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Billionaires and Taxes

Random said:
For generations, our unofficial policy regarding fossil fuels has been:

Step 1. Dig up and burn carbon to create lots of cheap energy.
Step 2. Use this cheap energy to create enormous amounts of wealth and prosperity.
Step 3. Die of old age before the negative consequences of Step 1 catch up to us.

Well guess what? Our newest generations are looking at the math and are realizing that Step 3 isn't going to work for them. This is a problem as, if you look at the plan, Step 3 does a lot of the heavy lifting. We are looking at massive shifts in the climate which, at best, will require very expensive adaptations. Saying that some areas will have longer growing seasons does not change the fact that other areas will lose all their arable land, or that we can look forward to more frequent and more destructive weather events.
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The last time this happened, we switched from wood to coal, then to oil, and kept on going. The obvious next step is uranium. Hopefully our newest generations will figure this out, rather than engineering the largest mass die-off of humanity ever.
 
theprestige said:
No it isn't. If it were, it would have succumbed to entropy eons ago.

The earth system is open to energy input from a certain nearby star, which obviates your appeal to closed-system constraints.
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What definition of "closed system" are you using? Is it one anyone else uses other than you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_system

"A closed system is a natural physical system that does not allow transfer of matter in or out of the system, although – in the contexts of physics, chemistry, engineering, etc. – the transfer of energy (e.g. as work or heat) is allowed."
 
theprestige said:
The last time this happened, we switched from wood to coal, then to oil, and kept on going. The obvious next step is uranium. Hopefully our newest generations will figure this out, rather than engineering the largest mass die-off of humanity ever.
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Nuclear power is certainly one option, though I think it would be better to find a fuel that is more plentiful and produces waste that either has a half-life considerably shorter than uranium, is less radioactive and/or can be easily reprocessed. This is still technically debt, though over such a long timescale (1000 years+) and (hopefully) with such a small environmental impact it could be thought of as "sustainable".

I think the next step is the electrification of everything possible, because once losses and efficiency are taken into account, electric machines generally require far less energy overall. The only problem with this is that economic growth has led to energy demand outstripping efficiency gains from electrification!

The biggest challenge we face is moving from a growth-based economy to a circular economy where the wealth is more evenly distributed. The idea that the pie can just get exponentially bigger and bigger and bigger forever is a fairy tale that the wealthy peddle to fools so the wealthy can take an ever bigger piece of the pie.
 
Spinlaunched components assembled in space for solar energy, with solar sails possibly serving as solar panels, parked at L1, with tight microwave beam to polar receptors, still requires launch and other technologies to mature. But that is the best long-term solution. Space-based solar can be relied on 24/7/365.

Sadly, not enough uranium to fully rely on that as main source, so something is still needed.
 
theprestige said:
The last time this happened, we switched from wood to coal, then to oil, and kept on going. The obvious next step is uranium. Hopefully our newest generations will figure this out, rather than engineering the largest mass die-off of humanity ever.
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Option B, I'm afraid.
 
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