Umm, by us in the rich world changing our personal and collective patterns of behaviour to environmentally responsible ones perhaps? I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work…

Wtf?

So, engels, you still did not answer my question in 34.
Is your goal a world in which we are all poor as heck, or only those developing nations?
By phrasing things the way you have you obviously are quite content to leave them wallowing in their misery.
I, on the other hand, aspire for something better for them. And yet, I’m the bad guy?

Or, to put it differently, we’re already having massive problems with the Chinese and Indians clawing their way up from “unrelieved misery” to “mostly crappy”. How do you propose that we move them further up the ladder, along with everyone in Africa, while the Earth’s population simply stays stable, let alone grows every year?

And heaven forbid you meet and marry someone from a foreign country, and then decide – say – that you’d like to attend your sister’s wedding or see her children every few years or so.

Presently, if you budget your emissions carefully, making a transcontinental trip “every few years” will not necessarily put you in the atypically high emitters category. (This may change if other forms of energy consumption become cleaner and air travel does not.)

(Oh – and what kind of power source are your computer, and the servers which keep this blog going running on? Because if its not solar-power or hamsters, I’m not sure why I should take your opinion seriously either.)

My computer and monitor together use about 250 Watts. My portion in the power consumption of the servers handling my traffic is probably much lower. Let’s say a total of 300 Watts for every moment I moralize on Crooked Timber. Every passenger-mile on an airplane consumes about 1KWh. This means that a 7000 mile trip (round trip NY to London) is equivalent to about 23,000 moralizing-hours, or about 30 years in which I moralize for 2 hours a day, seven days a week (which is an amount of moralizing that even I would find hard to sustain).

Both producing coal, and producing enriched uranium, cause environmental damage and require energy (hence, in the world of the present, cause CO2 emissions). It seems unlikely that the damage is as great for uranium as it is for coal, especially with fuel reprocessing.

Creating electricity from coal creates MASSIVE amounts of CO2—around half of total global CO2 output IIRC. Creating electricity from uranium does not produce CO2.

And producing power from natural gas is a distraction; there is not nearly enough natural gas available where it’s needed, and it is too hard to transport, to replace coal as baseload power.

(…by which, I should have said, I meant the complete production process from extraction to refining to energy production. I don’t know how reliable this estimate is, but it is certainly false to say, as in #43, that ‘nuclear… doesn’t produce CO2’.)

Whether or not nuclear power is ‘environmentally worse’ than other forms of power, when one considers all the possible consequences including very long term ones and certain low-probability but catastrophic outcomes, is a pretty complex judgment, not a piece of ‘information’…

No, you said “nuclear… doesn’t contribute CO2”.

I didn’t say “not environmentally damaging”; if I had, your comment would make sense.

If I’m wrong—if per unit of energy output French-style nuclear power is environmentally worse than American-style coal power—I would like a reference so I can revise my information.

Indeed, since uranium is wafted effortlessly from the ground by energy fairies.

Something like 2/3 of CO2 emissions are from coal-burning, largely for electric power; all that (say half of current CO2 emissions, and a larger proportion of future ones) could be replaced by nuclear, which is less environmentally damaging than coal AND doesn’t contribute CO2.