My girlfriend is a highly educated, experienced professional in the field and a true subject matter expert in climate change. She is very, very dedicated to this stuff and deeply, in her heart, dedicated to the validity of climate change and the need to get away from carbon. She lives it, too.
To my admitted surprise, she is generally optimistic. She is, based on a wealth of knowledge, solidly of the opinion that while things will get worse
They will no longer get as bad as the most pessimistic projections, and
They will, in the long run, get better.
Just the facts she has shared with me are too vast and complex for be to adequately explain here, and that would be maybe 5 percent of what she knows.
For sure, once it’s materially cheaper to make power (whether electrical or chemical) using non-carbon sources, there will be a switch. Economic gravity will pull that way.
The challenge, as always, is the sunk cost and legal and infrastructure inertia pulling the old way. A solar plant slightly cheaper than a coal plant has little to no net gravity. A solar plant that delivers power at 2% of the price of coal power has lots of gravity. Or one whose construction costs are 2% of a similar capacity coal plant’s.
I’d love to wrap up my time on Earth watching a real world techno-renaissance, not a real world Mad Max.
I have a hard time imagining the revolution in both regulatory and public attitudes required for that to be true.
You, I, and some experts in the nuclear engineering field might understand the differences in costs, risks, timelines, etc., between new safe small plants and the traditional not-so-safe behemoth plants.
In a world where half of America is terrified of the word “nuclear” and the other half is terrified of the idea of “consume less oil / coal”, I’m not sure who’s left to be in favor of these things. Besides you, me, and a handful of industry experts.
The biggest difficulty is that basically NOBODY in those places builds for the heat anymore.
Before air conditioning and cheap, efficient heating were invented, a region’s architecture and building materials were very heavily influenced by its climate. In places with a lot of snow, houses were built with steep roofs, so that the snow would not build up to dangerous levels. In hot places, sometimes houses were built with flat roofs, so that people could sleep on the roof in hot weather.
But now, such considerations, at least for heat, have gone by the wayside. People build buildings any style, and depend entirely on air conditioning to make up the difference.