Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Climate
change
The greatest market failure of all
Climate change is the common thread running through this topic.
With every year that passes, there are fewer and fewer desirable
changes to today's energy system that are not related to climate
change in some way. You could point, for instance, to the need to
provide the poor in developing countries with modern fossil fuels
for cooking and heating, so that they don't have to scour their envi-
ronment for firewood that kills them with smoke-related diseases.
But even here, the pressing humanitarian concern is ultimately not just
one of public health: the bigger picture would take in damage currently
done by deforestation, which is a major cause of climate change. Adopting
a pragmatic attitude to the sheer scale of the climate-change problem
requires many of our legitimate concerns about certain energy sources to
be reassessed.
Nuclear power is the most glaringly obvious example: the difficulty
of disposing of nuclear waste safely, securely and sustainably has made
it the elephant in the global-energy room. For all its physical risks and
economic drawbacks, nuclear power has the great offsetting advantage
of being the one non-carbon energy source capable of large-scale energy
generation (see pp.85-99). The bottom-line assessment about any energy
source these days will always come down to the question of whether or
not it contributes to the build-up of greenhouse gases.
 
 
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