Figure 1. At least we will see the stars Never let a crisis go to waste. This may be one of the least original thoughts ever. It's been attributed to Niccolo Machiavelli, Saul Alinsky, and Rahm Emanuel among others. As Emanuel explained, a crisis ``is an opportunity to do things you could not do before". Trite but true.
I broached the idea to people that I thought might be sympathetic. Obviously, the more quietly this is worked on the better. No response. They prefer incremental adjustments such as NEIMA and ADVANCE. So I decided no harm to go public.
I take issue with a string of blackouts being enough. It’s not enough to have inconvenient blackouts. I’m convinced it needs to be bad enough that people have to die. More than that - it needs to be the right kind of people. A couple hundred Texans in the winter when you can scapegoat the natural gas pipeline? No way. It needs to happen in the northeast and probably measure in the thousands before the excuses wear thin and this country wakes up from this fantastic of a wind/solar future.
I hope this doesn’t happen, but the inability of the Texas legislature to do much about our grid’s reliability over two years after than awful freeze doesn’t make me optimistic.
Whether or not there is a climate emergency, we are going to experience a climate policy emergency
In either case the public support for nuclear will, or already has, reached the critical mass for changes to happen fast in the right conditions
"Eventually the elastic will snap back on all this madness." I hope so.
Thanks, shared. Invaluable content as always.
Is any organization actually working on this plan?
Not to my knowledge.
I broached the idea to people that I thought might be sympathetic. Obviously, the more quietly this is worked on the better. No response. They prefer incremental adjustments such as NEIMA and ADVANCE. So I decided no harm to go public.
You can bet these guys are "...those lobbyists may have oodles of money..." to make sure it never happens and why it hasn't in the last 50 years.
I could not agree more with your third paragraph.
I take issue with a string of blackouts being enough. It’s not enough to have inconvenient blackouts. I’m convinced it needs to be bad enough that people have to die. More than that - it needs to be the right kind of people. A couple hundred Texans in the winter when you can scapegoat the natural gas pipeline? No way. It needs to happen in the northeast and probably measure in the thousands before the excuses wear thin and this country wakes up from this fantastic of a wind/solar future.
I hope this doesn’t happen, but the inability of the Texas legislature to do much about our grid’s reliability over two years after than awful freeze doesn’t make me optimistic.