“Handling that amount of nuclear waste is also a trivial task…” How would that be a trivial task? There’s no terminal storage here in Germany because nobody can say if the proposed locations are really safe for the thousands of years that the waste still be highly radioactive. And of course no one wants to live next to one of those dumps, just as nobody wants to live next to a nuclear power plant.

And as for your “nuclear power is safe enough” statement, I suggest you visit the (huge) area that was contaminated by the Tschernobyl disaster in Ukraine and talk to the victims that are still alive (but most likely have cancer) about it. Just skimming through the (official) lists of malfunctions in nuclear power plants you can find on the net might prove to be somewhat enlightening as well (you wouldn’t believe how many times things ALMOST went seriously wrong).

Renewables are here now, they aren’t too expensive now and prices are dropping rapidly (unlike any other form of electric energy source). Even with a reduced decline of prices for renewable energy, they will have a “break even” with traditional energies within the next 5-10 years. If it weren’t for the crap that the lobby and marketing machinery of the nuclear and oil industries feeds us (renewables = de-centralazation = no money to be made by conventional power companies) we might actually start using them on a big scale and solve both climate and price problems in a time-frame that is much shorter than that needed to build a couple of hundred new nuclear power plants.

regarding corn: corn production, in the U.S. anyway, is heavily subsidized, and as such is artificially inexpensive. corn is a taxing crop. it shouldn’t be used for nearly as many food products as it is (high fructose corn syrup, anyone?), much less as a fuel source. there’s a reason why ethanol from corn is the only non-petroleum-based fuel source that bush ever mentions; certain folks he is sympathetic to stand to make a ton of money off of that solution.

i’m not familiar with switchgrass, but that sounds like a promising possibility. i also know that good ol’ marijuana (nee hemp) can produce a startlingly high amount of fuel per acre, and the byproduct of extracting the oil is a high-protein seed cake. early Ford cars were powered by hemp fuels. Henry Ford even made cars from hemp. there’s a famous photo of him taking a sledge-hammer to the trunk of a car made entirely from hemp plastic, see http://www.ashevillehempcompany.com/About_Hemp.html. you can find an abundance of info on this by googling for ‘hemp fuel’; the most useful page i found with a quick search is here: http://www.masscann.org/hemp/

regarding “energy theater”. i love the term, will start using (and propagating, hopefully) it immediately. and yes, it’s rampant. real conservation, like security, is hard. and complex. just like the total cost of ownership of software is rarely indicated by the licensing fees alone, neither is the total energy cost of some “green” initiative measurable by the energy expended at the end-user level; you’ve got to consider the whole picture. consider organic produce… in general, it’s a better environmental choice. but when your apple came from new zealand, then is it a better choice than the inorganic produce from the valley only 100 miles away? probably not, when you consider the total energy cost in getting it to you.

anyway, enough rambling… thanks for the fodder!

It’s true that people can be rather melodramatic about our problems, environmental or otherwise. But that’s not what I was trying to talk about when using that term.

I have no idea whether the increase in food prices has been taken into account in those EROI-just-above-1 figures you mention. But I would guess that it hasn’t, because it’s an economic cost, not an energy cost. It should be considered, though: anything that raises the price of food hits the poor much, much harder (proportionally) than the rich. What’s the energy gain for that economic cost, and could that same energy gain be realized through other means with lesser costs? (Such as, for instance, replacing coal plants with nuclear reactors, as has already been mentioned).

Really, the sooner people can figure out viable generation from nuclear fusion (aside from solar generation, of course), the better, but the vested interests do seem to love pushing their non-solutions like biofuels, presumably because there’s money to be made in appearing to be doing something for the environment whilst switching pet special interest groups from one form of subsidies to another.

This post on co2 per mile travelled compared to this graph compared to this first google hit for co2 per mile travelled show some commonalities and some wide variation that is inscrutable without digging into the methodologies. A gapminder-esque project for aggregating environmental data and exposing it to the masses sounds good.

