This first spark of civilian nuclear fusion also lit the competition for the first commercial nuclear plant.

Let' us look at the different approaches to inertial laser fusion.

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The National Ignition Facility

The NIF was originally designed to help with the stewardship of the US nuclear arsenal. Construction began in 1997 and was completed 5 years behind schedule and at almost 4x its original budget.

It hosts 192 laser beam lines, each of which uses a rather complex array of components to generate, amplify and focus the laser on the target.

The “target” is a small ball of hydrogen ice (a 50/50 mixture of deuterium and tritium) inside of a capsule made of gold. This capsule, callled a hohlraum, is essential to NIF’s “indirect-drive” approach.

Instead of targeting the laser directly on the fuel and trying to “squeeze” it hard enough, which is called “direct-drive”, NIF’s lasers are actually aiming into the hohlraum, instead of onto the hydrogen ice ball. The impact of the laser onto the hohlraum’s inner wall converts the lasers’ energy into X-rays. These X-rays are compressing the fuel symmetrically from about water’s density to approximately 100x the density of solid lead. The indirect drive helps to prevent asymmetric compression. But this comes at a cost: at NIF, only roughly 15% of the energy of the laser pulse makes it to the actual fuel in the form of X-rays.

The lasers’ power output is considered to be close to the minimum physically necessary for achieving ignition. They were designed in the 90s and are rather inefficient by today’s standards, their delicate optics need hours to cool down after each shot. They waste a lot of energy by relying on the indirect-drive method.

In short, the NIF can neither deny its age nor its origin as a research facility for nuclear weapon stewardship, rather than as a commercial power plant. (Also not having any method of converting fusion power into electricity might have given the last point away)

And this is where the different fusion startups try to improve on NIF.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Two companies come to mind, which try to stay as close to the proven physics of NIF as possible. One is Longview Fusion founded by Edward Moses former Project Manager and Director of the National Ignition Facility. The other is Inertia, which has recently been founded by former NIF Lead Target Designer Annie Kritcher and Mike Dunne, who led the US program to design a fusion power plant based on NIF.

These companies are closest to the original NIF, but they try to improve on various components. Inertia, for example, is looking at using 10 MJ diode-pumped, solid-state lasers, which are roughly 10x as efficient in converting electricity to the right kind of light. That is roughly 4 to 5x more energy than NIF can offer, fired at 10 Hz on scaled up NIF targets. 10 MJ has been compared to roughly the energy of a truck at highway speed, fully loaded, ramming into a target the size of ball bearing and coming to a full stop within a billionth of a second.

The much more powerful lasers should be able to cope with imperfections in the mass-produced targets, which are supposed to cost less than $1 a piece, but producing a gain of 45 (instead of NIF’s current world record of 4).

Each shot would release 450MJ of energy (roughly 13l of gasoline). Multiply by 10 shots per second and you get 4500 MWth. Roughly half of this is lost during the conversion to electricity, so this is roughly 2GWe, of which 500MWe have to be used by the lasers, leaving 1.5 GWe for the grid.

Inertia aims at bringing down the cost of the NIF targets by replacing the gold-lined depleted uranium hohlraums with mass-manufactured lead counterparts, which have already been tested at NIF. Stamping out lead targets is apparently close enough to ammunition manufacturing to have some hope of vastly reduced costs. Given that each power plant would consume 864 000 of such targets every day, this seems like a rather critical assumption.

An additional advantage of using hohlraums is that they can protect the frozen D-T fuel pebble from the kinetic and thermal impacts of being injected into the hot reaction chamber at high speed.
Additionally, there are supposedly unresolved physics questions with regard to the direct-drive, like the uncertainties in laser-plasma interactions, which might reduce the theoretical advantage of direct-drive schemes significantly.
While NIF’s goal has been to make pristine targets to maximize fusion output of their undersized lasers (relatively speaking, given that they are of have been by many metrics the world’s most powerful), Inertia’s goal is to use a somewhat overpowered 10 MJ driver to overcome the challenges of less-pristine, mass-produced targets.

The dreaded first wall problem is dealt with by decoupling the laser driver from the reaction chamber and making the latter disposable. The chamber is a multi-meter diameter shell made of metal with holes in the top and bottom to let laser light through. The walls of the chamber are actually pipes though which a liquid lithium alloy is pumped as coolant. That lithium is also the breeding material for the tritium used in the fusion process itself.
Inertia wants to manufacture the chamber from cheap steel materials and plans on replacing it every 3-5 years.

The 10 MJ laser will be the most energetic ever built. Each beamline will have to handle a factor of 10 or so more energy than any prior design. Yet, the most challenging part will be to acquire enough diodes for pumping the laser material. The world does not produce enough of them. However, another kind of laser-diode, the Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser (VCSEL), used in smart phones, has seen production numbers increase by multiple orders of magnitude and their cost fall by multiple orders of magnitude in a span of 5-7 years. This is seen as a mere question of capital invested, not a physics or engineering challenge.

Same, but different

Companies like Focused Energy or GenF are investigating the direct-drive approach, ditching the hohlraum and trying to deposit more energy directly into the fuel. Notably, two of Focused Energy’s scientists - Pravesh Patel and Debbie Callahan - played pivotal roles in NIF’s ignition campaign.
Theoretically, the direct drive should increase the gain for the same laser energy by at least a factor of 5 or more. Focused Energy claims that their proprietary, mass produced Pearl™ fuel capsules will increase output 30x compared to the current NIF indirect-drive fuel system.

One of the founders of Focused Energy, Markus Roth, is also a pioneer in what is called fast proton ignition. Instead of trying to squeeze the fuel pebble perfectly, a specifically designed metal foil is inserted into the target, which emits neutrons when it is hit by a specific laser. The idea is that you can decouple the compression and the ignition of the fuel. Instead of relying on a perfect compression and ignition from the very center of the fuel, you can create an off-center local hotspot in the pre-compressed plasma, which will start the fusion reactions. Just like a spark plug does in an internal combustion engine. This technique should also help with some amount of asymmetric compression - at the cost of a somewhat more complex target.

While it is unclear to me, whether Focused Energy is still looking at using this approach (former versions of the website and interviews were more explicit about it), it is clear that Focused Fusion and GenF appear to also target the use of diode-pumped solid state lasers and power plants between 1 and 1.5GWe output.

One advantage of using many of these smaller lasers is that individual units (about a 1000 for Inertia and at least several hundreds for Focused Fusion) can be replaced more easily and very probably even while the power plant is running, possibly creating a highly reliable and serviceable fusion system architecture.

The same, but very different

Several companies, like Innoven, Xcimer or LaserFusionX, opt for another type of laser, so called excimer lasers, where a gas mixture (for example KrF or ArF) is used as laser medium instead of a glass.
These are promising, because they are fairly inexpensive to make, simple in construction, and about 10x as efficient as NIF’s flash lamps.

The theory seems to be, that although there were significant advancements in solid-state laser technology since the NIF was built, solid-state glass systems are still very expensive, not shown to be scalable to 10 MJ, and they would still need a great many of beamlines and subsequent holes in the reactor chamber.

Xcimer for example plans to use just two beams and therefore very few holes in the reactor chamber. This makes the use of a liquid first wall possible. They plan to improve on the HYLIFE reaction chamber, where a thick, liquid layer of a molten salt mixture absorbs the fusion neutrons, breeds tritium and is used to as coolant.

The liquid layer should also offer enough robustness to be able to use larger targets, thereby reducing the repetition rate to about 1 Hz.

These benefits come - as everything in engineering - with a cost.
Several orders of magnitude separate the largest excimer laser built to date from the sizes needed for a commercial fusion plant, so they carry scientific risk in their scaling.

The most frequently used gases are toxic, which might carry some risk of public acceptance. While excimer lasers are roughly 10x as efficient as flash lamps, they are still only approximately 7% efficient - approximately half of modern solid-state lasers. On the flip side, the excimer laser produce light in the ultra-violet range, which eliminates the need for additional optical components relative to solid-state lasers. However, the UV light is much shorter wavelength and carries different focusing characteristics than the NIF.

This change in wavelength requires different optical components in the system, for which a supply chain has to be build. A major challenges might be the forming of high fidelity, temporal pulse shapes, which have not been demonstrated in excimer lasers.

The same, but completely different

All of the former companies opt for using D-T fuel. This reaction releases high energy neutrons, which intruduce a lot of engineering challenges, like converting their energy to electricity via a standard thermal cylce, embrittlement of structural components, activation of components, radiation protection for expensive optical and electrical components and measurement equipment and so on. Alternative fusion fuel, like D-D, D-³He or p-¹¹B, while theoretically possible, are far, far harder to ignite

In contrast, the D-T reaction is the most efficient fusion reaction possible. D-T fusion ignition occurs at a “mere” 150 million degrees C, instead of D-D’s 500 millon degress C and is additionally releasing about 3.5x as much heat energy per fusion reaction. The other fuels need even higher temperatures and confinement, but would release a larger percentage of the fusion energy in the form charged particles, which could be converted to electricity efficiently without using a thermal cycle.
While a neutron-free reaction does simplify the plant design and operation, they would not be truly neutron-free in practice: D-³He releases neutrons via unavoidable D-D reactions, and p-¹¹B will do so as long as any trace of deuterium is present in the fuel.

But these challenges do not faze companies like Marvel Fusion, HB11 or Blue Laser Fusion. All of them are targeting inertial confinement fusion with p-¹¹B fuel. HB11 for example wants to use the proton fast ignition explained above to ignite a compressed p-¹¹B fuel pellet. All of them seem to target the usage of many, commercial lasers that are combined for a power plant system.

These approaches cannot rely on the same amount of public, published research and experimental facilities. D-T inertial confinement fusion is currently the only approach to fusion that can rightly claim that it achieved ignition and that there are few - if any - physical barriers left.

The engineering challenges remain quite daunting, though.
Especially with the usage gravitationally confined fusion plasmas coupled with non-dispatchable generators, also known as solar, growing a breakneck speed.

All new forms of power generation will have to compete in a world with decentralizrd, somewhat stochastic generation and storage against the backdrop of managing humanity’s impact on the carbon cycle.

What would you put your money on?
The only proven physical approach with the need for scaling some orders of magnitude in the industrial production of pumping diodes? A somewhat relaxed industrial challenges, but more of a physics risks by using direct-drive (with or without fast-proton ignition)? An entirely different sort of laser with resumably fewer manufacturing challenges, but higher pyhsics risk? Or even for a new fuel, possibly even with direct energy conversion to electricity?

Trillions of dollars are riding on the answer to this question.

Driven by the rapid predicted increase in electricity demand for electric vehicles, A/C, and computing, companies that rely on dependable energy and are interested in zero-carbon solutions, have changed from consuming fossil fuels and buying licenses to blame other people for their emissions, to looking into options that can physically satisfy their needs.

One option that keeps beating financial expectations and timelines is geothermal power. For example @fervoenergy has partnered with @Google to provide data centers and campuses with 24/7 carbon-free power. Additional,@fervoenergy plans to build 400 MWe of power in Utah over the next 4 years, which just got regulatory approval.

@Google announced another partnership with @KairosPower to deploy 500MW of clean nuclear power.

Their KP-FHR reactor combines molten salt cooling and solid TRISO fuel, a special fuel form that is known for its (almost absurdly high) security levels.

A TRISO fuel element consists of thousands of tiny, spherical uranium particles, each one coated in a tough containment consisting of mulitple layers of specially designed materials.

TRISO particles had been irradiated to previously unseen levels of burn-up and therefore fission product content (as bad as it can be) and were than tested at up to 1800°C and showed no to little damage and full fission product retention.

These temperatures are well beyond anything that can be achieved in worst case accident scenarios, which means it cannot melt down.

If the fuel were nonetheless damaged, the fission products would be retained by the molten salt coolant and would not be dispersed into the environment.

@Xenergy 's helium-cooled Xe-100 reactor also relies on TRISO fuel, which they produce in their own production. @amazon seems so convinced of the design that they just invested $500M with the goal of deploying up to 5 GWe of clean power by 2039. The reactor has also been selected for Dow’s UCC Seadrift Operations manufacturing site in Texas, where it is expected to provide reliable, zero-carbon-emissions power and steam.

@WECNuclear's also uses TRISO fuel for their eVinci reactor, which is supposed to become the research reactor of choice and an energy source for remote locations - think radar stations in Alaska -, where energy comes at a premium.

hat is rougly the same market that @UltraSafeNuke 's is trying to address with their own reactors and their fuel products, based on TRISO. They are also pretty serious about deploying their reactors on the moon or on Mars. Which is - if you think about it - as remote and hostile a location as you can imagine. They are also looking into powering rockets in space with it.

The @NRCgov has issued a construction permit to @ACUedu to build the Natura MSR-1 research reactor. It will be the first reactor, where the fuel is dissolved in molten salt, to be built and operated in the US in over 30 years. The reactor will also serve as testbed for the design before its commercialization.

Not to be outdone by the other hyperscalers, @Microsoft partners with

@ConstellationEG to restart the venerable TMI-1 reactor to secure 20 years of reliable zero-carbon energy.

@holtecintl is working on bringing back another reactor from the dead: Palisades. They secured a loan from @ENERGY and are apparently on track to with their restart program.

But there are only so many old reactors that you can bring back, and startups like @TheNuclearCo are planning to build the already proven Gen3 nuclear power plants, that have served us so well, in fleet mode. That is based on the idea that you need to "do" to get better at "doing", especially, if you set out to do something as big as power plant construction.

Canda is proving this point. They have been refurbishing their power plants and have it down to a science. These gigantic projects are now regularly completed months before schedule.

CANDU reactors have a stellar record. They are well suited for nuclear "beginner" states - and for states that have lost the ability for heavy forgings that are necessary for pressurized water reactors. That is because the core consists of many smaller pipes, which are easy to manufacture relative to the foot-thick forgings needed in PWRs.

The same supply chain that is needed for refurbishments could also be used for new builds globally. A good thing, considering that Romania is considering to complete two units.

India has developed an entirely indigenousversion of this reactor and is deploying it in fleet mode.

Reactor developer @COREPOWER10 is scoring major investment. They are trying to commercialize a molten salt reactor for powering ships.

@Blue_Energy_Co scored a $45M investment to develop their "modular power plants from modular reactors idea". They are reactor agnostic, partnering with reactor vendors and designing modular power plants to house them.

In the fusion space, we continue to see a lot of energy and investments. @Energy_Zap recently landed a major investment and unveiled its power plant design:

Even in the EU, where nuclear power has eked out a miserable existence (especially in Germany), there are some signs of an improving environment.

Nuclear will be considered clean. It might strike any sensible observer as ridiculous to claim otherwise, given the miniscule amounts of waste, the low resource intensity and zero-carbon electricity, but you have to count it as a win:

The energy abundance agenda is gaining much deserved speed and only our own stupidity and anti-rational ideology can stop us from providing clean energy - in due time - to everyone.

• Are they Pure Scientists, completely disinterested in what other people decide to do on the basis of the information they provide?

• Are they Science Arbiters, serving as a resource for the decision-makers, only answering factual questions that the decision-maker, and not the scientists , believes to be are relevant, without voicing an opinion of what the decision-maker should prefer?

• Are they Honest Brokers, trying to expand/clarify the scope of choices for decision-makers to act on his/her own preferences and values in a better informed way?

• Are they (Stealth) Issue Advocates, trying to convince the decision-maker to do the things that the scientist prefers (without telling them so)?

In a new article, he lays what what kind of science we can expect to see for the next few decades.

Here is the background: To normalize research scenarios of the climate future, a lot of climate scientist rely on emission scenarios. These try to model how much CO2 will be in the atmosphere in the future and how much warming that is likely to create. As Pielke showed in a journal article, the uncertainty about emission trajectories has narrowed so much, that the apocalyptical scenarios, which were still (albeit barely) in the cone of uncertainty 20 years ago, have fortunately turned out to be implausible. By a long shot.

But that doesn't stop thousands of studies per year to still use these discredited scenarios.

The Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) suffer from being decoupled from any assumptions about the socio-economic development: It's possible to model a world where everybody uses as much energy as the US, but made purely from coal, while still being as poor as Bangladesh is today and has as much flood protection as it does today.

After long years of debates and blaring headlines of doom, a new set of emission scenarios is finally being developed (REPs). But instead of fixing the problem of RCP, there are arguments

"that the REPs should remain separated from the underlying socioeconomic scenarios as was done previously under the RCPs"

How do you explain that the climate community decides to not evaluate scenario plausibility? Even the existing research on today's scenarios?

Anyway, the result is that essentially nothing gets fixed, because restricting the research to plausible scenarios is kind of boring :

While a policy-relevant question almost always entails a scientific question of interest, the scientific realm of questions is broader.

Probably the only thing we will get out of creating REPs is a dropping of the laughing stock, yet working horse of climate science - RCP8.5, often fraudulently refered to as "business as usual" (it never was), and its replacement with another emission scenario with implausibly high impacts as the new go to scenario, shattering a lot of hope that was put on the possible positives effects of the effort.

The scientific community, for some reason, has chosen to be of no use to real world decision-makers what so ever, because they decided to only look at worlds with so little energy use, that there is no way to get there (but hey, look at how minute the effect of humanity is on the climate!) and a world with implausibly high emissions (where climate change is really bad).

The future our world is currently heading to is not even modeled, making it hard for decision-makers to base the real-world decisions they have to face (more solar+batteries? synthetic fuel? dams? bans of cars? heat-pump mandates?) on anything that has been researched. (especially the local effects are virtual unknown)

In other words: Climate scientists decided to not craft the tools that could actually help decision makers in the real world. Despite spending a lot of time and funds on renewing their tool set, after it has proven to be useless to an astonishingly high percentage.

As Pielke oberserves

[T]he next several decades of climate science — and thus peer reviewed research, media coverage, climate advocacy, climate policy — are now being determined by a very small group of researchers, with a very narrow range of disciplinary expertise, without any underlying research on scenario plausibility or utility in decision making, and all (or nearly all) from the rich parts of the world, notably the U.S., U.K and Europe

He suggests to decouple the exploratory scenarios (of the broad scientific interest type, where all of a sudden political, technological and structural trends begin to trend in a negative direction) from actually policy relevant scenarios.

Given that the mere assertions of the policy relevance is as good a justification as any for funding purely science-(fiction)-focused scenarios and a seat at the table of power for modelers, I find it hard to imagine that there will be too many honest labels.

So what do you think? Are we only dealing with pure scientists here?

The infeasibility of using raw power directly has not stopped countries from engaging their rivals, though. Only the means have shifted. For example, advanced reconnaissance satelliteshave been deployed to spy on one another, to monitor missile launches, to guide one's own missiles and to facilitate communication to troops around the globe. This has spawned research into direct-ascent anit-satellite weapons, anti-satellite lasers and other counter-measures.

Another domain of the not-so-cold war is in the information space.

It has been recognized for a long time that influencing the population of another nation might bea far cheaper and far more effective means of changing that nation's leadership and politics than more kinetic forms of war. The internet, especially social media, has worn the traditional gatekeeping institutions down. No longer is there a managable number of TV stations and a handful of media outlets, instead anyone can potentially reach hundreds of millions, even billions of people now. One good meme can potentially topple a ruling elite. This has not gone unnoticed by intelligence commuities, which were presented with and eagerly tried entirely new means of toppling governments for (hopefully at least) their national interests.

It has also spawned counter-measures, many of which are not compatible with what we have come to expect from a democratic republic that has enshrined free speech as its founding principles.

Openness: The means of correcting errors

Freedom of speech is the very bedrock of an open-society.

Without the ability to say what you think, you lose the ability to think. The ability to think is required to detect errors. And that's what you need to have any hope of correcting them. I find it highly unlikely the massive, man-made famines and purges could have taken place in the Soviet Union or China, without the extensive apparatus for censorship and propaganda. It insulates rulers and ruled alike from seeing and hearing the consequences of the elites' actions. It prevents the ruled to coordinate in their own interest. Speech control makes life convenient for those in power, it will make life miserable for those at the receiving end of it.

Once the apparatus for destoying the means of correcting errors is in place, nameley the rejection of free speech and its replacement by assigned opinions about the predetermined results of the manufactured reality, there is too little friction to stop the pathologies of ideology and virtue-dominance status games.

Free speech is the the pre-condition for all our rights. It's our best, maybe our only safeguard against the devastating effects of ideology running wild.

It is also the not-so-secret incredient for innovation and devlopement, because it allows for correcting errors of the past to improve things in the future.

On the other hand, this strategic openness of democratic republics creates and asymmertry that can - and very probably is - used by adversaries with more closed societies. While those can "shield" their population and parties from any inconvenient truth, they can inject convenient memes into the minds of the adversaries' populations.

It seems like this attack vector has not eluded Western intelligence organizations., on the contrary, it seems very likely that they have already used the experience gained in controlling other countries' governments (see for example the color revolutions) at home. But this brings us to an age-old problem: who makes sure that those "guarding" the republic do so to increase its - instead of their own -flourishing?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

@MikeBenzCyber might be one of the most vocal proponents of this line of thinking. As outlines in a recent inverview with @TuckerCarlson, he suspects that many institutions, which are considered to be democratic, feel threatend by public opinion coming to different conclusions and ideas than said “democratic” institutions' leaders. Challenging those leaders or institutions, even voicing “doubt”, is spun as “attacking democracy”.

Social media platforms have been declared to be critical infrastructure for the distribution of information, and because they are used for “attacking democracy” by spreading "misinformation" , doing so is akin to "cyber terrorism". Intelligence agencies must take control and “combat” “propaganda” and “misinformation” - or else they wouldn't really be doing their jobs.

Because the network has swept away the gatekeepers and virtually anyone can become viral and influence a great many number of people, it’s not sufficient to control a few choke points. Instead, it’s important to deploy tools for censorhip at a sufficient scale to control almost anyone. All in the name of doing good and protecting democracy from "harmful" ideas.

