I am a relatively pessimistic person, so i want a solution now, while we wait for fusion to be realistic. I have to say, i hope i am wrong and you are right

Refreshing to see a constructive argument on reddit these days.

I agree with your points however i am more cynical as a person. In my eyes your arguments are too idealistic. Humans are greedy. It will be extremely hard to shift an entire society to consuming to such a less extend that your vision becomes reality.

That is to say that my vision is also verly idealistic but I think better achievable. I see the mining more as a bad investment that makes up for it in the long run as the pollution is more localised and therefore easier to deal with. In addition it puts less emphasis on the production of fossil fuels.

We already see this with the recent mass adoption of electric cars and covid. Fossil fuel prices went down across the board making it less tempting to upscale production. On the contrary, it helped downscale production. I think continuing this trend is the key

No it's not. Nuclear fusion, as it stands, is a pipedream. Nuclear fusion has been 20 years away from being successful for the last 60 years! We need answers now! They might not be as great as the, theoretical, nuclear fusion but we need a solution 20 years ago. Second best time is now

Disclaimer: i kind of went off on a rant there, but in my excuse, im passionate about this shit because I've been active into environmentalism for the last 20 years. Strap in, it's going to be a long one. Also please don't take anything i say personally, that is not my intention.

>(...) require a lot of destructive mining to procure the necessary metals.

I always hear the argument from bad faith actors, not that you are one but please double check your info and their sources. This argument gets tauted for batteries aswell.

Now I don't argue that the mining and refinement process is not polluting, on the contrary, it's pretty damn destructive.

HOWEVER, are people really arguing that extracting the nessecary minerals from litteral rock and dirt is more cost effective than taking the worn materials (ie: solar panels or batteries) and refine those back into useable minerals?

In addition we have the alternatives: oil/coal/gas. Burning these produces a shitton of pollutants other than CO2! A buddy of mine worked as a safety council in regards to nuclear waste. His work was making sure that all materials salvaged from a decommissioned nuclear reactor didnt exceed a certain radiation threshold. They had to stop multiple times because the coal powerplant, a bit xurther away, caused so much extra background radiation that it would exceed the thresholds by over 10x!

Also, that is just burning the garbage. Now lets talk about the procurement of said fossil fuels. Sure mining cobalt is pretty bad, but how many oil spills happened in recent memory? How big was the scale of the affected area and how bad were their repercussions?

Thats just oil, what about the coal mines? The workers have a massive increase in risk of cancer, if the don't die of blacklung that is. Also what do we do with depleted mines? We abandon them. We cant fill them with water due to risk of contamination of the water table (heavy metals like mercury, lead or arsenic/the chemicals that might've been used during extraction). We might use them for storage, but that costs too much money so we leave them as is.

Now we can talk about natural gas. Sure it burns cleaner, but storage and transport is a massive issue. In addition it is more cost effective to not fix leaks and just pay the fines due to massive lobbying. This releases multiple metric fucktons of raw methane into the air. If memory serves me right, methane is roughly 32x worse than CO2. But it degrades, no worries! Into CO2...

Individuals cutting back on their consumerism is a fraction of a drop in an ocean. For example what dafuq does it matter if I half my waste output, for 2 garbage bags a week to 1, while an average mcdonalds produces a container of garbage per day? What difference does it make if i take a bike to work instead of my car while international shipping starts burning bunker oil (that is such dirty fuel that it needs to be preheated to 40C before its even liquid!) as soon as they touch international waters? Why does it matter if i take shorter showers while the argicultural sector uses over 40% of all potable water that they pollute after use because of massive over fertilisation?

Now people will argue: "but all these problems exist because of peoples consumerism!" No it doesn't. The individual gets the choice between a bad option and a worse option. The only real short term solutions is a carbon tax, sweeping legislation and a massive clamp down on political corruption and industries across the board while improving international relationships so everybody starts getting their shit together!

Thats why I specified thorium reactors. The fuel gets depleted to such an extend that waste is practically a non issue as it is exponentially less than conventional nuclear

But if you burn it, it doesn't do much in the end...

Ethanol is a good replacement for fossil fuels since it has a high energy density, keeps long and it burns cleaner. However, as you said, it is still garbage compared to alternatives. Cover every roof, nay, replace every roof with solar panels. Make offshore windfarms and build nuclear thorium reactors for a proper baseline.

How ethanol got labeled the same as solar- or windpower is still beyond me