Although, as you say, it would take a lot of nukes to warm the oceans directly, a very few large nukes (perhaps as few as twenty, I read somewhere) might produce a nuclear winter effect that would noticeably cool the planet and impair agriculture. There are lots of climate engineering approaches that are less destructive, of course.

You're right that medical care is free here in Canada, but it can require time, experience and energy to achieve desirable outcomes. Doctors and nurses here are on the whole competent and caring, but the system can be bureaucratic and in-demand procedures often have long wait times. Some high-cost treatments aren't covered under provincial health plans. None of this is to say that assisted suicide should be restricted "until wait times improve". If you let the anti-assisted-dying types decide when the system is good enough for people to make their own decisions, the answer will be never.

As solar + wind + storage + long distance transmission + demand response ramp up, electricity will become cheap. The biggest cost will be paying off and decommissioning stranded fossil and nuclear assets. Over the coming decades energy uses that currently make no sense because of the high cost of energy will become feasible, e.g. garbage mining, large scale seawater desalination, effective recycling, cheaper manufacturing, higher energy mining processes to get the most out of low-grade ores, sucking excess CO2 out of the air and burying it, etc etc. Houses cost a lot? Building and servicing new towns becomes affordable when energy is cheap. Birth rates should begin to recover within the next ten or twenty years.

A good way to move past the base load concept is to overbuild renewables to a point where, between networking, storage and a very large capacity, there's always going to be enough power for critical needs. This means that most of the time there will be lots of extra power, and this can dispatched (via a demand response system) to uses that aren't time sensitive like smelting aluminum and generating green hydrogen. Because renewables are cheap the combined PV + wind + storage + transmission + dispatch system will cost less and can be built faster than anything involving nuclear, which always costs at least three times the agreed price.

As solar + wind + long distance transmission + storage ramps up, electricity will become progressively cheaper. It'll then take a while to electrify a widening range of industrial machinery and processes, but ultimately the cost of everything will go down, as will the cost of transporting everything to where we want it to be.

This is encouraging, as an economy is a mechanism that turns energy, raw materials and human attention into goods and services that people want. Cheap energy makes it easier to obtain, transport and process raw materials. Hopefully we'll experience a return to 1950's levels of per-capita energy availability, when it was possible for a single-income middle class family to afford a new three- or four-bedroom house and all its infrastructure.

As solar, wind and geothermal replace fossil energy sources, the energy industry's headcount will drop. The service requirements for a windmill or solar panel are small compared to the manpower required for oil extraction, refining and distribution. Grid-connected batteries and smart grids will also be relatively low maintenance. Overall, however, employment will increase as energy becomes cheaper. Cheap electricity accelerates the rest of the economy, particularly as construction equipment and industrial equipment and processes become electrified. As an economy becomes able to deliver more of the goods and services consumers want, demand increases.

Do we know if any of the staff who were made redundant in this acquisition were DEI staff?

An increasingly likely future is that humanity installs two or three times its current generation capacity worth of solar and wind to cope with intermittency, and enjoys electricity costs near or below zero most of the time. As present energy industry business models don't make sense in this future, generation will increasingly be owned by the industries that benefit from cheap power. E.g. Apple and Alphabet building out renewable generation for their own use. The excess power that will be available 95% of the time can be used for things like high volume sea water desalination or smelting aluminum. Existing energy companies see this future arriving, and are fighting back in various ways, including these nuclear schemes.

Oil and natural gas extraction require continual investments to maintain the same level of output, and fracked shale wells' output in particular declines in just a few years; so a billion invested in wind or solar has a longer-term impact than that billion invested in oil and gas.

China may see a scenario in which the unemployed move to provinces with more jobs, which are those with lower taxes because they have better demographics. This becomes a feedback loop in which the young people cluster into a few (probably south coastal) provinces, leaving the old and the sick to starve in the rest of the country.

... revelled in other people's suffering ... for which some revile her.

Energy density is bad, as it provides opportunities for taxation and bureaucracy. Solar and wind are terrible for energy industry profits, but good for energy consumers. Once they're overbuilt, networked over large areas and backed up with a moderate amount of storage, they deliver very cheap electricity, reliably.

Yes, that's why I'm injecting the seawater after the the steam has been superheated and is moving speedily along its pipe. Mechanically removing the salt crystals, first by inertial methods, then perhaps via filtration, will give up some of that heat and velocity, but yield freshwater steam for input to the next solar-powered turbine.

Although some have suggested building dedicated nuclear plants to do desalination at scale, there may be a cheaper way. At the equator, a gigawatt of solar energy arrives per square kilometre, for free. First, assume we have a reservoir of fresh water, which we start vaporizing with a large field of solar mirrors, producing low-pressure steam. Feed the low pressure steam through a turbine where the steam is pressurized, not by burning jet fuel, but by further heating by the solar mirror array, producing large volumes of high pressure steam moving along a pipe. This arrangement can be used to move large volumes of water great distances, re-pressurizing the steam with solar-powered turbines every few kilometres. In order to desalinate water at scale, inject sea water into the fast-moving high-pressure steam. The water flashes to steam, yielding somewhat lower-pressure steam with suspended salt crystals. The salt can now be removed from the steam mechanically, perhaps by passing the steam through a vortical separator. Some of the resulting fresh water goes back to the source reservoir, the rest continues inland. Once the steam arrives at its destination, it can be converted back to water by going through a heat exchanger or perhaps doing useful work.

If the Japanese and other advanced nations want to raise birth rates, they need to look at the problem from the perspective of young people. Make education free, keep taxes on young people low and entry-level salaries high, make large dwellings easily affordable, and provide free childcare. Solved! A good first step would be to cancel municipalities' ability to zone when affordability falls below a certain multiple of average income.