Like most people, I’m horrified by the ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. I hate BP for their half-hearted response to the crisis. I think the Obama administration has limited options for what they can do to stop the crisis (nuking the hole, while cathartic, would almost certainly make matters worse), but they have been too willing to defer to BP so far. To some extent, they have to — the oil companies have the technology to manage the well, while the federal government does not. But the government has not inflicted nearly the amount of pain on BP that they deserve, nor have they begun the process of preventing another disaster such as this from occurring in the future.
But while I’ve laughed along with everyone at the @BPGlobalPR Twitter feed, I’ve tried very hard not to forget the real villain in this story. The real culprit. The true bad guy. The person who is most at fault for the blowout of the well in the Gulf of Mexico, and even worse environmental disasters around the world.
That person is sitting at my keyboard, writing my post. He is me.
Oh, not just me. He’s also my friends. My family. Your friends. Your family. You. And everyone else in the developed world, a world that runs on energy, energy that is more often than not pulled from the ground, rock by rock, and siphoned from the ground, drop by drop.
We have had over thirty years since the OPEC oil embargo first woke America up to the critical role that oil plays in our national existence. Thirty years to find alternate ways to fuel our cars and trucks and boats. And in that time, we’ve developed ethanol, and…well, that’s about it. Oh, we’ve increased wind power a bit. Tightened up CAFE standards a touch (but not too much — Michigan’s a swing state, after all). But that’s peanuts. In 2007, petroleum provided 39 provided of America’s energy. Natural and coal tied for second, at 23 percent each. That’s 85 percent of all the energy consumed in America provided by three greenhouse-gas producers that are either mined or pumped, with the concurrent human costs. Another eight percent of our energy comes from nuclear power, which has its own environmental problems. Just seven percent of American energy is renewable, and a significant percentage of that is in corn-based ethanol, which is at best energy-neutral to produce.
In short, we have done nothing of significance for thirty-odd years while the crisis stared us right in the face. We knew that American oil supplies were in decline — and we did nothing to reduce our demand. We did nothing to develop alternative energy sources. We did nothing but drill, baby, drill and buy, baby, buy — the source didn’t matter. We took most of the easy oil from the ground, and so we’ve moved to the continental shelf, drilling a mile deep, to a well we literally can’t get at, because we have no choice.
And don’t tell me you’re different. You’re better. You’re environmentally aware. Since you’re almost certainly not Amish, living on the land and making your own clothes, you’ve been to a grocery store. You’ve bought fruit from Brazil in the winter. You’ve bought clothes stitched in Indonesia. You buy things from Amazon and Ebay, that are shipped by truck or by airplane, delivered directly to your house. Hell, you’re on a computer, which, like mine, is probably powered mostly by coal.
We cannot be angry at BP without being angry at ourselves. We cannot be disgusted with the oil spill without being disgusted at our unwillingness to push for alternative forms of energy. We power our cars and our homes with the blood of the men who died on the Deepwater Horizon, with the blood of the men who have died in mining accidents and refinery accidents. Not to mention with the money robbed from men and women who made their living off the Gulf Coast. And the men and women in the Niger River delta, and the men and women in northeastern Alberta.
Oh, there are things we can do to lessen the damage. We can force oil companies to dig relief wells right from the start of investigatory drilling, shore up our enforcement of environmental regulations. But it’s just a stopgap. Unless we lessen our dependence on oil, we’ll keep drilling the deep water, and eventually, ANWR. We don’t have a choice. We can’t replace 39 percent of our energy overnight. And we haven’t done anything to plan for the day we can.
And that is the problem. For all our righteous anger at BP, they’re just the pushers. We’re the junkies. And until we find a way to get clean, BP’s going to do what they’ve been doing. After all, they’re just working at our behest. No, we have to do far more than we have to end our dependence on fossil fuels. And until we do, disasters of this magnitude are inevitable. It’s nobody’s fault but our own.
