as an aside in the latest Trillbillies episode Terrence said that we need degrowth communism and it got me wondering what that means to everyone. to hopefully stifle any silly debates i’ll clarify that i’m talking about the West, not underdeveloped/overexploited nations in the Global South.
an end to oil drilling, gas extraction, and coal mining will obviously be necessary to stop climate change. how much modern technology can we replicate without relying on those things or other ecologically violent resource extraction? what does an agriculture system that doesn’t rely on petrochem-derived fertilizers and herbicides look like? how do we repair the immense damage that’s already been done?
i’d really appreciate some book recommendations on this topic as well as everyone’s thoughts
why not nuclear? it’s way more space efficient, and solar panels need to be replaced every 20 years
You run out of efficiently mine-able uranium fairly quickly when trying to scale up to the electrification energy needs of an entire planet.
well yeah, I’m not saying the whole world should be powered by just nuclear. solar definitely has its own place as does wind, hydroelectric, and the like.
there is also alternative reactor types like thorium, and if research continues fusion (which will be more feasible under communism with a well resourced public research and energy sector)
Sure, I’m not really anti-nuclear generally. It is in the mix and will continue to be in the mix. However, I don’t think it will be a linchpin.
People also talk about reactors taking a long time to build but all of this stuff will take a long time to build. We will overshoot. I have accepted this. All I can hope for is we don’t double down and use solar radiation management to forever rob our children of a brilliant blue sky.
Takes too long, the stuff that could be useful doesn’t commercially exist yet (SMRs and thorium reactors), too complex to scale
Solar panels don’t need to be replaced every 20 years - efficiency degrades over time, so you would expect 80 percent of the output at 25 years compared to a new one (or total efficiency of 16 percent compared to 20 percent new).
It takes 15-20 years to build, we’ll run out of fuel in a few years if you use it as the main energy source, and other renewables are already good enough.
Nuclear was a useful stop-gap when solar/wind tech wasn’t developed. Nuclear as a main energy source is pretty much dead in the water today though.