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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6772115" data-attributes="member: 177">I think we have different sources on that.  I've seen viable plans for getting the US onto an all-renewable energy basis over the course of 30 years.  The rate may be optimistic, but the energy availability is not.  There's more than enough sun, wind, and waves out there, we just have to exploit them.Nuclear is prohibitive in part because of how we do it - each reactor is a unique design, that needs an entirely separate certification process, and individuals trained on one plant cannot be used to bring another plant online, or operate it.  We can vastly reduce the cost of bringing Nuclear plants on line if we standardize.Of course, we still don't have a good strategy for decommissioning nuclear plants.  The amount of problematic waste is considerable, and the lifespan of a fission plant is only a few decades.  While we may need to add some nuclear to the mix, the short lifespan of the system makes it a questionable long-term strategy.And, we can't just keep our fingers crossed that fusion will work out.  No.  Once the average person is sold a story about how it is "only a few degrees of warming some time in the future" they are prevented from understanding the long-term cost.Current issues in Syria, and the rise of ISIS that came with Syria's issues?  Climate change related - Syria was destabilized by massive drought.  We can reasonably expect the cost of this to be billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and paying that cost won't even touch the root cause, so it will happen again.  Time and again, severe weather swings will destabilize chunks of the world, with similar results.  As noted - current military expenditures in the Middle East are, effectively, part of your mitigation policy.  Heaven help your "mitigation" when a nuclear power (say, India, or Pakistan) suffers a similar problem. Delaying mitigation is not really a functional plan - as you continue to burn fossil fuels, the price of mitigation escalates, while its effectiveness declines. Basically, if you want to make sure we *can't* mitigate, then by all means, simply try to adapt.  This is a short sighted policy - adaptation is not a one-time payment, but an ever-increasing maintenance cost.  If you think mitigation is expensive, then consider that adaptation is basically throwing money down a drain in a way that *doesn't stop the problem*.  If your roof it leaking, you can put a bucket under the drip for now.  But as the leak spreads and worsens, you have to buy more and more buckets.  And the buckets start filling up your floor space.  And you have to empty the buckets.  And soon, all you have is bucket-management, and no time or money to fix the darned roof!I was merely commenting on the inevitability.  The simple fact is that burning fossil fuels is not a permanent solution to our energy needs.As far as I am concerned, the only long-term viable carbon sequestration plan will be to bind the carbon into some solid form, not as pressurized gas, for exactly the reasons you cite.  Nobody does this because, it is, as I said, energetically like un-burning coal.  We don't have the surplus energy to do that at this time.</blockquote>

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