She’s mad, really mad


Why aren’t you?

She seems to be the only one making an honest response to our situation.

Comments

  1. blf says

    Here is a transcript of her speech, as published in the Grauniad, If world leaders choose to fail us, my generation will never forgive them:

    […]
    This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

    For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you are doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

    You say you “hear” us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I don’t want to believe that. Because if you fully understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And I refuse to believe that.

    […]

    There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures today. Because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

    You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

  2. vucodlak says

    Angry is good. Angry gets shit done./Anansi

    One of the biggest obstacles to progress right now is that the people holding the levers of power know they’ll be comfortably dead by the time the worst effects of climate change are felt. They will never know the suffering or the deprivation that younger generations will feel. They do not know fear. So long as this remains true, nothing will change.

    Fury is the one hope we have of teaching them fear.

  3. Akira MacKenzie says

    Intransitive @ 3

    Yeah, I saw that one pop on FB last night.

    Hey, Dinesh? Would Ms. Thunberg be more credible to you if she were not white? No? THEN SHUT THE FUCK UP, D’SOUZA!

  4. Akira MacKenzie says

    vucodlak @ 4

    Angry is good. Angry gets shit done.

    Sadly, it doesn’t do much good at removing corrupt president’s the White House, that still require a 2/3rd vote from the Senate who are quite happy with them.

  5. blf says

    (This is a reconstructed & slightly edited cross-post from Intransitive‘s (see @3) current Godwin Loses: Dishonest D’souza lives down to his name. Again. thread.)

    Teh fruitcake [dishonest d’souza] might want to know real nazis are also attacking her, Germany’s AfD turns on Greta Thunberg as it embraces climate denial (this is from several months ago, before the EU elections):

    […]
    Germany’s rightwing populists are embracing climate change denial as the latest topic with which to boost their electoral support, teaming up with scientists who claim hysteria is driving the global warming debate and ridiculing the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg as mentally challenged” and a fraud.

    The Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) is expected to launch its biggest attack yet on mainstream climate science at a symposium in parliament on Tuesday [May 14th] supported by a prominent climate change denial body linked by researchers to prominent conservative groups in the US [Heartland Institute].

    […]

    The party, whose members have been seen handing out climate change denial leaflets at school climate strikes, has ratcheted up its anti-Thunberg rhetoric ahead of the EU parliamentary elections this month. Its candidates have made comparisons between the Swedish teenager and a member of a Nazi youth organisation and called for her to seek treatment for what Maximilian Krah, an AfD candidate for the EU elections, called her psychosis.

    It has also been repeatedly claimed on AfD’s Facebook page that she is the leader of a climate movement cult. Posts on the page make repeated use of terms such as CO2Kult (CO2 cult), Klimawandelpanik (climate change panic) and Klimagehirnwäsche (climate brain washing).

    […]

    (I expect our own nukes are great, renewables don’t work, environmentalists are criminals to show up soon…)

  6. says

    We live in a country where nearly half of the voting public has been brainwashed into thinking climate change is a hoax, many by corporate shills, the rest by their religious leaders who claim, “Even if it’s true, Jesus will save us before it’s too late.” And the president, himself, declares that it’s a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to destroy our economy. Half of our leadership in this country doesn’t believe, in the face of verifiable scientific evidence, and is doing its damnedest to hamstring the other half. As much as I’d like to vote the bastards out, too many of them live in districts where anti-science preachers tell the populace what to do what to do, and thinking for oneself is strongly frowned upon. How do we solve this problem so that coastal Maine doesn’t become dim memories to my children?

  7. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    (I expect our own nukes are great, renewables don’t work, environmentalists are criminals to show up soon…)

    Hi. I’m here. Another reminder that seemingly the majority of climate scientists agree with me, and that France showed how it could be done, and Germany is struggling greatly in spite of comparable money and time, and Germany is still building new coal plants and still expanding coal mining, even now.

  8. vucodlak says

    @ Jonathan Norburg, #12

    How do we solve this problem so that coastal Maine doesn’t become dim memories to my children?

    We don’t. We’re way past that. Where we are now is “how do we mitigate the damage so that only a few hundred million people die, instead of several billion/eventually everyone?”

  9. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    As much as I’d like to vote the bastards out, too many of them live in districts where anti-science preachers tell the populace what to do what to do, and thinking for oneself is strongly frowned upon.

