Techno-optimism like this could be an amazing end-run around tedious moralistic debates about climate and poverty. It could attract supporters from both sides of these debates, couldn’t it? And new supporters who are currently sitting it out bc participating in these debates sucks unless you are an ideologue.
This is like catnip for people who love sci-fi. I love this.
What is the techno optimism is a velleity and scaling up clean power is really hard? The incentives to generate affordable power have existed fit a century. There’s little reason to think engineers are holding back, and there are only so many engineers. Doubling the number of engineers working in clean power seems unlikely to double the rate of progress just as exercising twice as much doesn’t make you twice as strong or fast.
We don't know what technologies would be put into use if CO2 emissions were taxed at $X/t and CO2 removed were subsidies at $X, but clearly more than if X=0
It really seems to me that we missed a big opportunity to grow energy use in a carbon-free way with nuclear power in the 70s, and much of the malaise since then is a consequence of stagnation in energy usage.
One thing that worries me about renewables is it seems like they might not scale to providing massively more energy; solar could meet our current needs but can we really devote enough land to solar to 10x our energy? Hopefully geothermal or next-gen nuclear or fusion works out.
What I heard a decade ago is that the amount of land needed for solar to match current energy demand was about the same as the land used by the interstate highway system. I don’t exactly know order of magnitude comparison between highway land area and parking land area but it is suggestive, especially since parking prefers shade structures.
As best I can tell, a MWh farm takes between 4-5 acres. To replace current fossil fuel production (~2.5k gigawatts) would take somewhere between 15-20 thousand sq miles or somewhere between the size of Maryland and W. Virginia. You can do distributed solar (residential roof tops and such) but they lose significant efficiency and as a result it takes a lot more panels and costs go up pretty dramatically.
Is there a quick story as to why 1 panel on each of 1000 houses is less efficient than 1000 contiguous panels on an empty lot?
I can see why installation costs go up when you have to put them on separate houses. And there might be more wiring (though that might be offset by shorter transmission, when the panels are right next to the end use.)
But is there something about e.g. the voltage raise that makes it easier if you have thousands of panels in a cluster? What's the loss in efficiency, if we set aside the losses in construction costs?
1) Location, location, location - solar farms are unsurprisingly usually located where there is a lot of sunlight. If we decided to turn the state of Arizona into the national solar farm, we could get impressive results!
2) Similarly, but slightly different - solar farms position the panels for optimal recovery. Some newer ones have them rotate with the sun across the sky to maximize their intake. When people plan building roofs, they have not usually been thinking about how to position solar panels on them for maximum reception.
3) To your point, getting a crew together and having them build the same thing over and over again in the same place is usually MUCH more efficient than doing it piecemeal. Scalability matters. Plus when you build local you usually build it so that powers that location first then feeds into the rest of the grid. All of which requires additional refitting/setup.
If the production process continues to improve at the same rate as it has been going, this may all be subsumed by the sheer efficiency and prevalence that solar can achieve. But if this is going to be our focus, we should recognize there are more factors than just comparing the most efficient solar on a relatively small scale to making it the backbone of our grid.
Okay, thanks. So the answers lie primarily in construction, secondarily in siting. Not so much to do with the electrodynamics of the generation method itself.
I'm wondering if they increase that simply because they know that residential installation is going to have significantly more failures. Trees branches breaking panels, bad installation, etc. that you wouldn't have to deal with on a pv farm.
Geothermal is the one to bet on. There’s no innate danger and it builds on an already incredibly successful package of geologic “enhancement” technology that has widespread application today.
We should be conserving that heat in the Earth's core for when the Sun burns out, then we'll really be sorry we frittered it away to power PlayStations and microwaves.
I don't think that land is much of a bottleneck for solar (we have so much empty land!) but I am curious about how difficult it would be to get the materials for all those panels.
Matt hits the nail on the head. The problem we have is that all these issues are framed as issues of morality-people are bad, we should have a smaller footprint, fewer children, and feel guilty. Really, its a technological question that is solvable with nuclear power and some other technologies. Why can't people think "Yes! Let's use twice as much energy to do twice as many cool things!" But do it in a clean way?
One thing I would like to have Matt explain to me is this-- why are so many issues like this? You could write a very similar article about why we don't test everyone for COVID everyday with cheap at home tests and just install super duper air ventilation systems in every school. Instead COVID became a moral battle instead of a technological one.
One reason is bad-faith (or just mistaken?) use of "technology will make the problem (what little of it there is) go away" as an argument against doing anything.
I don't think people are adding up the cost of HVAC improvements and then doing a cost benefit analysis though, that's my point. A technological problem is looked at through a morality lens so we can never just spend however many dollars solves it.
Nuclear power is the perfect example of this emotional reasoning. Its extremely safe if you look at the numbers and reasonably priced.
There's no math you can use that says that the current proven nuclear generation technology is reasonably priced. It's not even close.
Maybe nuclear will get there with next-gen innovations, but we can't know that yet, any more than we can know that investments in innovations in carbon capture or green hydrogen production will pan out.
For some reason there's this strange magical thinking around nuclear power that somehow very difficult technology challenges will "definitely" get solved while the same folks are skeptical about the likelihood that other similarly tough technical challenges with other technologies will get solved.
"There's no math you can use that says that the current proven nuclear generation technology is reasonably priced."
What does this mean/what's the comparison? Does it mean that the cost of electricity from natural gas + the social cost of carbon from burning natural gas is less than the cost of electricity generated from nuclear? Does it mean that the cost of solar + battery storage + new transmission lines is less than the cost of nuclear?
Also, are we talking about the US (where all nuclear plants have massive cost overruns) or about other countries which don't screw up infrastructure the way the US does?
Nuclear is uncompetitive everywhere(not specifically U.S.). It costs dramatically more than fossil fuel based energy and at this point solar and wind costs less than fossil fuel based energy. Even with the additional cost of energy storage wind and solar beat it handily.
The reason for the thinking (I have no idea how correct it is) is that nuclear power HAS been held back by overly strict safety regulation. What we do not know is if regulation had made nuclear 1% 10% or 100% more expensive than other zero CO2 base load technologies.
It really depends on what you mean by reasonably priced. It certainly isn't competitive with any of the other options (clean or not). If you need a power source though that doesn't require voluminous and weighty inputs and operates independent of wind and sun, it may be reasonably priced.
I genuinely don't know anything about nuclear power other than that its been used since the 1950s. What are the cost issues? Is it more expensive than it was in the past?
Everything is more expensive than it was in the past.
But the cost issues are mostly around, you know, handling highly radioactive material and confining it. While nuclear plants genuinely are pretty safe and radioactive waste is a pretty small amount that can be safely contained, the hot, enriched uranium and its near byproducts really are crazy dangerous, and you've got to have a lot of machinery that's operating at high tolerances to keep it all in the right places.
Nuclear uses 1/100th of the space, and is up to 3x more reliable than solar/wind. Both of these only generate power around 120 days out of the year. Nuclear generates power 340 days of the year. Per GW, after fixed costs that are eventually mitigated, nuclear becomes quite affordable.
“After fixed costs are eventually mitigated” actually means “after plants are fully depreciated, on the verge of falling apart, and in desperate need of billions in maintenance to squeeze out 20 more years of life.”
I’m done with this topic, I’ve spent four days bashing my head against the wall here. The number of people running around wielding a 1990’s understanding of the economics of energy generation and making sweeping pronouncements even as nuclear experts candidly admit the industry is in managed decline… is appalling.
If we can fantasize about renewables supplying adequate baseline power, we can also fantasize about cheaper nuclear.
