The Keystone XL Pipeline shows little sign of going away. Despite the Obama administration’s decision to reject the first proposal, it is widely expected that TransCanada will submit a revised plan in the coming months. And in the meantime, the pipeline continues to attract powerful backers and opponents. Former President Bush has called it a “no-brainer” and Joe Nocera has written two columns defending the pipeline in the New York Times (column 1; column 2). Many have argued as vociferously against the pipeline, including environmentalist Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org) and a group of Nobel Peace Prize winners including the Dalai Lama.

I have already written that I agree with the pipeline’s opponents. Given that pipelines are like marriages, I do not believe this is a good soul mate for America when the long-term implications are considered. But since we can expect these issues to be discussed repeatedly in coming months, it is worth taking the time to separate fact from fiction.

Fact: Stopping the Keystone Pipeline will not prevent global warming

Though the Keystone Pipeline is capable of transporting large quantities of oil — up to 590,000 barrels per day – and tar sand oil is more polluting than conventional crude, this pipeline is not the climate end game. The maximum capacity of the pipeline is only 3 percent of current U.S. consumption (roughly 19 million barrels per day) and 0.7 percent of global consumption (roughly 85 million barrels per day). This has a major carbon footprint but is only one among many of the climate challenges we face. In order to address climate change, we will need a wide-ranging response that addresses issues far beyond the Keystone Pipeline.

Fiction: America needs this oil

Americans waste a huge amount of oil. It has recently been estimated that 350 million barrels of oil (nearly a million barrels of oil a day — a greater amount than the capacity of the Keystone Pipeline) is wasted on food that is thrown out (the oil is used in fertilizers, tractors, long-haul trucks, and by consumers to drive to grocery stores). American drivers waste an estimated 1.9 billion gallons of fuel (roughly equivalent to 45 million barrels of oil) in congested traffic every year. Simply making sure that all tires were properly inflated could save 1.2 billion gallons of fuel per year, another 28 million barrels. Efficiency improvements like better insulation and hybrid vehicles could achieve further savings while putting money back in people’s pockets. We do not need more barrels of oil; we need to patch the leaks in the barrels we are using.

Fact: We can weaken OPEC by reducing consumption

One of the frequent defenses of the Keystone Pipeline is that it will prevent American dollars from flowing to the Middle East. The problem with this view is that oil is a fungible commodity. If the United States shifts its fuel mix to absorb less oil from OPEC and more from Canada, the extra oil from OPEC will be absorbed by international markets. OPEC nations will still continue to profit. As basic economics tells us, lowering consumption lowers the demand curve, thereby acting to decrease the market price of oil. This means that all OPEC nations will receive a lower price for their oil regardless of where it is purchased, arguably a better outcome for American foreign policy than simply shifting the fuel mix.

Fiction: Tar sand oil is not significantly worse for climate change than conventional oil

Some pipeline advocates are citing a recent IHS-CERA study that argues tar sand oil produces only 6 percent more carbon than conventional crude. This is an overly optimistic estimate from an industry-affiliated group that is not consistent with other findings. Tar sands must be mined with giant trucks and then heat is applied in order to separate the bitumen from the sands, thereby increasing the carbon footprint. A more reasonable estimate of 20-25% is found in a detailed analysis by Stanford Assistant Professor Adam Brandt. Moreover, a recent report notes that the overall impact may even be significantly worse than previously thought because tar sand companies are replacing boggy peat lands that absorb large amounts of carbon with dry forests when they are finished mining. We do not have determinative data yet to calculate the exact difference between tar sand oil and conventional crude, but there is little doubt that it is much higher than 6 percent.

Fact: We cannot prevent climate change if we cannot say no to projects like the Keystone Pipeline

Proponents of the Keystone Pipeline are correct to note that stopping its construction will not halt global warming. And the project does offer some virtues including job creation and increased energy security. But an inversion of this statement is also true. If we cannot agree to say no to projects that will entrench the use of fossil fuel energy — even if they offer some short-term benefits — we cannot hope to prevent global warming. Stopping the Keystone Pipeline, therefore, is important because it signals a willingness to make difficult decisions in the present that will have significant benefits in the future.

At the end of the day, we do not want more oil for its own sake — we want it for the things it does for us. American consumers want convenient personal transport and warm homes, not oil. Politicians want to achieve energy security and less dependence on hostile governments. These goals can be achieved with less oil, and at less cost, through conservation. Rather than building the Keystone Pipeline, we will be better served by trimming the fat from our current energy system.