We took most of the easy oil from the ground, and so we’ve moved to the continental shelf, drilling a mile deep, to a well we literally can’t get at, because we have no choice.
Your piece as a whole isn’t entirely off base, but this is just wrong. There is a lot of “easy oil” left on land. Energy companies aren’t allowed to go after it. There’s also a lot of easy oil left in shallow water, and they aren’t allowed to go after that either.
There’s no political constituency (well, there wasn’t, there is now) in favor of “protecting” deep water from development, so that’s where the new development has moved. You write about us going to ANWR next, as though that would be way worse than the Gulf. We should be in ANWR now. A spill of this type in ANWR would have been, not trivial, but nothing like the current disaster, because capping a bad well on land is proven art. A spill of this type on the shallow shelf would have been bad (much worse than on land) but also relatively easy to fix, today. (It wasn’t easy to fix back in 1980, when a shallow well in Mexico did similar damage to this spill.)
“We” all own some responsibility for the environmental damage done by energy production in our name, but “we” also need to take some responsibility for allowing bad choices on our priorities for protection. Environmentalists bear a share of the blame for what’s happening in the Gulf.
Robert, there’s nothing that prevented this deep-oil rig from having been run responsibly. Well, perhaps other than lax and nonexistent government oversight.
Robert, there’s nothing that prevented this deep-oil rig from having been run responsibly. Well, perhaps other than lax and nonexistent government oversight.
Of course. The blame for the immediate incident is on whomever cut corners or made mistakes; it doesn’t read as an unavoidable accident. But “avoidable accidents” are nonetheless unavoidable; we know that oil wells will have incidents and that wherever you drill for oil there will be spills. We can make the incidence of those spills 4% instead of 40%, or even .4% or 0.04% if we take a lot of time and trouble, but there will be accidents. Shit happens. Responsibly-run drill rigs will also, predictably, cause oil spills.
Accordingly, it makes sense to think about what you can do when someone does fuck up. On the Texas prairie, a spill is fixable by some guys in pickup trucks. On ANWR, it’ll take more than that. In shallow water, you need a lot of high-tech gear. In deep water, you need fucking Aquaman because we don’t know how to fucking fix it when it happens there.
It behooves us to think about where our disasters are going to happen, and not have “it won’t happen” as the plan. Which, from what I can tell, is pretty much the plan BP came up with. (And “it won’t happen” is also the line of defense proposed for Arctic deepwater drilling, where no mitigation would be realistically possible and they’d just have to let it leak until it stopped.)
I agree. But saying “there’s still more easy oil. Go for it” only postpones the problem of the easy oil running out, and does nothing to address global warming.
If we can’t reduce our energy demand – and I think we can’t. We’re addicted – then the only viable long-term solution is Nuclear Fusion, with Nuclear fission as a stopgap. I argue this on rational environmental grounds, which doesn’t make me popular with irrational environmentalists.
I know its been said that fusion is the power source of the future – and always will be. But there’s been real progress over the past fifty years, and I think practical fusion power could be a reality within a decade or two (or three or four. The point is, the remaining problems are technological/engineering in nature, rather than anything to do with the fundamental scienceproblem) if we prioritised development. I propose that we cancel the project to put a man on Mars – a program with extremely limited scientific value, and no economic value beyond the technological spinoff – and put the resources instead into developing fusion, which should give us similar levels of spinof, solve the energy crisis and save the planet in one fell swoop.
Well, not really. But it would be a big step in the right direction.
I think the Mars shot is pretty much a dead letter anyway, Daran, and I agree with you that replacement energy ought to be our priority.
Fission would do as a baseline; fusion would be more economical and cleaner, maybe, but we could get by without it. A fission baseline with maybe 10 or 20 percent renewable would be a multi-century stopgap solution, and in a multi-century timeframe renewables could be developed to the point of being adequate for human needs.
But more likely we’d figure out fusion.