The Chinese, for example, are doing exciting research on thorium reactors, which is something we ought to be doing.
Finally, a lot of the problem with the nuclear industry is it’s still living in the 1970’s. We really need a nuclear Elon to do for nuclear what the current Elon did for rockets.
I've appreciated your discussion on these topics though I suspect my biggest takeaway from your explanations about nuclear being expensive is that the problem has less to do with nuclear and more to do with a broader issue where large projects have become incredibly expensive. The most extreme example I've found is the Hammersmith Bridge in the UK where it was built for £80k in 1827 (about £7-8 million inflation adjusted). It has structural issues and needs repairs estimated to cost over £100 million.
I'm sure that there are any number of reasons why the cost has increased, but functionally going from being able to build something new for 8 million to being able to repair it costing over 100 million suggest that construction costs have exploded. You find the many of similar issues when reviewing the work that Alon Levy and others have done on transportation projects.
On a separate note, I also think that most people advocating for solar power don't really appreciate the land use issues that come from solar power farms (which are the most cost efficient.) Moving to distributed (residential/commercial) solar decreases the efficiency and ups the costs pretty substantially. Now maybe the costs continue to drop so that's less a concern, but its something that needs to be addressed.
David, you should create a post with some links and just copy and paste it as needed. I agree you have covered it well but there will always be new (and/or stubborn) readers in need of a refresher.
No, you may not. I’m not going to doxx myself to any greater extent than is already the case.
I’m sure you can figure out exactly who I am with the information I’ve already revealed to the commentariat over the last several months, and I’m not giving you a CV.
Especially since this comment is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to cast aspersions on my background, even though I have repeatedly stated my expertise is limited and my analysis is confined to trying to distill genuine expert viewpoints into a coherent understanding of the field.
Not really. A school name would be sufficient. I ask because your numbers are wildly inaccurate and your technical arguments non-existent. Can you think of a reason why electrical bills in France are not exorbitant considering what percentage of power they get from nuclear?
David R. seems to be unusually well informed and knowledgeable about power generation. If you have legitimate doubts/questions you should present them.
But I do understand a good bit of the economics and market structure of power generation in the US. As that’s the topic of conversation, I feel relatively confident discussing it.
My actual expertise is as a structural engineer with construction experience, including project delivery workflows in large projects.
Hence, I am very confident pontificating on why nuclear construction is a shitshow. Lol.
But yes, it would be nice to get an actual argument, as opposed to unending aspersions on my background, expertise, and knowledge.
Seems to me that vaccinating kids would be much cheaper. Although I think it would be great if kids got good air conditioning and heating in their classrooms.
It reminds me of parts of the personal finance community, FIRE, etc. There is often a ton of focus on doing without. Reuse your tea bags and ziplock bags, drive an old shitbox, never go on vacation, etc. And very little focus on increasing earnings.
“It’s great you’re eating beans and rice three times a day saving $5k a year but you left $20k on the table when you didn’t negotiate harder when you took a new job.”
There seems to be a strain of masochism that runs through both groups.
To me it's more the fervent religiosity to this FIRE movement. Like they've found the singular path and all others are damned. Or I've just met uniquely passionate, low-EQ assholes about it. I hear the $2M at 4% is all I need to retire at 35 mantra enough across our entry-level devs and data scientists to just glaze over at this point. I don't begrudge anyone seeking financial independence but - like - there's many ways to do it. For my money ... parallel revenue streams is the easiest path.
Ehh, divorcing yourself from the American habit of living right up to the edge of or slightly beyond your means so you’re not at the utter mercy of the folks issuing your paycheck has real merit. I also don’t see many in those communities neglecting the “search early, search often, and negotiate hard” mantra either, so I’m not sure where you get that impression.
The average person is never, ever going to earn more than $70k annually. Most people lack the ability to do it. So regarding the FIRE movement’s “hey, I can retire at 35 on $70k a year if I’m frugsl,” I just cannot see this as a bad thing.
No one I know who is a FIRE fan actually lives to that extreme. It’s all “I can retire at 50 if I’m careful.”
I think that’s correct and what we have done. Delaying gratification is not denying gratification. Planning for the king-term is just smart. Looking at money primarily in terms of value doesn’t mean you have to reuse tea bags.
This reminds me of a quote from a southern senator (can't remember who) when voting for the 16th amendment to the effect that people in his state wouldn't ever pay incomes taxes since there was no way they would ever make $4000 dollars a year. (Which was where the first income tax started).
I fail to see the relevance here. Rising general standards of living and incomes still doesn't mean most people are going to greatly surpass median earning abilities.
Even for many who could, they're not going to want to put in the work. Hell, I'm sure there are ways for me to make more money than I do, and I'm not going to kill myself finding and executing every one of them.
Yeah that's how I was introduced to them. I'm making less than $40,000 at the same age. It just doesn't map out the same way and they don't adjust that in their thinking at all
I really like Matt's framing here . It highlights a point I almost never see talked about in energy circles. The innovations we've seen in energy production in the last decade or so are once-in-a-century revolutionary and we've barely began to contemplate the implications of that.
The raw cost of making electricity using solar and wind, when the conditions are right, is now significantly lower than it's ever been in the history of civilization. I believe the current average levelized cost of utility PV at 2 cents per kWh is less than half the lowest ever historical cost of making electricity using any other means. Think about that for a second, within the last 10 years innovation has halved the cost of making electricity and that cost is still on a steep decline.
It seems very likely that electricity will be too cheap to meter during certain periods of most days within a decade or two. The implications of this will be revolutionary and we've barely begun to contemplate what it means.
UK spot-market electricity prices on a sunny and windy afternoon in summer are consistently negative.
UK has a lot of wind, and a windy summer's afternoon means lots of wind, lots of solar, and (importantly) almost no building heating (we have very little AC).
That cheap energy (if it's real not some accounting trick) could be used to do electrolysis of H2O or run CO2 scrubbers to off set burning fossil fuels.
Absolutely. If we have the spare power, we can also use the hydrogen from the electrolysis to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels from atmospheric CO2 - that's definitely an approach for plastics and for jet fuel, two users of hydrocarbons that there is no obvious substitute for.
It's negative cost because the production exceeds the demand, and, for some power generators, there is a cost in switching off (more; there's a cost in switching back on), so they prefer to pay to offload their power when there's insufficient paying demand than to switch off and then back on when demand returns.
Good to hear. Of course the problem problem is that this does not scale. But it is exemplary of how sufficiently cheap even intermittent power can be turned into useful time and place sensitive energy demands. In effect we are using H/O2 bonds or C/O2 bonds for chemical storage of energy rather than Li/O
Absolutely. And H2 and CH4 and especially longer hydrocarbons are much higher energy density than batteries.
That doesn't matter for static installations, and matters relatively little for road vehicles, but if you want to fly, or you want to stay out at sea for weeks, then you need storage a lot denser than batteries, even if it ends up costing more per kWh.
Long-distance shipping could theoretically sail (you could design the masts so dockyard cranes can remove them to access the containers) as long as they have a backup engine (solar and wind charging and a battery to power an electric motor would work). Modern automation would give you manageable crew sizes. The problem is that the ships would need to be a fair bit smaller, and they would be slower, which means you'd need a lot more of them.
I don't know where the cost balance would work out between extracting hydrocarbons from the atmosphere and sailing for container ships. I do know that the hydrocarbon extraction is needed for air travel anyway, so it may just come out in development costs.
Of course the beauty of taxing net CO2 emissions is that you and I do not have to know how it will work out wind/solar/geothermal /nuclear/carbon capture.
Wonderful article! This is the kind of tech/progress-positive content I subscribe for! So rare to see a mindset of energy abundance as good in these days of moralizing about not altering the environment.
