Oh, I totally agree – didn’t mean to give any impression otherwise. Filling the energy demand gap as quickly as possible with the least impactful generation source should be very high on societal goals, IMO. And it seems like that is what’s happening, mostly. Solar, wind, and storage are the largest share of what’s being brought up this year:
As I understand it, planning new, grid-scale nuclear power plants takes 10-20 years. While this isn’t a reason not to start that process now, it does mean something needs to fill the demand gap until the nuke plants (and other clean sources) come online to displace the dirty generation, or demand has to be artificially held down, through usage regulation or techniques like rolling blackouts, all of which I would imagine is pretty unpalatable.
The recommendation changed from car lengths to seconds decades ago, but wasn’t well communicated fwict. I learned car lengths from my dad and then seconds when I got my motorcycle endorsement.
If everyone were leaving 2 seconds of space, it also reduces stop and go traffic that is caused, or at least exacerbated, by the traffic wave phenomenon. But that’s even less well socialized.