Quote:
Originally Posted by grizy
Obsession with ethanol
Anti-nuclear
Obsession with dead end technologies (solar and wind immediately come to mind)
Investing in and mandating cleaner fossil fuels will do a lot more to keep carbon emissions in check than telling Africans to leapfrog to renewable (but unscalable and more expensive) energy sources like the UN is pushing
1. Ethanol
I don't know any environmentalist who has ever been obsessed with ethanol. It's big agribusiness that's obsessed with it and it's something that anti-environmentalists like to represent as something dumb that environmentalists support.
2. I'm ambivalent. I don't think nuclear is generally a good choice because I think there are better options.
3. I have AMA threads on Solar on OOT and STTF and a lot about solar in the Climate Change thread as well. I'm not sure whether I should go into detail on solar ITT or not or start a thread on it in Politics. So, keeping it short:
No, solar is where it's at. Prices continue to drop massively, grid parity is being achieved more and more broadly, manufacturing and total installations are increasing at an incredible pace. Replacing 100 years of fossil fuel growth is not something that happens overnight and perhaps it won't happen fast enough, but it is very far from a dead technology.
Wind, I don't know as nearly as much about. It has very large capacity in some areas. It's more intermittent than solar, but is widely available and often in places where solar resources are lower (cloudy northern areas).
Energy solutions for Africa are interesting and definitely worth a separate post at least, but energy use per capita in the US is 4 times the average in China, 7 times the average in Nigeria, and 14 times the average in The Congo. I understand that that's the demand that coming down the road, but for a while it's not even going to be a huge part of new demand.