I'd add a slight amendment to that ... "as much as is reasonably possible and makes economic sense". For the closed of mind like BAS, that does NOT mean "don't do anything that costs money", it means standing back and asking "is this the best use of the money available ?"
As I mentioned earlier, to get down to the levels of emissions some people are calling for will be HUGELY expensive, involving mind boggling amounts of money (and international political co-operation). To avoid all the complication of trying to shoehorn a highly complex discussion about a highly complex system that no-one fully understands into a just a few words, I'll use an analogy.
In some parts of the UK there is a flooding problem. In some cases this is entirely man made because some developer decided that a flood plain was a good place to build houses, and the planners (sometimes against the advice of the Environment Agency (EA)) gave them permission. As an aside, my dad used to tell me that whenever they (my parents) were looking at houses - one of the first things he'd consider was the risk of flooding - and when I think back, the houses I've lived in have tended to be in locations where "if we're flooded, then down there they'll be out of sight" might be applied.
So, do we spend ever increasing amounts of money protecting those houses from the predictable flooding, in turn causing flooding elsewhere (by taking a flood plain out of use), and then spending money on dealing with that flooding, and ... ?
Or do we decide that the cheaper option is simply to compensate the owners of the houses, knock them down, return the flood plain to use, and solve the problem ?
So far, it seems that the decision is that we protect the houses - it's been politically unacceptable to talk about forcibly moving the residents and bulldozing their homes.
Similarly, in the ACC debate, it appears to be politically unacceptable to ask the question ... well relative to the costs of avoiding the sea level rises, what would it cost to simply relocate everyone within x cm of current sea levels ?
And at the risk of going back on topic, part of the reason that nuclear is so expensive is the requirement that risks be not just As Low As Reasonably Practical as applied to just about anything else, but As Low As Practical (regardless of cost). If you take a step back, and given how dire the need to decarbonise the economy, does this massive increase in costs to avoid tiny risks mean that we are missing an opportunity to mitigate even bigger risks by very slightly increasing risk in nuclear in return for more nuclear generation and the ability to reduce fossil fuel burn ? No I don't have an answer to that, but it's clear that powerful forces (anti-nuclear lobbyists and sensationalist media) have made sure that the average man in the street associates nuclear with "big bangs" rather than carbon free power.
