Net Zer0

This article/transcript and podcast may be augmented by some of the images found in the (identical) video version here:

Welcome to the three Rs. Reality, reason, and rationality. I'm Brett Hall and this is my other podcast. My regular podcast is Tokcast, devoted largely to the work of David Deutsch and related thinkers like Karl Popper and Chiara Marleto. Today, because this particular episode is more an editorial than an exposition, although it contains a lot of exposition, it fits more neatly here.

In the 3R's Substack Podcast. This episode is going to be about energy, energy policy, and, well, related issues, as I like to say. And I'm calling it... Net zero. So we're going to be touching upon that. But not just net zero in the sense of energy. Net zero in the sense of a lack of progress. Stasis in other words.

Which is a theme that runs throughout well a lot of the content that I put out there. The climate is in a constant state of change. Geological eras are characterized, in part at least, by the composition of the atmosphere at the time. Were one to time travel back to the Mesozoic era, that's any point between 252 and 66 million years ago, in order to, let's say, catch a glimpse of an actual dinosaur in the wild, One would find things rather uncomfortable.

And not just because large, fast moving, lizard like, flightless birds would see any human as a potential meal. One would encounter not merely alien biology of that kind, but an alien atmosphere. The second period of that era is, of course, the most famous, the Jurassic. From 201 to about 145 million years ago, and the composition of the atmosphere back then contained around five times more carbon dioxide than the 417 parts per million in the atmosphere today, and it also had some 15 to 30 percent more oxygen.

That might be tolerable for a time, but ultimately, human beings have evolved to survive with the atmospheric composition, especially of oxygen, that we have today. Too little hypoxia, or too much hyperoxia, are both damaging physiologically These have effects over time on our respiratory and central nervous system, and in the latter case they can be, for now at least, irreversible.

And 201 to 145 million years ago, it was hot, very hot back then, around 3 degrees Celsius or up to 10 degrees Celsius, 5. 4 to 18 Fahrenheit, higher than the pre industrial average, higher than what it is today. All of this meant There were larger forests back then, fewer glaciers and smaller ice caps and higher sea levels.

But a time traveler presumably would be well kitted out to survive using technology, such an environment for an extended period of time. A small portable respirator that reduced the amount of oxygen would probably do it, and perhaps additional sunscreen for use during the day when the UV levels were higher due to a thinner ozone layer.

But... What any time traveler would not notice was a bio unfriendly planet or climate. Indeed, the surface of the Earth back then and the oceans would have been teeming with life. That atmospheric composition was positively fertile for the growing of plants and the comfort of animals everywhere who would have enjoyed vegetation levels barely imaginable today.

Lots of carbon dioxide feeds lots more plants. The world would also have been far more geologically active back then. More earthquakes, larger and more frequent volcanic eruptions, spewing more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Even a moderate volcanic eruption today will affect global temperatures, as on the one hand, for a short time, the atmosphere is filled with additional dust that reflects more sunlight, and that actually cools the globe.

And on the other, vast amounts of carbon dioxide can erupt, along with water vapour and lava, which over time, have a warming effect.

The Physics of Greenhouse Gases

How does carbon dioxide have a warming effect anyway? Why are some chemicals greenhouse gases and others are not? The science is straightforward on this and comes down to the shape of particular molecules.

Musical instruments have notes. specific frequencies of sound that they can play. A flute can't generate just any frequency, only some frequencies. Particular musical notes. This is to do with the length of the flute among other things. The column of air will vibrate at a particular frequency depending upon which holes are open.

A similar thing happens with a stringed instrument. A guitar string has a particular length and will vibrate when plucked at a particular frequency. This phenomenon is known as Resonance. Molecules like nitrogen and carbon dioxide consist of multiple atoms. These atoms are joined by bonds. The bond is the sharing or transfer of electrons due to electrostatic attraction with the protons in the nuclei.

And so, the nuclei are a particular distance apart. So, radiation of a particular frequency can cause the molecule to... literally vibrates. And, well, here's some physics for you. Vibration of a molecule is a form of kinetic energy and, to a first approximation, the average kinetic energy of molecules corresponds to the temperature of those molecules.

I say, to first approximation, as there are much better explanations of the concept of temperature than this, as I mention, well, right here in this article, about temperature and heat and how the words are used precisely in thermodynamics or physical chemistry. It may be worth pausing just for a moment on this term, energy.

In physics, classically speaking, energy is the capacity to do work. And work is the product of force and distance. It's actually the cross product, one of the many different kinds of multiplication that exist. But never mind that, just go and ask chatGPT or Google about types of multiplication. The problem with saying energy is The capacity to do work, which is the standard definition, is that there exists energy which does not have the capacity to do work.

In particular, waste heat, as a result of engines or heat pumps and so on, produces energy which, quite literally, cannot be used to do anything useful without affecting the engine or whatever the thing is that produced the heat in the first place. But let's pass over all of that, as I've talked about it before, in particular in my series on Chiara Mailedo's excellent book, The Science of Can and Can't, and to be precise, this episode here, which is my introduction to thermodynamics.

Back to the effects of energy in the form of radiation, or photons in other words, on molecules. You can see here, in this excellent animation here, that I have taken from a simulation. Anyone can use and download from the Physics Educational Technology website, which I've talked about before on my other channel, ToKCast.

It's also called “P H E T”, from the University of Colorado. This particular simulation shows you how infrared radiation will cause a carbon dioxide molecule to vibrate now and again, but never the nitrogen molecule. Notice, sometimes the infrared photon causes the carbon dioxide molecule to vibrate, and sometimes it doesn't. See here: https://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulations/molecules-and-light

If it does vibrate, then this is because the additional energy is there causing the whole molecule to be, well, less stable, for want of another term, it becomes unstable. Technically, an electron has been bumped up to a higher energy level somewhere, and to stop vibrating so much, that photon is released again, so the molecule returns to its more natural low energy state.

The re emission of that photon, that particle of energy, infrared radiation, is in a random direction. So, some of those photons, which are actually coming from the ground, which has been heated up by the sun throughout the day, will be directed back towards the ground. The photons coming from the cooling ground will return there, as if reflected by the carbon dioxide molecule.

Now, this in fact is how reflection in general, even from a mirror, happens. Again, never mind that for now. But why does the infrared photon cause CO2 to vibrate but not nitrogen? Not nitrogen molecules. Well, it's because the wavelength of the infrared photons, their frequency or energy, all of those things, wavelength, frequency, energy, they're fundamentally equivalent ways of talking about the same kind of quality of this particular bit of light.

Well, it's just such that the frequency, or the wavelength, or the energy, resonates with the bond length or size and shape of the carbon dioxide molecule. It's like plucking a guitar string. On the other hand, the nitrogen molecule consists of two nitrogen atoms, which are such a distance apart, and of such a mass, that infrared radiation does not cause them to vibrate.

It's the wrong frequency. For that you need a different kind of photon, a different frequency. So, here we have, fundamentally, the physical mechanism whereby increasing some gases in the atmosphere, like Water, carbon dioxide and methane, enhance the greenhouse effect, while others, like nitrogen, oxygen and argon, do not.

Absent carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the average temperature of the Earth would be colder. Much colder. About 33 degrees Celsius colder, can you believe it? Given the average now is around 15 degrees Celsius around the planet, that's the average temperature of the Earth, this would mean the average would be...

Well below zero, and the planet would freeze over solid, forming a new ice age. Again, forget about all that. Without carbon dioxide, there'd be no plants. And with no plants, there'd be no animals, and no us. So, carbon dioxide is absolutely crucial for life. But, unlike with oxygen, small changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide will not affect human health directly.

If we halved the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the world would get cooler, and many plants would struggle to survive, but we'd still breathe easy. If the oxygen levels remained unchanged, that is. If we doubled the carbon dioxide in the world, well, the planet would get warmer, but not as warm as during the Jurassic when levels were, remember, Five times more than they are today. And more plants would grow, but we would still breathe easy, all else remaining constant.

CO2 Fertilisation (The Greening of the Planet).

Indeed, this more plants would grow fact about more carbon dioxide is already being seen across the globe. It is one of the, a little uncomfortable for environmentalists, facts that NASA has found through satellite imagery that forests are actually growing in many places at a rate faster than they have in recorded history.

