Climate Change? Nahhh ...

How many miles of interstate in this country? Sure, some of it floods or is otherwise not viable, but lord, there are tens of thousands of miles available.

 

It's always possible the technology gets exponentially more efficient, but that would be a technological advance unaccounted for in the initiatives.

Now, that said, there may be a pivot to nuclear, which is the best option. The hyperventilating over that technology has died down since Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas took it on.

 

I knew it was one of those B towns in California!

 

I'm old enough to remember when people said Biden's vaccination goals were not ambitious enough.

 

People who say we can't be cleaner, don't want to try. There are millions of jobs in new technology. The fact that there are not solar arrays on top of every building in the sun belt is a national shame. I read an article somewhere a few years ago that the Netherlands was putting solar cells in bike paths. Bike paths! We can do that. We can put them in our sidewalks in the sun belt.

This idea that wind farms are ugly or take up too much space is ridiculous. There are energy generating wind turbines all over Europe. Whilr a large field of them might take up space, it's more common to see them running along an interstate, and they take up the space the poll takes up. You can farm around them. You have to mow around them if there's grass.

It's a peculiarly American outlook that the drive for cleaner, renewable energy is somehow not a good thing.

That there are so many people that want us to fail with this is astonishing. And though I'm not grouping anyone in this board in that group, we all know that group exists.

 

Almost all of the wind energy in the state in which I live is generated on land that is still used for its historical purpose:grazing. Wind accounts for about 30 percent of the energy generated in Oklahoma.

Almost all of the solar energy in Oklahoma is from solar panels on buildings that are used as residences or businesses. The exception is a few small-scale installations that are solely for energy generation. Statistics about the percentage of solar in the energy mix are harder to come by because much of the energy is used where it is generated and doesn’t enter the grid where it can be metered.

Energy from fossil fuels is not without its own land footprint. Drill sites, tank farms, refineries, natural gas compression stations, etc . sit on land that cannot be used for anything else. While the land over pipelines is used for agriculture and transportation, that use is not without risk of being interrupted by spills or construction equipment to maintain those lines.

You seem to present the mix of energy production as either/or. It’s much more complicated and flexible.

 

My only real problem with nuclear is what do we do with the waste afterward. The technology to run a nuclear generator safely is pretty straightforward by now. New designs like pebble reactors minimize the chance of a meltdown. But nuclear waste is the ultimate NIMBY product. We can't build containment for it that is viable for a truly long term, and unless they are very carefully located they can be subject to a natural disaster. We could load it on a rocket and toss it into the sun... but if there is a Challenger style accident with the booster then horribly poisonous stuff with a half life of thousands of years gets spread all over. That's a tough nut that has to be solved somehow.

 

This feels less like a fight over energy sources and more like a larger problem we keep bumping into the edges of, but never seem to address in full. There are lots of people in this country with a generalized trauma over the rapid changes happening in society and nervous as hell that they will have a much diminished place in it.

 

And most of them are white, and nervous about shifting percentages as well.