It probably is the same person. There are a few things (like having 19 instead of 10 storage tanks and living in NY instead of NJ) that I remembered differently.

There is no way I could afford to build the system he built, but if the whole system could be brought down to earth as far as affordability, I think interest would increase.

Thanks for the link.

will work to the extent that ingenuity can devise and implement them. A carbon cap and trade system is even conceivable since your direct target would be businesses, not individuals. Of course, within existing economic realities, any such system has to be global, not national, in scope. My point was that people aren't going to voluntarily alter their lifestyle just because they think it's good for the planet or even good for their patriotism. Individuals also aren't going to live long under any sort of rationing system or "carbon footprint" cap. You can hit businesses, if you do it carefully, and the changes within the goods and items and their corresponding costs will affect behavior. You can incent people and make conservation more convenient. But you can't get away with punitive actions, rationing, or lowering the perceived standards of living of individuals.

As for Kyoto, I agree with its goals of lowering our global carbon footprint. I happen to believe in global climate change and that it is a direct result of human emissions of greenhouse gases. I also happen to agree that our heavy dependence on OPEC petroleum is contrary to our own best geopolitical interests. That said, because Kyoto provided inexcusable and unconscionable exemptions for India, China, and Indonesia, I could never have have voted for its ratification. Doing so only exacerbates the already tremendous disadvantage in manufacturing costs we face compared to such countries. There needs to be a new Kyoto, one that does not exempt these "developing" nations and establishes a more reasonably level playing field for all industrialized and industrializing nations. Kyoto was a gaffe. The negotiators caved on a critical issue, and even the Clinton Administration was highly critical of the final result. Once you look past the admirable goal, Kyoto was a sow wearing lipstick.

I'm fairly pessimistic on short to intermidiate range reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It's just going to take too long to develop and fully roll out cleaner alternative energy sources, and I don't think there's enough that can be done in terms of conservation to bridge the gap. Frankly, the economic expansion of China and India are very likely to genereate sufficient additional greenhouse gasses to more than counter any realistically feasible reductions from North America and Europe, ultimately proving in stark fact the folly of Kyoto. I'm pretty well resigned to climate changes of 1.5 to 2 degrees celcius within the next 50-75 years and possibly 2.5 to maybe as high as 3 degrees within a century. I'm now more focused on promoting the examination of and investment in "cleansing" technology to lower the concentrations of CO2 in the upper atmosphere and preparing to cope with and mitigate the effects of the impending climate changes than trying to stave them off.

As you're trotting out all your favorite whipping boys for the blame game (oil corporations, the GOP, OPEC, etc.), don't forget to include Jane Fonda and the "China Syndrome." That movie and her misguided campaign against nuclear power - all done ironically in the name of environmentalism - took away 30 years we would otherwise have spent developing nuclear power plants in this nation. Foolish actions can be well intended and neither right nor left are exempt from them. Today, France is the world leader in nuclear power production, generating 80% of its electrical needs from this greenhouse friendly energy source. Where would we be today if the United States was likewise generating 80% of its electrical needs from nuclear power? I grant you that even without Jane's activism we wouldn't have achieved 80%, but 40% to 50% is not at all unreasonable assuming a 1 for 1 replacement of each new fossil fuel plant to have come online during those three decades. I believe we're around 20% today.

You got in the necessary and obligatory shot at business. And no question, every business has a vested interest in protecting itself and its profits. But are you claiming that the anti-nuclear power protests of the 1970's had no impact on the public perception of nuclear power? Are you suggesting that protest movement had nothing to do with cooling the investment climate for nuclear energy by the private power companies and TVA?

Even with Three Mile Island considered, the "risk" of investing in a power company is minimal. Demand is predictable and not subject to market fluctuations. There's generally a built in natural monopoly owing to the initial infrastructure cost (see cable television for a roughly similar example). The returns aren't very exciting, but risk/return tend to be directly proportional, right?

I hold to my previous assertion. The NIMBYism you referenced above was fueled substantially by an orchestrated anti-nuclear power protest movement done in the name of the environment. It was wrongheaded and shortsighted. TMI's timing (1979) couldn't have been worse, coinciding almost exactly with the movie, and was the final nail in the coffin of U.S. nuclear power development for three decades. Objectively, TMI demonstrated the safety of U.S. nuclear reactor design (0 deaths, 0 injuries inside the plant or in the greater community), but that message wasn't going to have a chance to get out. Chernobyl is a non-starter in this discussion. Soviet nuclear power design was abysmal with seemingly little regard for public safety (btw, like France, Chernobyl was government financed, no?). They had similar issues with poor design on their early nuclear subs, too. Anyway, to my point, by the time of this 1986 accident, U.S. nuclear power expansion was already a rotting corpse.

