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Tie fighters

Remember that story about how the Japanese government is urging businessfolk to dress down to save energy?

Apparently Japanese necktie makers don't appreciate it.

A salient point in the nuclear debate.

Marketplace decided to broach that touchy, touchy subject this morning, running a brief segment on the nuclear debate and the support it's been getting from some greens.

For the most part, it's your standard, run of the mill coverage: Some greens are reconsidering because of global warming; others aren't so keen.

However, there was one item that caught my attention. Southern Nuclear, which runs three plants in the South, is considering filing a site permit, the first step to a new reactor. The whole process will take about ten years before the reactor is operational, according to the report.

The report then jumps to an interesting corollary:

It's that timeline that forced some greens to reconsider nukes. They figure if it takes a decade to get a plant going, the debate better get started.

While I have no problem with the debate getting started, I see the lag time as a huge strike against nuclear. Professor Martin Parry, the IPCC scientist, said on Talking Point that thirty, forty, fifty years down the line, it's reasonable to expect that we will have clean, low-emission technologies to meet the world's energy needs. Parry left it open as to whether nuclear would be included in these technologies (he listed nuclear, clean coal, and renewables).

My point is that when we don't plan to build a reactor this year, we are ensuring that no new reactors will be built for the next ten years. By the time a reactor gets online, the other available technologies will be that much better, and we might say hey, maybe we don't really want to have to deal with all the costs of nuclear when we've got renewables to beat it. Reading sites like Treehugger and WorldChanging makes me more optimistic every day that the day is coming fast when those who choose to do so can easily live an emissions- and isotope-free life.

We might regret settling for a single with a compromise on nuclear when we won't see benefits until after we've already hit the grand slam and found really clean alternatives. Sorry, it's baseball season.

Update [2005-6-14 16:10:2 by Dave Roberts]: Sorry to butt in on Andy's post here -- hi Andy! -- but Jim Harding and Denis Hayes just published an op-ed in the Seattle P-I that makes exactly the same point:

Changes in electric market structure -- generally termed deregulation -- have only added to the risks that utilities and investors must consider. In a deregulated market, there is no certainty that costs incurred will be recovered. Even in fully regulated markets, utilities must consider the possibility that any number of technologies -- fuel cells, photovoltaics, coal with carbon sequestration, gas-fired combined cycles, geothermal, conservation or wind -- could undercut their investments long before the capital costs are recovered. Peter Bradford, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission member, argues that nuclear power is fundamentally incompatible with a deregulated industry, and he is probably right.

They also make a good point about proliferation. Check it out.

Words from a different kind of president

We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.

One choice is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years. Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three-quarters of them would continue to carry only one person -- the driver -- while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our houses, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste.

We will feel mounting pressure to plunder the environment. We will have a crash program to build more nuclear plants, strip-mine and burn more coal, and drill more offshore wells than we will need if we begin to conserve now. Inflation will soar, production will go down, people will lose their jobs. Intense competition will build up among nations and among the different regions within our own country.

If we fail to act soon, we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.

That was Jimmy Carter's fear. Here's what he wanted to do about it:

I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States. Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did [two years ago] -- never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the [next decade], for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade ...

(Via CommonDreams > DailyKos > Oil Drum)

Words of hope from President Bush

"See, there's a lot of things we're doing in America, and I believe that not only can we solve greenhouse gas, I believe we will."

Pulp

Sprol.com has become one of my favorite daily reads. Check out this extraordinary series of posts on "Pulping the World."

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Jerk

An environmentalist takes “enviroliberalism” to task, gets yelled at Jeremy Carl, a longtime environmentalist now working on sustainability issues in India, thinks that environmentalism should look in the mirror to find the source of its troubles. The problem, he says, is the dominance of “enviroliberalism,” a parochial sort of green thinking that ignores international issues […]

Beyond Blunderdome

Secret plan would put U.K. nuke waste in “interim” domes for 1,000 years The U.K.’s government-owned British Nuclear Fuels has developed an innovative solution to the nuclear-waste problem: procrastinate! The company wants to dump waste from nuclear power plants into giant domes designed to last up to 1,000 years — at which point, presumably, future […]

GOP starting to face up to climate challenge

More signs that the tipping point on climate has arrived:

In a Christian Science Monitor article today: "The ground is shifting on the politics of climate change faster than I would have thought," said Alex Flint, GOP staff director of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, at a press breakfast sponsored by The Energy Daily and BP America on Friday.

And as The Boston Globe reports: "The chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, Pete V. Domenici, is considering whether to team up with a fellow New Mexican, Senator Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat, on [a] proposal that would cap [greenhouse-gas] emissions but allow companies to buy their way out if the cost of reducing emissions proves to be prohibitively high." (More on Bingaman's plan here.)

"We're thrilled at the interest being shown by Republicans at doing something that's achievable and doable," said Bill Wicker, a Bingaman spokesman.

One of my concerns about cities.

If it isn't already abundantly clear, I am a big fan of cities. If there's one thing that gets me a little concerned about them, though, it's the fact that they turn over so fast. According to Stewart Brand's recent lecture, cities replace at least 2-3 percent of their fabric every year, so every forty years or so they have been completely remade. Where does all that sheer mass go? And where do we get all that sheer mass? Regardless of where it goes, this doesn't strike me as a particularly sustainable way to go about things. The suburbs probably aren't much better in this department, but this is an issue that a good urban planner should have on her radar.

It's a minor quibble, really. I'll be back to the regularly scheduled praising of all things urban by tomorrow, most likely. And the Stewart Brand talk is just packed with great stuff; more on that surely to come as well.

Greenwashing at GE.

While we are on the MSM watch (which I just learned stands for "mainstream media"), in Sunday's New York Times, Ned Sullivan and Rich Schiafo of Scenic Hudson accuse GE of "dragging its feet" on the cleanup of the PCBs that it has dumped in the Hudson River. This is the same GE that recently started its "Ecomagination" campaign, giving Sullivan and Schiafo this powerful one-liner:

Only after G.E. uses its ecomagination to rid the nation's waterways of its contamination will these words ring true. Until then, its green campaign is nothing more than an eco smoke screen.