Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition

[Vi'Talzin]

Hello everyone, I wanted to share a thought that I recently had and that is quite linked to many of the topics we usually cover in this quest. It is now well-known how most of the large oil companies had decent models of climate change since at least the early 70s. Considering how we have created a society that is quite well-educated and obsessed with measurements, models and indicators, I believe that we should obtained this information in-quest in those years as well.

Now, I'm not suggesting to stop exporting fossil fuels (at least not for few decades) as it would essentially mean political and economical suicide. However, addressing this type of long term pervasive issues is a field in which a planned economy has a huge advantage over an open market economy, and eventually presenting ourselves as the leaders of a block that is trying to prevent the greatest catastrophe that has ever affected humanity could be one of the few ways in which we can get a great advantage over the capitalistic societies. It could easily be weaponised to turn the public opinion agains the US in particular and turn a perceived lack of wealth inner block from a shortcoming to an example of virtue.

Setting ourselves up for success and create the conditions to limit our dependence of fossil fuels not only to reduce the fragility of our economy but also to eventually completely overcome the need to extract any type of fossil fuel will be a monumental task but I think that it is one worth pursuing as soon as possible and as much as possible. So things like securing sources of rare minerals necessary for batteries, as we are doing in Africa, promoting research on renewables as soon as it becomes possible and limiting the power of managers connected to fossil fuel are absolutely essential choices.

I know I am not the first person to raise this issue and that it has been an underlying thought behind many choices that characterise the quest, from our obsession with rails to the choice of pursuing nuclear as soon as it became available, but I wanted to raise the point that we should be very careful in considering strategies that in the OTL have been considered "successful" as such, since it is becoming more and more evident how in many cases they have been catastrophic choices with a delayed effect. We have decades of advantage on OTL and hindsight, let's make the most out of it.

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We have already been doing pretty much all we can whilst not hampering our economic growth tbh, main thing is gas plants replacing coal, and we have invested quite a bit in dams. When oil becomes expensive we can probably introduce efficiency standards on our automobiles as well, and we have been planning to nuclearize our grid in the 70s anyway. If we play it right and don't make the CPSU wary on nuclear power for the frankly extremely reasonable, they often go 300% overbudget and face massive delays, reasons of cost/exploit the optimism on nuclear that exists during this time we can probably reach France tier carbon emissions.

Anyway, this is more of an issue for the hypothetical sequel quest Blackstar has been floating around for a while, where we play the ecological ministry of the USSR in the 2010s, right now climate change is a bit of a fringe issue/its effects aren't going to show for a while. Ironically, our main opponent then will probably be the MNKh and its cadres, who probably won't be happy at expensive mitigation measures and the slowing of economic growth as solutions when the Supreme Soviet is demanding results of them. Also, its worth keeping in mind that without China shooting itself in the face and a stronger Soviet/CMEA economy, our climate crisis will hit harder and earlier than OTL.

 

[Pittauro]

So things like securing sources of rare minerals necessary for batteries, as we are doing in Africa, promoting research on renewables as soon as it becomes possible and limiting the power of managers connected to fossil fuel are absolutely essential choices.

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we really can't do much about this right now.

Oil is too important, and will stay too important to try to lower its outputs for decades.

The best we can do for now is to try and improve efficiency in trying to get as much as we can out of our unavoidable CO2 footprint.

The main things we can do right now are to take that hydrological action to try and mitigate water problems in the near future, and start to invest into nuclear to progress the tech once we can make the new plan. Though even there it will be a matter of deciding if we want to go with a soft 1 autodice or hard 2 autodice.

and this is all just preliminary work. IF and WHEN we get a chance to invest in renewables like wind, solar, tide power, we obviously should (maybe geothermal too? But from my understanding its potential is low enough, comparatively speaking, that it might just not be relevant at the level we plan)

But we're talking again something that won't be relevant for decades.

