Indeed the coal and nuclear industries have their lobbyists, and there are states and regions that are dependent on coal mining economically. But if climate change is an urgent matter in the short to intermediate term, it may make sense to embrace it while investing R&D funds in the long-term problem of waste disposal.  In the meantime, the world is overwhelmingly dependent on coal, not just in the developed world but especially in the rapidly developing but poor nations of India and China.  If it is going to be burned, why not endeavor to burn it more cleanly?

We have to have a natural environment, but the way we live renders it inevitable that we will consume resources and do some environmental damage.  Environmental protection likely will be a matter of more or less, not all or nothing.  Nothing we can do will turn out to be utterly benign….

The criticism assumes that the fossil-fuel economy has in no way, shape, or form been subsidized. It’s true that any subsidies would extend back for so many decades that, for most of us, effectively they have been lost in the mists of history. Arguably, however, no such segment of the economy could come into being without government involvement. For instance, there are the chemical-engineering departments at the great land-grant universities, not to mention the interstate highway system. There is, furthermore, the defense budget — given that fossil fuels, especially oil, represent a strategic resource that must be moved around the world, since the fuel deposits may be half a world away from their ultimate consumers.

In this case, the “principled” free-market opposition to subsidies amounts to partisanship on behalf of one economic sector, and an effective refusal to permit any energy source save fossil fuels….

It just goes to show that little if anything we can do will turn out to be absolutely environmentally benign. Practically every such thing involves an intervention into the natural environment that does environmental damage. “Going green” will be a matter of more or less, rather than all or nothing….

Tuesday’s Washington Post reports: “Nuclear power — long considered environmentally hazardous — is emerging as perhaps the world’s most unlikely weapon against climate change, with the backing of even some green activists who once campaigned against it….”

The story cites the views of a climate-change skeptic associated with Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). Is this story a product of  NYT editor Bill Keller’s recently announced plans to monitor “opinion media”?

For responses from the blogosphere, click here….

It turns out that he already had a proposal on the public record — in an article in the August issue of Esquire magazine that has just come to my attention. “Every country should agree to spend 0.05 percent of its GDP on low-carbon energy R&D. The total global cost would be ten times greater than current spending on this research, yet ten times less than the cost of the Kyoto Protocol. Such an agreement could be the new Kyoto treaty for the world — only this protocol would actually make a difference.”

Here are today’s comments from a correspondent in Boston: “… suggesting that wind energy should eschew government subsidy and stand on its own in the marketplace is in direct contrast to how every other energy market operates. How much drilling and exploration would energy companies do without government tax incentives? We wouldn’t have any nuclear power plants if the government hadn’t spent billions on nuclear research and development.”

“If wind and solar energy were to be allotted the same amount of money that nuclear energy has gotten, we would be energy independent in a very short time. Up until now, green energy has received a fraction of what nuclear energy has received.”

“Oddly, conservative business and political interests bemoan government intervention while chances are they would be taking advantage of it. Without our government we wouldn’t have highways, railroads or airports. I can only imagine how our food supplies would be threatened without agriculture subsidies to the farm industry. The Internet was invented and developed by the government. The list of where government intervention has succeeded is long.”

“Bring on government intervention and we will all make money and be better off.”

My only reservation would be that, instead of farm subsidies, this correspondent would have done better to emphasize the R&D provided to the agribusiness sector by the land-grant colleges and universities….

According to the report, “U.S. officials and domestic suppliers have been concerned that the U.S. wouldn’t reap the full benefit of the country’s rapid expansion in renewable energy. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D., N.M.) has voiced concern that the U.S. has outsourced much of its clean-energy manufacturing capacity. As part of the stimulus bill earlier this year, he earmarked a $2.3 billion tax credit for domestic producers of clean-energy equipment.”

“There’s an abundance of natural gas. But it would take a new service station infrastructure before compressed gas could replace gasoline on a wide scale. The American auto fleet could resemble that of Europe with its smaller, more efficient vehicles, but that would take a decade or so.”