"I tend to favor the expenditure of taxpayer money to accelerate research into ways to produce energy that are inherently cleaner in large part because there's a limit to how much people will impose costs on themselves in order to reduce external costs on others."

A better description is that it is difficult to impose costs on the cause of pollution. If someone damages my car, telling them to pay for it is straightforward. If someone releases something toxic in the air, paying the people affected in damages is not straight forward at all. Even organized individual cases like VIOXX show the difficulty.

This is a classical example of a neighborhood condition, and even libertarian like Milton Friedman would agree that this is an area for government involvement.

That said, no one has yet died of global warming caused by man. Even if they had, proving it is hard. So the case is far weaker when concerned with non-toxic boogey-men gases.

I would much rather governments spend every dime of regulation cost of greenhouse on research to a real solution to energy, like solar or fusion.

Or just zoning codes that mandate highly reflective roofing. Enough of the surface of the earth is covered with artificial coverings, that we could probably significantly effect the heat ballance of the planet just by our choice of colors.

"Research will eventually produce cleaner technologies that will get deployed and displace fossil fuels by being cheaper even before considering external costs. This can be accomplished without changing or improving human nature."

This is a long time out. If you don't care about the externalities, coal is abundant enough that it will be cheap for a long time to come. Furthermore, the technology to convert coal to electricity is very cheap - much cheaper than nuclear. Furthermore, the cost of insuring a coal plant is much cheaper than nuclear as well.

The problem is with the externalities - CO2, mercury, lopping tops off mountains, particulate matter, and so on. Persoanlly, I'd much rather pay extra to avoid these.

In terms of clean technologies, the only hope in my mind is cheap, mass produced solar for rooftops, purchasable at Home Depot, and installable with a staple gun. Considering I'm paying 7 cents a KwH, this is going to have to be *very* cheap.

Absent that, hopefully we can convince people that the reduced externalities of nuclear offset the cost.

Brett - I've thought about that myself, but I've never seen any studies. Perhaps roads can be added to the mix as well.

But I'm not too encouraged by this coal project, because it will take "international cooperation" and 5 YEARS to build! Were they thinking of midterm elections 2010? Crash projects on the other hand are gauntlets to throw down to solicit grit and resolve, which is what we may need for CO2 containment. If they can send a man to the moon why can't they make a decent cup of...

Once you can prove that climate change is substantially influenced by human activity it would be very easy to point to lives lost as a result. But it would also be very easy to point to immensely more lives saved or made better by the same human activities that affected the climate. It is akin to the application of vaccines. For every child that has a catastrophic reaction there are tens of thousands saved from deadly disease.

Randall Parker: "Industry lobbies and people do not want to pay more for electricity."

Industries and their lobbyists have precious little in common with ordinary people. Industry lobbies exist to increase industries' profits by subverting the will of people in what should be a representative democracy. And industries have found it to be a hugely cost effective proposition. They can secure billions of dollars of benefits by spending a few million to influence a few morally challenged politicians (are there any other kind?) Corporations aren't equivalent to people in another important way: People are moral beings while corporations are essentially machines designed for the primary purpose of maximising profits. All other purposes are subverted to profits. And this difference shows up in the falsity of Parker's statement. A significant majority of American people are in fact willing to pay considerably more for electricity if it is generated with clean technologies (http://www.americans-world.org/digest/global_issues/global_warming/gw5.cfm). Putting vast billions of free taxpayer money into the futuregen technologies as a giveaway to large corporations will make lower emissions seem cheaper but it is still the consumer/taxpayer paying the bill to the benefit of the corporate moghuls and investor class. But the real fact is that it will probably be cheaper to produce dirty energy than clean energy for the forseeable future. A pollution spewing powerplant is cheaper to build and operate than a futuregen plant and and an IC powered car is cheaper than an electric car. Industries have zero incentive to make these changes and it is true that people will only pay so much to make them voluntarily. The only fair mechanism to allocate the costs of cleaning up emissions is by society, embodied by the government, to estimate reasonable external costs of emissions and other environmental damage per unit of energy produced, allocate the excess monies collected to government agencies or NGOs to mitigate the damage and let the free market sort out the competition between properly priced energy sources. While the allocation of external environmental costs is necessarily a political process, it has an advantage in that there is a clear scientific basis for it and there is only so far industry lobbyists can go to corrupt it. This economic mechanism is fair because it implicitly recognizes that both consumer and producer of energy contribute to environmental damage and both should share in the process of compensating for the damage done to innocent third parties and society as a whole. This is a legitimate role of government in providing for the "general welfare" of society as our founding fathers intended.

