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We know the replacements for oil for energy, especially electrical demand, we're just unwilling to go through the social changes and costs to get there quickly.
by rtkwe 3y ago
We know the replacements for oil for energy, especially electrical demand, we're just unwilling to go through the social changes and costs to get there quickly. The US and Europe could have been on an entirely nuclear and renewable energy mix for electricity a decade ago if the social will had been there to force it but there's a lot of money in the existing industries to lobby against that.
- robertlagrant 3y agoWell, there's a lot of lobbying from Greenpeace that's set nuclear back a few decades. It's not just industry.
- rtkwe 3y agoIndustry is the real money behind it though. The waste disposal issue in the US because we don't reprocess our spent fuel was a legitimate issue but it was over reacted too along with big scares like Chernobyl and TMI. Singular events like that stick out a lot more than the slow poisoning from coal and gas plants but that's just a fact of human psychology and the difficultly of definitively attributing deaths to slow environmental poisons like that.
- robertlagrant 3y agoIt might be the real money (who knows), but I think public and political sentiment was massively swayed by Greenpeace.
- soco 3y agoOn the other hand, even here and even today people argue "if we don't do it someone else will" to resist switching from oil to anything else. So I wouldn't blame it on the industrial lobby, or at least not entirely. The status quo is a powerful argument.