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The green energy industry is a racketeering scam that steals the energy industry and uses stolen is tax dollars to do it. To scale nuclear , the only companies that remotely could handle the task are large vertically integrated oil companies. If we ever get rid of these sniveling beta males of the wef , and trump gets elected , big oil needs to be incentivized to phase out oil and gas and move to nuclear. The issue is economics. Government buffoons and grifters will prevent this from happening.

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There's a paper on energy consumption limits I should dig up. Even using nuclear energy, just the waste heat will boil the ocean in a few centuries at current rate of economic growth. We have to go off planet for the billions to come.

So this issue can be kicked down the road, but it's still present, much as I dislike it.

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author

that does not sound very pleasant

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That assumes 400+ years of geometric growth, which is pretty nuts to think about- something strikes me as not plausible about that.

Also, since we are only plotting out to 2100 in the IPCC scenarios, this is 3-5x longer than that. If we haven’t figured out how to remove carbon directly from the atmosphere in 400 years, then we aren’t going to be doing too well as a species long term anyway. Imagining that the current insolation and radiation rates are the same is a pretty terrible assumption given that we will be able to reduce CO2, methane and moisture levels with direct air capture by then to improve the radiation out rate substantially.

If waste heat is really an issue, then let’s worry about it in 250 years. For now we just need as much primary energy as we can get.

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I have to be going , I have an appointment back on planet earth

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That's nonsense. Not even remotely close to true. Solar insolation on the Earth's surface is 10,000X our total Primary Energy consumption. Insignificant and always will be. And that solar insolation has led to massive ice ages covering most of the Northern Hemispheres land area for most of the last 2 million years. It needs to be increased to keep that from happening.

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Dec 26, 2022·edited Dec 26, 2022

Our economy has grown an average of around 2.1% per year. Let's calculate how that grows.

1.021^100 = 7.99X, 1.021^200 = 63.85X, 1.021^400 = 4076.59X

1.021^444 = 10,172.54X

It will take 444 years for human energy use to equal your surface insolation figure. On average half of energy use is waste heat in an efficient system. It will take 33 more years at this economic growth rate to double.

1.021^477 = 20,196.63X

At the 477 year point, waste heat from human energy use will be equal to insolation.

1.021^800 = 16,618,570.72X

We will boil the ocean before we get to 800 years of this growth.

Exponential growth has no trouble getting to a 10,000X increase. And when it does, the economy will blow past it.

Compounded growth of an economy = compounded growth (on average) of energy consumption, and energy is historically grows faster than population growth. This paper isn't the one I was thinking of, but it starts to outline the problem.

Cook, E. (1971). The Flow of Energy in an Industrial Society. Scientific American, 225(3), 134–144. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0971-134 In case anyone needs it, I'll email it to Randall.

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And what on Earth leads you to figure this geometric growth of the World Economy will continue? The World population is already stabilizing. We have already surpassed Peak Children. The population is projected to peak at 10-12B by end of this century, then decline. And that's before taking into account all the birthrate declines and deathrate increases of the past 2 yrs.

Newest projection puts World population to peak @ 8-9B. So to supply Canada's per capita energy consumption (among the highest) to World avg would require a 5X increase in primary energy supply. And Canada, like most developed nations, Primary energy consumption peaked in 2000 and has declined 20% since then. So peak @ 2000X total World energy production still remains an insignificant amount. And industrial production efficiency just keeps increasing. So my numbers are likely to be on the high side.

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So you are a de-growther now? :-D

Global population has been projected to peak and decline before. Rather like peak oil, it keeps moving back. Except peak oil is probably finally here, and population will keep growing until it resources run out. I recently talked to someone who was confident we would hit 20 billion and be just fine. I respectfully disagreed that things would be just fine.

I think that many things will interfere with growth. That is why sigmoid (logistic) curves are found in the real world. But, exponential growth has been the norm for a long time. Adjusting to low growth, no growth has issues.

We see those issues now in our current world. When living standards decline, civil unrest happens. People coalesce around ideologies that tell them they can and should have more. Humans tend to go to war then. As someone who analyzed this sort of thing in the past, I see it in the USA now, where before, I saw it in 2nd and 3rd world nations. We see civil unrest here and we don't even have much to complain about yet. Energy use is rising. (Both political wings, left-ish: BLM, and right-ish: Jan 6, and probably these power distribution attacks.)

Even if population stabilizes, which I doubt it will for quite a while, why would you think that means the world's demand for energy will drop, or stabilize? Per capita energy use in the USA has flattened since 2010, but that isn't entirely voluntary, and prior to that, it doubled between 1975 and 2005. The reason for it has a lot to do with energy prices, and that has been clobbering the middle class.

People still ask, where is my flying car? I tend to agree that energy efficiency is a good thing, but, societies that have the highest per capita energy use are generally societies that are dominant and survive better.

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I never said anything about Degrowth, don't make shit up. I said maintaining energy consumption in Developed countries, while increasing it in developing nations to similar levels. That will be no problem. Easily done with nuclear energy, for a 100Myrs.

And per capita energy consumption in the USA peaked in 1979 and since then has dropped 20%. And it has also dropped 8% since 2010.

What part of we have already surpassed peak children do you have difficulty understanding? That means population must peak also. You have no basis whatsoever to conclude population growth will continue indefinitely. It didn't in Developed nations, in fact it is in decline, many countries in steep decline. Improved standard of living in developing nations almost certainly means stable to decreasing population. Even if the World consensus by the best experts in the fields is out by a substantial amount, it isn't going to be significant in terms of heat output affecting Earth's temperature. Vastly more significant is not replacing fossil with nuclear power, which is easily done.

The simple thing to do is embrace the free & independent nation state, the Westphalian system. Severe limits on migration. Any nation state does not control its population sufficiently will face starvation, and that is on them. Globalism is exactly the wrong thing to do. We don't need centralized dictators deciding population policy.

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