Cheap energy is a cornerstone of our (modern, American) way of life, to be sure, and losing it would be awful. For us. But there's the OP's point- climate change will screw over vast numbers of people who didn't even benefit from cheap energy to begin with.

It would be interesting to see an in-depth quantitative analysis of the effects of dramatically reduced fossil fuel use versus dramatic climate change, in terms of a general global sum of badness (and if anyone knows of such a resource, please link it!) But there's more to the whole matter than global utilitarianism- there's also the sheer unfairness of the situation.

Plenty of economists have compared the economic impact of taking action now vs. dealing with the damage later. Action now is much, much cheaper.

Not according to a bunch of Nobel Prize winning analysts at the Copenhagen Consensus. They said the effort/resources would be much better spent solving problems for the poor today. Curbing CO2 by some small amount in 85 years will yield, by a large margin, the least benefit of money spent today.

This isn't a topic they dared to cover, but imagine the benefit to the hundreds of millions in Africa living without access to reliable cheap power if their countries could secure international loans for coal plants. Jobs, prosperity, food, industrialized living.

Here's a debunking from one of the economists involved. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/aug/22/climate...

Yea, but action now has a "tragedy of the commons" aspect to it in that not acting lets you freeload off of your neighbors who do. Taking action later to deal with the damage is local expenditure of resources for local benefit.

A fair amount of the required effort is a good idea in itself, e.g. efficiency improvements in business, converting coal plants to natural gas to reduce air pollution health effects, wind is the cheapest and easist to build power source for new electricity capacity, solar correlates brilliantly with usage, electric cars/busses/taxis are great for big cities and so on.

It gets trickier later, but a lot if it just needs a tiny push in the right direction, as can be seen by the many countries around the world, already doing the "impossible" with relatively little fuss.

The bigger economic issue is that a very small number of people benefit directly from coal usage, and they can buy off politicians easily without challenge from the millions of people who suffer the ill effects indirectly through healthcare costs etc.

Humans have been adapting to nature BY SUFFERING MAJOR HARDSHIP for all of history.

No, cheap energy is not "essential." It's essential to living like a suburban American, but when you see Europeans living more comfortably than Americans, while consuming far less energy, that ought to give you pause.

It also should give you pause to notice how "essential" it is for the sea not to force you to relocate, something global warming is slowly doing to hundreds of millions of people.

32 of the 48 countries in Africa are in an energy crisis according to the World Bank. Think how many millions of lives could be improved/saved by cheap coal plants, with immediate benefits. Or, the horror, nuclear power plants in 15 years.

We're leaving hundreds of millions in abject poverty today, for some mild to negligible benefit in the future (We aren't cutting CO2 emissions from industrialized nations much anytime soon).

Or wind and solar (including PV, CSP and domestic water heating) seeing how they are cheap and easy to roll out? Why wait 15 years for nuclear that is seen as too expensive as well as socially unacceptable in many nations, when you can get immediate returns with wind? Why poison the air with coal when you can use distributed solar and save on grid expansion costs?

Because a modern coal plant can provide rock steady power at $.05/kwh, day in and day out. Yes, thorium, uranium, VOC's, and mercury suck. And the CO2 isn't exactly a benefit. But compared to the abject poverty, or even eternal "developing" status some countries acquire, it is probably a worthwhile investment, or at least should be given as an option. At least until solar becomes cheaper and we find a way to store energy for when it is needed. [EDIT] Because this isn't just about providing retail power to consumers, but commercial power to factors and industry, to generational wealth to pull whole societies out of poverty.

But asking the Congo to invest in massive solar farms when it can't afford cheap coal, is just cruel.

And Vietnam, China and many other countries see nuclear as the only sensible option. We only have about 3 billion years of fuel left (including thorium, but excluding the immeasurable amount of uranium that could be mined from Ocean water).

I'd be more supportive of gas if the industry weren't so resistant to measuring and controlling their methane leaks.

A growing number of environmentalists support nuclear. James Hansen, for example, advocates advanced nuclear in his book Storms of My Grandchildren. Several other very prominent environmentalists talk about their conversion to nuclear advocacy in the documentary Pandora's Promise.

And we could cut CO2 emissions from industrialized countries quite soon, with the right kind of nuclear power. ThorCon, for example, has a design for a molten salt reactor using existing technology, which could be built in modular form at a rate of 100GWe capacity per year by a single shipyard. It'd be safe, very proliferation resistant, six times more fuel-efficient than conventional reactors, and as cheap as natural gas. Their only problem is that the NRC won't let them do anything.

75% of U.S. coal plants are scheduled for retirement within the next decade. Air pollution from coal kills thousands of Americans per year, according to the American Lung Association. We have lots of shipyards. We have a historic opportunity here, if the government will get out of the way.

Modern nuclear power plants have negligible environmental impact.

Yes, they should be built everywhere.