Indeed, this phenomenon even has a name, CO2 fertilization. The more CO2, the more plant growth. The world is greening due to our burning of fossil fuels. A terribly counterintuitive notion, and again, highly inconvenient for the doomers on this point. More people can be fed, more animals protected in natural environments, and indeed, more renewable wood resources produced. Wood is after all renewable and burning it is carbon neutral so long as more trees keep on growing at a rate roughly equal to that with which they are cut down, which they are and which they do, but it's absolutely true.

People are Planet Engineers.

The climate is changing and we are one of the causes of it. And that must be said. Well, in one respect is a good thing. A good thing that we are causing the change I mean, or at least part of the change. Why the heck would I say that just to be provocative? No, it says of human beings we are getting to the point of being powerful enough to climate control whole planets.

Well, okay, one planet for now and it's not exactly under control, but hey, we are changing it rather than bemoan and regret this fact. We should celebrate it. We are planet changers. We're planet changers. Amazing. Being unable to change things on a planetary level, that's for the birds. But the principle of planetary change, or geoengineering, has now been demonstrated.

In practice, what we should now want to do is optimize. Optimize for what? Optimize for human flourishing, of course. And yes, some humans have deep fondness for the nebulous environment. Whatever they mean precisely by that. Whether it's their local environment, the planetary environment, or as I prefer, the environment that is the universe.

But, you know, many people just, when they talk about the environment, they mean... The natural living environment that conjures in their mind flowing clear waters at the ocean and big green forests. That's what they think when they think of the environment. They care about trees. Well, good. They should be heartened because, as I've just explained, the number of trees across the planet is increasing, and in fact, has increased markedly over the last few decades.

Sure, before that people were cutting down trees like no one's business because it was literally the main, if not the only source of energy they had. And still only have in some places. The burning of wood for heating and cooking. We do not want to return to those times, if only because the dangerous kinds of pollution, smoke in other words, has very real health effects on people.

All usual burning or combustion in other words, generates carbon dioxide. But not all burning need create smoke. That's the visible and invisible Particulate stuff that can get in your lungs and over time kill you much sooner than you should have been dead. But you know, that said I'm not suggesting people don't enjoy an open fire once in a while.

And while deforestation of old forests continues, this continues in places precisely where poverty reigns. Places like Brazil where people can only earn from cutting down native Amazon rainforest. If these people were more wealthy, they'd not be cutting down trees to eke out an existence. Moreover, if they were not cutting down the native forest, then the production of wood from trees planted on farms would be more lucrative.

And these would expand, and thus the number of trees would increase as we valued them more and the price of wood from New forests, artificially planted forests in the developed world would go down. If this seems absurd to you, that privatizing forests around the world could cause the number of trees to increase and the price of wood to fall, just consider the case of birds, or chickens anyway.

We long ago privatized chickens, chicken farms. The number of chickens increased. It's more now than ever, and continues to increase. every single year. And if there are cousins of the chicken living in native forests, well, we don't hunt them very much anymore. We don't need to because we farm them. And so the chickens and the wild increase as well. This could happen with trees.

The Double Standard on Wood

As an aside, just notice the strange double standard we still live in with regards to products from trees. On the one hand for years, I remember being told that. Purchasing wood was a terrible moral hazard. It meant some poor tree had to be cut down in order to make that piece of furniture or whatever.

We were told that people should not use wood. And so it even became the case that the moral thing to do was to use recycled paper. I think that's still going on. Even recycled toilet paper. Now we are told, actually, Wood's great for the environment. It's a carbon sink. Whenever you build a house out of wood, that house stores all that carbon that might otherwise be in the atmosphere bonded with oxygen as carbon dioxide.

So wood is now the environmentally friendly material, we're told. You don't have to use much energy to build a house out of wood, but if you're building a house out of concrete and metal, so much more energy intensive, and it's not carbon neutral, and so on and so forth. But, we still have recycled toilet paper on the shelves.

I know that, at my local grocery store. That's supposed to be the environmentally friendly thing? I don't understand. What kind of energy, electricity and chemicals are needed to recycle paper into toilet paper as compared to just using freshly cut down wood pulp? I digress.

Artificial versus Natural

The hyper emotionalization, for want of another word, of the debate around climate change resembles how invested some get in a similar debate.

That of the artificial over the natural, or man made over natural. It's as if the latter, the natural stuff, is always to be preferred over the former, the artificial stuff. You know, the one where human creativity actually gets involved to solve problems? When that happens, we say, Not natural! As if it's a pejorative to not be natural.

But what can be more natural than people solving their problems by producing artificial stuff? Sure, a so called fresh natural piece of fruit is nice when you can get it, but sometimes tinned fruit, canned fruit is all that we can get because, well... Transport times and maybe we're going on a long trek the duration of which is going to cause the fresh fruit to spoil Or maybe you're a soldier in a war zone or countless other reasons why getting fresh fruit then and there Isn't an option.

And anyways, how much of the fruit on the shelves wasn't artificially selected Or genetically engineered. How much of the supposedly natural food we consume wasn't tinkered with, genetically, by humans selectively breeding or carefully changing individual genes here and there. But some people get very upset when they hear something artificial is in their food supply.

Companies market products as natural as if that's a great thing. Contains only natural spider venom. You don't see that, do you? No artificial antibacterials in this muesli bar. Well, enjoy your natural salmonella. So much of what's out there that we value, vaccines are artificial. The point is, people do get upset about this kind of stuff.

And it may well be why people are so very upset in part about people changing the environment. It's unnatural. It would be as if the climatologists came out tomorrow and all agreed, actually, sorry guys, we kind of got it wrong. The climate is not changing. Because of people, it is changing, but just not because of man.

It's changing instead because the sun is gradually heating up and volcanic activity has been greater than usual over the last few decades and so on and so forth. This explains climate change after all, they might tell us. And then what would people say? I don't know, but maybe they'd turn around and say, well, climate change after all is a good thing because it's natural.

So let's start building sea walls and moving to higher ground. If that's what it takes. In any case, the climate change would be natural and not artificial, and therefore a good thing. Incidentally, the fact that at least some, whether it be a majority or a minority of climate change, is indeed driven by natural or man made factors is often suppressed in these discussions.

Anyone, any scientist, who comes out and says, well actually the sun is warming it turns out. And on geological time, we are entering a warming period as we continue to exit. The last ice age, well, they're regarded as fringe voices.

Fossil Fuels and Climate Predictions

But this kind of science is very difficult. Climate science. There are very many variables affecting a supremely complex system.

And to make predictions about what's going to happen in the future requires a supercomputer. But, as always, garbage in, garbage out. If your measurements right now aren't all that accurate, and if your model about what's going to happen isn't precise, then you're not going to get a very good prediction.

You're gonna get prophecy, especially if you're ignoring the mitigation strategies that people might undertake. The creativity that might come to bear on changing the future, because that's what we do. Perhaps it all is man made, or perhaps almost all of the change is due to natural factors. But even under...

But those circumstances, all of it being due to natural factors, I imagine people would still argue against fossil fuels anyway, or at least the burning of them. Because one reason they argue against fossil fuels now has nothing to do with the climate. It has everything to do with the fact that fossil fuel companies make a lot of money.

It's profitable. And of course, we all know that profits are evil, don't we? We wouldn't want people generating wealth and improving the standard of living around the world. But enough moral and economic cynicism. Let me get back to the science.

Thermodynamics and Carbon Dioxide

According to our best explanation of the physics of the atmosphere, carbon dioxide is the primary gas that maintains the temperature of the air, keeps it stable.

In other words, the fluctuations in the temperature between night and day are not so great here on earth because carbon dioxide at night prevents much of the heat which the land and oceans absorb from almost immediately escaping back into outer space once the sun has set. If this were not the case, then during the day, although the air would, in theory, warm up to about what it does in our world presently, in a world without carbon dioxide at night, the land would cool very fast indeed, as all the radiant heat from it would just zoom straight through the air.

