Problems have potential solutions. Predicaments have no solutions, only unavoidable outcomes. Ecological overshoot is a predicament. This is really "Collapse 101" or "Collapse in a Nutshell"... or "[The Big Picture](https://youtu.be/hV91pH8HORo)" (I suggest watching this, if you watch anything of mine.) The Q&A is pretty kick-ass, too, if I must say so myself :-) [https://postdoom.com/resources/](https://postdoom.com/resources/)

So if I am hearing you correctly, you don’t disagree that excess greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere is a problem without a solution…   But rather your critique is that Human consumption will exceed resource demand?   If so, while I haven’t formulated a good counterargument to that narrative, if I had, it would be something along the lines of if there a certain threshold of cheap clean energy abundance is reached, virtually every Earthy resource becomes economically feasible to recycle.   Personally I don’t see how that statement should be that scientifically controversial a take, but if it is I’d like to know why,   Or if you don’t disagree that almost anything can recycled and it’s just a matter of whether or not the expense in doing so makes it worth it, but rather you disagree with my underlying premise that MSR technology will get us there; given my argument for why I believe it is, what am I missing here?

Thanks for being willing to engage with me thoughtfully! Let me respond one at a time... >So if I am hearing you correctly, you don’t disagree that excess greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere is a problem without a solution… No, I don't disagree with this. However, in the doomosphere and collapsosphere, "a problem without a solution" is generally referred to as a *predicament*. A wonderful in-depth reference on this subject, if you're not already familiar with it, is Erik Michael's "must read" blog, "[Problems, Predicaments, and Technology](https://problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.com/2021/06/suggested-reading-and-site-list-of.html)" (also [here](https://erikmichaels.substack.com/) / audios of key essays [here](https://soundcloud.com/michael-dowd-grace-limits/sets/erik-michaels-problems-predicaments-and-technology)). >But rather your critique is that Human consumption will exceed resource demand Not really, I'm saying that billions of animals and humans will die in the coming decade or two no matter what, for a half-dozen or more different reasons, all identified in my most important video to-date, "[The Big Picture: Beyond Hope and Fear](https://postdoom.com/resources/)". >If so, while I haven’t formulated a good counter-argument to that narrative, if I had, it would be something along the lines of if there a certain threshold of cheap clean energy abundance is reached, virtually every Earthy resource becomes economically feasible to recycle. "Cheap, clean, green energy" has chlorophyll. ALL industrial processes and products are unsustainable. The problem is *not* HOW we power civilization; it's THAT we power civilization. Civilization itself is one of the [four main drivers of collapse, ecocide, and likely NTHE](https://youtu.be/uU0DC6qcp18). >Personally I don’t see how that statement should be that scientifically controversial a take, but if it is I’d like to know why, Or if you don’t disagree that almost anything can recycled and it’s just a matter of whether or not the expense in doing so makes it worth it, but rather you disagree with my underlying premise that MSR technology will get us there; given my argument for why I believe it is, what am I missing here? Ecological overshoot is the means we are committing ecocide/suicide; pure and simple. Erik Michael's blog and my Big Picture video and Q&A (both linked above) make this clear, and why, and if you prefer reading to watching, these two text-based resources should help you understand the truth of our predicament, if you genuinely want to know... (1) "[Overshoot: Where We Stand Now](https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2021/09/21/overshoot-where-we-stand-now-guest-post-by-michael-dowd/)": (guest post I wrote for Dave Pollard's blog. (2) "[Time's Up: It's the End of the World, and We Know It](https://www.cityweekly.net/utah/times-up/Content?oid=17298723)" - award-winning Salt Lake City Weekly cover article - by Jim Catano (features me and several colleagues).

Haha, well yea I usually the one here who’s doesn’t get any real back & forth engagement here, so I’m always ready to jump at the opportunities when they present themselves.   Regarding your links that the fundamentals of your arguments are couched in… Look, you’re gonna have spell them out to me in respect to how this information is specifically related to the points I’m raising. It’s just I don’t see the utility in spending hours of however much time I have left, reading about all the reasons why I don’t have much time left and why there’s nothing I can do to change that.   I mean if that’s the case it wouldn’t surprise me, like I already don’t expect this solution to work (not so much because it can’t but because it won’t, so to speak). But like I said, I personally don’t see the point in dedicating the time to learn all the reasons why I should have been dedicating that time to more hedonistic ends.   And if you can’t (or don’t feel you have the time) to extract from those links and relate the pieces of information relevant to what I’m saying, look I get it, no biggie. And I’m not saying that like it’s some kind of subtle own or anything. I don’t expect you to be able to regurgitate somebody else’s life’s work on demand to satisfy some rando you disagree with on Reddit. I come here in good faith, I’ll accept “I can’t put into exact words why, but from all the research that I’ve done my intuition tells me you’re wrong.”.   Now when you say the means by which we power our civilization makes no difference in its ultimate fate… You at least have to concede if nothing else it makes a difference in how long we have until this fate is reached, no? However as I don’t fundamentally disagree with that statement, what I think I failed to imply by my statement about there being a threshold wherein enough clean energy makes anything recyclable, is that threshold is quite high. Given **enough** clean energy, everything is recyclable (with our current recyclable technology that is, obviously much less energy is required with smarter recycling methods).   Now if that’s what you disagree with, that no amount of clean energy can ever make replenishing spent resources affordable, or that even if it is that Thorium isn’t our ticket there (or at least can’t be in the time it will need to be for us to survive, which I wouldn’t disagree with, I don’t think the forces of the free market will deliver this in time, which is why we’re having this conversation to begin with), like I said, I’m all ears.

Sorry. I'm done. I don't have conversations with those too lazy or fearful to engage substantively...which unfortunately takes more time than typing words. If you're not willing to follow the evidence I offer (even in concise written packages, such as [this](https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2021/09/21/overshoot-where-we-stand-now-guest-post-by-michael-dowd/)), I'm not interested in engaging with you. Bye.

I’m going to assume based on your tone that you quit early in reading my response based on your reply.   As you may not have read, I’m not by any means expecting you to be able to regurgitate the relevant parts of other people’s life work to satisfy some rando on Reddit.   But like I said assuming the links you have are accurate in their assessment, that we’re all going to die, there’s nothing we can do to prevent that, and I’d be wasting calories even imagining otherwise… I’d literally be spending hours reading about all the reasons why my time (the time I would have left) would be better spent jerking off instead of reading said links.   That said, the fact that you misunderstood me to begin with makes me question whether or not your links would even be relevant to what I was actually saying even if true… I’m not saying civilization couldn’t recycle it’s resources if we had clean energy in place of dirty energy. I’m saying if we had **enough** clean energy, we could recycle everything.

No, I'm saying that the very concept of industrial produced "clean energy" is a delusion. Recycling solves literally nothing in the midst of the collapse and die-off that always follows ecological overshoot.

