It turned out to be a very easily solvable problem (heavily concentrated industry, very few production plants, technological substitution being very easy).

I think the Montreal Protocol is often misunderstood to be a great success story / positively indicative reference class for much harder problems like climate, AI, etc., biosecurity, when it really is an example of an exceptionally easy problem to solve.

Apologies for my delay here.

There is indeed no contradiction -- solar got cheap through massive public support, first mostly R&D and later deployment subsidies / market creation policies in the hundreds of billions.

So the lesson from solar is definitely that public innovation support massively matters, it is more that different forms of support are most critical at different times (that is something the Kavlak paper emphasizes, how at early TRL R&D dominates and then later induced demand becames the major source of cost reduction) and that the R&D money cited is a small contributor to the cost reductions observed then.

If APs were like solar, I think we should expect things to take a lot longer and require a lot more support and maybe the current plateau would be like the 1980s for solar. (But I think there are good reasons to be more optimistic).

Apologies for the delay, Remmelt.

What I meant to say in my original comment is that when someone who has a bad reputation for being truth seeking / has a reputation for being a conspiracy theorist says something on an area outside their expertise we should not give a lot of credence to it. 

The burden of this not being a credible scenario should -- in my view -- not lie with commenters and, at the time I was commenting, most comments seemed incremental instead of pointing to a strong skepticism on Weinstein's take to start as if it were a plausible situation that a guy on a podcast without specific relevant expertise has uncovered a mechanism that 50 years of anti-nuclear activism have not produced (or, more nuanced, something that is so implausible that even typical anti-nuclear advocates wouldn't lead with it because they know it won’t stand).

To the specific question -- we do have a long section on nuclear in our 2018 report and I've obviously also spent a lot of time on it though I haven't written it up, but it took me several years to turn from German anti-nuclear environmentalist to the positions I hold now.

Here is an article on why a Chernobyl-style event is not possible with modern reactors. And the diesel generators would not be refueled for a year, given in the scenario there would be a failure of the entire power grid you would just use them to have enough electricity to shut things down safely.

I'll address the rest later (hopefully this weekend), but just to clarify that I did not mean to call you or your summary conspiratorial, Remmelt!

I only meant the substantive claim and coming from Bret Weinstein, but I'll address this with more time and the rest of your comment later.

Great stuff!

I am not sure how crucial this is, but I do think this piece gets some of the renewable energy analogies importantly wrong. In particular:

1. The primary drivers of making solar cheap where policies passed in the early 2000s, in particular massive deployment subsidies, not primarily R&D. So, the 30B R&D number for 2004-2012 are unlikely to be a major driver of the dramatic cost reductions in solar, at the same time countries like Germany spent 100s of B on subsidizing solar deployment (see e.g. Kavlak et al 2018, also Nemet's book)

2. By 2010, while solar was still marginal, the cost reduction dynamic was largely triggered through those policies and the virtuous cycle of investment, economies of scale, and China becoming interested in becoming a renewables manufacturing powerhouse. It is not driven by 2004-2012 R&D and it is not really driven by things that started after 2010, more a self-reinforcing dynamic playing out. 

Hopefully and plausibly, APs are an easier technology to get cheap than solar panels!

(3. Nitpick: Solar is 4% of electricity, not energy, electricity is only  ~1/3 of energy.)
 

Thanks, fascinating stuff!

Thanks, spelling these kind of things out is what I was trying to get at, this could make the case stronger working through them.

I don't have time to go through these points here one by one, but I think the one thing I would point out is that this strategy should be risk-reducing in those cases where the risk is real, i.e. not arguing from current public opinion etc.

I.e. in the worlds where we have the buy-in and commercial interest to scale up AI that much that it will meaningfully matter for electricity demand, I think in those worlds climate advocates will be side-lined. Essentially, I buy the Shulmanerian point that if the prize from AGI is observably really large then things that look inhibiting now - like NIMBYism and environmentalists - will not matter as much as one would think if one extrapolated from current political economy.

Ok, so I think we converge pretty much then -- essentially what I am saying is that people concerned about compounding risks would argue that these are not modeled correctly in GBD and that there is much more uncertainty there (and that the estimate is probably an underestimate, from the perspective of taking the compounding risk view seriously).

Thanks!

I think I remain confused as to what you mean with "all deaths from non-optimal temperature".

It is clear that the data source you cite (GBD, focused on current deaths) will not feature nor proxy what people concerned about compounding risks from climate are concerned about.

So to me it seems you are saying "I don't trust arguments about compounding risks and the data is evidence for that" whereas the data is inherently not set up to include that concern and does not really speak to the arguments that people most concerned about climate risk would make.

As said before, I think it is fine to say "I don't trust arguments about compounding risks" and I am probably with you there to a large degree at least compared to people most concerned about this, but I don't think the data from GBD is additional evidence for that mistrust, as far as I can tell.

By crude analogy, if you believed that COVID restrictions had a big toll on the young and this will affect long-run impacts somehow, pointing to few COVID deaths amongs this age cohort would not be evidence against this concern.