I think it was mentioned either in thread or discord that the Ozone Layer problem will come up soon, and it should be relatively simple to fix, like in OTL, but that doesn't really matter much.

climate change... we'll see how it goes, but we might end up stuck with dealing with its effects rather than try to actually prevent it.

That's the kind of problem that takes global cooperation to solve, and we're going to live in perma-cold war. Add how quest China and India might actually grow up faster than in OTL, and same for CMEA, and the problem might end up being worse. And we might just not be able to afford actually reducing emissions.


But hey, maybe I'm being too pessimistic. Renewables, Nuclear, Electrification of our infrastructure (railways, cars, buses, heating), removing coal or AT LEAST replacing oldest coal with newer coal... maybe we have a chance. but it's really too soon to tell.

 

[Nevis]

and this is all just preliminary work. IF and WHEN we get a chance to invest in renewables like wind, solar, tide power, we obviously should (maybe geothermal too? But from my understanding its potential is low enough, comparatively speaking, that it might just not be relevant at the level we plan)

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I don't see why a big solar or wind farm would be at too low a level for us. A quick search seems to suggest there's a lot of potential for renewable power in Central Asia at least. Whilst it likely won't be the bulk of our grid, I don't see why we couldn't throw up wind/solar farms as a booster kind of thing, the way we currently throw up coal plants when electricity gets too low mid-plan. I don't think we'll get a renewables auto-dice or anything but we can maybe pepper a few projects in.

Central Asia would need a massive shift rather than a massive increase in investment to reach net zero by 2050, according to the UN | UNECE

unece.org

 

[agumentic]

Hello everyone, I wanted to share a thought that I recently had and that is quite linked to many of the topics we usually cover in this quest. It is now well-known how most of the large oil companies had decent models of climate change since at least the early 70s. Considering how we have created a society that is quite well-educated and obsessed with measurements, models and indicators, I believe that we should obtained this information in-quest in those years as well.

Now, I'm not suggesting to stop exporting fossil fuels (at least not for few decades) as it would essentially mean political and economical suicide. However, addressing this type of long term pervasive issues is a field in which a planned economy has a huge advantage over an open market economy, and eventually presenting ourselves as the leaders of a block that is trying to prevent the greatest catastrophe that has ever affected humanity could be one of the few ways in which we can get a great advantage over the capitalistic societies. It could easily be weaponised to turn the public opinion agains the US in particular and turn a perceived lack of wealth inner block from a shortcoming to an example of virtue.

Setting ourselves up for success and create the conditions to limit our dependence of fossil fuels not only to reduce the fragility of our economy but also to eventually completely overcome the need to extract any type of fossil fuel will be a monumental task but I think that it is one worth pursuing as soon as possible and as much as possible. So things like securing sources of rare minerals necessary for batteries, as we are doing in Africa, promoting research on renewables as soon as it becomes possible and limiting the power of managers connected to fossil fuel are absolutely essential choices.

I know I am not the first person to raise this issue and that it has been an underlying thought behind many choices that characterise the quest, from our obsession with rails to the choice of pursuing nuclear as soon as it became available, but I wanted to raise the point that we should be very careful in considering strategies that in the OTL have been considered "successful" as such, since it is becoming more and more evident how in many cases they have been catastrophic choices with a delayed effect. We have decades of advantage on OTL and hindsight, let's make the most out of it.

Click to shrink...

I advise you to give up hope of prevention immediately. Dealing with climate change is something for a possible sequel quest, and by scattered commentary, if we do things right and with a good bit of luck, we might be able to keep it below +4°C. Maybe. That's not to say that we should do nothing - and we are laying the foundations - but just keep in mind what the likely outcomes for success are.

 

[Vi'Talzin]

I don't see why a big solar or wind farm would be at too low a level for us. A quick search seems to suggest there's a lot of potential for renewable power in Central Asia at least. Whilst it likely won't be the bulk of our grid, I don't see why we couldn't throw up wind/solar farms as a booster kind of thing, the way we currently throw up coal plants when electricity gets too low mid-plan. I don't think we'll get a renewables auto-dice or anything but we can maybe pepper a few projects in.