I agree that we could develop as much renewable energy as we reasonably can. I’m not convinced that there is enough potentially recoverable renewable energy out there to ever meet our doubtlessly continuing-to-expand needs – unless you also plan to save the US from volcanic Armageddon by cooling down the Yellowstone magma chamber.
I agree that there is sufficient fissile material to last for centuries. I’m just concerned about safety. The fuel is safe enough, and waste isn’t the big problem people think it is – early reactors were intentionally designed to produce the stuff. Reactor designs are infinitely safer than they were in the mid 20th. But as you point out above, you can never completely eliminate the risk. And a reactor meltdown is always going to be messy.
Fission is the only feasable solution in the medium term, i.e., the next few decades. We should move away from it as quickly as possible.
I propose that we cancel the project to put a man on Mars – a program with extremely limited scientific value, and no economic value beyond the technological spinoff – and put the resources instead into developing fusion, which should give us similar levels of spinof, solve the energy crisis and save the planet in one fell swoop.
While I tend to agree with your assessment of the value of a crewed mission to Mars, I doubt that the relatively little money NASA has would be enough to develop fusion in any reasonable manner. Canceling one or more of Bush’s recreational wars or selling an aircraft carrier or two might be more to the point.
ETA: My apologies to Daran and everyone else for my US-centricism in this comment. To expand and correct the comment: ESA doesn’t have that kind of money either. Pulling out of one or two of the wars Blair got Britain into may be more helpful for funding fusion research than canceling the Mars mission.
Wow, it’s nice to see Jeff, Daran, and Robert all agreeing … or, it would be nice, if you all weren’t totally wrong.
*sigh*
Jeff: I agree with you that you’re responsible for this energy/global warming catastrophe we’re merrily gliding into. I agree with you in your intended sense a little, in that you’re like everyone else (including me) who should be/should have been taking more steps to reduce our personal carbon/energy consumption footprint.
But I also agree with you in the sense that you didn’t at all intend, in that you, Jeff Fecke, pissed on the rep of the one president who made a greater effort than anyone preceding him to raise Americans’ awareness of the need to change our energy-gobbling ways. I’m referring of course to your rating of Jimmy Carter as one of the five worst presidents, despite the fact that he (correctly) pointed out how crucial conservation and switching to renewable energy was to this country, and even installed solar panels on the White House (and also did a lot of other great things like brokering a Middle East peace deal, but I digress). And I’m also referring (of course) to your rating of Ronald Reagan as one of our best presidents, despite the fact that he radically undermined Carter’s energy initiatives (removing said White House solar panels as soon as he could, for example), was a loyal friend to the carbon industry and devoted enemy to advocates of renewable energy and environmentalists. (He also did innumerable other scurvy and criminal things, but … digression.)
And finally, Jeff Fecke, I also agree with you that you’re responsible for the mess we’re in because of the post you just wrote, which, by saying we’re all responsible, provides a very convenient cover story to obscure from view the people who are really responsible: the carbon and nuclear industry owners (and the capitalist system generally) and their Republican and quasi-Republican puppets who have actively designed public policy (like building highways instead of mass transit, removing popular tram systems, and killing the electric car) to mandate public addiction to (gasoline-powered) car culture, a culture in which the masses of people have little choice but to participate in.
As for you, Robert and Daran, the notion that environmentalists are responsible for our current situation is total bullshit and the two of you ought to be ashamed of yourselves for giving this ridiculous meme any credence.
BTW, a good alternative view of our situation is The Story of Stuff which you can view online.
I know we’ve had this discussion before and I know it happened on this blog. I just can’t remember if it happened 2 years ago or 7 years ago.
Uranium is finite & non-renewable. We can argue about how long the supply is likely to last, I guess.
Uranium is finite & non-renewable. We can argue about how long the supply is likely to last, I guess.
In principle, so is solar. That fusion reactor we’re orbiting isn’t going to last forever. Also it’s not like we’re saving the uranium for better uses. Might as well use it. I think the more immediate problem is the toxic waste generated by the uranium and the dangers of mining it than whether it is going to last.
