Please ask your guests how John McCain or Barack Obama will make sure that oil that is drilled in the United States stays in the US and is not exported to other countries by the oil companies?

Why no representative of the environmental groups??

Why has there been no mention from either candidate about conservation? Having more energy sources isn’t going to change how wasteful humans are of our resources.

Conservation was an accepted part of the WW2 era of sacrifice for the country, and it won’t really cost anything. It will bring our bills down; an important part of helping those of us who are struggling to make ends meet.

Your discussion is good as far as it goes, but all I hear discussed is energy supply. We can’t supply our way out of this crisis. Conservation and efficiency are way cheaper per unit of energy than new supply, and a real green revolution would create jobs for millions of Americans, and a market around the world that would make us solid friends and bring cooperation.

There is also the potential for our ridiculously inefficient electric utilities to become networks for connecting us as contributors to the grid with our plug-in cars and home solar panels.

The caller George just said it for me, “think of efficiency first, last, and always!”

When people say that nuclear power has no carbon emissions, are they disregarding the emissions that occur from getting materials to the plant and taking care of nuclear waste?

Think of the infra-structure work that could have been done with the 50 cent per gallon gas tax suggested by Senator Kerry in 2004.

A high gas price drives down demand and conserves energy.

Instead of stating we need to suspend gas taxes when gasoline prices get high we should institute a tax now while gas is “cheap” and keep up the downward pressure on demand while raising money for the infrastructure.

Both candidates are riding on the Cheney ” American lifestyle is not negotiable” train. As long as no one talks about reducing DEMAND and adjusting lifestyle to a post peak-oil reality, this discussion is meaningless.

Energy efficiency and non-traditional energy sources (such as wind, hydro, or solar) are quite sensible and should definitively receive a reasonable portion of the R&D budget. These approaches might also help us to overcome the current short-term crisps.

Nevertheless, efficiency and decline in consumption cannot be the final answer to moving into the future: in order to solve the many looming issues we are facing (such as pollution cleanup, water and food shortages, etc.) we will need to produce a lot more energy in bulk. From my perspective, nuclear energy production (and solar in some areas) are the only technologies that provide the long term, low pollution source of large amounts of energy.

In this context it seems very irresponsible that the U.S. contribution to fusion research (ITER) has been severely cut. What is the candidates’ position on future funding of ITER and follow-up fusion research? Are they committed to push for a 2040 commercial reactor, which is–most likely–the most important science and technology goal for the world community?

I agree with Bob. In fact my litmus test in the voting booth is the candidate’s position on a carbon tax. Those who are against a carbon tax will never get my vote.

I have a question for your guests. John McCain stated in yesterday’s debate that we have been using nuclear power safely for 60 years. But from what I understand plutonium waste or uranium takes 25,000 years to break down. How can we guarantee that we can store that waste safely for 25,000 years?

Growing up in Sweden, I still remember the fall out of the Chernobyl catastrophe, the scare and the aftermath. In the northern part of the country, reindeer farmers had to slaughter 78% percent of their yearly livestock.

One issue that never seems to get touched these days is our recycling program(s). When I see what “greener” countries like Germany do to take care of waste, I feel like we could do a lot for the environment just by changing the amount of things we throw away.

For example, the Germans throw most packaging (everything with “green dot”) into the “yellow sack,” which then gets sorted later (which may creates jobs) and presumably recycled. There are bins for yellow sacks for nearly every household, and bins for glass recycling on nearly every street.

I wonder whether each candidate would advocate recycling reform at the national level.

The beaches of Santa Barbara are still ugly with tar balls from the last oil spills there.

The characterization of nuclear power as emissions-free avoids consideration of the substantial construction and decommissioning processes. Massive amounts of steel, concrete and various other high tech materials will be required. Will we fight the Chinese for it?

We don’t need to rebuild the grid.

More local (house and neighborhood) PV tied into the Grid means less new power plants and infrastructure.

Solar hot water is also important

I have not heard either candidate address mass transportation. In CT, where I live, the roads are seriously congested, in large part due to our very poor mass transit options.

How will be EVER become energy related when we must rely on the wasteful use of auto transit?!?

One more thing:

One commenter said Kerry’s 50 cent gas tax would have made a huge difference, and it would. In some form, there needs to be a real price point – a floor – for oil prices so that the Saudis and other manipulators of the market cannot take away the incentive for alternative markets to thrive.

Look what is happening now: a financial crisis develops and hey presto! Oil prices are way down! Wonder why?