Central Asia would need a massive shift rather than a massive increase in investment to reach net zero by 2050, according to the UN | UNECE

unece.org

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Yea, like, a project for it wouldn't be just building a single solar farm or whatever, it would be like our power plant projects where its several of them abstracted into one. Though I don't actually think we will get to do those projects, they just weren't competitive economically with fossil fuels until the 21st Century and that's when theoretical sequel quest would be.

 

[Pittauro]

I don't see why a big solar or wind farm would be at too low a level for us.

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oh, they're not. solar panels on every roof, wind farms out of town and in the seas, it's doable.

I was referring to geothermal. THAT might be too low level for us, because it's much more of a niche thing.

 

[Ashheap]

We just build 2 prototype reactor so this may not be applicable immediately but:
Considering we kinda have a more advance (and cheaper) version of nuclear fuel process and as a result got a semi-monopoly on that sector in OTL, I hope we roll well when this project come in the next plan(s) 🤞

 

[Vi'Talzin]

We just build 2 prototype reactor so this may not be applicable immediately but:
Considering we kinda have a more advance (and cheaper) version of nuclear fuel process and as a result got a semi-monopoly on that sector in OTL, I hope we roll well when this project come in the next plan(s) 🤞

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From what Blackstar has said, it seems it will be less dependent on rolls and more on what policies we take. If we throw too much money at it like the US did, the government will burn out on spending on it. For us to be sucessful, we need to invest just enough for economies of scale to kick in and for costs to be acceptable playing on the mistaken ideia it will become affordable in the long term.

 

[Quickshot0]

To be fair, nuclear power is pretty cheap in the long run once you finally manage to pay down the immense capital costs of building a reactor after some decades. A time line so long it's only something an org with a very long timeline would typically invest much in to. For investors they typically prefer things with repayment terms of a decade or less really, if only to be more liquid.

Due to this it is probably important to maintain peoples faith in it being a controllable and safe form of energy.

 

[Pittauro]

the two main problems with us with nuclear

1)Really high costs. we need, as many of us have been saying, to slowly grow economies of scale without burning out on the sector as a whole. This will take a LONG time to start to rival our other energy sources.

2)long building times. We only really start getting the electricity in the following plan, which is a problem when we need more electricity all the time... though once we're into it we'll start having generation come up regularly at least.

3)no matter what, it's just going to be more expensive than coal/gas/oil/hydro. it does at least have a few benefits, like putting less stress on our cargo infrastructure, and fewer negative externalities (coal smog resulting in higher healthcare spending mostly)

 

[MSH]

Throwing all that additional resource burden on nuclear reactors will also achieve peak uranium in the span of decades. There's a good amount left OTL - because we aren't using it very quickly. Fueling the entire socialist bloc like that will end nuclear as a power field.

 

[Crazycryodude]

Nah there's plenty of uranium on Earth, especially if you're willing to eat higher extraction costs because oops your entire grid runs on it now. And even if we start to tap out (cheap, easily and profitably accessible) natural uranium deposits we can just close the fuel cycle with fast reactors and keep reprocessing the same stuff over and over and over again. Yeah technically you still lose a little fuel mass each cycle, E=mc^2 is where the energy comes from after all, but for practical purposes we could close the fuel loop and reprocess the same fuel for centuries with only minimal 100% virgin inputs required.

More broadly though, the big problem with nuclear is that it's really expensive and takes a long time to come online. We're gonna start investing next FYP (1965-69) in custom built reactors to prove the concept is viable for grid scale power, and 1970-74 we will hopefully be building a heavy industrial enterprise dedicated just to mass producing PWRs (Atommash) which will let us start installing cheaper cores over 1975-79... which won't actually go on the grid until 1980-84. So the golden age for Soviet nuclear power is probably going to be ~1980-2010ish (the end being whenever wind power gets mature enough that we can begin to convert the steppe into an endless wind farm), especially as coal and gas get more expensive.

