When the full history is written, the abandonment of nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s will be credited as the major cause for severe climate change. We had

When the full history is written, the abandonment of nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s will be credited as the major cause for severe climate change. We had an opportunity to blunt this and head it off and we didn't take it. Coal burning for electricity is the single largest source of man-made carbon emissions. If we'd kept going with nuclear the US probably would have phased out coal by the mid-2000s. We also would have built a huge nuclear supply chain, advanced reactor designs, and manufacturing abilities to scale them. The kicker is that if we'd gone down this path, China and India and other large developing economies would have copied us, taking a head start on nuclear technology by cloning our technology and deployment. Instead of being powered mostly by coal, the rise of China would have been largely powered by nuclear. Renewable energy wasn't there until very recently. We could probably replace a lot of fossil generation with solar and wind energy today, but this has come far too late to head off a significant degree of climate change. Oil, gas, and deforestation are also responsible for a lot of emissions, so phasing out coal in the late 20th century would not have stopped climate change. But it would have blunted it significantly. https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-fuel https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-fuel In that alternate timeline we would have emitted just a bit more than half the CO2 we've emitted to date, and would now today be looking at both the phasing out of oil for automobiles in favor of EVs and the maturation of solar, wind, and grid scale battery storage to further displace fossil generation. We'd be in the home stretch. Instead we are now looking at the inevitability of catastrophic climate change, and China is still building new coal plants. (I'm not saying it's China's fault, at least not 100%. I'm saying it's also our fault for poor leadership and for abandoning a key technology.) AI alarmists should take note. Let's say we ban AI over fear of job losses. How many jobs will be lost when the economy contracts due to demographic effects? How much harder will it be to cope with climate change with a contracting economy loaded with unserviceable debt? Let's not abandon another powerful tool over fear mongering that is significantly less grounded in reality than nuclear fear mongering.