Battery technology improves by the day.
50 more years of research?

Yeah, there's always the "if", but technology doesn't spring from the minds of geniuses fully formed, it takes money and time, and we chose not to give it that until it was too late. It is a virtual certainty that increased funding would have lowered our dependence on fossil fuels by now tremendously, which would over the long-term resulted in a significantly lower level of CO2 in the atmosphere and therefore allow us to need less drastic measures now.

I know that to be true, but that doesn't bring about the end of human civilization as we know it.....

Here's some science for ya. You can burn coal 24/7. Solar doesn't offer that
That's not even considering the sheer amount of space solar requires.

We've had rich folk for at least 50 years trying to run a single house on solar, unsuccessfully. Wind has the same problems.

The only feasible renewable energy source would probably be wave motion, and hardly anyone is working on that.


THAT'S science. All this other crap is just politics.

We dont even have the batteries yet to store enough solar power to provide the base load over the night or over a few dark, cloudy days. To really be able to rely on solar carrying the base load in our nets, we would need the ability to bridge streaks of 2-3 dark, cloudy weeks without sunshine. Depending on how much efficiency we can get out of the solar panels themselves, we might even need to store power from the summer for the winter, i.e. across seasons.

That's still a loooooong fucking way to go from where we are. Furthermore, mass scale battery production might very well run into issues with a limited supply at some point. Batteries currently require various rare earths and limited natural resources, so the current battery technology cannot be scaled quasi-infinitely.

it would have just delayed the issues humanity is running into by a decade or two. so yes, technically you are right, it would have helped. but the fundamental challenge would still remain.

We need fusion.

Which allows the gains to be compounded for another decade, and another decade after that, etc.

If we started 50 years ago (yes, fifty years ago was when we had rock solid proof that climate change was happening and caused by humans. CO2 was theorized to increase Earth's temperature as early as the late 1800's) then we wouldn't need nearly as drastic action as we need today to mitigate the effects. That's the whole idea of not waiting to the last minute to save for retirement, you get the benefit of time.



Cool story bro. Even AOC doesn't think the world is going to end.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Sep 15 2019 07:49pm

Surprised you haven’t tried quoting iron man yet, tbh

Never saw it... or w/e venue it used.

Fusion or vacuum energy is the only sane solution. Spending ANY money on anything else is a joke.