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Messiahtosh
Apple Historian
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2006-07-08, 01:27

I saw the movie tonight and I have to heavily recommend it. Now I know there is still controversy over the issue of global warming, even in the scientific community - but this movie makes one thing very clear: no matter the controversy, we may as well move towards a solution as fast as we can...even if it's a solution to a problem that won't see a doomsday scenario for a long time, we'd be better off erring on the side of caution rather than tampering with catastrophe that WILL happen at some point.

That's the scary thing to me: that the only issue is not whether global warming is real, it's that we don't know the precise time of when catastrophe will occur because of it. It could be 40-50 years, or maybe 150 years until a major problem happens, so why not do whatever it takes to solve the major pollution issues within 20-25? My hope is that we can give ourselves a buffer while not lagging on the issue, but also find a way to keep the economy from faltering during the multi-industry transition period that would be inevitable.

Whether or not you like Al Gore is not the issue. He's just the messenger. Hey may or may not be doing it for more than his own passion on the subject, but that's still all trivial.

I just think of it this way: what better thing could we do, as a developed nation/civilization than put an end to our climate-altering pollution/ways of life?

Since disaster is not an 'if' but a 'when' then we may as well get our asses moving.

Oh yeah, and the movie is pretty good just as a movie too. The use of Gore's PowerBook and Keynote are prominent for MUCH of the movie. Very cool to see that the movie is basically a giant SteveNote...err..GoreNote.

"We are reviewing some 9,000 recent UNHCR referrals from Syria. We are receiving roughly a thousand new ones each month, and we expect admissions from Syria to surge in 2015 and beyond." - Anne C. Richard, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration
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Kickaha
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Join Date: May 2004
 
2006-07-08, 01:42

Err...

Look, I'm not going to debate the reality or not of global warming, or the reality or not of our effect on it, but to say that even if it isn't real we need to work to stop it is a bit daft in my book...

Just saying. (As a recycling, gas-saving, water-conserving, electricity-miser, pollution-anxious, organic-food-consuming, neohippie, I'm *STILL* saying.)

Reminds me of the South Park episode on global warming. Sheer genius.

If you believe it is real, and that we have the means to stop it because we're the cause, then by all means, work to reverse it. If you don't, then don't. Simple as that. Don't let fear guide your actions, think it through, decide what you believe based on rationality and facts, and act on it.

I'm not 100% convinced that we can do anything at this point, to be honest. Chaotic systems such as weather are nasty beasts. I just hope to hell nobody gets a bright idea to try and actively reverse it at some point. Minimize our impact, and hope for the best, that's all you can reasonably do.

Now if they'd only bothered to get the modeling behind Kyoto to be plausible, this wouldn't even be an issue... working with a bunch of climatologists during the heyday of that was interesting. The advisory group behind the Kyoto protocols took two competing prediction models - and cherry-picked features of each. One predicted hot and dry, the other cold and wet. Somehow they predicted hot and wet as their final assessment. Only one problem - these were interconnected systems of differential equations - you can't *do* that and have it mean anything. None of the climatologists I worked with were willing to support the science, even though they all wanted the US to sign. Bitch of a problem - by fudging the science, Kyoto gave an opening for the naysayers to latch onto. If they'd stuck to models that were scientifically reasonable, they wouldn't have given the opposition a foothold, but they were more concerned about producing the Ultimate Fear Scenario... *shakes head*

Sad.

Now if you'll excuse me, another tall gin and tonic is calling my name.

Last edited by Kickaha : 2006-07-08 at 01:48.
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Quagmire
meh
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2006-07-08, 01:50

IMHO, Global Warming is a part of the normal Earth climate cycle. Has happened ever since Earth has existed. BUT! Humans have in no doubt effected this cycle. Speeding it up or upsetting the cycle where is will do some big damage, is what we don't know. We also don't know how much of an effect the humans have made to it. Yes, we should go on the path of caution and do something about it now. What will help big time is total Fossil Fuel independence( no oil, coal, etc) and move on to something like BioDiesel, Hydrogen( the ideal fuel), and Ethanol for cars. Have wind, solar, water power create electricity to power our homes and businesses. Create less power hungry things. I will sure Netflix the movie when it comes out on DVD.

giggity
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Wrao
Yarp
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Road Warrior
 
2006-07-08, 02:36

I dunno... I kinda want to see a catastrophic end of the world(read: human race). It'd certainly be a boffo way to go.

although, that directly contradicts my desire to have children.

