Marko Beljac – you have expressed it beautifully.
Edward de Bono taught us to look for “solution multiplying solutions” when we are faced with a problem.
By mindlessly following the Bush, Howard, fossil fuel, nuclear corporate line, we would be adopting a “problem multiplying solution”.

By now – the penny, dime, 5 cents – is beginning to drop in the minds of people who can think further than watching the sharemarket index.

The nuclear industry must grind to a halt – and quickly, as international pressure focuses on the need to go for energy efficiency and truly renewable clean energy sources.
Christina Macpherson www.antinuclearaustralia.com

Thanks Marco, your article makes much sense; The interdependency of our eco system on countless factors is obvious in the Macro environment and the example should easily extrapolate into our planet's ecology. Our so-called democracies are an impediment to reaching solutions when the leadership is incapable of grasping the message and is not answerable for their ignorance.

Christina,

That's a cool website you have. Did you see a paper by Robyn Lim for the Centre for Independent Studies that argued that Australia should have a uranium enrichment capacity for possible nuclear weapons?

Maracas,

I agree with your sentiments; you're right in a democracy they should be accountable.

I agree that our genes are from the jungle, and not yet adapted to a high tech society. Furthermore, our genes are selfish, and favor individual procreation, not group survivial.

Yet, I think global warming maybe a bad example of a species extinction event. Rather, it is an example of a "bottle-neck," where most of the population dies, and only a small number of survivers pro-create the next population-boom.

The problem of global warming is the game theory paradox "The Tragedy of the Commons," where if it is in each individual's interest to exploit a common resource, then rational self-interest brings about the over-exploitation of that resource, which is not in the best interest of the individual nor the group.

In other words, it is cheap to use the air as a dumping ground for the resulting GHG emissions from burning fossil fuel for energy, but if every individual exploits this resource, global warming will cause the individual and the group to be harmed.

Ironically, followed to the extreme, runaway global warming (human GHG emissions start a chain reaction which melts the methane hydrate-twice the carbon of all the fossil fuel in the world) will have to survive by going underground.

Unlike living above ground, living below ground would mean forming a much more restrictive authoritarian society (like missionaries cutting down the coconut and banana trees, forcing the natives to stop living like bohemians), leading to just the kind of favorable evolution that the article "Evolutionary suicide..." points to.

Let me add that super volcanos and large meteoroids also present a intermittent threat that living underground would help the human species survive.

I must admit anyone who talks of genes or evolution in this manner understands neither. No wonder so many people don't believe in the reality of evolution when the "scientific" viewpoint is presented so cartoonishly.

None of these doomsday scenarios are actually likely to happen. The major threat to the planet is certainly nuclear weapons, much more so than climate change. However noone can envisage a massive strike holocaust happening like they used to in the '50s-'80s, so even a few detonations are survivable. Climate change is not sudden, there will be plenty of time to move people if the coastlines change, it will definitely put a strain on "civilisation as we know it" and some species (depending on the scale of warming), but in the long run, it's not "evolutionary suicide", we won't cook there's a long way to go for anything like that. Local extinctions have been seen in many species including humans, but there is absolutely no evidence of a planetwide extinction event looming on the horizon for us. Unless you want to count those pesky asteroids.....

Yes Bugsy, the change is gradual,as it has always been ,over billions of years,all the more reason to take heed and not leave our descendents a barren desert.
I too am wary of a plunge into nuclear proliferation and I believe the issue of alternative power sources which are not likely to leave us with such a potentially deadly residue must be exhausted before we pursue a position of no return.
I also believe the rush to embrace nuclear power has more to do with wealth creation by the miners,Government royalty collectors, and power station constructors, than we simple folk who end up paying the ultimate price

bugsy wrote "but there is absolutely no evidence of a planetwide extinction event looming on the horizon for us. Unless you want to count those pesky asteroids....."

er... if you look at all the 'material relevant factors' you will see that we have whittled away at the dynamic balance of life sustaining nature to now where we have moved to the edge of the system where one catastrophe can topple our whole ecosystem...