Which would be transparent to it and go off into outer space. The temperature everywhere on earth, absent places that humans might be, although there wouldn't be any humans, but if they weren't any humans and the temperature everywhere would fall below zero at night, because. No heat could be retained, certainly everywhere in the atmosphere anyway, or at least much less could be.

Small amounts of heat would be retained by other greenhouse gases like perhaps, perhaps methane and water vapor. But where's the methane coming from if there's no life? Because if there's no carbon dioxide, there's no life. But okay, hang about. If carbon dioxide prevents heat from escaping at night, Why does it not prevent heat from the sun reaching the ground during the day?

Shouldn't those two situations be symmetrical? Well, in fact, no, because much of the energy coming from the sun during the day is not, in fact, infrared radiation. It's visible light and UV radiation. The atmosphere is transparent to those types of light and just as well, because if it wasn't, well, we'd be here in darkness, wouldn't we?

Because all the visible light from the sun would never get through the atmosphere, but it does. So therefore visible light is a thing which is able to heat the ground and heat the oceans and so on. So all of that light gets through so we can see when walking around during the day and we can also. Get sunburnt at the beach.

So that energy from the sun at those wavelengths gets through, but water vapour and carbon dioxide primarily, and the thickness of the atmosphere generally, mean that the other wavelengths coming from the sun, like X rays and gamma rays, they don't get through the atmosphere, they're absorbed. We are protected by our atmosphere from some dangerous wavelengths of light, and from some particles as well.

And just as well, or there'd be no life on Earth. The sun's rays are dangerous if you're not protected from them, even at a distance of 150 million kilometres as we are. So, the visible light and UV light get through the atmosphere. of the Earth from the Sun and those are high energy wavelengths in comparison to infrared radiation.

But because of the second law of thermodynamics, when those forms of light, the visible light and the UV, cause the heating of land and water, they are degraded as they are converted from one form of energy into another. The first law says that the quantity of energy must remain constant. So energy... On to the Earth from space, from the sun basically, in the day, must equal the energy from the Earth into space at night, if not then the globe would heat up rapidly and the oceans would boil.

Instead, at night, the energy on the land is released back into outer space, but in the form not of visible light. This would be weird, it would mean the ground would literally be glowing, visible with the unaided eye. But rather, not as visible light and UV light, but as infrared radiation. A degraded, lower quality type of energy.

Sure, roughly the same amount is released into outer space, that's the first law of thermodynamics, but it's not of the same kind of energy. That's the second law. By the way, I say roughly the same amount, almost exactly, but we need to account for climate change, the additional amount that is actually trapped over time by the atmosphere.

So on the time scale of decades, centuries, millennia, the Earth's atmosphere is warming, as best we know. At night, on a typical night on Earth, the release of energy back into outer space at night happens only very slowly, because the carbon dioxide and large part absorbs some of that infrared radiation on the way out.

And then actually reflect some of it back onto the ground again, as we saw with the simulation from Thet. And so, come the morning, some heat is still left. It's always coldest right before the dawn. Well, almost always. But for Every additional molecule of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, well, there's one more place for infrared photons to be captured and possibly, possibly, reflected back in the direction of the ground, keeping it warmer than it otherwise would be without that carbon dioxide.

Burning fossil fuels takes carbon stored under the ground since... the Mesozoic era and before, in other words, hundreds of millions of years ago because of the decay of life trapped in mud or falling to the seafloor back then and converts it into carbon dioxide which ends up in the atmosphere catching more photons and thus Gradually, very gradually, increasing the average temperature of the Earth.

The Geological Carbon Cycle

Now, here I am ignoring everything else. I realize that. I'm ignoring volcanoes that exist right now, for example. Volcanoes are... Earth's natural climate control, and it's a marvellous system. Let's go into a bit about how it works, because I personally find this fascinating, the geological carbon cycle. And of course, I'm going to necessarily leave some details out, that always happens with science communication.

When there is more, rather than less, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the Earth is warmer on average. And that's a cause and effect. The cause of the warming of the atmosphere genuinely is additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Okay, so the warming is caused by the sun, but it's the carbon dioxide that traps additional heat in the atmosphere.

Okay, this means With more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a warmer atmosphere, the oceans also increase their temperature. Higher temperature oceans means more evaporation of ocean water. More evaporation of ocean water means more clouds, and more clouds means more rain. More rain means more carbon dioxide can dissolve into the rain, producing a form of weak acid rain, namely carbonic acid rain.

Now if you want the chemical reaction, it's this. And this very same reaction, it's an equilibrium reaction, that goes on in any bottle of fizzy drink. Soda pop, soft drink, whatever you happen to call it in your culture. The carbon dioxide gas is dissolved into the water. Now, in a soft drink like Coke or Pepsi or whatever, or even a beer, there is way, way more carbon dioxide dissolved into the water, into the liquid, than can possibly remain dissolved at the usual air pressure of our atmosphere.

This is why, when you take the lid off, only then do the bubbles start to form as the carbon dioxide comes out of solution. The carbonic acid becomes carbon dioxide and water again. What an absolutely marvellous reaction. Well, this happens in the atmosphere as well. More rain, less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Because the rain is taking the carbon dioxide with it as it falls. onto the ground or onto the ocean. But what happens then? Well, more rain on the land, for example, means more rocks will erode and more salts that are in those rocks are dissolved and they're carried by the rivers into the oceans. Salts that include especially calcium ions in particular.

So the calcium ions from the rock, often it's calcium chloride or something else like that, gets dissolved away and ends up being washed into the oceans. Whatever the case, whatever the particular salt is, it contains calcium that ends up in that ocean. So the oceans have a bit of calcium dissolved there as calcium ions.

Charged atoms in other words. And what does calcium love? Calcium ions love themselves a bit of carbonate ions. That's CO3 2 minus this thing. The very thing raindrops deliver to the ocean once the carbon dioxide has been dissolved. Into them into the raindrops. This is a picture from Wikipedia that I'm using because pictures there aren't copyrighted and so now you have a lovely mix of calcium ions and Carbonate ions coming together and they mix to form calcium carbonate CaCO3 all high school chemistry students know this and calcium carbonate is Well, it's a solid.

It's not very soluble at all in water. It doesn't dissolve. And so, when it forms in the ocean water, it just sinks to the seabed. It sinks to the floor of the ocean. So, over thousands and millions of years, it just collects layer upon layer. And this, then, is carried by subduction, the movement of tectonic plates.

One under the other, taking that material deep into the mantle of the Earth. But this new mantle material, with the additional Calcium carbonate has a lower melting point. That's what people in geology call a volatile. A volatile is. Well, anything that easily evaporates and calcium carbonate easily dissociate splits itself back up into, well, calcium oxide and carbon dioxide, as well as the water that is trapped there also in the tectonic plates.

Add to all of this, the additional weight, the weight of that calcium carbonate over time, it pushes on the mantle, the squishy bit of the earth beneath the crust and the additional weight and pressure literally pushes on continental plates and squeezes effectively the magma with. Remember, a lower melting point from chambers towards the surface where it rushes out of gaps in the crust we call volcanoes.

And that's all released with lava containing, you guessed it, all those volatiles, the carbon dioxide and water vapor in particular. Now, this does get deep into... Absolutely fascinating for me anyway, chemistry and geology, but basically it's because the magma is so hot that when the calcium carbonate is heated in the mantle it is easily broken up into, as I say, calcium oxide and separately carbon dioxide.

We call the carbon dioxide and the water vapor volatiles in geology. It's amazing how this stuff works. So more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere and the cycle continues. More CO2 Higher temperature, more rain, more carbon dioxide dissolving into the rain, more carbonic acid produced, more carbonite ions bond with the calcium ions, more calcium carbonate accumulates on the seabed, lowering the melting point of the mantle and increasing the weight of the seabed, forcing more magma to the surface at a lower temperature, volcanoes erupt, releasing more carbon dioxide.

Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Can you see why I flirted with the idea of being a geophysicist for a while? That and, well, rocks are beautiful when you look into it. Anyway, I have simplified, I have simplified much of this, as indeed this diagram does. continental drift to consider in the movement of tectonic plates in addition to what I've said.

