Hard Green

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MOTHER: I probably don't have to ask which fuel you favor.

PH: [Laughs] There is very little doubt in my mind that, properly managed technologically, the smallest footprint on the biosphere clearly is nuclear. But the imprint on the biosphere is not the only criterion we have. If people feel terribly uncomfortable with it, that's a legitimate factor. But if you're doing a strictly environmental choice, the smallest footprint is nuclear. And, I might add, smallerthan windmills, solar and all the other supposedly "soft green" darlings.

MOTHER: Are you defining "impact" simply in terms of how much real-estate energy the source demands?

PH: Once you actually do honest numbers, you almost inevitably come up with nuclear. If you're just going to do something solar on your rooftop, go ahead. But unless you are extremely frugal in your living, you will not get even a fraction of the power you're actually using today from solar panels. Then the question becomes, "Look, am I serious about using these soft alternatives to generate my power?" In which you undoubted ly will expand the number of acres you use in solar, wind and geothermal energy production, or else you go to a much more concentrated, centralized source, like nuclear, like coal, like oil. In terms of direct footprint on the biosphere, they are very frugal.

MOTHER: You mentioned in thebook the concept of "privatizing pollution." Could you explain what you mean by that?

PH: Pollution is clearly a legitimate problem that requires intervention of some kind. The debate isn't about whether one should do something about pollution, it's about what are the best means. The modern traditional means, of course, have been direct government regulation, where the government says, "Look, so much may be emitted from a tailpipe, or from a power plant smokestack." The next step beyond that is to allow different sources to trade, so that one can trade off against another. And that leads to much more efficient pollution reduction. With pollutants you can get a grip on in terms of how much is being emitted, and where it's being emitted, you create de facto property rights in the pollutant, you allow it to be traded off against pollution reduction technology. And with rather little effort you can develop very efficient markets that drive pollutants to a steadily declining level as the technology of pollution abatement improves and technological substitutes emerge. The problem areas come where you're dealing with things that are so diffuse that you cannot even get a handle on where stuff is coming, and where stuff is going. Consider carbon dioxide, which may or may not be called a pollutant. Nature is emitting 100 billion tons or so of CO 2 into the atmosphere each year. Humanity is responsible for five or six billion tons a year. With such a difficult substance, it gets very hard to create market solutions, because we don't have a good handle on what the problem is.

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