Exxon scientists forecast climate change in the 1970s. What if we acted then?

We did, however, have the capability to implement walkable cities with decent public transport. Not every city had to have an interstate running down the middle of it.

We had nuclear.

The smith-putnam turbine was 1941, and at any time since 1953 (or possibly 1906) one shippingport worth of investment into solar would have kick started the pv industry, learning curves are a pretty consistent thing.

Zinc Bromide batteries are still competitive today, nickel iron aren't far off. Pumped hydro is centuries old.

> We wouldn't have acted

Yup. Even the folks I know who regularly post about the dangers of climate change still make frequent use of commercial flight to take unnecessary trips, usually vacations. If Exxon had published their findings in the 70's, the only thing it would have gotten us is a few more decades of hand-wringing and empty virtue signaling.

The Smith-Putnam turbine was 1941 or if you needed some vocational school students to show you how to bring costs down and set the modern form factor tvindkraft was 1975, and a Shippingport worth of research would have moved solar about three decades down the learning curve, either starting from 1953 or the george cove array from 1906 if enough people had cared to pay attention to the concept in the ensuing 6 decades.

The ideal action at the time would have been a massive investment in public transport and serious adoption of smaller cars rather than starting a trending weight and height arms race in the SUV | truck class.

That, coupled with the USofA leading the world in setting an example of reduced consumption would have had a large impact and given us today more breathing room and time to deploy better solutions.

Instead the action of the time was by the only people to really really take the forecasts seriously - the Koch brothers and other big oil investors.

Their coordinated actions amounted to sinking each and every public transport project no matter how small, to relentlessly promote Car==Freedom ! Individualism ! and every other PR notion of the think tanks to increase oil consumption and profits.

Not to mention funding decades of anti-AGW denial and downplaying.

Which explains a certain cynicism toward free market capitalists.

Swiftian modest proposal: Kill and eat all those against nuclear power.

That'll flatten the curve on climate change, we'll finally be able to build nuclear power, and we'll solve world hunger.

I can't believe how many people are still out there cheerleading nuclear power after watching what's happening in Ukraine.

Nuclear power is great until you have a large-scale conflict in the vicinity of one of your plants. Then, one stray missile and you've got an enormous nuclear disaster on your hands.

People love James Hansen except for the part where he says nuclear power has to be part of the answer.

Obvious things are often wrong. There is insufficient uranium 235 to run the world and closed fuel cycles are even more expensive than PWRs that don't catch fire or shut down constantly due to corrosion.

Wind was available and proven viable (albeit slightly more expensive in the first prototype than coal with no emissions controls) before the first fission reactor. The first practical (albeit misunderstood) PV array was 1906. A fraction of the investment put renewables further down the learning curve than nuclear.

If these myths about nuclear were true, then china would not be building a single gas or coal plant right now. They have all the ingredients present in the US mythical golden age. Uranium mined by enslaved indigenous people and colonised foreigners with no safety, a government capable of steamrolling any opposition, a massive highly experienced and underpaid construction workforce, many recently built reactors, no environmental regulation, pressure and funding from military interests for plutonium. And yet they are constructing more coal than nuclear and an order of magnitude more renewables than both combined. Why?

> I had given up on people accepting nuclear power, but now it's finally getting really, really popular

You're confusing your own shilling in an echo chamber for popularity. Just because the industry is astroturfing like crazy and now has the backing of the fossil fuel industry's propaganda machine doesn't make it popular.