I’ve come to the conclusion that environmentalists and their allies will never come around on nuclear, because, like the old saying goes, they didn’t arrive at their opposition based on reasoning or facts. A glance at the death rates attributable to various forms of energy per kilowatt hour generated should have made nuclear a slam dunk proposition years or decades ago. The fact the Western world, directed by environmental concerns, decommissioned nuclear plants in the 2010s-2020s shows environmentalists aren’t serious people. Germany doing what they did, NY state doing what it did, should be scandals.
People put a lot of weight on novel risks and little weight on mundane risks we have become habituated to.
This is why people started getting scared of the potential adverse heart risks associated with Covid vaccines and disregarded the greater cardiovascular risks associated with an acute Covid infection.
Yeah, you could build nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s and somehow it was possible, but now no longer. The Chinese are building out nuclear, I wonder what magic they’re using to make it economical.
I suspect the long arm of the regulatory state.
And if it is really not economical, you’d think the Western world should have been treating the nuclear plants as remnants of a more advanced civilization, rather than decommissioning them.
That's pretty much it, so much regulation to get these new plants going. Folks don't realize how much safer they are (and nukes were already very safe) so they put ridiculous safeguards on installations. The nice thing about the new SMRs is their modular design facilitates scaling up production in a way traditional plants couldn't (one of the big reasons costs went out of sight for new traditional plants was that every nuke in the US was a custom design, a prototype if you will, and we all know how prototypes can take a while to get the bugs out). Another cost saver is to put these modular plants on existing retired coal power sites and using the existing grid infrastructure. Solar is great but when you add in the costs of battery backup, virtual plant regulators, and grid expansion for maintaining a consistent baseline energy supply SMRs start looking a lot better and less complicated.
This slagging of the regulatory state for clear deficiencies in US management practices is tired.
Wrote this on another energy thread.
"Each project is approved on the assumptions at the time. And there is a cushion built in to absorb risks that arise. This is project management 101. Projects that don't hit their cost target are bad projects. Why the project did not work out at the budget is the question that a post mortem answer. So I would love to see what the post mortem on Vogtle. And here it is. via archive.org go look at https://liftoff.energy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/20230320-Liftoff-Advanced-Nuclear-vPUB-0329-Update.pdf Read 29 to 31 for details on why Vogtle had cost overruns. Lawsuits and regulatory changes are not mentioned as a significant source. Its all crappy management - for example "Known test failure rates of components have ranged from 40–80% over different time periods". p30.
1) The CCP is not concerned about stranded capital or efficiency. This is a big issue with coal power build outs in the 2010s and beyond.
2) The CCP’s capital controls lets firms/state borrow at negative real interest rates (this used to be true until they started facing deflationary pressure.) Basically, they squeezed workers/households by forcing them into low interest rate savings accounts while inflation was well above those rates.
Nuclear power needs state subsidization. It’s a defense policy. One reason a bunch of projects died after 3 Mile Island is that interest rates spiked and forced government austerity. The erosion of public support (along with lawsuits from Utah over the NTS) made it easy to shelve projects.
“Nuclear power needs state subsidization. It’s a defense policy.”
Well, considering how many lives would be saved, seems like you could figure out exactly how much subsidy was worth based on Quality Adjusted Life Years. Or even where the state would make money on the subsidy based on the cost of QALY saved.
Politicians don’t make decisions based on QALY, nor do voters. Benefit Cost analysis is generally used to justify an action post hoc and support executive actions when it comes to litigation. It could change NRC rules and guidance but that still won’t change the politics of public financing (which has been mostly to make state subsidies to nuclear more opaque and invisible to public discourse.)
Love this! If this argument has a flaw, it might be the assumption that the green movement is actually interested in solving climate change. Based on their actions, climate “action” is for them more of a means to the end of degrowth environmentalism and a bunch of other kooky things too ridiculous to list.
Wanting well conserved green spaces is a perfectly coherent policy preference. Most conservationists aren’t misanthropes, they just have aesthetic preferences with misanthropic second order effects. Attributing scandalous motives to people whose main commitment is literary flora and fauna doesn’t seem that productive.
"aren’t misanthropes, they just have aesthetic preferences with misanthropic second order effects." I love this. I plan to generalize it to "They're not dumb, they just want things with dumb unintended consequences." Of course for eloquence we can't top MLK's, "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,"
Beat me to it. It's always going to be a game a whack a mole with many environmentalists, because their view of what's clean is much more than "does not emit greenhouse gases", and it will always going to lead to degrowth.
