Re:Americans aren't willing to pay to stop climate change
by trboyden on Friday July 02, 2021 @12:52PM
(#27713931)
If you truly care about cost, efficiency, and the environment, you should be looking at Natural Gas plants [1]. They are inexpensive at $60 million each, are more efficient [2] than all other power generators, provide more power (which will be needed for EVs), and is cleaner when taking into account the full lifecycle costs (construction to decommissioning). They also involve less red tape to get constructed, so they can be built quickly.
But you have to look at the decaying grid as well (another plus for Natural Gas because you could afford to do both). A lot of the power generation is lost in the grid. If you invested there, the current generation facilities could operate more efficiently and you could shutdown the dirtiest/least efficient ones over time.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/natural-gas-fired-power-plant...
[2] https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T...
There's about ~144.3M taxpayers in the US [2]. If each of us paid $1200 per year, that's ~$173Bn per year [3].
Considering that a nuclear reactor only costs $9Bn to build - that's 20 per year [4]. Considering that there are only 60 in the US currently, and that's about 20% of all electricity generation, and that Nuclear isn't the most efficient form of energy generation - we should be able to replace ~7% of dirtiest energy sources per year.
~7% * 25% = ~1.75% reduction in greenhouse gases (at least). Considering that we need to cut emissions by 60% by 2050 - in 30 years, this would be ~52%, and this is definitely not the most efficient method... It's reasonable to think this is actually enough.
However - considering the average taxpayer's Federal tax bill is about ~$8k - good luck convincing them to increase that by 15%. If you make ~$150k, this would be an extra ~$4k per year in Federal taxes.
If you're in the top 1% - and you make $450k - it would be an extra ~$19k per year...
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
[2] https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income....
[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100*12*144300000
[4] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100*12*144300000%2F900...