Subduction is a much more important factor than what I kind of indicated there, okay. The increased weight of the seafloor, uh, isn't so much of a factor. It's the, it's the subduction that drags the calcium carbonate down deep into the mantle where it's heated and then decomposed Calcium oxide and carbon dioxide, but also there's intermediate chemical steps that this diagram leaves out that I've left out involving calcium bicarbonate But let's not worry about the details.

Look those up if you've got an interest in this. Geology as I say is beautiful It's fascinating. The point here is that this lesser known of the cycles You know, there's other cycles. Surely people are aware of like the water cycle and that other biological carbon cycle. Well, it contains a number of, uh, feedback mechanisms.

In particular, the so called carbonite compensation depth, CCD feedback. The more carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the more rainfall there is, and the more carbon dioxide ends up in the oceans, and the more calcium carbonate on the seafloor, and the lower the melting point of the mantle. And this, Indirectly increases the rate of volcanism, and thus will cause more carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere.

But when this happens, when you've got more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causing more rain, well then, the more rain takes the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and that lowers the temperature of the globe again. Almost as if the Earth is breathing. But just don't take that analogy too far, Gaia worshippers.

This is on a timescale recall of many hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Of course, if people put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, this won't have the immediate effect of causing more volcanism, but it will have the effect of causing more. rainfall as the Earth's atmosphere effectively responds by, as I say, heating up.

This, of course, is increased evaporation of the oceans. All that much is true. And when the rainfall happens, it takes, as I say, some of the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, into the oceans and to some extent, at least carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is therefore self regulating, but.

Although this is all true, it's not true on timescales that matter much to humans when it comes to volcanism. And that's what matters in all of these discussions.

Power for People, Problems and Progress

In everything we're talking about here, we need to keep people front and center. People! are the most cosmically significant entities in the universe.

For now, as far as we know, people only exist on the surface of this one planet, the Earth. And so we should treat them as the special entities that they are. The only ones that can... Consciously do anything about anything that includes saving the forests and the whales if that's what you want I've made this point before that we cannot divorce discussions about energy from creativity the solving of problems, especially our most pressing concerns.

The rate of progress is the very thing keeping us from extinction. The best guarantee of death is stagnation, while a slowing of progress is simply a means of accelerating our demise. These two forces work inversely to one another. If we are going to go extinct, then extinction approaches ever more quickly, the slower we might.

Progress. And we make progress slowly when we have, for instance, less wealth, and we have less wealth when energy is more expensive. Energy in its most useful forms for us of electricity, heating and movement of people and cargo are what drive new solutions. Energy, by which I mean Thank you. The literal fuel for those things, the fuel for power generation, the fuel for literal furnaces and internal heating and the fuel for transportation is what enables people to get from here to there, and be here and there comfortably, and to possess the new technologies that allow them to solve their problems, and hence the world's problems, faster, and better, and more finally.

We can accelerate progress by accelerating wealth creation, and this happens when energy is as cheap as it possibly can be, for as many people as it possibly can be delivered to. If fusion power was here today, there would... be no debate. The hydrogen from mere cups of water could power civilization. But as yet, we have not figured out an efficient way to perform the nuclear reactions needed at scale, cheaply across the world, in order to produce electricity.

If we did, there would be, as I say, no debate, as that would be a fuel source of effectively limitless supply. and near zero hazard, at least from pollution. Problems are soluble, so that day is indeed coming. I don't know why people don't take this more seriously. The day is coming when we will have fusion power.

I would say, if we have fusion power, if I thought that the environmentalists and pessimists would win the argument. For, if they have their way, then electricity prices will continue to climb as we move towards renewables and net zero and thus impoverishing the world evermore and denying many the opportunities they might otherwise have to pursue a creative enterprise.

Put another way, a child born into a household just that little less wealthy because of high energy prices is denied the slightly better computer or the slightly increased amount of freedom associated with Say, homeschooling, or the slightly more positive outlook on life due to the need to curtail spending and conform to a higher budget.

Uh, there might be denied finding an interest in, let's say, physics. And yet, in the counterfactual universe, that very child is the one to go on to solve the problems with. efficient nuclear fusion reactors because at home they were allowed to tinker away with a private tutor coding on a supercomputer a simulation of various geometries for nuclear reactors that they became fascinated with and that chain of events culminating in the very genius that at let's say 27 years of age solves nuclear fusion power because They devoted their entire life to that particular problem.

And why? Well, because as a child, they were in a household that was more wealthy, free and comfortable, such they were able to foster that interest as were the people around them. But this is not our world for the overwhelming majority of people today. Yet it could be, but for a lack of wealth and motivation in trying to make things comfortable for everyone.

And easier and cheaper. Everything's more expensive when energy is more expensive because everything else needs to be transported somewhere and needs to be manufactured. And those things take energy. Wouldn't it be nice if solar energy was really cheap and worked reliably? Everyone agrees this would be wonderful, but that simply is not our circumstance.

Reaction to Joe Rogan and Elon Musk talking solar power

On the Joe Rogan Experience, number 2054, this one here, which was aired on the 1st of November, 2023, Joe Rogan asked Elon Musk about whether covering a car or a truck in solar panels would be a feasible way of powering a vehicle. Joe didn't seem to get the point Elon was making. It's just not possible.

Joe kept coming back to the idea that in the future, in the future, solar panel technology could be improved. Well, yes. But Elon kept insisting, quite rightly, that no, it's just not possible to power, let's say, a truck in this way, or even a car. But I don't think, in Joe's mind, the point landed exactly. Joe was, as an extreme optimist of a kind, sceptical about what Elon was saying.

In Joe's mind, the limiting factor, as in many people's minds, is the technology. But it's not. It's the laws of physics. Elon made some of these points in the interview, but I want to make it more explicit still. So let's go. Why can't you power a car with solar panels on the roof? Why doesn't that work? And why will it never work?

It's because the sun puts out a constant amount of energy each and every second, in all directions, from its approximately spherical surface. There are, of course, minute fluctuations, there are solar flares where additional energy gets put out, and there are sunspots where the temperature is a little bit lower on the surface of the Sun.

But overall, the power output of the Sun is very nearly constant. Indeed, there is remarkably in astronomy a creative name for this particular constant. It's called the solar luminosity, and it's very nearly 3. 8 times 10 to the power of 26 watts, in other words 3. 8 times 10 to the power of 26 Joules per second.

Joules every single second being produced by the sun. And this gives rise to another constant called, again very creatively, The solar constant, which is the amount of power the Earth receives per meter squared, and it turns out to be 1, 362 watts, precisely. Or, another way of putting that, perhaps more precisely still and clearly, is that at a distance of 150 million kilometers from the Sun, which is about where the Earth is, the Sun delivers 1362 joules of energy per meter squared.

Every second. That's a constant. It's fixed. It's fixed by the luminosity of the Sun and the distance of the Earth from the Sun. Indeed, to calculate the luminosity of the Sun, one simply measures that amount of energy using satellites. You need to be above the atmosphere after all, because the atmosphere is very good at absorbing rather a lot of that energy, and you have to measure it exactly perpendicular to the Sun.

The Sun has to be at the noon position over the equator and so on and so forth. So if you had a 100 percent efficient solar panel, and it was in outer space, and it was pointed perpendicular to the sun's rays, then that 1362 watts is what you get per meter squared. Which isn't bad. It means, you know, with one meter squared solar panel, you could easily power a laptop, uh, with that imaginary solar panel, of course.

Or, a rather weak heater. A warm, but not hot, hair dryer. But the thing is, solar panels are far from 100 percent efficient. They're more like 20 percent efficient, but what about improvements in technology? Well, we still run into difficulties like the theoretical upper limits on efficiency, something called the Shockley Keesa limit.

Well, that's due to the physical properties of something called the PN junction where silicon is used to make solar panels. It's a thermodynamic limitation on how good your panels can get, no matter how you improve the technology, and that limit is 33. 7%. It can be calculated. Now, maybe we could use something else, perhaps so called multi junction cells could be used.

Well, then maybe you could get over just 40%, but ultimately, no matter what one does, one cannot get to 100%. Thermodynamics itself fundamentally places a limit called the Landsberg limit or the thermodynamic efficiency limit based on the entropy of sunlight that restricts panels to 85 percent or at most 95%.

