Thorium-based nuclear power?

yikes.

If the chinese get thorium to work and build lots of plants instead of using coal - great, less coal burned, and they take the risks. Nuclear is extremely heavily subsided and can not exist without government insurance and loan help. I would much rather help wind and solar and leave nuclear subsidies to other countries.

We are in one world. If france, china, and india want to take the risks, that is not a reason for us to race them.

 

What about aviation? If a pair of fully loaded A380s pull a repeat of the 747 incident at Tenerife, ...

 

Brains, yes. Principles, no. When times get tough, human nature is always "I'm sorry, but screw the rest of you - my family and I come first." We're not going to let ourselves starve or live in poverty to save the lives & livelihoods of people on the coasts.

 

wow

 

Sorry. I probably should have prefaced that with "Warning: I'm a cynical SOB." But basically, I just try to avoid lamenting problems that are beyond my power to change (people sucking) and focus on fixing problems that I CAN change (technologies and policies that will keep our inherent suckiness from killing everybody).

 

I really don't think its likely that if we spent all our dockets on thorium, people in low lying areas would be safer. Even if the US turned Amish, the rest of the world would burn carbon, and people would still be at risk. So we are presented with this false choice of doing something, that I doubt will work, or these folks and the polar bears will drown.

I'm all in favor of reduce, reuse, recycle, but there needs to be mitigation. Weather related losses on the coast have been going up because property has been going up in at risk areas at a fast rate. We need to kill government insurance to move people into risky areas, and pay people to move out of harms way. That would be much more effective than a tiny cap in tax give away to some special interests or thorium subsidies by us taxpayers. political rant over. And Shame on you heartless Engineer

 

You do realize that those coastal areas include New Orleans, Houston, much of Florida, and New York City? Abandoning them will cost trillions.

 

We're not going to let ourselves live without our large screen televisions and sport utility vehicles, to save the lives & livelihoods of people on the coasts.

Fixed that for you...

 

Dykes and moving. Yep. Don't think need to leave houston or NYC anytime soon. Galviston and parts of NO should not have been rebuilt. This is wheter or not we turn Amish. Galveston is going to have another hurricane hit, its just a mater of time.

 

Much of New Orleans would drown even the complete absence of CC and sea level rise.

 

True, NO is toast in any case. There is still time to prevent the worst catastrophes by moving away from fossil energy, and nuclear will have to be a large part of the solution. I'd rather we didn't have to buy thorium technology from China or Abu Dhabi, but at least someone is developing it...

 

At least in the US, it's only when it becomes a crisis will people act and by then, it could be too late and the dykes, moving and whatever will need to happen. Until then, it seems like there will continue to be staunch doubters of AGW and thus little in the way of real action.

I can barely convince people elsewhere (on other boards) about the connection between driving full-sized monstrosity class SUVs, national security, where most of the oil in the world resides, oil chokepoints, etc. and them being danger to others on the road. I usually instead get bashed by hypocrites (does as I say, even if I'm not doing it myself) for my ways (e.g. I shouldn't be throwing stones because I chose to live somewhere w/lousy public transit and thus have to drive everywhere). Some (most?) of these monstrosity drivers have no clue about the connection.

I almost never bring up AGW on those threads because there are all those doubters and enough threads there on that already. Bringing up indisputable or virtually indisputable facts is easier, but yet still apparently insufficient.

 

perhaps this would help?
http://priuschat.com/forums/environmental-discussion/96723-true-costs-gasoline.html

 

Doesn't really matter. I pointed some of those folks to the true cost video before and mentioned how it doesn't include the cost of military interventions and ongoing operations to secure the oil supply in volatile regions of the world.

Far prior to the above, some people over on another forum mentioned consequences to a monstrosity SUV driver. He had no clue. He said "consequences? Higher gas prices?" He couldn't see beyond that.

 

Studies have shown that people will largely reject data that doesn't fit their world view. They will find a way to rationalize it away (the data must somehow be bad, etc etc etc). So you can't lead an argument with facts because you will make the person defensive and they will lock down and largely ignore you. You have to make a more subtle, emotional argument to lead off and gentle introduce facts as you build your case. There was a very interesting article about this in Newsweek (I think it was) about 5-6 months ago.