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Climate Bill Becoming Just a Nuclear Power Promotion

Is the Climate Bill Becoming an Excuse to Promote Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power?By Harvey Wasserman, AlterNet.  October 21, 2009.The Senate bill includes a “Clean Energy Development Administration” that could deliver virtually unlimited federal cash to build new reactors and fund other mega-polluters………..
The Senate Bill as now drafted also includes a “Clean Energy Development Administration” that could deliver virtually unlimited federal cash to build new reactors and fund other mega-polluters………….

What thin green substance survives could be limited to a few showpiece handouts for renewables and efficiency, with cap-and-trade as the centerpiece. But many environmentalists argue that cap-and-trade could create yet another costly bureaucracy with little real impact on the climate crisis………

Taxes on carbon and other forms of “ancillary” pollution would help if they assess radioactive emissions (from coal as well as nukes), destruction of our oceans,lakes and rivers, removal of mountain tops, creation of nuclear waste, and so on. Merely axing the subsidies to King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes & Gas) and rendering a level playing field for true green energy sources to fairly compete with the old fossil/nukes would take us a long way up the road to Solartopia. A feed-in tariff that rewards renewables for the pollution they avoid would also help.
Without all that, the Climate Bill’s outright negatives could be huge. Atomic reactors can do little or nothing to bring down carbon emissions………….Even if reactors could help with greenhouse gas emissions, it would take a trillion dollars or more to make a noticeable dent, and a decade or more for such reactors to begin to come on line………….
But Democrats are desperate for SOMETHING to show at December’s Copenhagen Climate Conference. The question is: how much will they give fossil/nuke Republicans to get a bill—ANY bill—with the world “Climate” attached?

Is the Climate Bill Becoming an Excuse to Promote Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power? | Environment | AlterNet

October 22, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 1, climate change, USA | antinuclear, climate change, nuclear