It is all very well to say that orangutans _should_ be more important than a standard of living, but in practice people will say one thing and vote in a completely different way when they are actually tested. Orangutan are not important compared to keeping families struggling between financially viable and non-viable on the good side of the margins.
* Producing aluminium (Apple products) * Producing & storing food (Haber process is energy -> fertiliser @ ~1-2% of worlds energy, refrigeration will also be a big deal) * Transport (of food and goods) * Heating (probably a bigger deal in places like Europe)
Energy is secretly quite fungible - eg, we can burn fossil fuels directly for grid electricity and use grid electricity as a substitute for fossil fuels if the price differential between the two gets large.
If general energy costs go up, food prices go up. That is the most obvious link between energy prices and poverty, but there are other less clear ones.
"Well, good," I think, "sounds like exactly what we need."
We are generating 4x the electricity we were in just the early 1970s, that sort of increase isn't sustainable and we're already seeing consequences of our actions. Unless a fleet of alien ships show up in orbit and charitably give us a bunch of fusion reactors... we've got to start making some pretty radical changes in our lives.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historic...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
I keep saying "nuclear", you keep saying "no". So I'm not going to consider myself part of the problem.
Uhhhh, I never said no to nuclear. I said at best it's a bandaid.
We have a few decades to make some very considerable changes, maybe two centuries to find alternative means of energy (fusion, mining asteroids for PV and battery materials etc as there's a very finite amount of the materials needed for manufacturing batteries and panels on earth too).
People like to say nuclear is our savior but, at current energy production levels, with a moderate estimate for continued growth, there's maybe 100 years of fuel there. Nuclear just isn't a solution for the world's energy needs, it however is a GREAT solution for generating considerable amounts of power in small spaces (ice breakers, submarines) and for portable power for emergencies like with the Russian floating nuclear power stations (Google the Akademik Lomonosov).
At least you have not made the mistake of inclusion "waste" as a problem in the same post.
Breeder reactors solve this. Yes, fuel will be significantly more expensive because of them. But all these "issues" with nuclear (except capital intensivity, that will likely stay) will go away.
Two firms said they were willing to build offshore wind farms for a guaranteed price of £57.50 per megawatt hour for 2022-23.
This compares with the new Hinkley Point C nuclear plant securing subsidies of £92.50 per megawatt hour.
Sure they campaigned against nuclear, but that doesn't mean they approve of whatever other means the EU has been using as an alternative, as they themselves say on their website[1].
I'm sure if they got their way we wouldn't have nuclear or "bad" biofuels, and would just be paying a higher tax rate to scale up our sustainable energy production. That the EU has been dropping nuclear power without that investment in sustainable energy isn't Greenpeace's fault.
1. https://www.greenpeace.org/archive-eu-unit/en/campaigns/Clim...