this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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The book Half-Earth Socialism covers this very extensively as a global resource constraint problem. The sort of "default settings" would be:
The main limiting factor is land usage. If we want to preserve half the earth's landmass for the biosphere to do whatever the fuck it does to keep us all alive, and keep 85% of existing wild species from going extinct, we don't have a lot of land to work with. Land reserved for human use will be split into:
Needless to say the societal changes necessary to reach this state would make the cultural revolution look like child's play.
why not nuclear? it's way more space efficient, and solar panels need to be replaced every 20 years
You run out of efficiently mine-able uranium fairly quickly when trying to scale up to the electrification energy needs of an entire planet.
well yeah, I'm not saying the whole world should be powered by just nuclear. solar definitely has its own place as does wind, hydroelectric, and the like.
there is also alternative reactor types like thorium, and if research continues fusion (which will be more feasible under communism with a well resourced public research and energy sector)
Sure, I'm not really anti-nuclear generally. It is in the mix and will continue to be in the mix. However, I don't think it will be a linchpin.
People also talk about reactors taking a long time to build but all of this stuff will take a long time to build. We will overshoot. I have accepted this. All I can hope for is we don't double down and use solar radiation management to forever rob our children of a brilliant blue sky.