He does far more damage than good, and you basically can't trust a word he says or cites.
Nuclear should stand on the reality of the proposition, and indeed should have a place in any low carbon solution if done properly.
You need a base load capability for smoothing in an electrical grid. Most renewables are the exactly opposite. The exception is biogas or other gasification plants a these cannot handle the required load at all. Not even hydropower.
Look at what happens in Australia if you push too much solar energy (same with wind) on the network.
Solar and wind need to be paired peaker plants. Conventional nuclear doesn't provide peaking ability.
Battery powered peakers are quite expensive, but the need for them can be reduced drastically through over-provisioning and interconnection.
Nuclear reduces the need for peakers exactly because it can overprovision reliably.
You could also make nuclear peakers if you wanted reasonably easily too. Nuclear plants have tunable output to a point, they're just slow and hard to fully stop, so you would make a design optimized for very tunable output and high peak power. (0)
Solar and wind cannot suddenly overprovision. The sources either exist or not, you can at most ground them instead of collecting power.
0) IAEA - Non-baseload operation of nuclear power plants: https://www.iaea.org/publications/11104/non-baseload-operati...
Not surprising it brought consequences, they seem intent on approaching it really chaotically. :)
Everyone is already behind the schedule with making the energy grid zero emission.
All over the last 15 or 20 years.
Sure, I'd like everyone to go that fast, or faster, but trying for the speed of Australia's solar rollout seems to be asking for trouble. Don't know enough to say if there was anything unavoidable, or unique to Australia in their problems...
But if you want to fight climate change, surely any cost is worth it? Otherwise you're not serious about it. Subsidize it, do whatever it takes to save the planet. Renewables are a false solution, they're quicker to build but cannot produce energy reliably, need to be replaced often, take too much space etc. If they could replace coal, surely Germany would've done so already.
Renewables are part of the solutions but what makes up the rest will depend on where you live. The solution for Sweden won't be the same as the solution for Hawaii. It's hard to talk generally on the internet about this because it only makes sense to discuss power generation in a particular place.
He mostly cites the IPCC and climate scientists. Or are you saying those sources aren't trustworthy?
I read the article. Every word of it is true. It can be summed up as:
Lots of people, especially teenagers, are starting to suffer mental health problems because they think the world is about to end. The world isn't about to end, this is a lie. The people claiming it is are mostly making it up, or misquoting other people, or in one case a journalist misheard "eight billion" as "a billion" and other comedies of errors. It's important that people understand what climate science really says before a teenager does something they can't come back from.
Can you source this?
> It's important that people understand what climate science really says before a teenager does something they can't come back from.
Are you saying that climate change is so widely accepted and feared that it's causing the rate of suicides to increase? Wouldn't a better indicator of the acknowledgement of (supposedly-overblown) effects of climate change be, you know, individuals and governments taking action to curtail those effects instead of walking out of global accords [1], or actively contributing to the acceleration of those effects [2]?
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40127326 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/world/americas/brazil-ama...
The first paragraphs of the article give both direct quotes from people saying they had that experience, and then cites a report from British psychologists saying they'd observed this effect at scale. Did you read the article?
Are you saying that climate change is so widely accepted and feared that it's causing the rate of suicides to increase.
It risks doing exactly that:
"Studies from around the world document growing anxiety and depression, particularly among children, about climate change."
People aren't scared of climate change as actually observed, they're scared of what they're being fed by people like Greta Thunberg, who is lying about the expected scale of the impact. The fact that journalists, politicians and even a few scientists are saying this despite it being false is what the article is about.