Comments

1. StevoR says

   2020-03-22 at 6:09 pm

   Yes, it sure is an interesting contrast between the urgent,drastic and immediate action we’vetaken on COVID 19 versus the pathetic failure to act and denial of reality we’ve had from a number of govts – notably Australia’s and America’s when itcomes to Global Overheating.

2. robertbaden says

   2020-03-23 at 4:48 am

   Shorter time frame to see results. And Trump’s response involved a lot of denial for a couple of months.

3. GerrardOfTitanServer says

   2020-03-25 at 6:52 am

   So, when are we going to take the “drastic” action of removing the political shackles around the only technology, nuclear, that is historically proven to make gigantic contributions to solving the human greenhouse gas emissions mess, as proven by France and Sweden?

4. Abe Drayton says

   2020-03-25 at 1:08 pm

   If it happens, it’ll be some time after people accept that drastic action is necessary in general. That’s the point where people will start having serious conversations about resource balancing, power rationing, and exploring options that have generally been considered “off the table”. It’s also the point where people will not be caring so quite much about the price tag, and be more willing to consider things like power plants NOT operated for profit, and therefor not operated with massive incentives to cut corners on safety.

   The real trick is going to be pushing that action in a constructive direction, rather than an eco-fascist one.

5. GerrardOfTitanServer says

   2020-03-26 at 2:11 am

   That’s just it. If we just got the Greens out of the way, nuclear could and probably would be cheaper than coal. People would just use it, whether they cared about the environment or not. It’s a great fluke of reality that the cheapest (ignoring super-cheap natural gas) electricity source, nuclear, also happens to be basically the safest source and cleanest for the environment.

   We don’t have to convince Republicans and climate change deniers that climate change is real – it would be nice if we could to accelerate the process, but there are many reasons to go nuclear other than the climate. We have simple price tag. We have energy independence and national security. It would contribute to global peace and less colonial exploitation because rich countries would have less need to go to war for oil. There’s also the simple fact that we could greatly reduce airborne particulate pollution, one of the leading causes of death worldwide, responsible for about 1 out of every 8 deaths worldwide. We could save those people. All of this is true regardless of the impact of CO2 and other greenhouse gases on global temperatures (and regardless of CO2 making the oceans more acidic).

   The irony here is that the people who profess to claim most about climate change are also the ones who are primarily responsible obstructing the solution. Again, one anecdote. California circa 1960 had enough nuclear power being planned and built that if it went through, California would have basically zero CO2 emissions from electricity production today. The utilities were planning to do that for reasons other than climate change. It was going to happen too, until Jerry Brown (D) teamed with the budding Green anti-nuclear environmental movement to kill most of those nuclear power plant plans, so that California would build coal, because he and his family had strong financial interests in fossil fuels.

6. Abe Drayton says

   2020-03-30 at 5:37 pm

   The greens aren’t the ones behind shit like this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-23/u-s-to-let-nuclear-plants-defer-repairs-schedule-longer-shifts?

   Which rightfully undermines public confidence that these are being handled responsibly.

7. GerrardOfTitanServer says

   2020-04-02 at 1:40 am

   To Abe Drayton
   In a manner of speaking, the Greens are responsible. They’re responsible for the vastly exaggerated threat that you think these things are. You are speaking about this as though it’s cataclysmic when it’s not. You think that each nuclear power plant accident is something unimaginably horrific based on the lies that have been fed to you for your entire life from the lying Green environmental organizations. You overestimate the real dangers involved by a factor of a thousand, and maybe a million. For example, Greenpeace publishes papers that say a million dead from Chernobyl, but it’s quite plausible that the real number is closer to a few hundred, and definitely no more than a few thousand.

   Coal is killing a million or two people every year. In just a few hours of normal operations, coal worldwide kills more people than nuclear power has ever killed.

   When nuclear plants are operated correctly, no one dies. Fukushima didn’t kill anyone, and practically all of the exclusion area is safe to live in now. Almost all of the topsoil removal is being done to assuage fears with no basis in medical reality. And this was with a 50 approx year old plant, under a once in a century natural disaster. And still no one died or will die from radiation, approx. Three Mile Island was way better. No one died, and no substantial release of radiation from the plant. The biggest accident was Chernobyl, a clusterfuck of a design, with a positive temperature coefficient, without a containment building, which happened when they were conducting an experiment, which required them to turn off safety features, which was performed by the less trained night crew. Even then, all of the respectable health organizations say that only 4000 or 6000 people will die from radiation causes. Worse, or better depending on your perspective, almost all of those deaths were easily preventable – the governments in affected areas just had to tell their people to not drink milk for the next few months, and practically all of the cases of cancer outside of the workers on site would have been prevented. Even more, those numbers of 4000 or 6000 deaths are probably an overestimate by a factor of 10x or 100x because those numbers are based on the pseudoscientific model of LNT.

   What are you worried about? What do you think could go wrong? What is the worst case scenario for a western nuclear power plant? We’ve seen it already in Fukushima and Three Mile Island. Your fears are irrational and based on lies. Again, contrast that with the ongoing reality which is that every hour, a hundred more people die from complications from airborne particulate pollution, and we haven’t even started on the horrors of climate change, ocean acidification, etc.

   This conversation will never be productive as long as you labor under the ridiculous lies peddled by Greenpeace, Friends Of The Earth, the Sierra Club, Helen Caldicott, etc., and their fossil fuel backers. They’re conspiracy theorists. They openly promote conspiracy theories. Helen Caldicott is on record as saying that Chernobyl is the biggest coverup in the history of medicine, and Greenpeace publishes obscure authors, and pretending to go through a respectable academic peer review, to publish a paper which goes against the scientific consensus, in order to claim about 1 million people died or will die from Chernobyl, and the paper uses the most ridiculous of methodologies (assuming all death rate increases in affected areas are due to radiation, including those with no plausible connection between radiation and the cause of death).

   These Green organizations really are among the scum of the Earth for the harm that they have caused by denying the world clean air and furthering the climate change problem.

   PS:

   I haven’t even mentioned the near unimaginable harm that the Green orgs are doing for world hunger because of their stance on GMOs and inorganic fertilizer. See:

   From the greatest human being to ever live, on his domain of expertise, which is about as close as it gets to me taking it as gospel:

   https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/01/forgotten-benefactor-of-humanity/306101/

   Environmental lobbyists persuaded the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to back off from most African agriculture projects. The Rockefeller Foundation largely backed away too—though it might have in any case, because it was shifting toward an emphasis on biotechnological agricultural research. “World Bank fear of green political pressure in Washington became the single biggest obstacle to feeding Africa,” Borlaug says. The green parties of Western Europe persuaded most of their governments to stop supplying fertilizer to Africa; an exception was Norway, which has a large crown corporation that makes fertilizer and avidly promotes its use. Borlaug, once an honored presence at the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, became, he says, “a tar baby to them politically, because all the ideas the greenies couldn’t stand were sticking to me.”

   Borlaug’s reaction to the campaign was anger. He says, “Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”