And don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that there’s a long queue of people ready to be our feudal lords. Some are just more open about it, perhaps because they already are:
Rarely has the feudalistic streak in green politics been so fantastically exposed. Here we have a king of unimaginable wealth and unearned power flying by private jet to a tribal autocracy to wag his finger at the global masses over their eco-unfriendly behaviour. At COP, Charles rubbed shoulders with the monarchs of the United Arab Emirates – ‘an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state’, in the words of the New York Times – and other kings, sultans and emirs. He chinwagged with the Sultan of Brunei, who owns 7,000 luxury cars, including 300 Ferraris. Then they’ll tell you you’re killing the planet by driving to Tesco once a week in your Skoda. He made merry with the Emir of Qatar, a multi-billionaire who has an entire ‘fleet’ of private jets, some of which can carry his limousines. Then they’ll damn you for polluting the skies with your annual Ryanair flight to Mallorca.
— Brendan O’Neill, “Revenge of the feudalists“
Yes, “COP28 confirms that environmentalism is an ugly revolt against modernity”. It shouldn’t be. Environmentalism should be about sustainability, but that word has also been captured and reworked; when used by governments and climate activists it actually means unsustainable for human beings. Just Stop Oil and their predecessor Extinction Rebellion work towards the extinction of the majority of human beings and the modern life.
Meanwhile, there is a cheap, easy, and tried-and-tested way to get a quick reduction in CO2 emissions: How would you like a 25% reduction of CO2 emissions in 12 years?
In a 2021 paper, Grant et al. concluded that just 5% of the world’s coal power plants were responsible for about 73% of carbon dioxide emissions from global electricity generation. With about 3,000 coal power plants globally in their analysis,1 that equates to about 150 power plants being responsible for ~25% of total global emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (assuming electricity makes up ~35% of global total emissions).
If the world committed to replacing those ~150 +/- coal plants with nuclear power plants by 2035 — perhaps negotiated under the provisions of the Paris Agreement — that would reduce total global emissions by ~25%, or almost 9 gigatonnes carbon dioxide (GtCO2), from the 2022 level of >34.3 GtCO2. That’s huge.
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Let’s put all this together:
- The best case IRA scenario provides emissions reductions of ~2.8 GtCO2 for ~$1 trillion.
- The best case coal-to-nuclear scenario provides ~9 GtCO2 for ~$450 billion.
Coal-to-nuclear is more cost effective by about about 7 to 1.
- The worst case IRA scenario provides no emissions reductions for ~$1 trillion.
- The worst case coal-to-nuclear scenario provides emissions reductions of ~9 GtCO2 for ~$3 trillion.
Here, coal-to-nuclear is infinitely more cost effective. That’s a big number.
These numbers are conservative — you can vary the assumptions a great deal and these conclusions will still hold firm.
— Roger Pielke Jr., “Low Hanging Fruit“
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