Wednesday, October 25, 2006

are we flirting with disaster?

Can we avert catastrophe? Bill McKibben writes about what some people are trying to do to avert catastrophic climate change in an article that will appear in the New York Review of Books November 16.

I don't know whether it's too late or not, but McKibben points to some encouraging trends, such as the increasing productivity of solar panels thanks largely to work (including government subsidies) in energy-poor Japan and Germany that are driving DOWN the prices of increasingly effective solar panels.

That, plus we should build more nuclear power plants. They have killed far fewer people per plant than coal plants have, especially true if James Lovelock's pessimistic projection that the human race will be reduced to 200 million living in the Arctic because of climate change proves correct.

1 Comments:

Blogger James Aach said...

Another prominent environmentalist like Dr. Lovelock who is calling for a second look at nuclear is Stewart Brand, founder of "The whole Earth Catalog".

Stewart has also been kind enough to endorse my novel "Rad Decision". It is an entertaining lay person's guide to the real world of nuclear energy, and is free online at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com.

I've worked in the nuke industry over twenty years and present a thriller describing the people, the politics and the tecnology of atomic energy. It's far different than what you might imagine. Readers seem to like it based on their homepage comments.

I honestly don't know what our energy future holds, but I think we'll make a lot better decisions if we understand our energy present first.

RadDecision.blogspot.com

1:18 PM  

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