The U.S. State Department announced on January 19th that they would deny the current application for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry petroleum from Canada’s oil sands through the Midwest to refineries in Texas. It was a good decision. The pipeline’s proponents will likely submit a revised proposal soon. It should also be rejected.

Pipelines are like marriages: they are meant to last several decades. We have to ask ourselves not only whether we want such a pipeline now, we have to determine whether we want to spend the rest of our lives with it.

Such a long-term commitment means asking hard questions, ones we typically reserve for such momentous occasions.

We often think of technologies as disposable. Smartphones are usually obsolete within three years as sleeker and sexier phones entice us. If a laptop survives five years, it’s practically a relic. Even cars rarely last longer than a dozen years. When a technology is old, it is replaced with something newer and better. In essence, we are used to having casual dating relationships with our gadgets.

These short time frames drive us to make decisions about technologies based upon our needs in the present. And why not? The consequences of a bad choice are relatively minor. After a year or two, we can discard the bad choice and hopefully make a wiser selection next time.

The same is not true for pipelines. Once built, energy infrastructures typically last for generations. More than half of the coal-fired power plants in the United States are over 40 years old. No large oil refinery has been built in America since 1976; instead, old ones have been expanded. Utility companies love old infrastructure because it has usually been paid off and is grandfathered into old rules of regulation. They are the cash cows of the energy industry.

Most debates about the Keystone pipeline are focused on the present. If you listen to the advocates of the Keystone pipeline, you’ll hear claims mostly about the pipeline’s short-term benefits. They emphasize the creation of lucrative construction jobs and access to a source of oil that is controlled by a friendly government.

These sound like compelling benefits. After all, it’s hard to be against more jobs and lower revenues for hostile governments (though as opponents note, it’s easy to be against the environmentally destructive manner in which tar-sand oil is produced and the big oil money that is behind the project). But when dealing with decisions about infrastructures designed to last many decades, we cannot focus exclusively on the present. We must consider whether we would still be happy with our decision in twenty, forty, and even sixty years. From this long-term perspective, the Keystone pipeline looks worse and worse. Consider the following:

1) Once the pipeline is complete, the jobs dedicated to its construction will be gone. The number of permanent positions will be quite small because pipelines are highly automated technologies that require only minimal labor to operate. The pipeline will not be a significant source of long-term employment.

2) Overwhelming scientific evidence suggests that climate change will be a more direct and difficult problem in the coming decades. Because tar-sand oil requires enormous quantities of energy (as well as water and land) to produce, it releases more greenhouse gases than conventional crude oil (estimates vary from as low as 5-15% in a study by industry insiders to as high as 37% in some literature reviews). As climate change gets worse, increasing our use of tar-sand oil will become a progressively worse idea.

3) The longer a pipeline operates, the greater the risk of an environmentally disastrous spill. At one level, this is a straightforward risk probability: more time operating means more chances for something to go wrong. And there are many things that might go wrong including a natural disaster like an earthquake or tornado rupturing the pipe, broken equipment, human error, or even sabotage. But it is also the case that failure rates on all technologies increase as they age. Metal experiences fatigue, connections can get brittle, and these degradations make spills more likely. Over time, therefore, the pipeline will become increasingly dangerous to the areas through which it passes.

So if the present problems with the Keystone pipeline are not enough, the long-term drawbacks should tip the scales towards having cold feet. Moreover, the Keystone pipeline is not the only option. There are a number of more compelling infrastructure partners that we might want to consider — technologies that will help produce and transport energy sources with lower levels of pollution. For example, it would be much wiser to invest in a proposed transmission grid to bring offshore wind power to the eastern seaboard or more capacity to deliver Iowa’s wind energy to markets. These projects would enhance our use of renewable energy, not fossil fuels. They offer a far more suitable long-term match.

Remember: we date our gadgets, but we marry our infrastructure. This is not the pipeline that we want to bring home to meet our parents, raise children with, or rely on for the rest of our years. This pipeline is not worth marrying.

This just in: Exxon Mobil has made a multi-billion dollar acknowledgement that climate change is real and is happening now.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for them to admit this, though. Exxon would like you to believe that climate change is neither real nor urgent. That is why they have spent millions of dollars over the last several years funding climate skeptics and fighting legislation that would regulate the emissions of greenhouse gases. When you hear climate skeptics speak, there’s a good chance that Exxon money is in their pocket.

