Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
It's about independence from any monopoly. Energy companies own the field, equipment, transportation, electricity generation, and distribution. I'd like my own generator and storage to lower costs.
Nuclear perpetuates the same system where safety is cut as a cost saving measure. You know they would be less safe if they legally could. Also the infrastructure is in bad shape to move radioactive waste by rail- ask Ohio.
Can we afford not to be?
So… to summarize the argument: we have to build nuclear plants, even though they are the most expensive renewable per kWh and they take the longest amount of time to build (even by the author’s “fast” timeline standards) because we don’t have batteries that can store wind and solar energy, even though there are multiple emerging potential solutions that could result in days-long storage capacity.
Not buying it. I don’t buy the “unsafe” argument but I also don’t buy this argument
Edit: this same publication that published this op-ed published a pretty negative review of this book, funny enough: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jun/02/going-nuclear-by-tim-gregory-review-a-boosterish-case-for-atomic-energy
“Emerging”- what does that mean? Whats the timeline on them? The failure rate? The cost at the scale needed? I mean if you’re gonna complain about nuclear being more expensive then the batteries need to be cheaper necessarily. Also what materials are they made out of?
Never understood the freakout over nuclear ..... when you measure up the long term statistics
Gas/Oil/Coal have killed more people over the past 100 years than nuclear ever did (even if you threw in the bombing deaths in Japan in WWII)
The deaths caused by gas/oil/coal are just not as dramatic ... all those people died from global pollution, poisoning, early death, shortened lives, lung problems, bad health ... and all by the millions
The general populace isn’t looking at statistics, they’re looking at scary news stories
The public is never good at stats, or complex ideas that cannot be converted into a good old fashioned sound bite.
Maths hardly ever change major policy by themselves. Often it’s only an accident of political necessity when policy is backed by statistics or science