A plan to phase out fossil fuel production in the US
I want clean energy as much as the next guy, probably more (it&#x27;s one of my top concerns). But plans like this are extremely naive. I agree, we need to get the of fossil fuels as fast as possible. But very few articles like this mention what we&#x27;d replace it with. Wind, solar, and hydro are all fantastic, but hydro is the only one that can produce constant output. It is also difficult to throttle the other two and bring up demands for surge. There&#x27;s a big reason fossil fuels are still around and it isn&#x27;t just politicians lining their pockets (not denying this is happening) and big oil conspiracies.<p>The fact of the matter is we don&#x27;t have the technology to replace it. Batteries aren&#x27;t just there yet. Can we wait for them and hope? I&#x27;m not convinced considering we needed to start building things decades ago. I&#x27;m pro nuclear because of this, because it&#x27;s the only current technology that can be built anywhere (yes, this is a major issue) and can throttle output. But people are scared of it. It deserves the fear, but what should be scarier is it&#x27;s basically the safest form of energy we have. But it is also expensive and we can&#x27;t just pretend that we&#x27;ll get economies of scale right away.<p>So what do we do? I think we push out fossil fuels as fast as possible. We heavily invest in battery tech. We minorly relax nuclear regulations to allow us to build newer generation reactors that are safer and hopefully cheaper. We go harder at researching fusion. And most importantly, we dump a lot into sequestration research. I think this is a safe bet, but it is still a bet. It&#x27;s not a fool proof plan but it diversifies the portfolio and reduces risk of failure. But it&#x27;ll be costly. Definitely not as expensive as a mass extinction event, but costly. And it is hard to get people to realize costs from an existential crisis.<p>I mean look at the article. When we talk about climate we still aren&#x27;t listening to the scientists and are talking past one another. So what do we do?