Sorry if this is scattered a bit--I am swamped with something else at the exact same time. The story of the modern being, I guess.

I went to a talk the other day on the future of nuclear power and nuclear security. I was working at the same time but I got a fair amount of it all the same.

Animals (including the weirdest bipedal mammal) are of course a big part of the carbon dioxide emissions in the world but there's also a real explosion coming in the emissions of cd in the next short-term (to 2025) from the main sources of energy we're using right now with the biggest explosion coming from electricity which increases and estimated 33% in that time and is nearly equal to the amount put out by petrol. The total amount of tons of cd emissions from a combo of petrol, natural gas coal and electricity is likely to increase by 25% in that same time.

The speaker was very plain that we have roughly 10 years now to really do something about the prime driver of warming. He was optimistic in large part (as I think I am half the time) that the folks now running our national science policy get quite a lot of this and therefore hopefully will not drop the ball which is earth. I know a couple of these people a bit and know them to be people of real character. Let's hope they are also people of stunning savvy to move the roughly

The US is still way ahead of places like China and India in terms of C02 production where it meets GDP per capital but they'll catch up a lot, of course. France is very low on that list because of their heavy reliance on nuclear power (which they of course went to in large part due to a lack of energy natural resources).

If the science on nuclear spent fuel management and proliferation risks could be solved or half- solved (no small things but they are being worked on seriously in every corner of the globe) then you'd see a lot more of the next generation nuke plants in the US. Some will come, likely built by someone very much like the French but they won't come here in a big way any time soon. There will likely be a lot more Nuke plants coming to China and India to a lesser degree but it will still generate by 2050 only maybe 30% of the developed worlds electric market and only 10% of the developing world's (that includes China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico) electric. Still, that's hundreds of millions getting their electric from low-carbon (yet, still wicked scary) nuke power.

It'd be lovely if something like wind come come down in price in a big way but it just hasn't and won't maybe ever. It ain't cheap to generate electricity by wind. It'd be great if the solar folks could rule the roost a bit more (and there's signs they're making some gains).

In the next few decades, it's all about increase efficiency in electricity generation + use; expand use of renewable sources like wind, solar, biomass + geothermal; capture carbon dioxide emissions at fossil-fueled (espec. coals) electric plants and permanently sequester the carbon, and increase nuclear power.

Oh, and wait for the next brainiacs to fix it all with the thing not yet dreamed.

That's the way of the world as Earth, Wind and Fire would say.