Link culled from the Economist.

[the_exiled_one]

Friends, feeling happy? You should cure that disease.
I suggest you download and read the book at:

http://withouthotair.com/

We are fucked.

Comments

[centrillium3000]

I've read that book.

Its a hard problem. I think it can be done but there's currently huge gap between the scale of what will be needed and what's being talked about.

Just to paint a very low resolution picture, we could more or less fix this problem with ~10,000 1 GWe nuclear reactors, a couple billion electric cars, 4-5 billion air source heat pumps, and all the associated infrastructure... oh, and we'd have to stop flying.

There is currently almost no infrastructure to support manufacturing any of these things at that sort of scale. At Areva, we can currently handle two reactor construction projects simultaneously, each taking about five years, so 0.4 reactors/year (~0.65 GWe/yr). As MacKay mentions, the historical global maximum rate of reactor construction was about 30 GWe/yr. We need about 300 GWe/yr average over the next 40 years.

Obviously a huge amount of investment in capital is needed - order of magnitude, I'm guessing roughly $100 trillion. I'm not sure whether that investment would be best guided by international markets in a robust carbon pricing framework, or by central planning. Probably a mix, I guess.

The energy industry worldwide has an annual turnover of $2-3 trillion so this isn't out of the range of possibility, but they're currently doing all the wrong things. If we're going the market route, we have to (carefully) make business as usual unprofitable, and we have to do it on an international basis. I'm hopeful that we'll see some steps in that direction later this year.

Anyway, I'm genuinely proud to be working for a company that let's me say, 'we're working on that'. :-)