Sigh... life is so difficult with these choices we make.
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Dorian Gray
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Paris, France
 
2006-07-08, 06:50

I think this movie is a terrible idea, as it propagates the bizarre notion currently prevalent in the US that only left-voting hippies care about the environment. Every time the flag-wavers see a film like this they become more entrenched in their stubbornness. It's getting to the point that some people think it's patriotic to drive a 4x4 and not give a damn about the environment. That's a terrible state of affairs!

The Royal Society (incidentally, the oldest learned society still in existence, formed in the 1600s) has an excellent short guide on understanding global warming. You can download the PDF on this page. It explains the position of scientists, and mentions that US oil-funded efforts are among the largest of the anti-Kyoto brigade (the Kyoto Protocol seeks to tackle global warming by reducing greenhouse emissions).

By the way, people who argue against the Kyoto Protocol remind me of people who refuse to give money to homeless people on the street by saying "they have places to go, so I'm not going to help them continue their homeless existence", while of course giving sweet FA to the charities who are supposed to deal with homelessness. The truth is exposed: arguing against Kyoto is an excuse to do nothing at all, just as the homeless reasoning is an excuse to give nothing at all.
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Kickaha
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2006-07-08, 06:55

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dorian Gray
By the way, people who argue against the Kyoto Protocol remind me of people who refuse to give money to homeless people on the street by saying "they have places to go, so I'm not going to help them continue their homeless existence", while of course giving sweet FA to the charities who are supposed to deal with homelessness. The truth is exposed: arguing against Kyoto is an excuse to do nothing at all, just as the homeless reasoning is an excuse to give nothing at all.
The problem is, by using shoddy science, they opened themselves up to the argument by those who were looking for an excuse. If they had chosen either of the models, or simply said "We don't know which one of these is more likely, but jesus, *look* at them, either one sucks!" that would have been honest. Instead, they moved out of the realm of science and into fear-tactic politics, and ended up shooting themselves (and everyone else) in the foot by providing the opponents with a wedge. Idiots. The science they finally presented as the rationale *was* crap, even if the climatological research otherwise is pretty solid. They got to within sight of the goal, then flubbed it.
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Dorian Gray
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2006-07-08, 07:22

But surely one person's "shoddy science" is the scientist-responsible's firmly held belief? I read enough to know that among climatologists worldwide there is a lot of debate about the precise mechanisms responsible for global warming, but the significant majority of these scientists agree that humans have caused major climate change. I'll take the liberty of quoting directly from the aforementioned PDF:

In the journal Science in 2004, Oreskes published the results of a survey of 928 papers on climate change published in peer-reviewed journals between 1993 and 2003. She found that three-quarters of the papers either explicitly or implicitly accepted the view expressed in the IPCC 2001 report that human activities have had a major impact on climate change in the last 50 years, and none rejected it. [Random bold highlighting by yours truly.]

In today's climate (har-dee-har) everyone's an expert, and this is the real problem. Just as it is senseless to ask a non-lawyer's opinion on Hammersmith & Fulham LBC v Monk (1992), it is senseless to ask the opinion of a non-climatologist on the IPCC. Therefore I am left with little choice but to accept climatologists' beliefs, and it would be arrogant in the extreme for me to say, "IMHO, Global Warming is a part of the normal Earth climate cycle" (to quote the unfortunate Quagmire).

It's time to have some basic respect for people who spend their working lives trying to understand something.
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Kickaha
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Join Date: May 2004
 
2006-07-08, 07:31

Um, Dorian, stop for a minute and please read what I wrote instead of skimming it and jumping to conclusions about what I meant.

I am not arguing that global warming does not exist.

I am not arguing that we are not likely to be a major cause.

I am not saying that none of the science out there reporting on it is good.

I am saying that, according to the climatologists that I worked with back when Kyoto was being drafted, and my own understanding of chaotic systems, and interdependent simulation systems from my math degree and years of simulation research, specifically the results presented in the Kyoto treaty as the likely outcome are bogus. That is all. Not the cause, not the reported effects, but the most likely long-term outcome. Not even any other research. Just Kyoto. Just the long-term outcome.

Does it mean it shouldn't be signed? Of course not.

But it left critics a freaking barndoor open to drive opposition through, when they didn't need to screw up like that. They had good science, and they chose to fuck it up at the last minute in the name of creating something that would look more urgent. They needed a solid wall of rationality, and the left cracks in it to play the politics game when it wasn't necessary. Those cracks were just stupid, and we've been paying the price for them ever since.

