In this way, battery-operated vehicles could plug into “cleaner,” even “greener” grid, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions somewhat in the transportation sector. And if the percentage of electricity use for heating continues to climb–as it has rather drastically for the last 20 years, even more carbon emissions reductions could be achieved.

But, as you suggest, it all must start with a concerted promotion of the nuclear industry, although clearly you have a dog in this fight.

The total active component mass in that fuel source weighed just a bit more than what I do and the entire assembly could comfortably fit under my office desk, not including necessary shielding. Even with shielding it could fit inside my spare bedroom office, a room that is not large enough for a queen sized bed and furniture.

I am also amused by the amount of money that the natural gas industry is currently spending on marketing to convince people that a 100 year supply – at current consumption rates – is something to get excited about.

I have a great deal of optimism about the Earth’s ability to support its current and projected human population in abundance, but only because I understand just how much uranium and thorium there is in the accessible portions of the Earth’s crust. Thousands of years of all of the energy that 10 billion people need is far more impressive to me than 100 years of less than 20% of the current US energy consumption.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights

Cap and trade has worked to limit clearly measurable levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, and mercury in coal plants because (a) those chemicals are relatively easy to quantify and (b) they can be reasonably inexpensively mitigated. The problem with CO2 is its ubiquity. It is therefore difficult to quantify and virtually impossible to truthfully avoid, given the limited means of accomplishing this.

If nuclear capacity does not increase and hydro remains limited (each year the percentage of its use gets smaller), what else do we have except fossil fuels to produce electricity reliably and affordably? Certainly not wind and solar. Nor is carbon “sequestration” likely to work, although I’m sure billions will be squandered down this rathole.

Consequently, cap and trade will devolve into a shell game in the United States, as it has in Europe, where the same people responsible for the C&T system would do the “accounting.” As a number of “financial investment” firms over the last decade have shown, one can do virtually anything with numbers if one can control the accounting method. Eventually, however, the truth about the fudged books will out.

If one really thinks that carbon is a problem then it needs a price, not a son of Enron approach that will accomplish little on the main purpose while doing a great deal of damage to the economy (and landscape).

Cap and Trade is of course pointless ,
the “No Goldilocks Solution”,
as we have seen in the EU where the problem with carbon prices is they are either too low and so cheap and meaningless as in recession times,
or too high to lead to any reduction at other times, when evasive
action for example involves paying off third world emitters (who according to a recent Economist article can simply be set up to rake in cash ie would not be emittiong otherwise), or tree planting exercises of dubious effect, which may in any case be fast growing non-native trees which changes local ecosystems.
An artificial market will always be an artificial market.

Emission Trading (Cap and Trade)
http://ceolas.net/#cce5x
Basic Idea
Offsets — Tree Planting — Manufacture Shift — Fair Trade — Surreal Market — Allowances: Auctions + Hand-Outs — Allowance Trading — Companies: Business Stability + Cost
In Conclusion

His arguments are bad. His persona has become grotesque; he is now a buffoonish caricature, the Foghorn Leghorn of energy punditry. “I say, I say I say, boy, is that a chicken hawk I see over yonder…?”