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I don't want to wish someone the worst. But I wouldn't loose one second of sleep if all those people involved in delaying climate action got some karmic justice.

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The only kind of climate action possible in those days was nuclear power.

If you go check who actually delayed nuclear deployment you will discover it was environmentalists.

There was plenty of action possible; building more railways, different city design less dependent on car travel and maybe publishing their own research instead of burying it for 40 years...

Cars are around 10% of total energy usage, this would have only minimal impact.

I agree about the research, but that's unrelated to the point I was making.

cycling, going vegan, renewables

Yes, and we can also not use plastic straws and eat seasonal vegetable, but it doesn't change that much compared to the amount of fossils we needlessly burn.

So because alternative technology didn't exist there was no case to have the discussion and invest more heavily in alternative green tech research, shortening the time frame to action and reducing dependence on fossil fuels earlier?

This isn't about what occurred then, it's about the time and opportunity cost of inaction that was fostered by rubbishing climate science and hiding the research.

You can certainly have the discussion, but it would not have helped. We are still having discussion TODAY and it's doing nothing of any consequence.

The only thing that matters for actual deployment is how much the energy source costs. Nuclear power costs were dramatically increased due to unnecessary fear.

For example solar power needs inverters - but those didn't work well back then. It just so happens to right now technology has finally reached the point that alternate power actually is cheap enough to deploy.

So we are deploying it.

All the "climate talk" is doing nothing, what actually matters is the money.

This is a good observation. It's so sad that we haven't used the best tool we had. We still don't use it properly even now, when it's clear that we are already in a terrible crisis.

The fear of nuclear power isn't unnecessary. We're talking about a giant company doing terrible things and a government unwilling and unable to do anything about it. Why then should the answer to that problem be trusting big companies and the government to safely run nuclear power plants?

The massive drop in renewable prices was triggered by government manufacturing support and subsidies. Huge amounts of it here in the US, in Europe and in China.

Similarly, the few countries who have massively built out nuclear power (ie, France) did so because of deliberate government policy, not because their free-market economies were chasing the cheapest source of kilowatts.

Nah, we had wind power available since at least 50s, and hydropower could be used too. Hoover dam is pretty old...

All hydropower that can be used is already used, and without neodymium magnets (which were commercialized in 1982) wind power doesn't work well.

That's incorrect, there were plenty of suggestions even forty years ago, many of them involving using less energy. Better construction, reduction of mobility for people and cargo, less wasteful mobility, resource recycling, many of the things that we still talk about.

Of course many of them imply a change in behavior and some of them imply a decrease in what's traditionally referred to as living standards.

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