The problem is that their conception of good and evil is not necessarily aligned with the public’s. Or even popular. To the contrary, many "attacks" on democracy are nothing but criticism of stale and increasingly corrupt institutions, which are captured by a malign ideology, social-justice fundamentalism, alternatively called wokeness.

The mechanisms codified by the constition in order to reduce the likelihood of large scale violence, namely elections, representative governments, the rule of law, etc., threaten to “transition power” (monitary, military) away from those occupying these institutions. But given their belief that they are the good guys after all, it follows - clearly and self-evidently - that the democratic republic is in mortal danger of being taken over by the bad guys.

Therefore, to protect democracy against the population's misguided and misinformed opinions, an insidious form of "military rule", and "inversion of democracy" is called for, maybe already implemented, that would to justice to the dystopian visions of Orwell, or Huxley's even more nefarious ones.

Nullius in verba

A major problem arises from the fact that just because someone claims to be wanting and doing good, does not necessarily mean that they are doing so. In fact, after 70 years of denial, research is beginning to emerge that shows that a lot of ostensibly anti-hierarchical aggression is infact "associated with antagonistic narcissism", while "neither dispositional altruism nor social justice commitment was related to left-wing anti-hierarchical aggression." The research found a strong correlation between left authoritarianism and dark triad traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, pyhchopathy) . It did not find greater altruism or committment to social justice. The researchers conclude that for these people their left-wing views are simply a way for legitimizing the use of force to gain power over others.

As @jordanbpeterson observes: "The correlations reported here are so high (.60) that, given measurement error, the constructs of antagonistic narcissism and left wing authoritarianism might be literally the same thing.”

What is the peaceful solution to such a situation, where positions of power and discretion are held by people who are not commit to democratic ideals anymore?

I think without free speech and open debate, there are slim chances of one. That's why @elonmusk ’s acquisition of Twitter/X has preserved hope for many people opposed to the censorship-industrial complex1, formed by the world's most powerful nations and some of the world's most valuable companies. It wasn't free for him, neither monetarily, nor socially. His advocacy for free-speech has painted a target on his forehead.

Many European laws for censorship have already been passed in order to "fight misinformation", which will surely find their way back to America (“How can you be against senisble rules to protect democracy?”).

It falls once again on SCOTUS to weigh conflicting values and ideals in what might be one of the most important and consequential cases of our lifetimes.

If free-speech is sacrificed on the altar of "security" and "state capacity", the twilight will have set upon the "shining city upon the hill". It's were tyranny thrives.

• Jordan B. Peterson’s “A Conservative Manifesto”,

• Johan Norberg’s “The Capitalist Manifesto”,

• Marc Andreessen’s “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”.

• Aaron Slodov's "Techno-Industrialist Manifesto"

• James Pethokoukis's “The Conservative Futurist”

At the heart of it is a commitment to lifting all humans out of poverty, while protecting the environment as much as reasonably possible, a vision of material abundance, freedom, and human flourishing. Maybe even off planet.

Recognizing that there is as much raw material as there was 100,000 years ago, adherents believe raw materials are not constraining our options as much as our lack of knowledge about how to use it properly does. Knowing that there is several thousand times as much solar energy hitting the earth as we would need to power all of our demands easily, or knowing that two billion times as much energy is missing the earth entirely, helps us approximately as much as knowing that DT, DD or HB11 fusion works. If we don't know know how to use it commercially, the raw existence of such vast energy flows and stores does not help us. The scientific revolution and industrialization are still at the beginning of generating the necessary knowlege about how to transform raw material and energy into more useful forms, yet they have already reduced human suffering tremenduously.

To realize e/acc's commitment, adherents focus on a series of technologies that have the potential of improving the future at an accelerating rate. Another major component is getting rid of of stifiling overregulation, (or "stealth command&control economy") like NEPA, certain barriers to high-skilled immigrants or laws that allow or even force companies, administrations or individuals to discriminate on anything other than merit.

New frontiers are opening up to realize that vision, presenting opportunities for entrepreneurs:

• Robotics need to be applied at scale to far more new industries. Food production, maintenace and manufacturing of industrial equipment, construction work, elderly care, remote control of equipment everywhere, 3D printing with increased precision down to the atomic level, underground and deep-sea mining.

• AI needs to be developed and applied to all sorts of administrative, planning, inspection, surveillance, transportation and diagnostic work. Intelligence augmentation via an interface to the human brain might also be in the cards.

• Biotech for creating new crops and breeds of animals, ultimately making the latter unnecessary, mRNA vaccines (for example against malaria, cancer, etc.), targeted therapies for rare and chronic diseases, ultimately reversing the effects of age.

• Energy will need to be provided carbon-free and cheaply. The field is wide open for advanced nuclear fission and fusion (there is even some serious research into LENR now), bringing down the price of deep geothermal, carbon capture, storage of energy is batteries and bricks, more efficient solar panels.

• Transport: cheaper rockets, commercial supersonic flights, electric VTOLs, space planes, better drones - including on streets, rails, rivers and oceans, airships.

• Space remains the ultimate frontier. Today, it costs something like $1500 to get 1 kg of material into space. Entrepreneurs have set their eyes on bringing that price down to $10/kg. Mining asteroids and sending virtually unlimited amounts of space-based solar power back to earth - and even visiting space touristically could become possible. If some gigantic piece of new infrastructure, like a space elevator, proved necessary on the way to that price point, e/acc is not daunted.

High-efficiency, highly automated manufacturing will play a key part in opening up the last frontier. Fortuitously, that is also the kind of manufacturing that is necessary for material abundance and military safety.

Hadrian is a good example of how manufacturing will have to look like soon:

The creation of new forms of manufacturing by merging new software, hardware and processes should bring down the cost and time of manufacturing the compoenents necessary for building the energy infrastructure to power more of the automation and AI in a virtuous cycle. Let's look a nuclear as an example of that.

Applying scan-to-CAM reduces the machining times for a nuclear RPV by around 40%, cooling the milling tools with supercritical CO2 extends their life hugely.

Using a electron beam welding reduces the time it takes to weld a RPV from around a year down to a day.

Applying all of these advances slashes the production time for a nuclear RPV from 3 years down to 10 months. In combination with more sensible nuclear regulation, ordering the NRC to weigh costs AND benefits for nuclear fusion and fission, as well as with better business cases for high-temperature nuclear like the recovery of unconventional oil in rather inhospitable and remote areas, for example by using@TerrestrialMSR's IMSRs, the stage looks set for real deployment with a sensible learning curve and target price.

Similarly, advancements of technology (lithium batteries and electric motors in this case) makes new transportation technologies possible. For example, the Adaptive Cycle Jet Engine might make getting to space far cheaper by accelerating the craft in the optimal regime given its height and speed. If that does not given "e/acc" a symbol as fitting as anyone could only hope for, I don't know what would:

The future does look bright, if we commit to making it so.

AI safteyism belongs to the class of “cynical philosophy”. Cynicism is the denial that progress has happened, is happening, or would be a good if it did happen. As so often, AI safetyism is paired with the idea that a problem is insoluable (“Humanity is too dumb to control an omniscient AI!”) and therefore requires the entrenchmentof new taboos, which justify — or necessitate, rather — violence against transgressors.

E/Acc is an optimistic philosophy, recognizing that evils (=anything that causes suffering or impairs human thriving) are inadequacies or errors in existing knowledge. E/Acc follows David Deutsch in believing that there are no limitations, other than the laws of nature, on our ability to eliminate evils by creating knowledge. Knowledge is created by iteratively guessing improvements creatively and criticizing them, and prior knowledge.

You will be hard pressed to find any innovation anywhere in written history, that was not repressed for its unknown, but oh so certainly catastrophic consequences on race, royalty, religion and — most importantly — remuneration.

The larger and more transformative a technology, the bitterer the fight.
While today’s battle is waged about artificial intelligence, promising the scaling of many important tasks, from driving, construction, farming, accouting, to creating art, music, and science, well beyond our human numbers, can we learn something about the cycnical playbook by looking at recent battles in this war of memes?

Nuclear Power

There is probably no other technology offering as much energy security and indepedence as nuclear power. It promises clean energy at the scale needed to provide all 8 billion of us with a high standard of living. A typical reactor stores months to years worth of fuel in its core; fast reactors can convert denatured uranium, which has been produced as by-product of the enrichment process, into usable fuel. If and when fast reactors work as envisioned, the US would have amassed enough uranium already for all of its power consumption for a few thousand years at current levels.
A power plant, once constructed, can run for 60-100 years. It’s hard to apply political pressure by threatening to cut off energy supplies, if the intended target can utilize such vast stores of energy.

Just like with oil, where “crude” doesn’t exactly help you to power your car, for nuclear you need regulatory complex, highly controlled, specialized enrichment hardware to turn “crude” uranium into something useful.1

When a country has mastered building and operating enrichment equipment and the chemical conversion processes that are necessary, there is not really anything stopping that country from using these enrichment facilities to produce weapons-grade uranium. Except the lack of will to do so, of course.
A country that has access to as much energy as it wants, and has also access to a sizable arsenal of devastating weapons2 is dangerously independent, hellishly hard to control.

Once the USA had mastered uranium enrichment and the controlled chain reaction for power generation, it open-sourced a reactor design that was derived from a military submarine in a wholly unprecedented display of altruism as soon as it was working; funneling almost all energy/minds to that design, which coicidentally(?) requires a constant supply of fuel, that countries adopting it could only get from one place at the time,3 and which does not produce new fuel.4

After most of research and industry was locked in on one type of reactor, and even that in many respects suboptimal reactor type became too competitive for entrenched interests, miraculously, the capacity to build these reactors seems to have vanished. While it was possible to build reactor for <1000$/kW5 in the late 60s, reactors that are still running, mind you, it’s apparently not possible in 2023, despite having computers, robots and nascent AI.

Maybe we just started to be bad at building complex power plants?
Do we see the invisible hand of the market here, which doesn’t favor such projects? Or is someone else’s hand very involved?

Isn’t it strange, that we get countries from all over the world to work together to spend $40G on a fusion plant that will never produce electricity, but we cannot spend a tenth of that money to derisk several fast fission reactor types, which would convert a liability (nuclear waste) into a hugh asset?

Why do we fail to spend a few millions in corrosion testing to get new coolants ready to go? How is it even possible to drive the licensing process to cost several hundred millions of dollars, lasting more than a decade — for reactors we have been building for almost 70 years?!

Given such an environment, an industry won’t attract energetic, bright, young minds. In fact, it looks exactly like it’s designed to be as appaling to that demographic as humanly possible. Everything is deliberately slow, hard and unimagnibly formalistic, lawyerly and expensive. Is it any wonder that such an industry is relegated to a pathetic, zombie-like existence?
Nuclear has become so unattractive as a competitive industry, that only state-backed companies from China, Russia, Canada or South Korea are building power plants around the world, while private companies appear less than competitive at the moment.6

Okay, we did not get the abudant energy that nuclear promises, but at least we have been kept perfectly safe, right? Of course not!

I am not talking about TMI, Chernobyl, Windscale, Majak, Hanford, or Fukushima. While these incidents fueled the public’s imagination, their death toll would hardly make any list of bad industrial accidents. I am talking about nuclear arsenals7 in the hands of Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong-Un, or Putin.
We managed to get access to the most devestating form of nuclear power (thermonuclear weapons) to exactly those psychopaths, that the regulations, agencies and committees were ostensibly intended to keep us safe from.

We sacrificed the prosperity of unlimited nuclear energy for nuclear safety, we got what we were most afraid of: big red launch bottons on desks of men you would rather have sit behind bars.

But that is certainly just a one-off, right?

Biotech

Biotech promises the creation of organisms specifically designed for human needs. Governments regulate work on gene editing heavily. It took 30 years to get a fast growing salmon and a rice that keeps children from getting blind to market; it has become so expensive, that we have to rely on major agro-businesses like Monsanto to bring patent-protected innovations to market.

The nightmare scenario has always been that someone might taint nature by engineering and releasing “something” that is deadly for humans or other parts of the ecosphere.

Yet, a government funded lab (is strongly suspected to have) released a virus, engineered to target human cells. The idea seems to have been to collect and then manipulate rare viruses for the development of vaccines in preparation for the case of a virus making the jump from animal to human naturally.
The virus killed 8+ million people, led democracies to restrict the freedoms of millions of people, led to domestic terrorism charges against protester, and spawned a whole censorship-industrial complex geared at supressing skeptics of the official narrative. Why? Are we too afraid to ponder the possibility that underpaid research scientists with some brains are capable of creating viruses that can kill (have killed?!) millions? Right under the nose with of the two most powerful governments of the world and with public funding?!

We sacrificed the promises of gene edited organisms to bio safety, we got the (probably) carelessly released weaponized viruses, masks, closed schools, and lockdowns.

How about drugs and medicine?

Pharmaceutics

It costs billions to get a new drug to market concentrating the market considerably. Many people are still prohibited from accessing experimental medicine as their last chance of staying alive, because it is too risky. We swallowed the “risk-free” OxyContin cleared by the regulatory agencies instead.

Sure, that started the opioid crisis and led to fentanyl, made in Mexico from Chinese precursors, killing tens of thousands of Americans annually.
But at least we still jail those pot heads for using cannabis as pain medicine!
We don’t even think about things like terrorists using drones for spreading widely available fentanyl over crowded stadiums, despite paying so many agencies to protect us from dangerous substances.

We sacrificed the promises of new medicines for treating ever more diseases (maybe even aging!) to drug safety, we got cartels, corruption and corpses instead.

We could also talk about being protected from raw milk, while being fed the sugarized food pyramid, or being protected from recessions, while creating the great depression and “too big to fail” banks, but that’s for another day.

The Safetyism Playbook

If we were to generalize the experience with cyncial X-safetyism so far, we would find roughly the following phases, after a technology shows some promise to be truely disruptive and progressive. I do not claim that these are always deliberate or orchestrated. Maybe these “baptist and bootlegger”-alliances happen organically, despite creating clear winners and losers?

1. Wait for the release version 1.0 with significant upwards potential.

2. Make it anathema socially, by anointing a group of insufferable, probably clinically depressed people and paying them to let their fatasy of doom run wild about all the ways something could go wrong, however far fetched. Amplify these nightmares by repetition in controlled media.

3. Publically shame or cancel anybody trying to give proper context by presenting costs AND benefits of the technology, its track record as opposed to prophecies of doom, as well as benefits AND costs of regulation as “stupid, uncaring, evil, genocidal x-denier”.
   Supress their message as much as possible.

4. Once public (or at least published) opinion is sufficiently hostile, use the dark fantasies of that group as basis for writing “safety” regulations to protect the public from the technology.

5. To really rub it in, bestow a council or committee entirely drawn from that doomers with official and arbitrarily veto powers over any innovation.

6. Suck the energy out of the sector: use the regulation to make it hard: slow, capricious, costly, protracted. From time to time, allow some hope, crush it arbitrarily,

7. Form/Select quasi-monopolistic state champions with great connections and career paths from industry into government and vice versa.

8. Once the tech is hard enough to scare away entrepreneurs and investors, build deeper moats. Government contacts give access to research grants, laboratories, bespoke testing faclilities, access to regulatory hearings, participation in creating binding standards, protection from lawsuits, etc.
   Only the previously selected champions have the capacity to participate.

9. Instantiate the most horrible version of the new technology as weapon.

10. Lionize the regulators for supposedly protecting the public, no matter how inept or wasteful they appear to be.

What do you think new regulations on AI will bring us? Will AI be sufficiently different to beat the playbook?
Or will it end up behind tall paywalls and in military (or militants’?) weapons?
What are your ideas to stop that from happening?

2

Having a large stash of rather uncontroversial LEU, can be a real military asset, if you have enrichment technology. LEU has <5% U235 content and is as valuable to bomb builder as “a bag of apples”. The minimal amount for LEU to build a bomb-like critical mass is “infinite”, it’s just not physically possible.
But large LWR will get loaded with 90t or so of LEU; approximately a third of the fuel is replaced during refueling.
Enriching the 30t of LEU from natural uranium every year will take more than 100 000 kgSWU. If you have the capacity to do that as a country and you have a full core of LEU lying around as spare, you can easily convert lots of it into weapons material quickly. You need approximately 25kg of LEU at 4.4% enrichment and 35 kgSWU to get 1kg of 85% enriched HEU, usable as weapon.

A third of your enrichment capability will thus produce 1t of HEU from that completely legal LWR core; enough for something like 50 nuclear weapons in 4 months.

A country that has mastered enrichment for commercial operations, can acquire nuclear weapons. This might explain the various Iran deals and the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s enrichment capabilities.

5

See for example: Overnight Construction Cost and Construction Duration of US Nuclear Reactors. From: LOVERING, Jessica R.; YIP, Arthur; NORDHAUS, Ted. Historical construction costs of global nuclear power reactors. Energy policy, 2016, 91. Jg., S. 371-382.

It was added to gasoline in the form of tetraethyl lead to improve the longevity, efficiency and performance of internal combustion engines. Unfortunately, it did not have the same effect on people inhaling the fumes.
Lead’s phase out began in the 1970s and is estimated to have resulted in $2.4 trillion in annual benefits, and 1.2 million fewer premature deaths, according to a 2011 UN study.

Now lead could make a comeback in our energy system, albeit in a more benign role.

Fission

Lead-cooled fast reactors use lead as a coolant for solid nuclear fuel rods.
Lead is abundant, relatively cheap and boils at over 1700°C, which enables low pressure systems and makes it possible to achive passive safety in compact forms. It does not react chemically with water, air or fuel, reducing the need for fire-supression systems, which are mandatory in the competing sodium-cooled designs.

The main problem with using lead is that it can corrode stainless steel. To solve this problem, either the exposed structures have to be replaced regularly, or they have to be protected against corrosion.

The Swedish company Blykalla considers their three alumina alloyed steels, which forms alumina oxides as a protective layer on the steel surfaces, as key innovation for making LFRs feasible. Their different steels are used for fuel tubes, the reactor vessels and pump components, respectively.

Lead’s neutronic properties ensure a very hard spectrum that makes this reactor type capable of breeding plutonium. It can also be run as burner for minor actinides, reducing the necessary time in geological storage.

We would need to reprocess the current generation’s spent nuclear fuel and dispose of the fission products, either using seabed disposal, deep boreholes or geological repositories, for example in salt domes, like at WIPP.

Lead-cooled reactors have a rather long history of research and usage, especially in the Russian military, which deployed 4 reactor cores (73MW) in prototype submarines and 7 in “Alpha Class” submarines (155 MWt). ~80 reactor-years experience could be gathered, with some painful lessons learned.

Today several companies in the West, like the Swedish Blykalla (formally known as LeadCold), Westinghouse or the relatively young, and well-funded newcleo, which acquired Hydromine’s IP in LFRs, are working on commercializing a design. Hydromine had developed some rather interesting solutions to make their design more robust, compact and affordable.

Especially in comparison to a large SFR, like the French Superphénix, the compactness of the LFR designs is apparent.

While newcleo is looking at “conventional” MOX fuel, Blykalla is working on nitride fuel, which features 40% more uranium per volume unit, which equals a 40% longer life for the fuel. Its melting point is > 1,500°C higher than the operating temperature, with seven times higher thermal conductivity in the fuel compared to oxide fuels. The hard spectrum of LFRs would also make them good candidates for using reprocessed fuel.

Curio is the only privat endeavor mainly focused on reprocessing fuel as their business model, that I am aware of. (Moltex or Exodys are working on fuel conversion processes for their chloride fuel salt reactors, but their main focus is the development of said reactors).
Curio is developing a reprocessing cycle called “NuCycle”, which recovers uranium for reenrichment, a mixture of transuranic elements from the spent-nuclear fuel of LWRs as fuel for advanced reactor types, and simulatneously isolates fission products for disposal.

Depending on the mixture of the fuel, a LFR can act as a breeder or burner of plutonium and/or minor actinides. In equilibrium, a LFR would only consume natural or depleted uranium as make-up fuel and only discharge fission products. These need to be stored for something like ~300 years, before they are less radioactive than the uranium ore that was their “parent”.
Theoretically, there would be no need for enrichment facilitities.

There are several known ways to store spent nuclear fuel or pure fission products. The only private company that I am aware of, which tries to work on fuel disposal is Deep Isolation.
They use standard drilling technologies for creating deep boreholes, into which the packaged material can be injected for safe and permanent disposal. This technique voids the need for a central repository. It might be often be possible to construct a geological “repository” under a power plant’s plot of land, which should reduce the need for transporting nuclear fuel considerably.

Russia is also working on a LFR design (BREST-300) to close their fuel cycle. Given that Russia is currently the only nation to have a robust fast power reactor sector with the sodium-cooled “BN-800”, their renewed interest in LFR technology gives proponents of this technology, as well as critics of the SFR technology, some validation for their positions.

A more radical and newer approach in LFR technology is pursued by Dual Fluid, a company started in Germany, but now relocated to Canada.
This company is looking at using molten, metallic uranium-plutonium fuel, which would get circulated through a core made of either refractory metals or siliconcarbide, and be cooled by molten lead.
Dual Fluid is stating a target operating temperature of approximately 1000°C, online reprocessing in larger units and a melt fuse to drain the core in overheating scenarios. Such a reactor would have extremely high breeding coefficients. The operating temperature is far above the level considered for other designs, which have to keep the temperature at ~500°C, to have enough safety margin in transient conditions, and to limit the corrosiveness of lead on the steel strucutres.

Rwanda has shown interest in this reactor.

Fusion

Lead’s role in the future’s energy system is not limited to fission power.
Deuterium-tritium fusion offers the easiest path to fusion, with the most “benign” conditions for ignition. Unfortunately, tritium has a half life of only 12 years, so it is highly radioactive (really weak beta decay) and there is hardly any of it naturally. Fortunately, we know how to breed it from lithium-6, a stable isotope.
But just as with fission breeding reactors, the utmost care is necessary to ensure that enough neutrons are “reserved” for breeding and are reaching the fertile material.