Nuclear will never be clean because of the waste, no matter how manageable.
Hydro will never be clean because of disruption to aquatic life.
Mass solar and wind will never be clean because of disruption to wildland, no matter how desolate.
Geothermal will get flack due to the disruption of mining. And indeed, all of the above will get flack due to the disruption of mining
But without all of that and without fossil fuels, you're left with only dramatic sipping of a small bit of energy they'll allow that generated in developed areas. And that also means dramatic degrowth, which would be miserable and most people wouldn't stand for it.
After the omnicause conglomeration of ideas, environmentalism became a vehicle to discuss and deploy anticapitalist rhetoric/policies/goals. Enviros are the calvinists of progressive orthodoxy, “we are destined to be punished by an angry superbeing, we are predestined and powerless to change our fate, and we must atone for our sins”.
Desalination creates a bunch of pollution. You wind up with toxic brine. If you dump it back into the ocean all that concentrated salt and other nasty stuff (concentrated heavy metals and pollutants) kills all the aquatic life.
You can dump it in Bakersfield because it’s already a dump.
Look across the pond for how badly energy transition can go. Electricity in the UK is extortionate because of the cost of subsidising renewables (mainly wind, far away from population centres) as well as having backup gas generation. A new nuclear power plant is being held up because of the cost of adding in ridiculous wildlife protection features.
Only yesterday, the 'Net Zero' government minister Ed Miliband (and potential new PM) decided he wants to stop allowing new licenses for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.
Environmentalists do not want people to be rich and happy. They instead:
- Want rationing as an end in itself.
- Want government supplied, artificial fertiliser free, oatmeal and beans for everyone, assuming the crops haven't failed.
- Want not only meat to be banned, but any wasteful rich tasty food to be banned. Who needs Ozempic if food is meagre and boring?
- Want dingy cubicles for all instead of wasteful large houses.
If they could have a world where there was abundant carbon free energy they would not want that, because that is not consistent with a precarious and impoverished lifestyle that they want everyone to live.
This is so strange to me. I would have thought that the relatively low standard of living in the decades after WWII (and of course the war itself) would have been quite enough deprivation. The UK I knew while working as a policy analyst for the FCO in the Blair era didn’t seem to be on this track. But I didn’t think Brexit would pass, so obviously I didn’t know Britain as well as I thought I did.
Just an anecdote. I was driving by the Baltimore harbor and they were storing segments of offshore wind turbine poles off of Keith Ave. It was kind of cool to see how large they are compared to onshore wind turbine pole (which can be split onto semi trailers.)
It’s kind of pathetic that one man’s aesthetic preferences are arbitrary rescinding funding and permitting for such projects.
The policy agenda here is sound — parcel assembly, transmission, NRC reform are all real levers. But "too cheap to meter" is doing rhetorical damage to your own case. Electricity at 2¢/kWh is genuinely transformative and probably achievable in 30 years; it's also still very much worth metering, because aluminum smelters and data center operators will pay different prices than households, and the metering infrastructure has near-zero marginal cost. Strauss's slogan was always sales copy, not economics. The abundance case is stronger when it names actual thresholds — cheap enough for synthetic fuels, cheap enough for vertical farming — than when it gestures at a price point that never made physical sense
I get where you're coming from and agree wholeheartedly with the premise, but two points: (a) organizations like Rewiring America are dealing with both the current infrastructure and political reality. There's lots of opposition to adding new solar and wind farms, and finding ways to help consumers save energy in that framework makes a huge amount of sense. And (b) I know induced demand gets dirty looks around these parts, but that's exactly what you'd get with energy too cheap to meter. The benefits would be large enough that we should strive for that world, but the consequence would be no reason to conserve, which would add demand until we put strain on the grid again. I'd like to see how that modeled.
Re: (b) if there’s one fundamental critique I would level at Matt’s writing it’s that he never solves for the equilibrium. Why stop at 10,000 acres? Given what he’s juxtaposing it with, ‘limitless’ means limitless, right?
At some level I don’t understand the traditional green movement even though I feel like I share their basic goals and am much more of a Lorax style environmentalist instead of a climate hawk.
