Interesting paper on the problem of electronic waste associated with cars.

[hunter]

5. I agree with NNadir. The car culture is unsustainable.

Quite amazingly, according to you, that the human race managed to survive hundreds of thousands of years without automobiles.

The automobile culture is not sustainable, therefore it will not be sustained. We can choose how we deal with this reality. We won't deal with it rationally of course, so the collapse of this world civilization, the first world civilization in all human history, will be quite spectacular. Exponential growth never ends well for an innovative species. Were not the first innovative species on earth, we won't be the last.

It still astonishes me how many anti-nuclear activists become feckless shills for the fossil fuel industry. Hell, I remember one here who called fossil fuels "natural" as opposed to nuclear power. Gee, I wonder where that idea came from? I remember all the "clean burning NATURAL gas!" ads from the 'seventies. "Natural gas" has always been a marketing term, first created to distinguish it from toxic city gas, which was made from coal and contained carbon monoxide. You really could kill yourself by turning on your gas oven and sticking your head in it. The waste these gas plants dumped in open ponds and trenches is as toxic and as carcinogenic as many sorts of nuclear waste.

The innumeracy of many anti-nuclear activists is also astonishing. The nameplate rating of wind turbines and solar panels is in no way comparable to the nameplate rating of a fossil fuel plant capable of running twenty four hours a day, seven days a week for weeks, months, or years at a time. However expensive Fukushima will be to clean up, the damage it has done to the planet is not comparable to the damage done by any coal fired plant of similar capacity. All that scary nuclear fuel is just sitting there, slowly cooling down, unlike any coal mine or power plant that spews its toxic waste everywhere.

The natural gas industry, and the manufacturers of natural gas power plants and electrical switching equipment, have no problem supporting the wind and solar industry. Wind and solar must be backed up near 100% by nimble gas power plants, plants that will be generating more power overall then the solar and wind power plants the back up ever do. (If you wave your hands about smart grids, hydro, and giant HVDC projects, you are not any sort of environmentalist and I will put you on my ignore list. Nobody who calls themselves an "environmentalist" would support large scale hydro projects of the sort that would be required to back up solar and wind power plants for more than a few hours.)

Unlike NNadir, I'm not an advocate of nuclear power or most heavy industry. But I don't let any concerns I have about nuclear power blind me to the dangers of fossil fuels. If we were truly interested in "saving the world" we'd ban fossil fuels immediately and let the chips fall where they may. Even a fully nuclear powered society would have little in common with the fossil fueled society we enjoy now.

My views as an environmentalist are fairly extreme. From my perspective, "greens" such as Jill Stein and Ralph Nader occupy the same political strata as Donald Trump. The are people who exploit the irrational fears of innumerate people, people who have at best a grammar school level understanding of science.

I have some formal training in the field of environmental biology, although my major interest is evolutionary biology. It's been my privilege to do some post-graduate field work, although my current interests mostly involve computers. Numbers large and small are not "unimaginable" to me as it seems they are to so many people pretending to be various flavors of "environmentalist." I'm inclined to ignore the arguments of innumerate people, and of those who defend their arguments squid-like, with great clouds of cut-and paste text.

Sometimes I daydream about a "sustainable" future for humans.

First of all, in my utopia, the human population would be declining and that would be voluntary. Every kid would know about birth control and human sexuality years before they had any great interest in sex. So how is that reflected in my own life? I support Planned Parenthood and do what I can to obstruct the religiously insane and ignorant anti- birth control and "purity" obsessed crowd, especially in the public schools and within my own religious community. And, as usual, I can't avoid my own hypocrisy, living an ordinary life here in California. My wife and I did not choose to go childless.

Second, in my daydream, the car culture would be rendered unnecessary and undesirable to most people, achieved by the reconstruction of our cities in a manner that increased population density and "walkability." In my own life, my wife and I by some planning and greater good fortune have managed to avoid the commuter lifestyle since we left Los Angeles in the mid 'eighties. My hypocrisy is that I still own a car. It seems to me that in this car culture a person who doesn't have a drivers license and a car is not considered fully adult except in the big cities with good public transportation. (One of my nephews lives in San Francisco. When he needs a car he rents one, and that's only a couple of times each year.) My own car reflects my low opinion of cars. It's an $800 mid 'eighties car with a salvage title. The fuel injection is good, the catalytic converter is good, so it's not the smog machine an older car would be. I don't wash anything on my car but the windows. It has lichen growing on it. I'll never buy a new car again, I did that once when I was young and foolish, pumped up by my vanity and first career-track job. My wife's car is a bit newer and much better looking, but likewise "recycled."

Third is my observation that "economic productivity" as we now define it is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the earth's natural environment and our own human spirit. We won't solve our environmental problems by buying more crap, not even wind turbines or solar panels. Wind turbines and solar panels will always be supplemental to the core energy sources. In this world those energy sources are coal and gas. We can't change that without radically changing our definitions of economic productivity and our personal measures of success and happiness.

It's not likely we humans of this modern world economy will change in time. Millions, maybe even billions of people are already suffering the consequences of our fossil fuel use, be it air and water pollution, or the direct consequences of global warming, yet fossil fuel use is increasing.

In this environment nuclear power, pro or con, doesn't seem worth all the arm waving and internet spew. Nuclear power is clearly more desirable than coal; even an accident as bad as Chernobyl doesn't turn the surrounding area into a lifeless wasteland. But that's not saying much, because coal is so horrendously bad. Gas extracted by intensive means such as fracking is pretty horrible too.

It seems to me that gas is the most dangerous fuel in our modern world. It's preferable to coal because it doesn't produce the waste of coal mining and coal power plants, and there are apparently enough "reserves" of gas to last a century.

Burning that gas, along with continued coal use, is destroying what's left of the natural environment we humans are accustomed to.

The future is not rosy and nuclear power has little to do with that grim assessment.