Ballgame —
Carter was a failure as a president not because he was a bad guy with bad ideas, but because he was a good guy who failed to implement his good ideas. One of the reasons I like Obama is that whatever his failings on ideological purity, the guy gets stuff done in the end. Believe me, had Carter pushed through a comprehensive energy plan, health care, and a decent regulatory scheme, nobody would view him as a failure today.
Moreover, no, I’m not absolving BP of their responsibility. But unless we recognize our own complicity in supporting the energy industry, we’re never going to get beyond it. Ultimately, we have to combine sensible cuts in energy consumption with new forms of (preferably carbon-neutral) energy. The government needs to push this. And we need to push the government. But too many people are just laying around, griping about BP, then hopping in their cars and driving solo to work. We have to acknowledge our own role in this crisis. And until we do, we’re just talking out of both sides of our mouths — and government will fail to hold the oil companies responsible, because it’s obvious you and I don’t care.
Jake – we have decades worth of easily-accessible uranium, multiple decades of easily-accessible thorium. (Thorium is 2nd best for a number of reasons but if I remember correctly it’s easier to reprocess thorium waste into weapons so it’s more of a security problem to have a thorium economy, which is why we do uranium even though there’s more thorium). Filtration of uranium from seawater is not technically feasible today but it will be within a few decades, and then we have a multiple-centuries fuel stock.
Then once you start talking about uranium and thorium that are hard to get to (now), and the potential for fuel reuse (still lots of neutrons in that there “spent” ore), we’re looking at many, many centuries worth. We don’t have to have an argument over it; the data is readily available. There isn’t an infinite amount, but there’s lots. Combined with renewables and (as Jeff says) achievable gains in efficiency, it’s workable.
It wouldn’t be infinite, but it would be a loooong time before we ran out. The equivalent would be, its 1750 and we’re deciding whether we can burn oil as the basis for our economy. Yes, yes we can – there’s plenty. In a few centuries we’ll have to find something else, but a few centuries is a long time for an industrial civilization to work on a problem.
(Here’s a little piece from wikipedia on uranium stocks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_depletion
I was wrong, seawater extraction is working now, it just isn’t economical compared to mining. But it’s doable, and that means we have more or less unlimited uranium.)
Ballgame, environmentalists didn’t smash the control panel and giggle as the oil came gushing up, no. But they are responsible for the consequences of the policies they advocate, are they not? Well, environmentalists have shut down nuclear power in the United States. You effectively cannot build a nuclear infrastructure here; they’ve built, what, 2 plants in 20 years? Meanwhile France has gone from 50% nuclear to 80% nuclear. They’ve shut down drilling in wilderness areas on shore, where disasters would be bad but manageable. They’ve shut down drilling in shallow coastal areas, which, ditto though to a lesser extent of manageability. So we can’t replace our oil consumption with electricity, we can’t drill for oil in the places where it is easiest to clean up after a disaster, but we have to have fuel for our economy.
Who is responsible for those decisions, if not environmentalists?
Once upon a time, oil had no other use to which to be put.
The question with the (not even theoretical) quantity of uranium is will it last 50 years or 2000 years. We don’t have to worry about that wrt the sun. When the sun is exhausted, so are we. With uranium… is it worth the effort & risk if we have a 50 year supply? What about if the supply is good for 100, 500 or 1000 years? Part of the problem is that, right now, we have no precise estimate. I’d tend to guess closer to the 50 year estimate if only because the 2000 year estimate requires technology that doesn’t exist and no guarantee that it ever will.
Not that I disagree at all about the more immediate problems even one little bit.
ballgame:
Politics, as they say, makes for strange bedfellows. I will admit, though, to some surprise that on the eternal question of whether to focus upon what to do or who to blame, you’ve sided with Jeff.
This is pure ad hom. If Jeff pissed on Carter’s rep, or even if he pissed on his grave, it has no bearing upon the merits or otherwise of his argument.