The “first wall problem” has been a major reason for concern for the commercial viability of fusion devices, and thus a major topic for research. That’s because the first wall has to fullfil several critical functions simultaneously:

• It has to absorb most neutrons to protect expensive components, like magnets from neutron damage and frequent replacement,

• it has to be heat resistent, it is has to allow for a coolant to extract heat from the fusion process, and

• it has to allow for enough of the neutrons to reach fertile material to replenish the tritium fuel.

There are several fusion reactor designs that rely on lead as part of a liquid first wall.

General Fusion is working on “magnetized target fusion”.

They want to create a vortex of molten lead by spinning it rapidly in a chamber. A plasma of deuterium-tritium is injected into the void. Using large pistons, the vortex is collapsed, compressing the plasma to fusion conditions. Lead absorbes the heat of the fusion process, protects the vessel from radiation damage and acts as coolant. The heated lead is used to produce steam in a heat exchanger and cycled back into the reaction chamber. Additionally, lithium is mixed into the lead an acts as breeding material for tritium.

Zap Energy is working on the fusion device utilizing the z-pinch effect, where a current running through plasma creats a magnetic field that compresses the plasma. Hopefully up to commercially usable fusion conditions.

While this method does work in producing some fusion reactions, it is prone to plasma instabilities, which so far have prevented this approach from producing more energy by fusion than was needed to start the reaction. Zap’s approach is to induce different speeds in the plasma, which stabilizes it during the pinch.

They want to pump lead over a solid weir wall, to creat a well of lead. The lead at the bottom of the well is used as electrical contact to close the electric circuit of the z-pinch current. Lead absorbs most of the fusion neutrons, protecting the structural materials of the vessel. Just like with General Fusion’s approach, lead is also the primary coolant and mixed with lithium for breeding tritium.

Lead has also a role to play in stellerators, fusion devices that confine plasma magnetically.

Renaissance Fusion, a European startup is working on revolutionizing this fusion device. Instead of relying on the geometrically highly complex 3D shapes of superconducting magnets, which have so far hampered the more wide-spread deployment of stellerators, Renaissance Fusion is changing the process from building the coils up by layering magnetic tape into complex geometric shapes to layering the super-conducting material on regular tubes.

After that, they use a laser to engrave the complex shapes of the magnet coils onto that tube, shifting the complexity from manufacturing to numerical optimization for finding the optimal pattern of the coils.
Thea Energy tries a somewhat similar route, where they use many, standardized planar coils to shift complexity from manucaturing and maintenance to finding optimal control algorithms for coils to shape the mangetic fields.

Inside Renaissance Fusion’s stellerator, they want use a thick layer of a mixture of liquid lithium and lithium-hydride. This acts as primary coolant and breeding material for tritium. A current running through the lithium and interacting with the magnetic fields, which confine the fusion plasma, forces the mixture onto the inner wall.

Renaissance fusion wants to embed lead in ceramic capsules, which would float on top of the lithium, facing the plasma. Lead acts as a multiplier for neutrons and moderator of the highest energy neutrons.
The combination of lithium-hydrides, which moderates the lower energy neutrons, and lead is supposed to decrease the necessary thickness of neutron shielding from 1.5m to 0.4m.

Summary

While we should cheer lead’s disappearance from fossil fuels and cars, it might be posed to contribute once again in our energy systems, though in a decidedly different role.

“Could it be that the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative? That all other moral truths follow from it?” -David Deutsch

If we were to take Deutsch’s conjecture seriously, it would follow that anything destroying the means of correcting errors is detrimental to moral progress. What are these destroyers? Bad memes!

While a virus is piece of knowledge, a program, that highjacks our cellular apparatus to replicate (given the right environmental conditions), a meme is a piece of knowledge, a program, that highjack our brain to replicate (given the right environmental conditions). Just as people can design viruses to achieve some goal, they are also able to design memes for different purposes. Unfortunately, people can weaponize both.1

I don’t know how many of our current problems are caused by people afflicted with weaponized meme. What is clear, though, is that memes causing the destruction of the means of correcting errors, for example by spreading contempt, cowardice, censorship or coercion, are the greatest existential threat to humanity.
Not only did these memes cause the deaths of 10s of millions of people during the 20th century, in the name of gods, races, classes and rulers, but they expose us to existential threats. That’s because they keep us from building, leaving us …

• without carbon-free, abundant power (fission, geothermal, fusion, space-based solar), mired in the geopolitics of oil and global climate summits.

• without anti-asteroid weapons, praying they will miss us.

• without solar radiation management, tying our hands behind our backs with regards to proposed runaway global warming.

• without mRNA vaccines against cancer, malaria or many other deadly diseases,

• without space settlements, leaving our species more vulnerable to cosmic events,

• without means of supervolcano control, leaving us at whim of geology.

• without AI, probably the greatest chance of humanity to improve our lot and lessen our toil.

• without growth, pitted against each other in a zero-sum game for a dwindling stock of resources. We know from experience, that people will do horrible things to make sure that they will get “their fair share”.

Unfortunately, almost all of our history has been dominated by the bad memes of shielding people and ideas from criticism.
The only prolonged phase where those memes’ dominance has been reduced, is the period started by the culture of critique and quest for ever better explanations, that we now call the Enlightenment.

What does it look like, if we don’t criticize and search for better explanations? As Andreessen puts it: “stagnation, anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness”, “statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism", “bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition”, “corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels”.

Once “vital and energetic and truth-seeking”, institutions become stale, corrupt, “corroded and collapsing”. Instead of furthering discourse and moving forward, they are now “blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.”

This often happens, because “know-it-all credentialed experts”, lacking sufficient humility to be conscious of their own fallibility - and errors! -, engage “in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected”. Exalted positions in (formally) prestigious institutions are often unaccountable and shielded from the consequences of the ideas they force onto other people.
Thomas Sowell calls people that are actively seek such positions the “anointed”:

[The anointed’s preferences] are to supersede the preferences of everyone else that the particular dangers they fear are to be avoided at all costs and the particular benefits they seek are to be obtained at all costs. Their attempts to remove these decisions from both the democratic process and the market process, and to vest them in obscure commissions, unelected judges, and insulated bureaucracies, are in keeping with the logic of what they attempting.

They are not seeking trade-offs based on the varying preferences of millions of other people, but solutions based on their own presumably superior knowledge and virtue."

Before anything can get done, whether it is a new power station, or railway, or airport, there an endless maze of make-work committees, NGOs, departments, consultancies, public meetings packed full of “the anointed”, has to be navigated. It does not add anything else than a transfer mechanism from other people’s money to those occupying the relevant positions bleeding entrepreneurs and builders dry.

As David Deutsch states there are two prominent strains of bad memes arresting progress:

[Taking some] real or imaginary problem that would sabotage progress if it were insoluble, and instead requires radical entrenchment of new taboos. Examples of such supposed problems are population (Malthus), pollution (environmentalism), genetic drift (eugenics), racial determinism (racism), class antagonism (Marxism), and even the very fact of human fallibility (postmodernism). […] The other is to deny that progress has happened, is happening, or would be a Good Thing if it did happen.

Probably not purely coincidentally, people that block progress often apprear to be profiting from doing so. Issac Asimov observed

“that all through history there had been resistance ... and bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance ... to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those groups who stood to lose influence, status, money...as a result of the change. Although they never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested upon their hearts..”

We are not lacking talent or courage or innovative ideas. We are afflicted with a system that causes debilitating amounts of friction in terms of money, time and motivation; building the future has become unnecessarily and unreasonably hard.

It’s easy to observe the effects of technological stagnation in economic data. Stagnation has been made effectively mandatory in many areas of the economy, because “safety standards”, “professional codes”, “occupational licenses” and artificial scarcity add enough friction to grind these industries to a halt.
The expected - and observed outcome: While less constrained areas are improving in terms of quality and affordability, the constrained areas become increasingly less affordable.

The recent “baptist and bootlegger”-alliance of leading AI entrepreneurs and politicians against AI is merely the latest instantiation of the memes of isolating against criticism and improvement to protect a comfortable space from “intruders”. In the name of safety, Biden’s EO regulates how much compute power you are allowed to spend on linear algebra. You can’t make up stuff like that.

Eumemics - correcting bad memes

What can we do to follow Deutsch’s conjectured moral imperative, if we were to take it seriously? We would need to gear ourselves, our societies, and our technology towards correcting errors and getting rid of bad memes by changing their environment in a way that makes them unviable.
We must criticize them out of existence, and inoculate our systems and ourselves with better memes.

Be optimistic in the Deutschian sense

All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. While problems are inevitable, problems are soluble. That means we will be able to move to better sets of problems without any inherent bound - if we dare to work on them.

Optimism in this sense is not a prophecy of success. It is an explanation for failure, based on the universality of the laws of nature: if we are failing at something, it is either because succeeding would violate universal laws, or because we have not yet created the requisite knowledge. There is no third possibility. - David Deutsch

Be humble about your knowledge

Just think about how unreasonable and backwards all those people were like 1000 years ago. Do you think your descendants 1000 years hence will think about you? Your ideas will seem childish, incomplete, and backwards not too far into the future. (If progress continues)

Humility is the acceptance of one’s own fallibility and wrongness on almost all topics. Even about things we really feel passionate about. Maybe it’s especially easy to be wrong about those, because confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance make it really hard to change your mind about things you care deeply about. Humility is the opposite of the anointeds’ vision.
Stay true to the method of acquiring knowledge - creative conjecture followed by criticism - not to the content of it.

F.A Hayek put it nicely:

“All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.”

Promote Free Speech

"Free speech is not a right among other rights, it's the predicate of other rights. It's also the predicate of a functioning psyche. And it's the predicate of a society that can maintain its integrity and its adaptive flexibility simultaneously." - Jordan B. Peterson

The decentralization of the media and reporting is sweeping away many of the traditional ways that states used for gatekeeping and “meme control” on their population. It has become incredibly cheap to reach a global audience with text, audio and even video content, opening the way for any kind of message - true and false.

Alternatives to the traditional science journals have enabled investigations and research into many topics, for example the origins of COVID19 and its effects, the effects of outdated and arbitrarily chosen emission scenarios or social cost of carbon guesstimates, the role of money, influence, and corporate research on pharmaceutical products and much, much more, that would traditionally not have had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting published.

This does not come without its own costs, because we are now back and the root questions of epistemology. How do we know, what we know? What information can you trust to be true? What source will tell you the truth?
We now know intimately, that “a prestigious history” is no guarantee for truth.

We have always been facing these problems, but now they have become so obvious that we have to meet their challenges head on.
As Karl Popper stated in 1960, there is not final authority of knowledge:

The question about the sources of our knowledge . . . has always been asked in the spirit of: ‘What are the best sources of our knowledge – the most reliable ones, those which will not lead us into error, and those to which we can and must turn, in case of doubt, as the last court of appeal?’ I propose to assume, instead, that no such ideal sources exist – no more than ideal rulers – and that all ‘sources’ are liable to lead us into error at times. And I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’ - Karl Popper

Our best hope, therefore, is to let people criticize the theories, policies and explanations put forward in the public square, to let them speak. Without free speech, we cannot improve upon our ideas, we cannot correct our errors, we cannot cause change. Not without violence that is. Free speech is the only way to let our bad ideas die instead of us. That’s why it so necessary to promote it, even if people put forward ideas you don’t like, our are criticizing ideas you do like.

Foster Free Markets

Free markets are a system that does not pretend to be based on an inherent goodness of market participants, but on their “selfish” desires. It does not require people to be well intentioned to work, which is certainly a plus, given how some people behave some of the time.

Markets have proved to be superior to all other known - and likely to all possible- economic systems in terms of growth. The reduction of absolute poverty in the world has been nothing but astonishing. There is no other system that follows the changing valuations, made by the choices of the largest possible number of people, as flexible. There is no other system that can make continuous adaptations to the unpredictable future possible, and even more important, profitable.

The market economy has been described as an almost magical machine that can turn soybeans into computers via trade. People can contribute what they are good at and can participate in what other people are better at. And they are free to explore what it is that they are good at.

But a market is nothing mystical, it is just the most effective way of organizing the economy. Willing buyers can choose from the offerings of sellers, and when a suitable price can be found, both profit from the exchange. Profits are what incentivize the fulfillment of demands.

Market prices contain information. The often astonishingly large number of inputs into products, their relative scarcity, emerging technologies that compete for the same inputs, interest rates, inflation, all of that and so much more influences prices. High prices signal entrepreneurs an opportunity to create new wealth by driving those prices down.

Markets are also able to utilize the widely distributed, often only implicitly existing knowledge representing local conditions, which overwhelms any centralized economic system. Hayek’s knowledge problem is real.

Markets enforce discipline: you cannot be a seller without a buyer. If you produce stuff that nobody wants, you must exit the market one way or the other. Not so in centrally controlled economies. When buyers cannot choose for themselves what works best for them, there is no limit on how far away from real demand the production system can be aiming. As Andreessen says: “The motto of every monopoly and cartel, every centralized institution not subject to market discipline [is]: ‘We don’t care, because we don’t have to.’ “

In short, markets allow us to adopt innovations, they allow us to access better technologies - and to get rid of outdated and overcome technologies and products that were made with less knowledge. Centrally planned economies on the other hand, don’t allow for corrections of the great planners’ plans. While markets use the intelligence of all, planned economies are constrained to the intelligence of a few.

Cherish democracy

Is it possible that democratically elected rulers make mistakes, become corrupted or captured? Sure, it happens all the time.
But could it also happen that a centralized government without elections makes mistakes and becomes corrupt? Of course.
What’s the difference when the system of government is fallible in both cases? It is that “Who should rule?” is the wrong question! The right question is: “How can we rid ourselves of bad governments without violence?”

Democracy paired with free speech2 seem to be the only system tried so far that has a good answer to that question. It makes it harder for a small group of the anointed to impose their ideas on the population and to shield themselves from feedback.

Accelerate Effectively

There are whole areas of technology that can improve our world.
We will look in an upcoming post at what we can do to effectively accelerate the dissemination of new technology.

What is at stake?

Why is it so important to get rid of the memes destroying the the means of correcting errors?

Let’s look at a popular problem of our time: climate change. Supposedly, too many people are using too many resources to lead a too prosperous life. (I would argue that we are too far from abundance for all to be satisfied)

The set of solutions that are available with existing technology, which so many people want to chain us to, can have catastrophic costs. There are devastating, tyrannical, or even genocidal solutions to this problem.

But there is also the techno-optimist route, unchaining innovators and working towards better technology! We cannot let us get boxed into a problem and be denied the means to Kobayashi-Maru our way out of it.

If we allow memes, people, politicians, companies, institutions, products, or systems to be free from criticism and not be subject to error correction, they will become erroneous and corrupt. This will stop and even reverse the progress we have made so far.

A lot of people are working on finding a source of energy fitting the bill.

Given the magnitude of the challange and the possible profits, it’s not too surprising that people get creative. Here are some of the less common ideas I have come across in the last month:

Electricity from methane - without CO2

The Allam-Fetvedt-Cycle technology is becoming more mature. This technology uses a supercritical CO2 turbine and pure oxigen to burn methane.
This CO2 leaving the process is at high purity and high pressure - fit for geological deposition.
There has recently been an interview with the CEO of the company, Danny Rice and , which you can find here.
In it, a possible price of $20/tCO2 has been mentioned. Low-cost, super-low CO2 emission reliable power might be within reach for countries with access to natural gas.

Geothermal

Fervo Energy is advancing enhanced geothermal power technology by using the “classical” horizontal drilling and fracking technologies developed by the oil&gas industry to produce viable geothermal reservoirs.
They recently reported reaching a milestone that many observers were expecting to see only in several years.
Their idea is to drill multiple, horizontal holes, fracture the rock between these channels and circulate hot water through these cracks to mine for the heat of the rocks.

XGSEnergy is developing a different geothermal system, where a tube-in-tube design recirculates water in a closed loop system through one hole.
To increase the contact area, they frack the surrounding material and force a heat conductive material (possibly aluminum pellets) into the cracks to create a conduit for heat. After the stimulation of the well, the bore hole is encased with cement. This is supposed to help connect the heat conduits to the circulated fluid. While Fervo has to deal with the risk that fractures are not connecting the bore holes, XGSEnergy’s design does not.

Their goal is to reach 300C+ temperatures where conventional steam turbines become practical. Future cost reduction might come from faster drilling, longer and hotter laterals, and increased pipe diameter for higher flow rates.

Eavor is another geothermal company looking to build closed-loop geothermal systems. They try to engineer a “radiator” formed by horizontal bore holes filled with a low pressure fluid circulating in it.

Their concept could work almost everywhere, except for deep sedimentary basins. Their concept is robust with respect to fracking bans, seismic activity, and poor fracture connectivity. There is a high probability of having acceptable geology below any customers’ feet for process heat applications.

The thermal output of an Eavor system is more predicatble than for the competing approaches, that rely on some amount of “random” fractures to work: a lack of connectivity or short-circuiting between wells might render those lost assets. This comes at the price of having to engineer and “carve” the radiator from the rock several kilometers deep underground.

Next to improvements in the design of the geothermal systems and wells, companies are also making progress with respect to the drilling technologies that are used. Polycrystalline Diamond Compact (PDC) bits can be used for faster drilling than traditional roller-cone bits. They already demonstrated speeds of up to 60'/hr in granite. Because there are no moving parts or seals on PDCs, they can tolerate high temperature drilling better and are therefore better suited for the depth that geothermal power needs to work effectively.

Some companies are working towards “contactless” drilling. Quaise is trying to use microwaves to bore through rock to depths of up to 20km. At these depths, temperatures are high enough to think about supercritical water, which raises the efficiency of the electricity generation tremendously. Even repowering existing coal power plants might be feasible, because the temperature levels at these depth are compatible to current steam systems of coal power plants.

GA Geothermal is working on plasma drilling technologies towards essentially the same goal as Quaise. Apparently, they are aiming for “only” 10km deep holes.

Given how much “learning by doing” is still necessary, geothermal is in a race to break out from being niche energy technology forever. Falling costs for other forms of renewable power and storage (especially thermal storage), are reducing the opportunities for geothermal power as a source for clean heat and electricity. Austin Vernon has a fantastic post on geothermal’s chances.

Hydrogen from methane - without CO2:

The same company that developed the Allam-Fetvedt-Cycle, 8Rivers, is also working on a process to create hydrogen from methane, while capturing the CO2. It uses pure oxygen for the splitting of the methane and captures all CO2 that is produced.
An alternative approach is methane pyrolysis, where some form of carbon-free high-temperature heat, possibly from GenIV nuclear fission plants, is used to split the carbon-hydrogen bonds in methane. This process produces solid carbon and hydrogen.

Photovoltaic cells powered by chemical fuel

Lightcell is working on an engine that burns fuel or hydrogen mixed with sodium. The idea is that hot sodium emits light with a really narrow spectrum.
You can build photovoltaic cells that are tuned exactly to the emitted photons (2.1 eV). The developers are targeting >40% wire-to-wire efficiency when used with hydrogen produced by electrolysis. If it works cheaply enough, these fuel-powered PV cells could be an alternative to batteries.

Photovoltaic cells powered by nuclear fuel

In a Titans of Nuclear episode the company Solid Atomic introduced their idea of small, seabed-based nuclear reactors working with photon-intermediate direct energy conversion (PIDEC).
Just like with the Lightcell setup, the reactor would feature special photovoltaic cells, that are tuned to a the light emitted by a fluorescent, gaseous materials, which get stimulated by neutron emissions of the the nuclear fuel undergoing fission. Such a reactor would be cooled by the surrounding seawater and have no moving parts, except for the shutdown rod. Such a system could reach in access of 60% conversion efficiency.

Electricity storage with cement and coal

Researchers at MIT have created a supercapacitor from cement, carbon black and water. Such a supercapacitor could be incorporated into the foundation of a house, where it would be able to store a day’s worth of electricity while adding little, if any cost to the foundation. Even more speculative uses are envisioned for roads made of this mixture, maybe even with the capacity for charging EVs traveling on it.

Hydrogen from the ground

Hydrogen is often talked about as a potential energy of the future.
Typically, people are talking about zero-carbon hydrogen derived from different source, for example by electrolysis of water using solar, wind or nuclear power, hydrogen derived by pyrolysis from methane or hydrogen derived from methane with carbon-capture.

But there is another source of hydrogen, straight from the ground!

The first scientific discussion of natural hydrogen dates to at least 1888 when hydrogen was seeping from cracks in a coal mine in Ukraine.
Reports of hydrogen are relatively common throughout the former Soviet Union—because Soviet researchers were looking for it. They held to a theory that would have required significant amounts of natural hydrogen to produce oil from nonliving processes rather than from ancient life. (See for example here)

Hundreds of hydrogen seeps have now been documented around the world.

The first target for natural hydrogen explorers will probably be shallow accumulations that sit under caps at a depth of 1-2km.
If the source rocks themselves are within reach hydrogen might be collected by direct stimulation, akin to fracking for shale by injecting water into the iron-rich rock. If carbon dioxide were dissolved in the injected water, it is spaculated that it could react with magnesium and calcium in the iron-containing rocks and be locked up permanently as limestone, while hydrogen is being produced.

Natural hydrogen is far from being a mature economy and scientists don’t completely understand how it forms or whether it accumulates in a commercially accessible reservoirs.

Space-based solar

Solar power has become increasingly cheaper to the point where “value deflation”, land-usage and reliability issues of grids become more pronounced.

The idea of putting solar panels into space, where they are neither subject to day and night cycles, nor land-usage issues, have been discussed for quite some time. Researchers at Caltech have now demonstrated how energy from such solar panels can be beamed back to earth using a phased array antenna. The idea is to construct PV cells that have these flat antennas at the back and send them to space, where the front side collects solar energy and converts it to electricity, while the back side, facing earth, beams the power to where you need it on the ground. Such an array could in theory convert cyclical solar power to base-load power, without storage devices.

