children. eight thousand. elementary school two hundred thousand violent acts by the age of eighteen from movies television shows to video games.

twenty four hour news channels is now team every day formulate a staples. for shakespeare. the. creature. that. makes the pill to swallow. everybody was. available in the grow. show. the ritz carlton. hotel.

you can see. them in the hotel. riviera. cintra hotel mccown. broken dream lucky immigrants who when a chance of a new life in the us find the grass isn't always greener when they find poverty unemployment in the land of the free with no government support many educated immigrants say. they find themselves in the worse living conditions than in their homeland us state department brothels fifty thousand degrees in cards per year. the wife of alleged russian arms trader victor boot of faces interrogation ahead of her husband's trial she claims she was detained along with her husband and questioned

for hours by airport and customs officials in new york meanwhile boots a preliminary hearing has been pushed back to the end of january. a russian icebreaker reaches one of the two ships stuck in ice off of russia's pacific coastline vessels have been stranded for over a week in two meters thick ice in the sea of all faults authorities say the fishermen are in no immediate danger and have enough supplies to see them through the rest. up next peter lavelle and is a guest debate on how long the world can remain addicted to oil that's coming up in cross talk after this short break. if you can.

follow in welcome to cross talk i'm peter all about it is probably the greatest debate of our time energy security how we use energy in what kind will most likely determine our energy future the decisions we make now will define how we live for decades to come. can. you discuss the future of energy i'm joined by dan last off in washington he's director of natural resource defense council climate center also in washington we have myron ebel he is the director of energy and global warming policy at the competitive enterprise institute and in paris we go to bruno combi he is president of environmentalists for nuclear energy and another member of our crosstalk team on the hunger all right gentlemen this is crosstalk please feel free to jump anytime you want we have three panelists and you guys have very different points of view so

please feel free to jump in here myron if i can go to you first in washington in making investment decisions about energy for the future for the western world and the u.s. specifically in your case what is the best form of energy that we should be putting our money on getting a return on and getting energy security and looking at the environment as well what's the best setter. there are two paths to investment today in the united states and in the west in general one is making market decisions making the best investment based on market conditions what's the most affordable and accessible type of energy and then we have decisions made on what gets the biggest government mandated subsidy my view is that any investor who goes down the path of working for government mandates and subsidies is playing a fool's game these are unsub so i'm sorry these are unsustainable industries that are being created they're producing very high priced energy that is

a terrible investment if if you're if you're in the market and it's also a terrible investment for our economy overall because it's raising the price of production in the united states so if i can ask you a different way stick with oil because we'll talk about oil peak and and other oil related resources so you would you say if you know i'm not putting words in your mouth but oil is you're for that for the time being that's your call. yes coal oil and natural gas are good investments if you believe in the power of free markets and you think that affordable energy is going to win out over government mandated more expensive energy i think i think those are probably good investments ok dan what do you think ok just let the market decide. well know we really need to transform the way we produce and consume energy if we're going to continue to prosper in the twenty first century so coal and oil are only cheap if we ignore the

national security environmental and economic side effects of those resources which are not generally included in in market prices today so the best investments in clean renewable energy over thirty billion dollars was invested in that sector last quarter that's the highest level ever seen according to bloomberg new energy finance and energy efficiency which is really the low hanging fruit by using energy more effectively in our buildings and factories we can lower energy costs lower our dependence on fossil fuels lower pollution and put a lot of people to work cleaning up the way we consume energy today what more minor minor incident these new technologies are not efficient they're actually create generate very expensive energy how do you reply to that. well it's not true certainly energy efficiency is the lowest cost resource and we're seeing

huge improvements in our productivity in the way we use energy that's a great investment on renewable energy you know there's a range. from wind energy which is very competitive with fossil fuels today solar energy photovoltaics is growing rapidly the costs are declining it's very cost effective in in some areas and the investments that are being made today in scaling up production will lower those costs and again when you compare it to the true costs of burning coal and oil it's a good deal ok bruno if i go to you ok we've talked about oil and gas and related industries we've talked about these new alternative energy resources but we have one out there that has been around for a while and it's called nuclear power and according to supporters nuclear power has gotten a heck of a lot safer over the last three decades then we and it's prevalent i mean we have