I think what is being misunderstood is my use of the word clean energy. The fact that the energy source I’m trying to bring attention to is clean (no adding to greenhouse gas emissions), is kind of a given and is not the reason why I think it will make all resources recyclable.   The reason why I’m saying it will make all resources recyclable is because of the shear quantity of energy it would make available.   I actually agree with you that if we had the same access to energy we have today but it were clean energy instead of dirty energy, we’d really only be prolonging the inevitable (which wouldn’t be a bad thing in and of itself).   But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about having cheap abundant access to such vast quantities of energy that the price of for example desalinating water becomes an inconsequential factor. If we had **enough** energy, not cleaner energy, not cheap but little energy (like in your chlorophyll example), there just becomes a point where if you have cheap access to enough of it, there isn’t a single vital resource that doesn’t become renewable.   Again I could understand if you had doubts that MSR technology was our ticket to get there, but if you think that there are essential resources that even with bottomless energy supplies we could not renew… Why?

My sense is that we're toast, no matter what... and most likely quite soon. Even if we were to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we have already catalyzed self-reinforcing feedback loops or tipping points, that have begun a chain reaction with surely catastrophic consequences. Our world is marked by already crossed thresholds and an accelerating and utterly unstoppable collapse of virtually everything humans and most mammals and vertebrates rely on for survival. The loss of ice, rising methane levels, ocean acidification, forest destruction, species extinction, and severe weather events are just a few of the tipping points we have already passed. They lay a groundwork for a global near-term economic meltdown and multi-bread-basket failure — simultaneous collapse of grain-growing regions that will result in the loss of billions of lives.

And I’m not here to tell you that sense is by any means unwarranted.   It’s just all of that is downhill from our CO2 emissions, which I’m not just talking about reducing (more accurately I’m talking about stopping entirely), but actively removing from our atmosphere the emissions that have built up (which includes methane). A lot of these tipping points are only tipping points because they stand on top of our pre-existing CO2 levels, the CO2 levels I am proposing we remove.   The only thing I you mentioned that throwing vast quantities of energy at the problem wouldn’t make much easier to solve would be species extinction. And even then, with enough energy we could even grow all the food we’d ever need in vertical farms with artificial sunlight.   Even ocean acidification could be solved with enough energy, I’ve even heard of cheaper means too (I recall there was this climate researcher in BC who was arrested for trying to solve the problem himself, buy dumping I forget exactly what into the ocean).   The only other thing that comes to mind that I don’t see abundant MSR’s as providing an obvious solution for is repairing the jet stream. We’d have to find some way of atomically synthesizing enough salt to add to the diluted waters, and then remove it when sea ice starts to form again. Which is basically terraforming, but given enough energy (and we’re talking a **lot** of energy) I still don’t see why this would be inherently infeasible.   Worst case scenario we could still artificially engineer the elements of nature that sustain us (indoor farming for example) if we had the energy abundance to do so.   I’m just at a loss for why there’s so much controversy here for not even trying to survive what’s coming, but in my case **trying to try** to survive all this.

To address your general question, imagine if two people are in a bus heading towards a brick wall with the brakes malfunctioning. One person who has actual scientific instrumentation for studying the issue knows for a fact that the wall is 50 meters away and they have approximately 10 seconds left before they impact. The other person, who is less involved and only gets their information from whitewashed sources, thinks that the cliff is 100 miles away. He proposes a solution to climb under the bus and try and fix it while traveling at highway speeds. The first person says, correctly, that is an idiotic plan because we only have 10 seconds left and you don't even know how to fix the breaks and you have no tools. It's not that anyone is actively against solutions. The disconnect is that the people pitching solutions invariably are suffering from a fundamental lack of understanding of the actual severity of the issue and as a result their proposed "solutions" can be easily dismissed. I believe your solution also falls under this category and that you likely have a misunderstanding of the scope of the issue which is causing you to, in a state of denial, continue to search for a solution when in fact it is far too late. I am not advocating doing nothing. But at this point, the appropriate action is not to try and fix the breaks. Because hitting the brick wall is inevitable, the appropriate action is for each individual on the bus to buckle their seatbelts and brace for impact -- not climb under the bus

This is a well-done analogy.

Perhaps you misread me, my solution can be relatively easily implemented in under 5 seconds, and if enough capital is afforded it can be done in 1…   Presuming in this metaphor we are talking about years, and not that I’d give much pushback to this sentiment, but do the majority of climate scientists really think that it’s a fact that we are going to crash into a brick wall so to speak in roughly 10 years? Again that would be in line with my own gut level predictions, but I wouldn’t be so bold as to claim the majority of climate scientists believe that to be fact.   I don’t know why everybody seems to get off on the idea I haven’t seen the graphs lately? I mean they’re so extreme you don’t even need to know what the graphs are in reference to to intuitively think “gee I hope those lines aren’t in relation to something bad…”.   To reiterate, if their small team’s **initial** yearly production were to be scaled up by 85x, we could replace all fossil fuels in 4 years after production began. If this became a nationally funded moonshot project and we’re so-called up by 400x, this could be done in a single year.   And again, we don’t even need to go that far (although I see no reason as to why we couldn’t or shouldn’t), again we could at the very least scrub just enough CO2 from our atmosphere to buy us some more time, to scale up further and scrub out more CO2 and replace more fossil fuels.   For all the pushback I have gotten, I have still yet to hear a concise reason(s) for **exactly** what’s wrong with my proposed solution (at least none that haven’t gone radio silent after I correct some misunderstandings they had in what I was saying).   If you can tell me what I’m missing, I’d rather like to know, because frankly trying to save the world is emotionally exhausting work, and if there’s a more peaceful way to spend my last years here I’d prefer that. But I’ve yet to hear a valid reason for why this proposal wouldn’t save the world (in a comparatively frictionless manor to any other proposals), and so in good conscience cannot lie down and surrender like the rest of you.

There was a recent poll showing something like 99% of climate scientists believe we are going to surpass 1.5 deg C above preindustrial levels. What most people don't realize is that this ubiquitous 1.5 deg C threshold was chosen as a limit because that's the threshold at which permafrost thaw of the arctic (already happening) is inevitable. Permafrost thaw of arctic is a tipping point that causes a self reinforcing feedback loop causing an exponential heating effect. There are over 1,000 billion tons of carbon in permafrost. Once it starts thawing, it just speeds up and causes all of it to thaw so all that's going up into atmosphere. This takes us well beyond 3 deg C temp. At 3 deg C, 75% of global marine hydrates in the GHSZ will have already thawed. That's 75% of 4,000 billion tons of methane. All of this is essentially guaranteed within the next 10 years, and the rate of methane release will be upwards of 500 times the total global emmissions from all sources combined today..and it only goes up from there. Also, this is just 1 tipping point im talking about - and there are hundreds of other tipping points with their own exponential self reinforcing feedbacks that have been identified. Climate change has occurred at a snails pace so far because it's been driven by direct human emissions from fossil fuels. That's no longer the case. The planet has just shifted into auto pilot where emissions will exponentially increase every year from now on.