Like I said, they had two equally dire outcomes to choose from, and for some reason decided to muddle them into a scarier sounding one that *wasn't* predicted, and isn't based on any rational foundation.

This was the opinion of several well-respected individuals who *have* spent their lives researching exactly this area, and who I had the pleasure of working with.

Last edited by Kickaha : 2006-07-08 at 07:43.
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Moogs
Hates the Infotainment
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: NSA Archives
 
2006-07-08, 09:35

"All I need is a killer buzz, some tasty waves, and I'm fine." Only question is whether I'll be surfing over the continental shelf or Kansas.
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Messiahtosh
Apple Historian
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2006-07-08, 10:06

My point is not that you do something based on a "maybe" but since we do contribute to high emissions, why not try to cut them as much as is possible or reasonable in our lives.

"We are reviewing some 9,000 recent UNHCR referrals from Syria. We are receiving roughly a thousand new ones each month, and we expect admissions from Syria to surge in 2015 and beyond." - Anne C. Richard, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration
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Dorian Gray
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Paris, France
 
2006-07-08, 10:20

I agree, Messiahtosh. I don't really need threats of imminent destruction to reduce my ecofootprint. My love of efficiency is sufficient to make that desirable. I frown on conspicuous waste in general, and I hope we all do!
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Kickaha
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Join Date: May 2004
 
2006-07-08, 11:06

Agreed. I'm too much of a geek to look favorably on waste of pretty much any sort.

"Oh come on, you could save another *2%*!"
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Mr Beardsley
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2006-07-10, 16:46

Quote:
Whether or not you like Al Gore is not the issue. He's just the messenger. Hey may or may not be doing it for more than his own passion on the subject, but that's still all trivial.

I just think of it this way: what better thing could we do, as a developed nation/civilization than put an end to our climate-altering pollution/ways of life?
Give me cheap nuclear produced electricity!

Make it cheaper to heat my home with electricity (possibly with a heat pump of sorts) than with coal power. Unlike electric/fuel cell cars, the technology is there, and totally viable. Fear of nuclear technology is the only thing holding it back.

Here is an interesting quote from Henry Ford reguarding civilization and power.

Quote:
The location of a new plant is largely determined by the cost of its power and the price at which it may make and ship goods to a given territory… Our civilization— such as it is— rests on cheap and convenient power. … The source of material civilization is developed power.

"Slow vehicle speeds with frequent stops would signal traffic congestion, for instance."

uh... it could also signal that my Mom is at the wheel...

Last edited by Mr Beardsley : 2006-07-10 at 18:17.
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Dave
Ninja Editor
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Bay Area, CA
 
2006-07-10, 17:35

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Beardsley
Give me cheap nuclear produced electricity!
I agree. US nuclear power plants are *very* safe.
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Dorian Gray
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Paris, France
 
2006-07-10, 19:41

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Beardsley
Give me cheap nuclear produced electricity!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave
I agree. US nuclear power plants are *very* safe.
"Safe" and "cheap" have not gone together in the history of nuclear power. Forty years ago nuclear energy was seen as the future, but governments are now very cautious about allowing new plants to be built because of the huge costs and public backlash. In fact, since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania, no new nuclear power plants have been constructed in the USA.

The International Energy Agency forecasts a 5-10% decline in worldwide nuclear energy market-share by 2025, as countries such as Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden phase out nuclear power. Of course, many countries are building new nuclear power-plants, including Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, India, Iran, Japan, North Korea, Romania, Russia and Taiwan, so nuclear will continue to be a large source of energy worldwide for a long time to come. For example, France gets fully 80% of its energy from nuclear power (from 60 nuclear power-plants) and has no plans to cut back.

But for half a century nuclear power has been too expensive to become our dominant source of energy. Perhaps increasing oil prices will finally make nuclear power very attractive from an economic standpoint, but political opposition to nuclear power-plants is higher than at any point in the past.

PS. Quoting Henry Ford on civilisation (or anything other than mass production) is a bit rich. He was a complete asshole in every way, certainly not qualified to pontificate on civilisation, and additionally made his comments in a bygone era when we didn't know the dangers of excessive energy consumption.
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shatteringglass
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
 
2006-07-10, 21:01

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave
I agree. US nuclear power plants are *very* safe.
May be so (though I've also heard arguments to the contrary), but there comes a time when those rods are unable to generate electricity, and we have to store them somewhere. That's the big problem.

