Nuclear power and climate targets

How about outlawing those huge electric billboards that are horrible enough they should be banned even if they were environmentally benign? Advertisers lived without them for hundreds of years. Same goes for any power draining items that don’t serve a useful purpose.

a hundred little things like this would begin to add up.

It’s true that wind and solar, which could go a long way to helping with climate change, are technologically driven. But their ‘engines’ are not–wind and sun. I missed the point of my own rant–namely, that people want an end to global warming but refuse to change their own behavior in order to achieve that. We only want solutions that don’t cost anything in terms of jobs, inconvenience etc. Sorry, lame observation.

“Sorry, lame observation.”

No, good conversation : )

“We only want solutions that don’t cost anything in terms of jobs, inconvenience etc”

You’re absolutely right about the situation Jeffrey.  Problem is, when we go down the “ban this” and “outlaw that” road, those are real industries with real jobs that effect real people.  Perhaps we should ban paper to save trees and put booksellers like yourself out of business?  Solutions are simple when your livelihood isn’t on the line.  Easy to legislate from a distance.  Easy to cut and slash without providing viable alternatives for people.

I think we find ourselves in a situation where we’re trying to have our cake and eat it too.  Problem is, going the other direction poses quite obvious challenges to personal freedom.  And while I tend to agree that people should be willing to sacrifice more, and I am willing to do so, I’m very hesitant to sign myself up for a situation where I relinquish my autonomy and someone else decides what I must sacrifice and how much.

It’s quite a bind we’re in.

Just for the sake of discussion, I don’t know that we’re in that much of a bind.  If we did everything we could without seriously disrupting the economy, we’d be most of the way there.

There will be some disruptions, like we should quit burning coal as soon as possible, so we need to do something for people currently working in that industry.

I agree with Jerry here. Look, we keep going back on not burning coal because some people will lose their jobs–not that many, but still. But coal is on its way out as a viable fuel anyway–too cost prohibitive. But more: burning coal is disrupting millions of lives. Wringing our hands and saying that there’s nothing to be done because we can’t put coal miners out of work isn’t a zero sum game. Ask the fishermen and women who will lose their livelihoods due to the acidification of the oceans–or the home owners who’ll be flooded by melting ice caps. Eastern Washington used to have summers–now they have smoke and fire season. That’s a major disruption and coal burning plays a role in that. In any case people lose their jobs due to changes in the marketpalce all the time–or should booksellers like me have been able to stop the advent of Amazon because that company caused bookstores to fold? Somehow, we only seem to hear about job loss when it comes to environmental issues–as a reason why we can’t do anything to address those issues.

Again, the disruptions that are about to crash upon us due to global warming are far in excess of those we might require now to try to minimize the coming catastrophe. So pick your poison.

Most of the myriad small and easy things to be done outlined in this thread don’t involve job loss. But they will require mandates. But we already have mandates–seat belts, for example, or helmets on motorcycle riders–that don’t mean we’ve lost all of our personal freedoms.

But we’ll continue to dither over abstract principles while the world burns. as it’s always been!