Climate change Archives - Atomic Insights

Replace price of carbon with price on carbon

Rod Adams · May 22, 2013 · 22 Comments

While browsing AdWeek, I came across a video titled The Price of Carbon and thought it would be worth sharing as a conversation starter. It’s a pretty concise way to encourage the continuation of a complex discussion about a topic with immediate and long term impact on human existence on Earth.

Instead of charging polluters a fee for dumping their carbon dioxide into our shared atmosphere, we are all paying the cost of the consequences of putting attempting to store about 30 tons per year in our air. I’m willing to pay my share and work to reduce our collective contribution to the pollution. Are you?

Update: (Posted at 3:44 on May 23, 2013) After receiving several comments, I realized that I did not clearly state my recommended means of both paying my share and working to reduce our collective contribution to the pollution. I believe that Jim Hansen’s fee and dividend approach makes a world of sense and can be packaged into a politically palatable product.

I also was hoping that Atomic Insights readers would “get” that I am certain that rapidly expanding nuclear energy will increase human access to affordable, reliable energy — and energy use is what gives us the ability to do valuable work and live abundant, fulfilling lives — while at the same time dramatically slow human greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, nuclear fission does not just reduce CO2 when it replaces hydrocarbon combustion, it also eliminates NOx, SOx, fine particulates, trace toxins, and mercury. End Update.

BTW, for those who want to argue by claiming that CO2 is a plant fertilizer and a natural product, consider the fact that feces can make exactly the same claim.

Green Nuclear Junk – reposted from DecarboniseSA

Rod Adams · May 22, 2013 · 5 Comments

Ben Heard and Geoff Russell collaborated on a post for DecarboniseSA titled Green Nuclear Junk that takes careful aim at an antinuclear meme that is mostly based on a series of false assumptions that include a table of mortality figures made incorrect by dividing by 8.76 instead of multiplying by that same number. With Ben’s [...]

Dieter Helm – Nuclear saga cannot go on (Leaders must push to a happy ending)

Rod Adams · March 27, 2013 · 47 Comments

Dieter Helm has generously shared an April 2013 article written for Prospect Magazine titled Stumbling towards crisis. In that article Helm points to US energy decision making as a good example that serves as a contrast to UK energy policy making. He sees chosen path in the UK as almost guaranteeing a crisis. In his [...]

Switch II Fission, the Sequel

Rod Adams · March 20, 2013 · 6 Comments

Last night I drove to Lexington, VA where the sustainability program was hosting a screening of Switch (to a smarter future). There was a decent crowd; perhaps 100 or more students, faculty and townspeople. It is an impressive documentary, with inside views of facilities that people rarely see. It also does a good job of [...]

Nuclear energy fights climate change and energy poverty at same time

Rod Adams · March 14, 2013 · 12 Comments

The Washington Post Wonkblog recently published an article with the following headline Can the world fight climate change and energy poverty at the same time? There is a straightforward answer to that question that involves some hard work and some paradigm busting, but at least it is a path that offers a good chance of [...]

Is Bill McKibben really serious about climate change?

Rod Adams · March 8, 2013 · 37 Comments

Andy Revkin recently published a post on his Dot Earth blog titled A Communications Scholar Analyzes Bill McKibben’s Path on Climate. In one of the videos that is embedded in the article, Matthew Nisbet describes Bill McKibben as a public intellectual and compares his activism on climate to that of Rachel Carson on the effects [...]

New York Times says positive things about new nuclear energy

Rod Adams · March 6, 2013 · 22 Comments

I’ll admit that I am actively searching for good news about nuclear energy to counter the conventional wisdom that we are losing the market battle to cheap natural gas. I found an interesting take on recent Cabinet appointments in a New York Times editorial titled Two Enlistees in the Climate Wars. Though it appears as [...]

Ondi Timoner interviews Robert Stone about Pandora’s Promise

Rod Adams · February 10, 2013 · 6 Comments

Ondi Timoner, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker in her own right, recently interviewed the directors of four documentaries that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013. All of the interviews are worth watching, but I was especially taken with her chat with Robert Stone about Pandora’s Promise. That segment starts at minute 27:11. You should [...]

Mr. President – Ike would recommend the nuclear option for energy policy

Rod Adams · January 23, 2013 · 37 Comments

Dear President Obama: I was heartened to hear that you have put fighting climate change near the top of your “to do” list during your second term. It is time for you to dig through your memory banks, your pile of correspondence and the lessons you are learning by studying Eisenhower’s presidency to realize that [...]

Do the math – Secure fissile materials inside reactor cores

Rod Adams · January 18, 2013 · 55 Comments

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just published an open letter to President Obama that offers opinions on how to solve various pressing problems. I’d like to riff on that letter and suggest that we should be pursuing ways to use one problem to solve another one. According to the BAS, there is a [...]

Kerry Emanuel – Puzzling Commentary on Climate Change and Nuclear Energy

Rod Adams · January 15, 2013 · 60 Comments

Dr. Kerry Emanuel, Professor of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science at MIT recently published a short, accessible book titled What We Know About Climate Change. It provides a good summary of the state of our knowledge about the issue, but the final two chapters of the book illustrate a [...]

Dieter Helm – Coal Critic, Atomic Agnostic, Natural Gas Enthusiast

Rod Adams · December 30, 2012 · 6 Comments

Dieter Helm’s The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong–and How to Fix It has the potential to be an influential energy policy book, not just for the UK but for the rest of Europe and the United States. Helm has been making the rounds to promote the book and recently gave a concise [...]