Intellectual Property and Sustainable Development

What Obama means by "clean," part 2

Regarding President Obama's plans to clean the environment and grow jobs as part of his new green economy, Bloomberg reports that he will announce plans to triple previous loan guarantees to over US$ 54 Billion for new nuclear power plants in the US.  Although an initial allocation of US$ 18 billion was made under President G.W. Bush, no loans had issued to date. 

While it is rumored that the Dept. of Energy (DOE) will begin researching new solutions to the problem of storing nuclear waste, this "fix-it later" solution to climate change certainly is not the precautionary principle of environmental law.  It is not clear if new funding will be allocated to the DOE's effort to make nuclear energy "clean," or if this will come out of previously allocated spending in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, which allocated US$ 6 billion for the cleanup of radioactive waste and another US$ 2 billion for energy research at the DOE.

Unfortunately, supporting nuclear energy might be the President's attempt to win Republican support for Climate Change and Energy legislation in the Senate, following the loss of a Democratic Senate seat in Massachusetts (see post below). 

What Obama means by "clean," part 1

Perhaps misinterpreting our earlier post, President Obama named these "clean" technologies as critical to ensuring American competitiveness and recovery from abysmal employment levels (minute 23 of yesterday's state of the union address):

• Nuclear
• Clean Coal, i.e. Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), i.e. finding somewhere other than the atmosphere to dump CO2
• Opening new areas for off-shore oil & gas development
• Biofuels

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has provided estimates of air emissions from various CCS plant designs. While CO₂ is drastically reduced (though never completely captured), emissions of air pollutants increase significantly, generally due to the energy penalty of capture.  Some proposals suggest dumping carbon masses deep into the oceans, exacerbating the problem of ocean acidification, which is due to anthropogenic carbon being in the atmosphere in the first place.

US biofuel production is predominantly corn-based ethanol, which raises numerous concerns regarding pollution, net generation of greenhouse gases, and food security.  Internationally, deforestation - especially of biodiversity-rich forests in South America and South East Asia - is also a major concern. 

Not exactly what environmentalists were hoping for.