Nate is amazing, he and some of his guests are exactly who I learned this from.

To some degree, fission also, though it has a few other problems like safety and security concerns around nuclear materials, locations of fuels and whether they are in friendly nations, other things the fuels can be used for and all the politics that goes with that, etc.

But we need more than just energy. At some point, regardless of our energy, we are going to destroy Earth’s ecosystems using up other resources, using this energy to mine unsustainably, etc. More energy just means we kill ourselves faster. We should not be looking for more or cleaner energy with which to kill ourselves with, we should be looking to continuity of our species and that requires living sustainably within the bounds of our environment.

I never understand this line of thought. The amounts of energy we use is never ever going to go down. It just isn’t.

If we don’t develop practical nuclear fusion before our fossil inheritance effectively runs out we sure will. It will also go down following ecological collapse caused by using all that energy. Infinite energy doesn’t make up for a collapsed ecosystem.