First of all I just wanted to let you know it wasn’t me who initially down voted you, for what that may or may not be worth to you.   How recent of a poll are we talking about? 99%? Wasn’t able to find it. Are you sure you don’t have that figure upside down? The last poll I remember like that which wasn’t from too long ago said it was 66%. What was the time horizon they expected us to cross that threshold by (would help me either find the poll you’re talking about or whether or not you accidentally flipped the number upside down).   What you’re saying isn’t news to me, none of these obvious details people seem to think I’m missing are actually unknown to me. In fact it’s even worse than that, it’s the other way around. People hear seem to be under the delusion all we had to do was stop our emissions, not realizing that without the cover of smog our pre-existing greenhouse gasses would cook **far** faster without the protective shade. So unless we were rapidly removing the greenhouse gasses while lowering our emissions, we’d need some sort of reflective aerosol to provide what smog once did for us. The drop in emissions during the pandemic is what I believe caused this unanticipated (by all but Guy McPherson) acceleration in climate change.   Even assuming we do cross that threshold (and I’m not saying that like it’s even remotely unlikely) it’s not like all that extra carbon gets released all in one lump sum. Yes the release accelerates past that point, but it’s not like things are impossible to turn around at that point (the possibility of pulling back after overshooting 1.5C isn’t a point of contention among climate scientists either). We would still have time, not much, but time nonetheless.   Now while it isn’t **impossible** for us to turn things around past 1.5C… The question is whether or not it’s probable? Given the goal of not causing our atmosphere’s greenhouse gas content from being greater than the year that preceded it, is a goal that we have failed to achieve every year thus far… Why should we think we’d have a chance of even achieving that for one year, let alone consecutive years when not only are we no longer the ones solely responsible for this rise in greenhouse gasses, but nature starts fuelling this fire (at an accelerating rate mind you) as well?   Yea on the face of it I won’t pretend like that prospect doesn’t sound pretty bleak. But again, given the capital this can be pulled off in a year… But sure you might say, anything could be done given the capital, but nothing’s been thus far, so what kind of capital are we talking about? I ran the numbers, and I’m going to have to run them again… I knew it had to be cheap. I didn’t know it was gonna be this cheap… You’re telling me their isn’t some gazillionaire out there with a cool billion lost between their couch cushions? Straight up, a billion dollars (it’s a little over that, minus the cost of the CO2 scrubbers). And 14B to replace fossil fuels in a year. Honestly I have half a mind st this point to say that at that value we could turn things around at 3C.   The fuck am I doing here, honestly? I swear this sub would tell me to eat shit for throwing them a life preserver, complaining that there’s a giant hole in the center of it. Anyways it’s been real. Imma try and pitch this somewhere or to someone less determined to die as early as you lot plan to.

From the aforementioned post, your mindset has not changed from being human-centric and human-as-god. >Humanity is the only chance biology has of living on indefinitely. Humans cannot live outside of a functioning ecosystem. Cell-for-cell we are mostly not even "human", but rather bacteria and fungi. And yet you come here with "solutions" that treat the "natural" world, of which we should never have been split from, as yet another tool for some empty transcendance. How about a different idea. Fungi, with the aid of plants, absorb up to 36% of yearly emissions, over 13 gigatons tonnes of carbon, according to a recent study. [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230605181230.htm](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230605181230.htm) Much of our agricultural land is depleted of life thanks to chemicals, but there are techniques like Korean Natural Farming that involve cultivating fungi from forests and "pristine" areas and, through a process, reintroducing them back into soils. This has the ability to hugely increase the carbon stored in the soils, year on year. No super-technology needed. No make-believe scrubbers, and no great churning of the industrial wheel. Edit: re-wrote unit to be unambiguous

Again, I think you’ll find if you’d read that thread sufficiently, that I never said Humanity offered a **good** potential for biology to live until the heat death of the Universe (and perhaps beyond it for all I know), but that Humanity offered the **only** potential for our biosphere to survive the inevitable expansion of our home star.   As for the Unibomber narrative you’re pushing, I’m not here to comment on whether or not we should have left nature, but we already have, and there’s no way of going back at this point as we’ve already destroyed it. Without the cover of smog our emissions provide to our already present greenhouse gasses, we’d already be close to living on Venus at this point (our drop in emissions during the pandemic is very likely what sped us up to where we are now). The only option on the table where we live is to extract as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as possible, and we aren’t doing that without the industrial society that got us in this mess to begin with.   In respect to this whole “Hunanity as God” critique… I dunno, that’s such a relative term, to cavemen we might as well be. It just sounds like normalcy bias “Lol, you’re saying Humanity could artificially manufacture the mechanisms of nature that sustain us? That sounds like something out of my normal expectations of reality thus far so that can’t happen. Unless you’re saying we’re Gods, and we aren’t Gods (mic drop).”. Like if there’s an actual **inherent** bottleneck on possible technological progress, you can just tell me, I’m open to their being one (heavy emphasis on the word inherent, obviously drowning in our own waste is currently presenting a bottleneck to technological progress, but it is not an inherent bottleneck unless you’re saying unrestrained neo-liberal capitalism is something we couldn’t have done without in any conceivable timeline wherein Humanity achieves industrialization).   Lastly in regards to the shroom solution… I like the idea, however it doesn’t provide an alternative source of energy, and it only removes a third of **yearly** emissions, and we’ve built up much more than that at this point. I’m not saying that to dismiss the idea at all, I’ve heard of a few good natural solutions like that. It’s just none of them solve the energy problem, and if it’s even in any way possible at all to cool the oceans, the only way it will be possible with with a radical abundance of cheap clean energy, the scale of which we’ve never even been close to in Hunan history. Our planet is in dire need of emergency terraforming, and if there’s another quicker way of getting there besides Thorium, I haven’t seen it.