Keeping nuclear waste onsite near the plant is dangerous. (I'm thinking of all those doomsday terrorist senarios. *Shudders*) But you could also argue that Yucca Mountain will be operational in the future. Well, we would have to transport it. And there's a LOT of nuclear waste to transport on the nation's highways and railways. And that's potentially very dangerous.

To produce more nuclear waste would be making an already-dangerous situation even more dangerous. Also, nuclear energy is being phased out in the more forward-looking nations. Like Dorian said, in the U.S. and many other countries, no new plants are being built, and many more countries are decommissioning their plants. It's clearly not the future like everyone believed 50 years ago.

Furthermore, nuclear energy is very inefficient, even compared to coal. By the time the power reaches your house from the nuclear plant, much of the original potential energy has been wasted during production and transmission.

Last edited by shatteringglass : 2006-07-10 at 21:13.
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beardedmacuser
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: eastmidlandshire
 
2006-07-11, 03:37

I see no problem with the disposal of nuclear waste. Following Chernobyl the "exclusion zone" around the plant has been reclaimed by nature and is essentially a huge protected man-free nature reserve which is beginning to teem with biodiversity.

Therefore in order to protect valuable areas around the world we simply need to dump our radioactive waste there. Load-up all of the US nuclear waste into old B52s and crash them into the Amazon or Indonesian rain forests or anywhere else that needs protection from people. Two problems solved with one easy strategy.
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chucker
 
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2006-07-11, 03:52

Quote:
Originally Posted by beardedmacuser
I see no problem with the disposal of nuclear waste. Following Chernobyl the "exclusion zone" around the plant has been reclaimed by nature and is essentially a huge protected man-free nature reserve which is beginning to teem with biodiversity.

Therefore in order to protect valuable areas around the world we simply need to dump our radioactive waste there. Load-up all of the US nuclear waste into old B52s and crash them into the Amazon or Indonesian rain forests or anywhere else that needs protection from people. Two problems solved with one easy strategy.
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Dave
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2006-07-11, 13:45

Quote:
Originally Posted by shatteringglass
Furthermore, nuclear energy is very inefficient, even compared to coal. By the time the power reaches your house from the nuclear plant, much of the original potential energy has been wasted during production and transmission.
You'll waste energy in transmission with any power source. How do you figure that coal is more efficient than nuclear? Even if it is, coal puts out astounding amounts of CO2.
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Kickaha
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2006-07-11, 15:38

Yeah, Dave's quite correct - how do you figure that nuclear is any *worse* than other sources?

Nuclear power could be *greatly* improved with the introduction of fast breeder reactors and waste vitrification. Reduces the hot lifetime of the waste 10-fold, and makes it solid. Long term storage at that point becomes a hell of a lot simpler, and more options open up.

Personally, I'd much rather have known, centralized quantities of toxic byproducts than the current situation where everyone is spewing a little bit here, a little bit there, and no one can contain it.
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shatteringglass
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Join Date: Aug 2004
 
2006-07-11, 17:04

I never said that because nuclear power is dangerous, we should keep using coal. (I only used coal as an example for comparison.) That would be stupid. Nor did I say that nuclear power was a worse alternative compared to the current ones, because they all have disadvantages. I am saying that it won't offer the type of benefits that people are trying to find in an alternative energy source, and that it's a bad place to look.

Also, I don't have a problem with a centralized location for the storage of toxic radioactive materials, like Yucca Mountain. I am worried, however, about the transport of such materials. There is a lot of nuclear waste to move, and it will take years to move it, and that's with daily shipments of waste from across the country. I figure trying to move waste from, say, Maine all the way to Yucca Mountain would be a nightmare. To create even more nuclear waste would just be foolhardy.

It is true that no matter how you produce energy, there will be some loss during transmission. I remember my environmental economics and geology classes doing a thorough evaluation of the efficiency of the different types alternative energy sources, and nuclear power was pretty low on the list. Now, if only I can find my notes...
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Kickaha
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2006-07-11, 17:54

I'd love to compare your notes with mine from a similar set of courses in physics. Nuclear was actually quite high on the list of viable options once TCP (total cost of production) was taken into account. For solar, this means producing the solar cells, etc. The study also took into account things such as meteorological impacts from solar farms (I wouldn't have thought of it, but it was a highly interesting substudy), land use losses, costs of localized toxic spill risks, and so on. It was *amazingly* interesting, and only hammered home that even the most 'eco-friendly' power sources have their drawbacks.
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shatteringglass
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2006-07-11, 19:34

That's really interesting. I kind of wish I took more classes that attacked this issue from other fields' point of view.

