Environment & Energy

...soothsaying based on the usual vague handwaving. Of course, I'm just glancing at it, as I'm busy and I have a low tolerance for handwaving social sciencey stuff.

The paper is here:

Riahi, K. et al. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways And Their Energy, Land Use, And Greenhouse Gas Emissions Implications: An Overview. Glob. Environ. Change 42, 153–168 (2017).

It's an open source; anyone can read it.

It contains this precious graphic with, um, "storylines."



The caption:

Who wants to bet whether the "storylines" consist of vast stretches of industrialized wilderness for so called "renewable energy," oblivious of the unsustainable material cost, although there does seem to be some musings about land use? (Good luck with that.)

Whether it acknowledges somewhere in the field of references creative engineering using high temperatures, things like reverse Allam cycles, carbonate selective electrodes, process intensification us high nuclear generated temperatures, and straight up [link:Boudouard reaction| Boudoaurd chemistry] is not clear to me. It would probably be a waste of time to wade through internal references.

It doesn't matter really. The paper is from 2017, six years into the adventure in which antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes were getting rashes from wedgies as they hoped someone would finally die from radiation exposure at Fukushima to justify their toxic and frankly, deadly, paranoia.

It's almost ten years later. Antinukism is finally, at long last, being relieved of its unjustified acceptance, perhaps way too late, but better way to late than not at all.

The removal and reduction of carbon dioxide from the environment takes energy, massive amounts of energy, energy to overcome the entropy of mixing, and reproduction of all the energy released in putting it there and then some to overcome the entropy term in the Gibbs free energy requirements.

This said, the engineering, while extremely challenging, with the challenges unlikely to be met, is still in the realm of the feasible if not in the realm of the simple.

As I near the end of my life, I am pained to realize what was possible but rejected.

Antinuke gloating over their success at demonizing nuclear energy is gloating over a crime against the future, one the future that has now become the present, and the future of all to follow.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

Have a wonderful weekend.