No. Renewables are the best policy. They have become aligned with liberals because conservatives decided to make energy policy a wedge issue instead of being rational.
Conservatives could just as easily call intermittent renewables the irrational wedge issue created by liberals. I think you need to actually make a non-symmetric argument about how it supposedly lowers energy prices. All the places that have invested in wind and solar have seen electricity prices go up and all the places that stuck with fossil hydro and nuclear did not. Thats pretty strong evidence that the all-in cost of wind and solar is high
> All the places that have invested in wind and solar have seen electricity prices go up and all the places that stuck with fossil hydro and nuclear did not.
You’re quite far out of your depth here.
The science has concluded that renewables decrease electricity costs. But comparing regions the ones that went straight into renewables were the ones with nearly 100% fossil fuel usage which were desperate for alternatives.
They started with expensive electricity and fossil fuels still often are the marginal producer in their systems.
And don’t get me started on investing in nuclear power taking 20 years to build and delivering $170-250/MWh electricity today. That is pure lunacy to propose.
Solar and wind are not "renewable" in the same way plastic recycling "works". The total LiveCycle of wind and solar arguably cause more pollution from the materials used. you can't recycle wind and solar when they are done. The generator itself is the waste produced from the process.
Not only that Solar changes the local climate because they absorbed and radiate heat as well as taking vast amounts of land that is stripped of life. Wind drives whales insane on the coast and kills massive amounts of birds.
If we can crack fusion then the only fuels used are helium and such. Much cleaner and they work at night and whin the air is still.
The environmental impacts of wind and solar are nonzero but absolutely miniscule compared to fossil fuel extraction. Base load is a concern but not unsolvable especially as scaling batteries becomes easier. Most importantly, solar + battery is already deployed at scale and is now the cheapest to install and operate in the real world. We are also close to being able to scale geothermal as renewable base load.
Fusion is great but it's still years away at least from a single viable commercial reactor. We need solutions to be deployed ten years ago. Waiting for Godot isn't an option.
