IMO, we need both - people screaming out loud to reduce consumption and rooting for truly green technologies that create a revolution. While some silent practical warriors change the status quo one kg of CO2 at a time until those revolutionary changes kick in.
I think no sensible person would protest a more sustainable solution than the current fossil burning tech even if it is not 100% renewable.
> IMO, we need both - people screaming out loud to reduce consumption and rooting for truly green technologies that create a revolution.
Nuclear fusion for energy generation purposes has been promised for, what, 60 years now? Hoping for that to eventually succeed will only lead to one thing: it won't work out and whoops, suddenly humanity is out of options because everyone had refused to change in the hope for a miracle.
It is more sensible to prepare for the worst case now.
Who promied what exactly. One president onetime said it was gone be "to cheap to meter" so now it can ne er be used because of "overpromise". Who gives a shit?
It delivers plent. And if we actually developed fission technology beyond the 1970 we could do so so much more.
Nuclear projects in Western nations done as low priority "keep the industry alive" individual projects are often late.
But historically when large amount of investment is made, you get very large amount of energy quickly.
Lets not pretend that every renewable project is perfectly on time on budget either. Its just that those are smaller and on project being late isn't news worthy.
India just finished reactors very cheaply. UAE and South Korea just showed an amazing buildout of nuclear that could be scaled to much larger easly.
Finlands project took a while and was expensive but now they have great reactor that produces lots of power for the next 80 years or more.
Frnace literally made its grid green in 20 years and they have had cheap energy since.
Fission is amazing, fusion is totally unneeded. Not using fission more is one of the dumbest things humanity ever did.
It is one of those things that genuinely polarizes people’s opinion. On the one-hand you have a solution that used carefully could simply replace fossil fuels for a large set of use cases. On the other hand, as little as it may be, their wastes are an undealt problem that is only wish washed away. Ironically, it also needs one of those revolutionary discoveries before it is truly safe.
Everyone who made it out of childhood thanks to antibiotics and vaccines should probably reject takes like this.
Technology has solved the vast majority of all of the major problems of human beings throughout all of human civilization. Agriculture is technology. Writing is technology. Inks and paper are technology. Pharmaceuticals are technology. Heart surgery is technology. The modern industrial supply chain is technology. Transportation is technology. Seatbelts and blood typing to enable blood transfusions - technology.
It is theoretically possible that technology could solve the problem of death itself.
To make claims to the contrary, which would be extraordinary, something a great deal more substantial than a handwavey dismissal is required.
I don't think anyone is talking here about going without antibiotics or modern agriculture. More like curbing excess production of concrete (making construction more sustainable) and metals (reducing automobilism and other wasteful means of transport).
The revolutions or sometimes evolutions resulting in democrat nations with regulated market based economies are what allowed the rapid pace of innovating you are praising. Those revolutions were radical social changes.
Sure, we now survive childhood based on vaccines, but remember that there was a time between the disease appearing and the vaccine being developed, and in that time we used simpler methods to try survive.
The issue is not what the world will be like in 200 years when the climate crisis is solved, it's how we get there. Tech takes decades to research, design, and develop; we need ways to limit the damage that can be implemented in years to limit the effects we'll see in our lifetimes. I agree tech will be the end solution, but continuing to burn at current rates while we wait for that is going to cause, or already is causing, massive problems.
> Sure, we now survive childhood based on vaccines, but remember that there was a time between the disease appearing and the vaccine being developed, and in that time we used simpler methods to try survive.
