I don't understand why we don't also get serious about solar and wind.
Because we already have reliable renewable power in the form of hydroelectric generation in the vast majority of the country. And, of the 30% of electricity that isn't generated from dams, half of that is from nuclear.
At this point it would be trivial to replace the few thermal plants in the Prairies with nuclear technology that actually works in the winter; solar doesn't, because the sun's only present in the sky for a maximum of 6 hours 6 months of the year in the vast majority of the country. And that's 6 hours of sun right on the US border; it gets even worse as the latitude gets higher to the point where the sun just barely rises in the northern wastes.
This might be news to anyone not living in Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, but Canada isn't actually a part of the US, so solutions that might work in their sunnier Southwest regions are completely pointless here. Of course, the boom in natural gas has yet to be fully exploited here in terms of much cleaner gas turbines replacing coal generation; it's almost certainly going to cause more damage to climate to go with solar power at an unacceptably low duty cycle, electric cars that won't work in the cold, and inefficient electric heating, but that doesn't matter to the "muh net zero" people who just want to make life worse for everyone.
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Because we already have reliable renewable power in the form of hydroelectric generation in the vast majority of the country. And, of the 30% of electricity that isn't generated from dams, half of that is from nuclear.
At this point it would be trivial to replace the few thermal plants in the Prairies with nuclear technology that actually works in the winter; solar doesn't, because the sun's only present in the sky for a maximum of 6 hours 6 months of the year in the vast majority of the country. And that's 6 hours of sun right on the US border; it gets even worse as the latitude gets higher to the point where the sun just barely rises in the northern wastes.
This might be news to anyone not living in Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa, but Canada isn't actually a part of the US, so solutions that might work in their sunnier Southwest regions are completely pointless here. Of course, the boom in natural gas has yet to be fully exploited here in terms of much cleaner gas turbines replacing coal generation; it's almost certainly going to cause more damage to climate to go with solar power at an unacceptably low duty cycle, electric cars that won't work in the cold, and inefficient electric heating, but that doesn't matter to the "muh net zero" people who just want to make life worse for everyone.