GLOBAL CLIMATE DEBATE

To preserve middle class jobs and American quality of life we should simultaneously pursue efficiency in energy use while increasing the use of energy while producing American industrial products. American workers are the most productive on the planet while using the highest amounts of energy per worker. This is not a coincidence.

It is fine to reduce energy waste but we should strive to increase (not decrease) energy use per worker in manufacturing. Use of advanced manufacturing equipment and energy amplify worker's efforts. Misguided efforts to reduce energy use per worker will only cause middle class America workers to directly compete in real wages with foreign workers who have similar use of energy and use similar manufacturing equipment. Do you really want to get in a world-wide wage competition with Chinese and Indian workers who offer their labor for 1/4 or less the real wages of American workers?

Poor energy policies and goals to reduce the energy used per worker in manufacturing will cause real American wages to sink back into the pack of wages paid by our foreign Asian competition. Do you really want to bring home a paycheck 1/4 the real value and purchasing power of the paycheck that you brought home a few short years ago?

We currently live in a competitive world economy where goods are made where they can be manufactured for the lowest overall cost when all factors that comprise the cost of manufacturing are considered. This includes the costs of labor, energy, office space, materials, shop space, medical and pension benefits, and the costs of transporting finished products to market. America can pay its workers more money in wages and benefits than the Asian industrial competition if the other costs of manufacturing, including the cost of energy, are lower. If all costs, including wages, are higher than the industrial competition you will not be able to sustainably manufacture in America.

We should strive to produce more, not less, clean, low cost, non-GHG producing energy and use it to build innovative world class products. Cutting back on energy use per worker will decimate real American middle class wages on a long term basis and force more and more manufacturing to go offshore.

The highest quality energy produced at the lowest cost and with the highest availability is nuclear energy. Nuclear energy can produce lower cost electrical energy than can be produced by coal fired power plants [1]. As a culture, America has to find a way to reduce the largely regulation and litigation driven factors which price up American nuclear power. At the dawn of the nuclear age the US built the very first commercial power reactor at Shippingport, PA in just over 4 years from ground breaking to power out on the electrical grid. Today it takes about three times that amount of time largely due to regulatory burden. To compete in the world and to preserve American quality of life we need to find a way to reduce the regulatory burden imposed by the NRC on new reactors while not sacrificing safety.

[1] Cost of electricity from Molten Salt Reactors (MSR), Moir, Nuclear Technology 138 93-95 (2002)
http://www.geocities.com/rmoir2003/coe_10_2_2001.pdf