I disagree with the comparison of France and its nuclear capacity to the U.S.; France is the size of Texas.

Secondly, it seems that oil dependence is being addressed solely as an energy issue and foreign policy. However, the agricultural use for fertilizer is another component.

Also, isn’t alternative, especially small-scale or local, a greater way to defend against terrorism? The more local we become the lower our ability to be damaged on a large scale form terrorists. This is the lesson with the economy as well.

Update! The price of gas is now below 3$ per gallon and is dropping fast.

Without a carbon tax, I’m gonna quickly buy myself a cheap SUV from Detroit and go on a nice long road trip!

The only answer, the only incentive, is to have the consumer of the product pay for the full costs, including the environmental, military and infrastructure costs of the product. The government only needs to institute a real carbon tax, and then the market will figure out the rest.

I agree with the post from Bob. We need to have the power grid including every house possible to be producing energy with PV’s and wind turbines.

My thought is, instead of the Power Companies building Nukes, why not put PV’s, Windturbines and hot water collectors on all homes (when feasible) to be returned to the grid. That should give us the extra electricity we need until furture new technologies…like fuel cells become available. Surely the cost of a PV system on a house must cost less than a Nuke per kw. The life span of use is about the same and the pv system isn’t radioactive.

I believe that the power grid providers should be the investors in these hardwares and not the consumer (as it currently is being financed).

Another thought. I read (years ago) that a small town in Switzerland had placed small size wind turbines on the highway that ran thru the area. There were several hundred turbines, the size of house fans. they were in the medium of the highway. So as the cars went zooming by at 70 mph the turbines were spinning and making enough energy to light 10,000 (not sure of the figure now) homes. Why hasn’t someone in the us thought of doing that. With our huge interstate highway system, we could be creating a lot of power (except during gridlock,ggg).

Almost everything we use is made from petroleum. All plastics, most fertilizers and lubricants to name few.

What are the candidates’ opinions regarding bio fuels produced by algae?

Actually, 70% of plastics produced in the US are made from natural gas (source: American Chemistry Council). Not sure why so many people think it’s oil.

As Contracts Administrator, I have negotiated and been privy to negotiations of international oil & gas contracts for one of the major O&G companies based out of Houston, Texas.

With respect to your show this morning, it seems to me that we all would benefit greatly from a new perspective on the issues of Energy and the Candidates. People can and will talk on and on about specific aspects – and this increased Energy-literacy is great to see – but in the end, we need to trust one of the Candidates and his choice of advisors to do the best job.

So far as the November 4th election and either candidate’s grasp of Energy is concerned, I recommend going with one’s gut. My gut tells me that the Obama-Biden team will do the best job for us – hands down.

Conservatives all over the world – US, EU and Asia – have had great success for years pitting the environment against jobs.

Recently the EU scaled back plans to impose strict carbon emissions on cars because manufacturers and unions managed to convince governments that these measures would cost jobs.

The world is heading into a severe recession and the unemployment rate in the US is expected to climb to 8, and maybe 10, percent by winter. In that environment we can expect that the “jobs” weapon will be very effective at blocking progress on the environment.

Unfortunately, with the price of oil plummetting the economics of “green” energy is weakening at precisly the moment when it would be nice to have some “green-collar” jobs. For example, Evergreen Solar, a Massachusetts solar cell maker that broke ground last spring on a new factory and announced big hiring plans, has seen its stock fall to 1/3 of what it was a few months ago. Likewise First Solar is down 53%.

Tom Friedman’s latest book, “Hot, Flat and Crowded” taught me about aspects of the energy issue too numerous to list here — a superb and, I hope, influential book in this election season. The financial collapse is tending to crowd out energy in the public attention, but energy should be seen as the keystone of reconstructing our endangered world.

I live in Santa Barbara. I’m at the beach everyday. I was in Santa Barbara when the oil platform spill occurred in 1969. There are no longer gobs of oil from that spill on the beaches of Santa Barbara today (2008).

Do Santa Barbarans support offshore drilling? Hell, no!

The beaches today are clean of oil gobs, but smothered by tourists.

It’s hard to blame the candidates for not telling the whole truth when they know the American people can’t handle that truth cerebrally instead of emotionally. I’m an environmental consultant by the way.

1. ‘clean coal’ — no such thing exists, and will not in any significant way. MIT may be happy to study this, but the fact is that even if appropriate sites and safe methods existed, there is no cost effective way to do this in the existing plants. We need to invest that money in existing clean technologies and in researching additional clean technologies to bring them to market. Can you imagine getting elected while loosing the coal states? They would actually have to change direction, but like the oil companies, they will not do it till they are forced to. Once they do, they will realize there are plenty of other ways to do business.

