Environment & Energy

First of all, the graphic in the post to which your respond, shows that so called "renewable energy" has had no effect on fossil fuel waste accumulations in the atmosphere in this century but below we can talk about time and quantity and the grotesque failure of so called "renewable energy" to do a damned thing about the extreme global heating now underway below.

Again, it was never about fossil fuels. The purpose of the so called "renewable energy" fraud was to attack nuclear energy at which it succeeded, leading to the destruction the planetary atmosphere.

I track the data at the Mauna Loa CO₂ regularly, weekly in fact, and report on the rates of accumulation each spring when new records are set, for example, here:

New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 430.86 ppm

Here's some text from that post:

Since I am still keeping that data in a spreadsheet updated weekly, I can now report the updated comparators over the last ten years as of the last week posted, week 32 of 2025.



The running average of 10 year increases has now reached 26.34 ppm/10 years as of last week posted, week 32 of 2025. Ten years ago, week 32 of 2015, that average was 20.92 ppm/10 years. Clearly things are getting worse faster, because the unsustainable fossil fuel dependent land and material intensive reactionary so called "renewable energy" scheme does not now, never has, and never will be about attacking fossil fuels. Even if this were the intent - and it isn't - it has failed miserably. The sole purpose of enthusiasm for solar and wind enthusiasm is to attack the only sustainable expandable form of primary energy now available to humanity, nuclear energy, technology developed by the finest minds of the 20th century, and trashed by popular embrace of some of the worst thinking at the end of that century and well into this century, at least in this country, and in coal burning hellholes like Germany.

So don't tell me that the trillions of dollars squandered on solar and wind junk has anything to do with fossil fuels. The Germans didn't shut their coal plants. They embraced them. They shut their nuclear plants, thus killing people, since nuclear power plants save lives. As for the atmosphere, things are getting worse faster. I TRACK IT. Weekly. Why do I track it? Because I'm not interested in chanting. I'm interested in data. I care. I give a shit.

The purpose of the useless "renewable energy" scam has always been about specious attacks on nuclear energy, including the lie that nuclear power takes too long to build.

I note that the United States, with engineers who lived and operated largely with slide rules and computers less powerful than a modern Apple Watch, built more than 100 nuclear reactors in this country over a period of about 25 years while producing the cheapest electricity on the planet. Routinely, I am told that what has already happened is impossible, generally by people who I regard as arsonists complaining about forest fires. The willful destruction of US nuclear manufacturing capability has only served the gas industry, but this situation is not obtained in the rest of the world, as I will show below.

I am often taken to task on this website for reproducing this data page from the IEA while discounting the soothsaying on it. There are people here, who think if one produces data again and again, it then becomes untrue. They are, of course, antinukes, filled with dogma, and devoid of any reference to data.



IEA World Energy Outlook 2024
Table A.1a: World energy supply Page 296.

The tables consist of two parts, one of which is data, 2023, the last year recorded - the 2025 WEO is published in November each year and will show data for 2024 - and then some soothsaying which antinukes credit, being as they are, faith based rather than reality based. I have been monitoring the WEO since the late 20th century, and have copies of every WEO in the 21st century in my files. This disabuses me of taking soothsaying seriously, although I do credit the data.

We have antinukes here who whine and cry about it, but the fact that combined, the useless solar and wind scam at a cost of trillions, produced combined 16 Exajoules of energy (despite the dishonest practice of the renewable energy hype squad to lie by posting units of power for unreliable systems like fossil fuel dependent solar and wind junk, all of which will be landfill and need replacement before today's newborns finish college, if there are colleges to finish). Solar and wind produced these paltry sums on a planet where humanity consumed 642 Exajoules of energy in 2023, this in an atmosphere of extreme if insipid cheering. The nuclear industry, by contrast, produced 30 Exajoules of energy in an atmosphere of insipid vituperation, the immoral claim that if anyone anywhere can even imagine someone dying from radiation exposure, it's then OK for millions of people to die each year, at a rate close to 20,000 people per day, from fossil fuel waste, aka, "air pollution" not even counting the effects of extreme global heating.

The rest of the world really doesn't give a rat's ass about antinukes in the United States. China has built 58 nuclear reactors in this century and now has 33 under construction. They are about to pass France as the world's 2nd largest producer of nuclear energy, probably in this year, and will pass the United States, still the world's largest producer of nuclear energy because of stuff built mostly 40 years ago, in the next few years. Their reactors produced in their country alone, 1.85 EJ of electricity, which corresponds if we assume that the reactors are Rankine devices, as most reactors (with some exceptions in China and elsewhere) corresponds to 4.6 EJ of primary energy at 33% thermodynamic efficiency. Note that unlike the solar and wind junk, one doesn't need to build redundant gas or coal plants to back them up. They run at some of the highest capacity utilization in the world.

If solar and wind are so cheap, why is everyone still building gas and coal plants?

The reactors in China will still be saving human lives when every solar and wind device on this planet will have been landfill for half a century.

I really am disinterested in slogans, particularly slogans distracted from and in conflict with data.

We have lost the ability to construct nuclear power plants because of intellectual and moral weakness, and because we're OK with dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste into the planetary atmosphere, where it kills it. We just love dangerous natural gas. We claim it's "cheap" because we ignore the unimaginable cost of destruction of the planetary atmosphere.

I hate to say it, but the United States is now at least 20 years behind China in an engineering infrastructure to build nuclear power plants, and in fact, behind - I really, really, really, hate to say it - Russia. Rosatom is a major exporter of nuclear power plants and is building them all over the world. Most of the 70 reactors now under construction around the world that are not in China are Rosatom products. The latest VVER is an impressive device.

Thanks for sharing the usual chant with me. I'm not impressed to be honest, but I'm certainly prepared to address it, since I've been dealing with this nonsensical claim for quite some time. Uncritical belief in this claim, in my view, has left the planet in flames.

Have a nice evening.