text: In environmental terms, it is a huge mistake to extract and burn any fossil fuel, including methane. It is being done in many states because widespread fracking caused a glut of cheap methane. A carbon tax, such as the one described in this article, would help to address this.
  
  New nuclear plants are problematic in the US. They are extraordinarily expensive and take so many years to permit, design, and build that they are not proving to be much help in climate terms. Also, the electricity they produce is too expensive for them to be economically viable.
  
  Photovoltaic cells, by far the most common type of solar panel, use only common earth elements. Some thin-film solar cells use rare earth elements which are recycled at end of life.  There are some newer designs of thin-film solar, including some from research at Binghamton (NY) University, that do not use any rare earth elements, so the problem of the lifecycle of rare-earth elements should diminish in the future.