Electricity from thin air

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have been making clean electricity from thin air - well almost.
The key is to have a material perforated by holes less than 100 nanometers in diameter. These holes - or nanopores - can turn almost any material into a harvester of electricity from humidity in the air.

The researchers describe this effect, dubbed the generic air-gen effect, in a research paper. The purported mechanism is that the holes are big enough to allow water molecules to pass through, but small enough that the droplets will bump into their edges. This is supposed to create a charge gradient between the upper and the lower side of the perforated material. The research enjoyed some favorable reporting from WaPo and Vice, but is currently only capable of prudcing gradients of seveal hundred mV.

Cold fusion

ARPA-E is funding projects to study cold fusion, which is now going by the name “low-energy nuclear reaction” (LENR) to be more inclusive of various not fully understood phenomena.

As Jonah Messinger writes at The Breakthrough Institute:
”to write off cold fusion simply because it does not readily comport with established frameworks of nuclear engineering is unscientific, deeply incurious, and stands in stark contrast with a large body of compelling empirical evidence.”

Our understanding of physics demands that the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, and various particle and quantum numbers have to hold for LENR. But, according to proponents, these laws do not demand the (cold) fusion has to produce highly energetic particles like neutrons.
Instead, the metal lattices that are used for experiments in cold fusion (including the infamous Fleischman-Pons experiment) can, in principle, absorb the nuclear energy via lattice vibrations.

Central claims of LENR are excess heat, high energy gamma-ray emissions, particle capture transmutations by metal hydride dopants, uncommen isotopic ratios in new element transmutations and host metal nuclei.

The ARPA-E funds will fund experiments that will investigate these claims under rigorous experimental conditions.

Conclusion

The future of energy is shaped by many ingenious ideas, dedicated research over decades, and chance. Fission, geothermal and CCS -maybe even fusion- might help us on our way towards deep decarbonization, for which our current set of renewable powers currently lacks affordable options.
It will be a wild and interesting ride!

Given how central this price is to the question of climate change policy, it should give us pause that Canadian Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault recently announced that the price on carbon should now be about $247, nearly 5x of the old estimate of $54. Or when Biden’s EPA proposes a value of $190, while Trump’s administration was estimating the relevant number to be between $3 and $5 per ton.

To justify the introduction of such a significant change in pricing, you would probably expected that a bunch of scientists finally came up with an objective way of measuring precisely what until now could only be guessed. Like when we finally were able to measure the mass of some elemenatary particle or the speed of light. Did anything like that happen? Let’s have a look.

Prices on Carbon

A price on carbon internalizes the costs for products and services with respect to their carbon emissions. This should lead producers to look for low CO2 inputs or alternative product lines, and — all else being equal — consumers to choose lower CO2 products; market forces can so do a lot of the heavy lifting for decarbonization. Furthermore, a price on carbon makes it easy to calculate the benefit of any policy with regards to carbon emissions. Normally, prices emerge via market forces. They convey a lot of information about capital, relative scarity and so on. The price of carbon on the other hand is a political price. How do you set that price accurately?

Even the theoretical answer isn’t quite straight forward and there are at least these different options:

• Option 1: Use the social cost of carbon.

• Option 2: Use “target-consistent pricing”.

• Option 3: Use Carbon Takeback Obligations.

• Option 4: Set an arbitrary price.
  (Carbon Coins are an example of this)

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is an estimate of the cost, in dollars, of the damage done by each additional ton of carbon emissions. To get to these estimates, “climate scientists and economists create models to predict what will happen to a range of indicators when new carbon dioxide is put into the atmosphere. Among these indicators are health outcomes, agricultural production, and property values. An extra ton of carbon emissions shortens lifespans, hurts crops, and causes sea levels to rise, decreasing property values.” (Source)

Target-consistent pricing works by setting a goal, presumably, because the desirability of that goal has been established satisfactorily —for example reducing emissions of carbon dioxide by 45% by 2030—and then estimating how much it would cost per ton of carbon in each year to enforce the desired reduction.

Carbon Takeback Obligations work by mandating producers of fossil fuels to verifiably put a yearly increasing percentage of CO2 generated from using their sold products into geological storage. The cost of doing so imposes a price. Interestingly enough, this price is predominantly determined by the technology of the competing fossil fuel companies and not by external sources. Short of forming a cartel inlcuding all carbon-removal companies, competition should incentivize these companies to apply their true prices.

Given how desirable and important a price on carbon would be, why don’t we just use the correct price and be done with it? Well, the trouble is that you cannot measure the price of carbon in the future. You have to estimate it.
Let’s look at some of the problems with that.

Climate Sensitivity

Climate sensitivity is one of the most important parameters, representing the relationship between an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere and the corresponding change in temperature. It is typically given as K of warming/doubling of CO2. Climate sensitivity is so important, because the damage caused by CO2 is mainly not a direct effect of CO2 (except for oceanic acidification), but stems from the increase in temperature it produces. Far higher temperatures are expected to cause changes in precipitation, rising of the sea level, changes in droughts, floodings, storms, wildfires etc.

Fortunately for humanity, it seems like the relationship is logarithmic, meaning that each absolute increase in CO2 has a diminishing absolute effect on temperature.

So what is the climate sensitivity? We only know its error range, which is additionally different for different lines of evidence:

While the numerical range of uncertainty has been remarkably stable in the +1.5 to +4.5 K/doubling range since at least 1979, it has been claimed that we have learned vastly more about the effects of CO2 and earlier estimates underreported uncertainty, while giving the same range pretty much by chance. Svante Arrhenius estimated in 1896 an increase of 5–6°C per doubling of CO2, but neglected various factors of the climate system that are included today.

It is unfortnuate that we are not able to pin it down better, because you can argue that sensitivities on the lower end of the estimates, cosistent with instrumental evidence, are low enough to cause the SCC estimate in a standard model to drop to nearly zero, while higher estimates, consistent with paleo evidence, give rise to far higher temperature estimates and thus to far higher costs of carbon.

But how exactly does an increase in temperature map to costs? This is done via a damage function.

Damage Functions

There is a wide-ranging debate about what the damage function is supposed to look like. Nordhaus won a Nobel price in part for his work on the shape of the damage function, and a lot of subsequently published research has given support for the general type of damage function and the general range of damages of his estimate, which are a few percentage points of lost GDP at a temperature increase that is predicted to happen by 2100. The “best guess” is something like -2.1% GDP @ 3K temperature increase.

But of course, there are other assumptions for the type of damage function. For some of these, an increase in global average temperature of 3°C would mean the complete annihilation of the economy and probably most, if not all, of humanity.

Why do these estimates diverge so sharply? One part of the answer to this lays in the assumption of the respective researches about the dynamics of the climate system. A point of great contention is the exsitence and the effects of climate tipping points. Another part of the answer lays in the assumptions about the future.

“Tipping point” is the name for the concept of self-reinforcing mechanisms in the climate system that will, once a threshold temperature has been crossed, lead to “runaway” warming. Common examples are the Arctic permafrost thaw, where the idea is that the thawing will release huge amounts of trapped methane, which acts as greenhouse gas and will increase the temperature, which accelerates the thaw and releases even more carbon, or forest fires in Canada that are emitting huge amounts of carbon, where the warming temperatures caused by these emissions promote more fires, which release carbon into the atmosphere and so on.

Fortunately for us: ”For the set of likely future scenarios we face today, the climate science literature has not identified any approaching global tipping point after which runaway climate change intensifies beyond humanity’s ability to arrest it. While tipping elements of the climate system—like Arctic permafrost thaw and loss of Amazon forest area—do influence total warming, the magnitude of this influence is substantially smaller than the societal factors that will ultimately determine the planet’s climate trajectory.” (Source)

But, what if? What if runaway warming is a high-impact, low-probability fat tail risk? Or what if climate change leads to changes in rain, that start a war for water that ends in global nuclear war? Those question are what keeps the debate about the damage function going.
We simply lack the knowledge about the future to rule all these scenarios in or out with certainty.

What seems less controversial today is that the idea of “baked-in” warming , i.e. warming in the future as a result of past emissions, regardless of human action today, seems to be false. Apparently, it has been known for quite some time that this is an artifact of older, coarser models and the conflation of constant CO2 concentration and net-zero emissions.

For what its worth, the good news is that it looks like humanity’s hands are on the thermostat. We are the masters of how much carbon we emit and we are responsible for the resulting warming.

Speaking of that, what assumptions do we make about the future, the other part of the disagreement about the shape of the damage function, to assess the damages?

Visions for the future

Climate scientists are using reference scenarios to “gauge” their models and make research more comparable. For example the widely used Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) provide narratives for different, at least plausible socio-economic developments. These scenarios try to provide a qualitative, logically coherent story in terms of quantitative elements like population growth, economic growth, technological change, land use change, and so on.
Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) discard the necessity for a coherent narrative and simply pose different scenarios for the radiative forcings in the future. This cuts “the link between the socioeconomic characteristics underlying the scenarios (population change, economic growth, and so on), the emissions scenarios they provided for climate models, and the climate futures those models would predict. The effect of the separation was to save time while abandoning any commitment to evaluating the scenarios and pathways for plausibility or probability.” 
This allows modelers to investigate hypothetical worlds of extremely high emissions, but of extremely low development and climate resilience.

The trouble is: a lot of the researchers are using long-outdated scenarios:

The most commonly-used scenarios in climate research have already diverged significantly from the real world, and that divergence is going to only get larger in coming decades. […] Evidence is now undeniable that the basis for a significant amount of research has become untethered from the real world. The issue now is what to do about it. [Our] literature review found almost 17,000 peer-reviewed articles that use the now-outdated highest emissions scenario. - THB

Using a scenario with implausibly high emissions introduces also high-end effects of warming (storms, sea level rise, etc.) that afflict modeled populations and thus the calcualted climate damages. The usage of plausible scenarios should therefore be a necessary, but not sufficient condition for any study, for it to be taken into consideration for concrete policies.

The cost of carbon is further dependent on how technologies are used in the future. Will we build dams to reduce the costs of flooding? Will we refrain from building in wildfire or flooding zones? Will we use drought- or salt-resistant crops? Will we build cold shelters? Early warning systems? Storm-proof buildings? Will we improve our wildfire managment strategies? All of the assumed/modeled answers to these questions will have an influence on the estimated climate damages.
This is especially visible in the decision about what areas to include in the damage assessment. The Trump administration only looked at damages in the USA, a high-income, high-technology country, with reasonably good governance, stable institutions, vast, fertile lands for agriculture, and the geopolitical safetey of ocean-sized moats and world’s most powerful military, to get to their SCC of $3-$5.
Not all countries are that well situated. Looking at the whole world muliplied that SCC by more than tenfold to $51. Richard Tol, serving as a Convening Lead Author on the IPCC AR5 Working Group III, assessed “that many of the more dramatic impacts of climate change are really symptoms of mismanagement and poverty and can be controlled if we had better governance and more development.” (Source)

The highest uncertainty exists by its very nature with reagards to technologies yet to be invented or commericalized. It’s unclear how to account for the possibilities of cheap CCS technology, a nuclear renaissance for fast or thermal fission, fusion, advances in geothermal power, battery storage, solar radiation management or DAC. In fact, producing a reliable, scalable, carbon-free source of power, which is cheaper than coal without any subsidies, could alter our paths substantially. As would the emergence of AGI, or even narrow AI in relevant sectors.

Another major influence on the cost of carbon is the discount rate that is used. Discounting future damages with 0% will create substantially different results from a discount rate of 4%, or even 8%. The former puts the burden of paying for all of the future’s climate damages on today’s populations, higher percentages increasingly shift the burden to future generations, which will presumably be far richer and technologically more capable than today’s.

Social Cost of Carbon

To recapitulate the discussion about SCC: it depends on the assumed climate sensitivity of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (for example methane), on what assumptions you make about the climate damage function, on what you assume about the societies, economies and technologies from now until 2100 (and often far beyond,) and the arbitrary choice of a “suitable” discount rate.

Given all that, it shouldn’t be too surprising that all of the subjectivness and arbitrariness going into these estimates determines the results in a kind of policy- or preference-based fact-making.

Ross McKitrick recently noted that

[SCC estimates] are if-then statements. They are not intrinsically true or false: what matters is the credibility of the assumptions. If emissions follow the RCP8.5 scenario (which they won’t), and if people don’t adapt to climate change (which they will), and if CO2 and warm weather stop being good for plants (which is unlikely), then the SCC could be five times larger than previously thought. More likely it isn’t, and very well could be much smaller.

Richard Tol, an economist with deep experience in the social cost of carbon, also emphasizes the effect of the subjective and largely arbitrary assumptions on SCC estimates, which vary by orders of magnitude AND sign:

Published estimates range from -771tC [dollars per ton of carbon] to +216,035/tC.
Research cannot reduce the span of credible estimates by much, as the future is uncertain and ethical parameters are key.

Richard Pielke Jr. sums it up very nicely:

The SCC can be whatever you, I or President Biden wants it to be, and a very science-y justification can be produced in support of this, that or another estimate. Ultimately it is science theater for regulatory policy.

So if the social cost of carbon is a largely arbitrary metric that can be laundered at will to give support for preconceived policy preferences, target-consistent pricing is surely better, right? Just set a target and price carbon accodingly to reach it!

The 1.5°C Target

Well, where does our 1.5°C target come from? Is it hard science, derived from physically meaningful and well measured boundaries?

Nope, it’s an arbitrary communication device invented for political purposes (i.e. placating some island nations at the Paris Climate Summit in 2015).

However, the scientific community —rather than loudly proclaim that the aspirational targets were exactly that and practically unreachable — followed the political demand for scientific justification after the fact to legitimize the impossible goal as an actual target to guide policy. - TBH

The 1.5°C degree goal is realistically not achievable short of a complete collapse of China, India and subsequently almost all of the rest of the world economy.1

It should be well known by now, that there is no easy substitute for fossil fuels, which are naturally abundant, concentrated, storable, versatile and competitive; over 80% of the world’s energy consumption is supplied by it.
For some of the most important substances (cement, steel, fertilizers, plastics), we do not have mature CO2-free alternatives.
Nuclear power seems like a possible substitute, for some of its intrinsic properties (abundance, energy density, …), but it’s stymied by cost (probably to a large degree caused by regulation). Even with risk-appropriate regulations, the required speed of the build out to hit the promised goal is mind-boggling.

Hitting net-zero in 2050, assuming there isn’t a huge reduction in energy demand, poses gigantic challenges and costs: we would need to build a large nuclear power plant or 2000 3MW wind turbines every day from now until 2050.

But even that speed does not come close to reaching the 1.5°C goal. To have only a 66% chance of staying below 1.5°C warming, we would need to hit net-zero emissions by 2030, not by 2050. And it does not account for any growth in energy consumption, for example by the 3 billion or so people, who are using less energy than an American fridge.

Footing the bill

Consumers, voters and politicians seem quite adamantly unwilling to pay the price for reaching that goal via economic hardship or carbon prices at a target-consistent level.

This has spawned a whole industry advocating for non-state global governance. It’s an emergency, so fast, transfer all the power to your betters!
No need for democracy! Who would these betters be? Someone — intelligent, uncorruptible, honest, unbiased — to tell us what “The Science” says and all policies flowing from that must be accepted. Or else.
It seems like the scientists and heads of international bodies are “selflessly” applying for that role.

Given the shortcomings of centralized, non-market economic systems, which have been well studied2, and tested regrettably thoroughly, that does not seem like a promising way forward. Especially, because a noteworthy difference to previous incarnation of such economic systems is that these at least paid lip service to the idea of improving the economic lot of the population, while this incarnation vows to focus on the opposite3 .
It’s not too surprising, that this does not bode well with the intended “beneficiaries” of these policies.

In summary, the social cost of carbon and the target-consistent pricing generate arbitrary prices, because the assumptions/targets are injected into the pricing model arbitrarily.
While the theoretical economic rationale for the price is sophisticated and sound, their practical derivation fails: there are too many subjective assumptions and unknowns to produce an acceptable value for many stakeholders; different estimates are indicative of different values and preference. Politics, not science, is the appropriate place for discussing —and ultimately compromising on — the question of what ought to be.
There are different models for injecting science into the political process (like “honest brokering”), which I think are legitimate, but injecting politics into the scientific process and hiding policy-arguments behind science, comes at the cost of lost trust in this process and its institutions.

Roger Pielke Jr.’s pragmatic proposal to just impose a tax of a few $ per ton to generate enough revenue to fund some serious research into clean, affordable and reliable energy, becomes far more attractive: the amount is just as arbitrary, but it’s better politics. A similarly earmarked gas tax enjoys long-lasting bipartisan support.

I have to realize that carbon dividends, i.e. a carbon tax, border adjustment taxes and rebates paid out per captia, which I have been advocating for repeatedly, and still think to be feasible politically, will have to rely on an arbitrary value; the discussion about what it should be, has to be had in the political doamin.

Alternatively, Carbon Takeback Obligation could shift the question about “the right price” to a matter of true costs, but lack an easy reimbursement mechanism.

Does climate change pose a risk? Yes, absolutely.
Should we do something about it? You bet!
Could a price on carbon help with that? Certainly!
Should we do absolutely everything, without any regard to the (human) costst for it?

I don’t think so. We need to be smart about our reaction to climate change. We cannot sacrifice democractic liberalism, the integrity of science, and the present’s poor to the anxieties of an “anointed" Western elite about the future.

More and more countries opt for 100% carbon-free instead of 100% renewable energy targets, as it becomes appearent that nuclear power, or firm, dispatchable, carbon-free energy in general, is a key technology for the least-cost path towards decarboniztion.

While most criticisms against nuclear power, like safety, waste and deployment speed turn out to actually be nuclear power’s strengths, the amount - and kind! - of fuel needed for a large-scale nuclear buildout pose questions.

Any nuclear reactor needs fissile material to work.

The only fissile material available in large quantities in nature is U235. But its concentration is so small that most designs will have to rely on enrichment of natural uranium or on breeding in the U/Pu or Th/U cycle to work.

Breeding decreases the need for natural uranium by over 2 orders of magnitude from 200t natural uranium per 1GWe-year to about ~1t for a breeder. This also extends how much energy humanity can derive from this resource and how much value it offers for each of the 8 billion people on earth. Thorium is roughly 4 times as abundant as uranium in the earth’s crust and would extend nuclear’s reach accordingly.

But the necessary reactors are not as mature and the materials that would have to be handled by operators are a greater proliferation concern. Especially for those who earn a living by being concerned publicly.

Enrichment

Enrichment using centrifuges is a well developed and mature technology, optimized and deployed for the existing fleet of reactors. Natural uranium with a U235 concentration of 0.7% is converted to UF6 and rapidly spinning centrifuges and a temperature differential cause the slightly lighter U235-F6 to behave sufficiently different from U238-F6 that some degree of seperation is possible. Laser enrichment is a newcomer and works by selectively exiting one of the isotopes with a laser and applying an electro-magnetic field for seperation. It could lower the costs of enrichment services further, but is frowned upon by anti-proliferation activists, who fear that clandestine programms by rogue states could be more easily concealed using this technology.

The very same technology and facilities that are used to enrich uranium for commercial reactors to about 5% U235 could be used to enrich uranium to weapons grade levels of over 80%. That is why the licensing is ardenous and the facilities are closely monitored by international institutions.1

There is probably enough “cheap”2 uranium globally to carry humanity for thousands of years. In the current political environment, enrichment has become constrained3, given that Russia accounts for ~46% of global enrichment capacity.4 Any nuclear renaissance will therefore highly likely be dependent on the build out of new enrichment capacity. The only exception to this might be CANDU-type reactors.

They are proven thermal reactors capable of using natural uranium and are therefore uneffected by any trouble regarding enrichment services. But even that design could profit from some enrichment.

Using “Slightly Enriched Uranium” (SEU) could increase the uranium utilization relative to natural uranium by 1/3 and decrease the waste mass by 2/3. Relative to PWR, a CANDU running on SEU would roughly need 1/2 as much natural uranium, but produce 2/3 more waste by weight.

The CANDU design has gained enthusiastic proponents recently, who published the Case for CANDU and emphasize the great track record of CANDU reactors around the globe, for example:

"Cernavoda-2, a CANDU-6 operating in Romania, is the top performing reactor worldwide out of 369 reactors operational between 2011 & 2021 with an average capacity factor of 94% according to the IAEA's PRIS database.” - Link

Critics are concerned that the Pu in the waste might be more usable for nefarious reasons, that the reactor could be easily converted by regimes to a weapons reactor and point to its higher mass flow of nuclear waste that needs to be recycled or stored.5

Thermal, graphite-moderated molten salt reactors can achieve far better uranium economy by using as mixture of uranium and thorium dissolved in FLiBe coolant salt enriched in Li-7, but neither the designs nor the required Li-7 are commercially available yet.6

When MSRs’ uranium is recycled, which is comparatively easy, the consumption of natural uranium could drop to 20 to 40t per GWe-year and only 24,000 SWU of enrichment.7 Additionally, the amount of Pu in the spent fuel is rather small and the isotope mixture makes it “virtually, if not literally impossible”8 to build weapons from.

Even in 2009, world uranium mining (50 kt) and enrichment capacity (57 MSWU) would have enabled over 2500 1000MWe reactors of that type.
Replacing coal boilers with molten salt reactors, proposed by various organizations9, would take an enormous bite out of the global fossil fuel usage.

Such a reactor running without Th does not have as good a neutron economy, but still an attractive uranium utilization of ~50 t/GWe-year - but only with fuel recycling that removes TRUs between batches.

U/PU Breeders

You cannot achieve net breeding with thermal reactors running on plutonium.
Therefore, you need a fast reactor to pursue this route. Fast reactors need about 5-10x the amount of fissile in the reactor core per GWe compared to thermal reactors to work. Because there is so much fissile in the core, the fear is that a bad actor could put some natural uranium in the neutron flux and cycle it out fast enough to get WGPu for multiple weapons per year, without anybody noticing.

