It certainly has. Mandates and subsidies will do that. What those cannot do is make a meaningful difference. The world has spent $4 trillion on solar and wind subsidies and conventional energy usage has only declined about 0.1%. Yet for that same $4 trillion we could've powered enough homes and businesses that climate change would be like Y2K - a conspiracy some claim was never going to happen because it was prevented.
$4 trillion in nuclear energy would have gotten 2 billion people, basically everyone on the planet currently burning wood and dung for fuel in their homes, onto green energy. Instead, America has led the way in blocking poor countries from getting loans for centralized power plants - unless they are solar or wind. Which everyone not getting paid to believe otherwise knows do not work. South Africa knows it, they closed one coal plant and still suffer brownouts despite spending billions on solar and wind. Germany knows it. When Russia shut off the gas the Germans were quietly buying due to shutting down nuclear energy, Germany had to turn coal plants back on, because solar and wind were ineffective.
China certainly knows it. Food and energy are strategic resources and China wants to be self-sufficient and an exporter of both. That is why they just approved 11 new nuclear reactors and said they will add 10 more each year, nearly doubling their electricity from nuclear by 2030.
Meanwhile, the Democratic party in America remains trapped in the 1950s when it comes to science. No vaccines between polio and COVID-19, they cause autism, no modern pesticides or GMOs, and no nuclear energy.
Admittedly, they worked hard to get nuclear banned. President Clinton provided government money to trying to prove acupuncture wasn't a sham, and gave untested supplements and organic food a government seal of approval. Those were all big wins for Democrats who love alternatives to science. His biggest handout for constituents was when he and Senator John Kerry shook hands getting government nuclear research ended. No American technological prowess allowed, the next decade Democrats would even put back-to-back anti-nuclear activists in charge of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. What we did for cell phones and television and the internet was not allowed for energy. Coal emissions exploded and wouldn't decline again until natural gas fracturing made older wells viable again - which Democrats then turned on.
China doesn't allow lobbyists. They certainly don't allow environmentalists. They even threw doctors in jail who discussed the illnesses from a new coronavirus in 2019 and early 2020 and forced WHO to stand down when the UN body suggested COVID-19 might be a pandemic.
That means they can add 10 more nuclear reactors without objection. Meanwhile, American activists won't even allow white-collar, light-pollution, diversity-enhancing science like astronomy in the United States, they pay protesters to block looking at stars.
No one wants us to be more like China, it would just be nice if the political party that changed its mind about vaccines after 25 years of denial did the same about food and energy. Instead, the Biden administration has replicated the pattern of Obama - approving new nuclear work to fanfare and then quietly canceling them as too expensive. When their party made it expensive.
China spends about $3 billion on each one. Their new additions will mean 8% of their electricity is clean nuclear. We can't even be like France, and France hates science.
For the $4 trillion we wasted on flaky gimmicks, the world could've had 1,300 nuclear plants. Energy would be basically free, a huge win for the poor who could then grown their own food affordably with that energy.
Western environmentalists are flummoxed. They like centralized control and state involvement they can help control, that is why they supported Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s and Mao in the 1950s. Those regimes were anti-capitalism and overtly social authoritarian, but Communist China is now embracing nuclear energy. They want the left to be a haven for anti-science beliefs, but will have an even harder time criticizing China than they do mid-east terrorists.
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