I must disagree with you a bit. Assuming photovoltaics are not an “extractive” industry is like ignoring the fact that the Prius has a battery made of some really bad crap – and producing and disposing of the battery offset any of the benefits we gain driving it 200,000 miles.

Large scale wind farms have similar issues – i have to make the towers – transport them and then try and connect them to the grid – which is not conveniently nearby…

Nuclear advances are impressive when you look at them without some of the fear mongering – the French have proven that a large percentage of electric demand can be safely generated with nuclear – at a very low cost.

One interesting approach is being developed by Hyperion – small scale nuclear reactors that can power 20,000 homes or so and can be safely buried and ignored except for refueling every five years or so,

Other chemical disasters also have infinite costs — consider the permanent loss of the entire town of Times Beach, Missouri, again due to PCB contamination. It’s also true that the costs associated with coal tailings and other mining wastes have equally long tails. Picher, Oklahoma is being abandoned due to mountains of toxic tin mine tailings that cannot be cleaned up.

We cannot base a permanent energy economy on extraction-based activities that cause progressive, permanent damage to the environment — sooner or later we’ll end up with all of the environment contaminated, and we’ll have no good places left for ourselves. If you like nuclear energy, we already have a wonderful source of fusion energy that produces far more power than we’ve been able to capture so far, and it keeps its waste to itself, at a safe distance of 93 million miles. Photovoltaic, solar thermal, wind, hydro, and wave energy produce no toxic waste needing cleanup after the plants have completed their lifespans. Not to mention photolysis of water to produce hydrogen, which has a nice promise to make a chemical fuel in home power plants for people who have an emotional need for a noisy internal combustion engine in their cars rather than a quiet electric motor. But solar hydrogen technology is much less farther along than the other renewable ones.

Natural gas is a useful low-carbon fuel, but it can only be a transitional stage to a fully sustainable energy economy.

I find it a bit baffling that those who tend to take the most agressive stance on climate change also take a similar stance against further development of nuclear energy.

i could accept cap and trade if it were coupled with real plans to increase our use of nuclear and natural gas. Shifting a significant share of our energy production from dirty to clean seems to make sense – and would likely keep retail electric costs down.