More of this. It is always surprising why more people who call themselves progressives aren't more comprehensively in favor of .... progress .... across more domains.
Geothermal tech is close to achieving the depths that would allow it to provide humanity with unlimited baseload energy. An interesting takeaway from an industry conference last month is that they are using materials developed for space exploration to handle the pressures and temperatures at depth.
Innovation is how everyone wins. Remember that when billionaires are criticized for going into space.
No one actually would bitch about them engaging in important private investment if they were taking a 2% haircut on owned assets each year to fund *equally important* public investment.
"Would that rhetoric exist in American income distribution looked like it did in 1958 with modern productivity and thus standard of living?"
Yes - it would be something people said. As someone recently said "In politics, nothing is ever enough....Social Security is fantastic. It’s wonderful. But is it enough? Not really."
Maybe. Its interesting to me that if you look at a ton of factors, people are doing much better than they were 30, 50, 70 years ago - but listening to major voices in progressive politics you would think the opposite.
2% of billionaire's assets (presumably over $50 million) would not fund a goshdarn thing. If you seized 100% of the wealth of all US billionaires- down to the penny- it would fund the US government for..... 8 to 10 months, depending on whose estimate of billionaire wealth one uses. 2% annually is just a drop in the bucket.
The amount of money the US government already takes in, and then spends annually, are just staggering- just an order of magnitude larger than the private sector. $3ish trillion in a year, $6 trillion out. It's not just that I'm opposed to largescale redistribution (I am!), but that the American private sector literally does not have enough cash to fund the government's ravenous maw
This sounds like a good argument for a VAT to me! :) But as every estimate I can find of US billionaire wealth puts it at $4ish trillion- that's not even a full year of the US federal budget, and 2% of that is just kinda insignificant when the US already brings in $3 trillion in revenue a year.
A 10% national VAT and increased income taxes *on everyone* is a much more feasible path forward. Obviously not popular tho
"...massive cost reduction in satellite launching..."
When Dang referred to "billionaires going into space," I assumed he was referring to their actually traveling, bodily, into space, like Branson's stunt. You don't need to launch billionaires into space in order to figure out cheaper ways to launch satellites.
If Dang meant "billionaires going into space" like, " billionaires investing in the space industry," then, yeah, that is more useful for innovation that's useful.
Just look at cars - innovations originally designed for racing or vehicles for the super-rich eventually get pushed down. That’s the entire purpose of subsidizing electric cars currently, which are only affordable for the upper class.
I mean, those definitely are stunts. Very effective ones considering the amount of free media generated. Like all advertising, subject to a critique of pointlessness.
But more importantly I think it’s wrong to say nothing useful is happening because only some companies are successful and others (so far) are not.
I have no issue with any of these innovations. The only ones I regard as useless are Facebook-esque “here’s how we cling to your anger-addled attention for five more minutes.”
I just don’t think taxing the ever-loving shit out of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk is going to impact their innovation or financial motives therefore even a little bit.
Love this article. Sure, it's possible that some of it is a little too far-fetched (or maybe not, I'm not an energy expert), and tomorrow we'll see a dozen competing Substack writers pointing out "but what about X?" and people rolling their eyes at it on Twitter like we did with One Billion Americans. But like that book, Matt's thinking BIG, and he's looking at things from an angle nobody else seems to be. This is what I signed up for.
With that in mind, I'd be curious what this does regarding future warfare. On one hand, a world with abundant energy, food, clean water and air seems like it would have few reasons for conflict. On the other hand.. once you have the technology to make cost effective supersonic laser space fighter jets, somebody's gonna find an excuse to use them, won't they?
We're actually already living in a post-war world. It's been 76 years since the last Great Power war. The last time there was a >75 year gap between such wars was . . . never.
[Yes, of course, past returns do not guarantee future results.]
Maybe. But on the other hand, the more sophisticated our civilization becomes, the higher the cost of warfare. At the end of the day all this stuff is extremely delicate and modern technology is SO good at destroying things that even a relatively weak power can wreak considerable havoc if it so chooses. Getting some stuff in your city bombed is always bad, yeah, but if you're living a super awesome sci-fi life in the late 21st century being reduced to the basic human condition is much worse in terms of the change in quality of life than it was in 1940.
More seriously, I approve this vein of techno-optimism. We may have advanced so far into climate change that we have already sealed our doom, as well as doom for most life on the planet. But it's too soon to be certain of that, and so long as there is room for doubt there is reason for hope. Hope, creativity and ambition will make us better, more generous, courageous, inventive, and active people. If we have to go down, let's go down striving rather than cringing.
"The science" gives us a range of forecasts and scenarios with various probabilities. Planetary doom is among the lower-probability scenarios that the science gives us.
To say, "this may happen," is just to say that planetary doom is among the scenarios with non-zero probability. That is not divorced from science: it is exactly what the science says.
I’m a great fan of the phrases “it’s vaguely possible” and “it’s not impossible” in referring to lower-order probabilities, so it’s vaguely possible that you’re correct, but I doubt it.
"Let's replicate animal meat in labs so we can substitute for a ribeye or burger"
Why stop there? Let's engineer the *greatest steaks of all time*. Something nature could never produce.
There's this mindset where we're simply looking to substitute for the current, like we're caretakers of some ancient and storied estate where we can replace things as they break, but shouldn't actually *change* anything. Its a depressive and short-sighted way of looking at things, related to the kind of Zero Sum thinking that has everyone arguing over the existing pie instead of looking to expand the pie.
Fascinating piece. I've been concerned for years, hell decades because I'm terribly old, that we as a nation have lost our narrative thread. We were plucky colonialists, then pioneers, then 'can-do' Yankees, then we 'saved the world' in WW2, rebuilt the world in the aftermath, faced down the Communists, etc... Different mythologies for different times. People need a story, and the story can't be all on the negative side - less of this, less of that, hair shirts all-around - there has to be a pay-off, a better world. There has to be a picture of what we can be, something to work for, not just something to avoid.
This is the first piece I've read that points a way to that positive narrative: not sitting in sweltering huts with the lights out and nibbling tofu, but a future of unlimited carbon-free energy, and all the coolness that would come from that. Scolding alone is not very effective. Scolding while holding up a picture of a bright future is much better. Optimism and hope.
Scolding doesn't work; pricing in the negative externality of fossil fuels does:
"Under our cost assumptions, we find that a $25/ton carbon price yields a 77% emission reduction relative to 2018 levels. The dramatic reduction comes from a large-scale closure of coal plants, investments in new wind and solar capacity, and from preservation of existing nuclear plants."
If there's any unifying thread to Matt's work it's that we need to break out of a scarcity mindset and be more optimistic. Whether it be tech, population, economics, or zoning, growth can solve many problems with economies of scale.
Things never work out how we expect but I think this approach is more realistic (politically and economically) long-term than the more-dystopian degrowth ones despite the leap of faith required. Scarcity is just like NIMBYism where everyone else wants someone else to bear the costs. Growth and abundance ultimately requires the fewest compromises.
I think I'm missing something about this. Are there people who are arguing against having a lot of clean energy? My impression is that the impediments to this future are technological and fiscal, not political will or public opinion, so I'm not sure who this article is arguing against. The climate stuff that passes through secret congress is generally only the "give money to clean energy RND" stuff, right?
It's implicit in a lot of the "solar vs. nuclear" debates. Models that say we can meet our energy needs with just solar + wind + batteries require energy consumption to not explode. You'll see ideas about how we will need what are essentially grid wide smart thermostats which can cut down on a lot of energy usage at night when the sun isn't shining.