Which would be good if we could get anywhere near that, but we cannot. Let's deal with things as they are now and be generous with our optimism. Right now, the typical solar panel is, as I said, 20 percent efficient. Let's be really generous and grant them 30 percent efficiency based on some experimental work being done now with solar panels.

At most, therefore, you can get 30 percent of your 1362 watts. In other words, 409 watts. 409 watts per meter squared is what we can hope for. If we're in outer space. But we're not. We're on the ground. That's where you're collecting your solar energy from. And much of that energy is absorbed. If the sun is directly overhead on a sunny day, then 75 percent of that 409 watts makes it through.

At best. That's 307 watts per meter squared now. This is noon, by the way. So, before noon, it's less than 307. And after noon, it's less than 307. And it's less if you're at higher or lower latitudes, especially places like Europe that are up near the North Pole. If you're at the equator, you're better off unless it's cloudy even slightly.

Of course, these arguments have all been made before and their arguments, well, kind of against solar energy. And I'm not, I'm not against solar energy. I think it's amazing technology. Power available to you from the sun is nowhere near enough to power a car. A small car, just to get itself around, uses something like a hundred kilowatts.

KILOWATTS! That's a hundred thousand watts. And we're here talking about an entire meter squared of solar panels getting you a couple of hundred watts. Even if you could squeeze a thousand watts out of your solar panel, you'd need a surface area on your car of a hundred square meters of panels to get it to a thousand kilowatts.

And that's for a small car! That's ten by ten meters worth of solar panels that's big and heavy and delicate and a danger on the roads and so on. Now it's true every year there is a world solar car challenge that races solar cars the length of Australia right down the middle of the country through the desert on the highway that links Darwin to Adelaide but these cars happen to use batteries they're around about 20 kilograms worth that are charged by the solar panels and they carry one light Now, in one sense, these cars are very impressive.

They only use about 6 square meters of solar panels, and can travel in excess of 110 kilometers per hour, which is the speed limit in Australia in many places. But, those cars are not accelerating at all fast, they're not going up hills, and they're certainly not taking home, Uh, the passengers shopping, much less towing a boat, or a caravan, or giving your friend a lift home.

Uh, these solar cars are not able to do these things. In fact, all these cars are very weak in terms of torque. Uh, that's another way of putting it. They have very little, literal pull. And no amount of improvements to solar panel technology is ever going to change that. So Elon was quite right. Joe is under a misapprehension that you could cover your Tesla car in solar panels and just run it directly from the sun, much less cover your Tesla truck in one of these things in order to pull a heavy load.

No, it just doesn't work that way. These things are really weak, solar powered cars. So as I say, Elon Musk was quite right to point this out to Joe, but I did disagree with Elon Musk during this interview because what he also said to Joe was that all you'd need in order to power the world was a 20 by 20 mile square array of solar panels to be carved out in the desert somewhere, and that could in theory, along with some batteries, batteries, Power the world.

And now another back of the envelope calculation by chat GPT tells me that around 332 square kilometers might do the trick as well. Okay. Compared to the 400 miles squared that Elon quoted. So roughly the same. numbers here. A few hundred square miles or kilometers covered in solar panels somewhere in the desert would be able to produce enough electricity in order to charge the batteries to power the world.

Or could they? I mean, under optimal conditions, ignoring transmission losses, and they'd be substantial because you've got to get. The electricity around the world, I mean, using what wires, but even if you doubled the area in order to account for all of that loss and you have sufficient batteries, the thing that is left out of Elon's analysis here, and that he didn't mention to Joe is those panels and the batteries, they're not really renewable, are they?

I mean, the energy is renewable, but panels have a lifetime and batteries absolutely have a lifetime as anyone with a mobile phone knows. And those batteries also are a bit of a fire hazard for now. And in both cases, if you're an environmentalist, aren't you worried about the chemicals involved in panels and batteries?

And what about all the energy required for their production as well? And the waste once their lifetime is over? But besides, such an infrastructure project would be immensely costly. Again, driving up the price of electricity now. Who can imagine what maintaining such a thing might cost? Moreover, if you did have this one place in the desert powering the world, what if it was attacked by terrorists?

Struck by a storm you weren't expecting, or an asteroid? The globe would go into blackout as all our eggs were placed into this one solar basket case. For what it's worth, as I said before, as I hinted at, photovoltaics, solar panels, are amazing technology, one of the most brilliant discoveries by people over the last few decades.

They're absolutely worth it in some places that are, as it were, literally off the grid. That's where they can come in handy. I know of some excellent projects out there where, for example, students from, you know, my local university, one of the local universities, where I went in fact, the University of New South Wales, they're also the people that do the quantum computation stuff.

They also have a degree in photovoltaics. You can do a Bachelor of Science in photovoltaics. And the great thing there is that the students from that university travel to remote communities around the world where electricity is lacking. And they install solar arrays so that people there in those communities can charge batteries that drive technology that they would otherwise not. That's fantastic!

The affordability of solar

So that's, that's good. There's also the other good thing that, you know, in Australia, like many places now, people can have a raise on their homes that produce more than enough electricity to power their homes. So their electricity bill essentially goes down to zero. But, in Australia, which is the one place I know about with respect to this, it must be admitted that these things were only affordable for the overwhelming majority of people.

You know, it's like 40, 000 worth of solar panels stuck on your roof. Well, the only reason the majority of people who have them could afford them at all was because the government, the federal government, offered and still offers. Generous subsidies for those. So effectively, taxpayers who do not own homes or taxpayers who are not willing to take up the offer for those subsidized solar panels, were themselves subsidizing those who did.

In other words, it was a form of income redistribution to the people who are wealthy enough to afford to pay part of the cost for solar panels to stick on the houses that they owned. But, you know, okay. So for those who do have them in a place like Australia, it's great. And more power literally and figuratively to companies who can reduce the price and increase the efficiency, reliability and lifetimes of this amazing technology. Handing out solar panels to everyone, or even people buying their solar panels, it comes at a price. And the manufacture of solar panels themselves is a costly exercise. A huge amount of mining is involved, and smelting and refining in order to produce the materials out of which the panels are made.

And the panels are often made in China. Much the same is true of wind power, and as I've hinted at, solar panels have a finite lifetime, as do so called wind farms or wind factories, as I will broadly refer to them in the rest of this piece. To ignore these facts is to remove from the table of discussion the complete picture of costs in terms both financial and environmental, if that's what you're concerned about.

Ultimately, wood burning anthracite, that's the Good sort of coal. The high end coal, so to speak. Australia's got heaps of the stuff. In a modern coal fired power station producing very little more than pure water and carbon dioxide as waste products. Be better or worse. And what is the criteria if you're comparing the solar panels to the coal?

If there's one factor analysis here, the amount of carbon dioxide produced, well, those solar panels produce carbon dioxide during the manufacture process. But a lot more waste besides. But if you're only looking at the carbon dioxide, well then, You kind of got blinders on, haven't you? You're ignoring all the other effects, environmental in particular.

Not to mention, as I say, the financial costs. If we enrich ourselves by using the cheapest possible energy source that's available now, which would actually be brown coal, we could lift ourselves in terms of wealth creation, which is upstream of rapid progress and creativity. We would then perhaps have fusion power sooner.

And once we have that, all of this discussion about renewables versus fossil fuels would actually be moot. There'll be pointless discussion because you wouldn't need to be concerned about whether it's coal or whether it's uranium or whether it's. Solar panels win because you'd be using water. That would be your fuel. Okay. Hydrogen would be. You'd have a fusion reactor and all those policies, all the costly policies would automatically fall by the wayside. And send the argument for, as I say, Coal or wind or solar or nuclear is beside the point except in special use cases like the aforementioned Remote communities that might still find some use in solar panels, but even then I mean electricity would be so cheap, presumably in a world powered by fusion that you could just have wires to wherever you want to go, because the loss of energy due to transmission losses, the heating of wires, it wouldn't matter to you, because you're not going to run out of fuel.