Short of some brand new, never been heard of before, power source, a future free of fossil fuels demands the use of nuclear power - fission or, maybe someday, fusion. You can't meet our needs with solar (CSP), wind, tides, hydroelectric, geothermal, or any combination thereof. Weather, physical space requirements, and geography all limit how far the above can be exploited for energy production. Parenthetical note: That's not intended as an argument not to fully exploit all of the above to fullest practical extent.

By the way, give Al some credit. His movie did wake up a lot of people in this country. It has noticeably shifted the tone of the discourse and shifted the public opinion away from the climate change ostriches. Looking back in a decade or so, don't be surprised to see that movie garner a lot of credit for waking this country up to reality of the threat.

I know it may not feel like it, but we're on the same side this time.

And back then nobody really considered the CO2 aspects. Certainly people from the GW denialist side (then or now) can't hypocritically accuse the anti-nukes of being short-sighted there. And at least the objections were real, from the people. That's free speech and democracy. You gotta problem with that?

CO2 specifically, in terms of global climate change, no, people weren't too terribly concerned about that in the 1970's. But the first clean air act dates to 1955, so worries over air pollution as a general concern were hardly new. The enviros of the 70's backed the wrong horse. They were worried about very unlikely nuclear meltdowns instead of very definite air pollution. The intent was noble enough, innocent enough, but the effect was counterproductive. From my very first post, I suggested the anti-nuke movement of the 70's were part of the current problem, that we'd have lower overall greenhouse gas emissions without their efforts. I just want to make it clear I've never said anything like their being the "only" or even "primary" part of the problem, although that small part of my initial post has become the focus of our discussion.

For the most part, I attribute the blame to the nature of the problem itself and its timing. You're talking about an emerging science, extraordinarily long predictive time frames, a very complex group of possible causes from many scientific disciplines, and a tremendous amount of raw data to crunch - all at a time when sunlight intensity is decreasing rather than increasing (view recent data on evaporation rates) thus mitigating the immediate effect of the change. This made it very hard to recognize there might be a problem, even harder to prove we were the primary cause, and extraordinarily difficult to take that argument to the general public. For the most part, businesses, politicians, scientists, and individuals (including protestors) have acted exactly as they genuinely felt appropriate given the limited data sets and perspectives before them at the time. I freely confess to being very slow and very reluctant to sign onto the manmade global climate change argument. I happened to know that our world is still on the upswing from a "mini" ice age from the 1300's to the early 1800's (remember the "year without a summer" in 1816? Really interesting story). I also happened to know the earth has experience whole geological ages where the average temperatures were far higher than what we're seing today. So it took some effort to convince me this was anything more than a natural, very long term earth weather cycle.

As for free speech (even "astroturf" free speech), I'm all for it. If I had to paint myself into an ideological corner, I'd punch the libertarian ticket, if that makes matters a little clearer for you. Heck, I even opposed the creation of an art board for the City of Knoxville because I felt/still feel it creates an unwarranted free speech restriction to address a nonexistant problem.

I didn't say that, but no I don't think the market responds to protests. Has Bush caved to the anti-war movement? Have oil companies really gone green and to the extent they have, is it because of public opinion? Hah!

Here I wasn't referring to a market investment. Power companies have continued to bring new power producing facilities online to meet rising demand over the past three decades. They are investing in their infrastructure for power generation, in other words. No one directly invests in a power plant in a market sense. You invest in a power company like Con-Edison, and Con-Edison decides what kinds of plants to build with those dollars. Public opinion can and did have a chilling effect on the nuclear plant option for those companies and for TVA. If you're a highly regulated monopoly or a government agency, you tend to be sensitive to avoidable public criticism. It could have negative consequences. In this case, the power companies could choose lower upfront cost with higher total operating costs over the life of the facility (natural gas/coal) or choose higher upfront costs with lower total operating costs over the life of the facility (nuclear). They were going to make money either way, so why go through the experience of Jane and Friends outside their gates with picket signs?

Now, to be one hundred percent fair, here, the anti-nuke protests were only one component of a "perfect storm" that killed off our nuclear power growth. You mentioned TMI. The third component was the runaway interest rates that plagued the last years of the 1970's. This certainly made larger upfront costs even less appealing to the power companies. The ultimate irony, to me, was that America's investment in nuclear energy died on the watch of the only president in our history who ever directly worked with nuclear power. (Not implying any sort of responsibility, just noting the irony).