It's basically two different mindsets, "solar + wind + batteries" requires us to be careful with our energy usage at night/thru the winter.
The "let's build a ton of renewables and also lots of nuclear/geothermal/hydro/carbon capture" would let us have a ton of excess energy during the day/summer, and then not have to worry at night/winter.
The benefits of the second option is we can use the excess energy to do a bunch of cool shit.
I read it carefully. As I commented before (sort 'new first' and I'm the 3rd from the top), I understand how poor countries could use more energy and cheap electricity to fight climate change would be great obviously but the idea that the US has been on a 45-year energy diet is absurd (I also think we'll be doing great if we merely make energy cheap enough to end fossil fuel use in 30 years). Aside from those two uses of cheap energy, which do you think would be a big deal for you? Faster airplanes, better strawberries, lawns in Vegas, more rocketry?
Vertical agriculture and cultured meat would be two huge environmental wins that aren't possible today largely due to the cost of energy (especially true of vertical agriculture, cultured meat still needs some more R&D to "get there" but once it does energy costs will become the limiting factor for scale). Feed the world with orders of magnitude less water and land use.
"Are there people who are arguing against having a lot of clean energy?"
It's quite easy to find environmentalists who implicitly (or even sometimes explicitly!) concede that their goal in reducing energy consumption is at least partially anti-capitalist/anti-consumerist in nature, not just about mitigating climate change.
Is it easy to find these people? The furtherest left climate change amelioration strategy in the mainstreamish conversation is the green new deal, which is definitely not a degrowther strategy. I didn't get the sense this article was written in response to 4 weirdos on twitter but maybe I'm wrong about that.
I half think this article was written in response to the reddit thread on Ezra Klein's last podcast with Holden Karnofsky. At times in that discussion it felt like Ezra even takes some of the anti-growth positions.
I couldn‘t agree more and am glad to see Matt pushing this direction (techno optimism rather than general fatalism). I also really appreciated the (presumably intentional) casual triggering of 911 truthers with „Jet fuel, as we know, can melt steal beams“. Both substance and style in this post.
It didn’t actually melt them, simply softens them enough to induce a limited amount of sagging.
In many buildings that wouldn’t cause a collapse, but necessitate a later controlled demolition.
In the case of the WTC, the interior of the building would have looked somewhat like a hair roller without the outside walls: concrete core with floor joists attached to it by pinned hinges. During construction, they were lifted into place and set atop support “tabs” (corbels if anyone wishes to Google) attached to the interior of the perimeter cladding.
The problem was that only gravity held them there. When they sagged, their spans shortened and they slipped off, causing the floors to crash down to the one below and repeating the process. Without the floors bracing the cladding to the core… down it all goes.
Yea, I'm gonna need some citations, as the only mention of liquid steel I can find is a variety of conspiracy theorist crackpot websites.
Not saying it's not possible that certain locations hit the 2500 degrees needed to melt structural steel, but it was not the mechanism of collapse and this is well understood.
The only places I've seen it mentioned are conspiracy-theory types, so I can't give you a real reference. Maybe it's completely made up, I don't know. I don't really care enough to go down the rabbit hole, it just bugs me when people dismiss it blithely (it didn't need to melt, just soften!) without understanding the actual conspiracy theory (that something did melt it, which they argue was a controlled demolition).
I took an entire semester course on this; the mechanism of collapse in all of the structures is in no way consistent with a controlled demolition.
In the absence of a reliable source saying there actually was molten steel in the wreckage I’m going to assume someone found a small puddle of aluminum or brass, or just nothing at all, because I can’t find any mention of molten or melted steel and didn’t see any when I was reading inspection reports a decade plus ago in school.
I DID know that they softened rather than melted and had a vague understanding of what you just wrote, but did not know the details (at least anymore)!
I cannot for the life of me remember if the hinges were between joists and cladding or joists and core, but the other end was just a gravity connection tab, and sagging girders slipped off and doomed the whole building.
"The turn toward conservation and efficiency was a necessary evil in an era when we couldn’t come up with a better way to deal with geopolitical instability linked to oil and pollution linked to all forms of fossil fuels."
I agree with the main thesis that we should think big generate a lot more energy than we do now. However, I think calling efficiency a "necessary evil" is pretty silly. A lot of the things we've replaced in the name of efficiency --- resistive electric heat, incandescent light bulbs (roughly the same thing), single-pane windows, uninsulated attics, etc. --- are comically inefficient. Replacing single-pane windows isn't a necessary evil; it's a great thing! If we generate a ton of clean electricity but then all move to resistive heating, that would still be super wasteful.
I think that increasing efficiency and energy production are both good. It's energy austerity that's bad.
The necessary evil framing really does undersell it. Generation 1 LEDs had a weird color profile, took a while to start and cost a lot more. Which feels like a necessary evil to conserve energy etc.
But in a few short years, LEDs became superior in every way! They use a tenth of the electricity for the same light, cost less to operate, don't get hot and last way longer.
I think current solar is basically like first generation LED bulbs. They're a great value if you amortize out many years (maintenance costs for solar farms are tiny, esp compared to fossil power) in certain places. And every year, it's a better value than the year before.
Techno-optimism like this could be an amazing end-run around tedious moralistic debates about climate and poverty. It could attract supporters from both sides of these debates, couldn’t it? And new supporters who are currently sitting it out bc participating in these debates sucks unless you are an ideologue.
This is like catnip for people who love sci-fi. I love this.
What is the techno optimism is a velleity and scaling up clean power is really hard? The incentives to generate affordable power have existed fit a century. There’s little reason to think engineers are holding back, and there are only so many engineers. Doubling the number of engineers working in clean power seems unlikely to double the rate of progress just as exercising twice as much doesn’t make you twice as strong or fast.
We don't know what technologies would be put into use if CO2 emissions were taxed at $X/t and CO2 removed were subsidies at $X, but clearly more than if X=0
I wrote a book review for AstralCodexTen on roughly this topic: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying
It really seems to me that we missed a big opportunity to grow energy use in a carbon-free way with nuclear power in the 70s, and much of the malaise since then is a consequence of stagnation in energy usage.
One thing that worries me about renewables is it seems like they might not scale to providing massively more energy; solar could meet our current needs but can we really devote enough land to solar to 10x our energy? Hopefully geothermal or next-gen nuclear or fusion works out.
What I heard a decade ago is that the amount of land needed for solar to match current energy demand was about the same as the land used by the interstate highway system. I don’t exactly know order of magnitude comparison between highway land area and parking land area but it is suggestive, especially since parking prefers shade structures.
As best I can tell, a MWh farm takes between 4-5 acres. To replace current fossil fuel production (~2.5k gigawatts) would take somewhere between 15-20 thousand sq miles or somewhere between the size of Maryland and W. Virginia. You can do distributed solar (residential roof tops and such) but they lose significant efficiency and as a result it takes a lot more panels and costs go up pretty dramatically.
Is there a quick story as to why 1 panel on each of 1000 houses is less efficient than 1000 contiguous panels on an empty lot?
I can see why installation costs go up when you have to put them on separate houses. And there might be more wiring (though that might be offset by shorter transmission, when the panels are right next to the end use.)
But is there something about e.g. the voltage raise that makes it easier if you have thousands of panels in a cluster? What's the loss in efficiency, if we set aside the losses in construction costs?
I think there are a few factors
1) Location, location, location - solar farms are unsurprisingly usually located where there is a lot of sunlight. If we decided to turn the state of Arizona into the national solar farm, we could get impressive results!
