5 ms·

Why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change

40 points by blue1 7y ago

mbruce 7y ago
That is a shockingly biased and simplistic comparison. Sort of like deciding on the answer and picking a few “facts” to support it.
- blue1 7y ago
  So what is missing/wrong in the article? (btw, I submitted not because I agree with it – I am not knowledgeable enough on the matter – but because I thought HN could add some interesting comment on it)
  - lawn 7y ago
    Even if we presume all points are true, they fail to bring up any of the positive points of nuclear power and they don't have anything to compare it to. How does it compare to say wind power? How expensive and slow is to build up an equivalent wind power farm? A proper comparison needs to take a look at positive and negative of all possible solutions. For example that "clean" hydropower has massive consequences for the nearby environment. Or that we cannot be 100% reliant on wind and solar power, since they are unreliable (there might not be any wind for example). Which means we need to have other alternatives (hint: not use coal as a fallback!).
    - perfunctory 7y ago
      > How does it compare to say wind power? How expensive and slow is to build up an equivalent wind power farm? From the article: "Utility-scale wind and solar farms, on the other hand, take on average only 2 to 5 years, from the planning phase to operation. Rooftop solar PV projects are down to only a 6-month timeline"
      - arpa 7y ago
        That's hardly equivalent.
  - StreamBright 7y ago
    1. Long Time Lag Between Planning and Operation I guess we should stop doing everything that takes long based on this. How do you define long? Compare to what? 2. Cost Nuclear energy is the cheapest source of energy once you take into consideration all the aspects of an energy grid. This is why Germany is buying energy from France instead of building renewables only. 3. Weapons Proliferation Risk Most nuclear power plants do not consume or produce plutonium. 4. Meltdown Risk Passive safety systems are the norm. The safety requirement to any new nuclear power plant is to have a potentially life threatening accident with 10^-6 probability. Meltdown is not a realistic scenario of non-Chernobyl type power plants (90% of power plants). 5. Mining Lung Cancer Risk So does mining coal. We can make mining much more safe. 6. Carbon-Equivalent Emissions and Air Pollution I guess producing a wing mill does not need to use any energy and the production does not have the same impact as producing a nuclear power plant. Not sure if the author understand that this applies to anything produced. In fact producing renewable power plants probably produces much more CO2 than a nuclear power plant because of energy density. He fails to mention that. 7. Waste Risk This is actually a solved issue, there are special nuclear power plants that sole purpose is to "burn away" nuclear waste by producing elements with less half time. "To recap, new nuclear power costs about 5 times more than onshore wind power per kWh (between 2.3 to 7.4 times depending upon location and integration issues)." This is extremely stupid observation. Leaving out crucial facts (like having base and peak power plants) and comparing apples to oranges.
    - imtringued 7y ago
      >Nuclear energy is the cheapest source of energy once you take into consideration all the aspects of an energy grid. This is why Germany is buying energy from France instead of building renewables only. This is the funniest thing I have read all day. Seriously I can't stop laughing. Ok let's be serious. It has more to do with the incompetence of the government parties than with the technologies involved. The renewable percentage grew to 47% from 40% in 2018. The reason is that we are being cooked alive by the hot weather, not because the government is acting intelligently. That 7% increase is effectively a 40GWh increase which is 4 times the amount Germany is importing from France. There is no shortage of energy, just a total lack of political willpower to do anything. Even without France, Germany could just turn off one of it's coal plants and use more of it's gas plants to solve the intermittency issue because gas plants produce half as much CO2 as coal plants. Sure it makes sense to keep the old plants running because that way we can turn off coal earlier and decommission the nuclear plants only when they reach their maximum lifespan. But it's too late now. Nuclear power clearly is no longer the answer to decarbonizing Germany's electricity market.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  It is actually full of lies. Cost as the problem of nuclear energy? 1 KWH produced by nuclear power is roughly 3-4 times cheaper than produced by renewables. This is excluding the impact of renewables on the grid. Weapons Proliferation Risk??? Most of the nuclear power plants do not use or produce plutonium at all. Nuclear weapons are produced in very specific facilities that have a huge energy consumption. This article is a classical propaganda to avoid the unavoidable use nuclear power for clear energy. Humanity needs these energy sources that we can use in space and on Earth to have a relatively small plant that produces a lot of energy without CO2. Yes there are challenges but we did not stop using fire because it produces smoke. We made burning safe over the last 400.000 years now we should make nuclear energy safe.
