Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

I don't know if it's useful to see it as a zero sum game. The sun is beaming practically unlimited energy out towards us (and a whole lot more that doesn't reach Earth but is still available eventually).

Even if it is zero sum: if we all stopped eating meat, we could pretty easily sustain ourselves. Putting it on population size instead of how that population behaves is not useful and frankly fatalist.

Look, it’s fine if you’re pro nuclear but why not be pro nuclear on its own merits? Your argument would be so much stronger without the parts disregarding wind and solar, as if energy sources are mutually exclusive. I urge you to do some more research on modern renewable technologies, specifically with regard to baseload and not see them as just an enemy of nuclear energy.

>I urge you to do some more research on modern renewable technologies

I see no evidence that solar and wind can actually replace fossil fuels. I think they are great in niche areas, but I see no evidence that they are even a partial solution to climate change. The nature of solar energy and wind energy is such that it is diffuse, and therefore needs massive number of collectors, and that requirement is directly proportional to population size, and per capita energy use (both of which are going up). This also means that you need to over-provision because solar and wind output varies daily, seasonally and even inter-annually (there are years when wind output is high, and years when it is low). And there is no battery technology now, or upcoming, that is capable of even storing that energy to even bridge daily variability at city-scale (for even a moderately-sized city).

Occasionally you'll see an article about some small country X getting 100% of their energy from renewables. In every case, that 'renewable' is hydro or geothermal (and hydro/geothermal is great and better than nuclear ... but only if you have the geography for it). It is never solar or wind. Every week for the last decade we have an article about how cheap (and getting cheaper) solar and wind is, and yet no country or even region is powered solely through these renewable. Germany is investing heavily in wind, while at the same time building pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades - WHY?!?!

Maybe renewable just can't do it and we should be honest about that. I think solar and wind are a distraction and they've become a religion.

By the way, here's a live view of the energy mix of my home province of Ontario (pop ~15 million)[1]. Because of nuclear and hydro we're pretty much at 85%-97% non-carbon power any given day ... and yet there is an irrational push for solar and wind (which also requires investment in natural gas) - what does solar and wind do for us? As a bonus, Ontario is one of the few places that you can make a credible argument against nuclear because we could sign long-term contract to ship hydro from Quebec ... but that's not the argument being made. The argument being made is that we should decommission nuclear in favour of ... can you guess? ... wind and solar - guaranteeing that we would need to build up natural gas for baseload. Insanity.

>specifically with regard to baseload

They need fossil fuel baseload. That's a fact. There is some talk about bio-fuels (i.e. burning wood!) but that's a disaster for the environment. We'd literally be clearing land to grow things that we then burn. And did you ever imagine that the energy technology of the future would be burning wood (or corn, or garbage)? And outside of biofuels, there is nothing else. In some cases, if you have the geography for it maybe you can build a pumped-storage reservoir, but that's the best you can do.

[1] http://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html

>The storage of nuclear waste for the time during which it needs to be stored without leaking is not a problem that has been solved

Yes it has. You just store it. It takes up minuscule amount of land. The argument I hear is: "You can't store waste safely".. why? "Because you just can't".

>That's leaving aside the problem of them inevitably breaking, which they absolutely will.

Inevitably? I'm not sure about that. Right now that's not an issue and it hasn't been an issue for the the 60 years we've had nuclear power.

>You can tell this is the case by looking into how these storage facilities actually do in practice.

Sure. How many times did you hear about nuclear waste from commercial reactors leaking and causing damage to the environment?

>Even if it only happens very few times, that's enough to ruin a very large swathe of environment.

No. That's not true. That's not how radioactivity works. The longer the half-life of a radioactive substance, the less potent it is, and as you spread it over a larger area the potency goes down EXPONENTIALLY. Waste from commercial reactor is tiny - if you spread it, you dilute it to the point where it is engulfed in background radiation. There is no chance that waste from a commercial nuclear reactor will ruin a 'large swathe of environment'.

I don't know how near a collapse is, since catastrophes in systems tend to come as a surprise, not a gradual event. I do agree, however, that there is substantial evidence to suggest a collapse in the human population is inevitable.