Or whatever else could make global warming (or similar climate-related risk) worse in absence of the geoengineering solution.

My opinion is that these climate risks are greatly overstated as is, but that doesn't mean that I don't recognize the potential moral hazard in geoengineering approaches.

I suggest crossing that bridge when we come to it. If a few gigantic power generators turn out to be much cheaper than alternatives, then that can fund a renewal of the power line infrastructure to support them.

As an aside, your magnitude scales are goofed up. For example, a sedate pedestrian and hard peddling cyclist differ in power consumption by a factor of four or so. A train can use more power than a fighter jet (and it is a huge jump up from a car). And the Space Shuttle has well over half the power generation of the Saturn V at peak thrust.

Completely wrong. A magnitude 3 earthquake for example, might last only a fraction of a second. A magnitude 9 earthquake might under the right distance and local conditions have shaking that is no greater than the peak acceleration of the magnitude 3 earthquake, but it might last half an hour.

Yes, you're only experiencing a small portion of the power of the big earthquake even when integrated over this relatively long time, but that's still a lot more energy than you receive from the smaller earthquake.

Another way to look at it, is that the big earthquake releases about a million times as much "seismic moment" as the small earthquake and about a billion times more energy. Even an inverse square law isn't going to disperse that energy very much.

Not a fact as I've already explained. You continue to insist on an inappropriate use of the term, "magnitude". And the duration of shaking from a magnitude 9 earthquake would be much longer even if the peak acceleration is equivalent to that of a point blank 6 or 7 magnitude earthquake (which incidentally is another reason not to use magnitude here).

There's a moral hazard to anything that makes a risk less harmful. The result is that people tend to behave in a way that is more likely to cause the risk.

For example, various satellite and cell phone-based communication devices combined with a sophisticated US search-and-rescue system make the effects of getting lost in the middle of nowhere less dangerous. Hence, more people are just taking their chances.

The same thing will happen with geoengineering. Because it is there, someone will decide that they don't need to curb their activities as much.

There's plenty of land-based stuff such as changing the albedo of road systems, putting out coal bed fires, or seeding algae blooms in remote ocean spots (areas that have iron as a limiting factor).

Nobody is disagreeing with you here or that there are some benefits to regulation even for events that exceed the scope of the regulations' intentions. What I disagree with is your glib, uninformed assertion that German regulated buildings would hold up to a magnitude 9 earthquake and its aftereffects even one that's a moderate distance away.

My point all along has been, as I originally stated, that regulations aren't intended to fix extreme disasters like magnitude 9 earthquakes, but more likely disasters like the floods and structural failures that you mention as context for the German regulations.

For example, it's possible that Japan won't experience another magnitude 9 earthquake for centuries. So regulating to resist that extreme an event would impose some degree of cost over regulation for a weaker earthquake standard at little additional benefit.

I don't really know what you're trying to say here. It's pretty clear that these towns were hit by both earthquake and tsunami.

It's a fact not an idea. The energy released, for example, is fixed no matter where observers are relative to the earthquake and that energy release is in turn a straightforward function of the magnitude of the earthquake. The earthquake is magnitude 9 whether you're right on top of it or measuring a blip on your seismometer somewhere across the world. You can't speak of a magnitude 9 earthquake being a magnitude 6 earthquake somewhere else. That's not what magnitude means.

You're referring to acceleration. Even in that case, the magnitude 9 earthquake is going to cause a longer period of shaking, even if the peak acceleration of the earthquake is similar to that of a magnitude 6 earthquake.

First, it would drop inverse linearly if it were a point-source effect constrained to a surface. But here energy is at least partly radiated in three dimensions (a hemisphere crudely) not two.

Second, earthquakes, especially really big ones, aren't point sources. You would have to be a lot further away to see the "effect" of the earthquake dropped as inverse square of distance. The epicenter marks only one part of the earthquake zone.

Third, distance and speed of propagation is dependent on type of wave motion generated by the earthquake. Some part travels along the surface, some propagate directly through the Earth (with varying susceptibility to absorption by fluid-filled volumes).

Fourth, a big source of attenuation is heating effects/friction. In an area with a lot of fractured rock such as eastern Japan, earthquakes lose energy much more quickly than intact continental plates (such as the eastern US which has experienced far smaller but still widely felt earthquakes).

And as I noted earlier, interference and soil type can greatly affect how much shaking a particular location receives.

I point this out to demonstrate that merely stating an inverse square law misses considerable nuance of how earthquake energy dissipates.

Finally, let us keep in mind that it doesn't take a lot of tank ruptures to get a mess with about as much cancer causing power as what is alleged to have been released by Fukushima. They don't have have air-borne fallout - which IMHO is a more likely way for people to get dosed than to have the material dumped in the ocean, but I think it's a bad idea to ignore the relative effect of ocean and ground pollution releases from these two sources.

Maybe they will, maybe they won't. I don't think it's wise to assume the economics of power generation are going to be all that different.

So algae is not a pure, unalloyed good. Still doesn't mean that there's anything seriously wrong with creating algae blooms in certain areas in order to consume and sequester CO2.

Where's the evidence of this vast underestimate?

While the moral hazard of geoengineering is rather obvious as a problem, so is the assumption that humanity only has one purpose, to keep the climate the same as it was in 1850.

Energy is irrelevant since it pretty much is gone from the system in a few days. The CO2 build up on the other hand is something that's not going away in a few days.

Not in areas strongly affected by the earthquake or tsunami. I note you keep using weasel phrases, "huge percentage", "usually", "unlucky", "here and there". The problem is that a magnitude 9 earthquake exceeds the specifications of your regulations. It's not a usual disaster. Sure, things will fare better than if you just blew off having regulations in the first place. But you're delusional, if you think German regulations can handle a magnitude 9 earthquake and subsequent 10-15 meter flood waters.

Which site is this "on site"? The magnitude 9 earthquake would be magnitude 9 no matter where you are. Magnitude is a measure of the moment of the earthquake, which is independent of where you happen to be. For the actual shaking, it can be less or more, depending on the structure of the ground and interference patterns of the earthquake.

This is a problem in Europe now.

The real physics of the mid-20th Century remain the real physics of the mid-21st Century. If solar and/or wind power become incredibly cheap (including the downplayed storage/smoothing operations necessary to make the grid reliable enough for mid-21st Century businesses), then we'll find a way to make them work. If they aren't, then no amount of pontification on their virtues will make them work as anything other than a means to drive up the cost of electricity and/or devastate the reliability of that future grid.

The energy source you are looking for is "coal". There's little actual competition between nuclear power and oil or natural gas. There are very few petroleum power plants and they tend to be in areas that have a lot of petroleum. Natural gas as a prevalent near-base load power source (rather than peaking load generator) is a recent phenomenon.

And why would any of these industries support environmentalists? In the short term, environmentalist opposition doesn't shut down nuclear plant competitors. In the long term, they'll get burned for any support they provide. The people who oppose nuclear power also strongly and deeply oppose fossil fuels too.

I think a much better explanation is public hysteria surrounding the word, "nuclear". It's bad enough that technology names have been changed to sound less threatening (for example, "nuclear magnetic resonance imaging" getting renamed to "magnetic resonance imaging" in the medical industry).

Speaking of exaggeration, we have your above post. A tank can be made robust enough that it can withstand a once in 20 million years direct large asteroid impact. But that capability would be a little more pricy than the human race would be willing to afford.

And German regulation would not be sufficient for a magnitude 9 earthquake and the subsequent tsunami despite your breezy assertions to the contrary.