    Ironic that you’re also describing the other side. The Greens are just as bad if not worse when it comes to science denial, innumeracy, and conspiracy theorist thinking. You only have to look at the dismissal by the Greens of basically every major reputable scientific health organization over the true impact of Chernobyl.

    There’s circumstantial evidence that many of the big Green groups are funded by fossil fuel money. They’re playing both sides against each other, and laughing to the bank, while the world burns in the background.

    We need to kick out the science deniers on both sides. We need to kick out the climate change deniers, and we need to kick out the anti-nuclear renewable advocates too. How do we do that? I don’t know.

  10. jrkrideau says

    @ Jonathan Norburg, #12

    How do we solve this problem so that coastal Maine doesn’t become dim memories to my children?

    It is far too late. Well, there will be a a Maine coast,just not the same one as today. And you will be able to tour Miami in a glass bottomed boat.

  11. Zeppelin says

    Forgive me if I’m not comfortable building nuclear power plants during a time when we’re steering towards gigantic social and environmental upheavals. Unless your power plant is “ISIS 2.0/Nazi Germany 2.0 losing the war and deciding to take the country with them”-proof, “complete societal collapse”-proof, WWIII-proof, I don’t want it around when shit hits the fan.

    We can’t even reasonably assess the risks of nuclear power precisely because serious accidents are very rare, but devastating when they do happen. If I had a machine that could provide unlimited energy forever but had a 0.5% chance of blowing up the planet, should I turn it on? What if it’s a 0.05% chance? What if we know the chance is very low, but not what exactly “very low” means? Because that’s where we are with nuclear. Have we been lucky so far? Unlucky? There isn’t enough data to tell.

    I’m also not particularly impressed by “circumstantial evidence that many of the big Green groups are funded by fossil fuel money” (you mentioned “conspiracy theorist thinking”?), unless we also get to dismiss your advocacy of nuclear power on the grounds that there clearly exists a large, well-funded nuclear power lobby.

  12. Rob Grigjanis says

    Youtube has the whole speech here. More than a third dislikes. Enough to keep the Kochs happy (or the one not yet roasting on a spit in hell – pardon my wishful thinking).

  13. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    To Zeppelin
    You’re just wrong. You have been lied to by the Green orgs. There is no nicer way to put it. Almost everything you know about the scale of the dangers of nuclear accidents is a lie.
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world

    Nuclear waste is a complete non-issue. Worrying about nuclear waste is worrying about a near-fantasy problem.
    https://jmkorhonen.net/2013/08/15/graph-of-the-week-what-happens-if-nuclear-waste-repository-leaks/
    http://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf

    In terms of simple deaths per joule of energy, nuclear is by far the safest. Safer than even solar and wind. Almost all deaths from radiation from civilian nuclear power are from Chernobyl, and that was less than a few hundred. Consider just the gigantic toxic lake in China where most of the rare earth metal mining and refining happens, which surely has killed way more than the mere 200~ that Chernobyl killed.
    https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

    https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/wind/big-winds-dirty-little-secret-rare-earth-minerals/
    https://bccrwe.com/index.php/8-news/9-are-wind-turbine-rare-earth-minerals-too-costly-for-environment
    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution
    http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth

    The best argument that you could make is land contamination, but even that is greatly exaggerated. In HBO’s Chernobyl, one character said that it might have “contaminated” most of Europe, which is sheer nonsense. A couple more brute facts that you might not know.

    Hundreds of people have lived in the Chernobyl exclusion zone in their old houses for almost the whole time, and have showed no signs of illness.
    https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-04-26/30-years-after-chernobyl-these-ukrainian-babushkas-are-still-living-their-toxic
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/moving_to_Chernobyl

    Even the whole Chernobyl plant site itself is not as bad as you think it is. Chernobyl was a multi-reactor site. Did you know that they operated the other 3 reactors for years after the famous accident? That meant many people going there to work every day.
    https://www.businessinsider.com/chernobyl-reactors-14-years-disaster-2016-4

    The simple fact is that according to the United Nations committee organized for this, made up of thousands of scientists from around the world, the biggest impact on human health was and is depression from the grossly exaggerated fearmongering around radiation.
    https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

    Poverty, “lifestyle” diseases now rampant in the former Soviet Union and mental health problems pose a far greater threat to local communities than does radiation exposure.