Actions, however, speak louder than words. And Exxon’s most recent action was a thunderclap.According to reports, Exxon has just signed an extensive deal with Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, to develop promising offshore oil and gas deposits in the Arctic Ocean. The companies will begin by investing $3.2 billion to explore in the Kara Sea, with the potential of increasing the investment to $500 billion in the future. Exxon is so convinced of the potential of these sites that it is giving Rosneft ownership rights in several of its global properties to complete the deal.

Large deposits of gas and oil have been known to exist in the Arctic Ocean for decades. So why did they make this deal now? One key thing has changed: the arctic ice is melting rapidly. The Kara Sea has typically been covered by ice floes nine months of the year or more, making commercial development of its resources unprofitable. But for the last several years, the extent and duration of the arctic ice has been diminishing, a phenomenon the vast majority of scientists believe to be caused by climate change. Suddenly, oil and gas exploration in the Arctic Ocean is looking far more attractive. Exxon has realized that a warming planet offers some new opportunities for profit and is adjusting its strategic decisions accordingly.

Exxon is not the only big oil company whose actions show it believes climate change to be real. British Petroleum made a major play for developing the same resources several months ago, but the proposed deal was rejected by a coalition of BP’s other Russian business partners. Not only does big oil know climate change is happening, it is planning its future around it.

That does not mean Exxon is likely to publicize this knowledge. Despite issuing a tepid statement acknowledging anthropogenic climate change in 2007 and promising to cease funding anti-climate change groups in 2008, Exxon remains up to its old tricks. Freedom of Information Act requests have revealed a continued pattern of funding for climate skeptics as well as collaborations with the conservative Koch Industries to support legislation that removes any restrictions on carbon emissions.

We should no longer be distracted by these words. Exxon is a smart and savvy company, and even if its actions are reprehensible, they make sense in a political system that allows corporations to pay millions of dollars to avoid costly regulations. Blaming Exxon for these activities is like blaming a raccoon for going through your trash. They’re simply responding to available opportunities.

This is exactly why we should focus on actions, not words. This deal is a multi-billion dollar investment predicated on Exxon’s belief that the planet is warming. It is one of the most powerful admissions of the reality of climate change imaginable. Michele Bachmann and the other Republican presidential candidates cannot blame this on disconnected academic scientists or members of a liberal conspiracy. This is the embodiment of free market American capitalism saying climate change is real.

All this begs the question: If Exxon Mobil believes climate change is worth acting on now, isn’t it time for the rest of us to follow suit?

What caused the Gulf oil spill? To describe how it happened is easy enough. Most people generally agree with the following series of events. On April 20, 2010, a huge fire erupted on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, killing 11 and injuring 17 others. The fire was most likely caused when a large pocket of methane gas came up the pipes from the underwater well and exploded on the rig. After burning uncontrollably for a day and a half, the rig sank into the ocean. Oil soon started flowing out of the uncapped well in large but undetermined amounts. To date, British Petroleum and its subsidiaries have been unable to stop the flow of oil despite several attempts.

This description of events does not, however, explain what went wrong deep in the Gulf of Mexico. Was the spill caused by a failed blowout preventer? Are regulators or oil companies to blame? Is this an inevitable outcome of a society dependent on fossil fuel energy? Which explanation we choose will have vital consequences for our response to the crisis. More than any other factor, how we come to understand the Gulf oil spill will structure how we attempt to solve it.

We are accustomed to thinking of problem-solving as a two-stage process where a situation is investigated first and solutions are developed afterwards. However, these two steps are not independent: the way that a problem is defined creates a particular view of what the proper solutions are and who is responsible for implementing them. Problems and solutions are mutually constitutive.

We can already see several possible explanations for the Gulf oil spill circulating through society. Here I lay out four problem framings with their accompanying solutions.

First, this could be considered a failure of technology: the blowout preventer is to blame. On this view, the safety device installed by BP and its subsidiaries to close the well in the case of an accident did not work correctly. If we understand the problem to be a failed blowout preventer, the solution is straightforward: design better safety devices and pass regulations requiring their use. The responsible parties would then be the oil companies (to develop the better technologies) and the relevant regulatory agencies (to develop stronger regulations).