But even in that golden age I wouldn't expect nuclear to be more than about half our power mix, fully nuclearizing the grid is just outside our capabilities for the 20th century even if we built the largest Atommash possible and installed every single core the minute it came off the assembly line. This is because intentionally doing degrowth/getting Soviet citizens to accept a lower standard of living as a green virtue of some sort is just absolutely politically impossible for as long as America exists with their cheeseburgers and cars and Hollywood movies constantly rubbing it in our face.

We'll make lots of noises about how the Americans are killing the planet and we're being good boys with a lower per-capita emissions rate, but as long as we have that talking point (lower per-capita emissions) there won't be the political will to drive emissions to zero, just ever so slightly lower enough that we can brag how we're beating the Americans (and even that is just a nice-to-have, not a political necessity that takes priority over continuing economic growth and satisfying popular consumer demand).

 

[Quickshot0]

Throwing all that additional resource burden on nuclear reactors will also achieve peak uranium in the span of decades. There's a good amount left OTL - because we aren't using it very quickly. Fueling the entire socialist bloc like that will end nuclear as a power field.

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I doubt that's really the case, peak resources is a thing that often comes up, but all to often it is based on known reserves rather then how much there actually might be. Beyond that it is possible in principle to also develop a thorium reactor, though it would take some time, but reserves of that are so far I know substantially more abundant then Uranium.

In any case over the years as more exploration has been done, more economically extractable Uranium reserves were found. And if one allowed the prices to rise a bit, as one would in case it started running out, some of the more expensive reserves would be considered as well. We've basically seen the same thing play out in oil, where once price went up suddenly shale became economically attractive, or deep sea wells, etc. And for Uranium extraction even some work on filtering it out of ocean water at eventually maybe economic rates was looked in to in Japan I believe, so one can kind of guess how far some price rise could stretch reserves could be.

Beyond even that is the matter that one can reprocess nuclear materials, as it turns out that reactors rarely burn up most of the usable material in their burn. The amount of non-use is so high that reprocessing it many times is a viable option and would multiply by at least a few times how long you can keep going with the resource. How ever it is worth noting that for instance the USA never really bothered doing this as current Uranium reserves are so plentifully available and so cheap that it is considered not worth the cost.

As such the resource is not actually likely to run out any time soon, we'll probably invent fusion energy long before that's really a concern.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Hello everyone, I wanted to share a thought that I recently had and that is quite linked to many of the topics we usually cover in this quest. It is now well-known how most of the large oil companies had decent models of climate change since at least the early 70s. Considering how we have created a society that is quite well-educated and obsessed with measurements, models and indicators, I believe that we should obtained this information in-quest in those years as well.

Click to shrink...

Just to make sure there's no hidden mistaken assumptions build into your choice of verb tense in the last sentence...

...In-quest it is not the early 1970s. It is most certainly not the point around 1980 at which the first warnings about global warming began to penetrate into public awareness (e.g. the Carter administration was at least vaguely making sounds about the problem occasionally, and I read a National Geographic special on global energy supplies as a boy, dating back to 1980, that I'm pretty sure mentioned it).

No. It is 1964 or so.

I know I am not the first person to raise this issue and that it has been an underlying thought behind many choices that characterise the quest, from our obsession with rails to the choice of pursuing nuclear as soon as it became available, but I wanted to raise the point that we should be very careful in considering strategies that in the OTL have been considered "successful" as such, since it is becoming more and more evident how in many cases they have been catastrophic choices with a delayed effect. We have decades of advantage on OTL and hindsight, let's make the most out of it.

Click to shrink...

Yes. However, the important corollary is that in many respects, our long range plans for global warming are banking on technologies that don't exist yet (such as cheap solar cells or notional mass-produced fission power).

And entirely neglecting fuel-burning developments purely on the grounds that they burn fuel risks leaving our industrial base in no shape to actually roll out those solutions to the masses in a timely manner when they become available.

