I'm not going to continue arguing Dan. I doubt very much that I'm going to change your mind on this issue and I know that you won't change mine.
As a parting shot however, let me just say that if everyone lived by your last sentence we would never have progress. We would just keep on going with what we have, never develop new technologies and when we hit peak oil, what then? I doubt it's going to happen when the alarmists say it will, but we know the amount of oil in the earth is finite and some day production will decline. If we don't start developing new and economically viable technologies now we're (not to put too fine a point on it) fucked. As for nuclear power, sure it's cheap and kind of clean (okay, temperatures in the waterways they need to be situated on go up by a degree or two: what's the big deal with algae explosions that choke a few thousand fish?). No, the biggest problem is those pesky catastrophic meltdowns. Sure they don't happen often but when they do... I don't have to tell you that the area around Chernobyl is still devastated by what happened over 25 years ago. And as we saw last year in Fukushimu (sp?) Japan they can still happen. So sure, the two main choices are fossil fuel or nuclear. But we need to be developing alternative technologies for a couple of reasons: Those two old technologies will eventually need to be replaced, and until then anything to relieve stress on the grid will help prevent brownouts, blackouts and the type of domino effects like the one in eastern North America in 2003 and what we've seen in India this summer. Even if wind and solar can provide 10% of our electricity right now (an easily attainable goal) we would be much better off imho. Cheers, frank "What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof." -- Christopher Hitchens <snip> Unfortunately, it's fossil fuels or nukes. Name your poison. Dan Matyola http://www.pentaxphotogallery.com/danieljmatyola -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
