Japan has announced it is significantly reducing its greenhouse gas reduction target. It now aims to achieve a 3.8% cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 versus 2005 levels. The new target amounts to a 3.1% increase from 1990 levels, a sharp reversal from the 25% reduction target.
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Eclipse Now on Rosie Barnes on Off-shore… False Progress on Rosie Barnes on Off-shore… Eclipse Now on If you enjoyed “Leave th… elizaphanian on If you enjoyed “Leave th… Eclipse Now on Michaux on Germany My political persuasion
Eclipse Now 
What you have to realise is that industrial civilisation is on its last legs. It can have no more than ten years left……. maybe far less if the FIRST horseman of the apocalypse, economic collapse hits first.
The SECOND horseman will be peak ALL fossil fuels/Uranium ~2017
The THIRD horseman, coming far far sooner than anyone anticipated (50 years!!) is Climate Change
The FOURTH horseman is the nail in the coffin, COLLAPSE…….
Peak uranium? Really? 😉 Pull the other one. There’s enough on land for 50,000 years and enough in our oceans for hundreds of millions of years. You may as well think of it as renewable because continental grind and erosion will top up the uranium in seawater faster than we can use it. We can extract uranium from seawater for $300 a kilo, and one kg is enough to power a whole human lifespan, cradle to grave, including nuclear synthesised fuels for transport, including flying. Just today’s nuclear WASTE could run the world for 500 years. You’ve got some catching up to do! But I can’t believe you’d try and push your doomerism on me when I saw the consequences. I met with the father of the boy your world-view killed. Why are you so hooked on this stuff? YES, the world is in a serious state, but NO, you DO NOT KNOW THE FUTURE! We could nuke ourselves back to the stone age tonight, or be on Mars and Venus in 20 years: we just don’t know!
The first horseman, the GFC, proved what a dampener on oil demand it is. America dropped their oil consumption 25% without collapsing into anarchy and mayhem.
The second just bores me: as prices rise, EV’s and bikes and trains and solar and wind and nukes will all become more competitive, and don’t tell me there isn’t enough energy left to do the job: that’s just pathetic.
The third is the most serious, but if forced to, we can paint the sky white for far less than the global fossil fuel companies ALREADY receive in kickbacks and stop global warming in it’s tracks. It’s not my favourite solution, because there are side effects. But America could EASILY afford to run that scheme alone.
So I’m not convinced. It’s serious, but you do NOT know the future.
Seriously dude, are you still trying to justify your mid-life tree-change to yourself, or the fact that a kid in your doomer group killed himself?
YOU are missing the point….. once the PRIMARY sources of energy, OIL and COAL become unaffordable and/or too scarce, everything stops happening. The truth is merely too inconvenient. Watch this:
Even if the coal and oil and natural gas are at peak there are still a couple of decades of energy left. That energy will be gradually and increasingly expensive, resulting in both less demand (encouraging the shift to bikes and EV’s and rail) andalternatives like higher ERoEI nuclear energy. The primary energy from that is unbelievable. Breeder reactors turn waste into fuel at ERoEI’s even early oil could only dream of.
Further to the comment above:
1. Peak uranium? When today’s waste could run the world for 500 years? Tell him he’s dreaming.
“ Barry Brook:…. So instead of getting less than 1% of the energy out of uranium, these fast reactors get about 99.8% of the energy out of it which means they’re incredibly more efficient in terms of using the uranium resource. And actually we’ve mined enough uranium already to run the whole world in these reactors for about 500 years.
Robyn Williams: So the old argument about running out of uranium isn’t on any more?
Barry Brook: We may run out in 50,000 or so years if we powered the whole world by uranium, but then we’ve got about four times as much thorium to use as well. So the argument that we’ll run out of uranium is a dead duck.”
Uranium from seawater could run the world for hundreds of millions of years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Seawater
2. It takes for or 5 years to build a nuke? Nukes are too expensive, who is going to pay for them? Both of these arguments are related, and both are baloney. It’s like condemning the airline industry because the Hindenberg exploded.
How long does it take to make a car, or how much does a car cost? It depends. Are we talking about a one-of-a-kind hand crafted Bentley classic, or an off the production line Hyundai? Today’s nukes can be modularised and put up on the production line. They can then be trucked to site and clipped together like so much super-sized lego. It’s just plain disingenuous to rely on the too long’ or ‘too expensive’ arguments. It does not have to be that way.
3. Spent fuel rods? Are you SERIOUS! This guy has NO IDEA what he’s talking about. The fuel can be reprocessed in an INTEGRATED Fast Reactor, and just today’s nuclear waste is worth $30 TRILLION dollars as a resource because it could run the world for 5 centuries. So we’re just going to *store* these ‘spent fuel rods’? That would be like digging up your best sweet oil, refining it into petroleum, and then burying it somewhere for decades! That would be retarded! Instead, these fuel rods can be reprocessed and USED! Waste = fuel, get it? As for Simon saying “Until someone comes up with a solution, I just don’t think nuclear is viable, ” well, until he’s done some more reading on the EBR2 which was built in the 1960’s for crying out loud, and how it *uses* nuclear waste as fuel, I don’t think Simon’s TALK is viable!