Against my better judgement,
but.....
What non-subsidized energy sources are you suggesting everyone use?
Right now? It's actually hard to say without more detailed and current knowledge of the industry than I'm willing to put in the effort to gather. In conventional fuels natural gas seems like a pretty clear winner if it's something they'd otherwise just be burning off as part of other drilling operations, but there are a lot of externalities related to fracking that aren't really accounted for right now. In fact, some of the same reasoning that applies to climate change applies to fracking for natural gas - can I say that
this earthquake was caused by fracking? No. Can I say that a
remarkable rise in earthquakes in high-fracking areas like Oklahoma is probably fracking-related? Yes (note: that site is from the highly liberal Oklahoma state government, widely known to be a haven for tree-huggers). What would be the cost of natural gas from Oklahoma if the producers were required to have insurance to cover earthquake damage? Except that it's impossible to trace a specific earthquake back to a specific well or series of wells.
In renewables I can't really answer because efficiencies have been changing so fast, particularly in solar. A lot of the most current "official" numbers seem to be 3-5 years behind, and I'm pretty sure a lot of the subsidies that were in place back then have also expired. Also, cost of production is only half the story since there also needs to be energy storage, although there's a huge amount of stuff that falls into the "energy storage" category (including gasoline, etc.) - it's all just about getting energy to the place where you need it.
I have no specific objections to thorium-based nuclear power at this point, but I reserve the right to look into it further if someone ever comes up with a way to make it practical. If we base predictions of cost on past nuclear builds, the money would probably be much better spent on options for energy storage to address the variability of wind and solar and on options for efficient distribution from high-production areas to lower-production areas.
We build conventional nukes because they are better suited to creating nuclear bombs. Thorium/MSRs are much less than ideal for this purpose.
Unlikely. The US hasn't been manufacturing new nukes since Bill Clinton was in office or possibly earlier, or at least they haven't been producing new nuclear material. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the nuclear material removed from older warheads, etc. was being reprocessed into replacement warheads, but that's a different thing and honestly I'm not sure what else they can really do with it.
I am really surprised you suggest such a thing, I am ok with it, but that makes you all alone on your side of the fencepost. That means there is no emergency, we can just stay on fossil fuels till something better comes along. Glad to hear we agree.
whoosh
[...]We seem content to let Asian countries take the lead to become the intellectual/economic rulers of the future.[...]
Not buying it, this whole paragraph should just have been left out. Still, if China appears to be taking a lead on trying to cut back on fossil fuels, perhaps that's related to
more air-pollution related deaths there every day than were killed on 9/11.
No, the planet is greening quickly. It is not taking geological timescales. It is already happening in mere decades. [...] The greening was not only NOT predicted by the alarmists, It was flat out denied it would happen. We were supposed to be a hot burning ball of fire already and the heat was supposed to prevent the greening from ever getting established. This is now known to be wrong. It doesn't take much on a planetary scale for the additional carbon sinks to start offsetting what we burn. About 3% additional carbon sinks or so from my understanding.
You say this as if it's really relevant. I don't know how much "greening" is happening and I'm not really that concerned about it except as an interesting data point. I do know that whatever the amount of increased plant growth it's clearly not keeping up with the rate at which we're pumping CO2 (and other greenhouse gases and particulates) into the atmosphere. If this was as simple to fix as planting a bunch of trees (e.g.
Pakistan's billion trees) there are huge numbers of environmentalists who'd be incredibly thrilled.
If there is really such an emergency, and such a dire situation, why wouldn't you want all possible avenues pursued with the greatest urgency? Why would any promising solutions be bypassed and put on the back burner? Or is there other motives at play?
Is this about thorium again? If so, knock yourself out. I have no real objections to at least exploring it except where it's presented as a panacea that in a few decades (when we're even more screwed and it's too late to do anything else) will fix everything (except that at that point it'll need to be not only a better option but so much better that it can reverse additional decades of damage).
