Climate change won't wait for the natural death of capitalism either. We need to get rid of it NOW
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2022
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Yup also the solutions already exist, it's solar power in most countries and it's the cheapest form of electricity generation anyways.
The cheapest, but also one of the two most intermittent. Nuclear can provide us with that baseline source, at least until grid-level power storage is more doable without a sizeable environmental cost on its own.
The solutions in fact existed 40 years ago.
honestly I agree, back then with nuclear etc we could have done it already. Nowadays the situation is different:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy :
Wind and solar are king imo.
The best argument for conventional nuclear back in the day was that it was a stopgap to reduce fossil fuels while renewable technologies mature in the future.
Well,
There is an argument for small nuclear reactors to produce heat for running in existing former coal plants though. Reutilizing existing infrastructure is way faster than building new long distance power lines and battery storage facilities.
Still a transitional technology though...
You could do the same with biomass though, which can actually be a permanent technology because it in itself is both renewable and carbon neutral.
Where should all that biomass come from? Farming and transporting all that probably consumes almost as much energy as you gain out of it afterwards.
Biomass is a nice niche powersource when used at sites with some surplus waste resource, but I think using it at scale has been thoroughly shown to do more harm than good by now.
Geothermal is especially good for heat though. For energy yes I agree.
EDIT: Clarity
I wonder how much that lowering of the cost of solar panels comes from increased exploitation of labor and nature (through harmful industrialized mining operations)