Daily Inspiration Quote by David R. Brower

Brower rigs this question like a moral trap: answer "yes" and you’ve basically confessed you’ll trade your descendants for cheap power; answer "no" and you’ve admitted the entire pro-growth posture is indefensible on its own terms. The phrase "minor convenience" is the knife twist. He’s not arguing that energy is bad; he’s shrinking what the present claims as necessity into something petty and self-indulgent, a "luxury" we’ve dressed up as progress.

The time math does the real work. "Doubling its energy consumption every 10 years" invokes the giddy logic of postwar modernity: expansion as a lifestyle, not a strategy. Against it he slams "the next 20,000 generations", a number so huge it feels almost obscene to say out loud. That’s the point. Nuclear waste forces a timescale where our usual political language breaks; election cycles and quarterly earnings look ridiculous next to a hazard that outlasts languages, borders, even institutions.

Subtextually, Brower is indicting a specific kind of optimism: the belief that technology will tidy up after us, that the future is a cleanup crew. "Exposing" is carefully chosen; it frames the risk as imposed without consent, making the unborn into an involuntary test population. In the late 20th-century fights over nuclear power and its back-end problem, Brower’s intent is to shift the debate from kilowatts and cost curves to ethics and intergenerational rights. He’s asking not whether we can build it, but whether we have the right to.