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> I kinda imagine that people in 2072 are going to dig this paper out, look at the flooded skyscrapers in the Manhattan skyline and wondering what kind of polit

> I kinda imagine that people in 2072 are going to dig this paper out, look at the flooded skyscrapers in the Manhattan skyline and wondering what kind of political perversity kept this dream from coming true. I don't feel like that question would be hard to answer at all, it's the same as "Who funded climate denial for decades?" - largely the fossil fuel industries (1) Is it "political perversity"? Yes, for sure, and increasingly blatant, given studies like the one reported on above. 1) https://www.campaigncc.org/climate_change/sceptics/funders https://www.campaigncc.org/climate_change/sceptics/funders https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/climate-denial-machine-how-fossil-fuel-industry-blocks-climate-action https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/climate-denial-ma... https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/20/the-big-business-of-climate-change-denial-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/20/the-big-business-of-climate-... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62225696 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62225696

PaulHoule 4y ago
That's half of it but I have been watching the energy situation for a long time, in fact I was a professional activist for about two years circa 2001 and it astonishes me how much the energy literature is like a stopped clock. For instance circa 2001 people were still citing papers from the 1970s about pyrolysis systems for biofuels and quoting the exact same cost numbers despite 30 years of inflation and other changes. (To be fair, advocates for new nuclear reactor types are pulling 50-year old research out of mothballs now.) Amory Lovins had a vision similar to the paper above in the 1980s which was very slow to arrive. I remember in the 1980s it was the nukes in Germany who were pushing heat pumps, Lovins was pushing combined heat-and-power fueled by natural gas. The immediate consequence of "the soft energy path" was that there was a lot of talk about solar and wind but a lot of gas turbines got installed. Today PV and wind generation have arrived and certainly the economics of storage have improved but it's not clear they are going to get good enough. What was annoying about Lovins though was that he always said that the soft energy path was going to be easy because it would save money and he was always facing this problem of: "Technology A that saves energy should pay back the investment in a short time, why don't people adopt technology A?" In some cases technology A just sucked. People always hated those compact fluorescent bulbs, it's a very different story from the LED bulbs that took over the world quickly. The book https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/lester-c-thurow/the-zero-sum-society/9780465085880/ https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/lester-c-thurow/the-zero-s... tells a compelling story of capital investment in an obsolete technology (steelmaking with the open hearth furnace) leading to lobbying, corruption and protectionism to prevent the US from switching to the superior basic oxygen furnace and thus damaging it's own economic competitiveness (expensive and low quality steel is an ingredient for expensive and low quality cars) One might make the case the fossil fuel industry is doing the same to preserve its capital investment but the scale is much larger and politics have certainly turned away from the kind of intervention that happened with steel.

PaulHoule 4y ago

That's half of it but I have been watching the energy situation for a long time, in fact I was a professional activist for about two years circa 2001 and it astonishes me how much the energy literature is like a stopped clock. For instance circa 2001 people were still citing papers from the 1970s about pyrolysis systems for biofuels and quoting the exact same cost numbers despite 30 years of inflation and other changes. (To be fair, advocates for new nuclear reactor types are pulling 50-year old research out of mothballs now.) Amory Lovins had a vision similar to the paper above in the 1980s which was very slow to arrive. I remember in the 1980s it was the nukes in Germany who were pushing heat pumps, Lovins was pushing combined heat-and-power fueled by natural gas. The immediate consequence of "the soft energy path" was that there was a lot of talk about solar and wind but a lot of gas turbines got installed. Today PV and wind generation have arrived and certainly the economics of storage have improved but it's not clear they are going to get good enough. What was annoying about Lovins though was that he always said that the soft energy path was going to be easy because it would save money and he was always facing this problem of: "Technology A that saves energy should pay back the investment in a short time, why don't people adopt technology A?" In some cases technology A just sucked. People always hated those compact fluorescent bulbs, it's a very different story from the LED bulbs that took over the world quickly. The book https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/lester-c-thurow/the-zero-sum-society/9780465085880/ https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/lester-c-thurow/the-zero-s... tells a compelling story of capital investment in an obsolete technology (steelmaking with the open hearth furnace) leading to lobbying, corruption and protectionism to prevent the US from switching to the superior basic oxygen furnace and thus damaging it's own economic competitiveness (expensive and low quality steel is an ingredient for expensive and low quality cars) One might make the case the fossil fuel industry is doing the same to preserve its capital investment but the scale is much larger and politics have certainly turned away from the kind of intervention that happened with steel.