Should we make a distinction between simple “raising awareness” short-sightedness and “taking a partial step”? Say, the minimal advantage of dual natural gas/Hydrogen combustion vehicles, leading to hydrogen infrastructure leading to built-in impetus for clean hydrogen production? There are many alternate paths, I suppose we can’t avoid the need for vision. Alexander’s comment just made me think of the difference between choosing to advocate an absolute goal, a relative goal, or a relative goal combined with an exit strategy. Along the lines of the cradle-to-cradle movement, we need to consider the next moves that become available from a given choice. Nuclear waste for instance fails this test spectacularly in the medium->long term, but it all depends on the timeframe we’re concerned about.

And ethanol just pisses me off. Rawr! Ok, I’ve ranted enough about stuff I haven’t thought enough about (contra one of the points of your post), I’m going to go mull over gapminder-for-carbon-choices.

“Environmental Theater”

Love the term. Describes exactly what irritates me about the so-called “environmentalist movement”, which is so full of cock-ups, stupidity, flame-fanning, and outright lies that it makes me physically ill.

Global Warming

Prime source of “environmental theater”. Is the Earth warming? Is it our fault? Even if it is, does it really have anything to do with CO2? With the data available to me through public sources, I can easily answer any of these questions either affirmatively or negatively, depending on which sources I quote.

Ethanol

Due to rising gasoline prices, ethanol is now somewhat financially viable, but has a few problems…low volumetric energy density compared to gasoline (but almost everything has that problem…there’s a reason gasoline is a prime vehicle fuel), and emissions. While some would have you believe that ethanol is a super-clean fuel, this depends entirely on how one defines “clean”. Ethanol does boast impressively low NOx emissions (which cause smog), but it also has Formaldehyde as one of its combustion by-products, and I think I’d rather have the smog.

Biofuels (ethanol and otherwise)

Not a terrible idea, but not a cure-all by any means. The main problem with biofuels (on a large scale at least) is that making them requires arable farmland. Since the beginning of 2007, when ethanol started being put in everyone’s gas in the US, food prices have gone up appreciably for the first time in decades. Why? Corn being used for ethanol. Corn prices go up. Corn is also used to feed cattle, etc. Beef, pork, poultry prices go up. Corn is planted instead of other crops (so it can be used for ethanol). Soybean, wheat prices go up. The only solution is more farmland. Now consider that the biggest environmental impact that humanity has on the rest of the environment is agriculture. Not fossil fuels, not DDT…agriculture. The only advantage biofuels have is that they aren’t finite in supply.

…and as far as the “no added carbon” argument, I don’t see how that works. Corn to ethanol takes carbon from the soil and puts it into the atmosphere. Fossil fuels take carbon from the ground and put it into the atmosphere. Either way carbon goes into the air that wasn’t there before. The fact that the fossil fuels come from deeper than the carbon in corn is probably of little relevance.

Coal Plants

By all means, get rid of them first. Carbon Dioxide is at least non-toxic. Coal emissions are nasty. The problem is that coal energy is really really cheap. Hopefully the new “clean coal” plants coming on-line in the next few years will live up to their promises. That should help considerably.

Electric Cars

The engineer in me cringes. What a horribly inefficient way to get around.

Also, you’re right, the batteries are generally pretty awful for the environment, and it takes a whole lot of energy to make one. This goes for hybrids too. Check out this article, or search Google for “prius hummer” for more on this.

Nuclear

I’ve been talking about pebble reactors for years…nice to see someone else talking about it for a change. :)

Again, not a cure-all, but better than a lot of things.

wow…I did kind of go on, didn’t I…

Sorry, just gets under my skin.

I think biofuels are worth the time. consider switchgrass, which can (supposedly) produce 1000gal of gas per acre with very little production costs. (This is about 150% more output per acre than corn.)

And they’re zero added carbon. extracted fuels are all added carbon.