The Gulf countries do, too, such as when the UAE paid Matt Damon for an anti-fracking film https://www.cnbc.com/amp/id/49218229

I don’t blame them for playing the game well.

I don't think people realize that when you have a huge commodity income stream under threat of ceasing to exist, it's quite realistic to spend a huge percentage of this on lobbying to stretch it as far as it will go.

Such as by constantly filling the internet with lies about how the technologies that are eating 1% of your market share per year, and growing by 20-40% per year can't possibly solve the problem and we must divert all funding from it to a technology that costs 3x as much, has consistently gotten more expensive with time, and can't scale?

Tbf, fracking does have proven issues with geological stability and soil contamination. But it would be very hypocritical of the UAE to go on an anti-nuclear tirade, since they themselves use nuclear energy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant

Right now wind and solar have dropped so much in price that they represent a serious threat to fossil fuels on a short time frame. Have all storage problems been worked out? No. But even moving 50% of our current fossil sources to renewables would have a huge impact on the profits of those industries and it’s now completely feasible in the short term and very cheap. If I was in the fossil fuel extraction industry I’d be throwing every astroturfing dollar into FUD calling for those plans to be abandoned because “only nuclear works.”

PS I’m 100% supportive of a mix that includes cheap renewables and more costly nuclear baseload. It’s when you see comments promoting nuclear and renewables as somehow in opposition, that’s the tell.

> Right now wind and solar have dropped so much in price that they represent a serious threat to fossil fuels on a short time frame.

I recommend sitting down and calculating the input cost for solar / wind. It's being subsidized substantially.

There aren't even enough materials currently mined to support the US switching to mostly (>50%) solar / wind. Silver/gold/copper/nickle prices would go up an order of magnitude, for instance.

I'm for cheap energy - period. It's directly correlated with improvements in life. If solar / wind get us there, great. If nuclear improves it, let's do it. Right now natural gas is also very cheap, should be drilling as much as we can. The more we maximize growth and cheap energy now, the quicker we advance technology, innovation and automation.

Have you calculated the costs of nuclear without government subsidies? As best I understand, it’s completely unsupportable.

It varies wildly by government and if you built at scale costs would drop dramatically as they did in the French and Russian build outs.

And how do you get scale when the costs are so steep? Cut US regulations to lower costs and you also give up taxpayer supported insurance caps without which no new nuclear would ever be built. It's unsolvable while wind and solar have already gotten far cheaper than nuclear.

> There aren't even enough materials currently mined to support the US switching to mostly (>50%) solar / wind. Silver/gold/copper/nickle prices would go up an order of magnitude, for instance.

You're thinking of nuclear. Which has a variety of critical resources and no plan reduce them. Renewables live in the real world where using less of a scarce resource allows you to outcompete your competition.

Modern perc panels use 30-50g (so half of silver production would produce 500GW/yr) of silver per net kW with commercial but not fully deployed technologies to reduce it to 18-30g, and feasible technologies to bring it below 5g (which is what a nuclear reactor uses). This is the only limiting resource that renewables necessarily use more of than nuclear other than concrete.

That article is an opinion piece written by a resident of the Institute for Policy Innovation, a far right think tank with ties to the Koch Brothers.

Oh no, "not far right"! Make sure you don't listen to that opinion!

Tell me how nuclear can be more than 2% of the solution? Where does the Uranium come from?