Electric cars are neat, but they’re no solution to the problem. Electricity is an energy distribution system, not an energy source. We need either to reduce our energy consumption to the 10-20% we could get from conventional renewables, or find alternative sources to fossil hydrocarbon.
Reducing our energy consumption would mean giving up private cars. I don’t think the public would be willing to do that, not even to save the planet.
I never said they were responsible. I said they were irrational. I was referring to those that vigorously oppose nuclear, but don’t object to burning fossil hydrocarbon so much.
Why not?
A billion years before it runs out, it will into a Red Giant, and you are so going to regret cancelling that crewed mission to Mars.
@14: It’s a good point, although I’m at a loss as to what the plastics of uranium could be. At this point, I’d consider depleting the world’s U235/238 supply a bonus since it makes less of it available for making bombs…actually, how much do we have sitting in bombs? Could that be our 50 year fuel supply?
A 50 year supply probably isn’t worth the initial costs of building the reactors. A 200 year supply sounds more reasonable, but two questions would have to be answered:
1. What is the human and environmental cost of mining the 200 year supply? If it’s going to kill more people and ruin more hills than coal mining what’s the point? If it can be mined cleanly and safely that makes it a much more feasible fuel source.
2. What do we do with the waste? I’ve heard claims of systems that can remove the dangerous bits minimizing the amount of dangerous waste to be stored (or even allowing it to be reused) but am not sure how realistic this is.
In short, I don’t think nuclear energy is completely unfeasible but there are questions that need to be answered before I would support using it in an unrestricted manner.
actually, how much do we have sitting in bombs? Could that be our 50 year fuel supply?
Reprocessing from weaponry is a fairly significant chunk of the current uranium market, actually. (Uranium mining is expensive, it’s cheaper to buy Russian warheads. That’s winding down though.)
1. What is the human and environmental cost of mining the 200 year supply? If it’s going to kill more people and ruin more hills than coal mining what’s the point?
The environmental costs of production are only a small fraction of the total environmental costs of the entire fuel cycle. Uranium mining is at least as dangerous and probably more polluting than coal mining, although you don’t have to do as much of it. It’s when you use the fuel that the real costs show up. Burning coal = trillions of tons of CO2 (and sulfur and particulates and other nasties). Fissioning uranium = water vapor. And Three Mile Island, of course. But far more radiation hazard is emitted by burning coal than by fission plants, ironically enough. (There are trace radioactives in coal, and when it’s burned they go straight into the air. Enjoy!)
2. What do we do with the waste? I’ve heard claims of systems that can remove the dangerous bits minimizing the amount of dangerous waste to be stored (or even allowing it to be reused) but am not sure how realistic this is.
Fence off 10,000 acres in Arizona. Every thirty feet, put up a sign that says “if you cross the fence you will die”. Station an army division nearby to shoot terrorists. Vitrify (encase in glass) any high-level waste and stack it up inside the fence. Low-level waste, drop it in a hole somewhere and then don’t live there.
They aren’t trivial problems, though I gloss over them, but they aren’t unsolvable.
@19: That’s the kind of discussion I think is needed to make the case for use of more nuclear energy. Except with more numbers and p-values.
Re Three Mile Island: No one died. The cancer rates near TMI 20 years after showed no increase. Therefore, no serious injury occurred from it. Chernobyl on the other hand…hopefully not going to happen in the US or Europe or, now, in the ex-Soviet Union. But the sort of accident that has to be kept in mind if nuclear power is to expand.
Robert @3: “Accidents happen” and “shit happen” is euphemism for “People fuck up”. And yes, no matter what, people will fuck up and sometimes things will go wrong. But the incidence, and scale, of those mistakes is much lower if people do not cut corners, if the government is not figuratively (and for some agencies, literally) in bed with the businesses it is supposed to be regulating, and if there is a solid disaster plan for dealing with those emergencies. You know all this, we’re not disagreeing. But there is a great difference between wailing that the BP/Transocean disaster is The Price Way Pay For Our Selfish, Oil-Hugging Ways when it happens despite our diligent and careful efforts, and when it happens because a bunch of dumbasses with MBAs think if it’s not a problem in the next fiscal quarter it’s not an actual problem.
