Do? I'm beginning to think the best course of action would be to stop subsidising Wind & Solar [because they cannot be relied on] and instead subsidise Nuclear.
My "do different" is to subsidize nothing but to tax net emissions [meaning in practice an excise tax on first sale of a fossil fuel in proportion to its carbon content and subsidy per unit of CO2 removed and permanently sequestered], remove the very substantial regulatory barriers to development of nuclear (and geothermal) energy, and subsidize R&D. Some of that R&D subsidy could be in the form of a payment per unit of zero CO2 energy produced by an experimental technology.
A detailed and comprehensive debunking of the kind of thinking that our policy makers are being exposed to.
Your detailed analysis shows that adequate technology for doing net-zero by wind, solar and storage is decades or even centuries away.
And we're all ignoring the basic Physics of this which tells us that atmospheric CO2 is already 'saturated' (>300ppm) and hence adding even lots more will hardly increase its greenhouse contribution and global temperature. My garden likes it too.
In other words, we're trying to solve the wrong problem.
So what is the policy implication? DO more? DO less? DO different? And who should DO it?
Thank you for your comment.
Do? I'm beginning to think the best course of action would be to stop subsidising Wind & Solar [because they cannot be relied on] and instead subsidise Nuclear.
But I need to do more info-digging.
My "do different" is to subsidize nothing but to tax net emissions [meaning in practice an excise tax on first sale of a fossil fuel in proportion to its carbon content and subsidy per unit of CO2 removed and permanently sequestered], remove the very substantial regulatory barriers to development of nuclear (and geothermal) energy, and subsidize R&D. Some of that R&D subsidy could be in the form of a payment per unit of zero CO2 energy produced by an experimental technology.
A detailed and comprehensive debunking of the kind of thinking that our policy makers are being exposed to.
Your detailed analysis shows that adequate technology for doing net-zero by wind, solar and storage is decades or even centuries away.
And we're all ignoring the basic Physics of this which tells us that atmospheric CO2 is already 'saturated' (>300ppm) and hence adding even lots more will hardly increase its greenhouse contribution and global temperature. My garden likes it too.
In other words, we're trying to solve the wrong problem.