Clean energy is basically only nuclear, which is laughably unclean if you think about it for five seconds. Maybe geothermal is clean. Solar might be clean if it's done locally in the regions that produce those minerals, but I doubt it.
Nuclear is not laughably unclean, this is a common misconception. Nuclear radiation is vastly less damaging to the homeostasis of the planet and the life on it than any hydro carbon fuel source . Not to mention there is a lot of radiation produced in the burning of hydrocarbons. and things like solar and wind require vast expenditure of hydrocarbon generated energy to install and maintain.
Not to mention the land.
Nuclear energy is more compact and generate vastly more energy comparatively. Which is what makes it more carbon neutral than anything else. It’s the only tech that could basically fulfill the needs of the U.S. power grid as it’s constituted today and then some.
Obviously the demands of the U.S. power grid as it’s constituted today are ridiculous and I’m all in favor of de-growth in the western world but it’s the only tech that could light the entire world without choking it in smog simultaneously. And also leave enough room for human society AND untouched wilderness.
Don’t let the stink of the Cold War lead you away from what is the superior technology comrades. The capitalists just dislike nuclear power because they only ever saw it as a weapon. That and they’re just short sighted and have an incoherent understanding of value.
Nuclear power plants could theoretically become so efficient that it becomes patently absurd for anyone to be deriving a profit from them. There just won’t be enough churn to mask or justify the exploitation. The degree of mining necessary would be so minimal too, especially considering already buried nuclear “waste” could theoretically be utilized as fuel.
I will die on this hill before I entertain being Anprim.
Nuclear is pretty fucking clean. And after that, we will have fusion energy, which generates pretty much no hazardous byproducts.
It's not a mirage, at all. Entire countries have switched to nuclear and cut their emissions drastically while creating less waste than 2nd century Rome in the process.
Tidal, geothermal, wind, hydro - in order, are the cleanest. Beyond that the sources get exponentially more harmful. I honestly don't get the uncrtical support for nuclear power on this site - shit is dangerous.
How is it actually dangerous? Hydro, which I love, has caused more environmental damage and death per Wh generated than nuclear power.
Hydro can be done with a relatively low highly localized impact, heck beavers do that shit (it takes a will to make hydo low impact, a will not often present). I'm not sure if you're being serious about the dangerousness of nuclear power but I'd point you to the enormous efforts that must be expended to safely mine the materials, train the technicians, operate the plants safely, dispose of the materials, and safely decomission the plants. Add on to that the fact that nuclear materials are poisonous for thousands and thousands of years - there were people seriously considering launching nuclear waste into the sun to get it off of Earth (until they realized that having a rocket carrying nuclear waste explode in the upper atmosphere would be really, really bad). Look into the Hanford Nuclear Site and the issues they've had with it as recently as 2013.
Yes, if you put in an absolutely massive amount of work, you can do hydro with low and highly localized impact. You can make nuclear energy with a lower total impact with less work. This includes everything you were talking about as far as safe mining, and so on.
The issues with disposal and decomission are issues of scale. If we had truly scaled up nuclear with mass-produced reactors, disposal and decomission would become orders of magnitude easier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8&feature=youtu.be
A real doomer lecture pretty much reaffirming your first point that energy return on investment always takes on boom and bust cycles with the growth of civilizations. The more you grow the more energy you need invested in maintaining that energy production and eventually the ROI crashes out and the civilization collapses. Profit is falling and so is our ROI on fossil fuels. No way around that and clean energy sources can't produce the same original ROI that fossil fuels produced so even with their implementation there would still be a major crash as civilization needs to retract to fit that lower energy production ceiling
There is a difference between "extraction" as it currently exists and trade in the purist sense, which allows for the beneficial sharing of resources for all people.
I do agree with this, in whatever form it comes in, the waste and excess of the global north must be fixed. I mostly take umbrage with the idea that "The entire concept of civilization is inherently unsustainable," since the system that has created this is not civilization, it is capitalism, mercanitlism, imperialism etc. Civilization does not need to be exploitative.
Yes, there is a lot of grift surrounding green energy, but the actual science for the real industries is sound. Wind is very good, solar less so but still good to an extent and the technology is improving at a pretty impressive rate, but nuclear for all its issues is crucially extremely low-carbon, which is necessary to save the planet.
