First, a little context. I discovered that my policy views are largely compatible with those of Jill Stein. Unfortunately, this survey largely omits energy policy. Since energy policy is, in my opinion, the most important thing in the current spectrum of US policy, I consider this a massive oversight.
How we approach problems with energy scarcity is the single most important political question of our age.
Energy, simply put, is the capacity to do work. Because of this, it helps drive economy. It is what we use to convert natural resources into goods. It is what we use to convert sunlight into food. It is what we use to convert labor into leisure. Our ability to extract and use energy to perform work is one of the biggest reasons that slavery is relegated to illegal operations around the world. We've made energy our slave, so we no longer need to make slaves of each other.
Energy, additionally, is "free" - in that the human race does not synthesize the things we extract energy from. We don't make gasoline in any significant amounts. We don't make coal. We don't make uranium or sunlight or wind. We just collect it, refine it, and distribute it. The companies that do this are pulling free stuff out of the earth and air, at great financial expense, and delivering it to us at profit.
What this means is that the collection and distribution of energy is a wealth-generating operation. Oil in the ground is no good to anyone; oil, refined as gasoline, and sitting in your car's fuel tank is worth, apparently, about $1.25/L.
So we don't need external energy - at least not on the individual basis - and societies came and went without any utilization of energy past basic agriculture for thousands of years. However, we, morally speaking, need energy to live sustainably. Without supplies of energy, we all become subsistence farmers. There become a precious few who are able to take the created wealth of many and use it to work out solutions to limits to growth. So in order for the human race to sustainably grow such that the entire world has the quality of life of Europe and North America, we need to solve the problem of energy scarcity.
Unfortunately, the way we've been slaving energy in the last 200 years - by combusting hydrocarbons - has had a nasty side-effect. We've been digging carbon out of the ground and dumping its ash it into our atmosphere. The ash - CO₂ - is an effective and long-lived insulator in our atmosphere, and the result has been that our climate is changing in ways we neither expected nor desire.
So it matters how we go about collecting our energy. The ways in which we do this carry with them consequences. Coal, oil, and natural gas are all polluters in this sense and, if we're to limit the consequences of our energy slavery, we must end our extraction of these commodities. We must reverse and balance the process - converting CO₂ in the air into fuel for later consumption - changing hydrocarbon fuels from energy source into storage device. This process is largely known, but requires high energy investment.
The question then becomes, where do we get energy from? The answers are simple, but it requires a sense of scale to get there. Solar power is one of the common answers, and seems right; hydrocarbons are embodied energy from the sun, after all. Wind is another good-sounding answer, and is ultimately a solar-powered source as well. Unfortunately, both of these have proven far too diffuse to cover the needs of an industrialized society. Even with our best efficiency devices, the sun only pours down about 1 kilowatt/m² at noon at the equator (1.4 kilowatt/m² if you go into space - and expensive venture in itself). Worse, since the sun only shines at daytime, and wind isn't well-correllated to diurnal cycles, it is necessary to back solar and wind generators with something to balance out the generation against its load.
In practice, this has been done with natural gas generators - and since natural gas is cheaper to build and operate than solar or wind, the tendency has been for solar and wind plants to expand their natural gas "backing" over time, and for that "backing" to predominate the energy output of the plant. This means that real outlays of renewable resources have done little to reduce our CO₂ production at the per-watt level. They're lower than natural gas alone, but only marginally. (Incidentally, natural gas produces about half the CO₂/watt-hour as coal or oil, making this marginal improvement significant when compared to coal or natural gas).
I haven't touched on our newest energy technology yet: nuclear energy. Some will argue with me, but the photovoltaic effect was discovered in 1839 and first implemented as a cell in 1887; fission was discovered in 1938, with the first sustained fission reactor being built in 1942. Nuclear energy is simply this: use fission to produce heat; convert heat into energy. It's amazingly power dense (~23 MWh/g compared to 13 Wh/g for natural gas and 7 Wh/g for coal. When averaged over the life of a cell, solar gets about 20 kWh/g) and land-dense.
Nuclear energy does carry with it a legacy of spent nuclear fuel - but technologies already exist to store, consume and reuse spent fuel; the problems surrounding it are political, not technological.
Nuclear energy has a history of fear and harm and shock and awe. The nuclear weapons detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki left scars on the world's psyche that will never be forgotten. The disaster at the Chernobyl plant in Pripyat, Ukrane has had and will have long-term consequences for everyone in that region. The recent events at Fukushima have sent ripples around the world of public policy.
However, from a pure risk assessment point of view, one can hardly understand why. Counting in all the cancers and potential cancers and deaths from non-nuclear causes at nuclear power plants, nuclear kills 0.04 people per 1000 gigawatt-hours. Better, it's not diffuse. From the point of view of Fukushima and Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, nuclear is terrifying; from the point of view of honest risk assessment, however, nuclear is less dangerous than any other electricity generating source.
