Unless of course someone decides it would hurt their profit margins a tiny bit.
Today's edition of the Secret Commentary is empty, because Dave failed to come up with something for it.
Unless of course someone decides it would hurt their profit margins a tiny bit.
Selkie, you’re supposed to be a supervillain!
Wait, maybe Doctor Terrorhammer could become the next Lex Luthor?
There’s different kinds of villains. I am currently running a evil kolbold rogue that had been stolen when he was still an egg by bandits. As soon as he could, he killed them and ran off with their supplies.
His whole thing is he wants equal treatment for monsters and peace between all races and he is willing to cut down anyone who gets in his way of that.
He has taken over a town and repopulated it with monsters he has convinced to join his cause and is rebuilding it.
All of this is financed by gold he has either gotten from stealing or murder.
The DM compares him to magneto.
I’d (continue to) read a webcomic about an adorable “supervillainess” who yanked the financial rug out from under irresponsible billionaires by making their self-destructive industries entirely obsolete overnight.
Your oil barons and similar have had decades to reinvest their profits into green energy development, making themselves the owners of the profitable new tech, and thus still insanely wealthy, even if fossel fuel use plummeted… but NO, instead they doubled down and kill public transit proposals, forcing more people to buy cars to drive on their highways, and fill up at their gas stations, even if they can’t really afford them, and stifle the economy of entire cities by preventing people without cars from being able to take jobs a bus-ride’s distance away from their crappy apartments, thus increasing poverty and welfare dependency.
Go for it Selkie! Make the Koch brothers cry for me!
Please let Selkie be smart enough to talk to Pohl first.
Oh, please please please.
Are you new to this comic? /s
Yeah, I don’t see this ending well.
Heh. Yeah, I know. I’m just really worried what is going to happen when Marta finds out how Sarnothi tech is accomplished.
The reality is we all pretty much know she’s going to be finding out soon.
Not gonna bother with the math, but now I wonder if I could estimate how much power Selkie’s eye lasers use, vaguely gesture at her not being tired afterwards, and prove that she must somehow be fusion powered.
Yep, Hammercorp using Sarnothi magitech solves the climate change problem, at a price that makes Selkie only a multi-millionaire with a shark-filled moat around her evil lair…
I know that look… TODD! CALL AVERY NOW!!!
Is Selkie drooling?
You keep your world-bettering dreams to yourself until the government says you can tell, young lady
Huh, it sounds weird when you say it out loud
To be fair to the government, she’s walking around with eye lasers and the ability to make giant war golems (not that anybody’s really put that together yet). The brutal truth of it is, she COULD do the entire Bond supervillain thing, because the limiting factor for ultra-tech is our lack of energy sources that are simultaneously high-powered, low-weight, cheap, fuel-free, and non-radioactive. I’m mildly shocked that no national government has tried to kidnap sarnothi at this point, because having your very own Echo might actually be worth the risk of starting a war with us.
Thank God underwater isn’t a great place to do chemical engineering and metallurgy, huh?
Reminds me of that editorial cartoon set at a world climate conference where items like sustainable cities and clean energy sources are being discussed and someone stands up and says “What if climate change is all a hoax and we end up making a better world for nothing?”
perhaps they just stop desertification, and leave the actual deserts alone
Right? Deserts actually serve important ecological purposes. I could see reversing some areas where desertification has already taken place, but yeah let’s start with stopping desertification and leave original ecological deserts alone.
Side eyes the canals and extreme water usage for farming in arid areas such as the southwestern US and the rain shadow east of the Cascades…. >.>
Eh, for what it could do to replace fossil fuels is stuff we could have done decades ago. Nuclear Power, Hydroelectic dams, Geothermal, and the various methods of Tidal generation can easily outpace fossil fuel powerplants.
The real big problem is managing input/output ratios of power (you can’t generate either too little or too much power without causing problems for your grid), but that’s why you don’t want to rely on heavily fluctuating sources like solar or wind. Hydroelectric dams can easily scale power generation up and down like fossil fuel plants can, and the rest can be solved by existing battery methods like pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
The ones harder to replace are mobile sources… and we’re well on the way to that. With switching to electric, the only problem is batteries… and that isn’t a problem either the magitech or “more power” actually solves.
Humans moved away from magic long ago partly because it was inefficient compared to using mechanical-based energy sources such as wind and hydro power (and of course due to learning decent agriculture techniques so you no longer need harvest fertility or weather altering rituals), and then on to fossil fuels because you can do that wherever you want instead of needing the perfect place for your wind turbine or waterwheel.
Of course, fossil fuels don’t have that positional advantage anymore except in mobile platforms (like cars, ships, and aircraft) because we figured out how to transfer electricity long distances. We can just use a series of extra-high-voltage pylons to move power to our cities and factories. And for mobile platforms it isn’t as important now because we’re starting to actually get decent batteries for the purpose.
So yeah. Fossil fuel problem is pretty much solved (except for long-distance shipping), the only real problems are to do with rate of implementation and people jumping on renewable bandwagons instead of actually researching which renewable energy source is actually best for their location.
Re your last paragraph: we keep getting constant spam about “let us put solar on your roof!” Only… We have almost 0 south-facing roof area, so solar won’t do us any good. But everybody keeps begging us to jump on the bandwagon anyway.
It won’t be as efficient for a full day, but you’ll get just as much power out of east-facing and west-facing roofs because they catch rays earlier and later respectively. If my maths are right you need about 25-33% more panel area to get the same peak power, but with both roofs in play you get more total power.
You’re forgetting something important: This is laser technology from another ‘country’. That means that getting this technology, adopting it and expanding upon it to make their own is now something that can be politically and military motivated as well.
Yeah, right. Blow the world up more likely. Frankly I feel alienated from my local and federal government and distrust anyone I don’t personally know.
The last couple of years have shown me that even close friends and family were secretly huge racist assholes and as soon as they were encouraged to act like that they took the opportunity to do so.
No, humanity cannot be trusted with something like that. Never. Ever.
Gotta say: Kudos to Todd for coming up with a tactful, truthful answer! And kudos to Marta for not pushing them for more info (and for being respectful of the refugee status of Sarnothi on land)!
From my knowledge, the problem isn’t producing the power but the ability to store it for when you want to use it (ie batteries). Dams cause a lot of issues environmentally (loss of salmon swimming upstream on the Columbia that fish ladders does not solve for example, evaporation loss of precious fresh water due to massive amounts of standing water along with water temperature changes both up and downstream, etc). I have heard good things about geothermal but that is also relatively new enough that we might not know long-term complications from it yet. Nuclear is actually one of the most efficient, but you have nuclear waste problems, general dislike by the public, and when something goes wrong due to negligence or from something else, it goes wrong horribly and massively. Fusion is something that they are working on, but haven’t completed yet.
It could be possible that batteries will get to the point where we can use stuff that is less consistent, but good batteries so far require rare minerals that are limited and destructive to mine. That being the case, I can see why they would be excited about a magical solution.
Ooh, just look at those big, googly, adorable predator eyes!
Hold up on the terraforming. Deserts are an ecosystem which deserve to exist too