• NJSpradlin@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Geothermal, wind, tide, hydro, solar… and then even nuclear. All ways to just create unlimited energy. But, because the elite enslave us to the status quo, through the jobs that keep it going… here we are.

    • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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      5 hours ago

      Then why did it take until 1859 for human population to start trending up and reach 8 billion?

      I’ll help you: oil. The ancient Romans had geothermal, wind, tide, solar, and hydro as well.

      They had the exact same energy we do now. The difference is we have power, they didn’t.

      I’ll help you again. You can’t fertilize crops with electricity, or make plastic.

      • Soup@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        The ancient romans also didn’t have solar panels, and actually hydro and wind were totally used in these little things called watermills and windmills. I wouldn’t be surprised if they figured out geothermal heating, too. The difference is that you can simply light oil on fire and that’s easy when you otherwise have a lower level of technology and aren’t ready for better, more advanced ways of generating power.

        You’re none too bright, huh?

        • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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          3 hours ago

          Yes, please describe how that solar panel came into being. Try it without the fossil fuel foundation of every single item we use. Everything from the rubber tires of the delivery trucks to the food the workers eat.

          You are blind to what’s around you. If you think we’re going to support 8 billion people living a Western lifestyle without fossil fuels, I’m afraid it’s not me who isn’t bright.

          How do you support our present industrial civilization with windmills and watermills? We already had these, why did we give them up?

          You’re completely oblivious.

          “better, more advanced ways of generating power.”

          But we don’t. We don’t “generate” power. We harvest energy. And once our little geological energy reserve is drawn down, how do you plan on keeping our present arrangements going?

          You haven’t explained how you plan to make fertilizers, concrete, plastics, with electricity? And you don’t simply “light oil on fire”… Where did the iron come from to make engines? Coal, oh yeah.

          You also think we’ll just spin copper wire and rare earth magnets from sunshine…

          Please go back to AI vibe coding.

          • Soup@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            You understand that without those wind and water mills that oil couldn’t have become a thing, right? Like I said, oil was a great way to bridge the gap because it is relatively easy to use but it shouldn’t be our end-goal. Having oil for producing things made of it is certainly important but we’d have a lot more to go around for those purposes if we stopped using it for inefficient things like so many personal vehicles, wasteful plastic packaging, and a myriad other things that we just don’t need it for. It’s done its time, it’s time we scaled back and moved on.

            We didn’t give up water or wind mills, either. Canada has so many hydro-electric dams that we literally call home electricity “hydro” and wind farms are only getting bigger and better.

            We don’t need oil to make concrete. It’s portland cement(limestone powder), water, and variously sized aggregates and it’s been around for a loooooong time in one form or another. The machinery used to create it does not need to run on fossil fuels. You may be thinking of asphalt, but even then maybe if we didn’t unnecessarily obliterate our roads with constant heavy vehicle traffic we’d be able to keep them for longer and not need to constantly pour resources into barely keeping them alive or refreshing them far too often.

            For someone with such a raging erection for oil you’d think you’d be more concerned about reducing our dependency on it so that we don’t waste this precious, finite resource.

      • NJSpradlin@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        One or two of them, or all of them individually, aren’t explicitly as competitive as existing non-renewables, sure. But together.

        Geothermal is very good option for some for reducing their electricity demand for heating and cooling their homes.

        Home solar doesn’t fully cover everyone’s electricity demand for their homes, sure, but can greatly reduce the demand for it of it doesn’t cover it outright.

              • cows_are_underrated@feddit.org
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                3 hours ago

                You know that renewable Energy exists? In the time we would need to replace follils with nuclear we can insted build renewables and Storage capacitys and we would be way cheaper.

                • Soup@lemmy.world
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                  3 hours ago

                  I’m mostly commenting on the fact that people are so concerned with the cost of nuclear plants yet they seem to not care about the cost of the damage that rampant fossil fuel production comes with. This has been the shitty argument for long before renewables became viable and nuclear would have been a much better stepping stone. There are also always going to be places where renewable energy won’t work or be enough.

                  It’s never going to be a single solution problem.

                  • cows_are_underrated@feddit.org
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                    3 hours ago

                    Ok, fair enough. I also absolutely agree that we shaould have went for nuclear instead of coal, but now its to late and its faster to replace coal with renewables, than replacing it with nuclear.

            • Szyler@lemmy.world
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              6 hours ago

              It is if you consider the cost of the redundancy required for renewable energy to serve as base load once you cut oil, gass and coal out of the supply.

              Nuclear can cover this base load until we develop better storage systems for large scale use.

              If we had just built nuclear with the modern architecture developed in the 70’s onwards we’d be able to move away from fossile fuel FAAR more easily today, without any mjor disasters from the reactor technology from the 50’s.

              • AA5B@lemmy.world
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                6 hours ago

                If we had just moved ahead with solar heat and hot water, or even solar panels, back when President Carter was trying to encourage it, we would already be moved away from fossil fuels

                My interest in renewables, in ecology, in recycling, was all from growing up with that. But how did we let fossil fuel companies take over the conversation, guide our choices down the road to their profits at our cost?

                • Szyler@lemmy.world
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                  5 hours ago

                  Many ways away from fossil fuel, both solar and nuclear would have been great options, but even with early solar, we would have had to use coal or gass for base load without nuclear was what u was trying to say.

                  How we let them was just by not standing up and not holding them accountable. That is still the issue today. They knew for DECADES and still is profiting with government subsidies everywhere. We need to push politicians away from lobbying and give them the support they need to be firm with the 1%.

            • Tja@programming.dev
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              8 hours ago

              A single one maybe not, if we standardize and scale it might work. If solar and batteries keep getting cheaper, it might not be worth it, but the current problem is that new reactors are their own unique snowflakes, making it more expensive.