The most mature Pu-breeders are sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFR). These are commercially developed by Terrapower10 and GEH. They boast a high-breeding factor, but have so far failed to be deployed economically. Their temperature is limited by the needed safety margin to keep sodium from boiling in some accident scenarios. Russia has a working 800 MWe sodium fast reactor and assisted China in building a 600 MWe one.
Lead-cooled fast reactors, developed by Westinghouse and Newcleo, are probably the second most mature type of Pu-breeder. They are limited in their temperature by corosion, which is a function of temperature. But at least lead is not flammable like sodium and therefore does not necessitate as costly fire-surpression systems.
Reactors cooled by supercritical light water could probably also be used as breeders. Although these reactors seem like a mere evolution of current LWRs, a lot of research will be needed to figure out corrosion issues.

Molten chloride-salt fast reactors, developed by Terrapower and Exodys are especially promising, because they allow for a breed & burn mode of operation inside the reactor, where no dedicated breeding blanket or online reprocessing beyond the removal of gaseous fission products and the removal of noble metals is needed. They could also run at higher temperatures than the metal-cooled alternatives. There is some hope that these reactors could work with natural chlorine, others believe that enriched Cl-37 will have to be used to make these reactors work as breeders. The first demonstration of a working reactor of this type has still to be done.

Once started, such a reactor would only need natural or denatured uranium as fuel, creating a huge asset from the tails of all previous enrichment activities. It would not need exotic structural materials, fuel manufacturing or recycling that produces pure Pu at any stage.

Th/U Breeders

Using Th is probably the most audacious route, because it necessitates the handling of high-enriched uranium (HEU). The breeding reactors optimized to use U233 will have to be (ideally) started with 80%+-enriched U235.
That means that it is not only necessary to have a large amount of enrichment facilities at the beginning of this nuclear pathway, but these facilities will have to produce exactly the stuff of proliferation nightmares, HEU.
Of course, the idea is to use this material in reactors for the benefit of people, and not in warheads, but the barrier of nefarious actors, state or private, would be lowered tremendously by a high availability of HEU, and the anti-proliferation mechanism installed internationally (IAEA) would become mostly void.

If we ever decided to use HEU, there are various reactor design options open, because U233 allows for breeding in the fast and thermal spectrum.

On paper, the most promising design for a practical breeding reactor using pure U233 is probably the molten salt fast flouride reactor using enriched Li-7 in the coolant salt. They seem attractive, because sufficiently simple and cheap solutions for the online fuel processing and radwaste disposal are available.11

But going the HEU route and using Th/U233, even a light-water reactor can become a breeder. In fact, it is the only proven thermal breeder to be demonstarted experimentally in the Shippingport PWR, after it had been adapted for the task. Because building a real reactor, not a paper or silicone one, is a real challenge, as Rickover’s memo so famously outlines12, the venerable PWR might be a technologically feasible route for such breeders.
U233‘s characteristics also enable innovative designs like Copenhagen Atomics’ heavy-water moderated 100 MWth reactor that fits inside a shipping container and could be mass manufactured like cars.

The way forward?

For people, whose job it is to be publicly concerned about nuclear proliferation, nuclear fuels options face these challenges:

1. Enrichment: LEU is grugingly accepted, but the enrichment equipment is seen as an enormous danger.

2. Pu: Any form of Pu is described as “weapons material”, although it is debatable, if RGPu could ever be made into one.

3. HEU: Just out of the question.

Therefore, unfortunately, there shouldn’t be nuclear power.
In an ideal world, with ample cheap, firm and clean energy options, and without any other risks, this might be the end of the story.

But that is not the world we live in. Continuing to firm the electricity grid with carbon-intensive fuels creates climate risks, which are often described as “extinction level”. But there is currently no low cost clean option available to developing countries focused on alleviating the very real and present risk of poverty for their citizens.

Nuclear power is not the only technology with potential uses for terrorists - and frankly, the technological and financial hurdles to build crude fizzle weapons from highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel seems exceedingly unattractive compared to biological and chemical weapons.

States, even poor ones like 1960s China, 1980s Pakistan, or 2000s North Korea, already have nuclear weapons, while various rich countries, like Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Germany or Taiwan could build nuclear weapons in a short time, but choose not to do so. It is not the technologcial limitation that is keeping these countries from devleoping such weapons, but their lack of interest in it.

Daniel Poneman proposed an IAEA initiative called the assured nuclear fuel services initiative (ANFSI) to enable depoliticized global access to enrichment and reprocessing capabilities, without sacrificing international safeguards.

Although nuclear technology is far from trivial, political or politicized questions seem far more challenging to the technology’s future.

The path of least political resistance, which doesn’t close the door for advanced designs permanently, seems to be the use of burner designs with low uranium consumption, like CANDU and thermal MSRs.
Seawater uranium extraction techniques and the fuel consumption can be improved continuously, when it becomes economically to do so.

This buys us time on the climate front and lets us postpone the question of what we want to do with RGPu to “later”.

If we failed to have economical long-term energy storage, fusion, space-based solar or more speculative alternatives economically available by “then” , which could be hundreds of years form now, even if we produced 100% of our energy consumption from such fission reactors, we would probably have done the necessary research and development for MCFRs for (relative) couch change and buy us another factor of 100x of time by burning through the RGPu and denatured uranium already stored.

If the price for a world, where carbon-free energy is abundant enough for “the other 7 billion” to make absolute poverty a thing of the past, consists of the theoretical increase in the risk of some non-state actor getting access to materials that might or might not lead to a weapon comparable to the Beirut explosion, without changing anything about that actor’s access to biological, chemical or autonomous weapons, I think it would not be the worst political trade-off we could achieve. To the contrary, it’s a debate worth having.

A lot of the proposed “solutions” for climate change will be perceived as exactly that: a change for the worse. The loss of their beloved car, less of the food they like to eat, less travel, especially by air, less A/C in summer, less heating in winter, less discretionary spending, fewer children.
For a lot of people around the globe, this is not unpleasent, but devastating, even deadly, because they have just recently clawed their way out of abject poverty.

Getting people to do things they don’t want to do requires an incentive: either a stick or a carrot. Or both.

While I have written extensively about the “stick-y” side of this, for example about cap&trade or carbon taxes. and mixed forms, like carbon dividends or carbon takeback obligations, I haven’t yet delved into the “carrot-y” side of things. Until today.

What is the idea behind carbon coins?

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future”, the “carrot” of carbon pricing, the Carbon Coin, alternatively called Carbon Quantitative Easing or Global Carbon Reward, intruduced by Chen et al., features promiently as a major part of the that fictional future’s success in reigning in, maybe even reverting climate change.2

The proposal is quite far reaching and needs the participation of ideally all, but at least 20-40 central banks of the largest economies, representing 80-90% of the world economy by GDP.

These central banks would cooperate and create a new currency, a carbon coin, which is nominated in 1 tCO2eq mitigated for a 100-year duration.

While the carbon currency would not be legal tender in any country, the central banks would make sure that it can be exchanged for national currencies, guaranteeing a rising real floor price.

The future floor price of carbon coins is rising according to a known schedule. There is no upper limit on the spot price of the carbon coin, but it will never fall below the floor price.

This is ensured by the central banks, which would have to use quantitative easing3 to defend the floor price in their respective national currencies.

The carbon coin will be managed by a new supranational authority, called the carbon exchange authority (CEA). It is a self-funded administrative system, which recoveres its costs through fees and commissions that will be charged to entities that earn a carbon coin.

This authority will issue a carbon coin, if an entity mitigated 1 tCO2eq in accordance with the authority’s standards4. It also ensures the accountability, fungibility and transparency of the carbon currency.
Relying on this, central banks are not required to undertake any technical assessments of climate mitigation services - they just have to trust the CEA.

The carbon coin could also be used as an index for the profitability and effectiveness of low-carbon investments. By construction, the amount of carbon coins accounts for the sum of all mitigated carbon.

Carbon coins work similar to a carbon offset, where the buyer (CEA) immediately retires them permanently. The coin is not redeemable for mitigated carbon.

What are the benefits of this idea?

By giving the carbon currency a predictably rising floor price, it will attract investment demand from institutional investors and households.
Investments by the latter in a carbon currency would increase the average savings rate and reduce household consumption. Private demand for carbon coins will be high, when the price floor rises quickly. This means that this demand can be stimulated by the central banks.

Proponents of the carbon coin claim that the coin is not a subsidy, because:

1. the coin is issued as “token”, not as a national currency,

2. it is funded by international monetary policy, and not through fiscal spending,

3. the coin is performance-based, while subsidies are not necessarily so.

They also claim that this funding model does not result in any direct costs for governments, businesses or citizens. That is because instead of raising taxes, the proposal raises inflation. The mitigation cost will be “hidden” via the foreign exchange currency market, where participating countries’ national currencies are devalued relative to the carbon currency.

This supposedly helps to overcome barriers to decarbonization of the world economy, like monetary, financial, political and legal systems5.

Why would you want a carbon coin?

To justify the creation of the carbon coin, Chen at al., formualted an alternative economic theory, called “Holistic Market Hypothesis”, which claims that the market failure in carbon is not a classical market failure, because the systemic risks associated with the anthropogenic carbon balance are so unusually large that there is the need for a second, positive externality, called the “Risk Cost of Carbon” (RCC) to be internalized to fix the failure.

This positive externality should be managed independently of and additionally to carbon taxes, cap&trade, etc., which internalize the negative externality. Internalizing the positive externality is supposed to create a new global carbon market that has the qualities of a global public good, i.e. non-rivalrous, non-excludable, and available worldwide.
The RCC is conceptualized as the price a virtuous actor has to pay to do a quantifiable amout of good (= ”save the world via fixing the anthropogenic carbon balance”) against the resistance of societal systems. Tomorrow’s risks are converted by central banks into today’s profits for the virtuous.

The goal of the carbon coin is to achieve net-zero, maybe even net-negative emissions.

Typically, the relationship of carbon emission to population, economy and energy is modeled by the Kaya identity,

where F represents the global CO₂ emissions from human sources, P is the global human population, G is world GDP and E is global energy consumption. G/P is the GDP per capita, E/G is the energy intensity of the GDP and F/E is the carbon footprint of the energy.

With △Q as the amount of globally, verifiably mitigated CO₂, and ω as the percentage of that removal that happens outside of the normal economy (and is therefore not part of G), i.e. is remunerated with carbon coins, a modified identity can be formulated as:

Chen et al. assume that ω△Q could be large6 .

Given the modified formula, it can easily be seen that humanity’s carbon emissions can be reduced by reductions in global population, a decrease of the average carbon intensity of goods and services (F/G), a decrease of the average carbon intensity of the used energy (F/E), or by increases in global cabon dioxide removal, which the carbon coins are supposed to stimulate.

Policies focused on reducing P, G or E ( these are the fewer people, less wealth and less energy of the introduction) in absolute terms, are called degrowth. These policies are considered by some7 as a less risky, yet obviously politically challenging pathways to F≤0.

What’s the rub?

Introducing a carbon coin necessitates the creation of a supranational and powerful organization, as well as the lasting cooperation of all the major central banks.

Some governments would certainly regard this as a severe loss of souvereignty. Carbon taxes, on the other hand, can be created and enforced at an appropriate level locally via border adjustment taxes. The revenues of these taxes can be used by governments as they see fit (redistribution via dividends, investments in clean RD&D, etc.).

By design, the prices of carbon coins are set independently by the CEA and costs are imposed via inflation, without democratic consent, which might similarly be regarded as a disenfranchisement by voters. While carbon dividends are a straight forward and equitable redistribution mechanism for a carbon tax, there is no obviously associated compensation mechanism for the world’s poor to counteract the inflationary effect caused by carbon coins. Any policy aimed at propping up their spending power voids the argument that these coins do not produce costs for governments or citizens.

Taking something that market participants don’t value and putting it profitably right at the center as the measure of value, nullifies market participants’ preferences. There is no guarantee that doing so will not distort the markets for food, housing, energy, health and educational services etc. and no government can stop the CEA from creating too much inflation for their poorer people.8 “Distorting markets” in this context could for example constitute large landowners exchanging their food production crops for some inedible, fast-growing grass, to pyrolyze it after the harvest and sequester the CO2 as the reulting oily residue. Something similar (ethanol subsidies) has sparked a huge debate around the perverse incetives of using crops for biofuel instead of as food. Depending on the price of the carbon coin, it could also prove to be much more profitable to install for example solar-powered direct air capture devices, instead of using the same solar power to lift poor people out of poverty.9 In fact, a huge demand for sequestration services could drain resources from the digging, drilling, construction, chemical, semi-conductor and similar industries, raising the price for their respective goods well above the already “carbon coin”-boosted general inflation rate.10

The justification for the magnitude of this intervention is the invention/invocation of a new economic theory and a modification of the concept of dealing with externalities, which does not appear to be mainstream economics.

Summary

Carbon coins are a top-down mechanism that circumvents (by design and intent!) democratic, financial, monetary and legal norms.

It would probably benefit people with available capital11 seeking for a safe haven, investing profitably in a guaranteed, arbitrarily multipliable asset. While the profits are privatized, (at least without any additional interventions) the costs are socialized highly regressively via general inflation, and probably cost increases in industries especially important for poorer people.

I don’t see any immediate scenario for their implementation, because I don’t believe that governments or electorates would give away that much power to an unelected entity, but I am not sure that I would be happy, if there were a pathway.

While carbon coins seem marginally less draconian than outright degrowth policies, the creation of an authority, shielded from market or democratic feedback, able to create arbitrarily large sums of money, tasked not with ensuring human flourishing, but with carbon removal, has to be viewed with the highest degree of skepticism for its effect on the people.

It is a proposal befitting Sowell’s “anointed”.12

There have been many ideas for the causes of the loss of trust: fake news, social media, news bubbles, a lack of religious faith1 or a lack of skin in the game. Experts often propose

“what amounts to third-party decision making by people who pay no cost for being wrong - surely one of the least promising ways of reaching decisions satisfactory to those who must live with the consequences.” - —- - Thomas Sowell.

An infamous example of this might be Anthony Fauci’s recent description of his role in the COVID19 pandemic in a @reson article:

”[We] looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint. It was for other people to make broader assessments—people whose positions include but aren't exclusively about public health..Those people have to make the decisions about the balance between the potential negative consequences of something versus the benefits of something.”

There are several lessons in the article, but unfortunately, it is not a unique set of lessons to be learned from the events of the pademic.

And this very fact is currently the best piece of evidence for the main culprit for the loss of trust in my personal estimation.

As Thomas Sowell has layed out in “A Conflict of Visions” and “The Vision of the Anointed”, that there are two - you guessed it - conflicting visions about the limits of human intellect.

In a constrained vision, humans are inherently flawed, easily influenced and incapable of designing large scale societal changes and predicting their consequences. People have to rely on systems to create functioning socities.

In the unconstrained vision, an elect group of people, the self-anointed, can easily design societal changes and correctly judge their results. If experts’ predictions turn out to work differently than promised, someone somewhere must have foiled it for nefarious reasons.

These visions create conflicts on essential questions like equality, power, justice and the role that intellectual elites ought to fill in society.

Equality

In the constrained vision, the best you can do is to apply the same set of rules to people equally. Whatever the outcome, it is a fair outcome on a system level. We lack the knowledge and foresight to design systems without any individual unmerited outcomes. This is a trade-off we are willing to accept for the sake of having functioning society.

In the unconstrained vision, we have a lot of foresight and rationality. Therefore, we can specify any desired outcome. A mismatch between the rational ideal and reality must be caused by bad actors somewhere.
There is no trade-off to be made, because if everyone desires the outcomes best for all, there are no conlficts anywhere.

Power

On the question of power, the unconstrained vision holds that there are people so morally advanced that they have individually the right to transgress the law to move all of society forward. Whenever A does anything that makes B do something that B would not have done otherwise, it’s the exercise of power. Preventing war means acting peacefully, extending communication and reigning in nationalism. Crime and war can be rooted out by good reason. Elites have a duty to seek larger influence in law, international affairs and development. The governments’ intention to protect the public forces it to intervene in the economy.

In the constrained vision, the offering of a tit-for-tat by A that B accepts voluntarily, is not power. Only if A’s action would reduce the set of choices that B can make, the actions would be considered as the exercise of power.
On the question of war, there is notihing to be added to the ancient saying: “Si vis pacem, para bellum.”
War and crime can never be solved, they can only be deterred.

Justice

In the unconstrained vision, “moral rights” are a right to results, not processes. Therefore, governments have to extend to domains formerly protected from its influence.
Morally superior people are obliged to get rid of injustices, even if it severely distorts the currently existing society.

The constrained vision holds that the locust and mode of discretion should be distributed. Even a mere attempt at building the apparatus necessary to administer justice in the Ralwsian sense is too dangerous. The apparatus will be abused by totalitarians of some sort or another, as the French and various Socialist revolutions have demonstrated to the satisfaction of anyone willing to see.
Private property protects ascertainable domains within which each individual is free to act as he chooses. Society evolves in an unplanned way according to these rules and the choices of the individuals, without a great designer or a central committee.

Elites and the general public

If you subscribe to the unconstrained vision, you might take away the following lessons from the COVID pandemic:
The most knowlegable people in the most relevant fields were stifled.
For the next padamic, we shouldn’t forget:

• The potential dangers of a virus as assessed by the relevant institutions are an overriding “trump”. You cannot arbitrate survival of humanity.

• You need to constantly remind the public of the dangers, lest they forget or even resist the best policies.

• You have to combat misinformation by controlling communication, lest someone spreads dangerous falsehoods.

• It’s best to only listen to established authorities who share their special knowledge, because they are able to discern the truth from conflicting data far better than the general public.

• Democratic decision-making processes are too slow in a crisis. Ignorant and recalcitrant people are spoiling the best responses.

• Science authorities are not respobsible for how they are interpreted.
  They design optimal policies with respect to their stated criterion for optimality in a technical sense.

• Models protected us from the worst outcomes. That was their purpose and that’s what they did. Accuracy was not as important as educating the public.

• Scientists give us all the information we need, when we need it, to do what needs to be done.

If you subscibe to the constrained vision, however, you might take away these completely opposite lessons. In the grand scheme of things, experts are vastly more knowledgable in their speciality, but they are only marginally, if at all, more knowledgable with respect to the complexities of our societies and economies. They failed miserably, despite all the consessions and sacrifices the public had made.

For the next pandemic, we shouldn’t forget:

• You have to look at costs AND benefits of a decision. There is no free launch and policies have costs, too.

• Talking only about the negative side constantly, distorts risks, frightens people and leads to policies that aren't optimal.

• Shouting at people that they aren't allowed to speak their opinion because they are not biologists/virologists and therefore not qualified was ill advised. In fact, it's neither biologists' job, nor their specialty to know or weigh all risks. Censorship of speech is the worst idea:

  "Particular solutions to partiuclar problems are far less important than having and maintaining the right processes for making trade-offs and correcting inevitable mistakes" - Thomas Sowell

• Following "The Science™", when all data is noisy and there aren't large size RCTs is not as straightforward as many people assume: "There is a paper...", is not how it works. Not even for scientific authorities.

• Granting authoritarian powers to very few unelected decision-makers does not help to find optimal solutions for the locally different environments and situations; in fact, it reduces the possibility of learning from experiments.

• Failure is an orphan. While it is OK for a biologist to say "I am not responsible for the outcomes, I only looked at the risks of this virus under these assumptions", it's absolutely not OK for decision-makers to claim: "I am not responsible, I only looked at 'The Science™'". By the way, it is expected and OK to err while making a decision, but if decision-makers failed to look at costs AND benefits, they proved incompetent at their job.

• Models that make predictions are as good as their assumptions. That means they are as fallible as their creators and an inaccurate model might pose gigantic costs.

• Scientists, even high-level ones with decades of public service on their record, aren't always telling the unbiased truth, if they think that a lie is better. They are humans after all.

The problem is: the different lessons are consistent with their respective visions. The same set of facts, yet vidication and support for contradicting perspectives that we might never be able to reconcile.

Thomas Sowell called people that preferentially hold the unconstrained vision of humanity “the anointed”, because they so often reserve for themselves the special roles that are allowed to play by a different set of rules, and conlcuded:

"[Their preferences] are to supersede the preferences of everyone else that the particular dangers they fear are to be avoided at all costs and the particular benefits they seek are to be obtained at all costs. Their attempts to remove these decisions from both the democratic process and the market process, and to vest them in obscure commissions, unelected judges, and insulated bureaucracies, are in keeping with the logic of what they attempting.

They are not seeking trade-offs based on the varying preferences of millions of other people, but solutions based on their own presumably superior knowledge and virtue." - Thomas Sowell

This is the main culprit of a loss of trust on my personal list:

More people as concious of this conflict and reject the privilege of a self-selected group to protect their status, ideas and policies from criticism.
Technology has lowered the costs of formulating and spreading these cricticisms.

The general public disgusts being treated as mallable, yeast-like entitiy to be controlled by some “better than thou” group of elites, whch is largely unaffected by the downsides of their own radical agenda.

The elites, sensing the revolt of the public and a loss of formerly air-tight communication superiority (remember those 3 TV channels or “The Paper of Record”?), need to revert to increasingly more brazen censorship of dissenting voices in a desperate attempt of protecting the power of their narrative and especially their exalted roles in it.

I believe it takes someone with a lot of (social justice fundamentalist2) education and specialization to think that it’s a good idea to display a lack of humility and respect so openly, and expect to be rewarded for it. In this light, the loss of trust in experts seems like a well-earned causal consequence of their vulgar display of anti-democratic power, arrogance and contempt towards the public’s opinion and preferences.

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the readers to transfer this concept to other hotly debated and highly politicized topics, where the elites’ opinion on what costs the public should bear does not coincide with the public’s willingness to pay up and predict the level of trust in those experts over time.

2

Characterized by ideas about the non-existence of an objective reality and power as the only arbiter of conflicts about it. It’s a regression from liberal ideas about the intrinsic value of an individual and its autonomy.

Then, for a brief, enthusiastic period of time after WW2, nuclear power was seen as the humanity’s great liberator from scarcity.
Without scarcity, there is less reason to go to war.