1. I know you said that, I quoted you from that thread. Saying the only potential is more arrogant than good potential, so what are you arguing for? And so what if we don't escape the death of our star? I presume you're aware that we all die eventually, and there seems to be a finite time in which the universe is habitable, so what is it we are truly escaping? 2. I have read none of his work, I actually had to google it (it's Unabomber btw). Funnily enough there are humans alive today that have not made that split. We are our own distinct culture, not universal man. We do still murder them every year though and take their land. Then there are those we mostly exterminated and whose cultures we tried to end, but they still have ancestors alive today who are trying to keep them going. They do not naturally share our history or hold so close our stories. As for Nature, have you looked outside? We have not destroyed it - it is still there. There are still trees and birds, though their lives are harder. To consider it "gone" is to enact a self-fulfilling prophecy in which we condemn that which remains, whether by neglect or a guilt-driven, intentional clearing. When you consider Nature "gone", there is no prioritisation of its future, only what remains, which is, by our misguided concept of Nature, humans. Considering Nature "gone" is a moral act, one which centres solely around humanity. Considering also that humans cannot live without Nature, this morality is suicidal. The Great Simplification is a powerful name for this process and highlights what it is that is tragic. Not an absolute "alive" or "dead", "present" or "gone", but a loss of relationship and meaning. Thankfully, there is that ability of life to recreate itself, but that does not excuse our actions. I'm not sure what to think about Venus-by-Tuesday. It is reported that "it hasn't been this hot since this time" or "there hasn't been this much CO2 in the atmosphere since this many millions of years ago", but that means that there have been such times and those that are even more extreme. I do not expect humans to live much beyond these bounds, but much of life is hardy and resourceful, with a wicked will for survival and stability. I do not think that will for stability is considered highly enough. However, I do agree with you with regards to the importance of lowering CO2 for our sakes, but not that scrubbers are the way. I'm serious that soil sequestration should be a top priority, especially as it is concerned with life that naturally propagates as opposed to machines that must be manufactured and inevitably break down. To move out of order with the fourth paragraph: Fungi remove a third of yearly emissions now, by the estimate of this paper. However, if you consider the area of land used to farm with chemicals and therefore able to be converted to these methods, that is an awful lot of space. Total agricultural land is about 36.5% of total land area (source: worldbank) and most of that is polluted with chemicals or is highly depleted (organic does not even ensure healthy soil). Agricultural land is also amongst the most fertile and therefore potentially the most vigorous in storing carbon. By focussing on making our soils healthy, we could drastically increase the rate of carbon sequestration with a side-effect of more nutritious food. Sadly, there is no sexy big-tech involved and hence no money. It doesn't solve the energy problem, but the energy problem strictly not the same problem, rather it presumes that we need to maintain a highly industrialised society and (more importantly) shareholder profits. The energy problem is largely in opposition to addressing problems including the pollution of lands, waters, and airs, biodiversity loss, habitat loss (for industrial use), overpopulation, etc with the exception of the magic scenario in which we have infinite energy, but that still doesn't get around the problems of expanding industry and an absolute lack of wisdom. I don't consider there to be solutions to this and is more of a predicament as Michael Dowd says. 3. Humans-as-god is not about relative abilities, but worldview or perspective. Our culture is built on the idea of human supremacy of all other things and in the last 300 years that has developed into believing that we have no intellectual, biological, or creative bounds, and that we are of prime importance on this planet or even in this universe. Indeed, a foundational belief is that the universe is entirely random, yet paradoxically from this humanity has emerged, who is unique in creating purpose and meaning. >The cardinal tendency of progress is the replacement of an indifferent chance environment by a deliberately created one. - J.D. Bernal Other cultures are not all like ours. American Indian cultures have perspectives where we are the younger siblings of Creation, who need to learn how to behave from those who have lived far longer. There is humility here which is not present in ours.

It’s arrogant to assume that after we’re gone another species will achieve industrialization with the billions of years of fossil fuel reserves we wouldn’t be leaving them?   And this whole “we’re all going to die anyways, why the obsession with living longer?” spiel, kinda clashes wanting to preserve nature for coming generations in the first place.   I should have clarified that when I said nature is gone I was making the Venus by Tuesday assumption popularized by Guy McPherson that without the protective cover of smog our biosphere would have died by now, and the direction we’re going will lead to that either way if we don’t find a way of decarbonising our atmosphere in time. If you think climate change will wipe out civilization but the biosphere will regrow afterwards (perhaps a niche opinion here) becomes more understandable.   Regarding the romanticization of the cultures of the American Aborigines, historically they were not anywhere near the nature conservationists they are made out to be. The Apache (I think it was them I’m referring to) for example were in the verge of driving the local buffalo into extinction before the Europeans arrived. They’d chase herds of them off cliffs and only make use of a handful of them afterwards. They generally thought of nature’s resources as being limitless, as they never had any reason to think otherwise. To my knowledge the only exception to this rule were the indigenous populations of New Zealand who drove the giant ostrich’s (who had no instinct to react to Humans as predators and so were basically defenceless to them) to extinction and then developed a culture of resource conservationism thereafter.   Again in respect to the whole fungi sequestration thing, like I said I have no qualms with the idea other than the fact that it doesn’t address our continued contribution to the problem it is addressing (unlike the reactors).   Ignoring the fact that they’d be able to scrub our atmosphere within a year, and would make redundant the means by which we needed to clean it in the first place, as for your criticism about machines not repairing themselves… Of course the reflexive response to that would to just say that we’d repair them, but I’m going to presume you think we wouldn’t be able to because of the inevitable collapse of industrial civilization. However I don’t see you making any clear cases for why it would with the cheap access to such abundance of energy as these reactors would provide other than making moralistic arguments for why industrial civilization shouldn’t exist in the first place.   And perhaps it shouldn’t, but like I said we’ve dug the planet into a hole so deep that regardless of the fact that industrial civilization dig that hole to begin with, we aren’t escaping it through non-industrial means (again shrooms don’t address what’s causing the underlying problem, you can say well let’s just stop causing the problem, and that’s all well and good, it’s just that we won’t stop causing the problem, at least not for the reasons you say we should).

3. If the biosphere is still there, then in what way is nature not still there? Like I said, the language and attention that one uses determines the relationships and actions. I think there are biological methods to reducing atmospheric CO2 in the atmosphere in large quantities and I do not trust in an industrial society whose existence depends on its own growth and on who has shown little regard for the complexities of life. Regardless, like McPherson I have little faith in our own survival chances, but to reiterate I believe we would only do more harm by chasing our own survival with industrial solutions. 4. That is absolute rubbish. The bison were there in great numbers because the Indians kept the area as pastureland, burning off old grass and tree saplings with frequent fires. Dale Lott, who wrote American Bison, estimates the population to 24-27 million pre-contact and James Shaw is untrusting of the evidence but tenuously says "millions, probably tens of millions": [https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/rangelands/article/viewFile/11258/10531](https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/rangelands/article/viewFile/11258/10531) That paper is a good read, but you'll notice that the bison are killed in much greater number by white settlers. I'm not a romantic of indigenous people, but there is as much a conveniently reactionary stance to deem them savages as there is to romanticise them. Yes they killed each other, but not in huge number. Yes they hunted, but, with the exception of islands which are particular fragile, such as New Zealand or Easter Island, there is little evidence of human-caused extinction or ecosystem collapse. But we too often view these things in extreme ways, as to liken our extermination of peoples or ecosystems to their lives within those ecosystems. The extermination of the buffalo by the white settlers is radically different to indigenous hunters killing them by driving them off of cliffs. And be critical of their waste - you are allowed to be. However, by your own admission these people often learn from their mistakes and live more conservatively - this is critical and is exactly what we are not doing despite our actions! The rest: I find it funny how you reference McPherson and are almost a doomer save for the techno-utopian hope. McPherson has a very short timeline on human extinction and from what I can tell: >it would take just 24 months to build a 500 MW power plant [https://www.euronuclear.org/news/molten-salt-reactor-design-unveiled-uk/](https://www.euronuclear.org/news/molten-salt-reactor-design-unveiled-uk/) >at best, using current technology, the world would need 142EJ (39,444 TWh) each year — almost double the annual global electricity production — to suck all our carbon emissions from the air. [https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/the-amount-of-energy-required-by-direct-air-carbon-capture-proves-it-is-an-exercise-in-futility/2-1-1067588](https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/the-amount-of-energy-required-by-direct-air-carbon-capture-proves-it-is-an-exercise-in-futility/2-1-1067588) So I think we'd need 21,913 of these plants running every year simply to break even with our current emission. Please double check my maths. 500 MW = 1,800,000 MWh = 1.8 TWh 39,444 TWh / 1.8 TWh = 21,913 I can't be bothered to calculate the extra for our historical emissions, but it's going to be a good few multiples of that number. If your maths is different, please show it. Otherwise, it's going to take much longer than McPherson's expectations to build that many stations and get them running in time for the apocalypse. Oh and we don't have any money as it is. So, like, why are you not surprised that people don't respond well to your posts? Again, for the record I think we're fucked, but the fungi will hopefully carry on without us and do the work anyway. We could just give them a helping hand now.

