this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 139 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (45 children)

I’m 42 and I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t obvious that we needed to phase out fossil fuels. Global warming was already known. The 70’s oil crises had even convinced conservative politicians that “energy independence” was an important goal even if they couldn’t grasp the concept of an energy transition. The Exxon Valdez spill happened when I was in elementary school. (We did a “science experiment” where we put canola oil and water in containers and used different materials to remove the oil.)

Fossil fuels have been obviously awful for at least 5 decades. Imagine how much less CO2 would be in the air if in 1985, we got on the good timeline instead of the “Biff becomes president” timeline.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (38 children)

Have you ever considered that first world nations are just going to use whatever energy source is the cheapest until it is no longer the cheapest?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (18 children)

Then we'd be doing fission. Fossil fuels aren't required to pay for their externalities the way nuclear is, not to mention that the fossil companies have spent decades lobbying and campaigning to keep from having to be responsible for their own bullshit, as well as campaigning to make other forms of energy seem / be less viable (either through PR messaging or regulatory capture).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Nuclear fission is not paying for the biggest externality either, its waste products. That for some reason seems to be the people's problem. And even then there doesn't exist a permanent storage solution for it as of today anywhere on the planet (yes, I know Finland thinks they have it figured out next year, but at a capacity of 5500t it will only hold the waste of the 5 Finnish reactors). It's absolute insanity to me how this gets brushed away so easily.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Should just bury this shit in a subduction rift and let the earth eat it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

And that's how you get Godzilla.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The problem with that is that the subduction rifts generally also have volcanoes that spew a bunch of that material back to the surface/atmosphere. It might take a few centuries for it to go through all that, but IMO better to bury it in one place and risk future people not understanding it (they'll figure it out quickly enough if they are human or similar intelligence) than to put it somewhere where the Earth itself will eventually reject it violently and people affected won't have much choice or understanding of what happens as a result.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Usually but not always.

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