It's all well and good to take a position that goes straight to the desired goal, but (especially when you're dealing with a massive piece of cultural infrastructure like the energy system) you have to integrate change into the existing economics and technology in a process that doesn't always follow the most obvious path.
So, how do you suggest we impose the sequencing you want on a dynamic economic entity? That's the point my questions are pointing to.
I've received a huge amount of grief here because too few people understand that the key element in this transition away from carbon is shifting from a strategy of least cost power provision oriented to the characteristics of baseload generation to one geared to filling in the cracks left by massive deployment of non-dispatchable renewables.
The bridge idea behind natural gas is that it shuts down the baseload plants and opens opportunity for the widespread deployment of renewables that results in achieving the dramatic price reductions we've been seeing over the past 10 years - reducing carbon emissions in the process.
What natural gas cannot do is compete on cost with ubiquitous solar and wind. As wind and solar technologies very soon become the least cost option everywhere those inexpensive-to-build natural gas plants will have a steadily decreasing role to play as they go from the baseload substitute role to the steadily declining one of dispatchable backstop for solar and wind.
The economic functionality of that process is an essential part of being on the most rapid path to elimination of carbon-e emissions.
Catering to the nuclear industry will ultimately result in more carbon emissions than their early retirement because it skews the economic forces that would otherwise propel the very, very achievable price declines in wind and solar that are required for actually ending carbon dependence.
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