In fairness, he did so in part because this was going to go against Total's interests (see Oil, Power and War for that part of the story), but yeah, it was still the right stance to have and history proved him right.
Yup, or things like sulphur thermal storage[1]. Also, hydrogen is pushed heavily by the fossil fuel industry, as it will provide another out for all their methane reserves (via steam reforming).
Or they did, because the people to benefit from those tax cuts happen to own the media and pushed the very anti-abortion and xenophobic ideas that got him elected...
And just the same, copyleft licenses (which are not "non-permissive" in my book) such as GPL don't "mean that you cannot without consent", they just want you to share the result back under the same license (which is often an issue for some corporate projects).
Yes, and as pointed out in the link I shared, air pollution is part of the limited impacts it is applicable to, but points out "it does not apply to impacts like resource use and energy use".
From the article linked above: "(...) We call this whataboutism. Actors advancing this discourse often deploy statistics demonstrating their own small contribution to global emissions, or they point to large emitters such as China – “We are a nation that produces 1.8 per cent of global carbon dioxide, so I do not get closing down our aluminium smelters, most of our steel production, and now our refining industry …” "
Either we start giving get out of jail free cards to specific sectors and so on or we agree that everything needs to reduce its emissions by ~8%/year from now on, regardless of their share in total emissions, and of how hard it is technically to decarbonize.
Yes, sure, we can go mine the bottom of the oceans and extract it by centrifuging ocean waters, that probably would give us marginally more than a doubling of margin.
Point remains: reserves are exhaustible, an exponential consumption may not be desirable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#:~:text=As%20of%2....
Besides the fact that electricity generation is merely one aspect of GHG emissions (hello agriculture, land use, transportation, etc). The ultimate argument against the "let's not radically change our ways and only retool the engine" view is the following: we have ~120 years of known reserves for the current fission reactors, with a potential 10x multiplier with fast neutron reactors should anybody (other than the russians and the chinese) bother to invest into researching the field. How many more doublings in our economy (and hence energy use) does it take to consume it all ? At a measly (by economists and politicians standards) rate of 2%/year, you get a doubling every 35 years. in 350 years (yeah I know this sounds very far in the light of the current news) we'd have increased our demand by 3 orders of magnitude...
Beyond the fact that electricity-generation is once again only part of our emissions issue, there's about ~450 reactors worldwide and the uranium ore reserves give us around ~120 years of operation on current 3rd (/3+) gen reactors (short of having fast neutron reactors basically). Having 1000 in the US (or rather 900 more or 3 times as many globally) would have brought that deadline closer by the inverse ratio, and we'd likely already have tensions on nuclear fuel sourcing.
Agree with you on the role of government spending though, but there also needs to be a radical paradigm shift in how we view the economy and what needs to happen in each sector (not just within energy in fact).