I concur. I take a Battlestar Galactica inspired approach to appliances in my house. It's fine if they have computers in them, I just don't want them to be able to communicate.

So say we all.

My question is how much non-nuclear could have been generated for the same price

Between none and very little, unless you are seriously suggesting building new gas power plants.

Neither solar nor wind works during these cold winter days when power usage is at its highest. There’s nowhere to build new hydro. Coal is being banned.

There are dorms at my university (University of Maryland) that are over 100 years old, but have been renovated enough that it's fine. I would hope that Universities have a long enough time horizon that things would be built to last an extremely long time with regular renovations.

With catastrophic climate change on the horizon, the theory is that pandemics will become significantly more frequent.

>"With catastrophic climate change on the horizon, the theory is that pandemics will become significantly more frequent. "

What theory is this? I've heard of globalization and rapid transportation speeding up pandemics, but never climate change.

It's easy to find better explanations with a quick search, but the general idea is that as habitats change, animals will move toward the poles and come into contact with other species that they historically haven't, creating lots of new opportunities for diseases to jump between species and mutate and do all the things they love to do.

There are also studies implying that animals like rodents and bats that spread the most diseases to humans are also adapting the best to climate change and human environments, which implies increased risk of new diseases: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.273...

There's also the idea of frozen pathogens thawing and infecting animals, which has happened recently: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/4884009...

In general it's not that climate change makes pandemics worse, but it makes the chance of a new disease infecting a human more likely.

The solutions are political not technical. Housing needs to be something that isn't used primarily to make money. Cooperatives, Vienna-style PPPs, and a society where if your house price doesn't constantly increase you can afford to retire.

This is the approach I have to computers controlling things in my home, it's fine if they are computers, but I don't want them connected.

The best reason for housing prices increasing faster than inflation is that the western world has made it policy that middle-class wealth is based on housing prices rising faster than inflation so many economic actors will personally benefit from higher and higher housing prices.