So we shouldn't even attempt to curb usage of fossil fuels?
No. If you want to affect change in the climate, start with doing the easy stuff first and see how things go. The environmentards on the Left pushing Gorebal warming don't want anything to do with any alternatives to getting rid of fossil fuels. Their focus on a set and single solution is a recipe for disaster. Look at their failure with CFC's. They made absolute claims that getting rid of these would fix the hole in the ozone layer at the S. Pole. It didn't. The hole is still there and just as big, and sometimes bigger, than it ever was. They now claim chlorine might be the issue and want to ban that. Or, they say it just needs more time.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Except for the part where we have to store dangerous radioactive "waste" for thousands of years because we still haven't figured out what to do with it. He's a robotics engineer for Amazon now, but before that my oldest son was a senior nuclear engineer at the Entergy plant in Baton Rouge, LA. My g-son, his son, works there now. They store the waste on site. They are located next to the Mississippi. Imagine a flood like we had in 1993. Imagine an earthquake similar to those in 1811-1812.
Yucca mountain is as near perfect a repository as we can make. We have figured out what to do with it. It's just those opposed are ignorant fools fighting it because it's "nuclear!" As your son. Storage of spent fuel can be done safely. Politics and hysteria are keeping it from happening.
Again TANSTAAFL. So we shouldn't even try to curb our usage of fossil fuels. *eyeroll* BTW, you left out the beloved science-deniers' mantra of "wind turbines kill birds." lol
It's far worse than that. Wind and solar are horribly inefficient. Conventional generation plants typically have 75 to 98% capacity factors and can run 24/7 when online making electricity to meet demand precisely.
Wind has a typical capacity factor of 30 to 50% and solar is around 25%. That is most of the time they aren't generating due to one issue or another. They are intermittent, unreliable, and unpredictable. Storage on a mass scale is unaffordable.
Therefore, yes, we should toss out wind and solar entirely not just for environmental reasons, but for issues related to their poor, execrable, performance.
I'd love to see your source for this.
While photovoltaic (PV) renewable energy production has surged, concerns remain about whether or not PV power plants induce a “heat island” (PVHI) effect, much like the increase in ambient temperatures relative to wildlands generates an Urban Heat Island effect in cities. Transitions to PV...
www.nature.com
While photovoltaic (PV) renewable energy production has surged, concerns remain about whether or not PV power plants induce a “heat island” (PVHI) effect, much like the increase in ambient temperatures relative to wildlands generates an Urban Heat ...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Hmm, Chernobyl. Great example of the safety of nuclear energy.
No, Chernobyl is a great example of how a Leftist, unaccountable, dictatorial government treats safety of its people. Chernobyl was an unsafe design used nowhere outside the Soviet Union for commercial power applications built by contractors that were corrupt in collusion with government officials on the take making it even more unsafe. Then it was operated in an unsafe manner during a test that was only required because of government mandates.
It's clear you know nothing about the actual design and causes of that accident. Ask your nuclear engineer son. He'd have had to study it in detail if he was working in nuclear power in the US. A review was mandated, just as it was for TMI for all people working in that field.
No, they are not all 100% effective. However, even those that do not offer 100% protection do tend to minimize an infection if contracted. The COVID vaccines are a good example of that. Ditto for the yearly influenza vaccines. This doesn't mean we should behave stupidly and quit getting them altogether.
In some cases, the efficacy of them is so low as to make them near worthless. Others do have severe side effects often enough to not be generally given. For example, the flu shot you get is usually about 40 to 50% effective. Some years, depending on the strain, it can drop to around 30%. Take it or leave it, your choice. The US military mandated getting anthrax vaccines for all personnel. The side effects of that one were so severe in some cases, and common enough, that they had to drop doing it. Normally it is only given to those with high possibilities of exposure or who have been exposed because of the side effects.
Good. I don't think that's feasible or possible, but we need to at least try to keep our air, water, and soil clean.
We should have reasonable limits on pollution. The EPA, and many supporters of them, want 100% removal of all pollution. Take drinking water. For decades, the allowable limit of arsenic in drinking water was 50 ppb. That's about 1000 times below the truly unsafe level like is found in say, Bangladesh. The EPA in the Clinton administration lowered that to 10 ppb. For about half the US water bills tripled overnight because of the cost of removing arsenic to meet that new standard along with the expensive testing and equipment to verify that. The only reason the EPA could even set that standard was that there was new, expensive, test equipment available for the first time that could accurately measure that miniscule an amount.
Now the EPA wants to set the standard to zero (0). In any case, the 50 ppb standard was more than adequate. People getting arsenic poisoning in the US from drinking water was nonexistent.
This is a common pattern for bureaucracies. They don't bear the burden of the cost of their regulations. They just make them. From the bureaucrat's standpoint they're being productive and doing their job. If there wasn't more to regulate, the bureaucracy would be in danger of shrinking or becoming irrelevant. Can't have that.
A quick overview:
Arsenic has long been a concern in drinking water, dating back to 1974 when it was one of the first contaminants regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), with a Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) of 50 µg/L (parts per billion). In 1996, an amendment to the SDWA required the EPA to...
wcponline.com