Climate Change and Energy Policy

Like governments of Left and Right before, the current ALP government in Australia has expressed the obvious fact that we can't move from fossil fuels to wind plus solar plus storage in the necessary time frame. The talk of carbon capture is a fantasy. One reason is that we need baseload power giving "inertia" to the grid, and we need high temperatures for many industrial applications. Nuclear energy covers those bases.

Another reason for nuclear energy is that we are guaranteed to overshoot on carbon emissions, and we are going to need huge amounts of energy to unwind that. Advanced (but not small) nuclear energy is the only plausible route. If fusion doesn't happen then thorium reactors can burn the waste we've got and make fuel continuously from cheap ingredients.

And what good does it do for Australia to go net-zero on wind and solar if most of the world doesn't have that option? It's not as if Australia's actions can protect Australia's climate. We need the world to change,  so we need to make nuclear energy work for the whole world, both for daily energy and even more for the extra energy we need to undo our inevitable overshoot. As a rich technologically advanced country we need to pitch in.

Until a few years ago nobody worried about climate change, except when there was a drought. However commentators and the public are starting to realise that climate change is more about floods than droughts. The fact that air can hold 7% more water for every degree of warming is getting increasing mentions. Of course this is a double edged sword, since it means that if the air is dry, perhaps on the lee side of mountains, then it can suck more moisture out of the ground it passes over. But more often it means that there is more water to fall, and even if it doesn't rain, many plants can get by sucking moisture out of the air. Given that droughts can be worse when they happen, we need to put more engineering effort into buffering the water when it occurs. Understanding aquifers and how to recharge them is a better option than building dams.

Young people are very worried by the lies being spread about the dangers of climate change. Rising sea levels, and many other things, are going to be bad, and we need to fix the problem carefully and energetically, but not rashly. Nobody needs to die. Indeed rash remedies are more likely to kill people than climate change itself.

But then we come to the current crisis, which is the drift towards war. Wars are fought with fossil fuels, and the good guys need to be ahead of that game. More significantly Russia is financing its war with fossil fuel exports. I endorse Doomberg's view (https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/broken-record-81d): The way to fix that is to ensure that there is a plentiful supply, driving the price down. The effort to slow Russia's exports has created a shortage that is harming economies on our side while increasing Russia's income. Ukraine's attacks on Russia's infrastructure might slow Russia's income, but that will exacerbate the shortages. We need to utilise the resources we've got and fix the climate and other problems later.