alt Hacker News> The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living
All of transportation, including commercial + aviation, in the US is 28% of greenhouse gasses, electric generation is 25%. They're functionally equivalent. Further, a common refrain from environmentalist messages I've seen my entire life is that "every bit counts" and that's used to justify why an individual should say, buy an EV or recycle.
Personally, I agree with that logic, but I also think grid-level power sources matter more.
If you think we're in an existential crisis then costs be damned, shutter every natural gas and coal plant and replace them with nuclear as quickly as it can be built under extremely aggressive bypassing of red tape that's not safety critical. The US and EU print trillions to fund wars, if it's an existential risk, certainly we can do the same to cut carbon.
If it's a pragmatic decision to slowly shift to wind + solar based on costs (while still burning a lot of natural gas for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine), that's fine, but it doesn't really convey an existential urgency.
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what about an existential-crisis-then-costs-be-damned emergency buildout of renewables and batteries? you would displace more carbon emissions far faster than a nuclear buildout, just due to the speed at which they can be deployed and scaled.
If you place the climate crisis into the context of every other potential crisis then yeah, the world is weighing up nuclear proliferation against climate change, both of which are potential extinction risks but not all that likely in the short term.
I agree that this means few decision makers believe climate change will literally end human life, or end industrialised society, in the near term. I disagree that any problem should be ignored unless it's existential.