No. of Recommendations: 6
The sensible approach on energy is:
*Regionally appropriate means of generating power
*Nuclear power everywhere
*Changeout of coal for energy to coal for less-bad fuel (you make methanol with coal and steam, and you can drive a car on it)
*Embrace natural gas
...while exploring renewables as gap-filing options.
The problem with that "sensible" approach, though, is that it won't reduce emissions all that much. Electrical power generation is only about 25% of U.S. GHG emissions. U.S. emissions are only about 11% of the global total. So even if you could eliminate all U.S. emissions from electrical power generation, it would reduce global emissions by less than 3%. Which is what the ROW adds to emissions in only a few years. And the "sensible" approach to energy won't reduce even electrical power generation emissions all that much.
There's no way around it. If you want to reduce carbon emissions by enough to materially affect future climate responses to GHG, you need to do a lot of very painful stuff. Including paying a lot of money to China, India, and other developing nations so that they do a lot of very painful stuff also without having to pay the cost.
The Democrats weren't wrong, or unsensible, in fashioning a policy to try to fight climate change.
Where they screwed up is that there's no political appetite for that. Democrats thought there was, which was hopeful but foolish. That hope is now fading. Doing something that can fight climate change will be enormously unpopular. Doing stuff that pretends to fight climate change but doesn't actually do it (like the "sensible" approach above) isn't likely to be much more popular, because the folks who care about climate change will know that it won't work and they'll publicly say so.
