Amazing so many slashdotters ignore it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
"Deutsche Bank says, that in January 2014 already more than 19 countries are under grid parity for solar power and sees starting a second gold rush for solar power..."
Of course, had we been paying the true cost of fossil fuels up front (pollution costs, health costs, defense costs, democratic costs of centralized wealth, other risks) as well as for nuclear (no insurance company will touch it), then renewables and energy efficiency (including passive solar) would have crowded out everything else in the market in the 1980s. Instead we got the Reagan years.
President Carter was wrong about a lot of things regarding energy policy. He should have focused more on appropriately pricing fossil fuel and nuclear externalities into the market, with any related taxes distributed generally as a basic income. Hard for him to do that with nukes as a previous nuclear engineer perhaps. But he was right when he said:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny."
We took the wrong path to fragmentation and self-interest under Reagan and have gone down that road in the USA for about thirty years. So many have suffered, including in the most recent financial crisis. It is a long hard walk back to community and public interest but we have to do it.
Pope Francis has been writing about this like in his book "The Joy of the Gospel: Evangelii Gaudium" which I just got to see what he had to say on the topic of economics and social justice as informed by ethics.
Fortunately, many people have worked at solutions anyway despite this thirty years of widespread pervasive market failure to account for externalities or distribute purchasing power equitably. Thanks to the hard work of engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs along with consumers who purchased expensive products anyway for environmental and practical reasons, now renewables and efficiency are cheaper than fossil fuels in many situation despite the unaccounted for externalities. This is a huge tremendous success but you would not know it reading most of the slashdot comments on this story. Part of the issue is that until grid parity is reached, people still deny it will happen and most do nothing. After grid parity is reached and surpassed, then it is foolish economically to use anything but renewables. Just like humanity did not leave the stone age because we ran out of rocks (but we still use rock for building sometimes), and humanity did not stop using whale oil because we ran out of it, so too we will not stop using fossil fuels because we run out of them (not will we likely stop using liquid chemical carriers for energy, but they may be made by renewables and likely someday fusion).
Granted, we in theory know how to make much safer nuclear plants too. In theory, somehtign like Thorium-based power run by responsible people could be more environmentally conscious than a lot of solar. But as long as nuclear within our current short-term-oriented social framework remains so centralized and big scale (even with 30-year town-sized nuclear "batteries" like Hyperion and such produced by big industry), beyond the political risks to democracy of such a concentration of political power, it is hard to expect to stop operating suddenly the same political and social processes that covered up and then failed to acknowledge past nuclear disasters. Most recently Fukushima is a prime example of denial and human suffering of dislocation, bu it is only one of several. Sadly, as far as short-term thinking, in California, if you want to know where the nuclear power plants are, just follow the seismic fault lines. :-( The good news there is that after those melt down after earthquakes, the Monterey area ecosystem will be much better protected from further "development" as in "paving paradise and putting in more parking lots", same as wildlife is recovering in the Chernobyl human exclusion zone. It will be unpleasant for most humans of California though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Could people build safe nuclear plants even in active seismic zones? Perhaps. But as with Fukushima and its underwater generators and raised storage ponds, in practice, we have not because of short-term thinking, group think, and similar dysfunctional social processes.
So, we still need to fix the free market to address the fact that unfettered capitalism socializes costs and privatizes gains while the rich buy laws increasing in their favor. That might involve:
* ensuring every citizen has purchasing power via a basic income (given most paid jobs are probably going away soon with robots and AI and cheap energy from renewables and probably soon hot and cold fusion) like Alaska does with the Permanent fund
* using the power of government to ensure goods have an up-front cost that more accurately reflect their true costs to society (don't ban big sodas in NYC, just raise their prices via taxes to account for health costs including long-term care), which includes ensuring all energy is priced up-front with a consideration of all the external costs (good and bad) like pollution, defense, war risk, systemic risks, political power concentration risks, health risks and so on.
Without those two broad changes, we will still see outright folly like burning "cheap" coal in the Midwest which causes acid rain and mercury pollution in the North East so people can't eat their local fish for subsistence living and need to pay billions in health care costs for cancer and asthma and such. Destroying the natural beauty of California for a few months of global energy supply with probably most of the profits going to a few well-positioned individuals is a similar bad bargain for the general public.
Of course, there are other ways to arrange human affairs that a free market (subsistence, gift, and planning) and the USA has aspects of them and they used to be stronger in the past. But if we are sticking with the free market as a major force, we should at least make it work in a humane and prudent way.
In the case of "Fracking", that means pricing in risks and costs for:
* polluting groundwater (probably the biggest risk)
* unknown risks like for corporate secrecy of what is in fracking liquids
* polluting around work sites
* climate change (another big risk)
* earthquakes cause by the process of extraction
* visual pollution of the landscape
* complex violations of property rights by nearby underground activities
* the fact that much of the fracking product is just exported now into a global energy market and so does not help US energy security
* the fact that we might want those resources later perhaps
* the effects of a short-term cheap energy source delaying the development of better longer term solutions
* probably others
Of course, solar has its own externalities too. Long-term, fusion energy will probably be better. But is hard to beat energy efficiency too -- including by lifestyle changes related to getting back to the basics of human health (community, simpler home cooked foods, walking, gardening in the sunshine, etc.).
And then we need to discuss how any benefits of the process would be distributed equitably -- like for example through something like the Alaska Permanent fund rather than sweatheart deals for what was once US government land and previously (and in some ways perhaps still) native land...
