“[These ‘experts’] weren't acknowledging the benefits of fossil fuels” – Alex Epstein on Now to Next

“what I found 15 years ago when I just learned a little bit about fossil fuels is that the world, including many of its supposed ‘experts,’ was overwhelmingly thinking just about negative side-effects and not about benefits.”

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[Trees]

Only in the Idiocracy we are living would the most basic concept of “pro vs. con” be abandoned.

Thanks Alex 👍

[Cspacecat]

The problem with having a social scientist engaged in physics is a lack of clear understanding. Global drought and heat waves are the greatest threat to human civilization, not a lack of fossil fuels. Europe's reliance on Russian natural gas is pure insanity. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, absolute humidity has increased over the oceans by 8%, while global drought has increased by 29%. It is the trace greenhouse gases from human industrialization that reflect infrared photons back at the Earth, increasing global temperatures. Those gases remain in the atmosphere for between 300 and 1, 000 years. The use of natural gas is like running up a credit card that your descendants will pay for during that length of time.

A scarcity of energy is what the actual issue is. Fracking for natural gas is only a temporary solution to a global problem. Natural gas is better than coal but not as effective as nuclear. Unfortunately, nuclear, utilizing the present light water reactors, has a global limited supply of uranium 235. Solar and wind are the cheapest energy supply, ever, and continue to drop in price while natural gas, oil, and coal continue to increase in price. The problem with solar and wind is intermittency. That means they are ineffective as baseline power. As you increase the number of batteries on any grid to compensate for this problem, you increase the relative cost of solar and wind to the point they also become cost prohibitive right along with natural gas, oil, and coal. Up to this point, it appears we are basically screwed as a civilization with an energy supply issue. That gets us to two other possible solutions, molten salt reactors using thorium and deep geothermal drilling. Thorium is four times more abundant than uranium 238 and uranium 235 combined, consequently thorium is a vastly better energy source than uranium which still gives us 130 years of energy supply using this technology.

If on the other hand, we are looking for an energy supply that will last millions of years, advanced geothermal drilling is our best option. Quaise says they can use a millimeter-wave drilling system to drill 3X deeper than oil wells to supercritical water temperatures. The system repurposes existing gyrotron technology to drill 20 kilometers beneath Earth's surface at decommissioned coal-fired power plants at a cost of $0.01 to $0.03 per kilowatt/hour. No fracking is required, avoiding the potential for earthquakes that have occurred in other geothermal systems. Drilling using this technique is hoped to be fast, with boreholes aimed to be completed in 100 days. This technology uses standard drilling techniques with standard oil drilling rigs. There are about 735 oil rigs in the US, which figures to be about 7 boreholes per day or about 2, 000 heat-producing boreholes per year driving turbines generating electricity. There are about 1 million oil well holes already drilled 1/3rd the necessary depth from drilling for oil in the US, so you could easily add another 500 boreholes per year giving you a total of 2, 500 boreholes annually.