So we kind of have to walk a tightrope. Because we are trying to industrialize now, and not in fifty years when green technologies are more mature, we cannot idealistically eschew things that, in-universe, the decision-makers don't know are dangerous and do know enable mass industrialization and development of their economy.

We have already been doing pretty much all we can whilst not hampering our economic growth tbh,

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I would say, given the road issue, that we have been doing more than we can do without hampering our growth.

I don't see why a big solar or wind farm would be at too low a level for us. A quick search seems to suggest there's a lot of potential for renewable power in Central Asia at least. Whilst it likely won't be the bulk of our grid, I don't see why we couldn't throw up wind/solar farms as a booster kind of thing, the way we currently throw up coal plants when electricity gets too low mid-plan.

Click to shrink...

Because cost per kilowatt-hour of solar power cells and wind turbines given mid-1960s technology makes doing so very, very hard to justify to a government agency that has to pay for the energy supply and doesn't care deeply about global warming because they do not, collectively, understand about it yet.

 

[Nevis]

Because cost per kilowatt-hour of solar power cells and wind turbines given mid-1960s technology makes doing so very, very hard to justify to a government agency that has to pay for the energy supply and doesn't care deeply about global warming because they do not, collectively, understand about it yet.

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I didn't mean to imply we'd be doing it as a 60s thing, or even a 70s thing necessarily, just that at some point we might be given the option to build an experimental wind/solar plant and that could theoretically lead to us doing something more with it. I am hoping we aren't going down the timeline Blackstar mentioned where we discover photovoltaics and then just never do anything with them.

 

[Quickshot0]

I didn't mean to imply we'd be doing it as a 60s thing, or even a 70s thing necessarily, just that at some point we might be given the option to build an experimental wind/solar plant and that could theoretically lead to us doing something more with it. I am hoping we aren't going down the timeline Blackstar mentioned where we discover photovoltaics and then just never do anything with them.

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That's not the case, in the most recent update from space development it was noted that solar panels were going well for powering a capsule and they'd stopped the fuel cell development program for it in response.

 

[Red Rationalist]

To switch the discussion to something different: Looking more closely at the history of our LCI showed something important. Mainly that some of our LCI projects, like plastic, synthetic fibres and synthetic rubber, decreased our oil income while increasing our consumer goods. Since people have waged concerns about over-export of oil, it's important to note that LCI investment can also be used to increase domestic oil consumption, thus balancing the foreign export markets. The relevant increase in domestic consumption is unfortunately rather small, but it's important to note that strong LCI consumer good initiatives can have a balancing effect on oil exports.
Example:

Plastic Production(Stage 5): Further mass expansions towards common use plastics are expected to yield a considerable economic return. Production will focus on the expansion of polyethylene and polypropylene, as both polymers are expected to be in highest demand. These will mostly go towards the private sector, but interest has been expressed by the army and by a massive number of enterprises to secure plastics production. Even with incentive funds rapidly going towards expanding plastic production, far more is needed in order to satiate the massive markets for it domestically and abroad. (415/380) (Completed) (-10 Rpt Oil) (+40 Rpt Consumer Goods) (-29 CI3 Electricity -6 CI1 Workforce)

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While a LCI+ Services plan is currently unviable, I still think strong free dice investment into LCI is a good choice. With 2nd generation plastics and further gas projects coming up, a lot of economic potential can be opened up via further oil extraction and the subsequent availability of natural gas. I just really want to shift our energy generation away from coal and onto gas [at least until nuclear energy matures from its current embryonic status], as the constant need to ship more Kuzbas coal from Siberia is a major contributor to infra hell.

 

[agumentic]

I just really want to shift our energy generation away from coal and onto gas

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I think now, after we tried to do this for a decade, the time has come to accept that this is just not going to happen, except maybe proportionally. Every new gas power plant is not going to be replacing a coal one, it's going to work together with it - or them, since we're building new coal plants as well - just to sate our endless hunger for more electricity. So, we're not going to move away from coal any time soon, and thus need to work on our mines and infrastructure to ensure they can provide the supply needed.

