Climate change and energy update

Bill Gates: Don't dismiss nuclear energy

A Record of Nuclear Oversight: Since the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island’s unit 2 reactor in 1979, on 35 occasions reactors have been forced out of service for a year or longer in order to restore safe operation because of a systemic, cumulative degradation of the reactor’s components. Critics of the N.R.C say these reactors reached that point because of inadequate oversight. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission points to a number of recently improving performance measures to assert that its oversight of the nuclear power industry has improved reactor safety in the last decade. Article

Electric Avenue

THE American response to rising gas prices has been depressingly predictable. We’re shocked to see prices top $4 a gallon, as if it’s never happened before. We demand that something be done — not to reduce our dependence on oil, but to cut the cost of a fill-up. Fortunately the White House is standing behind a goal that could genuinely transform the nation’s automotive fleet: putting one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

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Today, at universities like Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in national laboratories like Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley, scientists are developing technologies that could power a post-oil age — batteries nearly as rich in usable energy as gasoline, which would make cars like the Volt, with their gas-burning backup engines, historical artifacts.
If we gut domestic clean-energy research, scientists in China or Germany or Japan will finish this work. But it would be far better to stick with the program we’ve begun — financing research into better batteries while deploying vehicles that replace gasoline with electricity as much as possible — and prove that when it comes to energy, America can, in fact, learn from its mistakes.

Climate change and the flood this time: Midwest flooding is a taste of climate change in its early stages. We've got to fight back, and fast.

In Pakistan, Australia and now the center of the North American continent, we're getting a powerful taste of what global warming feels like in its early stages. (And if for some reason you've decided not to believe scientists, then ask the people we pay to analyze risk in our society: In September, one of the largest reinsurance companies in the world, Munich Re, said that "the only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.")
There are no grounds for optimism in this fight against the weather. So far we've only increased the temperature of the planet about a degree, and that's been enough to set the Arctic to melting, turn the ocean 30% more acidic and make the atmosphere about 4% wetter, loading the dice for floods. Climatologists predict that unless we kick oil, gas and coal habits very, very fast, the increase in temperature will be 4 or 5 degrees before the century is out. If one degree does the damage we're seeing at the moment, we'd be fools to find out what 4 degrees will look like.

Energy: Jimmy Carter, a president for our time

Robbing California of energy: The House's decision to rescind about $2 billion in Recovery Act funds and loan authority has jeopardized some $40 billion of private industry investment in clean energy.

A Former BP Exec Explains Why Peak Oil Is Real

Obama administration set to raise fuel efficiency standards, but by how much?