Sunday, March 11, 2007
Walking the Tightrope
As we face a future that will likely involve constraints on available energy, we will find ourselves walking the tightrope between the need to meet our demand for energy and the need to protect the environment. This article about a proposed LNG terminal in the LA basin illustrates the dilemma. California needs natural gas, but isn't overflowing with options for getting it. Australia has an option on the table, but the risks may be more than folks want to deal with. Or is it a case of not wanting to give up the million dollar view? I don't pretend to have an answer, but it's interesting reading.
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You have to wonder if a LNG terminal at Long Beach will be any more of a hazard than the refineries that are already there. As it is, an earthquake of sufficient magnitude could turn the refinery there into a nuke-sized fireball.
Your post reminds us of the dismal choices we will have to make here in Chicago in the years ahead. People will always take the easy road, and the dreadful prospect of returning to coal furnaces looms. People of my mother's generation remember the blanket of coal smog that used to lay over every midwestern city, and how thermal inversions would make your eyes burn and send hundreds of people to the hospitals with serious respitory problems. Expanding nuclear has hazards, but the thought of returning to coal is far worse.
Yet nuclear is off the table for now, given Exelon's proven incompetence in operating their nuclear facilities. Also, building as many plants as we will need to power our transportation and heat will be trememdously costly, yet what other choice is there? Coal really is not an acceptable alternative, and neither is doing without heat or electricity for half the population or more. That will surely happen if we don't address the situation now.
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