From the Washington Post … a look at the energy sources we use.
The bad news is that even though the use of cleaner sources is growing, the use of dirtier fuels is growing globally as well, which results in little change in total percentages over the past 15+ years.
Graphing the percentages of clean air energy use looks like this:
Notice the sharp increase year-over-year in the use of clean air energy sources before the recent plateau?
The Post explains the reason, “… fans of nuclear will note that the share of carbon-free energy grew most quickly 1965 and 1999 — a period, Pielke notes, when ‘nuclear power increas[ed] by a factor of 100 …’”
The good news is that we can achieve similar accelerated carbon-free energy growth. If stalwart political leaders champion and enact an aggressive climate action vision, we could expand the world’s largest and safest nuclear energy fleet—the U.S. nuclear energy fleet. By regaining our clean air energy leadership position, America can lead by example another sharp growth pattern in this chart.
The advanced clean air nuclear energy technology exists. The question is whether we choose to use it or not.
