[felgueres]

Solutions to climate change are not behavioral as some suggest here.

It’s about incentives.

Transitioning to carbon neutral energy is possible at the expense of businesses’ cost structure, ie. less competitive.

Same applies to building retrofitting, agriculture and other major carbon emitters.

There is no serious conversation about climate change without looking at nuclear energy; it is base load generation (24/7), cheap and carbon neutral.

Bipartisan federal mandates to scale nuclear energy is the only real solution to this problem.

[VintageCool]

Renewable energy is the most likely solution to this problem. Wind and solar are ready to scale and take over electricity generation.

Wind, solar, batteries, and transmission lines. That is a solution we could deploy today and it is being deployed today. There is a further backlog of wind projects in the US that could be unlocked if we approve transmission lines (like SOO Green) to bring power from the Midwest to the Northeast.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/transmission-fortnight-burying-power

The amount of power that we produce from nuclear in the US basically hasn't changed in 20 years. Wind has gone from almost zero to 8.4% of our total production in 15 years. Solar has gone from almost zero to 2.3% in 5 years. I expect that the US will be producing more power from wind than coal in 5 years.

[jacquesm]

"Bipartisan federal mandates to scale nuclear energy is the only real solution to this problem"

Where to start? Bipartisan implies 'America', which is not 'the world'.

Scaling up nuclear energy implies even more energy consumption rather than to do the obvious: shut down coal and gas fired plants and cap the per capita energy budget to something reasonable.

Finally, nuclear instead of solar/wind is going to push yet another problem down to future generations.

[felgueres]

Energy consumption correlates to quality of life.

Lower energy consumption is politically less feasible to implement, regressive and undesirable.

Bipartisan refers to cooperation of two political parties, not 'America'. But sure, few other countries have only two major political factions. More generally I meant to promote nuclear energy in political cooperation.

You are right in that the obvious is shutting down coal and gas plants.

The less obvious is that natural gas generation is very cost competitive. Solar/Wind are not viable solutions at the deployment velocity we need to achieve targets.

Also, they are not base load, so you are assuming storage is available and cost-competitive which seems to be 5-10 yrs from now.

An honest conversation of decarbonizing electricity has nuclear front and center.

[VintageCool]

The easiest path to reducing our carbon emissions is to electrify everything (notably: transportation and heating) and clean up the power grid. That is going to require doubling the size of the electrical grid in the next 20 years. There's a lot of wind and solar that we're going to need to be bringing online in the next couple of decades!