> Are you, like me, down with thorium reactor research? Or do you think
> it's wind, solar, hydro or bust?
In general, in principle, sure. But that's cheap, like detesting aggression. What are the principled objections you hear, anyway? Or is it more like an axiom?
I can't say that I've kept up on the details of developments in nuclear power except to note that the arguments for the new seem to be copy-and-pasted from the arguments for the old, often with a freakonomics-friendly, conventionally unconventional wisdom-inspired undercurrent of delight in sticking it to the tree huggers. So I don't often see arguments either way that are reliably divorced from a raft of cultural underpinnings, rather than make some attempt at serious wonkery.
But scraping down to unprincipled objections, consider what Amory Lovins -- an ever market-friendly energy policy geek whose battle cry for decades has been been a very un-hairshirty "cold beer and hot showers" -- has to say: that even the new variations can't survive without subsidies, so why not subsidize the already proven solutions with fewer regrets?
http://rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-07_NuclearSameOldStory
> As much trouble as suggesting that there's still room for serious
> climate change skepticism (not denial-ism, mind you, which is an
> entirely different thing, but scientifically-based analysis of gaps in
> our understanding of climate -- the sorts of gaps discussed by people
> like Garth Paltridge).
Out of curiosity I searched around for some account of Paltridge, who doesn't seem to have created much of a stir in blogistan. After wikipedia comes his entry in sourcewatch:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Garth_Paltridge
A representative snippet: ------------------------------------------------ [....]
In _Climate_Capers_ [2009] Paltridge wrote that "It has not be solidly established, and it is certainly not accepted by a majority of scientists as proven fact, that global warming from atmospheric carbon dioxide will be large enough to be seriously noticeable - let alone large enough to be disastrous ... Even accepting for the sake of the argument that some significant degree of global warming may be observed in the future, it is certainly not he consensus of the majority of scientists that the actual impact on humans will be significant - or indeed that it will be detrimental."[28]
[...]
In the last chapter, Paltridge trots out a lot of the traditional global warming conspiracy theories, claiming that the "warmists" have hidden agendas. Warmists either like the idea of carbon cap-and-trade because it would be "the first step towards global government", or they are socialists who want to "force a redistribution of wealth both within and between nations", or they are "powerbrokers" who see emissions trading as a path to the sort of power that used to be wielded the major religions, or they are politically correct and driven by "a need for public expression of their own virtue".[31]
[....] ------------------------------------------------
...which, provided that that is a fair account of his views, certainly sounds like old wine, and not in a good way. I know you (Dwayne) take the matter seriously, so I'm curious what you've found compelling by him.
-- Andy