If only I could remember the specifics from the economic courses I took last fall. What a difference half a year makes, huh? I really should know, seeing how I have a Economics degree.

I have a feeling that the efficiency and effectiveness of each solution depends largely on which discipline you look at it from. The net benefits of each option from an economist's point of view could differ significantly from that of a physicist. The class I took, Environmental Economics, attempted to bridge that gap, but I found that it left me with more questions. In that class, we took into account the net benefits of not only production, but also social welfare, too, which is quite a bit more vague.
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Kickaha
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2006-07-11, 19:43

Yeah, we ended up hand waving a bit on that one, using, for instance, a standardized 'X miners per MBTU of extracted energy' across coal, uranium, etc, and then using averaged health costs for miners in those industries, and so on, to estimate costs. Kinda vague, and not precise enough for a bunch of physicists, but still better than most assessments I've seen.

Which is kind of scary, when you realize that this was an undergrad physics course set. Of course, the prof was one of the authors of the Swedish human exposure guidelines, so he wasn't a creampuff, but still.
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Dorian Gray
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2006-07-11, 20:14

Since this thread was posted by Messiahtosh, the nuclear debate has been thrown back into the public sphere by Tony Blair's assertion (during the annual dinner of the Confederation of British Industry) that the issue was "back on the agenda with a vengeance". Labour's new catch-phrase is "wishful thinking won't keep the lights burning" or something similarly demagogic. The Liberal Democrats are accusing Labour of surrendering to the nuclear lobby and the Conservatives are saying that nuclear power should be seen as strictly a last resort, but I guess their wishes won't count for very much in the near- to mid-term future. Regardless, there are some good points about the government's proposals, not the least of which is the requirement that the private sector pay for construction and decommission of any new power-plants (the UK government was badly burned with the current generation of nuclear power-plants when costs ballooned dramatically beyond estimates).

I feel the biggest risk in building more nuclear power-plants is thinking that nuclear energy is a silver bullet just because it can go a long way towards solving our emissions problem. Nuclear has so many drawbacks that we should really be researching alternatives. Also, an increase in energy prices would help us develop more energy-efficient homes and transportation, and encourage sensible lifestyle choices, so I wouldn't be particularly against paying more for electricity if green sources are necessarily more expensive. Here in the UK I'd guess fully 75% of our lighting is still sourced from ancient tungsten filament technology, so if everyone (including industry) simply bought light-bulbs instead of heat-bulbs we would reduce our consumption by about a bazillion watts overnight. But people don't care because electricity is so cheap. Damned annoying.
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Kickaha
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2006-07-11, 21:45

In many places in the US, we now have the option of requesting that our electrical bill be applied towards purchasing electricity produced by green(er) means. In Vermont, there's a new program just announced called Cow Power, using methane from cow dung from dairy farms. Cost is about 4 cents extra per kWH, and it's becoming quite popular.

Now here's the kicker - in a lot of areas, the rising petroleum prices have made it so that the green(er) sources are *cheaper* currently than the traditional sorts - but there's only a small amount available. People are noticing however, and starting to gripe to their electrical providers to explain why they can't get more cheap charge. Investors are noticing as well, and starting to pump money into green(er) sources. I love it.

There are no silver bullets, (and no truly 100% green sources) but an intelligent balance of sources that are appropriate for particular regions is necessary. As has been pretty well proven by now, single source dependence is simply unworkable in the long term. Nuclear is, I firmly believe, a workable *piece* of the puzzle. Whether at 5%, or 95%, or anywhere in between, is up to the local needs, but it should fit in there somewhere. It's too good a source to discard completely.

Last edited by Kickaha : 2006-07-11 at 21:56.
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shatteringglass
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2006-07-11, 22:28

It's really nice to see a thoughtful discussion/debate on this issue. I'm seeing the topic from all sorts of differnt angles, and I'm learning. On most other boards around the web, by the 5th post probably, this thread would've dissolved into this flame war of epic proportions.
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Kickaha
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2006-07-11, 22:40

Yeah, we're boring like that.
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