Energy Abundance Would Be Amazing!

The following is the transcript of my troop deployment (i.e. ending rant) from episode 82 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

If you haven’t noticed, David tends to shit on wind & solar power a lot because it is, in many ways, worse than nuclear power. I think he’s misguided about this, because nothing about making wind & solar energy means we can’t make nuclear energy, and it can get deployed much faster. However, renewable fans are often misguided because they don’t recognize the limits of the technology. Even the most ambitious renewable fans tend to dream about replacing all existing energy production with renewables. Even doing that isn’t very realistic, but even if it was, so what? I don’t want to just replace existing energy production. I want to create way more energy, like ten times more, or a hundred times more. Why not 1,000 times more?I want energy that’s so cheap and abundant, we don’t even bother charging on a per unit basis.

Since the late 1800’s, the amount of energy the US generated increased at a pretty steady rate as more power plants were built and new technologies were developed. But in the mid-1970’s, all progress stopped. This was largely due to the environmental movement, which rightfully recognized that burning unlimited amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas had serious externalities which couldn’t be ignored, but which also, for a strange confluence of reasons, swept up nuclear energy into the “bad energy” bucket despite its relative safety and lack of pollution. The modern environmental movement seems to see any energy use as unfortunate and is focused on trying to make everything as energy efficient as possible, and sees generating electricity as a positive only when it’s replacing fossil fuels with wind & solar (or, in the occasional ironic twist, replacing nuclear power with coal). 

But that’s bullshit! Energy is great! If we had abundant energy, climate change would be solved. We could just pull carbon out of the air directly and make clean-burning hydrogen to replace fossil fuels. Need water for drinking and agriculture? Just desalinate sea water. We’d also be able to create and deploy new technologies. Did you know that right now, people are flying around on jet boards? They’re just very energy intensive, so they’re not commercially viable. But if we had cheap energy, including cheap hydrogen fuel, we could all be flying to work! Plus there are countless other technologies that we have the ability to make, but are too energy-intensive to be worthwhile. It’s no coincidence that recent technological advances have all been in the digital realm and we’ve had very little innovation in actual physical goods. 

So let’s not limit our ambitions to just replacing existing energy production. Let’s get back on the increasing energy track, which can include as much solar, wind, and other renewable energy that we can build, but should also include legions of advanced nuclear plants, the tech for which has very little danger of melting down, creates less radioactivity than coal, and just needs regulatory reform to be made viable. If we can create long-term, sustained energy production, the future can actually look like the future instead of just the present with better computers.