The 'C'-bomb of politics!

[elfs]

Two days ago, George W. Bush went on national television to implore Congress to open up more US territory to drilling interests, claiming that that would help lower gas prices. As has been pointed out, increased drilling will only immanentize the day when we have to find some other way of manufacturing plastics because we've burned all our hydrocarbons in our gas tanks and won't save you and I a whole lot of money in the process.

Yesterday, John McCain unveiled part of his plan to put a nuclear power plant in every state in the union. The Cato institute wonderfully calls this the Sim City Energy Plan, although I think Mr. Taylor fails to account for the regulatory burden placed on nuclear power since Three Mile Island. The regulations don't account for modern reactor designs like the pebble bed reactor, and create significantly highter costs.

But neither Bush nor McCain used the one word that would really have made a difference: conservation. What happened to it? Why don't the candidates talk about higher CAFE standards, or better public transit, or more appropriate virtual office requirements?

Virtual offices and replacing your lightbulbs with flourescents aren't exactly goverment initiatives (at least, they ought not to be). But our President can lead the way, by example and by exhortation. Our candidates can encourage those of us who haven't figured out what we can do to reduce our gas and electricity usage. But nobody's talking about conservation yet. (Well, okay, FOX News is, but only to remind us that smaller cars kill so you should keep driving your gas-guzzling SUV!)

Why aren't politicans talking about conservation yet?

Comments

[tagryn]

Agreed. I think there's a visceral NIMBY reaction against nuclear on the part of many environmentalists, and I regard it as something of a touchstone for how serious they are about global warming: if they absolutely rule out nuclear, it tells me where their priorities are vis-a-vis global warming.

France has an remarkable nuclear program that could be a model for other developed countries. The trick is always what to do with the waste; the Yucca Mountain plan might be the best of poor options.

For the USA, I think the short-term answer lies in some mixture of nuclear and coal (the latter simply because the USA has so much of it) while waiting for further breakthroughs in solar to make it truly affordable/competitive with other sources.

I'd be OK with more drilling if I thought it would make a genuine difference, but I think the current price spike is being driven largely by speculation and lack of refinery capacity (plus increasing demand in China and India) rather than a lack of oil per se.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

For the USA, I think the short-term answer lies in some mixture of nuclear and coal (the latter simply because the USA has so much of it) while waiting for further breakthroughs in solar to make it truly affordable/competitive with other sources.

Ground-based solar will never be anything more than an auxiliary power generation system, owing to the existence of objects blocking or screening out energy from the Sun (the biggest of which is the Earth itself). Space-based solar, on the other hand, might one day be our civilization's primary power generation system.