An enthusiastic conservation effort, coupled with a wide variety of alternative sources of energy, will soften the blow of peak oil, but it might be too little too late. And it’s incredibly difficult to get people to actually do something serious about conserving energy (see Janisse Ray’s “Altar Call for True Believers [1]” at Orion Magazine [2]). In my experience, most people don’t give a damn about our long-term energy situation, not even many of the people who preach that hard times might be right around the corner.
Many Americans refuse to consider serious conservation. It feels like surrender to them. It’s wimpy and shameful. I understand this emotion, but if we want to keep using wasteful amounts of energy, we’ll have to find it somewhere. Many people suggest coal. Coal is dirty and dangerously toxic [3], in addition to being a fossil fuel that drives global warning. We have limited options for generating levels of energy that we’re currently generating.
What other energy source exists in ample supply? Did someone say “nuclear power”? We’re seeing more and more people look to nuclear because there is really no where else to go (given that we’re not willing to wean ourselves of the extravagant use of energy).
Here are two viewpoints on the nuclear issue. The first is from Rebecca Solnit’s article in Orion Magazine [4], entitled “Reasons Not to Glow.” [5]
[E]very stage of the nuclear fuel cycle is murderously filthy, imparting long-lasting contamination on an epic scale; that a certain degree of radioactive pollution is standard at each of these stages, but the accidents are now so many in number that they have to be factored in as part of the environmental cost; that the plants themselves generate lots of radioactive waste, which we still don’t know what to do with—because the stuff is deadly . . . anywhere . . . and almost forever.
Solnit was reacting to a position now held by James Lovelock [6], the former anti-nuclear power advocate. Lovelock’s conversion (and the conversions of other prominent environmentalists) is reported by Gwyneth Cravens, published in Discover Magazine [7], in an article entitled, “Is Nuclear Energy our Best Hope?” [8] Here’s an excerpt:
Lovelock explained that his decision to endorse nuclear power was motivated by his fear of the consequences of global warming and by reports of increasing fossil-fuel emissions [9] that drive the warming. Jesse Ausubel, head of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, recently echoed Lovelock’s sentiment. “As a green, I care intensely about land-sparing, about leaving land for nature,” he wrote. “To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy such as wind [10], water, and biomass [11] cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors.” All of this has led several [12] other prominent environmentalists [13] to publicly favor new nuclear plants.
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