...we shouldn't forget great Britain. After all, when it's empire crumbled, they lost practically all countries with the very old rocks.

The rocks in Scotland from the Baltic Shield are European mainland traitors. They decided to stick with England during the breakup of Pangea, some 60-80 million years ago. The most northern highlands of Scotland are mostly made up of the Baltic Shield, and all the way to the south there's a suture zone with the rocks from England and the former Iapetus Ocean, I've heard that doing a north-south cross section is quite spectacular. Even more spectacular is that the famous stretched glens could be on top of ultra-old shear-zones that were re-activated again and again in their geologic past. This is not proven, but it's fascinating to muse about. Even without such esoteric thoughts, the Great Glen Fault is worth to be put on the "What I Need to See Before I Die" List for geologists.

And as I always say, there's a sound geological reason why British politics is so focused on the Anglo-American relation: if it wasn't for the failing rift in the North sea (the one that led to the copious oil & gas reservoirs), the UK would've been one of the islands nearby Maine, or nearby. Instead, the rifting continued west of the British Isles, and here we are today...

it's my fault the thread sidetracked.

If you want my serious answer, I'd say that some answers lie in going forward rather than backward.

As an example: the electric noosphere might one day reduce the need for the majority of people to go to work physically or to fly all over the planet for meetings.

We have already discussed here what replacing all domestic tungsten lighting by neon bulbs couid achieve. Or wind power, wave power etc etc.

I don't think many here are against Greenpeace, except when it goes aginst science, I believe we are all solidly against war of all kinds - including the war on 'terrorism'.

And please don't equate American mafioso failures with, for instance, Finland.

You can't be me, I'm taken

I do find the idea of giving a community "a heated swimming pool" in exchange for storing high-grade nuclear waste a bit of a joke. If only they were joking...

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman

Guess I hit a nerve here. Greenpeace is fine for what they stand for and the world would be a lot worse off without these vociferous groups butting their heads with the industrial molochs. But at a thorough first glance I took, Greenpeace simply know shit (if you'd pardon me the explicit) about geology and geological implications of time and reservoir science. And hence I call their bluff. If you've a contact for me in the USA with more sense, I'd welcome it, but I don't know one in the Netherlands.

I find the case of Yucca mountain in regard to bribing or exploiting communities to use their turf for waste disposal discomforting and share your sentiments there. It reeks of continuous neo-colonialism. But this angle simply cannot be projected onto Finland which has vast stretches of practically deserted land and which has geology that's the closest to the ideal for the nuclear mafia equivalent of pouring enemies into concrete.

I hope you know by now that I completely share your vision of a switch to energy reducing lifestyle. Yet even so, I also feel we should stay realistic enough that we need to fairly consider an energy back-up to our on oil floating world. Can we produce an amount of energy by renewables only, not just for the modern western world even with a major switch in lifestyle, but also for those parts in the world starting to catch on with the computer age? I don't know, but I've enough trust in radionuclear technology - if handled with vigilance and dedicated care by experts not driven by margins of profit - to leave it on my list (for now).

As said somewhere else, the priority of the oil energy switch in practice should be 1) Renewables 2) Conservation 3) Nuclear 4) Coal (gods forbid).