John McCain announced his new goal of pushing through 45 nuclear reactors by 2030. Whether you are pro- or anti-nuclear (or somewhere in between), 45 by 2030 will be too late for mitigating climate change. This is an important point that is often overlooked. Calls for carbon reductions from the IPCC and others require major actions pre-2030. The bureaucratic hurdles associated with building nuclear reactors in the US takes them off the table in terms of being a tool in the quiver to abate on-coming climate change in the next two decades. Is including nuclear in our long-term energy strategic? A worthy debate. But, it is not a useful tool for avoiding the consequences of on-coming climate change.
Shifting Baselines
The Cure for Planetary Amnesia
The Shifting Baselines Blog
Jennifer Jacquet is a Ph.D. candidate with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre. She works closely with Dr. Daniel Pauly, who coined the term Shifting Baselines, the syndrome on which this blog focuses.
Josh Donlan is a conservation scientist and a Visting Fellow at Cornell University. He often hides out in the backcountry of the Teton Mountains, pondering bygone giant beavers and ground sloths. He also is also the founder and Director of Advanced Conservation Strategies and has a habit of restoring remote islands.
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New Projects & Publications
November 27, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Why Consumers Alone Can't Save Our Fish" at 1pm at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.
August 2008: Josh Donlan is co-author on a new paper titled Integrating invasive mammal eradications and biodiversity offsets for fisheries bycatch: conservation opportunities and challenges for seabirds and sea turtles published in Biological Invasions.
August 2008: Jennifer Jacquet is co-author on a new paper titled Funding Priorities: Big Barriers to Small-Scale Fisheries published in Conservation Biology.
August 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Journal of Applied Ecology titled Diversity, invasive species, and extinctions in insular ecosystems.
July 26, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the East Coast at the Woods Hole Film Festival in MA.
July 24, 2008: Josh Donlan gives a talk on biodiversity offsets to The Alcoa Foundation and the Alcao Intalco Aluminum Plant in Bellingham, Washington.
July 22, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "A Way Forward in a Sea of Market Based Initiatives to Save Wild Fish" at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA.
July 19, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the West Coast at Outfest in Hollywood, CA.
July 17, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "In Hot Soup: Shark's Captured in Ecuador's Waters" at the Society for Conservation Biology Annual Meeting in Chattanooga, TN.
July 9, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Flawed Data, Reef Fisheries, And Food Security: A Close Inspection Of Marine Fisheries Catches in Mozambique, Tanzania, Fiji, And The Solomon Islands" at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
June/July 2008: Josh Donlan attends training for his Kinship Conservation Fellowship in Bellingham, WA.
May 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Ambio titled High impact Conservation: Invasive Mammal Eradications from the Islands of Western Mexico.
May 15, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet reviews Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood at the Tyee.
April 2008: Trade Secrets: Renaming and Mislabeling of Seafood by Jennifer Jacquet and Daniel Pauly is published in Marine Policy.
April 2008: Randy Olson and the Puget Sound Partnership release the flash video Shifting Baselines in the Sound:.
Mar. 2008: Dr. Josh Donlan joins the Shifting Baselines blog.
Jan. 2008 Jennifer Jacquet launches the Eat Like a Pig Seafood Wallet Card
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Nuclear & Climate Change
Category: Communicating
Posted on: June 20, 2008 2:33 PM, by Josh Donlan
Comments
Timelines are critical, for sure. That is true both for those who see nuclear as a distasteful but potential important climate change mitigation technology, as well as those who see it primarily as a means of dealing with ever-more-expensive hydrocarbons.
Posted by: Milan | June 20, 2008 6:27 PM
I'm bullish on renewables, but I don't think they can grow fast enough to meet rising energy needs over the next 40 years or so. If it boils down to choice between nuclear and coal to fill the gap, I'll take nukes.
There is no one technology on the books today that will make everything 'okay.' I think we need to put nuclear energy back on the table as an option.
Posted by: Ron Broberg | June 21, 2008 9:50 AM
Are we thinking in terms of the old US/USSR style of more efficient and higher pressure and more dangerous approach to power generation or are we talking about a new generation of fission power genertors using a more passive, less serious accident prone affair similar to what I understand the French and others, and soon the Italians, use? I think framing the argument as if nothing has changed in the last 30 years regarding design is not going to lead to productive approaches and will merely bring up old fear and the rhetoric of failed positions on all fronts. I for one, hold suspect the uranium mining and refining practices more than the power-generation aspects, and hope that fission as it's being utilized all over the world will be merely a short duration phase in our scientific civilizations path towards Deuterium-Boron.11 fusion on a wide scale which will revolutionize society's access to energy in much the same way as the industrial and computer revolutions altered society's productivity through the use of machines and our intelligence through the ubiquitous application of micro circuitry and memory.
Posted by: doug l | June 21, 2008 10:50 AM
Ron and Doug, you miss Josh's point I think - that even if we start building nuke plants tomorrow it will be so long before they're online that the climate will be essentially fried at that point. So let's put our effort into developing renewables while figuring ways to use what we already have online more efficiently. Nuclear power may take our descendants out of the solar system or to other equally unadvisable destinations, but it's not likely to get us out of this climate bottleneck in the meanwhile.
Erik, Orion Grassroots Network
Posted by: Erik Hoffner | June 21, 2008 7:54 PM
TAM 6 Call for papers: James Randi - little blaspheming atheist fraud and his army of robot zombie followers:
visit:
http://www.disclose.tv/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=94
to see how we stopped Randi's MD paranormal challenge....
and FINALLY:
guess what is inside angel's ENVELOPE:
| | RANDI'S HEAD |
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YXHGGfeVzI
Posted by: felizkrilll | June 21, 2008 9:33 PM
Erik:
It's not that I missed the point about nuclear as a solution for CO2 coming too late to be useful. Rather, I'm not convinced that's true. And even if it is, we still face a coming (global) energy crunch due to rising living standards in the rest of the world. Rising oil and coal costs, a CO2 reduction goal, and increasing energy demands make me think that all options are on the table. And if the primary reason it takes 15-20 years to bring a nuclear plant online is due to red-tape, then I think the problem lies with the regulations not the tech - a problem that government can solve.
To take nukes off the table because it takes too long to bring it too market due to regulation in order to favor technologies that may have constraints in scale or aren't even invented yet seems irrational.
Posted by: Ron Broberg | June 22, 2008 3:13 PM
Ron, I hear you, but I don't think red tape is the main problem for the long wait. But I think it's moot anyhow. I don't think we can even afford to build these plants - it'd take a huge amount of public money and incentives, and private investors are very wary of nukes. Renewables could be done more cheaply with less carbon.
Erik
Posted by: Erik Hoffner | June 22, 2008 5:17 PM
The levels of the CO2 are already too high if we are to believe the interview James Hansen gave to the guardian UK today. http://www.mygreenpeacebuddies.com/is-it-serious-57.html
I'm not sure there is a satisfactory short term solution especially since the country acts as if there is plenty of time and in the mean time other countries such as China takes the lead on the CO2 emission.
Posted by: Angela, | June 23, 2008 2:23 PM