Comment by mort96
19 hours ago
I agree. I just wanted to point out that to "stop burning fossil fuels" requires more than green electricity generation. Green electricity generation is 100% necessary, just not in itself sufficient, as was implied by "Would have been doable if we could have switched to nuclear".
Agreed.
We'll never stop burning fossil fuels -- not in our lifetimes, anyway. They're too useful.
Like: Cement kilns. They're ridiculously intensive of energy, and they're necessary. They burn approximately everything, from coal and natural gas to heavy fuel oil and petcoke to used tires. About the cleanest thing I've heard of them burning is old railroad ties, which isn't really so great either. :)
But if we solve some of the other big industrial users and mostly leave the cement factories, then that's... that's actually pretty good.
And we can make cement with electricity. There are companies working on scalable processes to accomplish exactly that. Electricity has just historically been very cost-prohibitive compared to alternatives in the cement-making world for it to be practical.
But! If we'd landed in the age of cheap electricity instead of this timeline, then that process would probably have been solved long ago; the incentives would have been so great that solving it would be inevitable.
And it really may have once been possible at one point to have steered things in that direction, and it even may still be possible today. But we're certainly not there (yet?).