oil doesn't actually come from fossils, "fossil fuels" is just another term meant to trick you.
100 billion on ukraine to "prevent russia from taking over the world" (note that russia's basically a third world country with a military so poor the 100billion of loose change the US gave ukraine is GREATER than the entire russian military spending during the same period of time 😂). virtually 0 on climate change 🤡
Eh, i think a lot of the "people" he's referring to are actually groups of people, and the ones who want to do exactly what he says and "just solve it" are gridlocked in bikeshedding and bureaucracy with people who actually disagree, but *also* can't get anything done, *except* for preventing things from getting done. Unfortunately, the govt system we have makes preventing things from getting done the easiest thing for anyone to do. Tesla was able to "just build the infrastructure" because they're not a democracy, they're an "authoritarian" corporation who can just execute on an idea without having to answer to anyone. This is why humans are evolutionarily susceptible to authoritarianism: sometimes, it gets shit done when it needs to get done, and sometimes, that makes the difference between a species living and dying.
Your generalization is not a reflection of reality. Large projects get done that are ultimately failures, lots of money is wasted this way at all levels of government. The problem in those cases wasn't "gridlock", but a bad plan or an objective that wasn't inline with utilitarian goals (usually the latter). Example: the attempts at solving homelessness in LA. Huge amounts of money spent to make luxury apartments for homeless people, these building contracts going to friends of those in power, etc. The few luxury apartment units actually built end up unoccupied. Nothing remotely to do with solving the problem, rather it is use of taxpayer funds for the sake of corruption and politics. Only a naive idiot would think these politicians were making a good faith attempt at solving the problem (instead of some kind of scheme to drive up property values, pass money to friends, etc). Other places across the world have made much better headway on the homeless issues with much less money using a variety of solutions. There is plenty of public, bipartisan will. The crux of the issue here is a combination of corrupt actors and idaological extemists who muddy the waters, and like Blow said, care more about proving the validity of their ideaology (or simple corrupt profiteering) than solving a real problem.
It's a very USA-centric view. Bundling everyone concerned about climate change in the group of "people on the left who scream we're all going do die" doesn't apply as much to Europe (since Greta Thunberg was mentioned). "Ocean acidity will kill all marine life first, that's very important to us" - yeah, see if you find enough people who care. That's why it's not brought up as much, people just don't care. It's much more practical to skip this marine life and say "well, it's humans who will suffer". But it's true, the issue is political. It's not that "the left" doesn't want to solve the problem. It's just that you need some political consensus on this. But as long as you have people profiting from spreading misinformation ("the right"), it's very difficult to actually get something done.
It's not even about the mess from the reactors that's the "issue". If we build the reactors they no longer have the issue for the people to fight over.
It takes many administration time cycles for nuclear reactors to yield benefits/have something to show for it so the current administration doesn't want to build it because they won't get reelected for it and even if they did built some, it's likely the next administration will stop the project, seeing it as a cost. I wonder if public support would help, since in theory the support means re-election but I know very little about politics and even less about public support.
That isn't the real reason. Think differently. Who would lose a ton of money (and therefore control) if abundant nuclear power were a thing? What became the underpinning of the US dollar in 1971?
"We don't have a production issue, we have a distribution issue" is something you'll hear plenty of rightie pundits talk about over and over again. In reality, we have an issue with ONLY concerning ourselves with short term profits, so anything that's returned is just thrown away in a landfill and not donated to people in need. Just like how people made it cool to buy lots of needless things starting in the 1930s with the Santa Coca-cola ads, we got to make it cool to have a healthy and meaningful celebration with family without spending tons of money on gifts that we think people want but actually don't need. And yes, we ought to get on those trains, bikes, and nuclear reactors if we were being serious about replacing coal and gas as primary energy sources.
it has nothing directly to do with the profit incentive and more to do with the ability of powerful organizations (corporations, states) to socialize the costs of their harming the environment. landfills are an aspect of that. if powerful organizations actually had to pay the costs of, say, spilling oil in a body of water, or landfills, they might be more hesitant to be so wasteful etc. it is socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.
@SimGunther that is not what he is advocating for. your "reading between the lines" is imagining things that are not there which are beneficial to your pre-existing beliefs and narratives. blow is just ignorant and naive, and he has plenty of opinions that are dumb without having to "read between the lines", like his belief that we should have insane asylums again.
and eventually we'll figure out how to make fusion power work so we can easily generate tones of power. though that might be far away, so I hope we have at least partly solved the problem by then. but it would be better to just solve the problem now rather than waiting 30 years for us to hopefully have made fusion power.
