Más sobre independencia, ahora para evaluar la transición energética

 Y, hablando de independencia investigadora, no viene mal traer este perfil de Vaclav Smil en New Yorker, gran ejemplo del valor de la duda razonable, y de lo importante que es hacerse las preguntas incómodas, en lugar de situarse en la comodidad de las posiciones excesivamente optimistas o pesimistas.

Otro gran ejemplo, el mejor profesor que he tenido nunca (aunque en este caso sólo como oyente), es Richard Zeckhauser. Rob Stavins le entrevista aquí (aquí la transcripción), y suelta esta perla:

Something that's troubled me strongly in worrying about climate change has been the behavior of vast numbers of the environmental community who are stuck in what I consider to be two different equilibriums. One of the equilibrium is what I call the pumped equilibrium. And that's the idea that people started at least three decades ago saying, "Climate change is a terrible problem, but we can control it by cutting back on our greenhouse gases and this is the last decade that we can do that. If we don't do it this decade, we're dead." And then, the next decade they said very much the same thing. And this decade they're saying very much the same thing. And they keep telling us that we're going to be able to get to either two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, or even more recently, 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels. I think that that's unrealistic if you leave aside times like a recession or maybe in some cases the pandemic, the world has been pumping out more greenhouse gases on a regular basis than it did three or five years previously. The United States has done a so-so job of cutting our emissions by about 10 percent over a number of years, but at the same time, China has increased its emissions by 13 percent, and you can expect that countries like India will be growing much faster in its emissions. So, I think that we should take a sober look at these problems and say, "What else can we do?" And the two other things that we can do is, one, we can worry about amelioration, otherwise we have all these emissions. Is there something that we can do to reduce their consequences or to otherwise take CO₂ out of the air? And the other thing that we can do is we can do some things that you might think of as adaptation that can make, even with the same climate, can make problems less serious.