eg in the past the forrests like amazon (the lungs of the world) used to produce some 40% of world o2 and now its daily rainfall has diminished, and stopped to drought. from factors like deforestation affecting critical tree density to lower air humidity to affect the self sustaining cycle of daily rain. We are relying on plankton to produce our only source of o2. A virulent virus that wipes out plankton, or out of control algae affecting most of the ocean and game over... for all o2 relying life forms on earth

If we go nuclear, murphys law applies. Something will eventually go wrong. If the mealtdown gets into our water table and underground water flow and spreads far and wide... game over as all life forms that depend on water will get radiated eg http://www.springerlink.com/content/372k7101tr402128/ of chernobyl affecting austrian water

So many examples exist to show we have put every life at the edge... smile though as now almost every person on the street has some awareness of this and so no destructive entity is going to get far without us noticing and acting to prevent further damage to earth which might include pulling the teeth out of these entities or enforcing an direct accountability...

Sam
Ps~keep your eye out on not just what the corporate media is parading, but more importantly what they are not as corporate interests used to rule and now look, see any of them accepting responsibility for foreseeable damage...

I keep hearing Doomesday scenarios from all the anti nuclear lobby, but I am yet to hear anyone come up with a practical alternative to supplying base load power in the next ten or twenty years. It is all very well condemning nuclear power as being a source of fissile material with which to make bombs, or Chenobyl type accidents. Have a look at the present state of Pebble Bed Reactor technology. It isn't too far off getting over those problems.

If all you anti nuclear geniuses out there can come up with some answers, then I will be glad to see nuclear power plants closed down, but if you want to reduce greenhouse emissions, there is currently no alternative that can be shown to work.

VK3AUU, I'm not anti-neuclear per se, but I have done a little homework on the subject. Pebble bed technology sounds great in theory, but my understanding is that it still has a mutitude of hurdles to overcome before becoming operational and therefore will be many years, if not in fact decades away.
That leaves us with current neuclear technology which, although it does work, continues to be plagued by cost and waste problems to which nobody has found a satisfactory answer. To make current neuclear technology even worse is the fact that so called "clean" neuclear is only possible by using very high grade neuclear fuel which is not only more difficult to mine and process, it's supply is rather limited. After the high grade fuel has been quickly expended, neuclear reactors will have to make do with lower grade fuel and the consequences that come with it, the biggest being CO2 emmissions similar to burning coal.
That being the case, why spend billions of tax payers money building neuclear power plants that will, in a short space of time, equal the CO2 output of coal fired plants? Not very clever. Then there's always the question of where to put the bloody things. None of them can be guaranteed to be anti terrorist. Better to face facts and start down a more sustainable way of life while we still have a chance to adapt. It's extremely foolish and selfish to suggest we can continue to keep on with our present greedy and self serving lifestyles.

A thoughtful item. Yes it is only a brief moment in the development of the human race, and all other species on this planet, plus some yet to be created. Neanderthal thinking and beliefs still reign supreme though. Like most seek God. So we are not that much further along from peering out of caves as yet.

What is disturbing of course is the apathy of Bugsy who can't see the problem(s). Bugsy will be staring into space wondering what went wrong seconds before he hits the window screen of life at 300 km per hour. We all know what the last thing to go through Bugsy's mind will be don't we. His derriere of course.

Doosday predictions.There's the climate, the tipping point has passed and changing light bulbs isn't going to reverse anything.

Most potential though lies in the hands of a moron or two. Bush has the access to create Doomsday and given his loss of support it is growing more likely he will use that power to show the US can still dominate. How many such lunatics have access to this same power? We don't really know do we? Cheney would have. Howard has a pop gun so we're not concerned there.

These people are supposedly leaders of the Free World. Yet they can't go anywhwere in public without shutting down all traffic and excluding all members of the public. Does that tell anyone what danger lurks for all of us? Just attend one of these visits and pull a cigarette lighter quickly from your pocket and see how many bullets head your way. Taser's, dogs, you will go down. Too late of course if you had any real intent but still.

Above all Mother Nature has her own plans and will let them loose as they develop. Man will never be able to predict or control this power. It's just nature and all we can do is try to adapt to it. Apparently. If we don't have the foresight to build pipelines from where the water is to where the water isn't what hope is there?

