Nothing is ever perfectly safe. Nothing you do ever has no impact. Everything in life is about tradeoffs, and the right thing to do is pick the best one. NOT wait for the perfect one!
Waiting generally has a very low environmental impact. Higher energy costs and a slower economy are not necessarily bad. Unbridled growth is not the only option.
> Higher energy costs and a slower economy are not necessarily bad.
Said no poor person ever. You can't just bury your head in the sand and pretend your policies/idea don't impact anyone.
If you understand that and choose to do so anyway because you feel it's better, fine, at least you understand that you are making a tradeoff. But just pretending there is no harm is disingenuous.
>Higher energy costs and a slower economy are not necessarily bad
Are you going to be the person who tells families around the country that their grandmother had to freeze to death this winter for the greater good?
How about the young couple that just had a kid and is suffering from stagnant wages. Are you going to come around and tell them to "tough it out" to prevent a catastrophic event a century or two from now?
All the while the smokestacks in the 3rd world just keep growing, and thanks to the lack of demand in the US they can consume even more petroleum products (and in a far less efficient manner) due to the lower cost globally.
Delays in, and cancellations of, nuclear projects for political reasons have had a huge environmental impact, resulting in billions of tons of CO2 release that would not have happened (counting just one pollutant).
(Also, premature decommissioning for political reasons, (e.g. Rancho Seco)
their point is that it's a false choice. perhaps those resources are better spent developing energy technology that does not require that we accept a certain amount of "unavoidable" environmental damage. it is avoidable, but perhaps a completely free market does not encode that effectively
