What are the social consequences of the coal/nuclear option?
Do you remember being an energy consumer in the 70s? The gas lines and unemployment that resulted from the formation of OPEC and energy embargoes to the US? That was the focus of everyone's life then and it engendered a deep-rooted fear in some. That fear didn't just fade away; it continues to underpin the drive for energy security behind both the willingness to reject climate science and the "drill here, drill now" support that fossil fuels and nuclear power enjoy today.
It was in that context that Lovins warned of the consequences of following the Hard Energy Path that has brought us to where we are today. In the article where he discussed it, he also outlined what he saw as a superior alternative - the Soft Energy Path.
You are aware that thanks to Republican control of policy we chose to throw out the energy initiatives begun by Carter in favor of ever more drilling and and ever greater reliance on centralized thermal sources like coal and nuclear - the hard path.
Lovins begins his narrative from 35 years ago by warning us that the consequence of locking ourselves into a "long-term coal economy many times the scale of" 1976 was that it would result in a doubling of CO2 early in the 21st century leading to "irreversible changes in global climate". He stated flatly that should we continue with centralized thermal and petroleum, it wasn't a matter of if, only of when.
Perhaps it could be said that Lovins was slightly off target when he speculated that the conditions necessary for making a transition to a soft path might be destroyed by delaying and not locking in the transition at that time. But when he said that the window of opportunity for change would not be repeated, he was undoubtedly correct; for even though we are now at a crossroad
similar to what he saw in 1976, current CO2 concentrations are now nearing 400ppm and steadily rising.
These are the final three paragraphs of that famous article in Foreign Policy magazine -
Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken.
...We stand at a crossroads: without decisive action our options will slip away. Delay in energy conservation lets wasteful use run on so far that the logistical problems of catching up become insuperable. Delay in widely deploying diverse soft technologies pushes them so far into the future that there is no longer a credible fossil-fuel bridge to them: they must be well under way before the worst part of the oil-and-gas decline. Delay in building the fossil-fuel bridge makes it too tenuous: what the sophisticated coal technologies can give us, in particular, will no longer mesh with our pattern of transitional needs as oil and gas dwindle
Yet these kinds of delay are exactly what we can expect if we continue to devote so much money, time, skill, fuel and political will to the hard technologies that are so demanding of them. Enterprises like nuclear power are not only unnecessary but a positive encumbrance for they prevent us, through logistical competition and cultural incompatibility, from pursuing the tasks of a soft path at a high enough priority to make them work together properly. A hard path can make the attainment of a soft path prohibitively difficult, both by starving its components into garbled and incoherent fragments and by changing social structures and values in a way that makes the innovations of a soft path more painful to envisage and to achieve. As a nation, therefore, we must choose one path before they diverge much further. Indeed, one of the infinite variations on a soft path seems inevitable, either smoothly by choice now or disruptively by necessity later; and I fear that if we do not soon make the choice, growing tensions between rich and poor countries may destroy the conditions that now make smooth attainment of a soft path possible.
These conditions will not be repeated. Some people think we can use oil and gas to bridge to a coal and fission economy, then use that later, if we wish, to bridge to similarly costly technologies in the hazy future. But what if the bridge we are now on is the last one? Our past major transitions in energy supply were smooth because we subsidized them with cheap fossil fuels. Now our new energy supplies are ten or a hundred times more capital-intensive and will stay that way. If our future capital is generated by economic activity fueled by synthetic gas at $25 a barrel-equivalent, nuclear electricity at $60–120 a barrel equivalent, and the like, and if the energy sector itself requires much of that capital just to maintain itself, will capital still be as cheap and plentiful as it is now, or will we have fallen into a "capital trap"? Wherever we make our present transition to, once we arrive we may be stuck there for a long time. Thus if neither the soft nor the hard path were preferable on cost or other grounds, we would still be wise to use our remaining cheap fossil fuels—sparingly—to finance a transition as nearly as possible straight to our ultimate energy-income sources. We shall not have another chance to get there.
If you are concerned about any aspect of the state of our energy system, then you should give this article a long, leisurely read. It can be downloaded in full at this link:
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E77-01_EnergyStrategyRoadNotTaken 
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