Second, the situation could be explained as a result of capture: the cozy relationships between industry and regulators that lead to weak regulations and lax enforcement. The fact that the Mineral Management Service (MMS) was responsible for both regulating off-shore drilling companies and collecting revenue payments from them created a financial incentive against effective regulation. MMS officials encouraged drilling to increase revenues instead of enforcing strict safety regulations. The solution on this view is an independent regulatory structure, a reform that is already underway (on May 20, 2010, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar signed a secretarial order breaking MMS into separate divisions for energy development, enforcement, and revenue collection). This reading of the problem requires actions by government regulators.

Third, the oil spill can be seen as the result of corporate hubris: a rapacious company acting to maximize its profits at any cost. On this view, BP, in its ongoing quest to maximize shareholder value, rushed into deepwater drilling without adequate understanding of the potential risks. Moreover, the company cut costs by minimizing investment in safety equipment and overlooked the reports of engineers who raised warning bells. The proper solution under this framing is a series of punitive measures against BP and its subsidiaries including lawsuits to recoup the costs of cleanup, the revoking of off-shore drilling licenses, increased taxes, and boycotts of BP fueling stations. Most of these actions would be taken by Congress and regulators; consumers would be responsible for the boycotts.

Fourth, the oil spill can be seen as the result of excessive social dependence on fossil fuel energy. Given the world’s insatiable demand for oil, big spills can be seen as an inevitable outcome. No amount of safety equipment or measures can prevent some form of accident from happening when complex technological systems, unpredictable environments, and capitalism interact. On this reading, the proper response is to wean society from fossil fuel energy. Practically all members of society would be called to action: government agencies to fund renewable energy development, put a fair price on carbon, and require renewable energy use; corporations to develop new energy technologies; and consumers to alter modes of consumption.

If American history is any guide, it is fair to assume that policymakers will favor the technological fix. Americans have long been captivated by the potential of technology to fix problems. Moreover, such a solution has two substantial benefits. First, it deflects blame away from human actors, and second, it is easy to accept because it places responsibility on a relatively narrow set of actors to solve a clearly defined problem. If such a reading of the problem becomes commonly accepted, we can expect that the oil spill will play out similarly to the investigations of the NASA Challenger disaster in 1986. A defective o-ring was identified as the culprit, setting the stage for a set of technological fixes such as redesigning the rocket boosters. Although some investigations pointed out flaws in the organizational culture, NASA created a band-aid solution to these critiques by setting up a few oversight boards. The problem, and therefore the solution, was assumed to be technological in nature.

For those who believe there are deep interconnections between energy and society, a technical fix to the current crisis is clearly inadequate. As many critics pointed out, NASA’s failure to address deeper and more systemic organizational problems contributed to the disintegration of the shuttle Columbia in 2003. The current crisis is an opportunity for Americans to reflect on the interactions between their personal consumption decisions, several decades of neoliberal deregulation of energy markets, a pervasive ideology of economic growth, and the environment in which we live. Such an approach has the potential to lead to meaningful changes in the ways we produce, transport, and consume energy. However, this can only happen if society comes to accept that more went wrong in the Gulf of Mexico than a broken blowout preventer.

For better or worse, the solutions to the Gulf oil spill disaster will largely be a product of the way the problem is defined. If we care to get the solutions right, then we should pay close attention to how we define what went wrong.

(Note: this column was originally posted on H-Energy on July 7, 2010 as part of a roundtable on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill).

Innovation is the watchword of our day. Listen to pundits on radios and televisions and you’ll hear a consistent message. We need innovative responses to urban poverty, the U.S. economy, and medical care. Name a hot topic, and you can find prominent spokespeople advocating the value of more innovation. Innovation has become our society’s default response to addressing social problems.

This is particularly true for our energy systems. Contemporary energy debates are littered with calls for more innovation. We need innovation because the United States is falling behind China in clean technology. We need innovation, we are told, in our collaborations between industry, government, and universities. We need innovation in small businesses, think tanks, and research institutions to generate the next generation of clean energy solutions.

On the surface, there seems to be little wrong with such claims. What is the problem with inventing better solutions, developing new technologies, or doing more with less? To take a position against innovation seems rather like being against puppies and apple pies. Well, to take this analogy further, puppies can pee on the floor and pie can make us fat, so perhaps such observations enable us to examine innovation more critically.

To put it bluntly, innovation is problematic because it has become a limiting perspective on the world around us. If you are a hammer, the world tends to look like a nail. Innovation has become our society’s hammer, and we are forgetting that we have other tools.