It's water, remember. Fusion power could, in principle, drop carbon dioxide emission levels to... Near zero. Asymptotically to zero. Sure, we'd still have aircraft burning avgas, and cargo ships would still need diesel or whatever. Presumably, almost all public transport could be connected to the grid in some way, and powered by batteries that are charged by nuclear fusion reactors.

But now, no one is thinking of what is physically possible in principle, unless it's implementing new technologies which cannot yet now do the job that we need. And that is, provide. Baseload energy.

The situation in Australia

In Australia, all the talk is of wind factories or solar farms and so on. And energy prices continue to skyrocket year upon year because the government has a policy of not building more coal fired power stations.

And in Australia, the federal government has literally made nuclear power illegal. Federal law doesn't permit nuclear power in Australia. It's phenomenal. Why? Irrationalities from a bygone era, the Green Movement, where it itself was mired in the irrationality that nuclear fission power is unsafe because in particular of Chernobyl.

Of course, that's like being afraid today of flying because of a crash in Tenerife in 1977 between two 747s. Or any of a number of air crashes. where more modern technology might have averted the disaster or helped avoid it. Well, technology has leaped ahead when it comes to traditional fission reactors.

Modern Japanese reactors have fail safe built upon fail safe. It is almost impossible to envisage how any of these new reactors could possibly go Chernobyl, so to speak. Australia literally sits atop among the largest coal and uranium reserves in the world. We could afford almost to deliver electricity to our own population for free, or near free, because the raw materials do not need to be transported very far, and they're very close to the surface of the land.

For some bizarre reason, China and India transport our coal and uranium across literal oceans from You know, the middle of our country to our shoreline across the ocean and then further to their shore. And they still pay less for electricity than we do. Why? Because they don't have policies against burning coal or using [00:59:00] uranium.

We do, and so we build costly and inefficient solar arrays and wind factories. And we're not alone. I mean, Britain is much similar in this regard. Much of Europe is similar when it comes, at least, to coal. Electricity prices are rising in the Western world precipitously because of green policies, so called green policies, designed to counter an apparent problem which the developing world is exacerbating, never mind us.

Well, and that's, that's if you buy into the notion that this is a real and pressing threat to civilization. Rather than just something for human beings to adapt to, as we always do when it comes to these sort of problems. Something where the change is literally so gradual, we can't easily agree what time scale it's happening on.

Whether the temperature is... Going up irrevocably or down, and the extent to which it is causing secondary effects like the melting of ice caps and glaciers causing sea level rises. To make the point about sea levels rising, propagandist politicians and others are driven to doing silly stuff like delivering speeches from the ocean itself pretending as if the sea level rise has already happened.

It's farcical. And in response, western governments largely in defiance of the interests of many of their own voters. Build or purchase more solar panels and wind turbines. As if it needs to be said, wind farms are unreliable. The wind does not always blow. More than that, wind farms are huge. Many people do not like the look of wind farms in their backyard or the sound of them.

Their size absolutely dwarfs the footprint of something like a coal fired power station or nuclear reactor. They even dwarf the mines for coal. And they're among the largest mines in the world, these open cup coal mines. Wind turbines in particular need to be spaced quite far apart because the wind literally slows down after it passes through the turbine.

Logically, that has to be so because the kinetic energy of the air is what drives the blades, so the energy will be lost once it's passed through a wind turbine. And what are the turbines made from? Vast amounts of steel or aluminium and other materials. Which must be mined, smelted, and refined. I'll come back again to this soon.

Students these days, in high school, in modern physics classes, are even taught equations like this one. The kinetic energy is half mv squared, almost every science student knows that. But you can use the special case where, you know, the mass of the air becomes the density of the air times the volume. So you've got half rho v pi r squared v squared.

And so, put all this together and you can get this. Wind turbine equation, half rho V pi R squared V cubed. So one can calculate the theoretical amount of energy that can be produced by a turbine with blades of length R spinning in the wind of velocity V. Rho, by the way, is the density of the air. This equation is a highly parochial one that ultimately is nothing but a special case of that first one, half m V squared.

Basically... the definition of kinetic energy. The blades of a wind turbine can spin fast, damn fast, but that's because some of them have blades up to 100 meters in length capturing vast amounts of air, but most commercially available ones, they're in the 20 meter to 80 meter range. Now one needs to know a little bit of Circular, uniform circular motion to understand this, but at a radius of about 80 meters, and I'm not going to do the calculation here now, anyone can ask, ChatGPT to check my back of the envelope calculations, but basically, the tip of the wind turbine blade might move at a maximum of, let's say, 126 meters per second.

And yes, wind turbines have a maximum speed, if the wind blows too hard, then the forces on the blade due to, The inertia of its own mass could literally rip the thing apart, and we've seen that before. But although that is fast, 126 meters per second, that's the linear speed of the tip of the blade, it means actually only about 15 revolutions per minute, 15 rpm.

That's an average. Figures I find range from 10 to 20. This is the rate, logically, of both the blade and the turbine itself inside the housing of the device where the electricity is actually produced. They both rotate at the same rate, even if the linear speed of the edge of the blade is much faster than the linear speed of the turbine inside. Sometimes that fact can trip people up.

Coal Fired Power Stations

My point in raising these numbers is simply by way of comparison. It's the rate of rotation, the number of revolutions per minute, that determines how much electricity can be generated by a turbine. It's one of the factors anyway. A steam turbine in a coal fired power station is of the order of 3, 000 revolutions per minute.

And those turbines are much bigger and much heavier, much, much bigger and much, much heavier, moving, rotating much, much faster. And in a coal fired power station, that rate of rotation is maintained, kept constant, because our AC power supplies operate at a particular frequency. In Australia, it's close to 50 Hz.

If you deviate from 50 Hz, this leads to inefficiencies, which is another problem with wind factories. The blades are spinning at all manner of speeds. It depends upon how fast the wind is blowing. So how can they match the frequency of rotation with which the actual frequency is required for delivery to the consumer at, let's say, 50 Hz in Australia, on which, well, all the devices that you plug into the PowerPoint have to operate.

Well, they use gearboxes among other things, but those gearboxes and other things introduce inefficiencies and complexities and points of failure. Unlike with the coal fired powered steam turbine that can minimize losses and complexities in this regard, coal fired power stations run for decades and decades using simple technology that is incrementally improved to help with efficiency and genuinely deliver Very cheap electricity with these days very little Dangerous pollution, just a gentle fume of carbon dioxide and water vapor with the other genuine nasties taken out at the point of emission by some fancy technology.

There really is clean coal, despite what the naysayers say. Yes, of course, there are energy losses elsewhere with coal fired power stations. Heat is a massive loss in a sense, but that's a necessary consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. The efficiency of any power station, like a coal fired power station, is to do with the difference between the heat source, the burning of the coal, and the rest of the environment, the heat sink.

You want the inside of the plant to be as hot as possible, you know, turning that water into steam, and the outside to be as cool as possible. Again, see my other podcast on thermodynamics for more about that. The vast amounts of coal and the simple design, which is easily made highly efficient, makes coal a very cheap source of fuel for the generation of electricity. But building wind turbines is expensive. And they are all the more expensive because you need so many of them to make up for just a tiny percentage of what a steam turbine can accomplish operating at maximum capacity. And you need ever more of them, wind turbines, to make up for the inefficiencies in each of them.

And again, we must come back to the wind does not always blow. They're just not reliable, but wind, rain, hail, or shine coal fired power stations just keep on running. The sun can shine or not. The wind can blow hard or slow or not at all. Coal just keeps on being converted into electron drift. And in a place like Australia, we have at least a century's worth of coal.

If we continue exporting it at the rate we do, this is. At very least, if we didn't export any of it and we kept it for ourselves for domestic use at the current rate, our coal would last us 3000 years! But we send tons of this stuff north to China for them to put through their coal fired power stations.

They have well over a thousand of them. Let me say that again. China has well over a thousand coal fired power stations. It's probably more like 1, 100 and it's increasing all the time as they build more and more and more as the country grows. Good on them. Australia, on the other hand, has less than 25, less than 25 coal fired power stations, and we seem to regret every single one of them and refuse to build even one more to make up the shortfall we're currently now experiencing.