Carbon Dioxide is not the driving force of climate change. All you have to do to prove that to yourself is look at historic levels of CO2 in the atmosphere historically from few years ago to thousands of years ago and you will see that the rate of increase in temperatures is not linear with the CO2. The only thing removing CO2 from the atmosphere will do is slow the growing of plants... which we all need. The whole idea of putting carbon back is poorly conceived and will not result in any significant reductions in warming for the climate. In fact, putting carbon back will paradoxically increase global warming because you are adding heat energy into the Earth to do that. There are Good reasons to switch out of Hydrocarbons, such as reducing pollutants.. (not CO2). However, conventional Nuclear is not safe enough. There is a big difference between making an entire area uninhabitable due to radiation that will last thousands of years (People STILL get radiation poison at Chernobyl)... and having to worry about some hydrocarbon cleanup due to an oil spill which may take decades, but IS achievable.
Climate change, if it is a man made issue, is a self solving problem. If climate change is bad enough it will wipe out enough of the human population such that the man made pollution will decrease to a point that climate change will revert. Same thing with lack of water. If the amount of freshwater isn't enough for the population then the population will decrease until there is a balance. All of this is only a worry or an issue if you expect and want the human population to increase on earth indefinitely.
@@h0gheadS Population decline is not always equal to genocide. You should read up on the definition. Infinite human population growth is not sustainable on a planet with limited resources, it's very simple to understand.
Many ecological outcomes of climate change are irreversible, even if climate itself is reversible. This is an issue if you consider things besides humans.
@@coconut_bliss5539 There is also natural climate change that has irreversible ecological outcomes. For example, the ice age that ended 10,000 years ago. That ice age didn't end overnight and the natural warming is still occurring today.
Legislation that would fix the problem by causing actions to be taken can't get passed without the support of the people, and consensus among the people is impossible because there's too many people, and it's way too easy for opposite polarizing views among the people to form so that all the time gets spent arguing about what to do, instead of actually doing anything, which means things stay the same by default, which means we continue doing what we've always done. Nothing ever will be done until the oceans turn to acid, the rain cycle no longer supports crop farming, and we begin to have irreversible famine. That's when we'll decide to do something about climate change, but it'll be too late by then. Most of us who are relatively poor compared to the oil executives will die from famine. The rich want less people in the world any way, so it's a win win win for them. The sign says "Danger ahead: Turn back NOW!", and we can all read and see the sign, but we're not the ones in control of turning back, the oil executives are, and they don't want to turn back because they're highly incentivized to keep heading towards the danger.
The purpose of the carbon tax isn't money-making. The purpose is to make it more economically competitive for companies with a lower carbon footprint. D'oh. This would be an attempt to solve the problem using market forces.
We got several carbon capture facilities on the planet and none fulfills its goals. The total co2 emission from nuclear is still several times to sometimes magnitudes higher than renewable energy which would be more useful and be available in time. I am for using nuclear power plants to power the transition to reneeables but they are too slow to build for our future problems and have increasing risks regarding more extreme weather and the lack of cold enough rivers (or water at all) for cooling. Still why use inefficient carbon capture when we can just leave fossil fuels underground which are mostly carbon anyway. There is no currently existing way for carbon capture to help us. Well except trees, swamps, etc. I do not like the straw man arguments brought up and hope people will challenge their views by reserarching on their own.
The thing that will keep us from solving climate change is that nobody wants to be poor. People in third-world countries find it ridiculous that somebody in the US will tell them to take some austerity measures. It's game-theory, where you can't get anybody else to "go first". My family in the Philippines wants my standard of living. Energy isn't properly priced. If it was properly priced, then saving energy would be a way to get rich. And if that happens, then standard of living goes up when you stop using so much energy. (ie: stop spending money that you can save.) Yeah, build some fuckin nuclear reactors. It's going to need to be safer ones that are much cheaper to build and run though. ie: Thorium, etc. It will never be solved by imposing austerity measures on people that are trying to rise out of poverty; or trying to stay rich.
I think the idea that "some people don't want to solve the problem", especially with regard to homelessness is ... nonsense, and a toxic political view. Nobody secretly likes homelessness or climate change. The problem is that you can't get people to make sacrifices. I give money to homeless and poor; but I have my limits. I can't give enough to really fix anybody's problem. I can send a few of my nephews and nieces through college in Philippines, because school is way cheaper there. I can't keep putting up homeless people in hotels or gifting them wads of cash. I do it, but it's not sustainable. I need to get my own kid through college, take care of my wife, and myself. It's just that these are in fact hard problems. You can't necessarily get people to make the personal sacrifices. Cheap and clean energy may come one day; but until then, people pick the most viable path to prosperity in the here and now.
@@rrr00bb1 The fact that you're thinking about it this deeply, without having had any real evidence presented to you just shows that it's not a real issue. It's like a new religion and you sure love going to church.
@@Reichstaubenminister I think about it more than a little deeply. My family from the Philippines is extremely poor. We can't ask them to be taking austerity measures when they are already poor. They want my standard of living. Nobody sees farther out than their own near-future.
