Mr Monbiot wants to minimize the harm done to people living in the future. He does not know what these people will be like, nor what they will view as harmful. But that does not bother Mr. Monbiot - he has a large feeling of concern about them and he thinks that having of this feeling of concern justifies his power grab and makes it OK for him to tell me how to live today. Monbiot's approach is irrational demagoguery. Surely no one takes this madness seriously. If you want to talk about future harm, define it first and tell me how you are going to measure it in numerical terms. Otherwise, we are discussing fiction, and those discussions are taking place in the modern literature wing at the other end of the library. They have nothing to do with the difficult work of scientific research that has so successfully improved our living standards.
Randal:
I, too, am concerned about making the world better for future inhabitants. I cannot put numbers on it, but I believe that those future people will enjoy having some hydrocarbon resources left, a world where education is respected and enhanced as we all continue to learn, and where people have learned to make good decisions based on all available truthful information rather than sales pitches.
In other words, I want to maximize benefits for future generations in a way that does not necessarily require current generations to make sacrifices. It does require us to make some changes.
I do not feel quite the sense of crisis and impending doom that some in Monbiot's camp do, but I am quite sure that we do need to take sustained action to improve our energy supply and delivery infrastructure. Traditional coal burning power plants with traditional mining techniques and traditional coal transportation systems are not competitive in the measures of effectiveness that I use to evaluate power plants.
We may have a different way of stating it, and perhaps even different methods for "imposing our will", but, like Monbiot, I work hard to convince decision makers to avoid building central station coal plants. If there was one going up in my area, I would go to the public meetings to express my belief that it is unnecessary and dangerous as a long term investment.
BTW - the literary end of the library has lessons for engineers - not every important measure of improved living standards can be described with numbers.
It's interesting that there are "nuclear energy critics" and I don't generally see this in other forms of energy. Has anyone ever heard of a "chemical energy critic" or an "ionization energy critic" or even a "thermal energy critic"?
Good point Doc, but I doubt that your standard 'nuclear energy critic' will see any value in being(or in most cases even understand) a 'PWR critic', or an 'LFTR critic', even though pro-nukes will often specifically criticise coal, or oil, or solar, or wind, rather than ionisation energy, or covalent bonds, or gravitational potential energy, or the energy of photons between 300 and 700 angstroms.
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