India

The story is simple enough: foreign companies (read: countries) are buying up American coalmines and natural gas fields. But what really struck the BTLS braintrust about this story were people’s widely differing reactions to the headline. Some immediately picked up on the sensational energy security angle, while others immediately saw an outrageous hypocrisy in the very notion of "carbon offshoring". Could the United States potentially end up right back where we started in terms of cleaning up the environment? Shouldn’t we be worried about foreign companies taking control of our limited natural resources? Why should we bother with costly carbon capture and sequestration technology if we're just going to end up letting someone else burn our coal somewhere else?

For answers we talked to BTLS host and senior braintrustee-Scientific American's David Biello. David explains that even though we see a lot of stories in the news about countries like China making great strides building clean energy technologies (like solar panels), China’s energy economy is still far from 'green'. Because China’s economy is expanding so rapidly, and because coal is still their primary resource, they need more energy (read: coal) than ever before.

While China may still have a long way to go, keep in mind—so too does the United States. According to David, coal makes up for over 70% of China’s energy mix. In the United States we’re not much better...

Nuclear reprocessing. You often see it in the news, usually related to what countries are doing it and why. Reprocessing in India and China may get more ink, but the the U.K. & France do far more of it. In the United States, on the other hand, we do not currently reprocess our spent nuclear fuel. So why not? Now that many environmentalists are reevaluating nuclear power (thanks to its status as a low-carbon fuel), many are asking just that: why shouldn't we be recycling this stuff? Almost seems like the least we can do, given the complications of mining and transporting uranium, right?

Not so fast. The fellows at The Union of Concerned Scientists aren't quite so keen on reprocessing. In fact, they're actually quite...concerned about it. As scientists. In their own words, here's what their list of major concerns boils down to:

• Reprocessing would increase the risk of nuclear terrorism.
• Reprocessing would increase the ease of nuclear proliferation.
• Reprocessing would hurt U.S. nuclear waste management efforts.
• Reprocessing would be very expensive.

Very legitimate-sounding concerns, scary-sounding, even—but not everyone would agree. After all, France and Britain seem to be doing alright and they've been reprocessing for decades. To find out more about the argument for reprocessing, we talked to CEO of Duke Energy (and Beyond the Light Switch expert) Jim Rogers.

Jim Rogers knows energy. Just this past Monday he rolled out plans for a $13.7 billion megadeal that will make Duke Energy the largest electric utility in the nation. So how can he consider something that has raised such serious concerns in the past to now be no different than "recycling"? First, Rogers addressed fears that reprocessing will create a greater risk of nuclear terrorism, saying that he finds it much easier to mitigate the risk of proliferation "in the