Sanders-Boxer TKO: New WRI report compares climate bills

[bananas]

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/21/1156/99887

Sanders-Boxer TKO
New WRI report compares climate bills
Posted by David Roberts at 4:35 PM on 21 Sep 2007

The World Resources Institute has a new report out comparing the various climate bills floating around Congress. Here's what you need to know (click for larger version):

This confirms what we already knew, that Sanders-Boxer is the best bill and the only one that has a chance of stabilizing CO2 at levels we can live with. Call your legislator!

[NNadir]

1. "We already knew?"

I'll tell you what we already knew. We knew how to draw an optimistic graph and confuse it with reality.

Maybe you haven't actually read the paper by the Rio Tinto/Walmart/Royal Dutch Shell/Artic Diamond Mine consultant Amory Lovins.

The Shit-for-Brains graph, showing 25% of our energy coming from "soft" technologies by the year 2000 can be found in Lovins, SFB, whoops, I mean Amory, "The Road Not Taken" Foreign Affairs page 77, October 1976.

Yeah right.

Since shit-for-brains published that, the first of his mindless anti-nuke diatribes, 500 billion tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste, aka carbon dioxide, about which he couldn't care less, have been dumped indiscrimately into the atmosphere.

It shows dangerous fossil fuels at being only 75% of our energy and nuclear as zero.

While shit-for-brains anti-nukes have been attempting to crow about a dumb self fulfilling prophecy, that nuclear would wither away because it is "uneconomic," nuclear power quadrupled on an exajoule scale, despite the whining and carping of shit-for-brains people who have no business talking about energy since they know zero about the subject. In this period, nuclear energy became the largest climate change gas free form of energy by far. It has killed zero people in the United States, but still there are lots and lots and lots and lots of anti-nukes complaining about nuclear energy and so called "nuclear wastes" even though they couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuels.

Why couldn't they care less about dangerous fossil fuels. Because they spend their time looking at happy face graphs in which wind and solar grow a brazillion percent every year but never quite reach an exajoule.

Is there some reason that we should substitute happy face graphs for reality in 2007, 31 years later after the Arctic Diamond Mine whitewasher or greenwasher or whatever the hell the Oracle at Snowmass actually is, with all of our lives on the line?

Rio Tinto: http://dte.gn.apc.org/38min.htm

[bananas]

2. A perfect example of the flawed analysis typical of pro-nukes

"The Road Not Taken" can be downloaded here: http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E77-01_TheRoadNotTaken.pdf

The pro-nukes don't point out that "The Road Not Taken" would have greatly reduced total energy usage by 2000, and eliminated fossil fuels completely by 2025.

The nuclear industry was killed by the 1973 Oil Embargo - years before "The Road Not Taken" was published.
When energy prices went up, consumers decided *all on their own* to conserve energy.

[NNadir]

4. The nuclear industry was killed?

Why the fuck are our mindless Rio Tinto/Walmart/Royal Dutch Shell anti-nukes still crying about nuclear energy 35 years later?

Let me guess, the fact that no refineries built since 1976 in this country means that the oil industry, about which anti-nukes couldn't care less, is dead? No?

There is NOT ONE, zero, anti-nukes who can do numbers.

Here's the conservation figures from 1949: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0105.html

Here's the nuclear production figures for the entire world:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls

Last year the "dead" nuclear energy industry produced a record amount of energy, making it, by far, the largest source of climate change gas free energy by far.

"The Road Not Taken" was the one that involved sense, not the shit-for-brains rantings and ravings of the $20,000/Rio Tinto whitewahser.

If you don't know what you're talking about, if you can't read, if you can't understand numbers, make stuff up.

[bananas]

3. Al Gore and Waxman discussed this bill during Gore's congressional testimony

From the grist live-blog (non-verbatim with bloggers comments interspersed):
"Gore: yes. I like your legislation. Your reduction levels are in keeping with what scientists recommend."
"Waxman: ... But we have to insist on those reductions."

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/3/21/64353/7250

Gore: let me say all the same stuff about nuclear again. If we let the market allow the most competitive options to surface, we'll see decentralized, renewable energy. Nuke plants are expensive, complicated, they take a long time to build. We can solve operator error, we can solve waste (though Yucca Mt. is not that solution). I'm not opposed, just skeptical.

Waxman from Calif.: if gov't did nothing, there's no reason any business would want to reduce emissions. So "market forces" without gov't intervention? Stupid. Yay, a shout-out for "efficiency"! References his Clean Climate Act. We call for 1990 levels by 2020; 80% below that by 2050. Do you think those kinds of reductions are those the scientists are calling for, whether or not they're politically palatable?

Gore: yes. I like your legislation. Your reduction levels are in keeping with what scientists recommend. I think current CO2 levels are already dangerously high. A few years from now, the world will look so different. The range of things we're talking about now are going to look small and silly. The trajectory of awareness and demands is headed straight up, and it's bipartisan.

Waxman: should we not also work to address conventional pollutants?

Gore: yes. The so-called "four pollutant" approach is the right one. Utilities should address all at once.

Waxman: I hear people worry about destroying the economy. That sounds like fear. I also hear an almost theological support for nuclear. I agree with your view -- let's unleash the ingenuity of the marketplace. But we have to insist on those reductions.

[jpak]

5. If we had followed Lovin's "soft path" policies rather than the GOP's "hard path"

The US economy would now be energy secure, low carbon and sustainable.

But alas - the US rejected the "shit-for-brains" soft path for the nuclear/coal/oil/gas hard path policies of Reagan, Bush I and II, the Gingrich/Lott Impeachment Congress and the assholes/shills at the Nuclear Energy Institute...

http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/

...and look where it got us.