A no-nukes argument with no waste

OMFG. This essay from Tom Paine's Patrick C. Doherty just made my day. It's a concise, effective argument against nuclear power that isn't based on nuclear waste.

Don't get me wrong -- nuclear waste is nasty. Nasty and more-or-less permanent. It's a compelling reason to be leery of nuclear power. But I'm not sure it's enough. The argument of the industry, taken up by some prominent enviros recently, is that we need a non-CO2-producing energy source, a big one, now, and nuclear is the large-scale source that's available. If you're convinced that nuclear power is viable, that it's a large untapped source of non-polluting energy, the problem of what to do with waste isn't all that compelling. Many people's intuitive reaction is: We're smart. We'll figure something out.

So Doherty doesn't even mention waste. He has two parallel arguments.

Karen Hundt, Chattanooga urban planner, answers questions

Karen Hundt. What work do you do? I am the director of the Planning & Design Studio in Chattanooga, Tenn....

Emily Gertz sends dispatches from Verdopolis, a confab on future green cities

Emily Gertz is a regular contributor to WorldChanging.com, and an internet content and strategy consultant for nonprofits. She has written...

Shrinkage

A couple weeks ago, Chip worried about worries about shrinking populations. Specifically, he worried that countries with shrinking populations -- or in China's case, shrinking proportions of males to females -- will try to stimulate procreation (hey, get your mind out of the gutter), which makes an enviro's spidey-sense tingle. He wished that someone would make the argument that a declining population is not necessarily a bad thing, economically speaking. Today in the Christian Science Monitor, David R. Francis gives it a brief shot.

Some random thoughts on population below the break.

Gene Hackmen

Open-source biotechnology boasts first big success Though some enviros are opposed to genetic engineering of any kind, other critics have...

Enviros join chorus against class-action bill, but measure still likely to pass

Will class-action plaintiffs still get their day in court? The Erin Brockoviches of America could have a much tougher time...

Jared Diamond’s Collapse traces the fates of societies to their treatment of the environment

I will always think of Jared Diamond as the man who, for the better part of the late 1990s, somehow made the phrase "east-west axis of orientation" the most talked-about kind of orientation there was -- freshman, sexual, or otherwise. His 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies began with a simple question -- "Why did Pizarro conquer the Incas and not the other way around?" -- and then managed to tell, over the course of only 400-odd pages, the history of why humanity has turned out the way it has. For most readers (and there were millions), Guns was their first exposure to theories of geographic determinism. To broadly simplify, Diamond's book posited that human populations on continents with a primarily east-west orientation benefited from a more consistent climate and therefore developed more quickly than those living on continents with a north-south orientation. It had the kind of paradigm-shifting impact that happens with a book only once every few years, and it turned Diamond -- a professor of geography at UCLA -- into something of a rock star.

They’ll be back

At a U.N. conference in Bangkok this week, nations and NGOs are debating the merits of the Terminator. No, not the esteemed governor; the controversial biotechnology developed by the USDA and the agricultural industry in the late '90s that can make plants produce sterile seeds. As a result, farmers would be forced to buy seeds anew each year. They'd benefit from hardier crops and higher yields, proclaim the corporate giants; growers and their advocates -- especially in poorer countries -- beg to differ.

The U.N. has placed a moratorium on the Terminator, and governments in Asia and Africa have called for an outright ban. But Canada is making a splash this week by recommending case-by-case assessments instead. "The Canadian government is doing the dirty work of the multinational gene giants and the U.S. government," says a concerned Canadian foundation.

Follow the latest developments -- or just check out the scintillating action shots. Hey, Greenpeace: If you're not gonna wear a tie, could you at least button up?

Doomed to repeat the past?

Did the dinosaurs die out because of global warming? Well, sort of.

In an op-ed in Sunday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Peter Ward, a University of Washington professor of biology and earth and space sciences, takes a look at climate change through the unlikely lens of paleontology. Ward points out that prehistoric volcanic eruptions released enough carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere to radically alter the planet's climate, resulting in serious ecosystem disturbances and extinctions.