iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Dan Visioni @danvisioni.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

I actually don’t have the instruments to necessarily judge if this is true or not-was the paper really revolutionary & did it really push policy in one direction, or was it just popular because it confirmed people’s broad assumption about the trajectory at the time, w/ some degree of inevitability?

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Dan Visioni @danvisioni.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Al Gore promoting it at the time seems to suggest the latter. However, also good to learn that @kencaldeira.com was already critical at the time - and certainly the reliance on CCS was problematic or at least exaggerated! I don’t know, but this was thought-provoking and a good history lesson!

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Ken Caldeira @kencaldeira.com · 26/06/2026

We wrote about the scale of the challenge and the need for energy R&D, and the Bush II Administration used our work to argue that we need R&D instead of deployment, rather than in addition to deployment. Some things are hard to control. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.nature.com/articles/27638

These results underscore the pitfalls of ‘wait-and-see’. This past
century, accelerated technology development from wartime and
postwar research produced commercial aviation, radar, computer
chips, lasers and the Internet, among other things. Researching,
developing and commercializing carbon-free primary power technologies
capable of 10–30TW by the mid-twenty-first century
could require efforts, perhaps international, pursued with the
urgency of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo space programme.
The roles of governments and market entrepreneurs in the eventual
deployment of such technologies need to be considered more
comprehensively than we can do here. But the potentially adverse
effect of humanity on the Earth’s climate could well stimulate new
industries in the twenty-first century, as did the Second World War
and the ‘cold war’ in this century.

from:

Energy implications of future stabilization of atmospheric CO2 content
Martin I. Hoffert, Ken Caldeira, Atul K. Jain, Erik F. Haites, L. D. Danny Harvey, Seth D. Potter, Michael E. Schlesinger, Stephen H. Schneider, Robert G. Watts, Tom M. L. Wigley & Donald J. Wuebbles
Nature volume 395, pages881–884 (1998)

https://www.nature.com/articles/27638

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