  - sideshowb 7y ago
    In the UK the contract for hinkley c nuclear station was signed at something like £90/GWh, which everyone seems unhappy with (CFO of edf resigned saying it would bankrupt them, while opponents are saying it's too expensive). Meanwhile we have new offshore wind going in at £50/GWh If cost of nuclear isn't a problem can you contextualize those figures? Is it a fair comparison, net of subsidies etc? I'd like to know.
    - StreamBright 7y ago
      You cannot talk about energy like that. What is the chance that 1 GWH is going to be produced? With a nuclear power plant you can have guaranteed energy, with renewables there is a chance that you get energy. You continously need to balance consumption and production. You can only control non-renewables. This is why building wind farms require the same amount of production is built using gas turbines for the worst case scenario. The £50/GWh vs £90/GWh is for the happy path best case scenario. I hope it makes sense.
      - sideshowb 7y ago
        is the £50 not based on annual average days with sufficient wind to generate (which I presume has fairly low uncertainty, though if it's not generating when you want then either storage or transport is needed)
rossmohax 7y ago
Don't know how the rest of facts check out, but Chernobyl is in Ukraine not in Russia.
- SuddsMcDuff 7y ago
  In reason six the author talks about emissions and air pollution related to nuclear power. Then shows an image of a nuclear plant releasing water vapour into the air.
  - akvadrako 7y ago
    Water vapor is the #1 greenhouse gas, so it's obviously a pollutant.
- abledon 7y ago
  article says "Chernobyl, Russia 1986", Pre 1991, [wiki] known as Soviet Ukraine, was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union from the Union's inception in 1922 to its breakup in 1991. So probably why he mentions the date after saying Russia
  - arpa 7y ago
    The correct term would still be USSR.
    - AlphaGeekZulu 7y ago
      Oh, come on. And the correct term for Great Britain would still be UK. And for Germany it would still be BRD, and for America would be USA... Note to my private journal about the hilarious history of the destruction of our planet: "In June 2019, an article about "Nuclear Power possibly not being the answer to solve climate change", lead to a public discussion, whether the author got a geographic term historically right or not (with the suspicion, that if he didn't, probably everything else in the article was wrong as well).
      - 7y ago
realusername 7y ago
What a biased article, pretty much every point is cherry picking. Edit: Everything here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson actually tells you the objectivity of this guy on nuclear energy.
candiodari 7y ago
This is stupid. Once you divide those costs by the power generated, they become almost negligible. To replace a nuclear power plant the size of an office building you need a solar or wind farm the size of a decent village. And it's exponential. To replace a large nuclear power plant, you need a solar farm that would rival the average state capital in size. That makes those costs look very different.
- fulafel 7y ago
  Area in obviously linear vs PV power, not exponential. Yes, the difference vs nuclear gets exponential because nuclear reactors are 3D, but in practice the reactor core size is always so small that it takes trivial space in the land use sense. There is no dearth of space in most countries to fit village / farm sized solar arrays. 1 hectare per 1 MWH approx works out to good numbers considering you can use the non arable land. You can google around about how land owners bargain about leasing land to pv farms, it's pretty obviosu that even at the current artificially low energy prices[1] it's working out well. [1] meaning fossil plants mostly don't pay for externalities so electricity price is largely determined by just fossil plant fuel / equipment costs.
  - candiodari 7y ago
