> Shellenberger is a nuclear lobbyist I think it is extremely foolish to make caricatures of people. Twenty years ago, Elon Musk was a software startup guy who

> Shellenberger is a nuclear lobbyist I think it is extremely foolish to make caricatures of people. Twenty years ago, Elon Musk was a software startup guy who had no idea about anything hardware - but that's only because nobody bothered to consider the full human behind the caricature. Mike Shellenberger was an anti-nuclear activist for much of his early life and has always been (and is still) an environmentalist. Furthermore, he may be a lobbyist now (I'm not sure if you are right or wrong), but he ran for governor of California a few years ago. He has been very explicit in explaining his reasoning for shifting from anti-nuclear to pro-nuclear in multiple talks and articles. Take a look at the full human, and your justification for scrutiny fades away. Everybody should be scrutinized to an extent, but he is not fundamentally a biased lobbyist with financial incentives. > Germany has much to do for carbon efficiency, but for total emissions it is somewhere in the middle. This is the problem, man. Germany has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on renewables and they still have high GHG emissions - all they have to show for their massive spending is a couple thousand extra deaths per year and higher electricity prices. If you gave my company the same amount of money, we'd have the entire world to net zero emissions within two decades. Goes to show the inefficiency of government funded programs, and the awful incompatibility of renewable energy with a reliable, affordable consumer electricity market. > I like to use current numbers, because extrapolating development is often pretty close to lying. We can use current and past numbers: for its entire existence, nuclear fission has been the (a) safest, (b) highest fuel density, (c) least waste-producing, (d) lowest emissions, (e) most reliable mass energy source humanity has ever had. The new generation of reactors will only improve this divide between fission and everything else. If you are against extrapolating development and want to rely on established numbers, you must conclude [fission > renewables] I know I'm biased, but I'm also right about all those superlatives.