Are thermonuclear bombs sustainable?

This is not as simple as it looks.

Planet sustainability can have different meanings depending on many metrics, variables and context.

I will start the reasoning with the most crazy example. Thermonuclear bombs. Are they sustainable? 99.99% of people will say no, for sure. But imagine we find a large asteroid coming on a crash collision with Earth, it will wipe out all life and finish the journey bacteria started some 4 billion years ago. The only power known to mankind today to be able to divert such asteroid is a thermonuclear explosion, so we can argue that the knowledge of making and using a H-bomb is actually positive on the grounds of sustaining life on Earth, by saving it. But at the same time, conflicts between countries could lead to a nuclear war that could potentially make us extinct.

In essence, planetary sustainability is about the long term. It is the process of creating and maintaining an environment that allow life to thrive, multiply and evolve, both in quantity and quality.

In today terms, it is about quantifying and mitigating public negative externalities. What? Read that again, slowly. Quantifying: knowing how much. Mitigating: knowing how to reduce. In this case to reduce negative externalities: stuff that is bad for us and life in general, like pollution or greenhouse gases, on a public sphere. Nobody owns the skies or the sea. So nobody is responsible for such stuff.

The main negative externality we have today is carbon dioxide. It is a wonderful molecule, the product of respiration and combustion. It is invisible and inodorous. It can absorb and emit a lot of heat. Therefore the main cause of changes in temperature on a planet atmosphere, like Earth or (the hell of) Venus. If you have too much, it will be too hot. If you don't have enough, it will be too cold. Without it plants can't do photosynthesis.

By a shallow reasoning it is pretty straight forward. Stop the emission of CO2 and Earth will be fine. So why we just don't do it? Because it is extremely hard. There are plenty of books (How to avoid a climate disaster, by Bill Gates, is one) that would go into detail about how to mitigate carbon production in detail if you want to know more.

Going back to what I wrote before, the process of quantifying the negative externality is important because we can put an equivalent price to it and drive people to make more rational choices based on their preferences and ability to pay. And the mitigating part is about producing cheap, abundant energy to replace the current fossil fuel use:

1 - Nobody owns the public sphere - releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is a public problem, not a private one. Carbon dioxide gas gets eventually distributed around the globe. It is like throwing your trash in the air and it vanishes. Would you choose to pay for trash collection if that was the case? For sure, most people wouldn't. That's why putting a price for the negative externality is the only way to make people care about how they use their carbon, not prohibiting them of doing stuff they like. Another advantage of creating a price for how much certain thing harms the environment on the long run is that is makes it easier to compare seemly uncorrelated products and services. Wanna drive a V12 ? Fine, pay per ton of carbon emitted each km of drive. Wanna eat steak every day and ride a bicycle? Fine, pay for the carbon equivalent of that steak you ate. Wanna eat a steak while driving a V12? Fine also, pay for both.

2 - Energy is everything - hydrocarbons from fossil fuel pack a lot of energy, they are easily transported, the energy is easily extracted and, most importantly, super cheap. There is no solution that can eradicate today the usage of fossil fuels everywhere. Solar, wind and hydro are definitely helping, but they can't solve all the problems and in some places not usable at all. Nuclear is carbon zero and should be used more, but the risks and the radioactive waste is a problem The true innovation that is coming to really change the landscape is nuclear fusion (for more info visit www.tae.com) which will provide almost infinite energy without almost no negative externality.

In a nutshell, we must price the inefficiency of a product, service or system into the price itself. Currently, the system doesn't do that, the harm - or waste - that such product creates on the long run isn't priced at all, therefore no incentives to reduce it.

I believe that combining heavy technology investments on clean energy and pricing the negative externality accordingly will together be the only feasible solution for us on the long run. We will make it.