Nuclear energy key to climate change: Obama

US President, Barack Obama, on Wednesday said nuclear energy and clean coal energy technology is key to the successful fight against climate change and on the latter it is important to bring India and China on board.

“I know it’s controversial in some quarters, but if you’re serious about dealing with climate change then you’ve got to take a serious look at the nuclear industry,” Mr. Obama said at a Town Hall meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire.

“If you are serious about climate change, you’ve got to figure out is there technology that can allow us to sequester coal and the emissions that are set out,” he said.

The reason for that is not just for the US, Mr. Obama observed.

“China is building a coal-fired plant once a week, just about -- India is doing the same -- because coal is cheap,” he said.

“Unless we can come up with some energy alternatives that allow us to franchise that technology so that they are equipped to burn that coal cleanly, we’re going to have problems no matter what we do in this country when it comes to the environment,” Mr. Obama said.

So technology is the key, he argued. “We can make significant profits and create huge jobs just upgrading traditional technologies”.

“Then you’ve got the whole clean energy sector, which is ready to take off if we provide the kind of seed capital, the kind of R&D credits that are necessary,” he said.

Mr. Obama said this recession almost killed a lot of US homegrown clean energy sectors.

“You talk to the wind industry or the solar industry, if we hadn’t passed the Recovery Act and all the support for clean energy, a lot of them would have completely gone under and we would have been ceding leadership as we already have, unfortunately, to a lot of countries like Spain and Germany and Japan that are doing a lot more work on it“.

“So this is a huge engine for job creation, and we’ve got to make those investments,” he said.

Mr. Obama said the US is one of the least efficient advanced economies when it comes to energy usage.

“It is estimated that we could probably lop off 30 per cent of our energy consumption just on efficiency without changing our lifestyles significantly“.

I say “significantly” because you’d have to start buying LED batteries or LED light bulbs. But it’s still a light bulb. You don’t have to sit in the dark. You don’t have to use gas lanterns. You just have to make the investment.

“And one of the things that a company like ARC Energy is doing is trying to bring down the unit cost for each of those light bulbs,” he said.