I am not convinced. When we discovered oil, it could have been used to clean up the environment, rather than destroy it. It could have replaced coal in industry.
Actually, it couldn't. You apparently don't know much about the manufacture of steel, or of cement. The use of a liquid fuel for either one would have required the use of a completely different type of plant. And that would have been a very large capital investment. And from the point of view of global warming, it would have made no difference at all.
That would have cleaned up our cities and made them pleasant to live in so rich people didn't feel the need to own country homes away from it all. Natural gas could have replaced existing space heating requirements and lasted hundreds of years, making cities even more pleasant.
I'm not sure why you think natural gas isn't used for heating houses; I'm looking at a natural gas fired forced air heating system in my garage right now. As it happens, it's going to be replaced shortly with a higher-efficiency unit, partly because it needs to be replaced, and partly because I want to cut down my carbon footprint. That's merely one of the measures I'm taking.
If we had recognized that our fossil fuel inheritance was a precious trust that should be safeguarded for future generations and limited its use, progress in building design and insulation would have meant that a lot of energy "needs" would never have come up. And maybe our industrial base would have been somewhat smaller. We would have fewer cars and maybe no cheap plastic toys from China at all.
I think that you're expecting people not to be people. I also think you're not really thinking about what that "industrial base" actually provides.
It is my observation that energy "needs" rise to meet any availability. As long as cheap oil was available, we kept coming up with new and creative ways to use it. We now spend more time in traffic and service fees for our homes cost a lot more because we've scattered them across the countryside.
Do you have any evidence to support this assertion? I've looked your posts on this thread over, and I don't see any. I also see evidence to support the opposite view, evidence you've ignored or passed over. Certainly I don't see a credible response to that evidence from you, and here you are making the same assertion again, in defiance of apparent reality. If you want to have a conversation, you need to respond to what other people say, not just ignore it and keep saying the same thing.
Nuclear was supposed to deliver power "too cheap to meter". Again, we just discovered a raft of new uses for the electricity it produced. If we had invested in more nuclear as well, I'm convinced we'd have an even greater dependence on electricity today, with no decrease in our dependence on cars at all. If TMI and Chernobyl hadn't happened, governments may have been more complacent and not as supportive of nuclear research. So current reactors may have been more dangerous and research into new technologies might have been further behind. We may well have had an even deeper climate crisis because mining, transporting and refining uranium still use a lot of fossil fuels, and nuclear plants rely on coal for backup. And we'd be even more desperate today, because we'd have less uranium remaining and our perceived energy "needs" would be even more astronomical.
All of this is frank speculation, and all of it is unsupported, and basically unsupportable by any facts, because it didn't work out that way.
I don't think the solution is to keep giving the addict his fix.
I don't think the solution is to starve a billion people because of an unsupported characterization.
I'm also concerned about the lecture on "dissing" nuclear power. The first article I quoted stated that Ontario Power Generation was
The whole point of a democracy is to have an informed and engaged electorate judge the pros and cons for themselves. It is contemptible to keep information from them, yet you suggest that it is revealing the dangers of nuclear power that is somehow morally reprehensible.
No, I suggest that blowing a bunch of smoke about how dangerous it is, without proper respect for the facts, is irresponsible. I don't disagree with your assertion that keeping information from the public is contemptible, and I also don't disagree that it's been done, but the dangers of nuclear power have been considerably overblown. Hyperbole serves no purpose; and in this case, it's an active danger to the environment. It has resulted in there not being enough trained nuclear engineers in the US, because kids deciding what classes to take in college didn't take classes in it. We've got over a hundred nuclear reactors operating in the US, and not enough engineers to tend them. And the reason is a movie that was filled with technical inaccuracies and a bunch of hysteria. And we've got a huge problem with carbon emissions that would be considerably smaller if we had built nuclear plants instead of coal plants. It's going to take ten years to fix that problem, and meanwhile we're going to be burning a whole lot more coal. So thanks for the mess.
What I think we need to do instead is inform the public about the dangers of global warming, inform the public about the dangers of all the various generation options, make reasonable assessments about what life will be like if we commit to the various options and let the public judge. My friends enjoy the challenge of reducing personal emissions to negligible levels. There's a big challenge around food supply that's hard to solve at a personal level, but that can be addressed as well with the necessary political commitment. I don't like the presumption that we know how much energy people need, what risks they should be willing to take.
The recommendations I've seen you make on this thread sounded pretty restrictive in terms of personal freedom. I'm a liberal, but I'm also anti-authoritarian, and it sounded like the carbon police to me. And it's the carbon police to avoid using a perfectly reasonable solution, which is unjustifiable. If you could have shown that there was no choice, well, OK, I guess we gotta do what we gotta do. But in the absence of proof of that, I think you're imposing a bunch of regulations in order to avoid a perceived danger that's less than you make it out to be.
People can save money, and save the environment at the same time. Drive less. Insulate your home. Think about what you buy, where it came from, and how much carbon footprint that has, and how to make it less. But if you think that's going to solve this problem, or that you're going to get the Chinese to let people starve because you're afraid of nuclear energy, I'd have to say that I haven't seen you present any evidence to support your views, and they strike me as pretty unrealistic.
I'll agree that most people are unaware of the magnitude of the upcoming energy crisis, but in my experience, when apprised of their options, most people prefer to focus on reducing their energy dependence first and investing in renewables second. That would change if the alternative was starving in the dark, but it's not. It means you give up such luxuries as standby modes on television and sweep instead of vacuuming sometimes. You hang your clothes to dry and it smells nice as a result.
You've been shown evidence to support the assertion that this will not be enough, and ignored it. If you have some evidence to present to support this point of view, then present it; otherwise, this is just more smoke.
But my biggest complaint about nuclear is that in practice it competes directly with conservation. I know there are a lot of people on this forum that believe the two can and should coexist. But the reality is that governments have energy budgets. Nuclear involves huge capital cost outlays. It creates budgets that make people's heads spin. And it is always based on models of energy "needs" founded on the current model. It presumes that in a low-carbon future we will continue to produce cars, electric weed trimmers, golf carts, can openers, little electronic dolls and other crap at the same rate. It presumes that our houses will continue to be poorly insulated and that we'll continue to commute from ever more distant suburbs. It presumes that populations will continue to expand. It always presumes that living with less is impossible. So the monetary commitment to conservation is a pittance, even though conservation is widely accepted as the cheapest, fastest, most reliable and safest way of reducing demand. Where a nuclear fix is not an option because of public resistance, the result is a greater investment in conservation and renewables to keep the lights on.
And yet more unsupported assertions. Again, you've been shown evidence you've ignored. If you want to provide some evidence instead of making assertions, then let's see it. Otherwise, what you've got is some half-baked ideas about saving the world that, if they were implemented, would result in a carbon police state with brown people on the other side of the world starving to death. And a bunch of hysteria about how dangerous nuclear power is.
Look, I think that your points about conservation and renewables are good ones. But I think you haven't done enough research to understand what we're looking at. People aren't going to give up their cars willingly; and they aren't going to vote for anyone who tries to make them. The solution that will work is to stop burning oil in them. That means electric cars. The electricity has to come from somewhere, and if we burn coal to make it, that just transfers the problem somewhere else. Renewables aren't going to handle what we already use, even if we conserve all we can; and the evidence to support that assertion has already been presented here. How can we expect renewables to handle the extra load that using electric cars will present, if they can't even handle what we already have? Nuclear solves that problem, at least for now, while we figure out the permanent solution, which is fusion.
Try and see if you can't give some answers to the questions I posed above, instead of writing a radical environmentalist screed. This is not the political forum.