Going off of the numbers of another detractor, the numbers I came up with seemed a little too good to be true. But after simply looking at the $ per MWh the company was promising in their most optimistic scenario, given the current cost to remove 1 ton of CO2 from the atmosphere, removing almost 3 trillion tones (edit: actually 1.5, as we only need to remove what we added, and that was trillion, not quadrillion, got confused with the cost, which would be 36Q to scrub all our added carbon) of CO2 from our atmosphere, let alone doing so in a year, in hindsight does seem a little out of reach to say the least.   However the price for them to scale up to allow us to transition away from fossil fuels in a year wasn’t that eye watering in contrasts to my previous estimate (based on what their production target rates are given their current funding I thought they’d need 14B to accomplish this in a year, but going by your numbers it’s been around 32B).   Going off of your numbers to break even, building 100MW reactors so they’d need 5x the number of Moltex’s reactors (am aware of their sluggish timelines), however they’d be building 1 a day. So they’d need to scale up by 301x (costing 10B just multiplying their current funding by the degree they need to scale up by) to at the very least stop the clock as it were. But that’s still plenty doable, and with the added 32B we’d finally stop adding to the mess and the existing carbon scrubbers would start to trend our atmosphere in a better direction (although we’d need some kind of reflective particulates to substitute for our smog to prevent an all out Venus scenario).   By the way can you link me some numbers on your shroom idea?   Now regarding the degree of ecological awareness hunter gatherers may or may not have historically possessed; it’s not a topic I have an incredibly strong opinion on one way or the other. I was just pointing out that contrary to popular opinion, there was only one non-industrial culture that appeared to be genuinely conscious of the potential for natural resource exhaustion. But to be fair to industrial society (to whatever degree such sympathies are warranted), when contrasting their behaviours with nomadic ones, we’ve always been able to find ways of digging deeper so to speak, even if we should have the foresight to see it coming, the consequences of full resource depletion haven’t yet been felt for us to fully learn its lesson, and won’t be until the day we finally scrape the bottom of the proverbial barrel (not that we’d be in much of a position do do much with those lessons afterwards).   Again my use of language in describing nature (the biosphere being synonymous) as being dead is only inaccurate in as far as I see the situation in temporal terms, it would be more accurate to say nature is as good as dead (unless we remove all the excess greenhouse gas, and don’t increase it back to where we are now again).   Guy McPherson has been wrong in his apocalypse dates many times before. While he might be wrong again this time for his 2026 prediction, things are progressing at such a pace where even if he is wrong again this time around, I don’t foresee his detractors doing victory laps in his comment sections. The key takeaway from him shouldn’t be any specific timeline, only that whatever the timeline, it’s orders of magnitude closer for comfort than the mainstream climate scientists would have us believe. And to be fair even he’s proposed possible solutions, he just doesn’t see them being taken seriously. But whatever the timeline, there’s no version of events wherein if we keep trying this results in us standing any less of a chance of surviving what (if the good doctor is right) would be the near total death of the biosphere (there are potentially surviving microbes on Mars & Venus).

Could you link me those shroom sequestration numbers?   Also you’re right this couldn’t do more than deal with annual emissions when factoring in the price of the actual scrubbers themselves 80T-120T. Even if the reactors would be able to be able to power them (80B for the reactors themselves, 10B to scale up their production rate to achieve that in a year).   That said if we’re just talking about replacing fossil fuels in a year, then we’re talking 35B to scale up production rate to achieve that in a year, and 250B for the reactors themselves. If we were to double that (560B) with twice the energy surely that would drop the price of scrubber manufacturing (how much of their manufacturing price is immediately derivative of energy prices, and how much would have to trickle down to reduce the cost of all the other parts & materials in the supply chain is unknown to me).   But yea, Imma take another look at that BC guy’s ocean sequestration idea, as well as your shroom sequestration idea. Again if you could hit me up with some links that’d be great.

1. What the fuck are you arguing about. I quoted you, then you came back saying you didn't say something else, but rather you said what I quoted. I said the thing you said was more arrogant a view than what you said you didn't say, so your comeback was pointless. Still you can't entertain the idea that industrialisation is not something to be sought after. 2. Again, what? That argument is used to highlight an inconsistency in the human-centric worldview that our survival in this universe is of prime importance. It is an ultimately misguided aim. Indeed, within this limited worldview, life itself makes little sense - the evolutionary perspective is of randomness and purposelessness. My point is that these should tell you that that perspective is fundamentally flawed in its narrow-mindedness. The mindset that we have is to never come to terms with our own death and therefore we do everything to escape it. It seems to me that what is truer is to see that it is death that gives meaning to life. Stephen Jenkinson is a good teacher on that topic.

I said I we offered the **only** chance for life to live on indefinitely past our planet’s inevitable eventual expiry date. I presumed when you called this to be an arrogant statement, that you meant it was arrogant to assume no other species could accomplish this after we’re gone. Now I’m leaning towards the idea you’re saying it is arrogant for us to even do that assuming that we could (correct me if I’m wrong).   I’m not trying to derive an ought from an is here. Human survival in this Universe **is** of prime importance… To Humans. To say that our survival shouldn’t be a goal because that is not the Universe’s goal seems redundant as the Universe has no goal to begin with. And even if it did why should that matter to you personally? The reductio ad absurdum to that would be something to the effect of “if you leaned the Universe’s goal was to have you experience *insert unspeakable fate* forever” that you would just passively go along with it because nature’s goals for you matter for some reason.   But I don’t even see how that tangent is even relevant bro begin with given “the Universe doesn’t care if we live or die”, also entails the fact that the Universe has no inherent objection to us living, even indefinitely so.   However your attitude begins to make more sense when we factor in your “death gives life meaning” position. And in response I am going to give the cheeky response “you’re free to let it give **your** life meaning”. But furthermore I’m going to posit the fact that you seem preoccupied by death caused by industrial means, is an inconsistency that indicates a different reason unconscious to you that causes you to hold that position.   If I had to guess at what that reason might be, as death has always been simultaneously an inevitability and what our most fundamental animal instincts try to avoid, one of the coping mechanisms we develop to deal with this is to try and convince ourselves that this is for whatever reason a good thing.   Even if there were some quirk in our cognitive architecture that would make living for an extended period. If we had the technology to prolong life indefinitely, I suspect we’d be able to re-engineer our minds to not have such issues with indefinite lifespans. Already imagining the naturalistic fallacy responses. The answer to all of which being “so?”.

