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"Sustainable" or "Unsustainable" are imprecise terms. Our Sun is unsustainable long term if you think in terms of billions of years.

What matters to many people here is whether a given use of energy makes a significant difference in present contributions to anthropogenic climate change.

There's an unfortunate tendency for environmentalist folks to pile on to the idea of preventing climate change as validation for their views and to speak as if all actions which can be undertaken to benefit the environment are equally important to prevent a climate apocalypse. They are not.

Personally, I'm in favor of widespread use of Nuclear generating stations. They're sustainable for millennia in terms of fuel abundance and the needed storage space for waste as well as being very low emitters of CO2 even when you amortize the amount of greenhouse gases generated during construction over their lifetime.




However much I'm in favor of nuclear power, you cannot separate the political environment surrounding it, and as such if it is not politically feasible to transition over to it, then it is not sustainable.

Sustainability doesn't just live in the bubble of what's physically possible. A global population of 500 million people living in a first-world standard of living is also quite sustainable, but you're not gonna get a lot of people in favor of a depopulation movement either.




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