the technology and it's getting back on the radar in the united states it's overwhelmingly popular i know france is one of the biggest nuclear powers for for civilian use in the world is that the path we need to really pursue. that's right peter you're absolutely right i think we should open our eyes that in just fifty years we have burnt the oil that nature took a hundred million years to fabricate but when it took us fifty years to burn the first half it will take us a lot less to burn the second half and the resources are limited now if you look at the example of france we have a country here that does eighty percent of its electricity with clean nuclear energy and it's perfectly safe so we have a solution for the world after all today we are absolutely addicted on oil this is not reasonable we need to find another solution as an environmentalist of course i am very much in favor of energy conservation and renewables but when you look at

the figures it just doesn't match the numbers it's not a solution that's up to three the need and we should be very careful that we are running into a major energy crisis nothing is even started yet compared to what we will be seeing and we were very lucky today to enjoy warm homes plenty for food and easy transportation this has not always been the case and will certainly not always remain the case and it will come in a few years from now so today we are in the era of oil and we need to move to the era of nuclear energy because if we don't that ice will go off ok minor if i know you will how do you feel about that i mean would that be part of your portfolio for energy security is nuclear power. yes i think nuclear has a bright long term future i think if in the near term it's still too expensive but you know that's something for people investors in the market to decide whether it is are or is not too expensive i think nuclear has

a very bright future and will be a very it will be an increasing part of the energy mix but you know that's just a prediction who knows i think what you really need to look at is bruno said that we enjoy a warm homes and a comfortable lifestyles because of all the energy we have in fact a lot of the world does not a lot of the world is energy poor well over a billion people don't have any electricity at all another billion or so have intermittent or or unreliable electricity and so there's still a lot of work to be done to make the world's energy abundant rather than energy poor that is largely going to be done through conventional energy because there is a lot of coal in the world a lot of oil and natural gas if you look at a country like india that is rapidly electrifying they are building coal fired generating plants china gets eighty percent of its electricity from coal they are becoming a major coal in my room both india because they are. dan you want to jump in there

go ahead if you want to jump in and go yeah i mean but dan go places. mind is right that both india and china have got a lot of coal plants recently but they both have in the last few years recognized that some unsustainable path and have invested heavily in clean energy technologies so india is now a center for developing solar energy china is the biggest producer of wind power in the world in terms of installations in the last year or so those countries recognize you have a. development path that is dependent on oil and coal is not sustainable for them and it's not sustainable for the world mind when you want to go ahead if you want to jump in there if i had my other reply and then i'll go to break and. dan is using the window dressing that china is doing in building a lot of windmills in fact a lot of the windmills that they're building they're not even connecting to the grid because they know that these are stranded investments there they're wasted as soon as they're built there's no there's no point in investing additional money to

build the very expensive transmission lines to invest to put those windmills on the grid so this is just window dressing it's p.r. for the west and in fact what they're doing they are winning the race for conventional energy and they are very happy to produce as many renewable technologies for the west as we want to buy because they it not only provides manufacturing drugs for them it also makes us less competitive because we're installing less competitive energy so they'll be happy to keep supplying us with with products that are not competitive and of course the reason they're there they're producing more windmills and solar panels is because they have cheaper electricity because they get eighty percent of their electricity from coal and that is increasing they are building one to two new coal fired power plants per week that is dwarfs all of the renewables in china that are being put in every year and it's very interesting if i go to you bruce. but beforehand you know it's really

interesting if that is the case myra did then and then the chinese say use renewables we'll take the oil we'll take all the oil you can sell us and i mean that that's definitely one of their strategies how do you respond of this vote on number of topics and brought up here and you want to jump in. yeah exactly jump in and respond to myron that. oil is just not sustainable it's not reasonable you mentioned the price of course the cost of energy and the abundance is very important and we do need abundant and cheap enough energy but look at the example in france we have the cheapest electricity rates in europe with far nuclear power so this one is abundant it's cheap it's safe so we better run for it before it's too late now to answer down about wind and renewable energies of course as an environmentalist i'm in favor of renewables and i myself live in an eco house just a few miles from here outside of paris which requires very very little energy but you still need an abundant and reliable source of power for the days when there is

no wind and no sun for baseload surprise and the only one that's available for the future in quantities that are sufficient is nuclear power what makes new qur'an or g.'s so different you see is what i call the factor one million just one gram one gram a few range and produces as much energy as one ton of oil no one gram to one ton is a factor of one million so this car that we are inflicting to our planet by taking the matter and using it is just almost insignificant with nuclear power and the amount of waste that is produced is in accordingly small proportions and this waste is totally confined therefore it has absolutely no impact on the environment so nuclear solution is a solution to the problem in fact it's the main part of the solution along with of course to some extent right now but i'm going to jump in right here we come back from that and we come back to me go straight to dan here after a short break we'll continue our discussion on energy stay with our.

