The Unspoken Tension in Environmentalism

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The Brookings Institution estimates that building enough wind and solar power to replace all the non-renewable energy production in the United States would, optimistically speaking, require a land area equivalent to 1.6 Delawares , or in international terms, roughly one Cyprus. Another, less optimistic, study put the figure at one South Dakota — Belarus, to non-Americans — about 20 times larger. (View Highlight)
Whichever of those two figures is closer to the truth, the U.S. will have to do the equivalent of paving an entire state with solar panels and wind farms and associated infrastructure, in order to reach a fully zero-carbon energy system. This seems to me (speaking as someone in Britain, with a stake in the climate but not in the preservation of local beauty spots in the U.S.) a good thing to do. But it will involve building things, not leaving nature untouched. (View Highlight)
Ironically, the way to minimize this impact would be to vastly increase reliance on nuclear energy, which is also zero carbon, and has a vastly lower land footprint. But that is even less popular with environmentalists, in part because of concerns over the long-term storage of nuclear waste, and in part because of safety fears. These worries are understandable, but nuclear waste storage is a solved problem now , and nuclear is far safer than any fossil fuel. (View Highlight)