Selling Our Safety - Revisited

Oh Crap! Why can't things be that easy? Why I didn't think of this before, I don't know. An additional consideration to the nuclear proliferation question is the environment. If we force India to continue to rely on carbon based energy, such as coal, we will continue to damage our environment at a point in time where we are increasingly approaching the "tipping point" in controlling global warming.

An excellent book regarding this topic is The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery. Throughout the book he points out the evidence that our global climate is changing at rates that are unimaginable. The main idea is this, in just a few years (about 8) the world will reach a point in damaging the environment that it will be too late to do anything to correct the damage. In this regard he is specifically referring to the polar icecaps. He points out that ice has a greater albedo than water (that is, reflects more of the sun's rays). Ice reflects about 90% of the sun's energy while water absorbs about 90% of the sun's energy. Since air is not directly heated by the sun but is instead heated by the radiational cooling of the earth's surface, greater absorption of the sun's energy by water will cause a steady increase in global tempertures. He estimates, that at the current rate, enough ice will have melted to creat an irreversible condition where no human efforts at conservation will allow us to reverse the effects. In other words, we will be unable to prevent further melting of the icecaps and eventually we will see no ice at either the north or south pole. The effects are uncountable from changing and more severe weather patterns to extinctions of uncountable numbers of species. All of which would have profound effects on individual and global economies. So basically, either way we are at risk.

And I was worried about the gas prices!