Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

governance S 29
• Costs to human health,
• Costs of all federal, state, and local subsidies, including levies
not collected,
• Costs of insurance against potentially catastrophic failure, and
• Social impacts, especially to the poor.
It makes no sense whatsoever to choose policies that switch from
potentially catastrophic problems to those that are merely ruinous.
Proposals for “clean coal,” for example, ought to be evaluated
against all of the effects of mining on land, water, and people,
as well as the costs and uncertainties of sequestering carbon in
perpetuity at a cost that competes fairly with all other alternatives.
20 Similarly, consideration of nuclear power must include the
subsidies for fuel enrichment and the costs of insurance against
accidents, decommissioning power plants, and storage of highlevel
wastes in perpetuity, as well as the civil liberty implications
of securing the nuclear fuel cycle and guarding its waste products
for thousands of years, the effects on weapons proliferation,
and an analysis of the risk of catastrophic failure on a Chernobyl
scale, whether by acts of God, human error, or malice. 21 In short,
compared to every other choice nuclear power is slow, expensive,
dangerous, incompatible with democracy, and uncompetitive
with benign, cheaper, and more agile alternatives. All energy
choices, however, must be measured against the potential for radically
increased effi ciency at the point of end use, distributed solar
technologies, and better design of communities, neighborhoods,
and public transport that would eliminate the need for a large
fraction of current fossil energy use.
Second, under the multiple stresses described above, it is likely
that economic contraction, not expansion, will become the norm.
If so, many things that we associate with economic growth will
be at risk. Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman, for one, argues
that broad-based economic growth is directly related to the moral
advancement of society, by which he means greater opportunity,