Nuclear power plants even have a lower rate of radiological release than coal plants, which are free to release the uranium and thorium oxides that form when coal, which contains these elements in trace amounts, is burned.
Specifically because they seek to phase out nuclear energy, defending this with falsehoods and fear, I can't rightly vote for a green party candidate. Exclusion of nuclear from the energy mix is incompatible with a goal to reduce carbon emissions.
Stein posits this straw-man:
“Every dollar spent on nuclear energy creates more carbon pollution than would result from spending the same dollar on renewables,” according to Stein, “and nuclear is getting more expensive whereas renewables are getting cheaper.”
This makes no sense, given that what nuclear energy supplants is not renewables, but coal, oil and natural gas. The only CO₂ produced at a nuclear power plant is that of construction, and that which gasses off of its concrete - a not insignificant amount, but an amount which is comparable - slightly higher per kWh - to the manufacturing costs for solar panels and wind turbines. All three are orders of magnitude under the operating emissions of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, given the necessity of natural gas backing for solar and wind (in absence of nuclear, which I'll get to in a second), all of the carbon emission reduction gains for renewables are for naught with reference to nuclear.
U.S. taxpayers continue to subsidize insurance coverage for the private firms that own and operate all U.S. nuclear plants through the Price-Anderson Nuclear Indemnity Act.
Price-Anderson requires that any nuclear cleanup costs in excess of $375M per event be covered by the government, and Price-Anderson act funds come from the reactor companies themselves, and is only held in escrow by the US government. Taxpayers do not cover this cost unless something goes wrong in excess of the current PA fund (which stands presently at $12B).
One can argue that ratepayers cover this cost - but ratepayers cover all regulatory costs, ultimately, so not only is it a dishonest implication to mention it in such a context - but the annual payments are capped - at $17.5M per reactor per year, which shakes out to about $0.002 / kWh.
She mentions that "nuclear is getting more expensive", but this is simply not true; the absolute cost of nuclear is getting lower, but - thanks in part to pressure from the Green party - costs due to legal build challenges and protests have gone up significantly, and regulatory costs have risen over time, at least in the US. China is rolling out nuclear to slowly supplant their coal production at a high build rate, getting their reactors from Areva at about $1.2/W - in the US, a reactor can cost anywhere between $4/W and $8/W, depending on what delays are imposed. Meanwhile, solar is not getting cheaper; it's getting more diffuse. Cheap solar cells come with lower efficiency, such that you can have very dense cells at $25/W or very wide cells at $16/W - after diurnality is taken into account.
Which brings me to a sidenote of a gripe about the solar and industries: solar and wind tend to have a very low capacity factor - the ratio between the capacity of the system and the average output. If you have 100 W of solar panels, and they produce 20 W over an hour, based on incoming sunlight, you've got a capacity factor of 20%. Solar and wind both hover around this number. However, when you see anything about a new renewable build in the news, you're only ever given the capacity - which in turn gives renewables the appearance of much lower costs. As an engineer, this strikes me as condemnably dishonest. By using capacity instead of expected output, you necessarily deflate your costs by a factor of five. This has the effect of distorting the public perception of renewable energy - a distortion that, infuriatingly, I've even seen make it into scholarly papers on the subject of energy policy.
Worse, there are outrages like Mark Z. Jacobsen's paper titled, "Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power" - in which he dismisses nuclear energy as a carbon producer - by literally including the carbon footprint of a burning city. This is dishonest for a couple of reasons. First: even today's nuclear power plants do not produce anything that is more easily used to build nuclear weapons than natural uranium. Second: If uranium is more valuable for energy than nuclear weapons, we simply won't make nuclear weapons (we make weapons to take energy from others anyway, after all). Without a market for natural uranium, its only value becomes is as weapons material, and the scarcity brought about by having only high-effort, low-density power becomes a motivation for their use: if you need more land to expand your power production, your neigbors have plenty of that.
I want to reduce the pollution of the human race. I want us to live in equilibrium with our environment. I want our growth to be sustainable. And to these ends, I don't see how that's possible without nuclear energy. I mean, if it's a choice of a small building with a tiny risk of radioactive release, versus destroying desert habitats by papering them over with cheap solar panels, I'll go with the small building and spend a lot of money making sure that risk is as small as possible. So I don't consider the Green party to be "green" in the sense of keeping the environment clean and making as little footprint as possible. They're advocating the mining of arsenic (solar) and neodymium (wind) at unsustainable rates, the latter of which we can't even do in the US because of legal restrictions (neodymium is usually carried with thorium, which needs to be disposed of properly). The Green party, like every other political party, simply fails to live up to their chosen moniker.
Stein retweeted:
RT @simpleatheist: How has voting for the lesser of 2 evils worked out for you? Check out #TheGreenParty & @jillstein2012 Educate Yourself!
Unfortunately, she, in my opinion, is not even the least of the eight available evils this election.