QUORA: ‘What is, in your opinion, the best solution to climate change without destroying the economy?’
I posted this answer:
I don’t like the term “solution to climate change.” It implies that climate change should be the principle focus of government policy, overriding all other concerns, including economic growth, individual rights, especially rights to property and free trade, the vital human need for reliable, low-cost, plentiful energy, etc. That’s the Greta Thunberg “solution.”
There’s a lot more to the issue of climate change than climate. But I also reject the Green New Deal approach, which packages an authoritarian socialist agenda in a nice green wrapping labeled “fight climate change.” So the question becomes, what can be done to mitigate human impact on the climate without destroying individual freedom and the economy—i.e., capitalism.
Climate change is a long-running natural occurrence. But in recent history it probably has gotten a good push from human industrial activity. As a reasonably informed observer, though not an expert, my view is that the weight of the evidence indicates that today’s climate change is largely but not exclusively driven by human activity. It also appears that a warming climate, while not an “emergency”—it has some positive impacts—could become a problem, perhaps a serious one. (“Climate crisis” is a political catch phrase, not a serious scientific conclusion.)
Given the insurmountable drawbacks of so-called “renewable” energy, solar and wind—namely their unreliability due to intermittency and inefficiency due to dilutedness—my answer would be nuclear power, hands down. Many informed people endorse nuclear power, including Democratic NJ Senator Cory Booker, former director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy under President Obama and Clinton Administration EPA administrator Carol Browner, Microsoft founder and investor Bill Gates, Environmental Progress founder Michael Shellenberger, and Reason science expert Ronald Bailey, author of The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century.
I believe that the principle “first, do no harm” should apply to the climate change issue. Before considering “solutions to climate change,” we should resolve to prioritize human well-being over “saving the planet.” The meaning behind that slogan is that impacting and altering the natural environment by humans is a bad thing, even if it improves human lives. We must keep in mind the fact that whatever negative impact may accompany climate change, life for humans without low-cost, reliable, industrial-scale energy would be a wholesale catastrophe. Individual rights and free markets are keys to the economic growth that the technological progress that are required to address whatever climate change dangers may lurk in the future.
With that in mind, and assuming CO2 is the main driver of anthropogenic climate change—a controversial issue—nuclear power is currently the only technologically feasible carbon-free power source that is capable of replacing fossil fuels as the main provider of our energy needs. And the transition can be done without the dangerous authoritarian socialism of a Green New Deal or the anti-industrial “clean energy” dogmatism of the Environmentalist movement. Nuclear power is not the only reasonable step that can be taken to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. But it is the best and biggest step we can take to mitigate man-made climate change “without destroying the economy.”
SUPPLEMENTAL:
I got this Reply from Brian Linderman questioning my link to Alex Epstein’s Pragu U. video on the “insurmountable drawbacks of so-called “renewable” energy, solar and wind.”
There are considerably better sources that explain the real technical drawbacks of variable renewable energy besides Prager which makes wide generalizations about technologies without recognizing that scale and grid networks play a large role in their feasibility.
I’d advise you to get a better understanding of some of these topics:
Followed by a series of links promoting the “viability of renewables,” which I have not read. However, since Lindeman mentioned that the grid networks can mitigate the “technical drawbacks” of solar and wind, I would check out Epstein’s interview with Michael Shellenberger, in which these two energy experts discuss the problems that renewables cause for the grid.
Anyway, here is my response to Lindeman:
Prager runs a wide range of videos, ranging from bad to good (in my view). I am citing Alex Epstein for his energy expertise, not Prager as such. Thanks for the links.
Related Reading:
Climate Change Catastrophists Who Oppose Nuclear have Anti-Humanist Premises
The NJ Star-Ledger is Right on Nuclear Power
The Real Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables--Michael Shellenberger
The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century--Ronald Bailey
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