Mark my words, in 20 years all of us will be lamenting those energy policies that will have brought us to third-world style poverty, while frantically learning mandarim to have a chance to migrate to China.
And the really fun part about it, is that we won't even have money to mitigate the effects of climate change, because we literally chased windmills instead of being realistic and pragmatic and investing on sound and proven technologies like nuclear instead of throwing money at intermittent sources that made energy absurdly more expensive in places like Germany, UK and South Australia, all the while dreaming that batteries will be enough to save us.
Of course, the wall street folks and the usual hustlers behind this, they will have already relocated to greener pastures leaving us to pay the bill.
> Mark my words [..] brought us to third-world style poverty, while frantically learning mandarim to have a chance to migrate to China
a) What's your reliable source of information that trumps all other institutions that say the opposite?; And
b) what makes them more reliable, says you?
If you're going to make sensational claims, you better have exceptional evidence to back yourself. Otherwise you're just making noise.
> Germany
Should never have shut down their nuclear, sure.
> South Australia
There was like, the one incident, which people like to point at and go 'See! It doesn't work!', when actually it was because transmission lines fell over.
Here's the latest quarterly report of the wholesale market for Australia, by state (note figure 1):
The lead time for this is 15 years. It's the only energy generation technology that has become less economical with time, precisely because it isn't 'sound' without strict oversight. Gas peakers are the more timely and economical option.
> the wall street folks and the usual hustlers behind this
The wall street folks won't put their money behind something that won't see returns, but yet that's exactly what they've been doing, and continue to do. China and India (and the rest of the global south) are building their own renewable capacity at absurd scale, not because of wall street shills, but because it's the most economical way to generate power.
For more than 20 years Americans have been coping with results of the Nixon and Reagan policies, and their ilk, which effectively brought all Americans except the most well-heeled to a level of third-world poverty, relative to the prosperity that was bound to unfold otherwise.
Remember what it was like when Nixon resigned in disgrace, and instantly you could never find someone who ever admitted to voting for him a second time? Not just for years, but for the rest of his life. And he was re-elected. That's how disgraceful it was to the overwhelming millions of voting World War II veterans and people who vote like them, to have such a dishonest person get elected as president. Disregard the lessons taught by WWII veterans at your peril.
If only more Americans could have retained that degree of righteousness, and it could have blossomed instead of withered.
Anyway at the time WWII veterans were still a major voting force but nobody would even talk about Nixon any more. Everybody knew he was complete selfish scum by then and nobody tried to deny it. But these are patriotic Americans who were not going to lose respect for the office of the President. After a number of years and a couple other presidents, eventually people could finally come up with one thing Nixon did that was not considered the act of a crooked politician. What did Nixon do that was good so he wouldn't have to go down in history as a complete failure? "Nixon opened up China." "Nixon opened up China." That's all anybody said when the subject came up, which was quite rarely. That presidency was so compromised that all energy was focused on leaving it behind.
Like everyone else it seemed like it was not too bad to explore relations with China at the time. At least it didn't seem completely evil. A little freedom of communication and trade with China might be OK. What could go wrong? With people like Reagan around no communists were going to get a leg up, so there should be nothing to fear.
In hindsight we were dummies. If Nixon could have been kept from going to China, the US would be 20 years ahead by now.
At least Nixon wasn't a whining loser like he could have been, and wasn't so low-class he didn't know enough to leave graciously when hundreds of millions of Americas didn't want him around any more. Since it was so embarrassing already anyway.
>wall street folks and the usual hustlers behind this, they will have already relocated to greener pastures leaving us to pay the bill.
And the really fun part about it, is that we won't even have money to mitigate the effects of climate change, because we literally chased windmills instead of being realistic and pragmatic and investing on sound and proven technologies like nuclear instead of throwing money at intermittent sources that made energy absurdly more expensive in places like Germany, UK and South Australia, all the while dreaming that batteries will be enough to save us.
Of course, the wall street folks and the usual hustlers behind this, they will have already relocated to greener pastures leaving us to pay the bill.