But their movement seems weird ass hell and committed to a vision from the 1970s.
This is probably true for contemporary green parties, but real socialists at least had their own view for abundance, whether or not it was as workable.
>The idea of a virtual power plant is to use software and connected devices to manage demand timing so that you can get by with less overall generation.
I agree with the overall argument of this piece, but in a healthy and sane grid that *isn't* trying to do crazy things like stop growth of energy use, a VPP doesn't reduce how much you need to generate. Especially not in a high-renewables grid, or in a region that's farther along on electrifying energy use, or even in a high-nuclear grid where load following is limited. It reduces how much you need to *store* or how much you need to *overbuild capacity and waste,* It replaces (some of the) batteries and grid upgrades that you'd need, not PV and wind turbines. It lets you run every power plant at its maximum operating efficiency and ensure the energy gets used productively.
Energy abundance is why we should prioritize getting new nuclear built, with government funding if needed for the first tranche to rebuild our technical capacity quicker. If batteries get much cheaper still and we can do it with solar alone, then we’ve moderately overpaid for the nukes. In any other scenario nuclear is a necessary pillar towards the too-cheap-to-meter electricity necessary for synthetic hydrocarbons et al to get us to true carbon neutral and beyond.
With warehouses there apparently is a financing issue that creates a holdup on solar (who pays, who benefits, who finances. If it’s all owned by one entity then the only issue is permitting.)
This is a little tometa for a simple minded economist like me.
"Clean?" "Abundant?" What ever you call it, everything still comes down to doing cost benefit analysis of projects using a price for the CO2 emitted, avoided, or seqestered at the value of the tax on net emissions that we should have.
>"And while we should of course try to use our existing electrical grid infrastructure efficiently rather than wastefully, making it more efficient isn’t going to solve the problem either."< This seems to be the key point, so is it true? Probably? But can we start with a less vibe-y version: "Roughly X% of the energy currently consumed leaks away and never produces the user's intended benefit--this is the 'Total Addressable Market' (metaphorically) of efficiency increases." Shouldn't we at least try to put a rough number on it? If X is 80%, then Matt's statement above is less convincing. I share the instinct that (1) "more energy" is probably a fatter target, and (2) the anti-fossil climate movement is really more interested in changing behavior than optimizing benefit. But other people don't share that! It's hard to discuss that productively without numbers. [You could go further and ask "Let's estimate the incremental cost of decreasing X by 1% vs. the cost of producing 1% more energy?" but I don't want to push my luck.]
The war on drugs is a 100 year massive failure. Any high school kid, or adult, can get their hands on any drug they want. On top of that the price has dropped sharply over the past few decades. Every time a supply source is stopped, another one pops up to replace it. The only successful tactic is to reduce demand.
Environmentalists make the same mistake. Stopping drilling, a pipeline, or an LNG terminal does not reduce fossil fuel use. Another country steps inn to fill the demand. Again we have to reduce demand. Again, the only successful tactic is to reduce demand.
I agree with the proximate points made here, but in the ultimate, reducing demand is not what we want out of energy, because it's so useful for so many things to sustain the industrial world. Dramatically reducing demand is the degrowth path. What we want is the current demand to be met with as clean of energy as we can get.
Loving the dig at corn subsidies... burning diesel and fertilizer to make ethanol that in turn makes my gasoline shittier is the absolute worst. Iowa should pay for its sins.
I’ve come to the conclusion that environmentalists and their allies will never come around on nuclear, because, like the old saying goes, they didn’t arrive at their opposition based on reasoning or facts. A glance at the death rates attributable to various forms of energy per kilowatt hour generated should have made nuclear a slam dunk proposition years or decades ago. The fact the Western world, directed by environmental concerns, decommissioned nuclear plants in the 2010s-2020s shows environmentalists aren’t serious people. Germany doing what they did, NY state doing what it did, should be scandals.
People put a lot of weight on novel risks and little weight on mundane risks we have become habituated to.
This is why people started getting scared of the potential adverse heart risks associated with Covid vaccines and disregarded the greater cardiovascular risks associated with an acute Covid infection.
I agree with this. The idea of a nuclear meltdown is pretty baked into the public consciousness.
No matter how you deal with safety and fuel disposal issues, new nuclear power in too damn expensive. None of the projects, both proposed and being built now have shown that they can be economically competitive, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/business/energy-environment/kairos-small-modular-nuclear-power.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iVA.DPw0.PIUsxAcwUceF&smid=url-share.