2) Similarly, but slightly different - solar farms position the panels for optimal recovery. Some newer ones have them rotate with the sun across the sky to maximize their intake. When people plan building roofs, they have not usually been thinking about how to position solar panels on them for maximum reception.
3) To your point, getting a crew together and having them build the same thing over and over again in the same place is usually MUCH more efficient than doing it piecemeal. Scalability matters. Plus when you build local you usually build it so that powers that location first then feeds into the rest of the grid. All of which requires additional refitting/setup.
If the production process continues to improve at the same rate as it has been going, this may all be subsumed by the sheer efficiency and prevalence that solar can achieve. But if this is going to be our focus, we should recognize there are more factors than just comparing the most efficient solar on a relatively small scale to making it the backbone of our grid.
Okay, thanks. So the answers lie primarily in construction, secondarily in siting. Not so much to do with the electrodynamics of the generation method itself.
Play around with this website and you will see how important latitude and roof position are: https://sunroof.withgoogle.com/
Using those results, you can go here to quantify those factors: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/
The angle of the panels to the sun during peak solar flux hours has a huge impact on PV power generation.
I still haven’t been able to replicate the LCOE figures we were mulling over the other day without using an obscene discount rate.
I'm wondering if they increase that simply because they know that residential installation is going to have significantly more failures. Trees branches breaking panels, bad installation, etc. that you wouldn't have to deal with on a pv farm.
Provided those are usable acres, yes. But topography, wetlands, setbacks, etc - depending on where you are could be double that
Geothermal is the one to bet on. There’s no innate danger and it builds on an already incredibly successful package of geologic “enhancement” technology that has widespread application today.
"Geothermal is the one to bet on. There’s no innate danger...."
So, you've never read Lovecraft.
Sure; let's just drill holes into the antediluvian depth awakening eldritch horrors. What could possibly go wrong?
We should be conserving that heat in the Earth's core for when the Sun burns out, then we'll really be sorry we frittered it away to power PlayStations and microwaves.
The sun burn out AFTER it has become a red giant and engulfed the earth
Pompei agrees
I think you are rather optimistic about solar meeting our current needs. Solar/battery would be a better description anyway.
Between transmission, geography, etc, I am a lot more skeptical than well, optimists.
You are 100% right about scalable to 10x current needs.
You wrote that one! Well done!
Not just the land. How do you keep that large of an area of solar panels clean, how much water or labor would it take?
I don't think that land is much of a bottleneck for solar (we have so much empty land!) but I am curious about how difficult it would be to get the materials for all those panels.
It isn't empty from the perspective of the wildlife there -- it is vital habitat.
Matt hits the nail on the head. The problem we have is that all these issues are framed as issues of morality-people are bad, we should have a smaller footprint, fewer children, and feel guilty. Really, its a technological question that is solvable with nuclear power and some other technologies. Why can't people think "Yes! Let's use twice as much energy to do twice as many cool things!" But do it in a clean way?
One thing I would like to have Matt explain to me is this-- why are so many issues like this? You could write a very similar article about why we don't test everyone for COVID everyday with cheap at home tests and just install super duper air ventilation systems in every school. Instead COVID became a moral battle instead of a technological one.
Yes, innovation & technology is how to convert zero-sum situations into win-win.
Some people fetishize the idea of living exactly how they think Native Americans lived.
One reason is bad-faith (or just mistaken?) use of "technology will make the problem (what little of it there is) go away" as an argument against doing anything.
This issue: “nuclear power”
And this one: “just install super duper air ventilation systems in every school.”
Have the same root issue: obscene expense.
I don't think people are adding up the cost of HVAC improvements and then doing a cost benefit analysis though, that's my point. A technological problem is looked at through a morality lens so we can never just spend however many dollars solves it.
Nuclear power is the perfect example of this emotional reasoning. Its extremely safe if you look at the numbers and reasonably priced.
There's no math you can use that says that the current proven nuclear generation technology is reasonably priced. It's not even close.
Maybe nuclear will get there with next-gen innovations, but we can't know that yet, any more than we can know that investments in innovations in carbon capture or green hydrogen production will pan out.
For some reason there's this strange magical thinking around nuclear power that somehow very difficult technology challenges will "definitely" get solved while the same folks are skeptical about the likelihood that other similarly tough technical challenges with other technologies will get solved.
"There's no math you can use that says that the current proven nuclear generation technology is reasonably priced."
What does this mean/what's the comparison? Does it mean that the cost of electricity from natural gas + the social cost of carbon from burning natural gas is less than the cost of electricity generated from nuclear? Does it mean that the cost of solar + battery storage + new transmission lines is less than the cost of nuclear?
Also, are we talking about the US (where all nuclear plants have massive cost overruns) or about other countries which don't screw up infrastructure the way the US does?
Nuclear is uncompetitive everywhere(not specifically U.S.). It costs dramatically more than fossil fuel based energy and at this point solar and wind costs less than fossil fuel based energy. Even with the additional cost of energy storage wind and solar beat it handily.
The reason for the thinking (I have no idea how correct it is) is that nuclear power HAS been held back by overly strict safety regulation. What we do not know is if regulation had made nuclear 1% 10% or 100% more expensive than other zero CO2 base load technologies.
It really depends on what you mean by reasonably priced. It certainly isn't competitive with any of the other options (clean or not). If you need a power source though that doesn't require voluminous and weighty inputs and operates independent of wind and sun, it may be reasonably priced.
Yes, ideal for submarines.
I genuinely don't know anything about nuclear power other than that its been used since the 1950s. What are the cost issues? Is it more expensive than it was in the past?
Everything is more expensive than it was in the past.
But the cost issues are mostly around, you know, handling highly radioactive material and confining it. While nuclear plants genuinely are pretty safe and radioactive waste is a pretty small amount that can be safely contained, the hot, enriched uranium and its near byproducts really are crazy dangerous, and you've got to have a lot of machinery that's operating at high tolerances to keep it all in the right places.
No, and yes.
Go read any comment of mine in the last week regarding nuclear (4-5x cost of renewables, at least 2x cost of renewables+storage).
Estimate for modern HVAC in all American schools runs upwards of $400 billion, last I looked.
Nuclear uses 1/100th of the space, and is up to 3x more reliable than solar/wind. Both of these only generate power around 120 days out of the year. Nuclear generates power 340 days of the year. Per GW, after fixed costs that are eventually mitigated, nuclear becomes quite affordable.
“After fixed costs are eventually mitigated” actually means “after plants are fully depreciated, on the verge of falling apart, and in desperate need of billions in maintenance to squeeze out 20 more years of life.”
I’m done with this topic, I’ve spent four days bashing my head against the wall here. The number of people running around wielding a 1990’s understanding of the economics of energy generation and making sweeping pronouncements even as nuclear experts candidly admit the industry is in managed decline… is appalling.
If we can fantasize about renewables supplying adequate baseline power, we can also fantasize about cheaper nuclear.
The Chinese, for example, are doing exciting research on thorium reactors, which is something we ought to be doing.
Finally, a lot of the problem with the nuclear industry is it’s still living in the 1970’s. We really need a nuclear Elon to do for nuclear what the current Elon did for rockets.
I've appreciated your discussion on these topics though I suspect my biggest takeaway from your explanations about nuclear being expensive is that the problem has less to do with nuclear and more to do with a broader issue where large projects have become incredibly expensive. The most extreme example I've found is the Hammersmith Bridge in the UK where it was built for £80k in 1827 (about £7-8 million inflation adjusted). It has structural issues and needs repairs estimated to cost over £100 million.
I'm sure that there are any number of reasons why the cost has increased, but functionally going from being able to build something new for 8 million to being able to repair it costing over 100 million suggest that construction costs have exploded. You find the many of similar issues when reviewing the work that Alon Levy and others have done on transportation projects.