2. fuel taxes should be MUCH higher. A small tax will achieve nothing. If a feebate system existed, using fossil-fuel taxes as rebates for clean energy users, we would have a clean system much sooner. Let the market do its work. But can you imagine getting elected by telling people you will raise taxes, in any form?

The best kept secret about the future of energy is cold fusion. Yes, I know, it was discredited several decades ago. Check out the recent developments at lenr-canr.org. Some experiments are relicated 100% of the time. Excess heat measurements are 90 times the experimental error and are hundreds of times larger than any possible nonnuclear process. Nuclear ash, helium-4, is measured with extreme precision that correlates with excess heat measurements at 0.99 correlation. The only plausable explaination is the nuclear process deuterium + deuterium = helium4 + 24Mev, with NO significant radiation outside the equipment and no significant radioactive to dispose of.

The only byproduct is harmless helium and radiation at backgound levels. The fuel is heavy water that costs about $400 per pound currently. One pound has more energy than the total life time per person comsumption in the U.S. The ocean has billions of years worth of heavy water at current energy consumption rates.

And if this is true, why haven’t you heard anything about this? That is a whole story by its self – the politics of science. Cold fution is a threat to the DOE ITER program that the US is spending $500M per year, total $16B in the last 50 years with no excess heat expected for years to come. Cold fusion research in last 20 years is estimated at $25M total. The U.S. should be spending at least $100M per year on cold fusion.

Isn’t this discussion really about short-term pain vs. long-term pain? The sad, politically-unpopular fact seems to be that we need short-term financial pain to keep up the popular and political pressure to move to alternatives. When oil and gas prices go down, they need to be taxed back up, which will fund R&D. Is there any disagreement on this from respected economists? And when do we treat the American public like adults and say that energy has to be taxed up? Who will best inspire us to make this sacrifice now and not pass more pain to our children?

Boy is this silly. The numbers that are being thrown around are so far from reality that it is not funny. For example the $80 billion dollar number for transmission is about 10% of the real numbers that were crunched at Grid Week by the industry experts. To put up enough windmills would take doubling the production every year for the next 5 years – right now globally the number of large windmills built would provide 17 days of the Pickens plans needs. People talk about the cost of nuclear as 6 billion dollars for a new plant, but they dismiss the fact that wind mills have a higher price tag. The amount of plutonium in used nuclear fuel will exist with or without reprocessing. CanDo reactors in Canada can burn the plutonium in MOX fuels, we are currently using them to burn some of the worst of the old russian materials. Neither speaker was credible. When will we see a realistic discussion of this issue? We need to solve it in a holistic fashion.

I think the people of Nevada would be greatly surprised, to learn that Mr. Woolsey, and candidate McCain, intend to send nuclear waste to an existing disposal site in Nevada.

The Yucca Mountain site, is not a nuclear repository. It is an experiment: One, which most Nevadans oppose.

Currently there is not a licensed high level nuclear waste repository in the United States.

Proponents of nuclear power continue to ignore, one must assume deliberately or disingenuously, the two things which need to be addressed if they want nukes to become more acceptable. WHY they persist in this bizarre stance is a mystery, since if they are serious about advancing nuclear power all they have to do if address these to move their project forward.

1. There is STILL no capability in place to permanently and safely store nuclear waste. If the nuke industry really cared about the future of their industry and federal government’s slow progress on it they would long ago have developed a storage option themselves.

2. There is no reasonable answer to the question of nuclear-accident liability. Price-Anderson sets the operator liability limit too low to cover a major accident, and instead assumes the federal government will come in and make everyone whole. But after Katrina that approach has no credibility. Not long ago when I attempted to buy a house not far from the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire I tried to buy a nuclear-accident rider for my HO policy but was told there was none available, because of restrictions in federal law! Needless to say, I declined to buy the house.

But this makes no sense at all! The statistical risk of a nuke accident is very low, so the cost of insurance should also be low. I have an earthquake rider on my HO policy. Earthquakes in New England are a lot like nuke accidents – a statistically low-probability event with lots of damage concentrated in a small geographical area. But insurance is cheap and widely available for quakes.

People will continue to resist nukes as long as these issues are not addressed, but the nuke industry seems blissfully unconcerned.

