Also - to elaborate - it doesn't actually cost billions of money to build nuclear reactors. Or wind turbines, or solar panels for that matter. Ultimately it cos

Also - to elaborate - it doesn't actually cost billions of money to build nuclear reactors. Or wind turbines, or solar panels for that matter. Ultimately it costs energy. You could argue that money is a claim on future energy. EROEI is the ratio between energy input and output. This goes back to humanity starting to use horses. This positive EROEI allowed some people to not have to work all day long anymore and could instead become blacksmiths and other professions. Fastforward a bit and the EROEI of coal and oil supercharged the growth/economy. That's the wave we've been riding so far, up until now, allowing us to get to almost 8 billion people on the planet. But with a lot of external costs. We've depleted all the easy to extract oil resources and the golden age of abundant EROEI is over. Since a good while ago (EROEI for oil started dropping in the 70's or 80's IIRC). And this is what we should have been preparing for, for decades already. But oil companies fought tooth and nail against policymakers even bring it up, and tried to refute it by stating that there is tons of oil still left to be extracted (without bothering to mention the cost). It's not a popular talking point if you're a politician but climate change on the other hand is something people can easily grasp and get outraged about and policy makers can't avoid. It's simple: The world heats up, sea levels rise, weather becomes increasingly aggressive and erratic - we're fucked if we don't do something. But that's not the whole picture. We'd be fucked anyways. When the EROEI sinks below a certain threshold the economy (that runs on human brains and external energy inputs) starts shrinking. This has arguably been going on for a while already (even though economists have been trying hard to doctor the numbers to look favorable). And if it drops enough it's a death spiral (the negative logarithmic curve). People end up blame policy, the economy, the capitalists, globalization, immigrants or racism, but what it actually boils down to is that energy is becoming more expensive to extract, and the whole thing is hitting us from behind (well some alarmists have for decades but have been considered fringe or "conspiracy theorists"). Nuclear is our best bet at this point, but it seems somewhat of a pipe dream. Throw some China into the mix where they are ramping up coal plants, or Russia, and there's no way we're going to be reaching any CO2 targets. We'd have to actually change society, people's behavior, how we live. One simple example is public transportation. We're frantically expending a ton of resources at converting existing transportation to electric, but we're not thinking it through. Instead of converting existing ICE vehicles to electric we should (somehow) be shifting to public transportation (not an attractive proposition in the middle of a pandemic). High efficiency vs counting on limitless abundant cheap energy. But people like their cars, and won't change their habits unless they are forced to. And this is why I think we're doomed.