Now, CHAT GPT lacks figures on precisely the number of coal fired power stations worldwide, but it's in excess of 2000. And Australia worries about adding one to this number. And meanwhile, we keep being told by the power companies that we run the risk every single winter and summer of having rolling blackouts or brownouts because we aren't producing enough electricity because the government is putting all of its eggs into the solar and wind basket.

It refuses to build nuclear, it won't build another coal fired power station, and it's shutting down the ones that are there. It's nuts. So we're on the verge of blackouts while we sit on a bed of coal and uranium. If we doubled the number of coal fired power stations in this country, presumably we'd vastly reduce the cost of electricity. and barely make a dint in the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere at the same time, given the number of coal fired power stations China and the rest of the world have.

But globally, our demand for coal in the coming years may increase due to growth. Or it may decrease due to improved efficiency, or it may remain roughly the same as these two factors of growth and efficiency balance each other out. In any case, a hundred years is a long time in the history of global civilization, much less 3, 000 years of civilization at our current rate of progress.

Well, it's unimaginable what can happen during that time. It's unimaginable what can happen in the next 10 years, let alone 10 decades. Why aren't we just choosing now, to use that coal now, to enrich ourselves now, and accept that problems are soluble. A solution is, burn the coal, burn the fossil fuels, enrich everyone, make electricity cheap, and whatever problems come along, let's deal with them then.

Can we live with a higher temperature? Can we deal with subtle changes in the climate? They are going to happen regardless. By the way, those numbers about the amount of coal and how long it will last are simply given on the basis of known reserves. Geophysicists remarkably find new reserves of coal every few years.

There is no reason to presume that That's going to stop. Geophysics is a fascinating area of science where we can look into the earth without ever digging it up. Australia's a big place. Coal mines might look big, but they're often in remote areas and are below the ground, so not easily seen in the landscape.

You know, unless you're actually standing on the lip of one and looking down into the hole, you'd never notice that there's a coal mine over there somewhere or other. This is rather unlike the huge wind farms that you see around the place. But Australia is just one big flat place that's got lots and lots of coal.

No one knows exactly what kind of fuel sources might lurk under other places around the world. Under the ice cap of Antarctica? What sort of mineral and energy treasures are down there? Yes, of course, that's absolute heresy to even say. But Antarctica is a huge place as well. A few coal mines on the coast could really help the planet. Or some pitchblende uranium ore mines. We don't know. No one's much looked yet. Yet.

The politicisation of the science classroom.

We're too interested in solar panels and wind turbines in the West. The issue with large numbers of wind turbines is that they are often located just off the coast or just on the coast where it's windy and that's where people live.

And they're noisy, as I've said. And they kill birds, if that's the sort of thing that worries you. My point here is that it's not clear that wind power generation is the obviously environmentally friendly choice. They're absolutely not the economically friendly choice. Now, Nick Cater's Substack article here called Storm Warning Chronicles, the worldwide trend of governments investing billions of dollars in wind farms or wind factories, only then to decide, well, this wasn't such a great idea all along.

They're not economically viable. They turn out to be unreliable, costly, and ultimately a path. to ruin for a society who would put their eggs into such a basket. So see this article here. Cater wrote earlier and at greater length about how around the world, environmentalists are at war with themselves when it comes to wind power, the environmental damage from wind turbines and dangers or threatens numerous species.

Supposedly, one of the arguments for transitioning away from fossil fuels was to save threatened species. This is then the tension between the national and even supranational governments and local interests. Here, physics teachers around the world find themselves in senior physics courses teaching all about the benefits of so called wind farms, as if these devices have been gifted From the moral realm by deified saints to us mortals.

As for a wind farm, as I say, well, that very term sounds rather friendly. We're farming the wind. Well, we're not really, of course. We're not growing wind like we grow wheat, corn, or even cattle. We're capturing it. If it's even there, we cannot manufacture wind in order to then harvest it. We get lucky or we don't.

As we do with sunlight, largely speaking. And as we have observed, these things, these wind farms are huge. Among the largest structures people are building right now. Almost 300 meters of towering metal per wind turbine. Many tons of steel, fiberglass, concrete, aluminum, and copper. All those things need to be mined.

And many of them are just very energy intensive to pull out of the ground. Aluminum, for one thing, is not found just lying around as nuggets on the floor of a gently flowing stream. It has to be extracted from smashed up rocks that are literally melted. How do you melt these smashed up, crushed rocks?

Well, the only thing capable of doing that is coal. Only coal burned has the energy to efficiently extract aluminium, or iron for that matter, from its ore, bauxite. That's not enough. Aluminium is so reactive, and therefore so tightly bound to other chemicals, that you then need electrolysis to separate it from its oxide, alumina.

This electrolysis requires a very high electric current. Where do you get such a high electric current? Well, from your electricity source. In principle, that could be a wind farm if the wind was blowing and many of them were nearby, but now we're in a kind of absurd circular trap of producing wind farms just to produce more wind farms.

These issues are complicated, but it's not mentioned in school courses on these things, much less considered by environmentalists who lord the virtues of wind power without ever considering the very real costs of these things. Again, environmentally. But we also teach about, you know, in physics courses about the internal electrical engineering of photovoltaic cells.

Indeed, things have moved on for many people out there who might have taken physics in high school. These days, in high school physics courses in your final couple of years of school, especially in the last decade, the physics curricula, has been politicized, heavily politicized. Almost no mention is made, as I say, of the costs or economics of these things.

It's a very parochial way of teaching physics, by the way. Let's talk about solar panels and, and, and wind farms. But you don't talk about the economics of these things. The curriculum writers say, why should we? It's a physics course after all, we shouldn't be talking about economics. But then you get to the bit of the physics course about coal fired power stations, and of course, there, there are lengthy discussions about anthropogenic climate change and the economic costs of that.

Apparently that is a legitimate part of the physics course. So much of what I've so far said is little more than preamble for my main point, and that is that the discussions about this is Globally, both at the national and international level, are framed in terms of sustainability, of ensuring that we have no overall impact on the environment, by which is meant the planet, no, no impact on the planet.

Net Zero as a special case of sustainability

We are being coerced into something known as net zero, a special case of sustainability, namely that the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by us must be offset in some way so that no net carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere due to human activity. And thus we are rushing headlong for the exits marked renewable in the hope that our energy use will never have any further future effect on the atmosphere or hence the climate.

But we must affect the environment. Everything about it. What we do has effects, and those effects are things we learn about over time. Sometimes they seem good, and sometimes they seem bad to us. Sometimes what we thought was going to be a bad thing turns out being a good thing. Sometimes we think the earth is cooling, and then we learn about something else that causes us to change our mind, that in fact the earth is warming.

I don't understand why both of these things are regarded as bad. And yet, I suppose, Even if we were told that the Earth's climate is completely unchanging, that would possibly also be a bad thing. I don't know. But in any case, the climate changes. Fact! Whether it's cooling or warming. Change is the necessary condition of our existence here in this universe.

But, of course, right now we should take our best explanation seriously, right now. And those best explanations say that the Earth is warming, and that we're doing it. Okay, that's the fact. Let's just accept that. That's fine. The Earth's warming, and we are largely responsible for it. I'm happy to take that.

What should we do about climate change?

But now, what we choose to do about climate change is completely up for grabs. That's a moral question. What should we do about it? I say... Let's get more wealthy as fast as possible so we can develop technologies to counter any negative impacts of climate change if they happen. I don't see any significant impacts of climate change now that are easily and obviously distinguishable from the regular weather patterns.

So whatever the effect is now, We cannot just blame every weather event or forest fire or bushfire on climate change. We cannot blame a flood on climate change. After all, that game can be played in both directions. We can thank climate change for an increase in crop yields. If a year goes by where there are fuel fires, Thank climate change.

If people enjoy more sunny days at the beach, thank climate change. If the rate of people dying from cold goes down, thank climate change. The point of these things is that when they happen, can they be said to be due to climate change? I don't think so. The weather is not the climate. We don't know enough about how the climate is affecting weather day to day.

It's just that whenever a bad thing happens, a hurricane. The news automatically says climate change, but whenever a good thing happens, it's not said to be climate change. It's said to just be the regular weather, whatever the problem is. And climate change is just one of many problems that human beings are facing right now is best mitigated by a more powerful civilization and power takes wealth and more wealth means more growth of the economies of the world.

