Nathan Hultman - Mentions and Appearances
Nathan Hultman is a nonresident senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings.
There are some technologies that can actually capture emissions of, for example, CO2, and those technologies right now are relatively expensive per ton of CO2 that you can actually eliminate from being omitted. But, there are also, of course, other options, there’s energy efficiency, there are alternative sources of supply, such as solar and wind, and there are even switches to other sources of fuel, such as natural gas.
But the discussion in the United States is different now, even from a month ago. [Hurricane Sandy] demonstrated to a large part of the country that we are certainly vulnerable to the kind of events we might see under climate change. People see now that it is related it to our national security.
I'm frankly quite uninspired by the new thematic approach to Rio+20. It's very incrementalist and it's not really thinking about the big environmental goals, which is what do we really need to do about energy and environment over the next 50 years.
The Kyoto protocol is reaching its end stage. And I think that might be a good thing. It might enable us to move on to what may be a more productive set of treaties or set of agreements that can again see these technologies implemented in a more real way.
... events at Fukushima will complicate planning for nuclear expansion for the coming years in all countries.