@@rrr00bb1 That's an entirely different issue and I wish your family only the best, but it has absolutely nothing to do with climate change. That's just globalist propaganda used to control people.
He's half-right about nuclear, but nuclear energy is only a bandaid. Even with improving the tech to greatest possible efficiency and safety, given the population growth (and the increase of energy usage) nuclear will only give us power for a century or two (at best) due to dwindling fuel sources. It will help the problem temporarily for a 5 generations or so, but then we're back to square one.
You can't just create fuel out of thin air; the same problem exists for fossil fuels, even if fracking has squeezed us out another decade or two. We don't have an abundance of oil now, we will likely deplete all sources within this century. @@Clinkety
Hey too much CO2 isn't a problem, even more warmth isn't a problem. CO2 is not a significant contributor to global warming. It just is not and even if it were, more warmth is associated with humans flourishing. Roman climate optimum saw Pax Romana spread across Europe and the medieval warm period hosted the Renaissance.
We are already at global average temperatures beyond anything seen in the last 2000 years, and getting warmer. The current crisis is not really comparable to anything pre-industrial. CO2 _is_ the problem, it's basic physics and multiple lines of evidence show that it's what's forcing the climate to warm.
@@APaleDot You can even check NOAA CO2 readings, it is a linear curve compared to humans exponential CO2 emissions. All CO2 emitted through burning of carbon is absorbed by plants, algae and other natural processes like weathering and reverse weathering. Its not that CO2 cannot absorb more heat than other elements - which is the phsyics as you say - its that there are many other factors that all play in which ultimately make the CO2 irrelevant. In fact the proposed greenhouse effect is also not relevant either. The major cause of heating of the atmosphere is obviously the sun, but what keeps the heat there is the adiabatic lapse rate. The current rising level of CO2 is because of the temperature ocean. CO2 escapes the ocean like bubbles from a soft drink. Any heat trapping or reflecting effect caused by CO2, methane or clouds is a local phenomenon. Finally you can check Tony Hellers channel for thorough research of temperature levels over the last century. The long and short of it is, we have not seen any great temperature rise or climate events in the past 20 years that we did not see in much greater intensity and number over the past 100.
That's true in a sense. Global warming has lead to hundreds of thousands of less deaths per year than previous years. There are also other benefits to CO2 increase. Of course, this is within limits (as everything else).
@@APaleDot Ah yes, who doesn't know the temperature documentation from 2000 years ago? You are naive at best, you probably still think the dinosaur propaganda with their carbon dating wasn't a lie.
I remember those bill gates vids long before Corona, saying how we needed more vaccine manufacturing facilities. Unfortunately due to the dynamics of democracy, and the near sighted nature of populations, no government was really able to address this issue without seriously jeopardizing their next term. I think something similar is happening with the energy issue
You're failing to understand that both the pandemic and the so-called energy problem were manufactured by the same people offering the solutions. Nothing works the way you think it does.
But the animals are dying 🥺🥺🥺 they fall prey to ecological traps and are all moving up North because theyre losing their habitats!!!!!!!! Jon you must save us!!!!!!
The worst thing for this planet is the sun. The sun is like this psychopath that everyone thinks is the good guy. The sun charms us and we are all like, "Yay solar power!!" Meanwhile the sun is all like, "I am going to turn into a red giant an 100% the extinction game!"
@@KANJICODER How far away is it? How hot is it? What is it made of? You'll probably claim to know because your high priests told you and you believed them.
@@Reichstaubenminister Faith in religion and trust in science are not the same thing. However, I will agree that most people do not think for themselves and science is no different than religion for such people. I had a stupid ex girlfriend once who told me "hot water freezes faster than cold water" and I am like, "Alright, that's an easy experiment to do at home. Let's try." That relationship didn't last long because my insistence to test and look things up was taken as "disagreeing and questioning" her all the time.
Is it really though? The Olkiluoto plant that just finished its third unit in Finland earlier this year is projected to have a LCOE of around €30/MWh, which is lower than a great majority of wind or solar installations. Even the LCOE for just the newest reactor (€43/MWh) is cheap compared to solar or wind. Most of the high cost of nuclear comes from the extensive regulatory burden placed upon it because of faulty public perception
@Dootie You're actually mental. It's not black and white Capitalism vs Communism. It's about governments actually working for the PEOPLE, NOT THE CAPITAL, in a still capitalistic society, just less in favor of billionaires and profit driven companies that don't care about their own workers or other people, but just about profit. American people are so brainwashed and stupid it's insane.
@@AmorphicS nobody tell this guy than he can open "Top 15 ecological disasters in the world" and find 14 other disasters that happened in not-socialism countries. It will blow his mind too much
