Well we did need quite substantial subsidies to get there so that part wasn’t wrong. And heat pumps are orthogonal to this. Like the stuff that’s happening now with heat pumps is exciting and I hope the ideas pan out but that feels orthogonal. I’m sure getting below parity was the primary concern but that was just the first one with storage being an even bigger second hurdle that hasn’t been cleared and we don’t know if we can clear. Like making enough batteries to sustain EV manufacturing & replace all existing vehicles is already a challenge. I’m sure we can muster it but grid-scale storage is an order magnitude larger problem than that. Renewables have all these order of magnitude technical scaling problems that nuclear doesn’t seem to have. The biggest technical scaling problem for nuclear is building a reactor that physically can’t melt down. We’ve been doing research on that with threadbare funding for a long time. If we meaningfully invested in it we could do it. Hell, China is targetting to build a production 370 MW molten salt reactors by 2030. Nuclear is really where we should be investing R&D dollars at government scale because that resolves self-imposed regulatory hurdles. Private investments seem to be generally sufficient for solar and wind.

In 2003 a huge proportion of people including many scientists and engineers believed that modern society is impossible without fossil fuels and that fossil depletion would inevitably lead to collapse if climate change didn’t first.

Remember sites like The Oil Drum and dieoff.org? Where we are today was considered laughably impossible and those arguments came with pages of calculations.

We are on track for what might be peak CO2 emission this decade. At that point we will start moving in the right direction emission wise. This is not good enough to avoid some amount of dangerous climate change, but it’s better than the doom scenarios of 20 years ago.

GDP is decoupling from carbon emissions too, which is massively important.

Now it seems we’re back to the big existential risks being war and awful politics with the latter driven by social media algorithms that prioritize the most toxic ideas for “engagement.” (Unless you buy AI doom. I don’t.)