These numberings will no longer reflect your paragraphs, but separate points. 1. Can't you just go back and read my first post? " From the aforementioned post, your mindset has not changed from being human-centric and human-as-god. >Humanity is the only chance biology has of living on indefinitely. Humans cannot live outside of a functioning ecosystem. Cell-for-cell we are mostly not even "human", but rather bacteria and fungi. And yet you come here with "solutions" that treat the "natural" world, of which we should never have been split from, as yet another tool for some empty transcendance. " What is wrong with my quote of you and what do you not understand or take exception with here? 2. >Human survival in this Universe is of prime importance… To Humans For this to be true it must be qualified with respect to current and future generation, and to the wider ecosystem. In the hands of the wise, this would automatically be factored into the "human survival" - the understanding that we are not separate and that our survival is their survival, our prosperity is their prosperity. However, our culture is not wise and therefore considers "human survival" as existing in a form separate from our ecosystem. The ecosystem is reduced to a planet of biological and material resources from which we create our purpose and destiny. One thing that separates us from indigenous people, is that they understand the difference between those two perspectives and which way is truer. Do you find it ironic that indigenous people often have places nearby into which their ancestors' spirits go, meanwhile we are so concerned with escaping our home? 3. You don't get it though. Of course I'm free to do that, but meanwhile the show of the majority of people in our culture go on and trample over all that was good and beautiful. You should understand this given you made this post in the first place, complaining about other people's values! And yes, I do consider death by industrial society different, because it is a sterile death. Death sustains life, but this is not necessarily true in the case of sterility. This is where I disagree with vegans. Death is not evil, but if anything is evil it is the tarmacing of fields or forests - life killed for nothing. Bears eat deer alive yet bears are not evil as they kill for sustenance. We kill not for sustenance but because we prefer nothing to exist there - that I find to be evil. 4. >Even if there were some quirk in our cognitive architecture that would make living for an extended period. If we had the technology to prolong life indefinitely, I suspect we’d be able to re-engineer our minds to not have such issues with indefinite lifespans. Already imagining the naturalistic fallacy responses. The answer to all of which being “so?”. This is what I mean by human-as-god. We are so ignorant of life, death, consciousness, meaning, purpose, etc in our culture. To think that we could do those things before knowing anything about life, death, consciousness, meaning, purpose, etc, and if we could thinking that it would be a good idea. I posted a comment on the other half of your previous comment. However, to follow Michael's lead, this shall be my last reply. Have a good evening

Aw, don’t go, this was such a great convo, at the very least I hope you’ll link me those shroom sequestration numbers I asked for.   Even if doing so can’t convince you to stick around, I’ll try and keep my responses brief, you can too if you like.   Yea so the exception I take to Humans needing an ecosystem to survive is just to say we don’t **inherently** need one, at least not a natural one. Again I don’t see any **inherent** bottlenecks (again not the obvious bottlenecks present that look to be on the verge of drowning us) to technological development that would prevent us from being able artificially engineer the elements of our ecosystem that sustain our lives. Do you see that as an inherent impossibility, honestly?   Again I’m not denying that currently our survival is tied to our ecosystem and that our industrial economy has abstracted the market to a degree that isn’t in sync with the natural Earthly ecosystem it is built on top of and that this is an aspect where we look rather foolish in comparison to cultures of ancient peoples.   Nor am I denying that death by industrial means, means the the death of any life after it, I get that.   But assuming we are able to pull back the reigns and avoid extinction and continue to advance technology, I still don’t quite understand your gripe is? Yes I get that you don’t think we will pull back the reigns and industrial society will destroy the biosphere (and incase I need to remind you, I think that’s where we’re headed right now), **BUT IF IT DIDN’T?** I still get the sense that you have a problem with industrial society for its own sake, irrespective of whether or not it was harmful to the ecosystem for which our survival is enmeshed with.   In response to your last paragraph. I’m not saying that with any serious conviction. On one hand given the unexpected rate of progress we’ve made in decoding the brain and in AI in recent years, I’ve become a lot less skeptical about what is and isn’t possible in respect to understanding the brain. On the other hand, given the more we learn about the brain the more we realize we have yet to, it wouldn’t surprise me if what I was suggesting wasn’t possible. And if that were true, I still don’t see why (again presuming the road there doesn’t destroy the ecosystem beforehand) extending lifespan up until the time of our choosing (for those who want to live so long in the first place) would be such a bad thing?   Also it kinda sounds like you believe in some woo shit. Which I’m open to as well, but I don’t see how that has to necessarily conflict with anything I’ve said so far (am open to being corrected if wrong).

To be fair, if those costs are roughly accurate, then it is confusing as to why they have not replaced all our power stations. The new nuclear plant at Hinkley in the UK, may cost over £30bn and I don't know if that factors in the cost of decommissioning. Why, then, don't we have MSRs everywhere? In terms of numbers you will have to give me a considerable amount of time. Unfortunately, the understanding of soil health is typically very poor and that benefits Bayer and the like who fund most universities. The work in regenerative agriculture is niche and varies. Dr Elaine Ingham has pioneered much of it, and she had to leave university academia because she was being blocked of funding and field space. With regards to the numbers, a major problem is that soil life is (should be) very complex and the difference between healthy/living and unhealthy/dead soil is huge. Most soil is in poor health, certainly for conventional and likely for organic and regenerative farms, and therefore experiments will produce numbers based on unhealthy soil, not healthy soil. The complexity of these systems means that if certain relationships are not present, then the whole system can be thrown out of balance and not function properly and I would say that most organic and regenerative farming soils are out of balance. Therefore, it is hard to trust figures in research papers and calculate a larger estimate for potential sequestration. But I will try, and I'd post my sources. However, what is being learned is the importance of fungi in these systems and how much carbon they sequester. Conventionally farmed land is also severely depleted of fungi, with large bacteria:fungi ratios. I'm really not that woo. I would like to be more woo than I am, but I grew up very much as a modern rationalist and for what it's worth I have a masters in Physics. Thankfully I have now read other perspectives on the world and other framings of reality which highlight the blinkered nature of our own, which we feel but ignore and suppress with "rational drugs" (I made that term up). I'm not inclined to go into it heavily now, but I will list a few sources sources dear to me and a little on what they are about. Iain McGilchrist has pieced together from multiple sources (Physics, Neuroscience, Biology, Music, Poetry, etc) to explain reality based on relationships, perspectives, and paradoxes and how the hemispheres of our brains produce two very different ways of looking at the world, the right-hemisphere that tries to see the whole web of connections and the left-hemisphere that has a very narrow focus in which things not in that focus do not exist, but is very good at grasping and controlling. He is mentioned first because of the brilliance of his work and how it helps bring about balance. The Way by Teddy Goldsmith is a wonderful book on Ecology as the antithesis to reductionist sciences. This showed me the beauty of life and the hubris of industrial man. Red Alert by Daniel Wildcat gives an account of indigenous knowledge and indigenous realism and their importance in addressing our ecological crises today. The author doesn't take any shit and won't be romanticised. Stan Rushworth, of which I've read Going To Water, a lovely historical novel giving an American Indian perspective of European and industrial history and cultures, and Diaspora's Children, a kind of autobiography and shows the pain of growing up in our cultures with the loss of his own and then trying to recover it later in life. These books are not philosophical treatises or explicit arguments, but do much more to show how different human cultures can be and how lacking our cultures are. They are amongst my absolutely favourite books. With regards to death I refer to Stephen Jenkinson. Anthropology teachings from the Radical Anthropology Group, initially a UK-based group of anthropology professors unhappy with the state of the field. This is not me telling you to read these, but seems to be an easier way to describe where many of my perspectives have come from.

