Pandora's Promise and the Problem of "Solutionism"

Lasrick writes "Kennette Benedict of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reviews Pandora's Promise, a new documentary that focuses on environmental activists like Stewart Brand who have gone from vehemently anti-nuclear to vehemently pro-nuclear views. Good points brought up by Benedict that weren't really addressed in the film." From the article: "The flaw in the film's approach is its zealous advocacy of one solution — one silver bullet — to meet the tremendous challenges of providing for some nine billion people by 2050, while also protecting societies from the ravages of climate disruption. The kind of thinking that led some of these environmentalists to single-mindedly protest nuclear power plants during the 1970s and 1980s leads them to just-as-single-mindedly advocate a push toward nuclear power 40 years later."

Comments

Re:Assumptions

[Trepidity]

Empirically, across a pretty wide range of situations, energy efficiency improvements tend to actually increase rather than decrease net energy usage, an observation known as the Jevons paradox.

Re:How is it not a silver bullet?

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Hello, nuclear fusion in stars actually has a very LOW power density. It's just that stars are very large. This is why getting fusion to produce power on Earth is so damn difficult, we are not trying to RECREATE the conditions inside a star, we need to SURPASS those conditions.

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