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An abundance of clean energy would solve a pretty huge amount of our problems for quite a while. That's not to say that everything would be great forever...but
by darawk 7y ago
An abundance of clean energy would solve a pretty huge amount of our problems for quite a while. That's not to say that everything would be great forever...but we'd have a whole lot more breathing room to figure things out.
- hanoz 7y agoMore breathing room for mankind, yes, but not necessary the rest of the natural world.
- darawk 7y agoI'm not really sure what you mean by that. Firstly, we are part of the natural world as much as anything else is. Secondly, having access to clean and abundant energy would allow us to do a lot of things to preserve the other parts of the natural world that we are currently not doing because it's too expensive.
- hanoz 7y agoI did say the rest of the natural world. If it turns out that the only way to bring down carbon emissions is to make low carbon energy much cheaper, then why would anyone think that we'd spend our newfound wealth on cleaning up our act in other matters? There are a multitude of cases of human over-expansion proving catastrophic for other natural environments which have nothing at all to do with climate change yet have been totally eclipsed by the issue. I don't know why anyone would think that much cheaper energy would help those cases rather than make them worse.
- darawk 7y ago> If it turns out that the only way to bring down carbon emissions is to make low carbon energy much cheaper, then why would anyone think that we'd spend our newfound wealth on cleaning up our act in other matters? Humans are consistently willing to devote some percentage of their wealth to nature preservation. That percentage is probably more or less fixed. Therefore bringing down the cost of doing so substantially increases the amount of nature preservation that can be achieved.