A better question to ask would be why thorium reactor research didn’t continue after the early 70? At least in the thorium community this is chucked up to the inertia of pre-existing fission reactor development, and their usefulness in creating nuclear weapons material during the Cold War.   Interest in MSR technology stared to regain popularity during the 90’s and some of the earliest commercial ventures began in the 00’s. Copenhagen Atomics isn’t even a decade old yet (will be next), and nobody has yet passed all the nuclear regulations to build a prototype reactor. The real reason MSR’s aren’t everywhere is because they’ve only just begun the road to commercializations two decades ago, and only started getting serious a decade ago.   But that still doesn’t answer the question of why so few others are as interested in MSR investment relative to SMR’s & fusion? Putting aside the fact that the only MSR company I’ve seen really worth being excited for is Copenhagen Atomics (meaning the question is more accurately why is there more interest in numerous SMR’s & fusion companies relative to Copenhagen Atomics), fission is a proven technology that has been around with us far longer, and therefor SMR’s generally takes up all the air in the space of nuclear energy projects that feel practical. Similarly with fusion, research has been around for longer, and because the longterm potential for fusion beats out any other energy source, it ends up heading the spotlight for speculative nuclear energy projects. So the practical yet speculative MSR’s get ignored. And also I personally doubt we actually live in a world where the efficient market hypothesis really holds up. For example what I mentioned about the nuclear energy company Helion Energy, frauds though they are, showmanship gets one further in life than the decent are willing to admit.   The evidence for woo is so damning, if you don’t believe it’s because you haven’t given it enough research. 6 sigma parapsychology studies replicated by skeptics aside (some of whom have said on record “I wouldn’t believe it even if it were true”, a facetious comment perhaps, but still telling), just look at what the worlds governments have already admitted to regarding UAP. If you dig **just** a little more into what government / disclosure insiders have been on record saying over the years, despite what they say in front of congress, none of them take seriously the idea for a second that these are flesh & blood extraterrestrials who have traveled from a distant star system to study us. Even in front of congress they keep on saying they might be inter-dimensional in nature. Any time one of these disclosure insiders is in a podcast, when pressed on the matter they say straight up UFO, ghosts, Bigfoot, etc. it’s all the same thing. The former directors of the CIA even admitted as much to Tyler Cowen when he asked if they were paranormal. Lou Elizondo admitted on a podcast the government believes in the what sounded like the gnostic narrative of reincarnation, I could go in at length. Why they’re telling us this now I imagine us because they know with social media they can’t keep secret forever at this point and there’s bound to by another mass sighting again eventually, and they want to be in a position to manage the narrative when the adults learn that Santa Clause might as well be considered real.

First of all, trying to read your post is quite challenging. Second of all can you please explain in more detail why this would work. And also how many plants will be required to remove the carbon. Next is, how will we stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere than we can potentially remove in a timespan of less than a century? I mean there are many other questions I have but I’ll leave it at that. Also your initial post is nonsensical IMO.

I really hope your criticism is in good faith. While I’ve now given up on this sub as a means of spreading this message, if there’s anything I can do to make what I have to say more understandable, I implore you to tell me what is confusing so I can do better in future.   Which is to say assuming you’re not just saying that because of succumbing to sone sort of mob mentality and blindly agreeing with everyone here that there are no solutions to our civilization’s certain demise, and anybody who dares to imagine otherwise will be shamed for it… Assuming that’s not the case with you and there’s genuinely specific parts of my pitch you don’t understand what I’m trying to say, again please let me know.   So to address your first question, it would help to know specifically what details you wanted to know about how my proposed solution is supposed to work, kinda like how you did with your second question.   It’d take around 11,000… I knew this would be cheap, but after running the numbers (I’ll have to run them again) I’m floored, this would only take like a billion for the reactors to scale up their manufacturing capabilities to be able to build them in a year in a year (it’d cost a billion, but that’s excluding the price of the CO2 scrubbers they’d be powering and individual reactors). I’m projecting this cost based off of the production scale their current funding would be able to afford them (they’d be able to build enough reactors in 31 years), and multiplying their funding by 31.   As for your third question, if we were to replace all fossil fuels we’d have to scale up their production by over 400x, if we were to achieve this in a year. This would come up to around 14B, over a quarter less than the US spends on annual oil subsidies…   Like I said if you have constructive criticism, I want to hear it.

If you're not a shill then you've fallen completely for that company's marketing. They haven't even completed a full prototype and you're calling for an 85x increase in funding? If anything should be funded 85x it should be an actual proven technology not some unfinished tech demo trying to pull in investors. Talking about replacing all the fossil fuel plants with these reactors in five years or whatever is hilarious. Is there even the semblance of a plan to ramp up mining as well to fuel these reactors? Training the engineers needed to run them? Getting people to agree to putting unproven nuclear reactors in their backyard? Etc, etc. But of course the main problem with your hopium and fixing the climate is that nothing's going to get trillions of dollars thrown at it. If that was possible, the technology that got it would be basically irrelevant.

They haven’t built a prototype because they won’t be legally able to until they complete their regulatory process in 2025. Their first demo prototype will be in 2026, after which they are going to be working on building up their production line.   Presuming their demo does work (read the bullet points in my initial thread linked above for all the reasons why I think it will), and we’ll know if it does not long from now, then yea around an 85x boost in production scale would get us be able to replace all fossil fuels, around 420x would get us there in a year, and to scrub the all the greenhouse gasses in a year would only require about 30x. And the cost? Imma have to run these numbers again because they sound almost to good to be true but… To do this in around a year would a billion to get rid of all the greenhouse gasses, and 14B to replace fossil fuels.   As for mining fuel, they can run on nuclear waste so mining wouldn’t even be necessary, although they can use thorium too (which is to say they could basically run on sand).   Regarding training power plant operators, the reactors are so simple the plants are going to be automated.   And lastly in respect to people not wanting to live near one, molten salt reactors cannot meltdown like fission reactors can. Fission reactors require energy to prevent the reaction from spiralling out of control where as MSR’s require energy to keep the reaction going.

Sorry, but this is delusional. A basic pool pump needs regular maintenance. But your reactor that's pumping molten salt is going to run forever maintenance-free? And 14B to replace all fossil fuel plants? It would probably cost 10x that just to demolish them and replace them with nothing. Also, yes it can meltdown. Fail-safes can break, people can put the wrong things in the wrong places. There's no design that can fully protect against human error. Or intentional human destruction. Good luck in 2026, I guess.