Yeah, you could build nuclear power in the 1960s and 1970s and somehow it was possible, but now no longer. The Chinese are building out nuclear, I wonder what magic they’re using to make it economical.
I suspect the long arm of the regulatory state.
And if it is really not economical, you’d think the Western world should have been treating the nuclear plants as remnants of a more advanced civilization, rather than decommissioning them.
That's pretty much it, so much regulation to get these new plants going. Folks don't realize how much safer they are (and nukes were already very safe) so they put ridiculous safeguards on installations. The nice thing about the new SMRs is their modular design facilitates scaling up production in a way traditional plants couldn't (one of the big reasons costs went out of sight for new traditional plants was that every nuke in the US was a custom design, a prototype if you will, and we all know how prototypes can take a while to get the bugs out). Another cost saver is to put these modular plants on existing retired coal power sites and using the existing grid infrastructure. Solar is great but when you add in the costs of battery backup, virtual plant regulators, and grid expansion for maintaining a consistent baseline energy supply SMRs start looking a lot better and less complicated.
This slagging of the regulatory state for clear deficiencies in US management practices is tired.
Wrote this on another energy thread.
"Each project is approved on the assumptions at the time. And there is a cushion built in to absorb risks that arise. This is project management 101. Projects that don't hit their cost target are bad projects. Why the project did not work out at the budget is the question that a post mortem answer. So I would love to see what the post mortem on Vogtle. And here it is. via archive.org go look at https://liftoff.energy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/20230320-Liftoff-Advanced-Nuclear-vPUB-0329-Update.pdf Read 29 to 31 for details on why Vogtle had cost overruns. Lawsuits and regulatory changes are not mentioned as a significant source. Its all crappy management - for example "Known test failure rates of components have ranged from 40–80% over different time periods". p30.
Two reasons.
1) The CCP is not concerned about stranded capital or efficiency. This is a big issue with coal power build outs in the 2010s and beyond.
2) The CCP’s capital controls lets firms/state borrow at negative real interest rates (this used to be true until they started facing deflationary pressure.) Basically, they squeezed workers/households by forcing them into low interest rate savings accounts while inflation was well above those rates.
Nuclear power needs state subsidization. It’s a defense policy. One reason a bunch of projects died after 3 Mile Island is that interest rates spiked and forced government austerity. The erosion of public support (along with lawsuits from Utah over the NTS) made it easy to shelve projects.
“Nuclear power needs state subsidization. It’s a defense policy.”
Well, considering how many lives would be saved, seems like you could figure out exactly how much subsidy was worth based on Quality Adjusted Life Years. Or even where the state would make money on the subsidy based on the cost of QALY saved.
Politicians don’t make decisions based on QALY, nor do voters. Benefit Cost analysis is generally used to justify an action post hoc and support executive actions when it comes to litigation. It could change NRC rules and guidance but that still won’t change the politics of public financing (which has been mostly to make state subsidies to nuclear more opaque and invisible to public discourse.)
And this is why nuclear plants might be on the top of my list for what I want my tax dollars to go to.
We might just want to ask why it’s so expensive now. Most advanced technologies become cheaper as they advance.
Love this! If this argument has a flaw, it might be the assumption that the green movement is actually interested in solving climate change. Based on their actions, climate “action” is for them more of a means to the end of degrowth environmentalism and a bunch of other kooky things too ridiculous to list.
Wanting well conserved green spaces is a perfectly coherent policy preference. Most conservationists aren’t misanthropes, they just have aesthetic preferences with misanthropic second order effects. Attributing scandalous motives to people whose main commitment is literary flora and fauna doesn’t seem that productive.
"aren’t misanthropes, they just have aesthetic preferences with misanthropic second order effects." I love this. I plan to generalize it to "They're not dumb, they just want things with dumb unintended consequences." Of course for eloquence we can't top MLK's, "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,"
Closer but still off, IMO. It’s a vehicle for self-actualization, adopting unpopular viewpoints is just the means by which they get to feel virtuous.
Every Bernie girl who js cute enough and committed enough has it within her power to convert a conservative dude. Most would rather feel superior.
Beat me to it. It's always going to be a game a whack a mole with many environmentalists, because their view of what's clean is much more than "does not emit greenhouse gases", and it will always going to lead to degrowth.
