Climate Plans That Rely Too Much on Carbon Removal Could Breach International Law
Climate Plans That Rely Too Much on Carbon Removal Could Breach International Law
I want to see more emphasis on nuclear in these climate plans. It's a far superior energy source than wind or solar, which have significant environmental costs that are commonly downplayed (manufacturing and disposal).
They're being deployed at scale first because both wind and solar had a learning-by-doing cycle which brought costs to levels below both fossil fuels and nuclear. In much of the world, nuclear never managed to achieve that.
The fossil fuel industry convinced the world that nuclear is dangerous and expensive. In reality, it is the safest and cheapest contemporary source of energy.
Nuclear is still profitable, and has the advantage of already been proven at the scale of an entire industrial nations grid. It takes a while to build, but is still faster than nearly all of our non-binding pledges. Instead, most of the world is betting everything on a massive redesign of the electrical grid with lots of HV DC and new hydro, all for a few percent higher profit.
Moreover, this possibility that renewables might be unstable at nation scale is exactly why we’ve built so many new fossil plants as a ‘bridge’ to when they are ‘ready’. The same would not have been possible if we had chosen the option that made a major industrial nations grid carbon neutral by accident in the seventies.