Both.

We should be investing in all non carbon emitting sources and we should have been doing it since the 1970s when we figured out pretty conclusively that this would be a problem.

Instead we had right wing fossil fuel shills on one shoulder and unscientific woo woo greens on the other, the net effect being that we kept burning more carbon. We still have them, Trump with “beautiful coal” and greens now opposing even solar power and batteries, but climate change is no longer possible to ignore. Some still manage it but those people are nuts.

If we hadn’t stopped improving nuclear we’d probably have emitted half the CO2 we have. It would have become cheaper and safer and more scalable and then when China industrialized they would have copied that instead of burning so much coal.

France with its nearly zero carbon grid is the existence proof.

It wasn’t until the 2010s that solar and wind became grid scale in a big enough way to matter. That was too slow.

Whether someone is at least open to nuclear power is my litmus test for whether they take climate change seriously.

I do. If we hit 600, 800, 1000 ppm CO2, which is possible if the world keeps developing on the back of fossil fuels, we are entering existential risk territory. Earth has had those CO2 levels before, and higher, but our species was not alive then.

We already passed the FAFO threshold for ppm CO2 and now we will FO. But that’s not X-risk yet. I’m talking about the next threshold, which may start around 600 but really kicks in near 1000. This is where you actually start asphyxiating. You get lowered IQ and impaired judgement to a small degree, but across the globe at a time when we really don’t need it.