I’m going to tell you, as a person whose path went from journalism to activism to engineering in climate tech and climate justice: persuasion isn’t going to get the goods. Changing the reality on the ground through R&D and deployment moves the needle. There are a lot of very good, very smart people who have been heads down since the 70s building the infrastructure for decarbonization, and we’re winning, even as we continue “losing” the political argument.
Yup. If solar panels are good enough and cheap enough, if grid storage and battery density improve fast enough, the economic costs of staying on fossil fuels will create huge pressure in the political space and economic competition. You can overwhelm the issue.
We shouldn’t HAVE to do this, our politicians should represent our desires and our long term necessities. But that’s clearly not an easy problem to solve, and it sure doesn’t seem to be going in the right direction.
So RND to push the economy makes perfect sense to me as a way to fight this from the other direction.
Hmmm, I remember what happened when we all got more 'free time' by using computers to do things that took us long doing manually.
Making electricity more 'green' is of course necessary but on the backdrop of the current capitalistic system, it will simply lead to more electricity being consumed. See current uptake by LLM data centers.
Yes, decarbonization necessarily means higher electricity consumption. Electrifying transportation, home heating, cooking, industrial processes, etc will mean an explosion of electricity demand. This means generating a lot more electricity without burning fossil fuels, and using that electricity more efficiently.
The good news: there’s a lot to build, a lot to invent, and a lot of work to do, and the solutions to these problems are not present in the training data. If you’re worried about how you’re going to pay the bills now that AI ate your job writing glue code for some niche subscription SaaS product, here’s your answer.
