Cap and trade

the question is in the middle of the paragraph, notice the question marks. This site isn’t only for advice but for information also.

I’m not sure this is the right site for your apparent purposes. Are you asking for advice?

Because the democrat party can only achieve power by keeping their voters as poor and ignorant as possible.

“Obama is making everything worse.”

Worse? You must be kidding. Obama is having to try to correct the mess that Bush left us in.

I’m against cap and trade. I think there should be a straight carbon tax. Everyone would pay X cents for every pound of carbon put into the atmosphere. The revenue should directly go to subsidize renewable energy. Any goods we import from countries that lack a carbon tax would have a carbon tariff added depending on their carbon footprint.

Currently fossil fuels are cheaper than nuclear energy. When the first nuclear energy plants were built we were promised electricity too cheap to meter. What we got was the most expensive way to generate electricity. Then breeder reactors were the next great thing but we never could get them to work right, they never produced much new fuel (though the French have had better results than we have) and the electricity they produced was so expensive that the reactors operated at a huge loss their entire lifetime. When fossil fuels get more expensive than nuclear energy will become more attractive but in the mean time we should look at safer and better designs. The only way nuclear reactors are cost competitive is with subsidies (wait! what about the free market?). Like I said in other advice pebble bed reactors seem like the best technology to me, both simpler and safer than light water reactors. Of course if we ever get fusion to work cheaply that would be the ideal but who knows when that will be perfected? Another issue is that the US does not have great reserves of uranium ore. We haven’t produced uranium since 1992 because it is much cheaper to buy it elsewhere. Australia, Canada, and Russia have rich deposits so switching to nuclear energy may just be exchanging being dependent on middle eastern oil to being dependant on Canada, Australia, and Russia’s uranium.

It seems to me so obvious as to require no explanation at all, that if energy prices were higher, people would use less energy.

I think the best energy policy would be to simply directly raise fossil fuel taxes to compensate for emissions which are currently collectivized, while simultaneously building nuclear facilities that use modern reprocessing techniques. Such facilities not only provide energy, but will help to eliminate the current problem of nuclear waste. These designs reduce overall waste, by reprocessing it. No new mining would be required for thousands of years (at current energy consumption rates), and there would be no need to build the Yuma disposal site.

If this policy were adopted. It would end the dependence on foreign oil. It would end carbon emissions from fossil fuels, it would result in a steady cheap price of energy. It’s clean, in that it results in overall less nuclear waste rather than more.

Cap and trade does not solve the problem of collectivized waste, it simply creates an opportunity for some to make outrageous fortunes at the expense of others, while doing virtually nothing to solve the overall problem of CO2, nor any other energy related problem.

toadaly, nuclear power is no panacea. The French have the most sophistocated fuel cycle in the world and heavily utilize reprocessed MOX fuel but they still buy uranium.

Nuclear energy has never been cheap. It has never been able to compete with cheap fossil fuels. Three Mile Island did not doom the nuclear industry, its high costs did. As the price of fossil fuels goes up nuclear will become more competitive. I don’t believe nuclear should be subsidized. It would benefit from a carbon tax though. Solar, wind, geothermal, and biofuels are potential domestic energy sources; these are the only energy sources that may deserve to be subsidized.