US support for environmental policies fading as political gap remains huge

the economics of clean energy (as they are mostly presented in media) only work when there is sufficient dispatchable (typically dirty) power available. After a certain tipping point the grid is no longer stable if you provide only non-dispatchable generation on a MW-for-MW basis. In order to avoid this catastrophe you need one of two things - you need a multiplier on your clean power generation and investments in transmission to support it, or you need storage sufficient to make a non-dispatchable source dispatchable (and of course transmission to support that, but not quite so much). Otherwise, the physics simply don't work. The trend does not extrapolate. It all breaks!

Renewable energy is absolutely essential, but the path we are going down of simply building new renewable generation, performing a linear regression on that line, and assuming that it can keep going until the grid is 100% renewable is a big flashing red warning light to anyone who understands the physics. If you want to support renewable generation, support storage!!! Build batteries, build pumped storage hydro, build transmission. The generation is the easy part!

Without planning and policy, the economics of the issue will not solve it on their own, we will end up with a mess of an unreliable power grid until such time that the incentives no longer support building new renewables and we will have the worst of both worlds.

Well, it's not immaterial for some people.

Politics still has an impact so likely red states will be paying more money for dirtier energy, with lower efficiencies and dying younger and poorer as a result just as the political influence of healthcare has impacted them to pay more and get less healthcare.

Not immaterial: it needs enormously bigger shifts than pure profit motive can drive. Yes, the renewable future will be a world of radically cheaper energy, but only if we can get there before collapse takes global civilization down. The Earth will pull through it with little worse than a mass extinction. Humanity will survive it, in millions, or even a billion, maybe more. But no empire has survived such an upset.

Not transitioning fast enough will be hard to distinguish from failing to transition at all. If global civilization, and the huge population that depends on it, is to pull through, much more has to be done, much faster. That the end state of success is huge prosperity is not enough when coal and oil still drive.

Building nukes mainly means continuing to burn coal for another decade. We hand over $trillions to coal and oil miners, every year. It would cost less than one year's fossil fuel revenue to transition off them, although it must take much longer than one year to build out. We can get across the line only by starting.

Why would higher electricity bills be required for climate change?

https://carbontracker.org/reports/no-country-for-coal-gen-be...

> phasing out unprofitable coal could save $10 billion per year and reduce household electricity bills by up to 10% by 2021

Not to put too fine point on it, BS.

In most cases where people are experiencing effects, we still can't definitively say yet that this particular or that particular one is definitively traceable to global climate disruption. But we know with certainty that, in aggregate, they are.

This term "climate change" that they still use is a problem. It is neutral, but we know that it is an imminent, looming catastrophe that, if we do not mobilize an overwhelming response, will engulf us and could well end with civilization collapsing and billions starving.

The exact mechanism of collapse is of course hard to predict. Will it be via ocean ecosystem collapse as dissolved CO2 increases, pH falls, and shells cannot be grown, eliminating much of the world's access to protein? We already see effects. Will it be via widespread crop failure from drought and flooding leading to mass migration of refugees? We see that, too. Or from heavily populated areas becoming literally fatal to be outdoors in, on certain days of the year? We see clear trends toward it. Will it be sea level rise flooding places millions live, who must then move? Sea level rise is quite unevenly distributed. Will it be when ocean currents change routes, causing huge changes to local climate well beyond average global change?

Two things are certain: (1) people will not stay put and die, and (2) the places they would need to move to or through already have people, in many cases also threatened.

Historically, mass movement has resulted in the ascent of fascist-like government, something already well along in the Philippines, Poland, Hungary, Brazil, and Russia, and threatening India, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, and the US.

Rise of fascistic government is always followed by escalating war, leading by steps big and small toward global thermonuclear war. With or without nuclear holocaust, the international balance of forces grows unstable, and collapse comes more and more easily. We have seen big impacts from tiny supply chain hiccups already.

None of the individual steps are certain or inevitable, and the future is certain to deliver many surprises, but the direction is clear. How far down the path does it seem smart to go?