Arguments Against Fossil Future?

Thanks for the correction on nuclear.

I understand the impulse to want to avoid government interference, but I don't think it's reasonable unless he is making detailed proposals for a lot of other policy changes to happen in advance or in parallel. I'll set aside past subsidies and government investments in fossil fuel extraction, use, and infrastructure to support same except to note that the playing field did not start level. For anyone involved. Instead I'd focus on how existing policy choices have shaped and constrained the development of alternatives. 1) We have pipelines for oil and methane, not hydrogen and methanol and CO2. 2) Our grid (due to Edison-era tech constraints) uses AC, which is great for spinning turbines, but means solar and wind need more equipment to interface with the grid, and similarly makes charging batteries (for vehicle or grid-scale storage) less efficient. It also makes long-distance transmission less efficient. 3) For safety (to avoid errors), airports only have one fuel type on site, and it's kerosene. Any alternative has to be refined and blended to be identical in function and properties to kerosene. 4) Electricity market structures vary extensively and are defined by regional and national government policy. How prices are set, how capital expenses get planned and approved, who gets to compete in the market, all heavily regulated in ways that, for historical reasons, favor fossil fuels. This situation has getting better for a while, but slowly and very unevenly.

He's just plain wrong on wind and solar being useless for fuels and industrial energy use. It's going to take decades to scale up and implement the relevant tech, because any shift that large and complicated does and because there just isn't enough renewable energy production yet to make sense at scale. But: 

1) Global shipping companies like Maersk are ordering dual-fueled ships that can burn methanol, and partnering with companies scaling up production of e-methanol (from CO2, water, and electricity). 

2) Major steel companies like POSCO are spending billions to replace blast furnaces with hydrogen primary steelmaking facilities. There are also technologies for molten electrolytic and aqueous iron ore reduction that have been getting lots of investment and attention in recent years. 

3) Ammonia production, for fertilizer, is one of the prime use cases for green hydrogen, and we're seeing more MW and GW scale projects in development and planning, respectively, to make it from wind and solar. It's also potentially a fuel that can be used in ships and fuel cells. Along with methanol, ammonia is one of the most plausible candidates for long distance hydrogen transport, the same way we transport fossil fuels today, because it's stable/dense/liquid and has existing supply chains used to handling megatons per year. 

4) Conversion of CO2+H2 to various hydrocarbons, for making diesel and jet fuel and chemical feedstocks, is still very early commercially and not yet price competitive, and the market is very distorted by near-term subsidies and long-term mandates. But it can be done, and is being scaled up starting in the past few years. And it's not just startups, the airlines, major oil companies, catalyst developers, chemical companies, and EPCM firms are getting involved through investment, R&D, plant construction, and other ways. At this point it's mostly a matter of normal engineering, iteration, scaling, and having enough wind and solar capacity available, to get to more reasonable costs. Just like with anything else. 

5) I have serious doubts about battery-electric and hydrogen-powered trucks and planes in general, but they are possible options, especially for lighter duty trucks and shorter distance flight routes.

6) As a side note, the same infrastructure needed to make synthetic hydrocarbon fuels is also a way to solve many of our trash and recycling problems. Waste gasification, converting biomass and plastic and solvents etc. to syngas, can feed trash into the same plants to make whatever hydrocarbons we decide we need, while rendering hazardous compounds non-hazardous and separating out the remaining inorganic components for further sorting and recycling. The efficiency used to be pretty terrible, but it's gotten much better and cleaner, and we're starting to see scale-up for municipal, agricultural, hazardous, medical, and other wastes.

Also, I like to point out that some of these problems can help solve each other, in time, with scale. Put enough BEVs with V2G capability on the road and the grid suddenly has 1-2 days of stored electricity available, enabling much higher wind and solar penetration rates while also reducing need for hydrocarbon fuels and reducing BEV cost of ownership. Demand for synthetic fuels and hydrogen can act as a form of energy storage too, soaking up excess production on sunny and windy days to stabilize demand by adjusting how they run based on real time wholesale electricity prices. They also act as price arbitrage and long-distance energy transport, increasing price stability. Renewable and nuclear power, in general, have much more stable cost profiles over time relative to oil and gas prices, too. 

If you really want to get fancy and long-term, there are wavelength-tuned LEDs now available for indoor farming that, with tandem solar cells, are efficient enough to potentially grow multiple acres of crops through indoor farming with one acre of panels, with less water, less fertilizer, less loss due to pests, less variability from weather, and higher yield than conventional farming. There are even transparent solar cells that can be installed on farmland to shade plants, but that only use the frequencies plants can't; these can actually increase yields while reducing water consumption. 

And ultimately if 5-10% of world GHG emissions ends up intractable, so what? Solving 90% of the problem gives us 10x as long to solve the rest. And carbon capture and storage or utilization, including direct air capture, become much more feasible when the problem is that much smaller, and you're doing it in a world with so much more experience using the component technologies in economically viable ways.

I don't think anyone with real decision-making power is arguing for switching all the fossil fuels off immediately, and they're very good at tuning out the activists who do. I also think the needed timelines for competitiveness of alternatives range from "it already happened, we're just catching up" to "decades, but still much faster than the premise of this book implies." And achieving a distortion free market requires significant government interference, both to force companies to pay for negative externalities and to compensate them for positive ones. I'd estimate that getting close to to distortion-free would require vastly more intervention and subsidy than is being done or than will actually be needed to replace almost all fossil fuel use, because of how far we've already come technologically and because of the secondary benefits of switching.

Edit to add: historically, nuclear should have been the best option for baseload power. It could have gotten there for slower load-following use if capex had stayed low and gotten lower, in  better regulatory regime. The higher capex/lower fuel cost would not have let nuclear replace faster load-following and peaker plants at any time in the past 50 years. Hydro and geothermal could have helped with that, but I'm not sure to what degree, Today energy storage technologies are at a point where they could fill in the gaps like the can for renewables, but that's only true because of all the government policy kickstarting and supporting their development that Epstein doesn't think should have happened. 

Doing all that would be very bad. Not Venus, but enough to greatly decrease Earth's carrying capacity for humans and everything else, for a long time. We really should want that not to happen. But methane clathrate release turns out not to be as rapidly self-reinforcing as once feared, and at this point there's no longer an economic or technological reason to think we'll need to keep using fossil fuels and cutting down rainforests long enough to get to that point. We're already seeing slowdowns in net deforestation, in part because in some countries there is net reforestation, though rainforests in particular are being lost faster in part because these exist mostly in less developed countries, but even then it's (2020 aside) slowing down.