    Sorry to say, but that doesn't work. 1 hectare/Mwh, abstract over any issues. What happens when renewables actually achieve what they set out to do: what happens when PV gets used for 50% of power ? What happens when it's at 80% ? 1 hectare/Mwh = 1e-5 km2/kwh 1e-5 km2/kwh * 450 billion kwh / 650000 km2 = 7 times the area of France Obviously this is not practical. At 10% you'd have to destroy significant amounts of the remaining nature in France. God help Belgium and the Netherlands should they try this, so France is definitely not a worst case scenario. You'd have to get the power from Africa. Yes, the US could (just barely, and only with a much bigger electricity grid). Russia could. China is actually dicey (at 7% growth per year it won't stay dicey for long and dive into "not happening" soon). Not many others. Also: at any scale solar PV will displace so much nature it will be worse for the planet than fossil fuels. At 1% ? No problem. But at 1%, fossil fuels aren't a problem either. At 1%, coal would be tolerable. At 100% ? Nuclear works. Alternatives ... uh ... None (I mean, there's fusion when it starts working) Simcity was right. https://www.worlddata.info/europe/france/energy-consumption.php https://www.worlddata.info/europe/france/energy-consumption.... https://www.google.com/search?q=france+area https://www.google.com/search?q=france+area
LoSboccacc 7y ago
most of these reasons are hogwash. the real issue with depending on nuclear is peak uranium, regardless on where you put the date nuclear is not renewable, could be part of an integrated strategy to move out of coal a fossil fuel but cannot be the only answer to long term energy needs, which doesn't mean we should not invest in it but that we are going to need an exit strategy.
lota-putty 7y ago
Thorium MSR? Aren't they a thing of future?
perfunctory 7y ago
An interesting comment on nuclear by senior vice president, development, NextEra Energy Resources. Starts at 1h18m - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SXxJWUv-x4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SXxJWUv-x4 Bottom line, at least in the U.S it's just uneconomical.
fulafel 7y ago
Important along with the current costs of the renewable competition is that renewables keep getting cheaper every year. If lead time is 15 years, that's a long time in incremental improvement on the wind/pv side.
stareatgoats 7y ago
> Nuclear, though, doesn’t just have one problem. It has seven. My main gripe with this article is that it limits the problems with nuclear to 7, I can think of at least a few more: 8. Centralized source of energy: nuclear requires that a few plants supply a vast network of energy consumers: this is one of the inherent problems of the current setup which makes it highly sensitive to disruptions. Many renewables on the other hand enables resilient local grids that can operate independently if the central grid fails for any reason, and thus keep extend the availability of such basic things as food supply during times of blackout. The need for such a setup is starting to dawn on decision makers. 9. Terrorist or wartime targets: Nuclear power plants scattered round your landscape is the equivalent of offering adversaries free access to your self destruction, not to mention the irreparable harm to the environment it invites. To name a few.
zeotroph 7y ago
The first argument (Long Time Lag Between Planning and Operation) is hard to argue against. To my surprise even in China it takes rather long. And in countries with a nuclear critical public is is a fantasy to think that going with "just the facts" for a year or two will sway enough opponents, and then go all-in with nuclear (as would be the case in an Ideal World). The Cost argument [$151 (112 to 189)/MWh vs $43 (29 to 56)/MWh / $41 (36 to 46)/MWh for wind / solar PV] is also convincing, assuming the numbers are correct. If it is really a factor of > 2 then this would even be enough to bridge shortfalls of renewable energy due to lack of wind or sun, i.e. building rather inefficient (40%?) long term thermal or battery storage. Weapons Proliferation Risk, Meltdown Risk, Mining Lung Cancer Risk, Waste Risk are tolerable when the alternative is a catastrophically warmer planet. The "Carbon-Equivalent Emissions and Air Pollution" point counts the time it takes for a nuclear plant to come online? So ideally going full nuclear would have started 10 years or so ago, but in the muddy real world this pure nuclear fantasy does not work. Time to bury it and stop wasting time and energy fighting for it, just get solar panels and build a wind farm already.
- polotics 7y ago
  How much coal does get burnt to produce your happy panel? How much oil to transport it from China? How sustainable would solar and wind really be were it to be produced only with solar and wind energy, what would the end to end EROEI be? My guess: 0.8
- tjansen 7y ago
  How can you get to 100% renewables using solar and wind? We don't have the capability to store enough energy to get through a few days without wind, especially during the winter months in northern countries where solar doesn't produce much energy. Nuclear energy may take longer and may be more expensive (not sure that's still the case when you build a few hundred plants), but it least it provides reliable energy all year.
spdegabrielle 7y ago
Let’s just be honest - the whole point of NP is weapons capability. NP isn’t going away no matter how much it costs.
smitty1e 7y ago
One day science may discover who it was that argued "constant climate". Arguments in favor of improving environmrntal stewardship are welcome. Fear mongering invites a "Newton's Third Law" reaction against the messenger.

