gmax137 said:
Just an objective observation after checking out how the author also answered other questions on Quora. Who is answering and the words chosen are good indicators of the quality of the response. That is why I get suspicious when someone uses words such as «It's easy». Doesn't mean they're wrong, but such comments need to be challenged.
About me, I live in Québec, Canada. As I said in an earlier post, here it is over 90% Hydro-electricity, it is nationalized, all the dams are up north in no-man's land and we have an incredibly reliable grid (I read here on PF, a comment from a person who stated experiencing power failure regularly every few months. Here, it is more like every few years and nothing major). Since it is government owned, when the company wants to do something, usually - in the end - it does whatever it wishes, no matter how many people would oppose the project. Thus, basically, nobody cares about power generation around here. There was one nuclear facility and it was closed a few years ago when it was time to renovate it at 2G$. It was basically just a way of diversifying the power sources for the company, exploring other avenues, and since it was close to an urban area, it was not a very popular site (like all nuclear plants), so the decision was easy to make.
Although reading about nuclear here on PF, I'm more incline of accepting it, the only thing I cannot get my head around are the nuclear wastes, even though everybody seems to say it's not a problem. Not an expert on the subject, but I cannot believe that disposing safely of a waste that can be dangerous to life for centuries is easy. I can't imagine that in a few hundred years, everyone will know where are all of those sites. I can't imagine that we understand fully the long time effect of those sites. Just based on the «regular» dump sites experience, we still find old sites that nobody really knew existed and they are less than a 100 year-old. Or we are building over old sites than we thought safe and we have now health issues in those neighborhoods. 50-100 years ago, it was all figured out that burying our household waste was the appropriate method and that by now, it would all of cleaned up by itself (composting). It did not happen as expected and - surprise, surprise - we are now trying to completely eliminate those sites by recycling. So how are we predicting so easily hundred of years in advance?
How I see the energy crisis? I think it is a beast that feeds itself. The more you try to resolve the problem, the more you dig the hole. You create machines that are more fuel efficient and less polluting, yet the fuel consumption and the pollution level increase anyway.
A recent study still expects oil consumption to rise by 2040, despite a wider adoption in electric vehicles. I'm pretty sure developing countries are not the only ones to blame for this.
From my experience, you give people a machine that consumes or pollute less and they think: «Hey I can do more with it; It won't be worst than before.» What they don't realize is: 1) It was already too much before and 2) They often use it so much more that they do more damage than they were before.
That is why I don't like how some present solutions as «magically» being zero-emission. It's not that I don't like the machines, but when we're told they are all zero-emission and no drawbacks can come from them, I think it is just encouraging people to waste resources without thinking (urban sprawl and leisure traveling comes to mind). And by resources, it's often more than just the amount of fuel used, it is also the urbanization of the land. The funny thing is that I think they even care less today, thinking that it will be so easy later that everything will balance itself.
The problem is over-consumption. You have to consume less, not by using more efficient machines, but by ... consuming less. It has a lot more to do with self-discipline than with a technical difficulty.
Let someone drive a US car from the 60's for a week, I can assure you that he begins to think a lot more about the necessity of all his travels once he starts filing that gas tank. Let him drive a full-electric car and he doesn't realize that it is actually powered by a internal combustion engine miles away and just brags how good and kind he is to the Earth. Even if it is more efficient, it is far from being zero-emission. If the electricity was produced by, say, hydro-power, still the more you use the car, the more it wears and that requires more resources to build new ones.
You cannot let yourself get into a spiral of consumption.