Therefore, build the canal. 600 points is not even that major, we totally can knock it out in a few turns.

 

[Red Rationalist]

I think now, after we tried to do this for a decade, the time has come to accept that this is just not going to happen, except maybe proportionally. Every new gas power plant is not going to be replacing a coal one, it's going to work together with it - or them, since we're building new coal plants as well - just to sate our endless hunger for more electricity. So, we're not going to move away from coal any time soon, and thus need to work on our mines and infrastructure to ensure they can provide the supply needed.

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To be more precise: I want to shift our increased energy demand onto gas, and reduce the amount of newly built coal power plants. What is done is already done, and our power needs aren't going to stop growing, but we can shift the way we fill new power demand.

 

[Dessard]

It is actually going to be possible to replace the worst old coal plants with gas or hydro next plan, though as mentioned unless we want to spend a massive amount of LCI dice on just drilling gas, it's more likely they'll just be replaced with better coal plants.

 

[DeltaV11.2]

True, there is the Bakchar iron ore deposit which is fairly near the Ob. The ore is lower quality than Moroccan ore and it is going to cost an enormous amount either building smelters there (the more efficient way to do things), to build cities around them and ship coal to them, or to ship iron ore to our current smelting centers (which has welfare advantages, but is enormously inefficient, especially as by the time this is the problem we should be building new mega-smelters anyway - small aging smelters would be better upgraded to scrap recycling).

Either course of action would be far more expensive than importing iron ore or importing steel however. There are security benefits from maintaining significant local steel production based on local resources, however, maintaining local production of iron ore does not make the exhaustion of Western resources less severe, it in fact makes it more severe.

The costs of transportation are particularly serious when developing Siberian resources and should not be underestimated.

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I think concerns about steel exhaustion are overblown. ITTL the USSR has considerably more ability to exploit and transport ores than OTL did, with more industrialized mining and better steelmaking techniques. Adding electric arc furnace capacity will allow for better exploitation of scrap steel.

 

[agumentic]

To be more precise: I want to shift our increased energy demand onto gas, and reduce the amount of newly built coal power plants. What is done is already done, and our power needs aren't going to stop growing, but we can shift the way we fill new power demand.

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Well, it's a nice idea in theory, but the way it works out - and probably will work out next plan - is that we need so much electricity we can't reduce the amount of newly built coal power plants. We're just going to build every kind of power plant we can, since they need different expertise and thus cost dice from different categories.

 

[Pittauro]

It is actually going to be possible to replace the worst old coal plants with gas or hydro next plan, though as mentioned unless we want to spend a massive amount of LCI dice on just drilling gas, it's more likely they'll just be replaced with better coal plants.

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that's not quite true.

next plan we'll have the options to put autodice on

1)hydro. a variety of sub-projects.
2)coal. even 0 dice will slowly replace the oldest plans (we have some from the 20s still running, and they're VERY inefficient), and we can put up to 2.
3)gas. 1, 2, or 3+1 HI dice options
4)nuclear. 1 or 2 (2 includes 2 experimental cores with the standard ones)


nuclear gives negligible electricity, so let us forget about that.

We need to decide how much hydro, coal and gas autodice we want to assign.

There's an argument for max coal, honestly, because it's by FAR the most cost-effective option. We'd DEFINITELY Need to expand coal mining and do the canal, but it might be worth it. We definitely want at least one dice there.


We'll definitely want AT LEAST 2 autogas, 1 autonuke, 1 autocoal, and I'm not quite sure how many on autohydro. We might want more, and we need to decide on which of them.

 

[Blackstar]

In terms of new power grid mixtures, you are entering the era when coal starts running away with any price comparison, especially if you can get the canal functioning and thus shift cheap coal from Kuzbas West without massive price increases. There is a reason why coal got so sizable and significant and it mostly comes down to the introduction of fine pulverization and supercritical steam systems. New coal coming with the following plan is the cheapest for money out of any other power option, and to a large extent will stay that way into the early 2000s.