40 points by blue1 7y ago

That is a shockingly biased and simplistic comparison. Sort of like deciding on the answer and picking a few “facts” to support it.

blue1 7y ago
So what is missing/wrong in the article? (btw, I submitted not because I agree with it – I am not knowledgeable enough on the matter – but because I thought HN could add some interesting comment on it)
- lawn 7y ago
  Even if we presume all points are true, they fail to bring up any of the positive points of nuclear power and they don't have anything to compare it to. How does it compare to say wind power? How expensive and slow is to build up an equivalent wind power farm? A proper comparison needs to take a look at positive and negative of all possible solutions. For example that "clean" hydropower has massive consequences for the nearby environment. Or that we cannot be 100% reliant on wind and solar power, since they are unreliable (there might not be any wind for example). Which means we need to have other alternatives (hint: not use coal as a fallback!).
  - perfunctory 7y ago
    > How does it compare to say wind power? How expensive and slow is to build up an equivalent wind power farm? From the article: "Utility-scale wind and solar farms, on the other hand, take on average only 2 to 5 years, from the planning phase to operation. Rooftop solar PV projects are down to only a 6-month timeline"
    - arpa 7y ago
      That's hardly equivalent.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  1. Long Time Lag Between Planning and Operation I guess we should stop doing everything that takes long based on this. How do you define long? Compare to what? 2. Cost Nuclear energy is the cheapest source of energy once you take into consideration all the aspects of an energy grid. This is why Germany is buying energy from France instead of building renewables only. 3. Weapons Proliferation Risk Most nuclear power plants do not consume or produce plutonium. 4. Meltdown Risk Passive safety systems are the norm. The safety requirement to any new nuclear power plant is to have a potentially life threatening accident with 10^-6 probability. Meltdown is not a realistic scenario of non-Chernobyl type power plants (90% of power plants). 5. Mining Lung Cancer Risk So does mining coal. We can make mining much more safe. 6. Carbon-Equivalent Emissions and Air Pollution I guess producing a wing mill does not need to use any energy and the production does not have the same impact as producing a nuclear power plant. Not sure if the author understand that this applies to anything produced. In fact producing renewable power plants probably produces much more CO2 than a nuclear power plant because of energy density. He fails to mention that. 7. Waste Risk This is actually a solved issue, there are special nuclear power plants that sole purpose is to "burn away" nuclear waste by producing elements with less half time. "To recap, new nuclear power costs about 5 times more than onshore wind power per kWh (between 2.3 to 7.4 times depending upon location and integration issues)." This is extremely stupid observation. Leaving out crucial facts (like having base and peak power plants) and comparing apples to oranges.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    >Nuclear energy is the cheapest source of energy once you take into consideration all the aspects of an energy grid. This is why Germany is buying energy from France instead of building renewables only. This is the funniest thing I have read all day. Seriously I can't stop laughing. Ok let's be serious. It has more to do with the incompetence of the government parties than with the technologies involved. The renewable percentage grew to 47% from 40% in 2018. The reason is that we are being cooked alive by the hot weather, not because the government is acting intelligently. That 7% increase is effectively a 40GWh increase which is 4 times the amount Germany is importing from France. There is no shortage of energy, just a total lack of political willpower to do anything. Even without France, Germany could just turn off one of it's coal plants and use more of it's gas plants to solve the intermittency issue because gas plants produce half as much CO2 as coal plants. Sure it makes sense to keep the old plants running because that way we can turn off coal earlier and decommission the nuclear plants only when they reach their maximum lifespan. But it's too late now. Nuclear power clearly is no longer the answer to decarbonizing Germany's electricity market.
StreamBright 7y ago
It is actually full of lies. Cost as the problem of nuclear energy? 1 KWH produced by nuclear power is roughly 3-4 times cheaper than produced by renewables. This is excluding the impact of renewables on the grid. Weapons Proliferation Risk??? Most of the nuclear power plants do not use or produce plutonium at all. Nuclear weapons are produced in very specific facilities that have a huge energy consumption. This article is a classical propaganda to avoid the unavoidable use nuclear power for clear energy. Humanity needs these energy sources that we can use in space and on Earth to have a relatively small plant that produces a lot of energy without CO2. Yes there are challenges but we did not stop using fire because it produces smoke. We made burning safe over the last 400.000 years now we should make nuclear energy safe.
- sideshowb 7y ago
  In the UK the contract for hinkley c nuclear station was signed at something like £90/GWh, which everyone seems unhappy with (CFO of edf resigned saying it would bankrupt them, while opponents are saying it's too expensive). Meanwhile we have new offshore wind going in at £50/GWh If cost of nuclear isn't a problem can you contextualize those figures? Is it a fair comparison, net of subsidies etc? I'd like to know.
  - StreamBright 7y ago
    You cannot talk about energy like that. What is the chance that 1 GWH is going to be produced? With a nuclear power plant you can have guaranteed energy, with renewables there is a chance that you get energy. You continously need to balance consumption and production. You can only control non-renewables. This is why building wind farms require the same amount of production is built using gas turbines for the worst case scenario. The £50/GWh vs £90/GWh is for the happy path best case scenario. I hope it makes sense.
    - sideshowb 7y ago
      is the £50 not based on annual average days with sufficient wind to generate (which I presume has fairly low uncertainty, though if it's not generating when you want then either storage or transport is needed)

