[nullc]

We need to stop looking at coal/gas, etc. as fuel. They're not. They are part of an atmosphere/carbon-sink battery.

When we get energy from carbon emitting sources we're discharging the atmosphere/carbon-sink battery. Eventually we're going to have to charge it again, and to do so it will take substantially more energy than we got from discharging it.

Beyond CO2, coal in particular produces a large amount of radioactive and particulate atmospheric pollution. We expect nuclear to capture most of its externalities but we ignore those of most other ways we obtain energy.