On Useful Technologies for a World Experiencing Climate Change - First Draft

2022-06-27T09:58:56Z

I was thinking over the weekend about the sort of technologies that will be useful in a world with significant climate change. I’ve come up with a tentative list of technologies that I think will do one of the following 1) reduce the chance of climate change occurring (or push it back in time) 2) reduce the direct impacts on human civilisation and prosperity of climate change 3) help us adapt and change more easily. This list is below. I’ve stuck a very short note on why I think they are important. Do feel free to comment with your own suggestions. Or to disagree with my selections. Or add other reasons why my selections are helpful.
I’ll be revisiting the list later so will update with additions, deletions and changes and then my plan is to spend a little time over the coming year doing a bit of a survey of the state of the art and the state of the ordinary for each technology. Some of them I’m very familiar with and some I know next to nothing about.
1. Energy – Renewable Electricity Availability

Being able to actually run the world’s energy requirements in a zero-CO2 way at approximately the same cost as today.

2. Energy – Renewable Energy is Very Cheap

Cheap (and I mean very, very cheap) energy makes a lot of currently existing technology able to be deployed at large scale. For example, desalinating water and pumping it long distances is prohibitively energy intensive when energy is expensive. Pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and converting it to fertiliser is also prohibitively expensive when energy is expensive.

3. Energy – Electrictification of Everything

The more things are electrified the easier it is to decarbonise their energy use.

4. Food – Vat Grown Meat

Meat production uses a lot of land and water. Not eating meat from live animals is a good way to avoid that resource use.

5. Food – Alternatives to animal protein

Meat production uses a lot of land and water. Not eating meat is a good way to avoid that resource use.

6. Food – drought resistant crops

In a world with more drought more drought resistant crops will help with food security.

7. Food – alternatives to palm oil and corn syrup

Both of these products are responsible for a lot of deforestation and we’ll need lots of trees.

8. Food – alternatives to agriculturally grown food

If we could grow all our food in wareshouses on the outskirts of our cities those cities could be anywhere and not reliant on any actual climate situation.

9. Tunnel Boring

Useful for mass transit systems and for building pumped hydro energy storage systems – which would be helpful if they were cheap to build and able to be built in more places.

10. Mass and Public Transport

Reducing fuel consumption and making dense cities more livable in.

11. Battery Tech

Energy density by mass and by volume. Life expectancy by time and cycles. Alternatives to lithium in production and alternatives to Lithium-Ion batteries in general, including ones more suited to bulk energy storage.

12. Lithium Seawater Extraction

The current best battery tech uses lithium. Lithium needs to be in plentiful supply. Being able to extract it from seawater cheaply would put a cap on lithium pricing.

13. Desalination

Water, probably important.

14. Autonomous Vehicles

Makes cities more livable, avoids lots of the costs of production of individual vehicles, makes cities more movable about in, helps public transport directly and indirectly.
15. Housing Energy Efficiency

Running homes in an energy efficient way will help avoid using energy and also reducing fuel poverty.
16. Geo-engineering

We may have to paint ourselves white to deflect the blast or the climate change equivalent.
17. Passive Cooling

In a warming world being able to keep cool without using energy is helpful.

18. Super Conductors

Very useful for long-range energy transmission and also for energy efficiency.

19. Super Computing for Weather Prediction

If the weather is going to be more extreme than very good predictions will help avoid loss of life and infrastructure

20. CO2 sequestration (forestry, CCS, pulling raw carbon out of the air, bio-char, carbon sequestration in building materials

We may need to actually pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.

21. Low Carbon / Negative Carbon concrete

Concrete releases a lot of CO2. Having concrete alternatives that are low CO2 or even better CO2 sequestering would be very helpful.

22. Iron and Steel coking alternatives

Lots of CO2 is produced in the steel industry. It’s energy intensive and use carbon as an input.

23. Fertiliser manufacturing

Fertilisers are a major product of fossil fuels and a major input to food production and a big opportunity to balance intermittent renewable electricity production with intermittent demand.

24. Subsea cabling

25. Treatments for antibiotic resistant bacteria

We do not need to add in any more pandemics to the world. Especially ones we can’t treat.

26. Tropical Medicine

With more of the world warm and more of the warm parts of the world also rich tropical medicine will be useful.

27. Aviation fuel alternatives

CO2 released from aircraft appears to be worse for climate change than CO2 released from a car. Also the energy density needed for long range air travel is a challenge.

28. Synthetic hydrocarbons to plastics industry

Reducing demand for fossil fuels and sequestering carbon in plastics

29. Recycling

Nothing is more energy efficient than not making something from new raw materials.

30. Synthetic textiles

A move away from especially cotton would help keep land for food production.

31. Weed and pest management

Weeds and live pests are going to move around a lot and interact badly with food production which is already having a difficult time. Meanwhile we probably don’t want to be dropping large amounts of expensive chemicals all over our farmland.

32. Autonomous targeted irrigation and fertiliser

Probably a useful way of keeping food production going in areas which are becoming unsuitable for it.

33. Water management and recycling

Water stress is going to be a major problem and a source of conflict. The better we are managing and recycling water the more we can avoid those problems and conflicts.

34. Refugee management

We are going to have many people, some rich, some poor, moving around the world – managing that will be useful

35. Democracy

We are going to have to make some difficult decisions and stick to them – democracy is probably a good way of doing that.

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On Useful Technologies for a World Experiencing Climate Change - First Draft