We. Need to grow. And it's not enough that we grow, or even that we grow big. The rate of growth matters. Each choice we make now that slows growth is another child who spends one day longer living in poverty, and is therefore Unable to take advantage of the opportunities offered by modernity. It is the child in the middle class who cannot quite afford to buy the best computer, so they settle for something lesser.

And cannot quite run the simulation they wanted to, at the rate they wanted to, so they get bored. They might have been on the cusp of some great new discovery. It is the company who might have developed the next best smartphone beyond anything we've encountered before, but the price point would have been set too high because the raw materials were too expensive to extract now that coal is taxed so heavily and almost legislated out of existence in some places.

And as I hint at, almost all of this analysis at times assumes a priori that climate change is a bad thing. But is the climate of the planet Earth now actually optimal for people? Might it not be better if Southern Africa or the Middle East had More rain, or if the centre of Australia was better watered.

What if some parts of Asia had a little less rain and was less prone to the regular floods we see in China and Japan and so on every single year? And as for South Pacific nations threatened with going underwater from rising sea levels, The data on this is quite weak if you look into the details. The sea levels might rise, but they won't rise everywhere equally.

The strength of gravity on the Earth pulls ocean water here and there by different amounts. There's some geophysics 101 for you. Say they were threatened, just as they are threatened by regular tsunamis, even absent rising sea levels. Well, anyone on the coast should be building sea walls and building higher structures.

The Dutch have literally been doing this for centuries. It's not like this sort of technology requires revolutionary thinking. It's known engineering, albeit on a larger scale. We can mitigate. In short, we can solve problems rather than trying to avoid them. In any case, climate change is happening, and will happen, whether we cause it or do anything about it.

We can treat the problem as an opportunity. Not to impoverish ourselves and try to have a smaller impact, but by doubling down on using cheap energy to enrich ourselves rather than impoverish everyone. We are people. The most powerful entities in the known universe. Physical reality hasn't seen the likes of us before, and what we are capable of, this is just the start.

We should be taking charge. If we are fortunate enough to be living on top of oil and coal fields and uranium deposits, just maybe, That's no accident. Maybe it's providence. I'm not religious, but it is a clue that not only does the universe seem fine tuned for life, but perhaps the very Earth itself is fine tuned for the flourishing of human beings.

Here you go, the planet is almost crying out, all the energy, cheap as you like, for as long as you like, until you fly free even at the shackles of this planet and these forms of energy. Have at it, energy dense fossil fuels. Burn them up until you've got fusion power or who knows what else. But until those are effectively exhausted, and you are a genuine interplanetary species, don't worry about changing the atmosphere and climate in minor ways.

You, after all, are children of the cosmos. You will live among the stars. But not with a net zero attitude. That's the attitude that says, this is all we've got, and all we're going to ever have. We're better than this. Let's fire up, figuratively and literally, fire the blast furnaces and reactors. And yes, even the coal fired power stations.

Get them moving, reduce financial costs everywhere so we have the money to move mountains. And hold back the sea with walls bigger than we've ever built before. And lift the world to a standard of living and wealth. We have not actually striven for before offer opportunity to people trapped in poverty because they cannot afford to pay their bills.

Offer them the chance to save, accumulate wealth, claw back some time from jobs they don't much like and be creative the rest of the time that they have let individuals create solutions for their lives and maybe for the world. Maybe then we'll have genuine alternatives. The fusion power we all keep hoping for.

That thing which might be able to power the carbon capture devices to reverse the impact of the fossil fuels we did use for a couple of centuries to get ourselves to the place where we had the technology and knowledge of how to reverse the very impact of those things. If that's what we want. It's like Wittgenstein's ladder all over again.

Once you've used it to climb out of the well of being a barely industrial society, you toss it away and then choose to use fusion power to suck the carbon back out of the atmosphere. Or maybe you don't. Maybe the science of tomorrow tells you that just a little more carbon dioxide is better for agriculture and old growth forests.

Maybe the dinosaurs, not the actual ones, the metaphorical climate science dinosaurs, had ideas about trying to maintain stasis. As if the climate of 1800 was the ideal one for humans and the rest of the planet for some reason. Maybe we'll learn better. Maybe we'll be able to learn literally to control the climate and increase or decrease carbon dioxide, rainfall, or wind to the point where we can truly realize the age old dream of controlling the weather.

Locally, so crops are always watered and days at the beach never ruined by clouds or storms. Who knows what we will become capable of, but to get there, we need more knowledge and technology. But to generate those at the fastest rate possible by as many creative people as possible, but I repeat myself, we need more wealth!

And that means not squandering it on projects today that cost billions transitioning from cheap, abundant coal and oil to hard to manufacture, low energy density, solar and wind farms with short lifetimes and all sorts of additional logistical difficulties. And let's stop simply gifting money to poor nations for shady Climate change mitigation projects where no taxpayer actually knows where the money is going or for what purpose.

Let's leave money in the pockets of the productive who can make more of it. Maybe they'll make a fusion reactor, who can know? But we may not find out for decades or centuries, hence, if children around the world, including in Western nations, are raised in communities where half of one's income goes towards a housing loan or the rent and the other half is for high energy costs, requiring some kind of welfare just to feed the family.

By the way, this is the future that socialists want. They want a future where everyone is dependent on the government. And although people tend not to vote for such things, the governments of the world will implement such policies by stealth, even in defiance of the majority of voters, especially when the elites in the form of both sides of the parliament agree that this is what's good for them.

Those citizens the politicians paternalistically judge do not understand the end is nigh due to climate change. The academics and experts have informed us. We, the politicians, we have the inside word. It's our duty to push for net zero. The world has decided. The World Economic Forum has decided. The UN has decided.

Unelected bureaucrats and eurocrats have decided. Who are we, one nation among many, to go against the tide? The argument is over. Fossil fuels are over. Renewables that need to be replaced and are unreliable. They are the only way forward. Buy shares now in your local wind or solar farm. Buy your solar panels.

There's a government subsidy. Business, invest in green and get a tax break. Schools, teach one side of the argument to be accredited. We are at a turning point, or at least we're at point of inflection. We can continue to see inflation rise and the cost of energy skyrocket as we refuse to use the cheap and near ubiquitous near the surface of the earth gifts of the earth to better ourselves.

Aliens watching us from space would surely be bemused that in 50 years if they should visit us and we would still be struggling to build our first universal quantum computer, still failing to have discovered the secret to fusion power reactors, [01:27:00] still without settlements on the moon or Mars and with millions or even billions.

still struggling to be lifted out of the lower and middle classes and into creative work, depressed at the cost of living, while wind factories and solar panels attempt to power an electricity grid on a planet with variable wind and sunlight, while the denizens sit atop thousands of years of reserve of high density cheap fuel, the aliens might think, What are they doing?

These people do know about combustion. In their history textbooks, they once even had coal fired power stations. But now people are freezing to death in the winters, unable to pay their heating bills. Others are expiring in other parts of the world due to heat. They cannot afford air conditioning. Why aren't they burning that coal?

Well, we've seen it before, says an older alien. Well, that's it for them for a little while. They've chosen poorly. Maybe in another thousand years they'll have it figured out. We don't have a thousand years. The children of today deserve to be more wealthy, powerful, and comfortable. And less nervous, anxious, afraid, and berated.

This is a time for optimism. To reveal to everyone we are, so far as we know, the only things that can do anything about the rest. Those aliens are imaginary intelligences. But we are not. Let's use that intelligence and the cheapest energy to fuel a new flourishing. Let's stop striving for net zero. Let's celebrate our impact.

It's what we do. We cannot be sustained in this way. Our present state of living is not sustainable. We improve rapidly. Only rapid progress is sustainable, as David Deutsch has pointed out. We can be more wealthy, more powerful, live more comfortably, and creatively, and among the stars. At least we can if we choose to.

Thank you for watching or listening. If you'd like to support this enterprise, either ToKCast or the 3 Rs, go to www.bretthall.org and there you will find links to my Patreon pages and my PayPal account where you can make a one-off donation. Until next time.