What does the community here think when it comes to climate change as a potential existential risk? While strategies for combating climate change are fairly straightforward, the seeming lack of political capital behind meaningful climate reform and legislation seems to indicate that the problem is going to get substantially worse before it gets better, and the potential consequences of ignoring this issue look to be quite severe indeed!
Should the rationality/x-risks community be spending more effort on evaluating this idea and exploring potential solutions? It certainly seems like a big problem, and the current trajectory is quite worrisome. On the other hand, the issue is a political minefield and could risk entangling the community in political squabbling, potentially jeopardizing its ability to act on other threats. What do you guys think?
At $130/kg, there's enough for 80 years at current consumption (about 10 years if we use it for all our electricity), but if we're willing to use ore with a tenth as much uranium, there's 300 times as much. Also, there's ways of using uranium 238, which is about 140 times as abundant. It's still a temporary patch, in the sense that we can't just keep using it until the sun goes out, but it will last long enough for fusion power to become economically feasible.
And thorium.