On a separate note, I also think that most people advocating for solar power don't really appreciate the land use issues that come from solar power farms (which are the most cost efficient.) Moving to distributed (residential/commercial) solar decreases the efficiency and ups the costs pretty substantially. Now maybe the costs continue to drop so that's less a concern, but its something that needs to be addressed.
David, you should create a post with some links and just copy and paste it as needed. I agree you have covered it well but there will always be new (and/or stubborn) readers in need of a refresher.
May I ask where you got your engineering degree that lead to these sunny conclusions? I do not think you are looking in the right places.
No, you may not. I’m not going to doxx myself to any greater extent than is already the case.
I’m sure you can figure out exactly who I am with the information I’ve already revealed to the commentariat over the last several months, and I’m not giving you a CV.
Especially since this comment is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to cast aspersions on my background, even though I have repeatedly stated my expertise is limited and my analysis is confined to trying to distill genuine expert viewpoints into a coherent understanding of the field.
Not really. A school name would be sufficient. I ask because your numbers are wildly inaccurate and your technical arguments non-existent. Can you think of a reason why electrical bills in France are not exorbitant considering what percentage of power they get from nuclear?
David R. seems to be unusually well informed and knowledgeable about power generation. If you have legitimate doubts/questions you should present them.
Frankly, that’s a bit of a stretch.
But I do understand a good bit of the economics and market structure of power generation in the US. As that’s the topic of conversation, I feel relatively confident discussing it.
My actual expertise is as a structural engineer with construction experience, including project delivery workflows in large projects.
Hence, I am very confident pontificating on why nuclear construction is a shitshow. Lol.
But yes, it would be nice to get an actual argument, as opposed to unending aspersions on my background, expertise, and knowledge.
Seems to me that vaccinating kids would be much cheaper. Although I think it would be great if kids got good air conditioning and heating in their classrooms.
It reminds me of parts of the personal finance community, FIRE, etc. There is often a ton of focus on doing without. Reuse your tea bags and ziplock bags, drive an old shitbox, never go on vacation, etc. And very little focus on increasing earnings.
“It’s great you’re eating beans and rice three times a day saving $5k a year but you left $20k on the table when you didn’t negotiate harder when you took a new job.”
There seems to be a strain of masochism that runs through both groups.
To me it's more the fervent religiosity to this FIRE movement. Like they've found the singular path and all others are damned. Or I've just met uniquely passionate, low-EQ assholes about it. I hear the $2M at 4% is all I need to retire at 35 mantra enough across our entry-level devs and data scientists to just glaze over at this point. I don't begrudge anyone seeking financial independence but - like - there's many ways to do it. For my money ... parallel revenue streams is the easiest path.
Ehh, divorcing yourself from the American habit of living right up to the edge of or slightly beyond your means so you’re not at the utter mercy of the folks issuing your paycheck has real merit. I also don’t see many in those communities neglecting the “search early, search often, and negotiate hard” mantra either, so I’m not sure where you get that impression.
As an example many of the most popular FIRE bloggers were software developers who were making $150k at 22. That aspect is minimized.
And in general saving money gets them hard in a way that making money doesn’t.
The average person is never, ever going to earn more than $70k annually. Most people lack the ability to do it. So regarding the FIRE movement’s “hey, I can retire at 35 on $70k a year if I’m frugsl,” I just cannot see this as a bad thing.
No one I know who is a FIRE fan actually lives to that extreme. It’s all “I can retire at 50 if I’m careful.”
I think that’s correct and what we have done. Delaying gratification is not denying gratification. Planning for the king-term is just smart. Looking at money primarily in terms of value doesn’t mean you have to reuse tea bags.
This reminds me of a quote from a southern senator (can't remember who) when voting for the 16th amendment to the effect that people in his state wouldn't ever pay incomes taxes since there was no way they would ever make $4000 dollars a year. (Which was where the first income tax started).
I fail to see the relevance here. Rising general standards of living and incomes still doesn't mean most people are going to greatly surpass median earning abilities.
Even for many who could, they're not going to want to put in the work. Hell, I'm sure there are ways for me to make more money than I do, and I'm not going to kill myself finding and executing every one of them.
One of the benefits of FIRE is greater resiliency for sure.
Yeah that's how I was introduced to them. I'm making less than $40,000 at the same age. It just doesn't map out the same way and they don't adjust that in their thinking at all
Sure, but it's the religious energy some of them put into self-denial that's annoying. It becomes an end in itself.
I really like Matt's framing here . It highlights a point I almost never see talked about in energy circles. The innovations we've seen in energy production in the last decade or so are once-in-a-century revolutionary and we've barely began to contemplate the implications of that.
The raw cost of making electricity using solar and wind, when the conditions are right, is now significantly lower than it's ever been in the history of civilization. I believe the current average levelized cost of utility PV at 2 cents per kWh is less than half the lowest ever historical cost of making electricity using any other means. Think about that for a second, within the last 10 years innovation has halved the cost of making electricity and that cost is still on a steep decline.
It seems very likely that electricity will be too cheap to meter during certain periods of most days within a decade or two. The implications of this will be revolutionary and we've barely begun to contemplate what it means.
UK spot-market electricity prices on a sunny and windy afternoon in summer are consistently negative.
UK has a lot of wind, and a windy summer's afternoon means lots of wind, lots of solar, and (importantly) almost no building heating (we have very little AC).
That cheap energy (if it's real not some accounting trick) could be used to do electrolysis of H2O or run CO2 scrubbers to off set burning fossil fuels.
Absolutely. If we have the spare power, we can also use the hydrogen from the electrolysis to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels from atmospheric CO2 - that's definitely an approach for plastics and for jet fuel, two users of hydrocarbons that there is no obvious substitute for.
It's negative cost because the production exceeds the demand, and, for some power generators, there is a cost in switching off (more; there's a cost in switching back on), so they prefer to pay to offload their power when there's insufficient paying demand than to switch off and then back on when demand returns.
Good to hear. Of course the problem problem is that this does not scale. But it is exemplary of how sufficiently cheap even intermittent power can be turned into useful time and place sensitive energy demands. In effect we are using H/O2 bonds or C/O2 bonds for chemical storage of energy rather than Li/O
Absolutely. And H2 and CH4 and especially longer hydrocarbons are much higher energy density than batteries.
That doesn't matter for static installations, and matters relatively little for road vehicles, but if you want to fly, or you want to stay out at sea for weeks, then you need storage a lot denser than batteries, even if it ends up costing more per kWh.
Long-distance shipping could theoretically sail (you could design the masts so dockyard cranes can remove them to access the containers) as long as they have a backup engine (solar and wind charging and a battery to power an electric motor would work). Modern automation would give you manageable crew sizes. The problem is that the ships would need to be a fair bit smaller, and they would be slower, which means you'd need a lot more of them.
I don't know where the cost balance would work out between extracting hydrocarbons from the atmosphere and sailing for container ships. I do know that the hydrocarbon extraction is needed for air travel anyway, so it may just come out in development costs.
Of course the beauty of taxing net CO2 emissions is that you and I do not have to know how it will work out wind/solar/geothermal /nuclear/carbon capture.
Blessed are we to be alive in the day of Titans bestriding the globe with YGLESIAS proclaiming "Techno-optimism!" and DOUTHAT replying "Decadence!"
Wonderful article! This is the kind of tech/progress-positive content I subscribe for! So rare to see a mindset of energy abundance as good in these days of moralizing about not altering the environment.
