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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6772240" data-attributes="member: 177">I don't have lots of time to dig up sources, as I'm at work.  However, the International Energy Agency says:"The median cost of producing so-called baseload power that is available all the time from natural gas, coal and atomic plants was about $100 a megawatt-hour for 2015 compared with about $200 for solar, which dropped from $500 in 2010. Those costs take into account investment, fuel, maintenance and dismantling of the installations over their lifetimes and vary widely between countries and plants."The key to note is that solar has halved its price in the past five years.  The price is expected to continue to drop.  Fossil fuel energy has remained fairly constant, and is only likely to rise.  And this is apples to apples - just as building new renewable energy has a cost, so does maintaining old fossil fuel infrastructure - those turbines need to be replaced too, you know.  Yep.  But the results aren't radioactive!  And the turbines in a farm can be taken out and replaced individually, and upgraded as technology gets better, without shutting down the entire farm, or needing a whole new installation.  You can maintain a windfarm pretty much forever, rather than having to have major toxic and radioactive waste cleanups and abandon sites.  This is similar for solar power, with the note that it is even better suited for distributed power generation. The renewables are, in a word, sustainable, where a nuclear plant very much isn't.  Two techs that have shown massive reduction in cost in the past decade - and the breakthroughs in storage required are not terribly massive.  Heck, the Tesla Powerwall has technology sufficient for home use already, though they need in increase scale of production to bring the cost down."World science groups"? Can't even name them?  Cite, please.Don't be condescending.  It was a simple editing error - replace "your mitigation" with "your adaptation".  Basically, failing to eliminate the problem means that regional weather and climate disasters will continue to destabilize the lesser-developed areas of the world, one after another.  Have fun adapting to brush wars.  Have even more fun when one of then is a nuclear power.Changes due to climate change are predicted to be on the span of decades to one century.  As in, sea level rise of another foot above the current level by 2050 is in the middle of the expected range.  This doesn't sound like much - probably no nee dto build a wall for that, even, right!  Except that the effect of storm surges becomes magnified.Wow.  Sweeping, unsupported statements.  Great.  Yes, or something more dense and even less biodegradeable.  The problem is that in order to take atmospheric CO2 and make a plastic out of it, you are basically reversing the burning process - you have to put in *at least* as much energy as you'd get out of totally burning that plastic, which is about the same as burning the same mass of oil (give or take a bit).  This can probably make this an industrial-scale process, but on the scale required the energy issue is a problem. It sequesters the plastic, yes, but does virtually nothing to hasten the demise of dependence on oil.</blockquote>

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