And so the USA “open-sourced” their Shippingport PWR design to the world.
In a productive frenzy, people developed all sorts of strange reactors,
sodium-cooled, graphite-moderated, aqueous homogeneous reactors or molten plutonium fueled.

But then, it stopped.

Development almost froze in time. In one analysis of this, a prominent protagonists came to the following conlcusion:

"The fundamental problem of the nuclear industry is not reactor safety, not waste disposal, not the dangers of nuclear proliferation, real though all these problems are. The fundamental problem of the industry is that nobody any longer has any fun building reactors....Sometime between 1960 and 1970 the fun went out of the business. The adventurers, the experimenters, the inventors, were driven out, and the accountants and managers took control. […] Nobody builds reactors for fun anymore. The spirit of the little red schoolhouse is dead. That, in my opinion, is what went wrong with nuclear power.”
- Freeman Dyson, cited here.

Edward Teller, the guy that built the most devestating weapon known to us, the hydrogen bomb, worked with Dyson to build a reactor that was so safe, that a bunch of bright High School students can operate it safely: the TRIGA reactor, which was deployed 66 times in 24 countries. It can be operated at thermal power levels from <0.1 to 16 MW. Its unique fuel form allows this reactor to be pulsed to power levels more than 1000x that: to 22,000 MW. A really weired, yet useful reactor.

The Darwinian experimentation weeding out thousands of bad ideas to cultivate a few good ones, stopped take place in the fission sector.

This is probably due to a complicated mix of public paranoia against all things nuclear, well-funded activists, a lack of economies of scale, and zealous regulators, which prevents entrepreneus to experiment with ideas.
Only a handful of companies are building an operating nuclear reactos across the world, most of them state-affiliated behemoths.

Because of this, innovators cannot reduce the price, and because entrpreneurs are not going to deploy an inherently expensive technology, we are kind of stuck.

The Killjoys’ Holy War

My personal interpretation is that there was a cultural shift that put Malthusian ideas back into the spot light.
In this view, progress was just increasing the number of people that were going to inevitably starve. Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” is probably the most famous expression of that line of thought that tries to manage the starvation of millions due to “logical”, “mathematical” “necessity”, derived from modelling human populations as mindless fungus in a jar.

When mastery over nature has become a bad in itself, enabling the cancerous, unregulated poplulation growth and subsequent collapse, it is not a far leap to start to condemn energy itself as evil.
Instead, Amory Lovins argued, we should look to “energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.”
Discovering “a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy” would be disastrous, “because of what we would do with it.”
Paul Erlich famously compared giving society cheap abundant energy to giving a child a machine gun.

If you belief that cheap and abudant energy is evil, why not regualte it out of existence? Instead of promoting physical and technological engineering to build technologies that could free humanity from so many constraints put upon by the accidents of history, the killjoys’ religious creed about the undesirability of humans demand social engineering, conventiently concentrating all power in their hands to enforce an “equitable” distribution of ecological resources according to their superior intellect, wisdom and taste.
There cannot be any “permissionless innovation”. Everything has to be weighed and signed off on. Only what satisfies their particular creed can be allowed to go forward lest to increase human influence on or worst of all mastery over nature.

Once you have identified an evil, all trade offs are false. Nuclear power was identified as that evil, because it really has the potential to overcome scarcity.
But that cannot be allowed, so it’s safety must be absolute and there mustn’t be any waste.
This spirit has permeated and in fact dominated the culture in the West for decades and only the eventual energy crisis seems to be powerful enough to snap politicians out of it.

When they do, they scramble to restart the industrial base to build PWRs. Unfortunately, these industries atrophy during the long slumber periods, making countries pay essentially FOAK costs, over and over again.
Overregulated, slow, highly politicized and emotionally charged: the killjoys won that battle of their war against liberating humanity from energy constraints1 by making innovative people run from the industry.

The same fate befell “the other kind” of nuclear power: fusion.

After an almost Olympian competition to get to a break-even fusion reactor between the US, Europe, Soviet Union and Japan, in which the power produced in experiments grew a trillionfold between 1970 and 1997, bureaucrats and science managers put on the breaks. Instead of keeping the competition going, they essentially cartelized all of the research by funneling all of the funds into an international project. They created, ITER, a large, low-risk, conservative science approach.
It took nearly a quarter of a century to even decide where to put it, and it will take even more than that to reach ignition, which was scheduled for 2035, but will probably not be reached in time.
It might have been a great management decision, but it sucked the fun out of it.

But then something strange happened. Entrepreneurs entered the field.
And the fun returned.

Philanthropic Entrepreneurs?

Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, George Soros, Marc Benioff are among the billionairs that invest in fusion companies.

In the theory of capitalism, the market is the place where demand and supply meet. Unbelievable many, complex and distributed interactions all across the globle collapses into a single numner: the price.
Because there are obvious problems wiht the "pure" from of markets, for example when people with little or no income cannot produce “demand”, societies implemented fixes.2 But let’s assume here that money earned is a noisy proxy for (social) value produced.

If that is true, (idealized) capitalists are the most outwardly focused and a lot of “stupid” decision from the perspective of “techy” people by the owner/management might actually be motivated by “raising” revenue, which, in this model, is equivalent to producing more social value.
Of course, (market) capitalists are seen as the most selfish people by idological adversaries, because they “care only about money”.
It’s either “fair” that they earn their salaries, because they ensure that the maximum social value is created, or they are thieves.3

(Idealized) Scientists are on the other side of this spectrum: they research what sparks their interests and drives them forward. They venture into the unknown, because it is fun.
You could either call them the most selfish people there are, because they follow only their own interest, or you could think of them as the most charitable and socially beneficial people, donating their life to question of possibly immense impact.

Engineers are in the business of translating theoretical knowledge of the scientists into consumable and usable products to offer to people (either via a market, or via some other form of distribution “according to their need”).
Regardless of your personal economic priors, engineers are somewhere in between the extremes. Their concern for “real world” problems robs them of a lot of the romanticism of the scientists, and blunts the edge of the crititicism against "caring only for money”. Anyway, they are at the interface of the “pure” research realm and the “mundane” business world.

Fusion companies are led by tech entrepreneurs, which are business people with a positive view on technology, risking their own money - for something.
A breakthrough in fusion would be worth unimaginable sums of money: it could replace, oil, gas and coal for energy generation, which are worth trillions per year. It could also help to mitigate climate change, which is worth enormous amounts of money, too.
But it also enables billions of people to lead (energy) richer lives, prevents emission-related deaths and enables general economic growth; especially in the poor areas of the world. It has enormous social benefits.

So pick your favorite story for why they are financing these companies, but no matter your particular narrative, that fact remains that they are bringing scientists to work on the most extreme states of matter, never before seen temperature differentials, the world’s most powerful lasers and magnets, and custom-made materials able to withstand plasma erosion and neutron damage. They are also bringing the engineers who are translating theory into actual systems that work, while their business acumen drives the enterprises towards potentially marketable increments.

Private Fusion

There are now more than 30 companies, working on fusion via mutliple pathways: inertial confinement, magnetic confinement, magnetized liner inertial, inertial electrostatic confinement, and magnetized target fusion; they are playing with superconducting magnets, lasers, gigantic guns, pistons and capacitators, tokamaks, stellerators, reversed field configurations, liquid metal blankets, partical accelerators, plasma guns, magnetic mirrors and different fuels.4

Some companies, like Avalance Energy are trying to capitalize on the fact that there is no theoretical lower size limit on a fusion device. Their designs could comfortably fit on your desk. Just listen to how much different that is from working in a highly regulated environment:

"We are applying a test-fail-fix approach, akin to rocket engine development, to small scale fusion and it's incredibly exciting to see our hardware ideas go from design to test in a matter of days."
- Robin Langtry, cited here

It’s almost certain that (almost?) all of them will fail. But they are pushing the envelope of the possible forward. These companies are competing and collaborating with each other. The regulators in the US and UK have opted to leave them mostly alone, which means that they will have a higher iteration rate from design to design and lower costs (relative to fission!) to build the prototypes.

Let’s not kid ourselves: there are ginormous challanges; plasma stability, tritium breeding and handling, heat transfer, hard neutron radiation, repitition rate, supply chains and so on. There shouldn’t be any way how these scrapily founded companies, leeching off of research done in National Labs like 40 years ago should have a leg up compared to ITER, a mulit-national, gigantic project which will cost about 5 times more than all of these private companies have as funding.

But they are working in a pure capitalism, fun way. There is little more powerful then highly intelligent people tinkering around with an inspiring goal and a direct transmission line from pure research to market oriented application.
Fusion is having all the fun, fission is having all the regulation.

Fusion is definitely still the underdog compared to fission.
We know that fission works very well and would probably allow a 10x reduction in building costs, if safety regulations were sane and risk appropriate.
But the regulations are in place. It is keeping people from building. And “competitive” plants are large mega-projects (notable exceptions are: Last Energy, Copenhagen Atomics, Oklo, Holosgen, USNC, Radiant), which are so slow and expensive to build right now in the West, that it is hard for them to get financed. Public perception is also a huge problem for fission, and not for fusion at the moment.5

I am grateful that people are trying to improve the world in this way.
It’s great that they have fun while they are sticking it to the killjoys.

I would love to see there colleagues working on fission joining them.
We could all profit from that.

The marvelous simplicity of the PWR

After nuclear power had been developed for bombs, Admiral Rickover used the knowledge gained during the development to design an unparalled source of propulsion for US Navy submarines, allowing them the travel submerged for months at a time around the world, if necessary.

Rickover chose to develop a reactor cooled by pressurized water for this task, for which liquid metals like sodium or lead, molten salts and various gases have all been used over the years as competing proposals.

To make a nuclear reactor work, you need use to neutrons to split large atoms into smaller atoms and neutrons. Suprisingly, the products of this process weigh less than the orignal, large atom an the neutron. The difference is converted into energy by Einstein’s famous formula E = mc².
If you can make sure that each neutron creates at least one more neutron that creates yet another neutron and so on, you have a chain reaction.
If you create more than one neutron in every generation, you have an exponentially growing chain reaction and ever escalating levels of power.
Great, if you want to build a nuclear weapon, but not desirable, if you want to have a power generator. For that you want to make sure to have exactly one new neutron for every neutron you put in, to get a sustained, controlled and stable chain reaction.

Pressurized water naturally controls the chain reaction.

When a neutron is created from a splitting large atom, it is incredibly energetic. Per event, the splitting of an atom produces millions of times more energy than buring a molcule in a chemical processes. If such a fast neutron collides with molecules, it loses some of its speed (=heat = energy) in the collision, heating the other molecule.

A slowed-down neutron has a far greater chance than a fast neutron to split an atom. The hydrogen in water is great at slowing down neutrons.

The pressure of water determines the temperature at which it boils. At over 150bar ( = 15MPa = 2250 psi), water remains liquid even at over 315°C ( = 600 F). When water boils and turns into steam, its density drops radically. In steam, there are orders of magnitude fewer molecules in the same volume, compared to liquid water. That means fewer molecules can slow down neutrons and therefore fewer neutrons will split atoms. This reduces the power output of a reactor. If the coolant flow is not reduced, the fuel will cool down. Once its temperature is low enough to turn the steam back into liquid water, it can slow down neutrons once again.

Water’s characteristic when turning into steam thus allows to set the operating temperature of a reactor by setting its pressure and nature will make sure that the chain reaction will be kept stable by the laws of nature at the desired temperature. If you want to draw more power from the reactor, just pump more (cool) water through it.

These characteristics, in addtion to water’s cheapness, non-toxicity, availability etc. made it really attractive.

Rickover made sure that his system was rugged enough by installing parts of it in a submarine and depth charging it. Failing parts had to be reengineered.

Out of this military application, the civilian Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) was developed. On Sept. 6, 1954, President Eisenhower used a radioactive wand to activate the bulldozer that broke ground for the construction of the first PWR power plant at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. It was designed to use relatively cheap low-enriched uranium. Rickover insisted on this design choice, because:

“From your point of view as a bombmaker, the stuff is junk. You can no more make it explode like a nuclear bomb than you can a bag of apples.”

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.128). Polaris Books. Kindle-Vesion

This means that PWRs have no direct military applications The design was “open-sourced” (=declassified) by the Atomic Energy Comission

Hundreds of engineers from around the world attended seminars on the Shippingport power plant given by the Naval Reactors Branch, Westinghouse, and Duquesne during 1954-55, and Westinghouse made available thousands of technical reports on every aspect of the project. Following its opening, it continued to serve as a school in reactor technology for hundreds of engineers.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.101). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

This PWR design became the model for more than three fourths of all civilian nuclear reactors produced worldwide ever since.

Safety

Zubrin challenges the public perception of nuclear power with regards to safety.

While high doses of radiation delivered over short periods of time can cause radiation poisoning or cancer, there is, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “no data to establish unequivocally the occurrence of cancer following exposure to low doses and dose rates—below 10,000 mrem.”1 Despite this scientific fact, the NRC and other international regulatory authorities insist on using what is known as the “Linear No Threshold” (LNT) method for assessing risk.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.114-115). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

The LNT is a simplistic measure. It works on the assumption that the harm done be a hazard is independent of the dose. So if 1 person gets drunk by consuming a liter of vodka, LNT asserts that there will also be one drunken person, if 1000 people drink 1/1000th liter of vodka each. Yes, it is as absurd as it sounds (here is a recent paper on the effects of low-level radiation), but this is the theory under which nuclear power’s “risk” is regulated and screaming headlines about “nuclear deaths” are produced.

Interestingly, this theory is not applied to other sources of radioactivity, for example coal power:

Coal contains radioactive constituents. Worldwide, coal-fired electricity stations release some 30,000 tons of radioactive radon, uranium and thorium into the atmosphere every year. They also emit millions of tons of highly toxic chemical ash containing mercury, arsenic, selenium, not to mention over ten billion tons of CO2 per year. In fact, along with 10 million tons of CO2, a single 1000 MWe coal-fired power plant annually produces 200,000 tons of ash, and in addition to several hundreds of tons of mercury and other chemical poisons, sends some 27 tons of radiative material — half radon, the other half uranium and thorium — right up the stack. In fact, the amount of uranium and thorium emitted to the environment as pollution by coal-fired power plants would be more than enough to fuel every nuclear power plant in the country, which could produce equivalent power without any of the CO2, toxic gas, or radiological emissions.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.117). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

Coal emits far more radioactivity than natural gas, but still

A 1000 MWe natural gas power plant sends about 8 Curies of radon into the environment every month.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.117). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version

Interestingly this is about the same dose of radiation that was emitted by the “worst” nuclear accident in US civil nuclear history, Three Mile Island.
But while TMI emitted this dose ONCE in a historical and infamous accident that fueled the fantasy of writer and film makers (“The China Syndrome”), it gets absolutely no attention, when far more radiation is released from non-nuclear sources. Zubrin presents this table to communicate the point that the dose of radiation from nuclear power is miniscule.

But what about Chernobly?! First of all, it was not PWR, but a different animal all together.

That reactor (an RBMK-1000) did not have a containment building, did not only not have the balancing characteristic of the PWR, but had infact a destabilizing positive feedback loop, did not have proper shutdown systems and was deliberately run without security systems for a test on that fateful day in 1986.
Yet even using the LNT hypothesis:

According to a study by the International Atomic Energy Agency and World Health Organization using LNT methodology, over time this fallout could theoretically cause up to four thousand deaths among the surrounding population. Chernobyl was really about as bad as a nuclear accident can be. Yet, even if we accept the grossly exaggerated casualties predicted by LNT theory as being correct, in comparison to all the deaths caused every year as a result of the pollution emitted from coal-fired power plants, its impact was minor. Chernobyl-like catastrophes would have to occur every day to approach the toll on humanity currently inflicted by coal.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.124). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

Waste Disposal

Zubrin tackles another concern often brought against nuclear power:
”What about the waste”? He argues that:

The hazards of nuclear waste disposal have been exaggerated by environmentalists, with the openly stated purpose of seeking to create a showstopper for the nuclear industry.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.118-119). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

There are several ways to dispose of nuclear waste. For example the dirt cheap an simple seabed waste disposal:

The way to dispose of nuclear waste at sea works as follows: First, you glassify the waste into a water-insoluble form. Then you put it in stainless steel cans, take it out in a ship, and drop it into the mid-ocean, directly above sub-seabed sediments that have been, and will be, geologically stable for tens of millions of years. Falling down through several thousand meters of water, your canisters will reach velocities that will allow them to bury themselves deep under the mud. After that, your waste is not going anywhere, and no one will ever be able to get their hands on it. Furthermore, no nomads roving the Earth after the next ice age eliminates all records of our civilization will ever be harmed as a result of accidentally stumbling upon it. (I mention this latter point because protection of the public for the next 10,000 years, under all contingencies, has been made a Department of Energy nuclear waste repository requirement.)

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.119-120). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

The other solution is to build a land-based “deep geological repository”, which are more expensive to build and which are stifled by litigation.
Several states have provisions against new nuclear power, as long as there is no repository. While the US has an operating waste disposal site in possibly the best geology you could wish for (WIPP), it is forbidden to put civil nuclear waste there. Instead, Congress has decided to build (and subsequently start/stop) a repository in one of the worst geologies (Yucca Moutain), which is not operational. The non-exsitence of a repository is cited as reason to block new nuclear power plants or even of getting rid of nuclear outright. Because the US government fails to provide a repository, operators have to store used nuclear fuel on-site.

[Anti-nuclear environmentalists] claim to be interested in public safety and ecological preservation. Neither claim is supportable. By protecting fossil power from nuclear power, the anti-nukes are perpetuating environmental devastation and harming public health. Regarding public safety they are even worse. Indeed, it must perplex the rational mind that anyone can agitate, litigate, and argue with a straight face that it is better that nuclear waste be stored in hundreds of cooling ponds adjacent to reactors located near metropolitan areas all across the country than that they be gathered up and laid to rest in a government-supervised depository in a location far removed from civilization. Yet that is what they do.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.118-119). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

Recycling used nuclear fuel would make the waste issue less of a problem, because the longer lasting actinides (for example Pu) would be removed and reused as fuel, while only the short-lived fission products would have to be disposed.

These have less volume and only need to be stored for about 300 years.
Of course, this is blocked by activists in need of a problem to raise money on as well. And activism like this is lucrative.

Zubrin makes the case that several proportedly environmentally concerned activist organizations are in fact in the business of mercenary environmentalism, where they lend their vocal opposition to what ever cause pays off.

The balance sheet of some of these groups definitely some support for this hypothesis:

Potential

Zubrin argues that nuclear power hat the potential to empower all of humanity without wrecking the environment and suspects that it is for this very fact that nuclear power is so controversial: it voids so many claims to power and control over other people.

In arguing for limits to growth, Malthusians always inevitably end up pointing to energy. There is only so much to go around, they say, so human aspirations must be crushed. Lest we run out of energy, they claim, people in advanced countries must accept lower living standards and the poor nations must stay poor forever. But nuclear power completely upends any such rationale for putting chains on humanity.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.63). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

He tries to show the potential of nuclear power relative to fossil fuels by comparing how much electricity you could derive from both.

Humanity currently consumes about 20 TW-years of electricity equivalents per year. At our current rate of consumption, there are about 225 years worth of “conventional” fossil fuels. If humanity were to flourish and people were to use globally as much energy as Europe, we would be using approximately 5 times as much energy, which comes to 45 years of resources. To demonstrate the value of the different resources, Zubrin converts the amount of potential electricity at a price of 7 cents per kilowatt-hour, and divides it among the globe’s current population of around 8 billion people equally. (German electricity consumers would rejoice at these prices)

In this frame, there is just not enough energy to go around and we need to constrain humanity now. And we haven’t even talked about the CO2 emitted from the usage of fossil fuels yet.

Nuclear power is in a different league.

By contrast, our presently known reserves of uranium and thorium ore comprise at least 500,000 TW-years of energy, over a hundred times as much as fossil fuels, sufficient to power the globe at ten times current rates for over 2,500 years.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.64-65). Polaris Books. Kindle-Vers

The picture gets even more lopsided, if you allow for technological advances, like the ability to extract fissile material from the sea (like James Conca described here)

But it becomes absolutely ridiculous, if you begin to ponder the potential of “the other” form of nuclear power, fusion power. While the “regular” nuclear power plants derive power from splitting heavy atoms, fusion releases energy by combining two light atoms into a heavier one. This is the process that powers the sun and the mechanism in the largest and most devastating weapons known to us: thermo-nuclear bombs.

The most important thing there is to know about nuclear power is that it is far and away the greatest energy resource available to humanity today, exceeding all others combined thousands of times over.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.62). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

According to Zubrin, the scarcity mindset pits humans against one another: if you fear that there isn’t enough for all of us, people will start to hog what ever is deemed valuable. And other people will try to take it by force. But given the numbers above, there is actually no need for this.
There is plenty of highly-concentrated energy to go around. Zubrin even argues that there is enough to upgrade the planet:

Put simply, the Earth lacks sufficient fresh water. Using nuclear power we can remedy this defect. The Earth has no shortage of salt water, and all it takes to turn it into fresh is energy. Nuclear power can readily meet this need. In fact, the waste heat from nuclear power plants can be used to desalinate massive amounts of sea water, with almost no cost to the stations’ grid power at all. […] Using mass produced nuclear power plants for desalination, not only Australia but even vaster tracts of desert stretching across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the sub-Arctic, and the Americas could be turned into fertile land, filled with grand forests, delightful meadows, towns, and farms, producing food, inventions, and thoughts, and hosting abundant and diverse wildlife.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.269-270). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

But the oceans are also home to vast ecological deserts, where there are too few nutrients to allow fish from thriving. Enough energy could help here as well:

Then there are the oceans, which are largely desert as well, not because of a shortage of CO2 or water, to be sure, but of trace nutrients, like iron, phosphorus, and nitrates that come from the land. In fact however, these are only lacking in the surface waters of the oceans. Below a few hundred meters in depth they are present in abundance, because the deeper waters, lacking sunlight, have not been scavenged for their nutrients by photosynthetic organisms. If these nutrient rich deep waters could be pumped to the surface, they could turn every part of the vast desert ocean into nurseries for life as productive as natural upwelling areas such as the Grand Banks. By employing floating or island based nuclear power plants for this purpose, the abundance of life in the world’s oceans could be multiplied tenfold or more.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.269-270). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

Nuclear power is also the only plausible form of energy that could enable humanity to journey to other planets or even stars.