rossmohax 7y ago

Don't know how the rest of facts check out, but Chernobyl is in Ukraine not in Russia.

SuddsMcDuff 7y ago
In reason six the author talks about emissions and air pollution related to nuclear power. Then shows an image of a nuclear plant releasing water vapour into the air.
- akvadrako 7y ago
  Water vapor is the #1 greenhouse gas, so it's obviously a pollutant.
abledon 7y ago
article says "Chernobyl, Russia 1986", Pre 1991, [wiki] known as Soviet Ukraine, was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union from the Union's inception in 1922 to its breakup in 1991. So probably why he mentions the date after saying Russia
- arpa 7y ago
  The correct term would still be USSR.
  - AlphaGeekZulu 7y ago
    Oh, come on. And the correct term for Great Britain would still be UK. And for Germany it would still be BRD, and for America would be USA... Note to my private journal about the hilarious history of the destruction of our planet: "In June 2019, an article about "Nuclear Power possibly not being the answer to solve climate change", lead to a public discussion, whether the author got a geographic term historically right or not (with the suspicion, that if he didn't, probably everything else in the article was wrong as well).
    - 7y ago

realusername 7y ago

What a biased article, pretty much every point is cherry picking. Edit: Everything here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson actually tells you the objectivity of this guy on nuclear energy.

candiodari 7y ago

This is stupid. Once you divide those costs by the power generated, they become almost negligible. To replace a nuclear power plant the size of an office building you need a solar or wind farm the size of a decent village. And it's exponential. To replace a large nuclear power plant, you need a solar farm that would rival the average state capital in size. That makes those costs look very different.

fulafel 7y ago
Area in obviously linear vs PV power, not exponential. Yes, the difference vs nuclear gets exponential because nuclear reactors are 3D, but in practice the reactor core size is always so small that it takes trivial space in the land use sense. There is no dearth of space in most countries to fit village / farm sized solar arrays. 1 hectare per 1 MWH approx works out to good numbers considering you can use the non arable land. You can google around about how land owners bargain about leasing land to pv farms, it's pretty obviosu that even at the current artificially low energy prices[1] it's working out well. [1] meaning fossil plants mostly don't pay for externalities so electricity price is largely determined by just fossil plant fuel / equipment costs.
- candiodari 7y ago
  Sorry to say, but that doesn't work. 1 hectare/Mwh, abstract over any issues. What happens when renewables actually achieve what they set out to do: what happens when PV gets used for 50% of power ? What happens when it's at 80% ? 1 hectare/Mwh = 1e-5 km2/kwh 1e-5 km2/kwh * 450 billion kwh / 650000 km2 = 7 times the area of France Obviously this is not practical. At 10% you'd have to destroy significant amounts of the remaining nature in France. God help Belgium and the Netherlands should they try this, so France is definitely not a worst case scenario. You'd have to get the power from Africa. Yes, the US could (just barely, and only with a much bigger electricity grid). Russia could. China is actually dicey (at 7% growth per year it won't stay dicey for long and dive into "not happening" soon). Not many others. Also: at any scale solar PV will displace so much nature it will be worse for the planet than fossil fuels. At 1% ? No problem. But at 1%, fossil fuels aren't a problem either. At 1%, coal would be tolerable. At 100% ? Nuclear works. Alternatives ... uh ... None (I mean, there's fusion when it starts working) Simcity was right. https://www.worlddata.info/europe/france/energy-consumption.php https://www.worlddata.info/europe/france/energy-consumption.... https://www.google.com/search?q=france+area https://www.google.com/search?q=france+area

