B0ycey wrote:They are doing this. It is called fusion. Once the breakthrough of making it energy efficent occurs, we have clean abundant energy for life.
Fusion is definitely something to aggressively pursue, I would like to see investment in fusion increased twentyfold, but there are dozens of technologies that we could be developing, any one of which would be a game changer, and we're just not doing it. Walkaway safe thorium reactors would be a game changer, we could easily have those in less than a decade. We need to be massively investing in fusion, fission, solar, battery tech, everything, all of it, but instead we're talking about carbon taxes and market incentives.
Fuck the market and market solutions, solving a problem like climate change requires coordinated strategic mass investment and planning. Government funding for r&d gave us the space age and the information age, if we left all that to the market we'd currently be way less technologically advanced than we are. The market didn't create shit, the market basically just expropriated the technology that we as a society developed and sold it back to us.
And yhe reality is if oils was to run out next year, tomorrow we would have an alternative to oil out there today as the technology is out there now!
We have existing alternatives, the point of a carbon price is to incentivize the transition to those alternatives. The problem is those alternatives are nowhere near as cheap, efficient, or reliable as carbon energy so if we transition before those alternatives are competitive with fossil fuels that's gonna trap a lot of people in poverty who would otherwise be rising out of it. Transitioning prematurely would create a lot more human misery than necessary.