In an age in which the Economist titles an article "Post-truth politics - Art of the lie", and with information and "facts" abundant online, we sometimes forget about the complexity of some issues. It's easy to demand more clean and sustainable energy - delivering it is a whole different ball game.

One example is nuclear. The political will in Germany to abandon nuclear energy has been enormous after the catastrophic events of Fukushima. And indeed, when the generations before ours built those nuclear reactors, they really didn't think that far ahead. The lack of long-term storage for nuclear waste is proof of that. However, it seems that providing electricity to fuel economic development was deemed more important than long term sustainability.

Now, in the age of sustainability, we try to make things right. Just that we somehow missed the fact that our priorities have massively shifted. While 25 years ago the fear from radioactive fallouts and the issue of dumping the waste from nuclear power plants was indeed an issue, this should not be the priority right now. We have maneuvered ourselves into a situation where the risks of climate change weigh much heavier. And unfortunately (as much as I hate to say that), nuclear power is going to be a cornerstone of any solution out of this mess. As Michael Shellenberger nicely explains, getting off nuclear before we established enough renewable energy sources, will simply lead to those reactors being replaced with dirty sources such as coal. And that would be far worse than what we have right now.

Not tackling the problem early enough, hasn't left us with many options at this point. Even worse, our narrow and simplistic focus on energy has left out considerations for the other parts of the system. It's not just that we produce too much greenhouse gases through our energy production/consumption, we also use a lot of water. In fact, energy production is already responsible for 15% of water withdrawals.  And in order to avoid moving from one crisis (energy) into the next one (water), we need to be very clear what good solutions have to look like. Some of the technologies used to facilitate the transition to low-carbon energy sources (e.g. biofuels or capturing & storing carbon from fossil fuels), actually significantly increase the water consumed to produce that energy.

There is no simple solutions to achieve the goals that many countries agreed upon with the Paris Agreement. To really solve this crisis, we need to start thinking this through end-to-end. There's plenty of experts out there who understand this, unfortunately their voices are rarely heard. Relying on career politicians however, seems like having a 5-year old designing a rocket engine. 

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Please share your comments and inputs (via comment function, twitter, e-mail, etc.). In my short write-ups I address topics that I am particularly interested in because they align with my values and beliefs. As such, they are always a reflection of my ideas, thoughts, and opinions. The only thing I am positive in that regard is that I do not have all the perspectives, all the knowledge, or all the facts - help me be better tomorrow.