This short piece from Harvey Wasserman gets pretty much everything right — and by "right" I mean, "in agreement with me." My only quibble is that he spends too much time bashing nukes, and bashing them for the wrong reasons (wrong effective-messaging-wise, not necessarily substance-wise). I’d prefer he bash them because they’re more expensive and less flexible than R&E, not for the well-hashed-over waste issue. But that’s a quibble.
Here’s the heart of the matter:
What’s not being said is that the solution to the problem—the necessary transition to Solartopia, a world based on renewable energy—is also the key to the future of our economic well-being, and would be whether global warming was a problem or not.
In short: even without the dire disaster of climate change, a transitioning to green power is the only hope our global economy has for future prosperity.
Indeed, moving to an industrial system that runs on wind, solar, bio-fuels and other renewable sources, along with increased efficiency, including a revival of mass transit, can and will do for the global economy in the next 25 years what the computer/internet revolution has done for the last.
What’s also clear is that there is absolutely no room in this future for fossil fuels or nuclear power. But King CONG (coal, oil, nukes and gas) is not going to give up without a ferocious fight.
Yup.
(OK, one more quibble: doesn’t “Solartopia” build “starry eyed unrealistic fantasy” into the name? Perhaps he should rethink that.)
