Casey Handmer's company is creating synthetic hydrocarbons from renewable energy. Here is a good video where he gives a tour of the company and talks about its goals: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NngCHTImH1g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NngCHTImH1g</a>.<p>Curious what people think about the idea of synthetic hydrocarbons? It is a seemingly obvious idea that I hadn't heard about until recently, as long as you can use energy efficiently to create the synthetic hydrocarbons.
Listened to this yesterday. Super enjoyable. Made the point that electricity in the future will be consumed much closer geographically to where it is generated than today - and so we probably don’t need huge interconnects - but much less close in time (because batteries).
Around 10 minutes in, they discuss why the price/unit of aircraft fell between "kitty hawk and WW2", whereas it has increased exponentially since then.<p>The actual answer to this is "target" monetary inflation. That is, increasing the money supply at a slightly faster rate than the increase in productivity makes prices rise at a fixed pace.
For those prefering a direct audio link:<p><<a href="https://chrt.fm/track/993DGA/media.transistor.fm/bec9beab/c9694126.mp3" rel="nofollow">https://chrt.fm/track/993DGA/media.transistor.fm/bec9beab/c9...</a>> (MP3)