Nuclear will never be clean because of the waste, no matter how manageable.
Hydro will never be clean because of disruption to aquatic life.
Mass solar and wind will never be clean because of disruption to wildland, no matter how desolate.
Geothermal will get flack due to the disruption of mining. And indeed, all of the above will get flack due to the disruption of mining
But without all of that and without fossil fuels, you're left with only dramatic sipping of a small bit of energy they'll allow that generated in developed areas. And that also means dramatic degrowth, which would be miserable and most people wouldn't stand for it.
100%,
After the omnicause conglomeration of ideas, environmentalism became a vehicle to discuss and deploy anticapitalist rhetoric/policies/goals. Enviros are the calvinists of progressive orthodoxy, “we are destined to be punished by an angry superbeing, we are predestined and powerless to change our fate, and we must atone for our sins”.
This + desalination in California is the way.
Desalination is too energy intensive. We must keep it in the ground (sea)!
You can dump all the excess brine waste in the Salton Sea or Bakersfield.
Is there a reason why you couldn't just dump it further into the ocean? Or have I missed the point of a shot at Bakersfield?
Desalination creates a bunch of pollution. You wind up with toxic brine. If you dump it back into the ocean all that concentrated salt and other nasty stuff (concentrated heavy metals and pollutants) kills all the aquatic life.
You can dump it in Bakersfield because it’s already a dump.
Putting Bakersfield underwater is its own (literal) spillover benefit.
For an example of what abundance looks like, think 'long-distance phone calls.'
Look across the pond for how badly energy transition can go. Electricity in the UK is extortionate because of the cost of subsidising renewables (mainly wind, far away from population centres) as well as having backup gas generation. A new nuclear power plant is being held up because of the cost of adding in ridiculous wildlife protection features.
Only yesterday, the 'Net Zero' government minister Ed Miliband (and potential new PM) decided he wants to stop allowing new licenses for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.
Environmentalists do not want people to be rich and happy. They instead:
- Want rationing as an end in itself.
- Want government supplied, artificial fertiliser free, oatmeal and beans for everyone, assuming the crops haven't failed.
- Want not only meat to be banned, but any wasteful rich tasty food to be banned. Who needs Ozempic if food is meagre and boring?
- Want dingy cubicles for all instead of wasteful large houses.
If they could have a world where there was abundant carbon free energy they would not want that, because that is not consistent with a precarious and impoverished lifestyle that they want everyone to live.
This is so strange to me. I would have thought that the relatively low standard of living in the decades after WWII (and of course the war itself) would have been quite enough deprivation. The UK I knew while working as a policy analyst for the FCO in the Blair era didn’t seem to be on this track. But I didn’t think Brexit would pass, so obviously I didn’t know Britain as well as I thought I did.
UK Labor exists solely to make US Democrats look good.
Just an anecdote. I was driving by the Baltimore harbor and they were storing segments of offshore wind turbine poles off of Keith Ave. It was kind of cool to see how large they are compared to onshore wind turbine pole (which can be split onto semi trailers.)
It’s kind of pathetic that one man’s aesthetic preferences are arbitrary rescinding funding and permitting for such projects.
The policy agenda here is sound — parcel assembly, transmission, NRC reform are all real levers. But "too cheap to meter" is doing rhetorical damage to your own case. Electricity at 2¢/kWh is genuinely transformative and probably achievable in 30 years; it's also still very much worth metering, because aluminum smelters and data center operators will pay different prices than households, and the metering infrastructure has near-zero marginal cost. Strauss's slogan was always sales copy, not economics. The abundance case is stronger when it names actual thresholds — cheap enough for synthetic fuels, cheap enough for vertical farming — than when it gestures at a price point that never made physical sense
I get where you're coming from and agree wholeheartedly with the premise, but two points: (a) organizations like Rewiring America are dealing with both the current infrastructure and political reality. There's lots of opposition to adding new solar and wind farms, and finding ways to help consumers save energy in that framework makes a huge amount of sense. And (b) I know induced demand gets dirty looks around these parts, but that's exactly what you'd get with energy too cheap to meter. The benefits would be large enough that we should strive for that world, but the consequence would be no reason to conserve, which would add demand until we put strain on the grid again. I'd like to see how that modeled.