More of this. It is always surprising why more people who call themselves progressives aren't more comprehensively in favor of .... progress .... across more domains.
Geothermal tech is close to achieving the depths that would allow it to provide humanity with unlimited baseload energy. An interesting takeaway from an industry conference last month is that they are using materials developed for space exploration to handle the pressures and temperatures at depth.
Innovation is how everyone wins. Remember that when billionaires are criticized for going into space.
No one actually would bitch about them engaging in important private investment if they were taking a 2% haircut on owned assets each year to fund *equally important* public investment.
*no one* would bitch if they were taxed? "Billionaires shouldn't exist" is literally something people say
Would that rhetoric exist in American income distribution looked like it did in 1958 with modern productivity and thus standard of living?
I’d argue that it would be as far out of the mainstream as the CPUSA was then.
"Would that rhetoric exist in American income distribution looked like it did in 1958 with modern productivity and thus standard of living?"
Yes - it would be something people said. As someone recently said "In politics, nothing is ever enough....Social Security is fantastic. It’s wonderful. But is it enough? Not really."
I mean, sure. My phrasing wasn't really accurate. But would it be a mainstream sentiment, and would many who voiced it care all that much? I doubt it.
It's because of the failings of American policy over the last 40 years that this discussion is so vitriolic.
Maybe. Its interesting to me that if you look at a ton of factors, people are doing much better than they were 30, 50, 70 years ago - but listening to major voices in progressive politics you would think the opposite.
2% of billionaire's assets (presumably over $50 million) would not fund a goshdarn thing. If you seized 100% of the wealth of all US billionaires- down to the penny- it would fund the US government for..... 8 to 10 months, depending on whose estimate of billionaire wealth one uses. 2% annually is just a drop in the bucket.
The amount of money the US government already takes in, and then spends annually, are just staggering- just an order of magnitude larger than the private sector. $3ish trillion in a year, $6 trillion out. It's not just that I'm opposed to largescale redistribution (I am!), but that the American private sector literally does not have enough cash to fund the government's ravenous maw
I’m just going point out that “the American private sector” takes in something like $50 TRILLION in gross receipts annually.
Government is most certainly NOT “an order of magnitude larger than the private sector.”
So I have no idea what it is you’re trying to say.
This sounds like a good argument for a VAT to me! :) But as every estimate I can find of US billionaire wealth puts it at $4ish trillion- that's not even a full year of the US federal budget, and 2% of that is just kinda insignificant when the US already brings in $3 trillion in revenue a year.
A 10% national VAT and increased income taxes *on everyone* is a much more feasible path forward. Obviously not popular tho
"Innovation is how everyone wins. Remember that when billionaires are criticized for going into space."
Yeah, from the fact that some innovation is good, it does not follow that every innovation is good.
I criticize the billionaires because innovating on pointless space-toys is preventing them and others from innovating on important things.
I want more innovation! But it has to be the right kind, or it's just new ways to do stupid stuff
I wouldn’t describe massive cost reduction in satellite launching as stupid space toys.
"...massive cost reduction in satellite launching..."
When Dang referred to "billionaires going into space," I assumed he was referring to their actually traveling, bodily, into space, like Branson's stunt. You don't need to launch billionaires into space in order to figure out cheaper ways to launch satellites.
If Dang meant "billionaires going into space" like, " billionaires investing in the space industry," then, yeah, that is more useful for innovation that's useful.
But that is just the way things work.
Just look at cars - innovations originally designed for racing or vehicles for the super-rich eventually get pushed down. That’s the entire purpose of subsidizing electric cars currently, which are only affordable for the upper class.
"But that is just the way things work."
That's the way that some things work, some times.
At other times, innovation has come about through other means.
Neither the Manhattan Project nor the Apollo program came about because idle rich people had more money than they should.
I mean, those definitely are stunts. Very effective ones considering the amount of free media generated. Like all advertising, subject to a critique of pointlessness.
But more importantly I think it’s wrong to say nothing useful is happening because only some companies are successful and others (so far) are not.
I have no issue with any of these innovations. The only ones I regard as useless are Facebook-esque “here’s how we cling to your anger-addled attention for five more minutes.”
I just don’t think taxing the ever-loving shit out of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk is going to impact their innovation or financial motives therefore even a little bit.
It's impossible to predict what innovation is right and what's stupid.
Love this article. Sure, it's possible that some of it is a little too far-fetched (or maybe not, I'm not an energy expert), and tomorrow we'll see a dozen competing Substack writers pointing out "but what about X?" and people rolling their eyes at it on Twitter like we did with One Billion Americans. But like that book, Matt's thinking BIG, and he's looking at things from an angle nobody else seems to be. This is what I signed up for.
With that in mind, I'd be curious what this does regarding future warfare. On one hand, a world with abundant energy, food, clean water and air seems like it would have few reasons for conflict. On the other hand.. once you have the technology to make cost effective supersonic laser space fighter jets, somebody's gonna find an excuse to use them, won't they?
We're actually already living in a post-war world. It's been 76 years since the last Great Power war. The last time there was a >75 year gap between such wars was . . . never.
[Yes, of course, past returns do not guarantee future results.]
Maybe. But on the other hand, the more sophisticated our civilization becomes, the higher the cost of warfare. At the end of the day all this stuff is extremely delicate and modern technology is SO good at destroying things that even a relatively weak power can wreak considerable havoc if it so chooses. Getting some stuff in your city bombed is always bad, yeah, but if you're living a super awesome sci-fi life in the late 21st century being reduced to the basic human condition is much worse in terms of the change in quality of life than it was in 1940.
Damn, I love it when Matt writes science fiction.
More seriously, I approve this vein of techno-optimism. We may have advanced so far into climate change that we have already sealed our doom, as well as doom for most life on the planet. But it's too soon to be certain of that, and so long as there is room for doubt there is reason for hope. Hope, creativity and ambition will make us better, more generous, courageous, inventive, and active people. If we have to go down, let's go down striving rather than cringing.
“ We may have advanced so far into climate change that we have already sealed our doom, as well as doom for most life on the planet.”
This is almost as divorced from the science as Abbott’s unwarranted optimism.
"The science" gives us a range of forecasts and scenarios with various probabilities. Planetary doom is among the lower-probability scenarios that the science gives us.
To say, "this may happen," is just to say that planetary doom is among the scenarios with non-zero probability. That is not divorced from science: it is exactly what the science says.
Fair enough. I just don’t apply the word “may” to probabilities measured in the tenths of a percent.
"I just don’t apply the word “may”..."
You may already do it, without realizing it.
In fact, I'd say the probability that you sometimes use "may" of sub-1% probabilities has a greater than 1% probability.
I’m a great fan of the phrases “it’s vaguely possible” and “it’s not impossible” in referring to lower-order probabilities, so it’s vaguely possible that you’re correct, but I doubt it.
Breath of fresh air here.
I think about this in other industries as well.
"Let's replicate animal meat in labs so we can substitute for a ribeye or burger"
Why stop there? Let's engineer the *greatest steaks of all time*. Something nature could never produce.
There's this mindset where we're simply looking to substitute for the current, like we're caretakers of some ancient and storied estate where we can replace things as they break, but shouldn't actually *change* anything. Its a depressive and short-sighted way of looking at things, related to the kind of Zero Sum thinking that has everyone arguing over the existing pie instead of looking to expand the pie.
More like this!
Fascinating piece. I've been concerned for years, hell decades because I'm terribly old, that we as a nation have lost our narrative thread. We were plucky colonialists, then pioneers, then 'can-do' Yankees, then we 'saved the world' in WW2, rebuilt the world in the aftermath, faced down the Communists, etc... Different mythologies for different times. People need a story, and the story can't be all on the negative side - less of this, less of that, hair shirts all-around - there has to be a pay-off, a better world. There has to be a picture of what we can be, something to work for, not just something to avoid.
