maporsche wrote:I'm all for nuclear technology. Build as many of those plants as we can afford.
We do need to keep investing time/money/energy into finding a clean, plentiful, and renewable energy source though. Our worldwide energy needs are not going to just go away.
And as far as the 'Why should the US do it if China and India aren't'.....well the answer there is simple. We can afford to; there is a market for this technology (anyone see "Who killed the electric car?"); we need to be the leaders in this technology so we can export it to combat our trade deficit; and nothing breeds invention like necessity. If we are able to develop a clean, cheap, renewable energy resource then China/India won't need to build coal power plants.
Yes, well, obviously if someone develops a cheap, clean, renewable energy source, then we don't worry about this anymore. That's kind of a cop-out, though - surely you're not saying that we have no choice but to develop a cheap, clean, renewable source of energy and all other efforts to combat global warming are misguided? (Or possibly you are, in which case, I can't really argue with you. ;p)
Even so, committing increased funding doesn't necessarily mean that we'll get the technology in return - this isn't Civilization we're playing here, heh. Some technical problems are genuinely difficult. They're not remaining unsolved because we're somehow failing to fund efforts to solve them, but because they require a fundamental breakthrough of one kind or another that we just haven't managed yet. Of course, that sort of thing is a lot more likely if we have many different projects working on different approaches to the problem...
But that's not an emissions-centric approach. That's not an "everybody has to do your bit" approach. It's certainly not a reason to panic - I mean, we don't have a cure for cancer, and certainly cancer is going to end the lives of more people in the next century than global warming, but you don't see anyone proposing international limits on the consumption of fast food. (Well, not seriously.) But global warming is absolutely being marketed as "imminent disaster unless we all act now". So what precisely is prescribed under the "act now"? What, specifically, should be done in the absence of the gee-whiz-cool technology that would render this argument unnecessary?
Once you've laid out that proposal, then we can judge it on the merits. It may be too expensive to do under any circumstances - if the solution is more expensive than all but the most unlikely worst-case scenarios, we're simply not going to do it. It may not be too expensive, but require political compromises from people that we cannot make to undertake those compromises - that's going to be China and India and other impoverished third-world nations, for whom the question of industrialization isn't academic or historical. Also, it's entirely possible that your proposed solution could not possibly work - the equivalent of wearing a propeller beanie in order to attempt to fly.
I worry that current anti-global-warming proposals have ALL THREE of these defects... that they're too expensive to undertake, that they require the cooperation of people who cannot be made to cooperate short of outright invasion, and that even if we did, it wouldn't actually do the job!
So if we're looking for technological solutions, that's okay, we can manage that. Increase the research funding, maybe set up some x-prize projects, gotcha. But then, let's throw out Kyoto and send Al Gore home and quit pretending that buying a Prius is an act of morality. ;p
