I understand your argument, but honestly, as someone living in a heavily polluted area, I couldn't care less about the CO₂ problem. When you have the immediate concern of people dying 15 years earlier than they might have, when your throat burns 300 days in a year, and you often can't see much farther than 400 meters, I would be very happy if we could just switch everything coal powered to natural gas.

As someone who also lives in a heavily polluted area, I agree, but I can also move.

Nobody can move away from the consequences of CO2 saturation. There's no second planet to move to.

Peaker plants are far dirties than base load plants.

> > Solar needs to have standby fossil plants that keep at idle or else you get brownouts

> That's strictly cleaner than running the region on fossil plants only

True, but from a CO2 and climate standpoint that's strictly dirtier than nuclear. And reducing emissions by enforcing good insulation norms, taxing the hell out of kerosene, etc.

Nuclear, of course, has its own dirty issue in sequestering byproducts (discounting the occasional meltdown, which---thankfully---is still generally a localized problem relative to CO2 emission's global threat, although it's not very localized... Chernobyl threatened much of west Asia and Europe in the worst-case scenario which, thankfully, didn't materialize).

It's a little hard to weigh those costs vs. benefits, since nuclear byproduct sequestration is relatively cheap but the consequences of failure are relatively high (dirty bombs). On the whole, I'd peg the risk factors for solar and wind as lower, but I'd still prefer to see nuclear plants replace fossil fuel plants if other options aren't available.

This is a problem of means. We don't have infinite resources to spend. For instance Germany spent 300 billions euros on wind and solar power since 2000. They decided to stop using nuclear, and are still burning masses of coal, and are still quite far away from clean electricity.

Would they have invested 300 billions in nuclear, Germany would run on 100% CO2 neutral electricity today, with an hefty margin (arguably 200 billions would have been enough).

Then while everybody speaks about electricity, they conveniently forget that it represents only 20 to 25% of all of our energy needs. The remaining 75-80% for industry, agriculture and transports are almost 100% fossil-fueled...

Looking in the mirror is enough. How much did you (and me, its nit about you specifically) spent as a student? 1k/month? How much you earn after tax? 5k? So if after 10years of work less than half a million on your account you spent on uneccessary things. (Ok... its all spent for the kids...)

Why the downvote. Seriously, if we believe we need to consume less, it might be a good idea to put it into perspective what that will actually mean for each individual. I am including myself into this as well.