Costs

Given its practically unlimited potential, the vast amounts of experience with the technlogy and the natural self-regulation properties of PWRs, nuclear power should be really cheap, actually beating the competition easily:

Your 1000 MWe nuke [should cost] something like $500 million, which is about what it takes to build a few suburban shopping malls. Yet the rest of the industry is shelling out $5 billion or more — ten times as much to build a plant of the same size? What gives? Why do commercial nukes now cost so much? According to antinuclear analysts, that’s just the way it has to be. So, regrettably, unfortunately, the dream of cheap unlimited non-polluting power is just a fantasy, and the little people will simply have to learn how to get by with less. Bunk. New nuclear power plants do indeed cost a lot, but they shouldn’t, and they didn’t use to. The Nautilus only took four years to develop and build, and the Shippingport plant three. In the 1960s, power stations got much larger, but it still only took an average of five years to build a new nuclear power in the United States. In South Korea today it still takes an average of four years to build a nuclear power plant. Now, as a result of environmentalist efforts to introduce regulatory roadblocks at every stage of the construction process, it can take 16 years to build one in the West. This has enormously increased the cost of all such projects.”

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.132). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

In fact, nuclear power was built in the late 60s for less than $700/kW, since then, construction methods improved considerably, which should make Zubrin’s estimate possible.

So why is nuclear power so expensive today?

Ask the opponents of nuclear power and they … create the impression that people who build nuclear plants are a bunch of bungling incompetents. The only thing they won’t explain is how these same ‘bungling incompetents’ managed to build nuclear power plants so efficiently, so rapidly, and so inexpensively in the early 1970s.”

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.133). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

Zubrin, pondering this conundrum, comes up with two different reasons:

He produces a table that models inflation adjusted prices per kW over time squared and finds the resulting index to be rather constant, indicating that an increase in the completion time of power plants is a main driver of cost increases.

There are many reasons why stretching out time increases costs.

1. Retaining works costs money, whether they are standing around waiting for orders to do the next task or are actually getting work done.

2. It adds to interest rate costs and inflation costs.

3. Increased construction time adds opportunities for extremely costly changes in regulatory orders or litigation.

The other reason for cost increases is the regulatory process, which he describes as follows:

The overall process used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to strangle the nuclear industry goes by the charming term of “ratcheting.” As Cohen said, “Like a ratchet wrench which is moved back and forth but always tightens and never loosens a bolt, the regulatory requirements were constantly tightened, requiring additional equipment and construction labor and materials. …between the early and late 1970s, regulatory requirements increased the quantity of steel needed in a power plant of equivalent electrical output by 41%, the amount of concrete by 27%, the lineal footage of piping by 50%, and the length of electrical cable by 36%. The NRC did not withdraw requirements made in the early days on the basis of minimal experience when later experience demonstrated that they were unnecessarily stringent. Regulations were only tightened, never loosened. The ratcheting policy was consistently followed…

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.136-137). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

Nordhaus and Stein have recently presented the maddening new regulations that the NRC wants to subject advanced nuclear designs to in a Foreign Policy article, which are based on literally impossible assumptions.

Litigious anti-nuclear mercenary environmentalists and overzealous regulators of the power source with the best security record of all are to blame for escalating costs, accroding to Zubrin. Not the technology itself.
From this follows his recommendations to unleash nuclear’s potential:

There are four areas that need to be addressed. These include regulatory reform, waste disposal, support for research and development, and public understanding.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.272). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

Summary

I’d like to come to a close of this review with Zubrin’s actual introduction to his book:

Global warming and anthropogenic atmospheric chemistry change are both real.

1. They are not currently a crisis.

2. But they are going to become a crisis, and then a disaster, unless something is done to effectively change the current trajectory of events.

3. The primary solution offered by those who recognize this problem — to wit, reducing carbon use by making fuel less affordable to people of limited means — is unethical and impractical, and consequently deserves to fail, has failed, and will inevitably continue to fail, spectacularly.

4. That the claim that modern civilization can be powered by updated forms of the renewable energy sources that needed to be replaced by fossil fuels to enable the birth of industrial society is nonsense.

5. That the more radical prescription of global population reduction offered by the minority of climate crisis believers who recognize the unfeasibility of the carbon tax and green energy solutions is the worst idea of all, one that would lead to catastrophes too horrific to even contemplate were its enforcement seriously attempted.

6. That far from contracting our energy use, human progress must and will inevitably entail continued exponential growth of human power generation.

7. That therefore the widespread adoption of nuclear energy is essential for a positive human future.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes (S.8-9). Polaris Books. Kindle-Version.

Zubrin’s “The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future” presents his case for nuclear power with a level of unapologetic enthusiasm that is refreshing.
While his arguments are probably well known to pro-nuclear minded people, I think he has done a great job with this book in packaging these arguements in a readable form to help further public education on nuclear.

In a world, where the formerly leading industrial country Germany decided to follow through with vandalizing its world-class nuclear reactors in the middle of an active war with its main energy supplier on the opposing side for logically and scientificly unsound, yet highly-emotional reasons, such education is dearly needed.

While activists claim to be concerned about the hypothetical world’s poor of the future they apparently have no moral problem with or are completely oblivious about how their preferred policies are negatively impacting real people of the present.

Practically any technique that does not require a complete destruction of today’s economy and a recreation of it as a global, top-down technocracy directing all business to act in the interest of all (as defined by the technocrats), seems out of bound and at least one of the reasons behind opposition to nuclear power, large-hydro or CCS. But there is an even more taboo topic: geoengineering. More specifically: Solar Radiation Management (SRM).

How we try to regulate the earth’s temperature

Our current approach is somewhat indirect. We know that global temperature is determined by how much solar radiation is kept in the atmosphere; we know that so-called greenhouse gases change how and how much heat is kept on the planet. Without this effect, the average global temperature would be about 30°C lower than it is now. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Because the amount of CO2 grows, we expect global temperatures to increase and various adverse effects from that. We know that fossil fuel usage increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. So if you do not want rising temperatures from CO2, you have to stop increasing the concentration of CO2. And that means you have to cut fossil fuel consumption to zero. The rub is of course that 80% of our global energy usage comes from fossil fuels, powering everything we define as modern life-style, from central heating and AC, to refrigerators hospitals, ambulances, our agriculture, mobility, electricity, building, mining, water and waste treatment, clothing and so much more. People do not generally like to even think about giving up any of these. But without affordable zero-carbon alternatives, exactly that is the ask of activists today.

How we could regulate the earth’s temperature

SRM does not care about the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. It is concerned with the global temperature, and tries to control it by changing how much solar radiation is absorbed in a reversible way.

Among the methods that are being contemplated seriously¹ are: installing a huge fleet of mirrors in space to reflect some sunlight away, building a fleet of robotic sea vessels that spray enormous amount of water into the air to seed clouds, which reflect sunlight and using a fleet of flying vehicles² to inject reflective particles into the stratosphere.

And astonishingly, some of these techniques are so cheap that scientists worry that a rogue billionaire could change global temperatures. Research for Copenhagen Consensus shows that just $9 billion spent building nineteen hundred seawater-spraying boats could prevent all predicted temperature increases projected to be caused by CO2 in this century.

If you compare that price with a predicted $60 trillion in damages in the twenty-first century that would come from unmitigated global warming, it seems like a bargain.

And precisely because it looks like changing the planet’s temperature might be cheap and easy, it is not understandable why climate scientists are not working overtime to understand and experiment as much as possible to know as much as possible about its potential negative impacts. A cursory glance at the published literature reveals at least an equal amount of papers dealing with moral questions and potential governance structures for deploying hypothetical forms of SMR as papers actually dealing with it.³

This apparent lack of rigor in qualifying the techniques is especially inexplicable, if scientists and activists were really as worried about potential tipping points as they claim. If they existed, the world might be in need for a rapid decrease in temperature. That is exactly what SRM could deliver. The Mount Pinatubo eruption was a kind of natural experiment for SMR, because it spewed vast amount of sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere, which reflects sunlight. This eruption decreased global average temperatures by a bout 1°C in a matter of weeks.

Not surprisingly, a cost-benefit-analysis undertaken for Copenhagen Consensus found that every dollar spent on research in this area could lead to a total benefit worth $2000.

Given the high confidence that climate scientists apparently have in their mastery of modeling the world’s climate from physical principles over timespans of a hundred years or so to a degree of detail sufficient for demanding a sweeping redo of the world’s political and economic systems, it should be a trivial task to predict the effect of local geoengineering efforts. And in deed the demand to work on this more thoroughly has been around since at least 2015.

Why do we not do it the smart way?

The language used in describing SMR might be revealing of the baffling gap in the potential of this technique and funding to research it. For example the language used to describe a real downside of SRM (once you start doing it, you better make sure that you don’t stop doing it) in this paper seems quite revealing of a general stance towards fossil fuels, the industry producing them and fixing their downsides by technology instead of by changing human behavior:

The addictive character of this techno-fix will not encourage decreasing our CO2 emissions and if stopping this geoengineering scheme was mandatory for whatever reason (unexpected effects, financial crisis…), the stratospheric sulfate sunshade would rapidly lift and several decades’ worth of warming would hit the Earth and all living organisms with no left time for adaptation.

Or here⁴:

Although SRM poses new risks, it is sometimes proposed as the ‘lesser evil’. I consider how research and implementation of SRM could be regulated, drawing on what I call a ‘precautionary checklist’, which includes consideration of the longer term political implications of technical change. Particular attention is given to the moral hazard of ‘regulatory drift’, in which strong initial regulation softens through complacency, deliberate deregulation (‘regulatory gift’) and the limited constituency of people with the skills to regulate (‘thin markets’). I propose the strengthening of civil society groups to keep regulators in check.

Of course, SRM is not a panacea. For example, it could influence the overall rain patterns and induce a non-uniform cooling effect, creating “winners and losers”. It is also not concerned with the question of the effects of a change in the ocean’s pH value.

But in evaluating a technology or strategy, the relevant question is not “Is it perfect?”, but “Compared to what?”. Compared with our current experiment of emitting 51 GtCO2eq/y and letting activists try to demonize and suddenly erase 80% of our energy supply, that we know is currently irreplaceable in long-range transport, agriculture, mining, smelting and electricity and so on, SRM seems attractive in terms of costs, scale, and reversibility. Instead of putting a few hundred trillions of dollars on the table in the short term for migrating away from fossil fuels with our current technology⁵, SRM could buy us time for spare change (relatively speaking) to innovate the costs of alternatives to a point, where the economics work in favor of deploying them at scale.⁶

It seems to me that the problem for SRM (and probably nuclear fission technology) is that it transforms much of the hatred against “capitalism” from “scientific truth and necessity”, to mere asinine rhetoric. It seems so cheap an easy that proponents of the alleged truth seem to prefer stifling research on it to prevent some rich person or country from doing it voluntarily to the alternative: giving up cherished dreams of world revolution and top-down control (with them at the helm of world affairs, one must assume).

Could it be that the projections of the efficacy of SRM are far too optimistic? Sure! It could be more costly and have far more adverse affects than anticipated. But if that is the case, we need to know. We have to investigate it. I think David Keith [@DKeithClimate], assessment in his 2022 paper gets it right:

[W]e find that the costs of over-confidence in [SRM] can be extreme – climate damages are very large if we rely on [SRM] when it does not work. But we also find that under-confidence in [SRM], or ruling it out when it works, can have comparably high costs. These arise in the form of forgone opportunities to limit costly climate impacts[…] Biased judgments are costly, whatever the direction of the bias. A coin has two sides.

1. There are verious “science fiction”-esque proposals in the literature ↩︎

2. Maybe a fleet of cargo airships might help. ↩︎

3. But that could very well be a fault in my queries. ↩︎

4. I hope that this is not a nut-picking. But correct me, if I am wrong. ↩︎

5. Which might be an unreasonable proposal, depending on your assumptions. If you want a prosperous zero-carbon society with only renewable power at the same level of reliability and global average consumption on par with today’s Europeans, you are facing enormous practical problem in mining enough material to transition to a mostly electric society (copper, cobalt, lithium) and replacing a lot of the established processes for producing steel, cement, plastics etc. If you weaken the constraints, for example if you allow for regular mass blackouts, wide-spread poverty, high climate vulnerability and mass starvation, transitioning becomes less challenging, but also less desirable. ↩︎

6. If for example fusion power, space-based solar power, electrical storage or deep geothermal power would become cheap enough in 50 years to easily power the world and direct air capture devices, SRM would have been one of the most cost-effective innovations in history. ↩︎

It has become increasingly clear for me that different nations’ handling of these situations revealed once again something fundamentally at odds with our normal believes about rationality and how we act:

It is the basic human operating system to prioritize emotions and rationalize later on.

Emotions rule

It looks increasingly like that differences in our reactions are best explained by differences in what we fear:

When you fear climate change more than anything else, you will be willing to sacrifice all of the economy to combat it. When you are at the end of your work life and expect a pension, changing all of the economy is probably the last thing you want to do. You fear change. Should you weigh the benefits and costs on anything related to energy, the industry to power all industry? Certainly! Do we have an “objective” way to do it? Nope. Even translating policy effects to money doesn’t help, because, OBVIOUSLY, in this special case I care about, there is some externality that is not captured. And some negative aspect is certainly not weighed with the “right” discount factor. It’s easy to find post-hoc rationalization to do what we wanted to do anyway. And it takes a lot of discipline to even try to overcome such tendencies.

Take Covid19. When you are 70, your risk profile looks very different from when you are 7 or 27. But odds are that 70ish year old people are holding the reins of power.

It makes sense for those in power to want everybody else to behave in ways that minimizes risk for exactly those in power. So when it’s: “Everybody has to wear masks” and “Only the vulnerable have to wear masks”, people in the “vulnerable” and “mighty” category might opt for the former. They don’t have anything to lose from that (it’s masks for them anyway), but there might be a benefit from other people wearing masks. Costs of that decision, if any, will be delayed and distributed.

The same with vaccinations; given my current reading (which should mean little to you) it has probably been a good decision for people older than 60 to get a vaccination against the original and alpha variant, when these were dominant. So it’s vaccinations for them anyway; so why not making anybody else to do it as well? It might give the powerful yet vulnerable group some advantage (maybe even monetarily, although I have of course no way of proving that), if younger people are vaccinated as well. Maybe their viral load is lower during an infection, which might lower the odds of them spreading the virus. To the powerful, yet more vulnerable people. This effect also exists, even if a vaccine does not stop an infected person from spreading the virus. See David Deutsch’s explanation on that.

Suppose person1 meets person2. The probability that this infects p2 depends on whether p1 is infected. If p1 isn't, that probability is zero. https://t.co/USpwgybNcY

— David Deutsch (@DavidDeutschOxf) January 16, 2023

So who behaves irrational? The powerful, older people wanting everybody to wear masks and get vaccinated? Or the younger people being forced to do so or those opting for it voluntarily to increase the odds of protecting a vulnerable family member or those fighting any mandate? Well neither group. Everybody is rationally FOR THEMSELVES.¹ Does that shift risks? Do other people have to bear costs they wouldn’t want to have? Sure! Is that bad? Depends on who is doing the analysis, I guess.

Analysis

If you “analyze” a problem, you cut off the irrelevant parts. Or at least you try. But that is rather subjective, sometimes, even arbitrary. (Like my realization that “rationality” seems downstream of “emotions”. Could be wrong, but explains a lot for me at the moment) You might think that some pollution is ok to reduce poverty. Another person might think you are a criminal for even proposing that, because “you never know” what this pollutants might do in the world. One is afraid of poverty, someone else might be afraid of any impact of humanity on the planet. What we see as relevant, when we see it as relevant, who we think can be sacrificed, who we think is allowed to sacrifice. All of these are probably driven by emotions and tradition and culture and childhood trauma to a far greater degree than by rationality. People might be motivated by love, hate or fear alike.

Information asymmetry

Do we know how to make decisions in these situations? Not really. We know how an individual actor ought to behave given their belief about the state of the world and the effects of their behavior on the state of the world. It doesn’t mean they are right. It doesn’t mean that this behavior is good, let alone optimal for anyone else. So who should rule? Who should be made to obey? And what are the relevant beliefs and probabilities you should include? Do you model “other people want control over me”? Do you discount it by “but it might be good for me”? Do you include “I only have 5 years left to live. I want those years to be great, I don’t care after that”? Or do you include “my children”? In the same way as “your children”? Is it relevant, how your relationship to your family is? Should you generalize your experience (good or bad)? If it’s not your personal experience, whose should you use? How do you know, when it is ok to use a proxy for a question (for example the recency proxy for probabilities) and when does it payoff to do actual research? How do you even know that there is relevant research on the question at hand? When do you ask an expert?

Experts

But which expert should you trust? An expert is someone, who has been trained (hopefully by experienced people) on a set of past problems and their solutions. They know how to handle the problems of the past. Great.

What is not so great is that hardly two problems are the same. There are no two identical viruses. There are no two identical situations. Every new situation poses new challenges. Sometimes we get lucky and past solutions work on new problems. (for example applying norms to bridges that are to be built in areas, where you have built before, on ground conditions, that you have dealt with before, over lengths, you have crossed before etc.)

When we are not lucky, we need to find new solutions to new problems. And then all bets are off. We have to grope around in the dark and grab everything that might help us. It’s not necessarily the same type of people that are experts of the old and innovators of the new. The problem is; most of the new stuff fails. It takes a lot of time to build something new. So the innovators will be wrong in more than 9 out of 10 cases. But when they are right, it is a gigantic pay off. If you could predict even slightly better than random chance, when that is going to happen, you’d be filthy rich.

But we cannot predict that! So is it rational to trust “experts”? The answer, as ALWAYS is: it depends! Is it something, that has been dealt with before? Probably, they can handle it. Is it closely related? That’s dicier. Still, probably, they can handle it. Is it new? Odds are, they don’t know the solution. They will have to find it. That means “experts” will be wrong. A lot. But so will anybody else. Because, it is new. We don’t know what we don’t know. So we cannot predict how to handle it. There could be a rogue doctor, a reclusive genius etc. coming up with a solution. Experts are also not free from having their biases for financial, political, ideological, religious and all the other reasons, that “normal” people have to deal with themselves.

Who are you to tell, whether their solution is good and their approach is unbiased? How do you even know whether the problem is “like an old one”? How do you think you can judge the quality of their work? Have you worked in that field previously? Or on related problems? If not, you will have a really hard time judging, who is right. And an even harder one predicting whose approach might turn out to be right.

Predictions

It is hard to distinguish a wrong prediction from one, where the circumstances or context changed. Is Paul Ehrlich consistently wrong (as his critics claim) or is he heroically raising the alarm soon enough to change our ways? Is he merely warning? “If this trend persists, then doom” is a prediction and probably often true as logic statement, even though it is not necessarily factually true. If the trend does not persist, then “not necessarily doom”. But then the prediction is not wrong either, it has just become an irrelevant hypothetical. That makes true prediction of the kind “If it rains enough, the ground will be wet for a period of time under normal circumstances” often trivial.

The rub is that because we are interested in the latter part, we often assume that the predictor would guarantee the conditions to hold or really think that the “then”-part is going to happen. But that is probably a fault on the part of the audience… or skillful manipulation by the predictor.

It’s even worse to prove probabilistic predictions wrong. “There is a 99.99999% chance that X will become president in the next election”. How would you even begin to disprove such a prediction? There is only one election. If “Y” becomes president, then what? Did the 1 in a million event happen? Was the reasoning process of the predictor faulty? No way to tell from the result.

It’s not even easy to tell who WAS right afterwards!

Data

Evidence from data is also tricky. Given the same set of data, you can slice it in many ways. You cannot even say what is relevant, because relevance (in the common usage) is not well-defined statistical term. Is it the correct data? Is it capable of answering the question that is being asked? Does it test the right people in the right way at the right time? Does it administer the right dosage? Does it follow the participants long enough? Who is to say, what the right way even is?

Science is the process of putting forth a hypothesis and being criticized. Everything “science” knows, is tentative. When a better explanation comes along, it supersedes that what is already known. Scientists accept that they don’t have access to a final, “capital T” Truth. Real scientists try to find small pockets of reality that they can prod and probe until they get a handle on it.

Some audacious ones might venture to generalize the results. But good scientists typically know that this is an assumption that has to stand the test of reality. But who wants that degree of humility? Of “probabilities” of “current knowledge”? We want the Truth, now. With 100% certainty.

Priests

And we are often acting as if some people, bestowed by some institution with degrees, titles and honors, would be “qualified” to deliver it. That relieves our anxiety. We are no longer in the world of uncertainty that we are responsible to live and work with. Paaah! That is only for dumb folks.

No, we are “following the science”! Coincidentally, it will often conform to our preconceived notions or amplify the danger of something that we “intuitively” knew to be dangerous. Competing ideas are “dumb”, “conspiracy”, “evil”, “selfish”, “shortsighted”, “irrational”. Shamans and priests have made a great living out of this model of creating certainty out of their behinds for thousands of years.

Today, they have access to globe spanning platforms to transport their certitude to you between breaks filled with ads for sponsors, which are certainly not biasing their views.

It is a tired trope, but the Gell-Mann amnesia is a real phenomenon. Unfortunately, we are not knowledgeable enough to call journalists and other peddlers of false certainty on their BS on more than a handful of topics. They are often substituting their own moral ideas and their own preferences for “objective” or “majority” views.

How often to you get a really balanced view on a topic? You will probably not even be able to tell, because you are just not sophisticated enough to detect it on a lot of topics. Neither am I. Hardly anyone is. If any at all.