If a government does not secure libery and justice for it's people, it is not legitimate. Just as the government has a coercive role in protecting the general welfare from bank robbers who would find it to their benefit to steal money from a bank, it also has a similar role to protect society from corporate polluters and irresponsible consumers in a way that promotes justice.

Tdean, I think it is easier at that point just to put regulations on.

We are always going to have unions and industry lobbies influencing events in our democracies anyway. Which is why I am not hopeful for the future of democracy. All the nations that went from third world to first world in the last 50 years were right wing dictatorships during their rise for example.

The companies and unions already in an industry like coal are always going to be more powerful then the supporters of future potential industries that would replace them. The biggest reason nuclear was stopped during the 70's and 80's was to protect the coal industry and unions.

There was plans on the table in the early 70's to replace every coal plant in America with nuclear by 1980. 15 million Americans in the 1970's were either directly or indirectly through immediate family involved in the coal business however. Entire congressional districts economies were coal based.

So America threw in the towel at the creative destruction the market brings.

AA2,

Regulations are never easy to "put on". Establishing regulations is also a political process and if a set of regulations imposes costs on an industry that might lead to the economic failure of that industry, they will fight for their survival with all the resources at their disposal. This will lead inevitably to the regulations being watered down based on the political clout of the industry rather than any rational basis. Deciding on external environmental costs of various energy source technologies isn't easy or politic-free either, but once established based on sound scientific methodology, it could be administered as easily as a gasoline tax. The tough part in terms of politics lies in establishing sound and efficient remediation and compensation programs for those impacted by emmissions and other environmental impacts to ensure the resources aren't siphoned off by powerful and corrupt politicians. That is a severe and continuing problem in politics, as recent stories of "bridges to nowhere" show. We can only depend on the press and an informed public to ensure that such corruption is corrected in a reasonable time. I have to have some faith that such bald-faced theft of taxpayer monies will not be tolerated by the public forever.

While you may think it a great thing to replace all coal-powered plant with a nuclear one, I strongly doubt that the majority of the public ever has. Nuclear power can only compete in the marketplace if large external costs such as waste disposal and insurance against catastrophic failure are largely covered by taxpayer freebies. At one time it might have been possible to argue that catastrophic failure was such a remote possibility that it's cost could be ignored, but with real terrorists financed by Arab petro-dollars actively gunning for nuclear reactors that probability is hugely increased. I doubt that when those risks are critically evaluated that the public will choose to trade the diffuse and long-term climate change problem for much more dramatic terrorist enabled nuclear meltdowns.

I am just noting that estimating damage from pollution or the amount of catastrophic insurance that a company needs is going to be politically influenced as well. Unless a private mechanism for calculating and collecting that money can be introduced.

But if it can't we are back to square one with it being a political issue.

I think nuclear could change the equation if it is not affecting people in a general way. Like a coal plant does, or like a hydro dam affects many people when it is built.

Your point about cost is really key. My feeling is today there is no question that nuclear is the cheapest form of electrical generation over the long term. Coal is somewhat cheaper to build up front I believe, but nuclear's operating costs are much lower. So quickly the nuclear falls below coal, especially with low interest rates.

Natural gas is the cheapest by far upfront, but horrendously expensive to operate as you constantly need to buy gas. However as a peak supply it can be useful.

I have the source at home saved on pdf, so I will get the exact numbers and source, but off the top of my head costs for the options are something like natural gas 6.4 cents per kilowatt hour, oil 5.7, coal 2.3, nuclear 1.9.

Here is one of the cost estimates, probably the best one as it includes 7 different studies. http://www.world-nuclear.org/economics.pdf

Go to the bottom of the pdf for the different studies.

All of the technologies involved in the FutureGen project are already proven and in operation in various forms of utility and/or industrial plants - both in US and abroad. If the funds to be spent on this small (275 MW) demo plant were offered as incentives to incorporate CO2 separation and sequestration features in planned coal gasification based power plants, hyrogen production or substitute natural gas and fuel oil plants, it may be possible to accomplish more, and in a shorter time. FYI - CO2 is currently being piped some 250 miles from a coal gasification synthetic natural gas plant in N. Dakota into Canada and injected in the ground for enhanced oil recovery. This can be done with coal gasification based power plants and coal-to-liquids plants as well, and a government incenitive (if not legislation) to do so would go a long way.