No, Fecke, don’t say such a thing! How could you even think that?
Rather, please say “He is I.” Standard English calls for the subject pronoun rather than the object pronoun when using linking verbs such as to be.
Of course not. I’d tell you that “you IS different.” That is, the pronoun you is different that the pronoun I (as well as the pronouns he, she and they) because you reflects both subject and object form. You can throw the ball to you. In contrast, I don’t throw the ball to I; I throw the ball to me. They don’t throw the ball to they; they throw it to them. Etc.
Glad to get that cleared up.
Jeff, the whole notion that “Carter was a failure” is a right-wing meme which has taken on life more due to his being smeared by the corporate media than due to his actual record. In many respects, the standard of living for working Americans peaked under Carter. The gap between the rich and everyone else was narrower than it’s been since. Laws were still in place to prevent the financial apocalypse we’re dealing with today. Primarily due to the ‘oil shock,’ we had begun to run up trade deficits, but they were still very modest (around 1% of GDP, as compared to the 4%+ of GDP they’ve been this century). There was the historic peace agreement he brokered and genuine hope for the Middle East. There were serious problems with our health care system, but on the plus side, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield organizations were still non-profit (many started becoming for-profit entities under Clinton).Vitally important restrictions on intelligence agencies had been enacted. And, as noted, he publicly advocated for a profound re-thinking of our energy approach precisely along the lines of the values you claim in your post, and he enacted the Energy Tax Act of 1978 which established the gas guzzler tax.
From a progressive’s perspective, he had some serious flaws, of course. Among other things, he did nothing to halt the Indonesian genocide against East Timor, and I voted for Kennedy in the 1980 primary.
But all of this is somewhat besides the point. I didn’t criticize you for calling Carter a “failure,” Jeff, I criticized you for saying he was one of the five worst presidents of all time, which might make sense from a right-winger’s point of view, but is ridiculous from a progressive’s perspective. (I think a pretty compelling case can be made that he was among the five best, at least since 1900.) The best that can be said about your assessment — given your post above — is that it belies a near-total political incoherence.
And frankly, I find even that charitable assessment difficult to maintain given that you’ve rated the union-busting, James Watt- and Clarence Thomas-appointing, Taliban-funding, sleazy covert operations-loving, deregulating friend of oily oligarchs everywhere, Ronald Reagan, as one of our best presidents, a notion which once again makes sense from a right-winger’s perspective, but is beyond incoherent from a progressive’s point of view, and as I noted is completely inconsistent with the values you claim to espouse in your post above.
And a big part of recognizing our complicity is understanding how the corporate media will instinctively portray advocates of environmentally predacious capitalism (like Reagan) as good guys, and politicians who counsel resistance to it, however mild (like Carter), as ineffectual.
I’m convinced that one of these days, the genuinely progressive Jeff is going to wake up one day horrified to realize that he rated Ronald Reagan as a “great” president, do a facepalm, and ask himself, “Oh my god, what the hell was I thinking?!?”
Until then, I do at least appreciate the rhetorical restraint with which you’ve responded to me, given the harshness of my criticisms.
I’m not criticizing Jeff for who he is, Daran, I’m criticizing him for what he did, which has a direct bearing on achieving the goals he’s professing here.
Depending on the source of electricity they utilize, they could be hugely less polluting than internal combustion cars. If they were solar-powered (something that’s been technologically feasible for decades) their carbon imprint would be dramatically reduced.
As noted, I don’t think that’s necessarily true.
Properly designed, public transportation is enormously popular, even in the U.S., as evidenced by people’s attitudes in New York City and D.C. (where the Metro strains under the demand).
I’m not aware of any environmentalist of any significance who is indifferent to the continued reliance on fossil hydrocarbons.
