As the world grapples with the existential crisis of climate change, environmental activists want President Joe Biden to phase out the oil industry, and Republicans argue he’s already doing that. Meanwhile, the surprising reality is the United States is pumping oil at a blistering pace and is on track to produce more oil than any country has in history.
it was solar water heating, but yeah, total dick move. I will say, renewable tech has finally caught up to the demand and we’re all benefitting for it today; the best solar panel you could acquire in 1979 would yield less than 1/4 today’s panels and be much heavier and more expensive - we weren’t in a position for Solar to take any percentage of the requirement. Same with wind power - turbines are 10x larger now, and their massive props took decades to develop to yield today’s massive farms that are capable of powering hundreds of thousands of residences. Geothermal, hydro and other means might have been deployed more, hard to say.
Our planet’s not doomed, it’ll be fine when we’ve destroyed our only biosphere and poisoned / wrecked all the food sources. The planet will keep on trucking just fine. Humanity may be ultimately self defeating, but we’re not dead quite yet. We might just still pull this out. I’m trying, real hard, to stay just slightly optimistic.
The sun transmits a lot more heat energy than light energy, so using it to heat water is actually really smart. Especially if you can run that hot water through your HVAC system and heat a living space.
Solar thermal systems are so simple to build you can do it with a bit of wood, some aluminum cans, a piece of glass, and some black paint. And you get a lot of heat out of something like that with no moving parts.
yup. and critically, it was all available in 79, when this was rolled out. I would love to see a 100% renewable federal energy budget but we literally can’t do it today with our modern tech, 1979 it was a dream. but Carter realized that examples like the white house saving tens of thousands of dollars every month on something as simple as hot water was a win, no matter if the tech was a panacea for our energy needs - the action of doing something.
reagan and conservatives are in the pocket of big industry and big oil, so yeah, no shit they didn’t go for it, chuds.
My dad really loved Carter, and designed and built a passive solar home that he hoped would be the blueprint for whole developments of them.
Then Reagan got elected.
Luckily he’s still got the plans somewhere.
I think Carter was one of the best presidents we’ve ever had in a lot of ways.
Former military, submariner, without an ounce of warmonger in the dude. avoided conflict intelligently. did the best with a shit-sandwich of multiple world crisis landing. genuinely believed in his religion without ever forcing it on others. lived humbly. knew we were building the f117 and it’s existence basically negated a lot of the need for the b-1 (lol bone) (which had a host of other threats and problems dogging it) - and Reagan crucified him for the choice by pandering to the military industrial complex even after he was read-into the situation. Was scientifically literate enough to understand stealth changed the entire landscape of war.
There’s a lot to love, the right just hates him because of bullshit.
Nuclear was (and still is) a viable energy production option, but the greens do not want this carbon-free power source. So, natural gas it is! (Even with renewables, it is still paired with natural gas out of necessity)
Nuclear power is hardly a carbon-free power source. Even if the construction, mining, refining, and transport of the fuel was done with electricity, the concrete for the plant would release a lot of CO2.
It’s less than a fossil fuel, to be sure, but calling it carbon-free assumes you just plop down a reactor and it starts making power, which isn’t the case.
Sure, but all those same problems apply to wind and solar too. It isn’t like the concrete to anchor the wind turbine just appears there. If we are going to call wind carbon-free, nuclear is too.
But, coming back to my point, one actively burns fossil fuels in order to use renewables. They are paired with natural gas plants out of necessity for just base-load power. If one is serious about a carbon-free energy grid, nuclear is the best option out there using today’s technology. We should have been building out nuclear since the 70s energy crisis and we should be building it out today. France did, and it is why Germany is now buying power from them in spades.
Jimmy Carter worked on nuclear power in his Navy days. He could have chosen to build nuclear plants but didn’t, mostly because of his experience with nuclear accidents. I’ll trust Jimmy more than some guy on the Internet.
Which nuclear accidents? Three mile island (which happened in '79 and Carter was elected in '76) to this day has a death toll of zero, as well as injuries. In fact only one death has occurred from the facility, which occurred during decommissioning. Unit 1 (of 2) continued operating until 2019 without issue. The Chernobyl accident didn’t happen until '86.
Here’s a list of nuclear accidents. There’s very few, and most of them did not cause any deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents
Storage of waste is also very safe and easy. It’s overblown, and the biggest issue is regulation that requires them to store it themselves with no better solution created yet. Coal doesn’t have this issue, for example, making it cheaper than it should be. Solar and wind also don’t have this issue with mining waste and other pollutants. This is a cost issue and not an effectiveness of safety issue though, so not really relevant.
Jimmy isn’t an expert in the field (and neither am I), but the experts say it’s safe and reliable. Jimmy is just a guy who was elected president. He did fairly well, and has done a lot of good after too, but I don’t trust his opinion over experts.
