Regarding: “ In this long interview with Robert Bryce, I was to find Chris Wright sounds…well, he actually sounds disconcertingly like One Percent Brighter a lot of the time. That’s a sign either that I’ve drifted farther to the right than I ever imagined possible, or that left-wing climate orthodoxy has spun so wildly out of control that sensible centrist takes now qualify you for a seat in the Trump cabinet.”
I’m with you 100% that we should be all-in on a Nuclear Renaissance — and I think Wright may be like-minded. I’ve read elsewhere that, notwithstanding that his career has been in oil & gas, his original primary interest going back to his MIT days was in nuclear energy.
With respect to your conclusion that “tail risks must be taken seriously even if they can’t be quantified”, I agree with that too. However, it all comes down to what “taken seriously” means. Climate-related spending must compete with other spending priorities, and it’s critical that they do so in an atmosphere of dispassionate, reality-based analysis. Other spending priorities include, for example, ensuring that the West is able to withstand political and, very possibly, military conflict with the China-led East. That, I would argue, is much more than a tail risk, and is likely to have a far more immediate effect on whether climate policies we argue about today turn out to even matter.
Quico, Chris Wright is good. His demolition of the economics of electric cars won me. Emission reduction is a climate framing that emerged from Marxism after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, and deserves the same suspicion directed at communism. I would like to pitch sunlight reflection to Wright. Also Marine Permaculture
On your point agreeing with Wright that the worst effects of climate change probably won’t really hit for another two or three generations, your subsequent analysis shows that may be dangerous. If we ignore emission reduction except based on market economics, climate can be repaired firstly with direct cooling technologies and then with methods to mine carbon from the air and sea. The worst effects of climate change are pretty bad now. On the precautionary principle we should aim to prevent tipping points.They could suddenly make things far worse and are a primary security problem. Our planet is likely to prove more fragile and sensitive than is now understood.
Look, this is a big slow ship to turn around. If we hit a tipping point, then we will deal with it. That’s just the way it is and no amount of arguing about probabilities is going to change people’s minds. Wright is the first energy secretary with any understanding of the oil industry at all- and he is a straight up genius entrepreneur to boot. Let’s see what he can do!
"Your general political orientation explains your tolerance for this kind of aggregate climate risk better than anything climate science can bring to the table."
Yep. High risk low probability events aren't quite completely ignorable, but neither is it immediately evident that it's worth suffering any significant certain poverty and casualties now for uncertain and potentially insignificant future benefit.
After all, potential extinction level events are hardly limited to climate: nuclear war, superbug pandemic, super flare, asteroid strike, AI uprising, runway Von Neumann machines, genetically engineered organisms, etc... Yet we don't radically restructure our society and economy to minimize each of these risks at any great cost.
It seems most reasonable to me to focus more generally on building resilience and baseline capacity to respond quickly and effectively to new threats as they become sufficiently known to make informed decisions about the trade-offs among available courses of action. In short, the faster we get richer and higher tech, the greater the likelihood that we'll have the resources and means to respond effectively as needed, regardless which low probability event occurs.
In regards to climate, the overwhelming democratic majority favor an "all of the above" approach to making energy as affordable as possible. Drastic cuts to emissions via deliberate degrowth are politically off the table. OTOH, it's not like fossil fuels are infinite and energy independence is an increasingly critical national security issue as AI demands ever greater power, so I think there's a really solid case to be made for heavy investment into advancing nuclear power, even aside from the climate case as a way to reduce emissions without sacrificing power. Weirdly though, the Climate Cult seem actively resistant to ever supporting a non-emissions-based argument for anything, even if it would also reduce emissions. It's like they're morally offended at the idea that emissions reductions could be a mere happy side effect of pursuing other priorities, like they would rather accomplish nothing because they don't get moral credit if their measures don't require painful sacrifices.
Regarding: “ In this long interview with Robert Bryce, I was to find Chris Wright sounds…well, he actually sounds disconcertingly like One Percent Brighter a lot of the time. That’s a sign either that I’ve drifted farther to the right than I ever imagined possible, or that left-wing climate orthodoxy has spun so wildly out of control that sensible centrist takes now qualify you for a seat in the Trump cabinet.”
I assure you that it is the latter.
I dunno man, I'm getting old!
I’m with you 100% that we should be all-in on a Nuclear Renaissance — and I think Wright may be like-minded. I’ve read elsewhere that, notwithstanding that his career has been in oil & gas, his original primary interest going back to his MIT days was in nuclear energy.
With respect to your conclusion that “tail risks must be taken seriously even if they can’t be quantified”, I agree with that too. However, it all comes down to what “taken seriously” means. Climate-related spending must compete with other spending priorities, and it’s critical that they do so in an atmosphere of dispassionate, reality-based analysis. Other spending priorities include, for example, ensuring that the West is able to withstand political and, very possibly, military conflict with the China-led East. That, I would argue, is much more than a tail risk, and is likely to have a far more immediate effect on whether climate policies we argue about today turn out to even matter.
Quico, Chris Wright is good. His demolition of the economics of electric cars won me. Emission reduction is a climate framing that emerged from Marxism after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, and deserves the same suspicion directed at communism. I would like to pitch sunlight reflection to Wright. Also Marine Permaculture
On your point agreeing with Wright that the worst effects of climate change probably won’t really hit for another two or three generations, your subsequent analysis shows that may be dangerous. If we ignore emission reduction except based on market economics, climate can be repaired firstly with direct cooling technologies and then with methods to mine carbon from the air and sea. The worst effects of climate change are pretty bad now. On the precautionary principle we should aim to prevent tipping points.They could suddenly make things far worse and are a primary security problem. Our planet is likely to prove more fragile and sensitive than is now understood.
Look, this is a big slow ship to turn around. If we hit a tipping point, then we will deal with it. That’s just the way it is and no amount of arguing about probabilities is going to change people’s minds. Wright is the first energy secretary with any understanding of the oil industry at all- and he is a straight up genius entrepreneur to boot. Let’s see what he can do!
"Your general political orientation explains your tolerance for this kind of aggregate climate risk better than anything climate science can bring to the table."
Yep. High risk low probability events aren't quite completely ignorable, but neither is it immediately evident that it's worth suffering any significant certain poverty and casualties now for uncertain and potentially insignificant future benefit.
After all, potential extinction level events are hardly limited to climate: nuclear war, superbug pandemic, super flare, asteroid strike, AI uprising, runway Von Neumann machines, genetically engineered organisms, etc... Yet we don't radically restructure our society and economy to minimize each of these risks at any great cost.
It seems most reasonable to me to focus more generally on building resilience and baseline capacity to respond quickly and effectively to new threats as they become sufficiently known to make informed decisions about the trade-offs among available courses of action. In short, the faster we get richer and higher tech, the greater the likelihood that we'll have the resources and means to respond effectively as needed, regardless which low probability event occurs.
In regards to climate, the overwhelming democratic majority favor an "all of the above" approach to making energy as affordable as possible. Drastic cuts to emissions via deliberate degrowth are politically off the table. OTOH, it's not like fossil fuels are infinite and energy independence is an increasingly critical national security issue as AI demands ever greater power, so I think there's a really solid case to be made for heavy investment into advancing nuclear power, even aside from the climate case as a way to reduce emissions without sacrificing power. Weirdly though, the Climate Cult seem actively resistant to ever supporting a non-emissions-based argument for anything, even if it would also reduce emissions. It's like they're morally offended at the idea that emissions reductions could be a mere happy side effect of pursuing other priorities, like they would rather accomplish nothing because they don't get moral credit if their measures don't require painful sacrifices.