canpakes wrote: ↑Mon Jul 26, 2021 5:38 pm
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And you’re right; ‘where electricity comes from’ certainly
does factor into the thread topic, given where so many of the older coal-fired generating plants operate -
Coal plants place a disproportionate burden on poor and largely minority communities, exposing residents to high levels of pollutants that affect public health, according to a new report led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. [...]
So long as you have a lot of empty and otherwise little used and very sunny space, the renewable energy source that is solar power can be exploited without generating atmospheric pollution . And it's cheaper than fossil fuel energy, and getting even cheaper all the time.
And guess what? The US has a lot of that space just waiting to be exploited. On top of that, there are vast expanses of accessible continental shelf waters from which wind energy can be harvested. The damage to the environment per Megawatt-hour of such renewable energy is hugely less than what fossil fuel extraction and burning causes for an equivalent amount.
In the first instance cheap renewables can supply the need for electricity distributed for domestic or industrial use. The UK is experiencing more and more days on which its electricity demands are mainly met by renewables.
But as production grows (and there is nothing to stop it), there will be more and more cities whose transportation, both public and private, goes electric. Eventually it will be the old gas-guzzling vehicles that can't find a refill, while the country has plenty of electric charging points offering rapid recharges for new high capacity batteries.
Once people said nothing could replace the horse. Then it was steam engines that would never be replaced by those little popping motor cars. Now people are telling us renewable electric vehicle power is just a tree-huggers' dream. Yeah, yeah ...
That will leave the fossil industry with a hugely reduced need to produce oil:
currently only 12% of production goes to feed the chemical industry.. Oh, and did I mention not belching CO2 into the atmosphere to drive up temperatures to levels where half the country burns up? There is that too.