Brains & Climate

This aphorism by Yogi Berra, the Baseball Hall of Fame philosopher, used to be a funny example of a tangled arrow of time. But now it means that, thanks to global warming and ocean acidification, our kids and grandkids cannot have the kind of future that we had; they can count on a future of high risk, both directly from climate change and from the regional collapse of civilization.

People take sensible precautions when the risk is high. Ask a roomful of people if they have fire insurance. Almost all will raise a hand. Ask how many have had a fire in the last ten years, and almost none will respond. Yet people pay for insurance because, should a fire happen, they could lose everything—and still have to pay off the mortgage.

But uncertainty is another matter. Those with money to loan will worry about ever getting it back, and so loan rates will soar.

(more…)

11. What do you think about nuclear energy? Is it safe? How can it be utilized to reach your timeline goals?

Nuclear power generation is currently the major C-free energy source. It is over fifty years old, with an excellent safety record. It’s hundreds of times safer than hydro (dams fail) and thousands of times safer than fossil fuels. Unlike the other expandable C-free sources, most of the beginner’s mistakes have already been made. It took three decades before the efficiency doubled.

France has switched to nuclear for 78 percent of its elect­ric­ity. Hydro gives France another 13 percent. So France is 91 percent clean, 9 percent dirty—and Texas is the exact opposite. Texans now get 91 percent of their electricity from fossil fuels, almost twice the national average. Switzerland is 1 percent dirty and the U.S. is at 60 percent (electricity only; about 85 percent dirty counting transportation energy needs too).

If France and Switzerland switched their vehicles over to electrical power, they would serve as even better C-free energy models for the world. Much as I admire Denmark’s style of distribut­ed cogeneration and the move to renewable wind and solar energy, there simply isn’t time to scale that up around the world before 2020, given how many coal trains and oil tankers need to be retired. (more…)