Energy From Thorium Discussion Forum

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/10/wwf-fu ... hange.html

The brazen lying would be comical if lives weren't at stake. Apparently they think the capacity factor of wind farms are between 40 and 60% and the capacity factor of nuclear plants between 60% and 80%.

I waded through this swamp this afternoon. One small paragraph stuck out as damning the whole report:



Now if this is the case, I would expect to see a list of these 'widely accepted sources' given that they are 'available to the general public' so that I could see for example, where there is a potential emission reduction in the aviation sector of 66% after reductions realized by something called 'Avoided Aviation,' whatever that might be.

Without access to to primary sources this report is nothing but a dreary bit of poor fiction.

That is not hard to translate. Add a few hundred percent taxes to the price of an airline ticket as a carbon tax surcharge and you will avoid aviation.
(At least for the little people, important folks like congress members or climate change experts will be exempted).

Taxes aren't the only means to avoid carbon emissions. In this case it's again easy to make reference to France or Germany. In France, TGV trains are quite competitive with normal air traffic. The only loss is time. However if you for instance think about the distance Brussels-Paris, the train is more advantageous. Nevertheless for Brussels-Nice, it becomes a bit less advantageous. But with appropriate taxiations (or reductions), the price of a train ticket could be more competitive (in certain cases it already is in France and Germany). In Germany the use of quite good night trains is also combatting CO2, especially since all of those high speed vehicles are electricity driven.

It's because of this that i'm quite excited about the US's plans for high speed train connections

Those interpretations may all may well be true, and call me a hidebound traditionalist if you wish, but I prefer to have terms like that defined in the document using them, rather than leaving open for guesswork by the readers.

At any rate under both translations above, a move to a more polluting mode would still qualify, so I am still not convinced that this value has any meaning.