I think the problem is the gap between outrage and effective action.
Outrage is what identifies a problem, but to solve the problem requires state capacity to deploy infrastructure cost effectively and at scale.
Now we have no shortage of outrage. We've got activists blocking traffic and having "die-ins" in which they lie down on the grass and sob. We have endless moaning about 'climate collapse'.
But none of that increases nuclear generating capacity. None of that deploys any reliable battery storage at scale.
So then you have the neoliberal free-marketeers thinking that if they impose taxes on oil then magically these nuclear plants will be built, just out of the free market. This is faith-based infrastructure.
But that doesn't happen, so you have the public being burdened by high taxes, then they kick the politicians out of office to lower their taxes, and nothing gets done.
Is that because the public has an emotional attachment to fossil fuels? That they love coal? No, people don't care where they get their energy. Making them care -- e.g. promoting outrage -- does nothing to deploy nuclear power at scale. Lecturing end users about how they are "destroying the plant" also does nothing. That's also just more outrage.
This lack of effective action and the substitution of outrage for engineering competency is why we still need fossil fuels for baseload and will continue to need them.
In fact we are so paralyzed by emotion and irreality that I predict that we will never recover the state capacity we had in the postwar period and instead will just end up buying nuclear plants from China and battery storage infrastructure from China, because we don't have the competency to deploy this infrastructure at scale by ourselves.
But China has state capacity. They do not have the outrage, which is why people who only value outrage think that China is doing nothing. But China will leapfrog the West in things like Nuclear power and even in the area of battery storage at scale.
It may not be according some 2030 timeline, which is again a political deadline rather than a deadline arising from a sober assessment of engineering roadmaps, but China will eventually do it because it has state capacity to act in this area and we do not. When it comes to solving big infrastructure challenges, we have only outrage.