LoSboccacc 7y ago

most of these reasons are hogwash. the real issue with depending on nuclear is peak uranium, regardless on where you put the date nuclear is not renewable, could be part of an integrated strategy to move out of coal a fossil fuel but cannot be the only answer to long term energy needs, which doesn't mean we should not invest in it but that we are going to need an exit strategy.

lota-putty 7y ago

Thorium MSR? Aren't they a thing of future?

perfunctory 7y ago

An interesting comment on nuclear by senior vice president, development, NextEra Energy Resources. Starts at 1h18m - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SXxJWUv-x4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SXxJWUv-x4 Bottom line, at least in the U.S it's just uneconomical.

fulafel 7y ago

Important along with the current costs of the renewable competition is that renewables keep getting cheaper every year. If lead time is 15 years, that's a long time in incremental improvement on the wind/pv side.

stareatgoats 7y ago

> Nuclear, though, doesn’t just have one problem. It has seven. My main gripe with this article is that it limits the problems with nuclear to 7, I can think of at least a few more: 8. Centralized source of energy: nuclear requires that a few plants supply a vast network of energy consumers: this is one of the inherent problems of the current setup which makes it highly sensitive to disruptions. Many renewables on the other hand enables resilient local grids that can operate independently if the central grid fails for any reason, and thus keep extend the availability of such basic things as food supply during times of blackout. The need for such a setup is starting to dawn on decision makers. 9. Terrorist or wartime targets: Nuclear power plants scattered round your landscape is the equivalent of offering adversaries free access to your self destruction, not to mention the irreparable harm to the environment it invites. To name a few.

zeotroph 7y ago

The first argument (Long Time Lag Between Planning and Operation) is hard to argue against. To my surprise even in China it takes rather long. And in countries with a nuclear critical public is is a fantasy to think that going with "just the facts" for a year or two will sway enough opponents, and then go all-in with nuclear (as would be the case in an Ideal World). The Cost argument [$151 (112 to 189)/MWh vs $43 (29 to 56)/MWh / $41 (36 to 46)/MWh for wind / solar PV] is also convincing, assuming the numbers are correct. If it is really a factor of > 2 then this would even be enough to bridge shortfalls of renewable energy due to lack of wind or sun, i.e. building rather inefficient (40%?) long term thermal or battery storage. Weapons Proliferation Risk, Meltdown Risk, Mining Lung Cancer Risk, Waste Risk are tolerable when the alternative is a catastrophically warmer planet. The "Carbon-Equivalent Emissions and Air Pollution" point counts the time it takes for a nuclear plant to come online? So ideally going full nuclear would have started 10 years or so ago, but in the muddy real world this pure nuclear fantasy does not work. Time to bury it and stop wasting time and energy fighting for it, just get solar panels and build a wind farm already.

polotics 7y ago
How much coal does get burnt to produce your happy panel? How much oil to transport it from China? How sustainable would solar and wind really be were it to be produced only with solar and wind energy, what would the end to end EROEI be? My guess: 0.8
tjansen 7y ago
How can you get to 100% renewables using solar and wind? We don't have the capability to store enough energy to get through a few days without wind, especially during the winter months in northern countries where solar doesn't produce much energy. Nuclear energy may take longer and may be more expensive (not sure that's still the case when you build a few hundred plants), but it least it provides reliable energy all year.

spdegabrielle 7y ago

Let’s just be honest - the whole point of NP is weapons capability. NP isn’t going away no matter how much it costs.

smitty1e 7y ago

One day science may discover who it was that argued "constant climate". Arguments in favor of improving environmrntal stewardship are welcome. Fear mongering invites a "Newton's Third Law" reaction against the messenger.