Social media critics, and academics being quoted in media, are declaring the end of the world due to American pollution. Are they correct?
They are not. America is not the emissions problem, developing nations that either exempt themselves using "developing nation" status, like China, or picked their own methodology to claim they are helping fight pollution, a tactic in the Paris Agreement used by over 100 other countries, while producing more of it. They are the problem, not the United States.
(1) America has the lowest emissions per capita since World War I. Thanks to agricultural science and free market research that the private sector engaged in so their profits didn't 'go up in smoke', plus natural gas, the amount of pollution per capita is lower than World War I.
It is lower than World War II, when the country was fighting two wars, in the Pacific and Europe, and producing planes, bombs, and battleships plus munitions for 16,000,000 soldiers.
More coal will not change that because...
(2) Clean Coal Technology exists.
Dr. James Hansen, the Godfather of Global Warming, said the only thing that needed to happen to stop emissions increases was for the world to adapt Clean Coal technology. He said that in 2008. Clean Coal Technology already existed by then.(1) Business does not want its profits going into the air. Energy has high costs. They are the best stewards of the environment, not urban activists who make $3 billion per year scaring people about energy, medicine, and food.
(3) Nuclear takes time to build but poor people need affordable energy now.
Nuclear is the best option but we can't make the perfect the enemy of the good. Poor people who were hammered by four years of high inflation due to excessive hiring of new government employees and stimulus packages for them to hand out need economic relief. That can come from affordable energy.
The greatest beneficiary will be the state that hates Republicans the most.
Trillions of dollars wasted on solar and wind and it has made little difference in conventonal energy. For the money squandered on progressive porkbarrel projects since 2009, 2 billion people could be on clean nuclear energy with no emissions and no risk.
California is dominated by anti-science progressives and they only have one nuclear plant left to close before their decades-long war on it is complete. Yet they have a looming financial problem. Electricity prices are controlled by the state so they mandated solar and wind over the objections of scientists and to pay for it, they charged conventional energy users more. Due to economically insane subsidies, mandates, and net-metering, conventional energy costs have gone up 100% during the tenure of Governor Gavin Newsom. Those costs are paid by the poor, who may not own their homes and certainly can't afford solar panels, even after subsidies.
California can't build more nuclear energy, activists won't even allow dead trees to be cleared or to create fire breaks to prevent the three wildfires per year, but the state can buy electricity from other states. While nuclear energy ramps up, spot market purchases that the state will allow during frequent summer brown-out times can be made using energy derived from coal until nuclear is ready.
NOTES:
(1) That does not mean Democrats wanted to hear it. The Obama administration hated affordable energy in a way that made no scientific sense. He brought in an Energy Secretary who wanted $9-per-gallon gasoline because that would make the solar panels his administration wanted to prop up viable solar. He started and stopped multiple nuclear energy projects so he could shake off the anti-science stigma of President Clinton and Senator John Kerry, who banned nuclear energy in 1994, while never allowing any to move forward and enrage Boomer Environmentalists. He canceled the Keystone XL pipeline over the objections of his own scientists and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton because he claimed 400 miles of safe pipeline would put the Ogallala aquifer at risk. When there are already 20,000 miles of pipeline there.
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