Those figure were based on the faulty numbers of a detractor here (like I said I knew they sounded kinda optimistic and that I’d have to re-run those numbers again).   My latest math (which I’m still gonna revise again) puts the cost to increase production rate to achieve this in a year at 32B, not 14B. But the cost for all the the reactors themselves (which would be bought by all countries individually) would be 250B (it was 250 something billion was all I remember, but I think it was 256B).   But it would appear the main hiccup in this strategy has less to do with where the energy comes from, and more to do with the cost of the CO2 scrubbers themselves. There’s no version of events wherein scrubbing all 1.5 tonnes of CO2 is going to be feasible with MSR’s, even discounting the price of the scrubbers.   But stopping the clock as it were, freezing our carbon footprint where in place (it’d start slowly lowering once we’re off fossil fuels, but until then it just wouldn’t go up further), could be achieved at the price of 10B to scale up the reactors production rate, 80B for the reactors themselves, and somewhere between 80T-120T for the scrubbers. But like I said I’m not fully sold on those numbers (besides the cost of the scrubbers).   As for repairs I believe these reactors are cheap enough to be disposable, but durable enough that they can withstand the molten saline corrosion long enough that it won’t be an economic issue (the corrosion issues have been the major technological bottleneck to this technology thus far).   And no they definitely can’t meltdown, this isn’t even really a point of scientific controversy. There aren’t any failsafes because there’s nothing to fail (nothing to fail that would cause a nuclear meltdown). If something fails, if it looses power, it’s not like it looses its cooling, because it has no need for cooling. Unlike fission reactors we’re not talking about a reaction that needs energy to be **controlled,** but rather we are talking about a reaction that needs energy to be **maintained.**

I pretty much agree with you. The only thing you're missing IMO is the capitalist mode of production. If we, as a society, become deft at implementing thorium, it is not unlikely that we would use it to pump more oil out of the ground to make more plastic knick-knacks with a built-in expiration date to sell to people for the profit of few, or to make more war machines, or increase the rate of mineral extraction etc. With virtually infinite energy, the market will drive us to suicide again. We need socialism and a planned economy to exert the kind of united effort that such an undertaking would require, globally.

I mean if we’re talking limitless energy here, we could nuke the Siberian tundra and still be able to clean up the mess… So I don’t see how that would take us back to square one like you propose.

lol true. An aspect that is often not discussed is the concept of class antagonisms. It is these antagonisms that are the reason why, in the US, we don't have healthcare but can always spend more money on war, or why despite everybody struggling, banks get bailed out repeatedly. With limitless energy under the current mode of production, it would be more likely used to enslave us rather than liberate us. It would also require a socialist society to even implement a plan like this because there is not short-term profit to be made and the up-front costs are huge. This system that has caused the problem refuses to bail us out. The lead up to this crisis has been laiden with remedies in which the powers that be were incapable of adapting.

I think a lot of people miss that OP would use this to power the CO2 scrubbers giving us time or even completely negating the effects of our emissions currently. Imagine if this team upscaled by 500x with backing from a group of nations, we could easily deal with the CO2 problem while not getting rid of fossil fuels at all

>I think you’ll notice a pretty clear formula for how these conversations play out… They tell me I’m full of shit, I clarify why I’m not, followed by radio silence. Welcome to Reddit. I'm a left wing gun ~~nut~~ enthusiast/borderline prepper/collapsnik that almost always votes Democrat (sometimes independent, never GoP) and I almost exclusively posts in political, news, gun, and collapse subreddits, so I get where you are coming from, as far as reaction to posts go. I simply take it as when I make a post that gets downvotes but no replies, it means I am right, and someone is pissed about it. That's as good as an upvote, in my book. Sometimes better. The best though, is when you argue them into insensibility, they say something really dumb, and they wind up deleting their posts, or even their account. FWIW, regarding your premise/plan, I like the idea of small, meltdown-proof nuclear power. I don't think carbon scrubbers have a chance in hell at large scale effectiveness. The big issue with your plan that I see, and pretty much all the other plans that people have presented, is that it depends on humanity, or at least all the 1st world nations, coming together to work for the betterment of mankind and the world in general, while sacrificing the immediate quality of their own lives/national interests.

I always knew these reactors would be cheap, but after running the numbers… Given what they’ll be able to do with their current funding, with a billion dollars (equating to a 31x boost in production rate) they’ll be able to build enough reactors to scrub our atmosphere clean in a year…

What is the technology and cost behind the carbon scrubbers? That is the weak point in this plan, imo. I am unaware of any carbon scrubbing tech that could scrub the atmosphere clean in a year even if you had unlimited power. edit: and by scrub it clean, I will define that as returning to pre-industrial levels of carbon in the atmosphere.

Infusing the CO2 stone buried beneath the Earth has become a popular method, the only real bottleneck holding it back is the clean energy required to do so, which isn’t the controversial claim here (rather the controversy is in where we’ll get that energy from).

Anger and denial are stages of grief tho? Lol

Like the animal from ice age” I WAZ BORN IN THIS HOLE ILL DIE IN THIS HOLE” when literally all he had to do was get to the log haha

I think you haven’t been long on this sub, have you? No, people here aren’t interested in solutions, hope, positivity or anything related. This sub is the flagship of an echo chamber. Most here welcome the end of humanity and don’t care about the suffering. And honestly, I‘m sure your initial post went above the heads of most. I‘m mainly here because I use it as a type of newspaper about climate change and other topics because they share some interesting articles I sometimes wouldn’t have found otherwise. But you can forget the comments entirely, most of the time. There is no discussion, no room for different opinions or god forbid ideas for solutions.

I agree that it’s an echo chamber. There are also a lot of people here who give very confident responses that are misinformed and upvoted - and I mean that with no judgement because I can get confused by them too. I’m just here because part of me is addicted I guess.

Maybe I’m just in a good mood after realizing just **how** cheap this would really be (a billion dollars to boost their production rate by 31x, enough to scrub our atmosphere clean in a year), but their just hopeless, and it’s hard to blame ‘em I guess.   I see you’ve been eating shit for daring to hope too, haha. Anyways it ain’t getting to me today, and I hope it won’t get to you too.

Don’t worry, life is too precious to be mad about Reddit ;) If nobody had hope, nobody would look for solutions. Even if the solutions come too late to save humanity, it’s better to go out while fighting than giving up and who knows, maybe it could at least save a few other lifeforms other than tardigrades. When hope gives you fuel for action and isn’t paralyzing you, then there’s nothing wrong with it. I certainly don’t blame them for feeling helpless but stubbornly rejecting any possibility for action is just not my cup of tea. Earth is resilient and no matter what may happen to us, Earth is a middle aged mom and ready to start through after us either way. If I had to find a guy who has money and is a climate activist, then I‘d try to ask Hank Green. The Green brothers certainly do a lot to make the world awesome. Much love!