Airne,
You wrote "To make current nuclear technology even worse is the fact that so called "clean" neuclear is only possible by using very high grade nuclear fuel which is not only more difficult to mine and process, it's supply is rather limited."

Wherever did you get all this BS about nuclear fuel? What you are saying is completely wrong. I used to work at a uranium mine. The product of ALL uranium mines is "yellow cake", almost pure U3O8. It isn't difficult to mine or process, neither is its supply rather limited. This is the material which Australia sells overseas to the Chinese etc., who then process it into whatever type of fuel they need for a reactor. That is where it starts to get a bit harder.

It would be great, if you people would stop believing all the BS about the nuclear industry and learned some of the fscts. One thing is for certain, whatever we use as sources of clean energy in the future is going to cost us a lot more than we are paying at the present. None of it is going to be developed quickly and perhaps time is not on our side.

VK3AUU - Here is the most interesting solar technology I have found to date. I encourage all persons to peruse this site:

http://www.nanosolar.com/

It would appear to be at the cutting edge of solar power development.

"Nanosolar is poised to produce enough to generate 430 mega-watts of electricity a year—four times the amount produced by all solar plants in the U.S. combined. Perhaps more importantly, Nanosolar is the first company to figure out how to produce these cells cheaply. How cheaply? Less than $1 per watt, or one-tenth of the cost of traditional cells."

VK3AAU, all I can say is that writing a post in a hurry on a Sunday morning isn't the ideal way of making a point. Perhaps in hindsight, I should not have mentioned the mining aspect without a little more thought, although I believe there's still an issue with neuclear fuel at the production end. Oh, and the name is AIME not AIRNE.
Neuclear energy is a horrifying path to take and by my point of waste disposal I'll stand, but at the same time, should other countries decide they want our uranium at any cost, there will be nothing to stop them from coming and simply taking it by force. Neuclear energy is a genie that should never have been let out of the bottle, but it's too late now.
Ev, nanosolar cell technology looks like a brilliant breakthrough and with the new generation of batteries that are coming on line, who knows? We might even be able to achieve something clean and planet friendly in the not too distant future. Electric cars are making some sort of comeback in the States although thanks to John Howard and his lack of commitment and outright animosity against ev's and therefore a cleaner environment, I doubt we'll see them in Australia for a very long time yet. Nanosolar and electric vehicles could save a magnitude of problems.

Recently read that 1 million people could survive in the USA if industrialised manufacturing and agriculture were not available.

The dislocation would be nothing like 90% of our population has ever experienced. Where are the other 300 million going to go?

Cowboy Joe, do you also realise that if the US were not at war in Iraq, something of the order of 10 million more Americans would be unemployed. Think of the flow on effect that would have.

The evolutionary process has blessed us with the title of "The Big Brtained Mammal", but it does not divorce us completely from other species.
We have the capacity, if we choose to get it into gear, to use our brain-development to make a most important difference. If we did, we would side-step those urges which bring about plague-numbers, and their unavoidable subsequent crashes, in fellow species like rabbits, mice, and lemmings.
But, our society as a whole chooses not to get its collective brain into gear. Rather, it limits its cerebral capabilities to no more than developing the means to maintain, for a while longer, the ongoing proliferation of our plague-numbers - which must eventually crash.
Whether a love-affair with the experiment of nuclear energy, and its side-kick - military/terrorist weapons - will be the first to bring human numbers down; or maybe our continuing attachment to the great atmospheric pollution experiment, is an almost irrelevant academic debate.
Is it "too much truth for the human brain to handle" to admit that the evolutionary process has not made us immune from the fundamental population-limitations imposed upon our fellow species?

VK3AUU. Don't uranium mine managers grant tours of their projects to employees? If they did, you would understand that some 75% of the radioactive compound ends up in the tailings dam after mill processing.

In Australia, the dam's casing must endure for a thousand years. That's a bit of joke since one radioactive compound in the tailings dam is thorium 230 which has a half-life of 75,000 years. These dams must be monitored for perpetuity long after the mine has shut down.