her and. her. backyard i'm not gonna let it. play out i'm not trying to prop up and then spread all over the country. virtually all terrorists today are muslim do we have the right to make such provocative statements and do

muslim schools have the right to exist. in new york city. download the official auntie application on the phone all i pod touch from the top story. which all teach life on the go. video on demand ati's minefield costs and feeds now in the palm of your. question on the dot com wealthy british style stock. market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy

with max cause or for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into kinds a report on our. to. you. want to. welcome back to france talk on purely about remind you we're talking about energy for the future. you.

but before let's see what russians think about this issue since the industrial revolution two hundred years ago mankind has been depended on fossil fuel and with the current rate of fossil fuel usage many fear this form of energy will soon be exhausted when this happens humanity will be poor to develop alternative energy sources according to the recently about us and a poll forty three percent of russians see atomic energy as a replacement of oil and gas sixty percent think the future is water resources and then other eight percent believe it is coal that will replace the exhausted oil and gas today many companies in the energy industry are inventing new technologies in order to cope with the changing energy order. ok i'd like to go to dan here dan we fall into the break room i was talking about the great virtues of nuclear power and comparison to other energy resources and you want to jump in so here's

your chance go ahead. well sure his arguments are really highly misleading to suggest that they're one gram of nuclear fuel but to produce that gram of nuclear fuel you have to mine many times that much material so there's a big scar from the nuclear fuel cycle and we still don't have a permanent solution to the waste problem but the biggest problems with nuclear are actually not that the biggest problems are the fact that nuclear energy development has been used as a front for nuclear weapons programs in iran and north korea and the cost of france's nuclear industry is highly subsidized so when there is actually no one no private investor ever in the world has a bill through what i'm going to say that had a good mark french nuclear where it has nuclear power it is built for a competitive market just hasn't happened in overhead reply it's absolutely untrue france has the cheapest to go tricity rates in europe thanks to nuclear electricity

not only that but the environmental results are very good when you compare for example the carbon output into the atmosphere of a french citizen it's six tons per year and the german or english or damage citizens which burn a lot of coal is ten tons per year almost double and the difference is exactly the french nuclear program if you compare france and italy it to be has a very similar structure to france no energy resource but it to be chose not to develop nuclear power and france did and then it's a hugely different rate you know kristie rates are about the twice as much in italy as they are in france today not to speak about the carbon footprint so nuclear energy is an environmental solution it's not just a dream renewables are small things to have a nuclear maybe some extent. all right all right go go ok i want to go you go ahead and you're listening to this argument go ahead well. yes i think it's very interesting that dan thinks it's a very powerful argument against nuclear that it's heavily subsidized by government

that is by taxpayers but he doesn't think it's a good argument against wind power solar power and other kinds of renewables like ethanol all of these terms everything i was just recognized and many of them are now mandated. ok again when the reality is that nuclear the reality is that nuclear has received the lion's share of government subsidies for over fifty years and it's still not competitive where as solar and wind are. just recently emerging as full scale industries in the costs are declining rapidly i also want to address this myth that there are not enough were noble resources to power the globe now i am not excluding the possibility that nuclear could play a role if in fact the cost can be brought down but again there's no evidence that that will actually happen but the reality is that there are plenty of solar resources all around the world there's a scheme to completely power europe with solar power transmitted from sub-saharan

