Maybe this is already widely understood on here, but I feel understanding how the anti-communist left was leveraged to fight nuclear energy.
As more people are reading this I wanted to share what I consider to be a superior analysis https://communistperspective.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-nuclear-debate-for-and-against.html
And to be clear, you can be pro-renewable without being anti-nuclear I am referring to many of the European Green parties that are anti-nuclear above all else. Nuclear has it’s drawbacks, but it is preferable to climate change, for now.
Reducing usage can and absolutely should be done, and unlike building new plants of a particular type, it doesn’t require changing people’s minds. Well, mostly.
One of the biggest wastes of energy is of course work commutes, which are stupid. But that’s mostly fossil fuels and let’s just set aside electric cars for a minute. The other big waste besides travel is lighting and HVAC for the offices.
Then we have the easier stuff. Most homes have terrible insulation or no insulation at all. Insulation should be on the list of minimum habitability requirements for rental homes. The difference during summer in a moderate climate (such as los Angeles) is 80-90% decrease in energy usage.
Industry should also have to pay their fair share. Instead of getting a discount for being bulk users, they should have to pay more for being demand drivers.
New communities should be built with microgrids. Each home and business should generate their own energy using solar and wind. By having unlimited energy flowing from some unseen tap, people tend to not pay attention to how much they are using and just pay the bill when it comes. There’s some economic principle with a fancy name that covers this but I forget the name.
And that’s just for starters. Really we waste 95% of all energy generated by power plants. And I mean waste. As in the same things could be accomplished without compromise for less energy. It’s the economic incentives that are all out of whack.
Urbanization is insanely important and there is actually a very interesting and tragic history of how the US public infrastructure of trains and trams were monopolized then dismantled by bad actors on behalf of GM and other car companies. The car, tire, and oil industry (I think it was firestone, Ford, and Standard Oil) also heavily invested in lobbying for highways, privatization of railroads, and the mass adoption of suburban housing developments.
All this to say is that yet again, monopoly capitalists are at the heart of our problems. I worked briefly on wind energy and the open secret was that the real opponent (on a local level) was the power grid/utility companies. Their business model is never maintain the power grid, so the ide of REPLACING/REFURBISHING the power grid to be more compatible with alternative energy is a non-starter. As we all agree here, they should be permanently nationalized. My friend works for PG&E and he tells me how they take the money from the government to update the grids, pocket it with huge bonuses then don’t maintain the grid and problems happen.
Edit: This essay grossly misrepresents the intent of the conference imo (“how come everytime we capitalist try to improve something, things get way worse but also way more profitable”), but includes raw data worth examining, i.e. the Ford Foundation “tackling urban development” (lmao at bourgeois academics who never call out conflicts of interests).