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You can just look at the total emissions from France and compare with Germany. It's quite amazing the difference.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...

Imagine having HALF the CO2 emissions. HALF. That would be amazing. If we had that in most of Europe and the US instead of listening to the anti-nuclear lobby we would have a ton more runway to fix the issue than we have now.

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Germany was the industrial heavyweight of the 70s and doing a lot more - those emissions aren't just because of nuclear vs coal (although that's very real too). Anyway, anti-nuclear activism only got traction in the 80s so any delta there is not because of that. Economics were probably the main driver (perhaps Atoms for Peace was more France-centric? Not sure if there were other drivers). You can see here that energy use per person was 1/3 higher in Germany than France in the 70s but I suspect if we could find total energy expenditure it would be more like double for Germany than France during that time period: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...

Germany does have half the CO2 emissions of the USA.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...

Holy hell, I didn't know it was that bad. Thanks for pointing that out.

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