africa. or from the actually from from this era you know the region of africa uganda. and then i did ask you because if i did ask everybody question i'd like to ask everybody was near you know one of the things is very interesting is is i think in principle all of us would like to see these things you know the sun solar energy wind power and all that but who's actually going to do it i mean is it good to be governments are going to do that's going to be companies are going to be doing this because when i see companies extracting oil in the gulf i have a don't trust them very much anymore and the government gave them so much of so much of a free hand i mean what i'm saying is all of these ideas are huge absolutely huge dollar wise who's going to pay for it if i go to myron first i mean you're obviously a friend of the markets coming to the markets to this can they do this because it's such a huge thing. the market private investors in free markets can can do it as long as they are not forced to invest in things that have no or very

little commercial value you know dan said that wind and solar are emerging technologies that need a little boost right at the beginning well that beginning was in the one nine hundred seventy s. when the united states government started heavily subsidizing wind and solar power we've been doing it for well over thirty years and you know wind has gotten cheaper solar scott and cheaper but they still are much more expensive than a coal fired power plant or a nuclear plant so i believe that these these are these really are particularly wind is a dead end technology solar has a lot of technological potential for transformation wind is just always going to be too expensive because the wind doesn't blow by all the time for example it has to do with people need air conditioning in the summer and winter when in the summer when people need air conditioning in texas they have all these windmills the wind does not blow in the summer it only blows in the other three seasons and so those

windmills are producing essentially valueless electricity when they need it when it's valuable the windmills are not producing it so this is this is a dead end technology that the environmentalists keep flogging and it there's no point in it we're just throwing money down the hall. and you want to go where they see my doing is right i submit to you know the fact is that new new wind farms are cheaper than new nuclear plants or new coal plants today unsubsidized and that doesn't even account for the fact that coal plants spew millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year so you know i think if you look to the future of a sustainable society the real debate perhaps is between wind and nuclear and wind clearly is less expensive when you actually account for the cause. cost of building a nuclear power plant yes france's electricity rates are low but they're not paying

for the full cost of actually building that fleet of nuclear power plants if you try to build a new plant today it's many many times more expensive then building wind farms ok bruno again the same issues being brought up as who pays for decay because you you've pointed out and everyone else is pointed out is that the french states supports this i'm not going to use the word subsidize a lot of you guys talk about it but it is a state program right so i mean again it's that the default is the state taking care of the energy security when we have myron looking at the market is not exactly true right go ahead go ahead. it's not exactly true when you look at the french nuclear program it's been funded by the banks not by the french state india if has borrowed money from the banks to build the nuclear reactors not from the french state the french state only help for the research which is something else now when you look at india if you did the phones it's the biggest electricity company in the western world and it provides abundant electricity not only for france but to all

its neighbors which we export spain belgium u.k. germany switzerland their exports from france to all the neighboring countries why because it's energy here is abundant and it's cheap it's cheaper that's the reason now when you look to answer done at windmills i agree with myron that windmills the big industrial windmills are just a crazy dead and no solution at all look at the facts if we want to replace just one nuclear reactor the e.p.a. our reactor which france is building now on the coast of normandy well you have to line up the giant steel monsters which are the modern windmills all the way from genoa in italy to barcelona in spain all along the french mediterranean coast now this is not environmentally friendly it takes up a lot of space it takes up a. the building materials and if you take these into consideration as an environmentalist i would like to say that it's absolutely not the solution and the

energy is then available only when the sunshine or the wind blows and we need the energy upon demand those to guard amounts of energy cannot be stored so the only major energy source that is available when oil starts missing and running short is nuclear power and we better get prepared for it because look at it again at the case of france the decision to build the nuclear program was taken at the same time with the decision to develop renewables and energy conservation so you should not oppose these two things we need every clean energy we get because we are running into a major energy crisis so we should take every solution not just one and even by putting i may run short of energy all right dan go ahead. yeah i agree with that notion that we're not going to solve our energy problem with any single technology whether that's wind or nuclear or or or solar we need

a robust portfolio and what we most need is government policies that require reductions in the pollution that is being produced by fossil fuels that's what will create this estate market for clean energy and will sustain our prosperity going into the future so byron talks about the free market but as a basic principle of free markets that they don't achieve social socially desirable outcomes if people are allowed to pollute without paying the cost of that pollution then that's what's happening today with fossil fuel combustion so i agree that there is a role for the market in selecting the right combination whether it is nuclear or wind or solar and certainly energy efficiency they're all going to play a role but we need to get the basic market structure right so there were driving down the pollution that is is producing one of them in the devastate you know maybe some.