For example, appeals to innovation imply that we lack the knowledge, technologies, or skills to solve our problems. In today’s world, this is not always the case. We already know a great deal about how to address our energy problems. There are a wide variety of solutions we could implement today that require no innovation. We could pass a carbon tax, implement energy efficiency programs with existing technologies, and expand the distribution of renewable energy systems. None of these actions require innovation to implement. If we already know many things to do, then calls for innovation are problematic because they distract us from acting immediately on solutions already at our fingertips.

Another problem with innovation is that it advocates a particular set of relationships between government, the private sector, and the free market. In short, innovation is remarkably consistent with free-market principles, limited government, and a belief that the private sector will solve our problems. Innovation and neoliberalism complement each other to a surprising degree. However, this might not be the only set of relationships between government, markets, and industries that is beneficial. For example, many people have called for the U.S. to engage in a Manhattan or Apollo Project for renewable energy. The creation of the atomic bomb and the lunar mission, it should be remembered, were accomplished under a very different set of relationships between public and private than is popular in today’s rhetoric. Government officials directed large sources of capital, organized projects, and actively shaped the activities of hundreds of subcontractors. Centralized planning, rather than innovation, characterized these projects. Broadly speaking, such efforts succeeded and might work again. But the key point is that these projects were based on a different set of ideas about the right relations between public and private than are implicit in calls for innovation. An exclusive focus on innovation, therefore, diminishes the potential of other management approaches such as central planning to aid us in our efforts.

In sum, innovation is not a bad thing, but we need to use it more critically. In our current age, it is all too common to treat innovation as the solution to any problem. We would do much better if we retained a full set of tools and approaches for addressing issues. When the world calls for a hammer, we should use a hammer. But let’s not love the hammer so much that we turn the world into a nail.

The public release of a series of emails between climate scientists in November of 2009 created a widespread controversy. In and of itself, this is quite fascinating. In our anti-intellectual age, the fact that the correspondence of a small group of nerds became a topic of widespread debate is surprising, to say the least. For several weeks, the personal lives of climate scientists were discussed alongside the vacations, romances, and indiscretions of celebrities. In an unexpected twist, the climate scientists at the University of East Anglia and Paris Hilton suddenly had common ground on which to commiserate.

Climategate, as the scandal became known, provides no end of opportunities to reflect on the interconnections between science and society. Does the fact that scientists are not always nice people influence the ways we understand their knowledge claims? Why has there been so little media attention dedicated to the illegal hacking of private servers? When will society began to recognize more broadly that scientific knowledge production is a messy process and that deviations from the ideals of the scientific method are the norm, rather than the exception?

Here I want to focus on one particular aspect of climate science skepticism more generally: the curious focus by broad groups of people on the epistemological correctness of scientific claims. In most domains, the claims of scientists are largely ignored. When was the last time you overheard people talking heatedly about the protein folding patterns? In climate science, such claims are at the forefront. Why are people so animated about the alleged massaging of statistical data, the accuracy of tree ring evidence, and the soundness of Himalayan glacier melting estimates? Does this represent a sudden uptick of interest in science across broad segments of the public?

I doubt it. Instead, I think it is more useful to understand the debates over climate data as a proxy for deeper questions about the proper role of science in a democratic society.

Science is not simply a method for asking and answering questions about the natural world we live in. Our views about what science should be performed, who should fund it, and what we should do with the results reflect broader notions about what type of world we should live in. When we hear someone ask “how accurate are the models?” we should realize that they may be asking “who has the right to make policy-relevant knowledge?” as well. “Do predictions of glacial melting incorporate the latest findings?” can also mean “what type of local, national, and international governance is appropriate for addressing climate change?”

Let me spell out these distinctions with two hypothetical examples of how a climate scientist and a climate skeptic might approach the role of science in society. According to our imagined climate scientist, the following claims make sense: knowledge should be made by the best and the brightest; policy makers should base their actions on scientific facts; international government agencies are best capable of addressing a problem that is global in scale; society should act aggressively when scientists report risks; governments should impose whatever tax burden on society is deemed necessary to address the risk.

Our hypothetical climate skeptic adheres to a different view of the relationships between science and society: knowledge that can only be created and understood by a few is elitist and therefore untrustworthy; scientific evidence is one among a broad set of criteria for determining policy; actions taken by international governmental agencies may undercut local autonomy and self-rule; a conservative policy agenda will address the wide range of social problems better over time than knee-jerk reactions; the social costs of policies must be weighed against any potential benefits.

