74 comments on Sustainability, Energy, and Health
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74 comments on Sustainability, Energy, and Health
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GAIA Host Collective
The December 11th episode of David Suzuki's The Nature of Things looks to Europe for evidence of sustainable development. You can view the entire show at:
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/natureofthings/2008/suzukidiaries/
Cheers,
Paul
I'm not sure how much credibility Suzuki has when talking about sustainable development given his stubborn opposition to nuclear power. The end result of such policy promotion has allways served to increase the capacity of coal.
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_Change/Energy/Nuclear.asp
One of the core tenets of sustainability is to not produce long lived toxic substances that build up over decades faster than they can be converted into non-toxic substances. So there is no contradiction in his position.
He is arguing we use wind and natural gas instead (not coal).
One of the core tenets of sustainability is to not produce long lived toxic substances that build up over decades faster than they can be converted into non-toxic substances. So there is no contradiction in his position.
The core tenet of sustainability is no opulation growth. What has Suzuki proposed to stop population growth in Canada?
Canada's fertility rate of 1.7 births per woman is already well below replacemnt.
First, for a country like Canada that has immigration, just giving a figure for birth rate, is obviously incorrect. Second, per this info,
http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/populationgrow.htm
Canada is not even at replacement level regarding birth rate. It says the growth rate is .3% internally, and .6 from immigration, given a total population growth rate of .9%. Now the population pollyannas will say - "But that means Canada won't double in population for 77 years". But however much you want to ignore or poo poo population growth, it is not sustainable. So if sustainability is coming out of one side of your mouth, population control better be coming out of the other. But even more shocking, it brings no benefits to the majority. It's major benefit is to landowners and developers (and the politicians they choose to bribe) who get to reap the gains that population growth brings to land prices and the demand it creates for new construction. Yet the negatives of population growth fall on everyone. The overcrowding, traffic congestion, pollution, wage depression, resource depletion, resource price increases and others. It continues to amaze me how everywhere - save some rich enclaves - they let population growth continue to ruin things, and yet the people in all these places all shrug and sigh and say "well, that's progress. you can't do anything about it."
Until governments begin to remove it, CO2 from natural gas burning is indeed building up faster than it is being converted into relatively non-toxic substances such as bicarbonate.
The noted shill has recently said,
... as if continuing to rely on nuclear fuels, in which his behaviour would suggest he has no financial interest, were not entirely different in all the mentioned respects from continuing to rely on much more costly, much more tax-lucrative fossil fuels, tax lucre that he lives off.
--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be tamed)
Hi Dezakin,
Personally, I don't consider Dr. Suzuki's credibility to be diminished in any way because of this, and in the context of Canada's somewhat chequered experience with its CANDU reactors, one might reasonably look to other alternatives such as industrial co-generation, district heating, wind, small hydro, biomass and so on. In addition, we Canadians waste enormous amounts of electricity and have done relatively little to address this; let's at least try to make better use of what we already have before embarking on an expensive campaign to add new capacity.
Cheers,
Paul
Please people, when discussion wind generation, stop comparing 1 kw installed wind capacity to 1 kw installed capacity of any other source. They are NOT equivalent, and if you don't know what the actual equivalence ration for useful estimating is, you're not qualified to be in the discussion.
Hi lengould,
Did I make such a claim?
Cheers,
Paul
Implied.
Then, with all due respect, you read more into my statement than intended. Each of the alternatives I noted will have their individual availability and capacity factors. Of Ontario's twenty nuclear reactors, sixteen are currently operational, two will not return to service due to their poor economic performance (Pickering A's Units 2 and 3) and two more will be offline until 2009/2010 due to multi-billion dollar refurbishments (Bruce A's Units 1 and 2). Note that Pickering A and Bruce A's capacity factors for the period spanning 1997 to 2003 is as follows:
Pickering A
Unit 1 - 87.97%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%
Unit 2 - 64.23%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%
Unit 3 - 65.34%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%
Unit 4 - 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 18.88%
Bruce A
Unit 1 - 20.57%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%
Unit 2 - 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%
Unit 3 - 57.24%, 85.6%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%
Unit 4 - 39.9%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 13.83%
Cheers,
Paul