Breakable wrote: The key here is “developed” world. Would somebody have the same problems in Peru for example?
Be expecting a political dogfight (understatement) to be more challenging than the scientific challenges. And the faster you want to move, the more vicious its likely to be. The best way to head that off is to educate everybody in the developed and developing worlds that there’s more money to be made by aggressively embracing FF than opposing it. Even the undeveloped nations, since they run the UN in terms of numbers and sob stories.
The biggest challenge I see, therefore, is finding new uses for coal, given that they can be one of the first industries with virtually free energy if they desire, and an adoption gradient of at least a decade, no matter how many FFs are cranked out every year. (The various supply, tooling, training, and regulatory chains will impose a limit below what can actually be produced in the early years.)
The first thing that comes to mind is coal gasification, along with reduced mining and transportation costs protecting the profitability of their dwindling traditional market. Another is the PR windfall of cleaning up their safety record by seeding new industries based on virtually free energy. Say desalination and the ability to mine the sea, so to speak.
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