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No idea who Gerald O'Neil is, but he's absolutely wrong. The entire world consumes about 20 TW of electricity. At the same time, we receive about 200000 TW of e
by credit_guy 4y ago
No idea who Gerald O'Neil is, but he's absolutely wrong. The entire world consumes about 20 TW of electricity. At the same time, we receive about 200000 TW of energy from the Sun. We are in a rough balance, so we also radiate about 200000 TW. 20 TW is not even a rounding error. If we increase our electricity consumption by a factor of 100, it's still going to be a rounding error compared to how much we receive from the Sun and then radiate into space.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoAnd 3% forcing is enough to cause cataclysm. Which gives us 100 to 200 years to get off the growth train. ie. we are exactly where we were WRT direct thermal forcing now as we were WRT GHG when the alarm first started being raised. So when your rube goldberg plasma machine produces ten times as much heat as work then we need to end exponential growth before the transition happens rather than 50-10 years after and immediately replace it with solar. If it produces 100x as much heat as work, it's not even useful for that. Luckily the process of extracting the energy and containing the plasma is so convoluted it's never going to be viable anyway even if the fusion step works. Inertial confinement might result in a viable machine, but I'm not holding my breath