I think the people of Nevada would be greatly surprised, to learn that Mr. Woolsey, and candidate McCain, intend to send nuclear waste to an existing disposal site in Nevada.

Currently there is not a licensed high level nuclear waste repository in the United States.

The other issue is transporting nuclear waste to the site. This would add a huge amount to the cost with insurance. What if one or more states refused to let a train load of this stuff through? It could be a legal mess trying to sort out all the logistics of the interstate transportation nuclear waste on a large scale.

Peter trying to compare an earthquake to a nuclear-accident is a far stretch. By the way there are more earthquakes in New England than you think. They are very small on the Richter Scale.

The problem with a nuclear-accident as you well know is that unlike and earthquake you can’t live in a hot zone.

The nuke thing is absurd and to costly, why on earth would we spend billions of dollars on this kind of technology when we could develop wind, solar, hydro, and natural gas. Methane from garbage dumps should be looked at as well.

Conservatives like McCain do not have a leg to stand on when it comes to energy, the record is not in their favor.

Does anyone have a transcript for the show? I think McCain’s advisor and former CIA director slipped up when discussing the old salt wars and actually admitted that the current war is all about oil..

Just relistened to the show.. Here’s the quote:

“Countries went to war over salt mines. It’s a big deal. The way oil is now.” -Jim Woolsey, 10/16/08

Sounds an aweful lot like the ol’ spook considers the Iraq war to be about oil… who would’ve thunk it?

The nuke thing is absurd and to costly, why on earth would we spend billions of dollars on this kind of technology when we could develop wind, solar, hydro, and natural gas. Methane from garbage dumps should be looked at as well.

I agree; I’m just pointing out that if the nuke industry wants us to take nukes seriously as a carbon-free alternative they need to step up to the plate on liability and waste. So far they’ve just tried to dodge these things.

I have a friend who recently built a house that’s totally PV and can even sell the surplus back to the utility. So anyone who says PV isn’t ready is out of touch.

I’m an investor in several alternative energy companies and while I’m happy for subsidies, I’d happily trade away all the subsidies for simply ELIMINATING the subsidies that coal and oil get that makes them artifically cheap.

It’s unfortunate and disappointing that neither Amory Lovins nor Paul Hawken were part of the show. Their presence would have provided some contrasting and refreshing views on the energy issue, than the same-old, same-old craven and unimaginative shtick we hear from the camps of tweedledum and tweedledee, and they would have challenged/refuted the claims of the McBama advisers regarding nuclear energy.

If we go ahead with building nuclear plants, those plants will be funded and guaranteed by the federal government. I think our government has taken enough socialist steps recently to last us for some time. Let’s not add new nuclear plants to the list.

Did Tom Ashbrook/On Point producers even consider inviting either of them to this particular talk, or any other non-partisan energy expert? If not, what a shame. It’s highly disappointing and another sign of the falling standards of this program as it keeps limiting different viewpoints.

I will be voting for Obama this election, but I take issue with his stance on nuclear energy. I consider myself an environmentalist and many others like myself are now coming to the realization that our best chance right now is to invest in nuclear energy. Jim Hansen of NASA known for being silenced by the Bush admin. on the issue of global warming was recently on Charlie Rose, and he is just another example of a prominent environmentalist who sees the need to go nuclear. The issue of waste has been addressed with Gen. 4 reactors. A new book out “prescription for the planet” details the issue of nuclear and the misinformation that often gets repeated.

Aaron, where will the funding and guarantee for IFRs come from?

The issue of waste has been addressed with Gen. 4 reactors. A new book out “prescription for the planet” details the issue of nuclear and the misinformation that often gets repeated

Gen IV reactors are not expected to be commercially available for power production (as opposed to research) for 25 years at the earliest. Furthermore there are several very different designs being considered for the Gen IV Initiative. Also, it’s not accurate to say that waste is “addressed” in Gen IV reactors, since they all the competing designs still produce waste to varying degrees. See the Gen IV website – gen-4 dot org.

So at this point any discussion about their merits is WAY premature and purely theoretical.

“{Aaron, where will the funding and guarantee for IFRs come from?”
It is going to have to come from the federal government, at least to begin with.

AV’s point that nuclear=socialism is well taken.

The nuclear industry could not exist except that the government assumes the risk of a major disaster. The private insurance industry simply won’t underwrite those risks.

So a good question for any candidate espousing nuclear energy but rejecting single payer health insurance:

“How come government-paid single payer insurance is OK for nuclear energy but not for healthcare?”