I have no idea what is going on inside Iran, no idea about their cultural traditions, how it relates to the Islamic Revolution, how much of the violence is driven by the internal security forces, how much is being paid for, if any, by their regional or global adversaries, because I am not knowledgeable enough about their motives, inner balance of power, factions etc. I don’t know who blew up centrifuges or drone factories for what reasons.

Or take the current war in Ukraine. How much do I know about the actions and intentions of either side? Of the stuff I think I know, how much of that was spoon-fed to me by the propaganda arm of one of the countries? Which propaganda department is more reliable? It’s hard to tell from afar.

And afar is exactly the situation the journalists are in that are “compiling” information to present it as fact to you. But in reality, neither they nor you know how many dead there are on the ground, which side’s strategy is currently working out just as planned, because neither they nor you have a clue what either side’s plan looks like. We can’t even tell who blew up North Stream 2, if anyone at all.

You can guess, sure, but you have to face the truth that your view on the situation is based on your guess, which you made based on the reporting and story telling of journalists, that are guessing their stories based on state propaganda and anonymous and/or activist accounts on social media. But that won’t keep any of us from having a firm moral opinion, will it?

And it gets darker still.

The really perverse thing is: if you are in doubt, but your adversary manages to “brainwash”, “propagandize”, “influence”, “inform”, or “educate” their troops and people into a coherent force, while “your” side is in doubt, “on the fence”, “discussing”, it’s very likely that your side will lose.

This asymmetry between what is optimal for individual and for groups is a real and often problematic tension.² Too often, the individual gets crushed by a “group”. The dynamics of groups and how beliefs, even those that are easily proven to be false, become a badge of honor and a sign of group membership is quite interesting.³ And more than a bit depressing.

What do you want to do now? What do you do, when “experts” don’t know the answer, data doesn’t help you (yet?) and you don’t know the answer?

Living

You cannot not act.

But what do you want to do? You start to “f” around, like everyone else, like all the experts, like all the researchers, like all the entrepreneurs.

Maybe, eventually, someone will stumble upon something that works. With a lot of luck and access to markets, you might be able to buy their solution for outrageously high prices. But at least you don’t have to find a working solution yourself. Our best bet seems to be that kind of freedom.

We let people chose for themselves according to their own risk profiles. We challenge and criticize people with different views to get to a better place. That freedom of speech is something that helps us to stay sane collectively.

But when these “locally optimal” decisions conflict, it seems we have to find a mode of choosing a path. Some societies opt for a single person, in the best case working like an unbiased coin flip, in the worst case that person is a vindictive tyrant that is more concerned with punishing enemies than with solving problems, to force a solution on all. Other societies have opted for representative democracy and try to broadly federated (decision) power. We call a social structure, where decisions are made as close to the people as possible a democratic republic. (It’s probably not hard to tell that I think this form of government to be a great invention). Is it perfect and free of conflict? Obviously not. As irritating as that might be, Churchill might have had it right:

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…” - Winston S. Churchill, 11 November 1947

Religion

A great problem remains and seems to become increasingly more challenging: What do we do, when our fundamental beliefs are different? What if your God is Gaia? Or the Russian master race? Or the Prophet? Or Vishnu? Or some cult leader? What if all your thinking and action is oriented towards that? But mine is not? Then we will have religious wars.

Challenging views will cease to be an important corrective to get us to something better and become heresy that has to be canceled. And the heretics have to be ostracized.

Religion used to be a Schelling Point for a short period of time, a phase we now call the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. Everybody in the Western world knew roughly what anybody else there was looking for. At least in the moral realm. ⁴ Without such a unifying belief (or direction), cataclysmic strife seems to be ahead and the terrors of the 20th century, the two World Wars, the holocaust, the Great Leap Forward; all of that might be just a prelude. We certainly have far more horrible weapons at our disposal now: nuclear weapons in the Mt range, viruses, chemical weapons, drones, long-range artillery, cyber wars.

What is the alternative to religion? Maybe full-blown nihilism?

Maybe all the people manipulating their way through life are right. They act in their own reality, improve what they can improve locally (for themselves). They try to bully, pressure, bribe, coax, coerce people to do their bidding. And they probably think they are right to do so.

Maybe, that is the best we can do, while also preventing cataclysm? Maybe all you can do is to formulate a positive vision of the future? Or finding something that people are afraid of and abuse them by scaring the s* out of them until they do “the right thing”? That seems to be what most activists and political messages are doing today, that seems were “internet celebrities” are making their fortunes and that is where companies are making windfall profits.

Welcome to 2023.

A crime is by definition “an action that is against a law.” That’s the sum total of the legal side of this question. But I don’t think that the answer to the moral side of the question is that trivial.

Intuitively, it is obvious that not all crimes are alike. Jaywalking and fraud, theft and rape are all crimes, but we would probably not lump them all in the same moral category.

Sometimes following laws themselves can - must - be considered a crime. They are just raw power used to force people to do the bidding of some tyrant, often to the detriment of whole groups (“We will kill you, if you are won’t do what you are told to do”).

Sometimes, actions and situations we intuitively consider as wrong aren’t crimes. Like having to see poverty crippling children, leaving them blind, stunted and full of parasites. It’s the fault of all people that could help, but won’t. (After the paupers have tried their best to get out of the situation themselves)

Laws often try to encode something positive, to enshrine some good, or at least to damn some bad and get the whole power of the state to force society to combat and shun that bad, or do what is considered to be good. At least by those in power.

But if the law becomes tyrannical or protects tyrants? Does crime become a duty?

Does that make “crime” a meaningless term? It seems fitting, if it is used in reference to something like intentionally causing harm or killing people. But is that most of the law? Or is most of it just some powerful people imposing their will?

The book’s protagonist Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov has a theory that certain “distinguished” people are allowed to break the law. These chosen people can and do crush lesser people to gain the means necessary to ascend. Like Napoleon did.

He tries to take the first step to greater heights by murdering and robbing a pawnbroker and her sister. He is devastated by the fact that feeling remorse and doubt makes him unworthy of being one of the chosen people. But what, if he had succeeded? Would that murder have made him a hero? What if that money, like he planned, would have paved his way to becoming person of influence? What if he had done a lot of good after that?

How flawless has the record of a person to be to still consider that person a hero? Do the funding farther qualify, or is the sin of slavery weighing too heavily in the final tally? Is Fritz Haber a hero for saving billions? Or a villain for killing thousands, maybe millions? What great man of history is free of blame? Even religious founders don’t measure up to our current standards. Some people we consider to be heroes today didn’t make the cut in their time.

I don’t think that I will find solutions to these questions here, but it is clear that they can eat away at the foundation of your view on your society and yourself.

Blind obedience to established laws can become as detrimental to the world as raging destruction of the established order. You have to master the law to transgress it for the real benefit of other people.

It is not enough to only act on a low-resolution view on people, processes and the world in general. “The rich”, “the economy”, “the environment” etc. are too coarse-grained to inform meaningful, positive action. It takes excruciating work to build a map that is detailed enough to actually improve even small pockets of the world on the scale of families and companies. Failing to do the necessary work is a sin of omission, sloth, maybe greed and envy. But is it a crime in itself?

Or does this failure only become a crime, if it leads to the death of millions, like during the Great Leap Forward or Holodomor? Or not even then, because the perpetrators claimed to have good intentions? (Who knows, maybe they even did!) But that’s the rub, isn’t it? It’s not enough to have good intentions.

What if those you want to help don’t want it to be better. Or if it is actually you that doesn’t? Maybe you are just envious and self-serving? What if you are delusional and confuse your hatred for other people’s success with love for the downtrodden? Have you made sure that you are stepping on them more lightly than what you replace?

Even if you did, what is the justifiable ratio of harm to benefit that is still acceptable? Who is allowed to get hurt? To what ends? Who is allowed to decide that? Why isn’t that a crime? Hard questions for utilitarianism and related ideologies.

In the end, Raskolnikov could not bear the guilt and burden he had put on other people by confessing his guilt to them and turned himself in to the authorities. He found some relief and redemptions in Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov’s love towards him. At only 18-years old, she used to work as a prostitute to feed her siblings, because her alcoholic farther and consumptive stepmother had failed to do so. She believed that suffering for God is the way to redeem one self. Sofya had her belief in God to keep her sane and sort out what is and isn’t a sin and a crime.

Raskolnikov only had his theory that aggrandized himself.

What mechanism does our secular society have to answer these hard questions and to align its members? Is rationality enough? Did the horrors of communism and fascism prove Dostoyevsky’s (and Nietzsche’s) suspicion that without religion, only wars of ideology fought with religious fervor are ahead of us? Even if they were proven right without a shadow of a doubt, what would that mean for us? Would we impose some religion on all of us? Could we? Which one?

Posing challenging questions is what classics are supposed to do. This one delivered.

They make products and producers identifiable. Performing below expectations has real consequences.

Can we use their power for the benefit of society and the electricity consumer?

Brands and quality

Common sense says that it is not possible.

The way we set the price for electricity explicitly tries to “blend” all electricity and make it as much of a commodity as possible:

Multiple producers bid a price for the next 15min period. Once the forecast demand is met, all producers get the price of the highest bid that was accepted. This is supposed to incentivize bidders to bid their real costs. If they ask too much, they will not sell anything, if they ask too little, they will lose out. The electricity is bought by intermediaries that sell it to their customers. The customer can thus not create any relationship with a particular producer. Given that voltage and frequency of electricity are fixed, theoretically, there should not be a difference in producers and the cheapest producer wins out.

But not all electricity production is equal and not all costs are captured: Reliability, stability, storage demands, black start capabilities and emissions are for example not captured by the pricing mechanism. Without brands, consumers cannot give direct feedback on their preferences. Without this feedback and any possibility of consumers to choose their producers, there is a huge incentive to lower the quality of the product and increase the profit margin.

In Alchemy, there are two great examples of the consequences of this incentive:

• Rivets for boats in the Soviet Union became so bad that ships sank regularly. The remedy was to stamp the rivets, so you could trace bad quality back to the producers.

• Ice cream in Romania. There were 3 companies producing ice cream sandwiches. But one was markedly better. People peeled back the packing to get a look at a production code, which indicted the origin. This created a pseudo-branding.

The modern day instantiation of this incentive is that there are laws that mandate variable renewable energy to be put into the “pool” of electricity, they can bid at $0/MWh and get a politically subsidized compensation. Providers can reap the premium that customers are willing to pay for reliable power, without actually being able to offer it. They can outsource the ability, and the costs associated with it to market competitors.

Why do we think it is a moral virtue to force the public to pay a premium to people with houses and spare money on their hands for EVs and rooftop solar, while we raise the price for the general population? Including the very poor? I have become convinced that the lack of branding of electricity makes it possible for vocal, virtue signaling people to get away with free-riding. Utterly free of the consequences of what they ostensibly demand. It did seem impossible to me to brand electricity, because everything is physically connected and blended by the grid. You cannot channel specific energy through it. BUT: you can send information about it!

Create your own electricity brand

So we should be able to offer an option for these vocal people to cut fossil fuels from their life, without having to wait for any institution or greedy capitalist company to act on the issue. Instead of merely using capitalist, financial instruments that transfer the blame for consuming fossil fuels to poorer people, they can actually opt for only using green energy. How? Easy!

Let’s take an ordinary smart meter that will be vital to the future of mostly renewable grids to cut people - presumably those that aren’t able to pay the higher prices or don’t have political influence - off the grid, when there is a mismatch in supply and demand. That’s called load shedding. But that electricity will still be tainted by some amount of fossil fuels, especially by fast ramping gas power plants.

I think that no upstanding climate activist can bear that. So we need something better than mere “smart” meters. Let’s use “virtue” meters. Any activist can pay to have them installed in their homes in series with their “normal” meters. Maybe a public charity can help out?

Every electricity consumer has an electricity provider. These buy electricity from physical energy producers. We can - and do! - measure how much energy the producers put on the grid, and how much power is sent across grid connectors. This information can be used in the virtue meter.

Let’s say an activist is a very good person. Great! What producers do they want? Solar and wind? Because hydro destroys nature and nuclear is bad? And fossil fuels are evil anyway? No problem!

When we know the real-time production data of electricity producers, activist can choose their level of virtue. Here are some ideas:

• Saint: They choose some identifiable power producers (like a specific rooftop solar installation) near them with “dedicated” peak capacity1 equal to their average power consumption.

• Monk: They choose a virtual pool of many producers with “dedicated” peak capacity equal to their average power consumption.

• Devotee: They choose some identifiable power producers with “dedicated” average capacity2 equal to their average power consumption.

• Fashionable: They choose a virtual pool of many producers with “dedicated” average capacity equal to their average power consumption.

• Sinner: They choose a maximum instantaneous carbon intensity of electricity.

• Deplorable: They choose an average moving horizon carbon intensity over a day.

• Demon: They choose an average moving horizon carbon intensity over a week.

• Satan: They choose an average moving horizon carbon intensity over a month.

And that is an electricity brand!

I imagine that a lot of public activists will create their own brands and people can join them. Just link your virtue meter to the AOC or Greta energy brand.

Whenever your instantaneous power consumption would violate your chosen idol’s virtue level, the virtue meter will post a message of praise on social media - and cut your power. If you are a saint, that will likely be every evening - and several times during the day. Or most of November and December, if you happen to live through a German Dunkelflaute.

What a token of true valor to shiver in the dark for your own ideas! You can also use the accompanying app on your smartphone that will cut all internet traffic for you for the time being. The whole history of your electricity brand will be public for everyone to see, and your shining example will surely attract followers quickly!

My personal prediction is that a device like this would rapidly increase the understanding of the difference between average and peak power, the relationship of nameplate capacity, utilization and availability factor and the role of fossil fuels in today’s energy infrastructure. And that knowledge might be useful in discussions about climate change.

My guess is that the brand value of nuclear power for providing zero-carbon, reliable nuclear power would certainly go through the roof. Not the worst outcome, I guess.

Like every time, they will be focused on years and temperature targets ending in 5 or 0, with absolutely no known way of achieving them. Not without condemning the developing world to poverty and reversing 150 years of progress in the developed world, that is. Roger Pielke Jr. has an article detailing how we locked ourselves into this box via “social construction of ignorance”.

What seems different this time around, is that there are more voices that seem frustrated to the point of disgust by this meeting. Two great articles have appeared on GOP27, one by Ted Nordhaus and Vijaya Ramachandran in Foreign Policy (TN&VR), and another by Bjorn Lomborg and Jordan B. Peterson in the Telegraph (JBP&BL).

Why are people frustrated by COP?

Measured by the impact of these summits on CO2 emissions, we have to conclude:

“In a surprisingly honest review of climate policies, the UN revealed a “lost decade”: The report found that it couldn’t tell the difference between what has happened and a world that adopted no new climate policies since 2005. Consider that: all those climate summits and grandiose promises – all that expense and trouble – and no measurable difference whatsoever.” - JBP&BL

But it is worse. Because the Western elites try to implement a rather narrow set of technologies on a global scale with the aim of mitigating emissions. Naturally, this strategies has costs and benefits.
While this strategy might become a net benefit for people born after 2050,

the immediate costs of this strategy — to put it bluntly — puts the lives of people at risk. Not only in far away countries.

”How is that?” you might ask? By shifting investments away from “adaptation” efforts that try to increase the resilience of people to climate change.

"Climate adaptation [...] works. It includes [...] buildings that withstand disasters, dikes and dams that protect from floods, air conditioning and cold storage for food and medicines, early warning systems, well-equipped first responders, and evacuation routes [.]" - TN&VR

Building such infrastructure requires huge amounts of concrete and steel.
Unfortunately, there is no substitute for fossil energy in creating such materials beyond the lab scale.

Because renewable energies like solar and wind are intermittent, they are no complete substitute for fossil fuels. You cannot build an industrial manufacturing base on intermittent energy sources, because production plants are severely damaged by any distruption in energy inputs. A few 1/1000 of a seconds disruption can lead to weeks of maintenance work. We do not know how to store energy anywhere near the scale or cost we need to smooth the intermittency.

Industrialization is the developmental path that every prosperous country had to go through, except for some resource exporters that fueled the industrialization efforts under the Bretton Woods system. And it is this route that Western elites are tying to prevent developing countries from taking. Instead, developing countries are supposed to “leap frog” fossil fuels. But it remains unclear how that is supposed to work.

“Tackling climate change with current technology is essentially impossible. This means that climate policy-makers tinker at the margins, offering deceptive solutions, and morally grandstanding. This pattern has repeated for three decades.“ - JBP&BL 

Instead of celebrating the fortuitous coincidence that making people richer makes them simultaneously safer from climate change, the West’s approach creates a global divide:

"But the confusion and disinformation about adaptation [...] shift the focus away from proven development pathways, transforming a wildly successful global development project into a zero-sum conflict that [pits] rich countries against poor." - TN&VR

Instead of helping developing countries with adapting their infrastructure and becoming richer and more resilient in the face climate change, the West is focused on mitigation at all costs — especially if these costs have to be paid by the developing world. If that means a blanket ban on financing of developing projects that are not using the “approved” technologies, so be it.

What shoud we do differently?

To be frank: we need a 180 on our approach towards tackling climate change.

“A complete shift of international efforts to address climate change toward a shared global effort to accelerate economic development, build resilient infrastructure, and accelerate low-carbon innovation and deployment is long overdue.” - TN&VR

Electricity is the easiest sector to decarbobize. Alas, the narrow set of technologies that are not “verboten”, are too costly and cannot reliably replace fossil fuels. Concrete, steel, fertilizer and long-haul transport are a much tougher challange. There are simply no substitutes for fossil fuels in their production on the scale that is needed.

We consume 1.8 billion tonnes of steel, 4.5 billion tonnes of concrete, 150 million tonnes of ammonia and 370 million tonnes of plastics. These are the “four pillars of modern civilization” as Vaclav Smil is calling them. As far as we know today, none of that is possible without fossil fuels. We probably need more of these pillars, if we want to make people resilient against climate change.

Fertilizers alone are responsible for 4 billion people being alive today that would not be without them. Even if we scraped every little dropping of poo and dung as fertilizer, there is no way that we could feed all of us. Almost all fertilizer that allows people to live is made from natural gas.

“Pretending that the proper technological answer currently exists, and is not being implemented because we lack conviction and willpower is reckless and misleading. Worse, it stops us from pursuing real solutions to the many problems that confront us – only one of which is climate change.” - -JBP&BL

Believing that we already got all technologies we need, has led us to devote $600 billion per year to financing ineffective climate remediation strategies. A better strategy is to innovate our way to better solutions.

“According to the Copenhagen Consensus Nobel Laureates, we should increase our current spending five-fold, to $100 billion per year.” - JBP&BL

While for example the EU’s mixed strategy of cutting carbon with a mix of market and planning dictates is estimated to spend one pound to avoid a mere three pence of long-term climate damage, green energy R&D is estimated to return eleven pounds for every pound invested. Improving our efficiency in tackling climate change by a factor of several hundreds is nothing to look down at.

Finding that $100 billion per year should not pose a problem, given that we already spend 6x that amount on alternatives. Judiciously spending the remaining $500 billion per year on critical infrastructure projects like hydropower or flood protection would certainly help to improve climate resilience. Better yet, some of it could be spent on those areas that the Copenhagen Consesus Center has identified as the most efficient projects to reduce suffering the world over: like deworming pills, vitamins, vaccines, better family planning and education.

Innovation has already helped the USA to become the leader in carbon emission reduction via an unexpected route.

“The ten-year $10 billion US public investment in shale gas, which originated under George W. Bush. [I]t led the way for a production surge (with all the attendant economic benefits, particularly for the poor) that allowed natural gas to become cheaper than the dirtier coal it partially replaced. […] The consequence? The US has the best record of C02 emission reduction of any country in the past decade – and simultaneously reduced its reliance on foreign suppliers of uncertain reliability and cost.” - JBP&BL 

But exactly that is the nature of innovation. It is open-ended. You do not know, what you do not know. Therefore, you cannot predict, what you will discover.

If innovation leads to a low-carbon energy form that is cheaper than fossil fuels, countries all over the world will choose it. That is a far better solution for the poor than an effective carbon price of infinity generated by “keep it in the ground” rhetoric.

Fortunately, there are already people working on solutions that could help us to power the future. There are some rather obvious solutions, like nulcear fission in various instantiations. Huge GenIII+ light water reactors like the Korean APR1400 or the American AP1000 have already provided reliable energy around the world, smaller, more modular and supposedly better deployable versions of essentially the same technologies in Holtec’s SMR-160, NuScale’s VOYGR or GEH’s BWRX-300 are getting ready.
GenIV reactors developed by the likes of Kairos Power, Moltex Energy, Terrestrial Energy, TerraPower, Exodys or X-Energy are supposed to be cheaper and run hot enough to be used in industrial heating applications.

There are over two dozen of members in the Fusion Industry Association that are working on various and ingenious ways to realize the promise of fusion energy, Commonwealth Fusion, General Fusion, Zap Energy, Helion, TypeOne Energy, Focused Energy or FirstLight Fusion.
There are companies working on high-altitude wind, which is much more predictable, or on geothermal power, people working on genetically modified algae to produce CO2-free oil.
Most of it is far from cost-effective today. But research on these and many other solutions is not only comparatively inepxensive, but offers the opportunity of finding a real breakthrough.

Instead of lecturing people in developing countries, the developed countries have the opportunity of making them safer and creating a path towards a lower-carbon future that could actually be attractive.

But, alas, this would mean to ditch the role of grandiose, self-righteous, wise and generous benefactor, accepting some humility, and getting out of the way of real improvements for the world’s poor. Too many people seem too comfortable in their role and are getting too much praise from activists and media to make that a likely outcome.

And so COP27 will probably be just like its 26 predecessors: a great PR event, where the world’s poor are sacrificed to quell the angst of rich, Western narcissists.

But at least people are starting to see it for the ineffective and damaging theater that it is.