As the world grapples with the existential crisis of climate change, environmental activists want President Joe Biden to phase out the oil industry, and Republicans argue he’s already doing that. Meanwhile, the surprising reality is the United States is pumping oil at a blistering pace and is on track to produce more oil than any country has in history.
They could have said it with renewable energy, but they said it with oil.
The day Reagan took Carter’s solar panels off the White House was the day our planet was doomed.
it was solar water heating, but yeah, total dick move. I will say, renewable tech has finally caught up to the demand and we’re all benefitting for it today; the best solar panel you could acquire in 1979 would yield less than 1/4 today’s panels and be much heavier and more expensive - we weren’t in a position for Solar to take any percentage of the requirement. Same with wind power - turbines are 10x larger now, and their massive props took decades to develop to yield today’s massive farms that are capable of powering hundreds of thousands of residences. Geothermal, hydro and other means might have been deployed more, hard to say.
Our planet’s not doomed, it’ll be fine when we’ve destroyed our only biosphere and poisoned / wrecked all the food sources. The planet will keep on trucking just fine. Humanity may be ultimately self defeating, but we’re not dead quite yet. We might just still pull this out. I’m trying, real hard, to stay just slightly optimistic.
Nuclear was (and still is) a viable energy production option, but the greens do not want this carbon-free power source. So, natural gas it is! (Even with renewables, it is still paired with natural gas out of necessity)
Nuclear power is hardly a carbon-free power source. Even if the construction, mining, refining, and transport of the fuel was done with electricity, the concrete for the plant would release a lot of CO2.
It’s less than a fossil fuel, to be sure, but calling it carbon-free assumes you just plop down a reactor and it starts making power, which isn’t the case.
Sure, but all those same problems apply to wind and solar too. It isn’t like the concrete to anchor the wind turbine just appears there. If we are going to call wind carbon-free, nuclear is too.
But, coming back to my point, one actively burns fossil fuels in order to use renewables. They are paired with natural gas plants out of necessity for just base-load power. If one is serious about a carbon-free energy grid, nuclear is the best option out there using today’s technology. We should have been building out nuclear since the 70s energy crisis and we should be building it out today. France did, and it is why Germany is now buying power from them in spades.
Jimmy Carter worked on nuclear power in his Navy days. He could have chosen to build nuclear plants but didn’t, mostly because of his experience with nuclear accidents. I’ll trust Jimmy more than some guy on the Internet.
Nuclear power has less deaths than even wind by terawatt hour produced. Hell rooftop solar has caused significantly more deaths per terawatt hour produced. The fact you think one of the safest power generation sources is a serious danger is not based in reality and is what I was alluding to when I said that the greens don’t want nuclear, so instead we built out natural gas.