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"All of us, including the people who fly around to Climate Change conferences, need to reflect on what it means to be without electricity."

I reflect on that issue about 2 times per day. But what I really reflect on is the fact that water, even hot water, comes out of a pipe above the sink.

What's "gunnel whacking"?

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Tim,

It's an image from Garreth Hardin's lifeboat "ethics". Hardin envisaged a planet in which a wealthy few in a lifeboat were surrounded by drowning masses fighting to get into the boat. Hardin's advice was to take up an oar and smash the hands grasping at the boat's gunwhale rather than have the lifeboat swamped by too many people and everybody dies.

Gunnel whacking is pretty inefficient. Rapid defossilization would be far more effective. But as the Rajapaskas discovered, the masses are not going to go quietly.

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About gunnel whacking (written in 1982):

The first is a general distrust of a society with abundant energy supplies. We find Stanford University Professor Paul Ehrlich, an anti-nuclear environmental spokesman, stating: "In fact, giving society cheap abundant energy at this point would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." Amory Lovins of Friends of the Earth puts it this way: "If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other."

https://www.gridbrief.com/p/guest-feature-energy-debate-really-energy

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What happened since Ehrlich's and Lovins' quotes should have ended the debate. But here we are decades later and both are allowed to play "I was right, my timing was just off. But NOW, now we're seeing I was right".

As we Tweeted after Ehrlich's 60 Min appearance, a stopped clock is right twice a day. Easy to compute how many days it's been since then. Compare Ehrlich's record to stopped clocks. The latter beat him by about 40,000 since his prediction.

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Yep, Ehrlich said the quiet part out loud, and that is the real reason much of the world isn't allowed to have nice things.

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We appreciate the fact that you drive at the human prosperity aspect of this like a Jack hammer.

That's our biggest worry and motivator, too. For our readers but even more so for those in the developing world who will never even see our work.

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Home Run, Jack. I'd rank climate much lower on your gordian knot:

Existing existential threats: 1. air pollution (including indoor--as per your essay); 2. purchasing fossil fuels from cartels and despots and associated wars, deaths, famines. Both of these are present day.

Longer-term existential threats: ocean acidification; peak oil (farming cost inflation--diesel fuel); (debated) climate

NOT existential threat: used nuclear fuel

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Feb 5, 2023·edited Feb 5, 2023Author

B.F.

I know lawyers are great believers in the adversarial process, but we have to be careful to avoid turning this into a contest., a battle between energy poverty and global warming. Rather we need to balance these two very large problems. Nuclear power will allow us to do that but only if it is as cheap as it could be.

https://gordianknotbook.com/download/low-co2-electricity-the-options-for-germany.

In this paper, the balancing is made explicit in the objective function.

Used nuclear fuel is not really a problem at all,

or at worst a "beautifully small problem" David MacKay RIP.

jackdevanney.substack.com/p/600-year-old-spent-nuclear-fuel-is

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Maybe we are talking past each other. I agree with all your points - low-cost nuclear power is the key to solving humanity's complex and inter-related problems. I am just ranking (1) geopolitical instability linked to fossil fuels (e.g. Russia, Ukraine, the Middle East. Venezuela) and (2) air pollution (including indoor air pollution due to energy poverty) much higher on the problems-to-be-solved list than global warming (which nuclear power will address, too). Global warming is remote and controversial. (1) and (2) are much more pressing and immediate. That is my point. It's not a contest. It's just about how I would rank the problems that low-cost nuclear power alone can help solve.

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