Fired up! Climate change gridlock needs to be replaced with action

EARTH: The Operators Manual (PBS)

Watch Full Program on PBS. See more from EARTH: The Operators Manual.

Climate Change, A Major Challenge of the 21st Century with Rafe Pomerance

Clean Energy Technology... it's a race we don't want to lose.

The global clean energy industry is set for a major crash. The reason is simple. Clean energy is still much more expensive and less reliable than coal or gas, and in an era of heightened budget austerity, the subsidies required to make clean energy artificially cheaper are becoming unsustainable.
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The crash won't be limited to the United States. In many European countries, clean energy subsidies have become budget casualties as governments attempt to curb mounting deficits. Spain, Germany, France, Italy and the Czech Republic have all announced cuts to clean energy subsidies.

Such cuts are not universal, however. China, flush with cash, is bucking the trend, committing $760 billion over 10 years for clean energy projects. China is continuing to invest in low-carbon energy as a way of meeting its voracious energy demand, diversifying its electricity supply and alleviating some of the negative health consequences of its reliance on fossil energy.
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If U.S. and European clean energy markets collapse while investment continues to ramp up in China, the short-term consequences will likely be a migration of much of the industry to Asia. As we wrote in our 2009 report, "Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant," this would have significant economic consequences for the United States, as the jobs, revenues and other benefits of clean tech growth accrue overseas.

The Coming Clean Tech Crash

I don't think the consequences will be short term. There's investment in infrastructure that will make it a "structural problem" to regain any foothold if we let China win this race.

How far would car ownership have gone without government paying for roads?

What he said

Lateline - 31/03/2011: George Monbiot joins Lateline
www.abc.net.au

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, it's a horrible, traumatic, extremely dangerous thing that's happening in Fukushima and it's devastating to the lives of many people living around there. But the extraordinary fact is that no-one has yet received what is believed by scientists to be a lethal dose of radiation. And what has happened is that that power station there has been hit by a force nine earthquake, a major tsunami. Those have exposed a horrendous legacy of corner-cutting, poor design and of course appalling siting on an earthquake zone and all sorts of horrible effects in terms of the necessity for evacuation and the spread of low-level radiation and the rest of it. It's about the worst possible nuclear catastrophe that you could envisage and it rates very high on the scale of nuclear disasters. And yet even so, the extraordinary case remains that so far - touch wood, and let's hope very much that this remains the case - no-one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

And that has forced me, really, to challenge myself and to re-examine my preconceptions and to think, well, this is a nasty technology. I don't like it at all. But if the result of the great switch-off of nuclear power in Japan, in Germany, possibly in China, possibly the US, possibly in the UK, many other countries in response to this disaster is to move more into coal burning, which already seems to be the case, then we're talking about moving from a bad technology to a much, much worse one. And faced with a choice between those two options, it has to be nuclear.

This is what I have been thinking! Coal vs nuclear, not solar or wind vs nuclear!!

Economic?? Give me a break. Yes, nuclear has failed to internalize all costs... but how about coal? Heh? We are on the brink of destroying our ecosystem because we burn fossil fuels? How much is it going to cost to fix that (even if we could )?

Another thing that I've been thinking about is how much we might have learned about dealing with the problems of nuclear power in the last 40 years if environmentalists had been more open minded to it.

We are going to be doing lots and lots of stuff to save the planet, each with with unknown side affects. So hold your nose and tolerate nuclear as a transitional power source.

HT Paulm over at Climate Progress.

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Who are you going to blame?

The United States fell behind China and Germany in clean energy investments in 2010, a result of the lack of a coherent national energy policy in the U.S., according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

e360 digest

Blame the voters. We have met the enemy and he is us

Another thing that bugs me is the way we all discuss the coming climate catastrophe as if everything will be normal, and suddenly in 2050 it all goes to hell. No, in 2049 it'll be bad, in 2039 and 2029 it'll be bad, but not as bad... and we are likely to see more rough spots (drought, fire, flood) this decade.

Imagining The U.S. Without Nuclear Power

It's uncomfortable for me to see we know so little.