Clearly, there are many actors in climate science debates and they hold a wide variety of opinions not captured by this simple schematic. However, the point of this example is to show that how people understand facts is intimately linked to their conception of a good world. In other words, facts are normative. As a result, when we hear debates over the facts, we should be listening for the underlying conversations.

With these thoughts in mind, one of the unfortunate aspects of our current climate debates is that because the discussion is about scientific facts, we are missing chances to have broader discussions about a shared future. While humans have rarely managed to reach consensus about the best ways to live together in the world, such dialogue is all too rare in this day and age. If we were to discuss the relations between science and the state, our commitments to ourselves and future generations, and the best ways to achieve these goals, we might come a lot closer to addressing climate change than by focusing narrowly on the accuracy of scientific facts.

The fact that nuclear power is being counted on to improve the health of the planet should give us pause. For several decades, environmentalists identified nuclear energy as one of earth’s greatest dangers due to the handling and storing of radioactive waste and the possibility of plant meltdowns. In addition to its environmental risks, nuclear power has never been competitive economically. No nuclear power plant has been built in the United States since 1973, largely because public utilities have chosen to invest in cheaper options.

Even though nothing has been done to alleviate these environmental and economic concerns, nuclear energy is poised for a resurgence, as exemplified by New Jersey’s energy plan. The obvious explanation is global warming. Fears of a warming planet have reframed the environmental and economic worries of nuclear energy. The industry has been given new life because of the ability of nuclear energy to produce large quantities of electricity with comparably few greenhouse gas emissions (provisions in recent energy bills promising subsidies for nuclear power plants have helped as well).  

However, we should not lose sight of the fact that nuclear energy is only attractive because it is the lesser of several evils. This is not the same thing as being a good option. We need to ask ourselves how we got into a situation where our energy options are so limited that building an incredibly expensive and environmentally risky nuclear power plant makes sense.

How did we get here? Three sets of historical decisions have shaped our present position: heavy government subsidy of nuclear energy, a failure to make proactive decisions surrounding climate change, and a lack of investment in renewable energy technologies.

First and foremost, the only reason nuclear power can enter contemporary energy debates is that the industry has received tens of billions of dollars of investment from the U.S. government over the last sixty years. Much of this funding was political in nature: after dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. government was eager to show that the most destructive technology ever constructed could also help society. The idea of a nuclear “swords to ploughshares” program justified the investment of billions of dollars in nuclear energy programs to elite policymakers. Even though the results rarely matched the hype, the continued government support of nuclear power ultimately enabled the industry to become relatively well-developed, if not fully financially solvent. The critical point to keep in mind is that without huge quantities of government funding, nuclear power would not be an option today.

The second historical thread is the failure of the United States and other industrialized nations to proactively address global warming. By the 1970s, and certainly by the beginning of the 1990s, there was an emerging scientific consensus that the atmospheric effects of burning fossil fuels were leading to a warming of the planet. The United States has paid almost no heed to these warnings (some nations, such as Europe and Japan have taken more aggressive steps towards reducing emissions, although rhetoric has exceeded reality most of the time). The failure to begin taking proactive steps despite clear scientific evidence has exacerbated the present situation, forcing us to investigate all options for reducing greenhouse gases, even nuclear power.

Third, and related to the above point, one of the most effective interventions would have been to invest heavily in renewable energy technologies to lessen dependence on fossil fuels. The ability of the government to invest heavily in developing energy technologies is proven by the example of nuclear energy. If some of those billions of dollars over the past sixty years had been invested in developing solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, and other renewable technologies, these technologies would be much more commercially developed. As a result, we could be in a position to derive a much greater part of our energy requirements from renewable technologies. Such investments would likely have made a goal of achieving 20% of New Jersey’s energy from renewables seem as pathetic as Bush’s latest climate policy.

These past decisions have shaped today’s reality. Since we cannot go back and change the past, the best we can do is to learn from it. The nuclear lesson is that whatever we do today will structure the options available to our children, for better or for worse. If we choose to continue on our present course, our children will inherit a world of resource scarcity and a considerably warmer planet. Hopefully we can do better. If we invest heavily in renewable energy technologies that have minimal environmental risks (and not all renewable energy technologies are equal in this regard—see my post on the problems of ethanol, for example) we have a chance to give the next generation a legacy of solutions to accompany the challenges we will undoubtedly leave them as well.

The past dealt the present a bad hand for dealing with climate change. It’s up to us to take proactive steps to stack the deck in favor of the future.