Vaclav, while I concur with your analysis regarding renewables and their drawbacks (which are persistently ignored by those who seem to imagine that “green” is a magical solution to everything) it’s difficult to agree with your enthusiasm for nuclear power. For a start, fusion power is still at least 20 years away, as it has been for the last 70 years. Which means that today’s nuclear power comes with a heavy price tag: radioactive waste with a half-life of tens of thousands of years. We humans are simply too stupid and too short-sighted to be entrusted with that kind of responsibility. We’ve already done immensely stupid things like dumping barrels of toxic waste into the oceans (without bothering to mark where we dumped them); the barrels have a duty-life of a little more than 100 years while the highly radioactive waste they contain will be lethal for 20,000 years.

Thus it is impossible to reconcile the evident safety risks with the zero-carbon advantages of nuclear power. Humans are just too irresponsible and dull-witted to be entrusted with this technology. Therefore we have to look for a multi-pronged approach. Work-from-home around the West would save an estimated 12 million barrels of oil per day (the equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s entire output) and thus save nearly two billion tons of CO2 emissions per year. If we stopped building stupid structures that lack proper insulation, we could save at least another 12 million barrels per day in the West alone. Alterations to our current insane agricultural practices could reduce global CO2 and methane emissions by at least another 4 billion tons of CO2 per year.

So by combining more rational policies towards work and construction and agriculture we could dramatically reduce our need for CO2 intensive power generation. It’s not a complete solution by any means but it has none of the risks of relying on nuclear power and therefore the risk/reward profile is dramatically superior to any realistic nuclear-based approach.