Thank you, and I do participate plenty. Part of that participation is calling out eco-hypocrisy, which seems to be the only thing that mainstream climate activists are good at.
As to Germany, why did they rely on gas? Oh right, because they shut down their nuclear plants. So in the span of 3 years, Germany has gone from getting its base load from nuclear to gas to coal. If you really believe that atmospheric CO2 is an imminent threat to civilization, the tradeoffs are obvious and clearly biased in favor of ramping your nuclear industry significantly rather than hoping for a future breakthrough in battery technology that can allow you to run your base load off solar and wind.
Like solar panels before they reached scale, this will start off as an incredibly expensive proposition, but it will get cheaper with scale. France seems to get it - they are building 50 new plants - but nobody else does.
Instead of lobbying for impactful changes at this scale, we have plenty of activists going after ersatz plastic items, gas stoves, and gas-powered cars (all of which emit less CO2 than the top 20 biggest shipping vessels). It's not clear to me that these stupid little inconveniences actually take less political capital than anything else, but they certainly do wear down public tolerance for the program, which is fatal in the long run.
Germany relied on 1) gas from Russia because it was naive on geopolitical issues.
2) fossil gas in general, because it was a cheap method to compensate clean energy storage (such as gas from renewable energy, classic batteries are by far not the only option to store energy) and grid improvement to compensate geographic fluctuations without storage.
Nuclear was phased out because of the potentially catastrophic risk as well as the unwillingness go provide permanent storage for nuclear waste.
Further, traditional nuclear power plants don't scale well, see the costs in France (even though it's not represented in electricity prices and this although France is already heavily invested in nuclear power plants), problems with heat waves/dry climate, as well as the fact that economic uranium sources are limited.
France is building new plants, planning close to 50, however the long term trend will be a reduced share of nuclear power in the grid, because old reactors will have to shut down as well, and renewable energy build out will shadow everything else.
This is in terms with the estimates in the IPCC report that cover cost and potential avoidance in CO2 emissions.
Personally, I see activists mainly going after the government's to implement a strategy to reduce emissions, but surely almost everyone doing this will call out plastic items and fossil fuel usage where avoidable.
Rightly so, if this reduces tolerance for whatever program (doing what? Reduce emissions?), I don't see the problem there, but rather at NIMBYism, mis information and green washing.
There's nothing wrong with going after these things.
I feel like you are more interested in preventing actions from being taken than shedding light on things that are missed - I hope I am wrong though and calling out hypocrisy of climate activists isn't the primary part.
> Nuclear was phased out because of the potentially catastrophic risk as well as the unwillingness go provide permanent storage for nuclear waste.
That kind of personifies the eco-hypocrisy I have mentioned: The Germans want what they want, but they want other people to bear the cost and the risks of it. If they aren't willing to pay the costs for cutting carbon emissions, do they really want to do it? I think they have revealed that the answer is "no."
> Further, traditional nuclear power plants don't scale well, see the costs in France (even though it's not represented in electricity prices and this although France is already heavily invested in nuclear power plants), problems with heat waves/dry climate, as well as the fact that economic uranium sources are limited.
The people who say this have no clue whether it is actually true. Since Chernobyl, there hasn't been a serious effort to build out nuclear power plants at scale. Previously, the Soviets did a pretty good job demonstrating the scaling laws here, but they also cut too many corners.
As to the whole idea that renewable energy will overshadow other sources of power, renewables are not dispatchabale on-demand without several significant advances in power storage technology (which will come from batteries before anything else - nothing else scales well enough right now).
As to Germany, why did they rely on gas? Oh right, because they shut down their nuclear plants. So in the span of 3 years, Germany has gone from getting its base load from nuclear to gas to coal. If you really believe that atmospheric CO2 is an imminent threat to civilization, the tradeoffs are obvious and clearly biased in favor of ramping your nuclear industry significantly rather than hoping for a future breakthrough in battery technology that can allow you to run your base load off solar and wind.
Like solar panels before they reached scale, this will start off as an incredibly expensive proposition, but it will get cheaper with scale. France seems to get it - they are building 50 new plants - but nobody else does.
Instead of lobbying for impactful changes at this scale, we have plenty of activists going after ersatz plastic items, gas stoves, and gas-powered cars (all of which emit less CO2 than the top 20 biggest shipping vessels). It's not clear to me that these stupid little inconveniences actually take less political capital than anything else, but they certainly do wear down public tolerance for the program, which is fatal in the long run.