I’m not aware of any environmentalist of any significance who is indifferent to the continued reliance on fossil hydrocarbons.
They’re indifferent enough that they will tolerate the continued burning of hydrocarbons, rather than tolerate nuclear. Environmentalists would rather we burn coal than build nuclear plants.
Switching to electric cars and wind-powered subways isn’t one of the options on the table. Renewables don’t provide base load power; they aren’t reliable enough. In historical time and under realistic economic constraints (we’re not going to abandon all social and military spending to pour a trillion a year into solar infrastructure), our choices are coal, oil, and nuclear.
Environmentalists chose the first two.
Vitally important restrictions on intelligence agencies had been enacted.
Yeah, thank God we shut those people down.
Carter is also pretty much single-handedly responsible for the complete fuckup with Iran, leading directly to a hostile regional superpower with nuclear ambitions and capabilities.
Are you saying that hydroelectric, geothermal, biogas, biomass, solar thermal with storage and OTEC (to crib from wikipedia) don’t provide and/or aren’t capable of providing base load power? Or are you using a different definition for base load power than I’m familiar with?
The case for renewable base load plants is, more or less, the same argument you use for nuclear. The technology will be there within decades.
No, they can be part of a base load, but they aren’t generally power plants that can be kept online at human whim rather than nature’s whim. “Get solar array 7 back online! We’re losing power at the hospital!” Well, too damn bad, solar array 7 will be back online when the sun comes back out.
You can make up for that. Build a smart grid and have five times your nominal capacity installed, and the sun going out over Nevada can be compensated for by high winds in Boise, or what have you.
But it’s waaay more expensive than to do the same thing with coal or nuclear plants, which run as long as the switch is turned to “on”.
Robert, I don’t accept the premises of your argument. There is a mind-numblingly extravagant amount of energy waste built into our irrational economic system. If we are genuinely concerned about carbon emissions, why do we allow the sale of SUVs and other personal vehicles with criminally inefficient gas mileage? Why don’t we have rational employment and development policies, so the majority of people live close to where they work, and don’t waste their lives stuck in traffic, poisoning the planet in the bargain?
Oil-based enterprises and the car-culture are enormously subsidized … a 50¢ to $1 per gallon gasoline tax would be the barest minimum needed to cover the wars we’re waging in the Middle East, which, as anyone who’s honest with themselves knows, are being fought to maintain access to oil. We should have significantly high tariffs on goods that can be readily produced within the country to hinder the environmentally destructive practice of having them manufactured overseas and then shipped across the ocean where they’ll be consumed, just because China has cheap labor.
As for nuclear fission, its economic efficiency is largely illusory. Sure, its fuel — on the front end — is cheap and plentiful, no question. But I haven’t seen any analysis which builds in the true cost of having to deal with it on the back end — the cost of having to protect humanity from it for hundreds — even thousands — of years. No, that cost we “externalize”, as economists like to say, which is to say we’re laying it on the backs of generation upon generation of non-consenting workers for millenia in the future, who must either pay for the nuclear power we enjoy today or face devastating consequences.
And I categorically disagree with you about Iran, etc., but that’s a soapbox I’ll have to climb some other time.
Not arguing for nuclear power, but…
independent of the supply of uranium, any individual nuclear power plant is unlikely to be in use for much more than 50 years. I think 30 years is the expected life of a nuclear power plant, although some have been in use for much longer than that. Continuous exposure to lots of radiation is hell on structural integrity. Once the reactor vessel starts leaking neutrons, you have to dump the existing plant in a radioactive waste dump (or leave it in place as a new radioactive waste dump) and build a new one.
Interesting tidbit from Ana Marie Cox at Bloggingheads.tv on how the Canadian regulatory approach would have largely prevented the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf.
Maybe, but it’s also a lot safer and/or cleaner. The question of expense is largely dependent on the technologies of the near future.
It’s still essentially the same argument as you’re using for nuclear.
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