What are the most promising technical solutions to energy/climate change

We need massive construction of a few standard nuclear reactors. We need to federalize their fuel supply and recycling. The power company would operate the reactor, sell the power, and our tax dollars would take care of the fuel cycle outside of the plant.

We need to go quite hard on regenerative farming. It wouldn't surprise me if this switch alone could pull the surplus of carbon out of the air, and put it back into the topsoil of farms, where it belongs. Industrial farming is about as close as you can get to hydroponics these days, except it's done outside with 1" of topsoil.

Wind and solar are great, but storage is a huge issue, both in terms of stress to the grid, and uneven availability. There are some project plants that show 50% round trip efficiency for storage... which is better than throwing out a surplus.

We also could encourage energy hungry industries to be more interactive loads... for example... aluminum smelting can be scaled up or down quite a bit (though not to zero, to match adjustable electricity pricing)

We could electrify the freight rail system in the US. It almost happened 100+ years ago. Improvements in trans-shipping could also reduce the need for liquid fuels in transport by reducing long haul trucking.

We should get rid of plastic bottles, and go back to reusable glass containers. Single use plastics should be considered "unsuitable for new designs". (as they say with electronics components)

Heat pumps are just fancy air conditioners... and they are far more efficient at both heating and cooling if they are coupled to an in-ground coolant loop We should subsidize them.

Does that fit in what you're looking for?

Synthetic fuel:

https://www.prometheusfuels.com/news/dude-wheres-my-fuel

The most promising tech. Make fuel from CO2 captured from the air. We can keep using our existing infrastructure. Buys us a lot of time without destroying our current way of life.

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Carbon Capture: (Twitter accounts) @CharmIndustrial @noya_carbon @heirloomcarbon @ebbcarbon @livingcarbon

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/airmyne

> Net Power, a startup that built the world’s first zero-emissions fossil-fuel power plant in Texas. Earlier this year, Net Power fired up a $150-million power plant that burns natural gas but has the ability to capture 100% of its carbon emissions.

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Emission free manufacturing:

> What Gross is pursuing with his new company, Heliogen, offers a way forward for renewable energy to be applied to manufacturing processes for cement, lime, coke, and steel — some of the most energy intensive and polluting industries that exist in the world today.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/19/heliogens-new-technology-c...

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Geo-engineering

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Nuclear

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Food:

Modified feed to lessen cattle methane emission. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/alga-biosciences

Real milk without cows. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/brown-foods

I work on nuclear micro reactors (specifically this one: www.usnc.com/mmr) and there is big promise here to make many reactors soon and cheap. Their size of 15 MWe is too small to fully power human civilization which requires 20 TW of primary energy. For reactors with a 60 year life, that would require a population of 300,000 reactors sustained by a production cadence of 5000 reactors per year. That's actually comparable to the production rate of wide body aircraft. Even if such production rates are not acheived, these small reactors do not suffer xenon poisoning and can use thermal storage to produce dispatch power. It's like a zero carbon natural gas peaker, and can provide the needed backbone for intermittent renewables. The optimal mixes for many locations around the US are something like 10% dispatch nuke, and there rest wind and solar. It's one of the few energy solutions that looks a lot like a fossil fuel source, by virtue of it's high temperature heat, the fact it can be used on demand, can be located anywhere where it is needed, etc.

Not yet exploited: I'm a big fan of deep bore geothermal energy using a closed loop. Here's an example from a company trying to make it work. Idk if they can actually do it but it can def be done by a large enough entity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtQmGPmyLA0

Build some pipes in the ground. Pump an anti-freeze like fluid into the ground so it heats up. Bring it up on the other side and the heat from the fluid heats some steel pipes submerged in water so the water turns to steam. Steam turns turbine and electricity is generated.

You can either send it straight to market or you could store it via batteries, flywheels, compressed air, your choice.

Lots of areas where energy could be lost but the earth is hot so it's not like we're depleting a resource

As someone who has donated all of the money I’ve ever made to fight global warming, I can say the problem is the heartless and shallow so called environmentalists. Here in the west our so called green movement is run by puppets of authoritarian regimes attempting to use morality as a way to gain leverage. It’s the reason why the Germans banned nuclear and is reliant on Russia. It’s the reason why America is cutting its energy output. It’s the reason why the ecb has stopped support of fertilizer plants in Africa and Europe. It’s a disaster and no one should ever listen to someone who can’t quantify the problem or the solution .

Nuclear and natural gas. Forget tilting at windmills.

Embrace limits.

There's a limited energy budget at Earth's surface.

Humans have benefitted by ransacking a treasure store of energy which accumulated over 100--300 million years, and will quiet possibly not be recharged in the remaining span of habitable life on Earth (about another 800 million -- 1 billion years). Even absent energy concerns, we've also been ransacking rich mineral deposits some dating to the earliest eras of life on the planet (banded iron formations, the result of blue-green algae growing 3 billion years ago). Absent ore-formation through minerological and biological processes which concentrate minerals to levels which make further extractuion and purification viable, we'd be stuck with far fewer choices for materials.

The largest challenges in degrowth are not technological but political, cultural, economic, fiscal, and ultimately about shared beliefs, values, and vision.

Over nearly 50 years of awareness of, reading on, and researching this problem, that's become abundantly clear, and hopes of a successful negotiation of this particular transition are not high.

The energy landscape is largely known and has been for the past 70-150 years. Solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and biomass.

We're already making use of much or all the available biomass (as food, with considerable fossil inputs), hydro, and goethermal resources. Solar can be ramped up, as can wind. Both produce power of a different scope, cost, and quality (availability, variability) than what advanced technological countries have come to rely on.

Nuclear is an option but faces its own issues: limite fuel (uranium and plutonium, possibly not so much in the case of thorium), major political and social-organisation risks, and of course a very long-tail disposal risk extending beyond the span not only of all our social institutions but of civilisation itself --- tens of thousands of years.

William Ophuls and Thomas Homer-Dixon are two authors in particular who have been looking at the political challenges of adapting to ecological limits.

I strongly recommend all Ophuls' work, though Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (first published in 1977, revised ~1994) and Plato’s Revenge (2011) are probably the best starting points. The first secion of Ecology in particular makes one of the most cogent arguments for the Limits to Growth premise I’ve found anywhere.

At Worldcat:

https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...

https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-s...

https://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-th...

Also available via Archive Org:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=william ophuls

Ophuls has a website with more recent writings, though the essays are missing from the present-online version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190311104851/https://ophuls.or...

Thomas Homer-Dixon is referenced by Ophuls several times and seems closest in spirit to his work:

https://homerdixon.com/