We need solar, wind, probably tidal soon, etc, but nuclear is also clean, safe, and more reliable. It should be considered where appropriate. I prefer solar and wind, but they have different capabilities than nuclear and we should recognize that.
I honestly don’t care enough about anything you said to take the time to reply to any of it, because I’ve heard it all be fore.
But this I will not stand for:
Yes, he is.
Jimmy knows more about nuclear power than both of us combined.
You know, I knew that but totally forgot. Thanks for the reminder. This is a cool article about his experience, particularly in a nuclear cleanup. This part is particularly interesting, considering his long life. “They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now. It was in the early stages and they didn’t know.” Even a thousand times more than the maximum today isn’t even as harmful as most think.
This is also an interesting insight into how his views changed.
He was originally interested in the technology through reason, but he became opposed through emotion.
However, he’s not an expert. Admittedly, this is a biased source, but there’s no chance he was actually educated on nuclear reactor operations, at least prior to becoming president. He was more knowledgeable than others at the time, who could barely know anything on the subject, but he couldn’t have known how they actually operate.
I don’t disagree he probably has more knowledge on it than both of us combined, but I don’t claim knowledge on it. I claim knowledge of what experts say, and they all say it’s the safest source of energy we have. They say it does have some risks associated with it, but so does everything. There is a near zero risk for meltdown of modern reactors, and even if one were to happen it’s extremely unlikely to cause serious damage.
For example, the thing that caused the most damage with Fukushima was the evacuation, not the actual radioactive waste. They evecuated areas that didn’t need to be and probably caused more harm than they prevented. If they took a measured response, fewer people would have been harmed and less damage would have been done.
Give a counter-argument of why we shouldn’t at least consider utilizing nuclear energy in places where it makes sense?
Edit: Also, for reference, I live very close to probably the largest concentration of nuclear reactors in the world. The Norfolk Naval Shipyard. I haven’t been worried about it for a single second of my life. There have been no accidents, as far as I’m aware, and they’re very safe. There’s a reason the navy makes such good use of them, even on vehicles designed to be under attack.
I’m all for using nuclear energy where it makes sense. Which is basically past the asteroid belt, and possibly the moon because of its two-week-long nights that make solar power difficult. But beyond that I don’t see a use for nuclear fission power.
For the rest of it, the expense and risk of nuclear energy doesn’t make sense, at least to me. I would love for the nuclear dreams of the 50s to be realized. But, like airships, nuclear fission feels like a dead-end technology, especially at this point in time.
I think we would be better off investing in systems that support renewable energy - electricity storage, efficiency, and grid modernization - than it would be to dump billions of dollars into plants that won’t come online for decades.
But that’s me. And I’m really thankful that you took the time to write a great response. LLAP 🖖
Nuclear power has less deaths than even wind by terawatt hour produced. Hell rooftop solar has caused significantly more deaths per terawatt hour produced. The fact you think one of the safest power generation sources is a serious danger is not based in reality and is what I was alluding to when I said that the greens don’t want nuclear, so instead we built out natural gas.
There’s lots and lots of reasons why nuclear isn’t going to be a solution, and its danger is only a small part of it.
I’ve gone round and round with nukebros for years so you’re not gonna change my mind on this.
And what are those lots and lots of reasons?
What is it with nukebros and coming out of the woodwork like this. Is there some Discord chat where you let your nukebro friends know somebody’s got a different opinion?
I don’t have time to rehash an argument I’ve had a hundred times already. Go look it up yourself.
Don’t be a sealion
Renewables do not need gas FFS. Batteries, over production, pumped hydro are solutions. There are more
The investments could have been made to get us to where we are now a lot sooner. We chose not to make that investment.
pray tell, what 1980s tech could have swept in, I’m genuinely curious what you know.
Technology doesn’t have an era attached to it. It is whatever is created in its time. More investment means faster advancement of technology. The capabilities of the solar of today don’t have anything inherently “modern” about it. It’s just that it exists today, but could have existed decades ago or decades from now, depending on how quickly technology progressed, which is mostly a factor of how much time/money/effort are invested into it.
see the illusion there is if we had just invested enough directly into solar that we could have gotten to today’s tech faster. but today’s tech is a mishmash of pv, materials development, photolithography and a ton of other processes that took the intervening 40 years to achieve. Some of it could have been accelerated but I honestly can’t see how that would have changed the state we’re in.
Now, changing the narrative in 1979 - that’s a what-if book I’d fucking read. Carter hits Reagan for colluding with Iran and america wakes up to the scientists first warnings - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/ - https://e360.yale.edu/features/they-knew-how-the-u-s-government-helped-cause-the-climate-crisis - instead of helping big petroleum by subsidizing it to the tune of billions of dollars every year continuing today - we could have taken a turn towards the inevitable change, well we might have saved the ecosystem.
Today it’d take ww2 levels of focus around the world to avert the worst. But changing the narrative back then, oof. That would have been powerful.