True but not relevant here.

If you’re only looking from a financial perspective, sure. But given the slow construction times, these decisions are an issue for absolutely everyone, given that decarbonization is a worldwide project.

“Texas is so deregulated, it’s basically Russia” is an interesting take but I approve.

Well, thanks.

Otoh, I withheld judgement on your opinion for a reason: I can think of at least one example of a German pro-nuclear pro-coal anti-renewables shill who has rather recently turned into a pro-nuclear anti-climate-change shill.

[Addendum: In fact, in Germany, associations like Nuclearia (pro-nuclear), Eike (anti-renewables), Vernunftkraft (anti-wind power) are all linked, including in their financing through the Heartland Institute.]

I understand that the situation might be a little different in other countries, but the whole worldwide civil nuclear field was born out of the military-industrial complex and is still very connected in governments, much more so than solar/wind energy companies are.

New reactors are expensive. New reactors are late. New reactors can basically only be built by nation states but not privately. Nuclear is not insurable. Nuclear produces waste with excessive half-life. Nuclear steals resources and mindshare from other options. Nuclear energy output can’t be moderated well (basically for economic reasons, it runs full steam all the time and for safety reasons, you can only moderate output a little), so it does not effectively augment wind and solar, rather leading to wind/solar having to be turned off.

Wind and solar meanwhile can be built cheaply, quickly, privately, locally, site sizes easily scale between kW or GW of output and they only produce a little regular waste at the end of their life. (Okay, granted, Neodymium mining does produce some nuclear waste too — but definitely nowhere what uranium mining produces.)

Wind+solar+hydro+better national/continental grids+batteries+flexible demand is a much better combination.

Basically, Warl0k3 thinks Diplomjodler’s argumentation is a conspiracy theory. In his comment, he ironically takes the position of a nuclear bro who finds out that his devious plan was discovered.

I mean just looking at the amount of concrete in that picture, I get pessimistic. When will this particular site have dug itself out of the carbon “hole” created by its construction?

As for trees: That is really, really hard to measure and even harder to know in advance. Some factors appear to be:

• different tree species store different amounts of carbon
• tree plantation or actual forest?
• prior use of the site (e.g. meadows do store carbon too)
• development over time (most trees need to grow a couple years before they start storing significant amounts of carbon)
• failure of sites due to being planted in a bad way (e.g. a lot of Chinese Green Wall sites and quick-buck billion tree projects seem to be affected by this)

The article doesn’t really do a great job of answering the titular question. So … Is the answer “mostly because of policy failure”? Because that is what opening two coal plants in 2024 sounds like to me.

I’m also a little confused how they managed to jump from “renewables are making power cheaper in Japan” in one paragraph to “this is hampered by G7 liking fossil gas” in the next paragraph. (I do share their worry about G7 nations investing in fossil gas too much. My home country Germany has just introduced a gas peaker plant strategy and appears to be over-investing in LNG terminals.)

Iirc, German passports are overall the most versatile in terms of allowing international travel.

Why bother with bribes if he’d do it for free anyway?

If Big Gravity didn’t illegally hold down the truth, your book would fly off the shelves (literally).

The economics unfortunately currently still work against these types of plants in many cases. Let’s hope the IRA provides enough backing that this projected plant can actually go into production.

Grist is a US website. Though admittedly they use a .org domain and thankfully don’t sprinkle their site with star-spangled banners.

Nobody trusts those efforts. They exist because politicians felt they had to do something and lobbyists told them this was something and so it was done.

(Electrifying transport on land will go a long way towards reducing oil use though.)

Their money is a big part of their power. We need some wedge in there to be able to take more and more of their power away eventually. What’s still happening right now is that they extract money from society and use a small amount of that to pay dividends to people with political/judicial power.

In that sense: Taxing exploration and extraction can be a gateway for more, including criminal justice. But we do need to get over that initial hump.

parts of Europe are in yellow due to threat of terrorist attacks

But the US is green? I.e. no terror attacks or shootings ever occur there…?

This is really close to truth. So many of those products producing trash are useless (bottled water) or even actively harmful (soda, cigarettes). You don’t actually need to pay Coca-Cola at all. You just need a reusable bottle and a water fountain or tap.

Coca-Cola and Phillip Morris will not suddenly start being helpful.

In that sense: encourage your municipality, employers, etc. to set up public water fountains and no-smoking zones. (And if you really want sweet drinks, buy syrups.)

They are not moving into that direction voluntarily. They are because Evergrande went bankrupt and because of accidents. (Not mentioned in the article but I wonder if cheap fossil gas imports from Russia also contribute, as China is now importing significantly more of that.)

As these things go though, economic issues tend to hurt people’s livelihoods too. Kinda not what anyone should want.

One would think that a country whose economy is still rooted in a central planning system would be better at controlling overproduction. In fact, historically, planned economies tended to underproduce.

Arte Karambolage has done this for multiple animals, with French and Germans: Die Lautmalerei/L’onomatopée, der Hund/Le Chien (non-Europeans might be geo-blocked, sorry). Interestingly, the Germans in the video all go for “Wau wau” instead of “wuff wuff”.

(There are more episodes of Lautmalerei/Onomatopoée. A funny one is the elephant. Germans all use “töröö”, because of the influence of a popular children’s audiobook about a speaking elephant.)

So, South Pole are the fine folks who figured out that you could make big monies selling fake CO2 certs to the world’s biggest companies, right? Are we still listening to their expertise?