“The greenies and lunatic Left will never accept nuclear power at the level needed.”
As long as that’s the case, we know the climate is not an “emergency” and we can ignore them.
Now, we just need to remove the current bunch of criminals running the country, and reverse the current disastrous policies...
Regardless, the world needs a LOT more energy going forward. The only sane way to achieve that is putting a large amount of nuclear power into the mix. Various next-gen reactor designs are walk-away safe, and nuclear waste is a solvable problem.
Perhaps within a few decades we’ll have even better options.
Gerard O'neill, several decades ago advocated power generation in space. We have all the technology on the shelf.
Go to the moon and/or asteroids. Mine and smelt all the metals needed to build the power plants there with 1/6 gravity on the moon and less on asteroids.
Launch the materials from there to small factories in orbit around the earth and construct the power plants in geosynchronous orbits.
These would be simple steam generators. If you understand how a steam generator works, half of the power comes from the steam, the other half from the suction of condensing the steam.
A power plant in orbit would have the ultimate heat on the sun side of the plant, and the ultimate cold on the shaded side.
You beam the power to earth with microwave energy to converter stations.
You wouldn't need a huge grid of power lines as receiver and converter stations could be located in local areas.
I expected, back in the 1970s that well before now this would be where our power came from.