Terry asked Brian Clegg:

Brian, what is your prognosis for humanity given the existential threats of overpopulation, ecocide, climate chaos, melting ice caps, nuclear threats (wars or meltdowns of coastal reactors); plus, perhaps most importantly, we are likely to run out of all non-renewable and many renewable resources in less than 30 years making any sort of green energy plan ridiculous and redundant? Going to Mars is not an option. Hmm.

Brian Clegg I'm relatively optimistic. I can't see how we could run out of renewable energy resources - we only use a tiny fraction, for example, of solar energy at the moment - and renewable energy generation/energy storage is becoming increasingly cost-effective.

Climate change is a very serious issue and will get worse before it gets better. Any serious solution has to go beyond emission reduction to capturing carbon etc. out of the atmosphere.

Nuclear threats are still an issue in terms of bombs, though it still feels less scary than it did back in the 70s. I'm a big supporter of nuclear energy, which is green in climate change terms - even with the accidents there have been, coal has killed far more people per amount of energy generated than nuclear. The reaction to the Japanese accident (particularly from Germany) was ridiculous - the tsunami killed plenty of people but the reactor accident killed no one.

flag