ENB Pub Note: We will be releasing a Podcast with Ronald Stien on Wednesday on the California refinery crisis. We highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter. This article was originally posted on America Outloud.
For candidates who hope to lead—whether as Mayor, Governor, or President—energy wisdom requires comprehensive awareness: that modern civilization is not powered by electricity alone; that materials matter; that oil underpins global logistics and manufacturing; that ethical mining must be part of any responsible strategy; that nuclear power is returning to the global stage; and that Earth’s mineral and energy resources, while vast, are ultimately finite.
America’s prosperity has always been tied to its ability to understand industrial realities, not simply political aspirations.
With this in mind, the following open-ended questions are designed to invite deeper discussions between political figures, rather than to trap them in questions that they are not equipped to answer. If an aspiring leader can articulate thoughtful responses to the following questions, voters will have a clearer sense of whether that person possesses the level of ‘energy wisdom’ needed for national leadership.
This chart should end the climate debate once and for all. It comes straight from the Energy Institute’s 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy.
For thirty years, the world has moved nearly $8 trillion of investment into wind, solar, and other so-called “renewable” sources for electricity.” The result? Their share of global primary electricity consumption has barely budged. It sits there, stubbornly flat, while the thin green line for emission-free, continuous, and uninterrupted nuclear power has actually narrowed, while we have experienced real-life disastrous experiments such as the Dunkelflaute or the recent Iberian blackout.
If these potential leaders really thought carbon dioxide emissions were going to cook the planet, then emissions-free nuclear-generated electricity would have expanded in a geometric progression.
Why aren’t our political leaders looking at the data on electricity generation?
- Fossil fuels of coal and natural gas still supply more than 80 percent of the world’s primary electricity, the same percentage as 30 years ago. Renewables (including hydro and burning wood) hover around 15 percent at best, and the modern wind-and-solar portion is a rounding error in the overall electricity mix.
- Nuclear? A measly 9 percent and shrinking relatively as global demand grows for electricity. That’s not a transition. That’s a 30-trillion-dollar grift, the most massive wealth transfer in history dressed up as salvation.
- Wind and solar are intermittent. They rely on the weather. They fail when their capacity is most needed, every time. They always require backup – usually natural gas or coal plants that must stay spinning even when the sun shines, and wind blows, because the grid is not reactive, the power needs to be available all of the time.
- Electricity from wind and solar is not, cannot, and never will be the backbone of a modern industrial economy.
- Who will pay the price when politicians guess wrong? Certainly not the politicians.
Why are political leaders unwilling to discuss the fact that wind and solar devour land?
- A single 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant sits on a few hundred acres and runs 93 percent of the time. Covering the same output with solar would require hundreds of square miles of panels, plus battery farms the size of counties, plus transmission lines slicing through every red state from Texas to the Dakotas.
- A SMR power plant sits on a football field.
Why do political leaders avoid talking about the mining required for those solar panels and EV batteries?
- Child labor in Congo for cobalt, environmental rape in China for rare earths, and mountains of toxic waste nobody wants to talk about, not to mention the slave labor used to make the wind turbines and solar panels (all overseas, of course).
- Meanwhile, the spent fuel from a nuclear plant fits in a single dry-cask storage container the size of a garden shed. We know exactly where every ounce of it is, and it contains an almost infinite supply of renewable electricity potential (it is always being made)
Why do political leaders avoid discussions about nuclear safety?
- Three Mile Island in 1979 killed zero members of the public. Chernobyl was a Soviet design that, unfortunately, led to many deaths, mainly due to chain of command issues from the Soviet Government at the time.
- Fukushima was a Tsunami accident and not a nuclear accident. Lessons have been learnt from the emergency backup design.
- France generates 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear and enjoys some of the lowest carbon emissions and electricity prices in Europe.
- France is the world’s largest net exporter of electricity, generating over €3 billion annually from exporting surplus low-carbon, nuclear-powered energy to neighboring European nations.
- America’s 93 aging reactors still produce 20 percent of our power with a safety record that makes every other electricity source look like Russian roulette.
- The U.S. Navy has operated all of its nuclear reactors on submarines and aircraft carriers for 70 years without a single operational casualty.
- The entire civilian nuclear fleet worldwide has a lifetime death rate per terawatt-hour LOWER than solar and wind when you count installation accidents, and rooftop falls.
Why are political leaders so hostile to nuclear-generated electricity?
- The chart from the Energy Institute proves the point in living color: thirty years, eight trillion dollars, and the needle barely moved. The green “nuclear” line didn’t expand because the political leaders driving this agenda never support electricity wisdom conversations.
Why don’t political leaders ever come up with solutions?
- When citizens in the USA send messages to their leaders, they usually ask them to “do something.” This is like asking an arsonist to “do something” to help a building owner collect insurance. It is difficult to fault our leaders, because they all “do something.” Yet their “something” does not include solutions. For nuclear power, the consequences of doing nothing are becoming dire.
- We have been blessed with the answer to cheap, unlimited electricity, yet our leaders prefer to promote monopolies devoid of anything that will upset the flow of money. For nuclear power in the US, that is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). While the NRC is devoid of any hint of moving the nuclear power industry ahead, they still exist. Are they increasing the safety of what is already the safest industry in the world (no injuries during normal commercial operations in almost 70 years of worldwide operation; Chernobyl was not an “accident”?
- Is the NRC considering the quality of life for even a single person in the world? NO. They have stopped progress for nuclear power in the US (and, arguably, in the world) for over half a century. Yet they are staying in business through fees paid by the very customers they purport to be serving. So, they are “doing something” as requested by the citizens. Yet the “something” they are doing is lashing people to the pole of economic hell by denying them the power source that can set the world free of electricity worries. So, one solution is to close the NRC and allow real progress to benefit the citizens of the world. In short, what we need is leadership, not lethargy.
Yet our leaders in America treat nuclear-generated electricity like it’s the devil’s work. History tells us political leaders will continue to bitterly cling to the political safety of the climate story. Electricity reality tells us that it’s time to start energy-wisdom discussions and start building nuclear power for continuous, emission-free, and uninterruptable electricity to meet the demand that is expected to grow by over 40% over the next decade. With no competing supply of electricity, who will win the bidding war, data centers or customers like all of humanity that are indirect customers of data centers? That’s why we need power. That is the answer that will determine how beneficial your future welfare will be, as electricity is becoming the most valuable commodity on earth.
Please share this information with teachers, students, and friends to encourage Energy Literacy conversations at the family dinner table.
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