Re: (b) if there’s one fundamental critique I would level at Matt’s writing it’s that he never solves for the equilibrium. Why stop at 10,000 acres? Given what he’s juxtaposing it with, ‘limitless’ means limitless, right?
I don’t actually think “too cheap to meter” was meant literally. Something can be really cheap but also have a price associated with it.
At some level I don’t understand the traditional green movement even though I feel like I share their basic goals and am much more of a Lorax style environmentalist instead of a climate hawk.
But their movement seems weird ass hell and committed to a vision from the 1970s.
You’ve heard the joke that many Greens are just watermelons?
Well you can look at the UK and see how far they have drifted from environmental issues as a priority… it’s disconcerting.
This is probably true for contemporary green parties, but real socialists at least had their own view for abundance, whether or not it was as workable.
>The idea of a virtual power plant is to use software and connected devices to manage demand timing so that you can get by with less overall generation.
I agree with the overall argument of this piece, but in a healthy and sane grid that *isn't* trying to do crazy things like stop growth of energy use, a VPP doesn't reduce how much you need to generate. Especially not in a high-renewables grid, or in a region that's farther along on electrifying energy use, or even in a high-nuclear grid where load following is limited. It reduces how much you need to *store* or how much you need to *overbuild capacity and waste,* It replaces (some of the) batteries and grid upgrades that you'd need, not PV and wind turbines. It lets you run every power plant at its maximum operating efficiency and ensure the energy gets used productively.
Energy abundance is why we should prioritize getting new nuclear built, with government funding if needed for the first tranche to rebuild our technical capacity quicker. If batteries get much cheaper still and we can do it with solar alone, then we’ve moderately overpaid for the nukes. In any other scenario nuclear is a necessary pillar towards the too-cheap-to-meter electricity necessary for synthetic hydrocarbons et al to get us to true carbon neutral and beyond.
Isn't the problem a bit Massachusetts specific? Most states have non forested areas where it is easy to stick lots of solar panels.
Not really. There's been a huge amount of pushback against solar farms in KY where my family lives.
I also see signs about this (and city water) in rural parts of Michigan.
Kentucky is also green and flat.
It’s rolly. Ohio is flat.
With warehouses there apparently is a financing issue that creates a holdup on solar (who pays, who benefits, who finances. If it’s all owned by one entity then the only issue is permitting.)
Then there are all those parking lots.
This is a little tometa for a simple minded economist like me.
"Clean?" "Abundant?" What ever you call it, everything still comes down to doing cost benefit analysis of projects using a price for the CO2 emitted, avoided, or seqestered at the value of the tax on net emissions that we should have.
>"And while we should of course try to use our existing electrical grid infrastructure efficiently rather than wastefully, making it more efficient isn’t going to solve the problem either."< This seems to be the key point, so is it true? Probably? But can we start with a less vibe-y version: "Roughly X% of the energy currently consumed leaks away and never produces the user's intended benefit--this is the 'Total Addressable Market' (metaphorically) of efficiency increases." Shouldn't we at least try to put a rough number on it? If X is 80%, then Matt's statement above is less convincing. I share the instinct that (1) "more energy" is probably a fatter target, and (2) the anti-fossil climate movement is really more interested in changing behavior than optimizing benefit. But other people don't share that! It's hard to discuss that productively without numbers. [You could go further and ask "Let's estimate the incremental cost of decreasing X by 1% vs. the cost of producing 1% more energy?" but I don't want to push my luck.]
The war on drugs is a 100 year massive failure. Any high school kid, or adult, can get their hands on any drug they want. On top of that the price has dropped sharply over the past few decades. Every time a supply source is stopped, another one pops up to replace it. The only successful tactic is to reduce demand.
Environmentalists make the same mistake. Stopping drilling, a pipeline, or an LNG terminal does not reduce fossil fuel use. Another country steps inn to fill the demand. Again we have to reduce demand. Again, the only successful tactic is to reduce demand.
I agree with the proximate points made here, but in the ultimate, reducing demand is not what we want out of energy, because it's so useful for so many things to sustain the industrial world. Dramatically reducing demand is the degrowth path. What we want is the current demand to be met with as clean of energy as we can get.
Loving the dig at corn subsidies... burning diesel and fertilizer to make ethanol that in turn makes my gasoline shittier is the absolute worst. Iowa should pay for its sins.