This is the first piece I've read that points a way to that positive narrative: not sitting in sweltering huts with the lights out and nibbling tofu, but a future of unlimited carbon-free energy, and all the coolness that would come from that. Scolding alone is not very effective. Scolding while holding up a picture of a bright future is much better. Optimism and hope.
You might like Saul Griffith: https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2019/12/16/21024323/ezra-klein-show-saul-griffith-solve-climate-change
Scolding doesn't work; pricing in the negative externality of fossil fuels does:
"Under our cost assumptions, we find that a $25/ton carbon price yields a 77% emission reduction relative to 2018 levels. The dramatic reduction comes from a large-scale closure of coal plants, investments in new wind and solar capacity, and from preservation of existing nuclear plants."
http://ceepr.mit.edu/files/papers/2021-011.pdf
"Scolding while holding up a picture of a bright future is much better."
Agreed. Combine that with some delicious tofu recipes, and then you're really cooking.
If there's any unifying thread to Matt's work it's that we need to break out of a scarcity mindset and be more optimistic. Whether it be tech, population, economics, or zoning, growth can solve many problems with economies of scale.
Things never work out how we expect but I think this approach is more realistic (politically and economically) long-term than the more-dystopian degrowth ones despite the leap of faith required. Scarcity is just like NIMBYism where everyone else wants someone else to bear the costs. Growth and abundance ultimately requires the fewest compromises.
I think I'm missing something about this. Are there people who are arguing against having a lot of clean energy? My impression is that the impediments to this future are technological and fiscal, not political will or public opinion, so I'm not sure who this article is arguing against. The climate stuff that passes through secret congress is generally only the "give money to clean energy RND" stuff, right?
It's implicit in a lot of the "solar vs. nuclear" debates. Models that say we can meet our energy needs with just solar + wind + batteries require energy consumption to not explode. You'll see ideas about how we will need what are essentially grid wide smart thermostats which can cut down on a lot of energy usage at night when the sun isn't shining.
It's basically two different mindsets, "solar + wind + batteries" requires us to be careful with our energy usage at night/thru the winter.
The "let's build a ton of renewables and also lots of nuclear/geothermal/hydro/carbon capture" would let us have a ton of excess energy during the day/summer, and then not have to worry at night/winter.
The benefits of the second option is we can use the excess energy to do a bunch of cool shit.
Curious what cool stuff you have not been able to do because energy is too expensive in America.
…the things discussed in the article above that you paid to read?
I read it carefully. As I commented before (sort 'new first' and I'm the 3rd from the top), I understand how poor countries could use more energy and cheap electricity to fight climate change would be great obviously but the idea that the US has been on a 45-year energy diet is absurd (I also think we'll be doing great if we merely make energy cheap enough to end fossil fuel use in 30 years). Aside from those two uses of cheap energy, which do you think would be a big deal for you? Faster airplanes, better strawberries, lawns in Vegas, more rocketry?
Vertical agriculture and cultured meat would be two huge environmental wins that aren't possible today largely due to the cost of energy (especially true of vertical agriculture, cultured meat still needs some more R&D to "get there" but once it does energy costs will become the limiting factor for scale). Feed the world with orders of magnitude less water and land use.
"Are there people who are arguing against having a lot of clean energy?"
It's quite easy to find environmentalists who implicitly (or even sometimes explicitly!) concede that their goal in reducing energy consumption is at least partially anti-capitalist/anti-consumerist in nature, not just about mitigating climate change.
Is it easy to find these people? The furtherest left climate change amelioration strategy in the mainstreamish conversation is the green new deal, which is definitely not a degrowther strategy. I didn't get the sense this article was written in response to 4 weirdos on twitter but maybe I'm wrong about that.
I half think this article was written in response to the reddit thread on Ezra Klein's last podcast with Holden Karnofsky. At times in that discussion it felt like Ezra even takes some of the anti-growth positions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/q1snkb/how_to_do_the_most_good/
I couldn‘t agree more and am glad to see Matt pushing this direction (techno optimism rather than general fatalism). I also really appreciated the (presumably intentional) casual triggering of 911 truthers with „Jet fuel, as we know, can melt steal beams“. Both substance and style in this post.
It didn’t actually melt them, simply softens them enough to induce a limited amount of sagging.
In many buildings that wouldn’t cause a collapse, but necessitate a later controlled demolition.
In the case of the WTC, the interior of the building would have looked somewhat like a hair roller without the outside walls: concrete core with floor joists attached to it by pinned hinges. During construction, they were lifted into place and set atop support “tabs” (corbels if anyone wishes to Google) attached to the interior of the perimeter cladding.
The problem was that only gravity held them there. When they sagged, their spans shortened and they slipped off, causing the floors to crash down to the one below and repeating the process. Without the floors bracing the cladding to the core… down it all goes.
Then what caused the (reported) actually-liquid steel, which was seen by first responders and investigators?
Yea, I'm gonna need some citations, as the only mention of liquid steel I can find is a variety of conspiracy theorist crackpot websites.
Not saying it's not possible that certain locations hit the 2500 degrees needed to melt structural steel, but it was not the mechanism of collapse and this is well understood.
The only places I've seen it mentioned are conspiracy-theory types, so I can't give you a real reference. Maybe it's completely made up, I don't know. I don't really care enough to go down the rabbit hole, it just bugs me when people dismiss it blithely (it didn't need to melt, just soften!) without understanding the actual conspiracy theory (that something did melt it, which they argue was a controlled demolition).
I took an entire semester course on this; the mechanism of collapse in all of the structures is in no way consistent with a controlled demolition.
In the absence of a reliable source saying there actually was molten steel in the wreckage I’m going to assume someone found a small puddle of aluminum or brass, or just nothing at all, because I can’t find any mention of molten or melted steel and didn’t see any when I was reading inspection reports a decade plus ago in school.
I DID know that they softened rather than melted and had a vague understanding of what you just wrote, but did not know the details (at least anymore)!
I cannot for the life of me remember if the hinges were between joists and cladding or joists and core, but the other end was just a gravity connection tab, and sagging girders slipped off and doomed the whole building.
I‘m sure this thread is exactly what Matt had in mind when he wrote that line.
Yeah, that was definitely unlocking a new trolling-level.
"The turn toward conservation and efficiency was a necessary evil in an era when we couldn’t come up with a better way to deal with geopolitical instability linked to oil and pollution linked to all forms of fossil fuels."
I agree with the main thesis that we should think big generate a lot more energy than we do now. However, I think calling efficiency a "necessary evil" is pretty silly. A lot of the things we've replaced in the name of efficiency --- resistive electric heat, incandescent light bulbs (roughly the same thing), single-pane windows, uninsulated attics, etc. --- are comically inefficient. Replacing single-pane windows isn't a necessary evil; it's a great thing! If we generate a ton of clean electricity but then all move to resistive heating, that would still be super wasteful.
I think that increasing efficiency and energy production are both good. It's energy austerity that's bad.
The necessary evil framing really does undersell it. Generation 1 LEDs had a weird color profile, took a while to start and cost a lot more. Which feels like a necessary evil to conserve energy etc.
But in a few short years, LEDs became superior in every way! They use a tenth of the electricity for the same light, cost less to operate, don't get hot and last way longer.
I think current solar is basically like first generation LED bulbs. They're a great value if you amortize out many years (maintenance costs for solar farms are tiny, esp compared to fossil power) in certain places. And every year, it's a better value than the year before.