This month, Spain's wind energy generation hit 27% of the country's demands with Spain having double the population of Australia. The Spain project occurred without any grid instability despite the sceptics' criticisms on "wind fluctuations".

Singapore announced last week it is investing $136 million to develop a solar power plant and Abu Dhabi has begun construction of a 500MW solar power plant where their government has already dedicated US$350 million towards this giant project.

I imagine that not too far into the future, proponents of fossil fuels and nuclear power may indeed need to live in burrows to escape the wrath of the masses when evolutionary suicide becomes even more apparent.

Bear in mind that America has more nuclear power plants (103) than any other nation and remain the largest polluters on the planet. What is also interesting is the high rate of cancers in the USA. Is there a connection here?

You can guarantee that as coal and uranium are mined out, this energy source will become prohibitively expensive.

Wind and solar, after the initial construction, will always remain free and will not be depleted. And as you say VK, that's no "BS".

Dickie, your estimate of 75 percent of radioactive material in tailings is probably a bit conservative, but it is in a fairly large bulk of material, and at the end of the mine life will be covered over, so you only have to worry about the radon, which would have been produced anyway, mine or no mine.

The Chinese seem to be getting on top of the Pebble bed nuclear problems and the South Africans are also well on the way there too. I note that the Chinese are building 30 conventional Nuclear stations at the present with plans for perhaps a total of 200 so that should help to clean up their pollution. It was pretty bad 13 years ago when I was in Beijing.

I note that the Portuguese have in the last few days, completed an 11 Mwatt solar power station and also that South Korea hopes to have a 14 Mwatt station going next year. They don't come cheap, but the running costs should be quite low. Pity they don't work a night. It is just plain delinquency that our government isn't more enthusiastic about solar, instead of all the clean coal BS.

It is interesting to note also that at the present rate of increase in world population of about 1.5 percent per year, that we will have four times the current number by the end of this century. rather frightening, isn't it.

VK3AUU. I'm unclear about your claim that the tailings dam will be "covered over" at the end of the mine life. How do they propose to do that? I understood that these radioactive compounds must be submerged in water at all times to prevent toxic releases, therefore, monitoring must still be performed for perpetuity.

The UIC for some reason, fails to allude to Radium 226 which has a greater half life (1622 years) and continually produces its daughter product, Radon-222 during its much longer half life.

Uranium mining can never be viewed frivously as it is also responsible for significant releases of carbon based chemicals and other pollutants including radioactive emissions.

U mining also requires massive amounts of water and energy for its operations which is quite obscene given the current crisis we are now facing.

Mr Switowski's failure to discuss the environmental impacts of U mining has not gone unnoticed, whilst he endeavours to sell his heinous "clean and green" package of nuclear energy.

Messrs Bush and Howard can find billions of dollars to support the the war in Iraq but refuse to budget immediately for expansive renewable energy programmes.

Population explosions remain one of the largest threats to our remaining eco systems and to the survival of this planet. It is a problem beyond my capacity to offer any constructive solutions.

The fundamental problem with solar and wind power generation is that when running will not have the benefit of continued economic growth of the enormous calibre that fossil fuels have. Sun and wind are free.

You'll find that countries that do not rely on minerals for economic growth are more willing to utilize and develop non-fossil fuel for power generation.

Also, there are people, especially in Europe, who couldn't give a toss about the arguments between scientists on environmental degradation/climate change. They personally cannot avoid the effects on a daily basis, unlike us lucky 'head in the sand' Australians.

Europeans are also not so inclined to dismiss what happened at Chernobyl. The financial costs alone were enormous.

Our current economic philosophy is that without 'growth' we'll slide backwards. Many cannot imagine anything other than what went before. Therefore, progress means growth which means more of the same. Progress does not seem to be able to mean doing things differently, let alone significantly differently. Our pioneering forefathers met the same attitude way back when: it can't be done! You'll fall off the end of the Earth! It is wrong, God/the Economy is sure to punish you with hell/deprivation.

What is intelligent anyway, if it only means we can rationalize anything away?

Great article Marko. To expand on what you said, once said by someone else: 'All error and evil have within themselves the seed of their own destruction'.