Which Country Will Achieve True Sustainability First?

[WhoWee]

...um, someone still has to pay for those incentives with higher taxes.

While it's true, the person making the investment and taking the incentives would pay less. It's also true that their investment would result in a number of economically stimulative transactions resulting in a profit for the manufacturers, installation companies, and others - along with payroll taxes at those companies. Also, the electricity generated by the solar installation would cost less to generate and not consume resources. However, I'm uncertain as to the rate the utility would credit to the generator - it should be reduced to lower the cost of production.

 

[WhoWee]

My point was that incentives to produce and make a profit that can lower costs to everyone is more advantageous than creating a pollution credit exchange that penalizes everyone and makes a handful of traders mega-wealthy - unless of course you happen to be one of those traders.

 

[Al68]

Many nations, including the U.S., are "able" to do this now, but don't due to government regulation. The U.S. has, for practical purposes, an unlimited supply of Uranium for power production, and can easily grow enough food using only a small fraction of its land resources.

Both are currently limited by government, not nature.

They are limited by neither government nor nature, but by free market forces. There's no real need for new nuclear power plants or new farms, because existing plants and farms produce enough cheap energy and food, and there are many third-world countries with vast reserves of cheap fossil fuels they have no need for. Government could _force_ the country to be "sustainable", but right now the market does not see the need to be such.

This is a good point, but I think the OP was asking about being self-sustainable, and the U.S. currently relies on imported oil while it doesn't need to.

The "market forces" you refer to are responding to the fact that government regulation makes some energy sources more expensive than others, so they aren't really "free market forces" in the traditional sense.

But, you're still right, the U.S. could easily be self sustaining with or without nuclear power. But, in the long run, we just won't have any practical alternative to nuclear power, so there is every reason to advance the technology sooner rather than later. It's pretty amazing how well nuclear power can already compete, considering it's a technology in its infancy.

 

[hamster143]

But, you're still right, the U.S. could easily be self sustaining with or without nuclear power. But, in the long run, we just won't have any practical alternative to nuclear power, so there is every reason to advance the technology sooner rather than later. It's pretty amazing how well nuclear power can already compete, considering it's a technology in its infancy.

We have no idea what will or will not be practical in the long run. 30 years ago, solar was not practical at all, today solar panels are already cheap enough to start making sense, and there's a good chance that they'll get cheaper. Conversely, fusion has been touted as a promising, abundant and cheap source of energy since 1950's, and it's still as far from the practical implementation as it was then.

All we know is that we have enough coal for at least 50 years, and, when it becomes rare enough, an alternative solution will inevitably present itself. We should continue funding the research into solar, nuclear and fusion, but an attempt to switch away from coal now would only make us poorer and energy more expensive than it could have been.

I can draw an analogy with colonization of Mars. Will there be a human colony on Mars in 2100? Most likely, yes. We don't know what technology will be used to put it there, but our descendants will figure something out. That does not mean that we should spend $200 billion trying to put the colony there right now, using ICBM-derivative chemical rockets.