In terms of iron availability, your internal iron mix will get more complex and slightly more expensive(assuming you do the canal in a reasonable timescale) but that also will be compensated for by both technologies and imports. Indian, Swedish, and to a lesser extent Brazilian iron ores imported into the south and transported along the Western deep water system along with technical improvements towards on-site DRI for eastern deposits and processing improvements in lower grade ores will keep steel prices tolerable, assuming those are funded. You still expect further and larger steel production growth both for exports and to fuel domestic industries, even the last plan saw strong growths, not to the extent of 2000-2007 China, but effectively a doubling of domestic steel production. As the construction industry matures along with the automotive and export-manufacturing ones, you can likely expect a further doubling of production over the next ten years but expect a quasi-stagnation to follow that as the supply for global demand is steadily taken over by China.

 

[0disseus]

...In-quest it is not the early 1970s. It is most certainly not the point around 1980 at which the first warnings about global warming began to penetrate into public awareness (e.g. the Carter administration was at least vaguely making sounds about the problem occasionally, and I read a National Geographic special on global energy supplies as a boy, dating back to 1980, that I'm pretty sure mentioned it).

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Hi! I'm very aware that in OTL, information about the potential side effects began to permeate public awareness in the 1980s. However, scientists such as Edward Teller first described how the burning of fossil fuels could be responsible for substantial effects on climate as early as 1957 (portions of his speech at a symposium at the American Petroleum Institute in 1959 are quite famous and had a strong influence on the perception of the risks of climate change during its initial stages). Moreover, a report from Stanford in 1968 titled 'Sources, abundance, and fate of atmospheric pollutants' showed early models connecting fossil fuels-related CO2 emissions with increased temperatures. At the same time, it emerged that almost all the major oil companies (most notably Exxon and Shell) had internal reports describing the consequences of climate change in the 1970s and initiated significant scientific investigations in this topic, including some of the most exhaustive research on the ocean's capacity to absorb CO2.

Naturally, instead of sharing this knowledge, the companies heavily funded campaigns of misinformation and confusion, criticizing the scientific validity of this field of research.

Therefore, while I know that it seems early to raise the issue, I wanted to point out that in OTL, the issue of climate change actually arose in the same period as the idea of non-military uses of nuclear explosions, a topic that has already emerged and been explored in TTL. Additionally, important reports on the topic of the human impact on climate will be published during what would be our next 5-year plan.

And entirely neglecting fuel-burning developments purely on the grounds that they burn fuel risks leaving our industrial base in no shape to actually roll out those solutions to the masses in a timely manner when they become available.

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I agree completely, once again my post was not proposing to neglect Fossil fuel-centered technologies: I understand their incredible importance in economic development and that they are a necessity in this phase of the quest. However, I do believe that if we have fostered a transparent and technocratic system, we might receive reports illustrating this issue sooner than many might expect, as will many other in-universe policy makers. Thus, we might be in a unique position to kickstart the research that, as you point out, would otherwise be decades away. If not in the next 5-year plan, perhaps in the one right after. Despite Voz's 'numbers go up' mentality, we might have the chance to take the warnings on fossil fuels seriously and ignore the tentative obfuscations promoted by actors who only care about their own profit.

Add how quest China and India might actually grow up faster than in OTL, and same for CMEA, and the problem might end up being worse. And we might just not be able to afford actually reducing emissions.

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This is a very good point; however, the presence of a healthier Soviet bloc might have greater impacts than we might expect. It is a quite common opinion in the field that one of the reasons why China is not implementing aggressive measures regarding climate change (despite already showing a level of commitment on this topic unimaginable a few years ago) is that it would put it at an immense disadvantage compared to the US, as long as they will also be relying on fossil fuels. Having at least another global superpower ally capable of limiting the influence of the US might assuage some of their reticence and be a reason to avoid some of the choices that have led to the current impasse.