    Relocation proved a “deeply traumatic experience” for some 350,000 people moved out of the affected areas. Although 116 000 were moved from the most heavily impacted area immediately after the accident, later relocations did little to reduce radiation exposure.

    Persistent myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation have resulted in “paralyzing fatalism” among residents of affected areas.

    These Green orgs are filled with charlatans, frauds, and lies.

    The entire Green movement is a religious cult. Again – not my words, but the paraphrase of the preeminent climate scientist James Hansen. Transcribed by me:
    https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=2041

    Well, I can point out one or two points. What you find if you advocate – You know, frankly, I’ve spoken to many scientists, and by far the majority agrees that nuclear needs to be part of the solution. However, when you stand up and say that, there’s an anti-nuclear community, which I would characterize as quasi-religious, which just hammers you, and you have to spend a lot of your time trying to deal with that. I’ve even found that some of the – you know that I’m no longer a government employee I have to raise the funds to cover my group of four people, and there are a number of foundations [???] foundation that have been my most reliable source while I was a government employee because I like to speak out is not part of my government job but so I had to prove that I was not using government funds, so when I traveled I had to get non-goverment funds to pay for that. Well, the foundation that provided the funds now will not give me a dime because they are anti-nuclear, and so there’s a lot of pressure on scientists just to keep their mouths shut, but we’re at a point where we’d better not keep our mouths shut when we can see a story which has become very clear, and that is that it’s a .. mirage to think that all-renewables can provide all of the energy that we need, and at the speed we need. China and India are using tremendous amounts of power, almost all coal for their electric plants, and there’s no way that they can power their steel mills and all the other factories that they’re building products for us on solar panels.

    The foremost scientific expert in renewable energy transition in America is a certain Mark Jacobson, a f’ing liar from Stanford. The guy blatantly lies in peer-reviewed papers about CO2 emissions from nuclear vs wind, and also in popular press articles, specifically Scientific American. He wrote a paper for the express purpose of quote mining it later. He quote mines this paper to say that nuclear produces 25x as much CO2 as wind, but when you look into the details, it’s all because he counts “burning coal” under the nuclear column, and because he assumes that there will be a periodic recurring nuclear war if we increase our use of nuclear energy, and he calculates the CO2 emissions from burning cities that will result, and adds it under the “nuclear power” column. I am not making this shit up.
    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030/
    https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf
    https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnPolicyPt1.pdf
    https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/ReviewSolGW09.pdf
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/03/when-scientists-sue-scientists/
    https://www.vibrantcleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/ReplyResponse.pdf

    His work at Stanford is also funded by natural gas money.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/03/when-scientists-sue-scientists/
    https://www.vibrantcleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/ReplyResponse.pdf
    https://atomicinsights.com/stanfords-universitys-new-natural-gas-initiative/
    https://atomicinsights.com/following-the-money-whos-funding-stanfords-natural-gas-initative/
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/28/the-dirty-secret-of-renewables-advocates-is-that-they-protect-fossil-fuel-interests-not-the-climate/

    Again, this is the most respected and most revered accredited scientist in America for “showing” that we can switch to renewables and we don’t need nuclear.

    This pattern of fossil fuel funding is common for Green orgs at large.
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/28/the-dirty-secret-of-renewables-advocates-is-that-they-protect-fossil-fuel-interests-not-the-climate/
    https://atomicinsights.com/how-important-has-oil-money-been-to-antinuclear-movement/
    https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-sierra-club-admits-donations-targeting-a-natural-gas-competitor/
    http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/1/11/jerry-browns-secret-war-on-clean-energy
    https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/

    And some of the big Green orgs today, like GreenPeace, keep private their list of funding.

    Let’s also not ignore a possible Russian connection.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/08/08/he-used-to-rule-germany-now-he-oversees-russian-energy-companies-and-lashes-out-at-the-u-s/
    https://atomicinsights.com/russia-is-a-primary-beneficiary-of-well-marketed-illogical-effort-to-slow-nuclear-energy/

  14. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Yawn. #21 tl;dr. Seen it all before. Too many times before. True believers like you don’t listen, so you can’t ever believe your are wrong about anything.

  15. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    To Nerd
    Could you be wrong? How could you know it? What sort of evidence and argument do I need to find and post here to convince you that you’re wrong?

  16. Zeppelin says

    @GerradOfTitanServer

    I appreciate the links, but I’m actually reasonably well-informed about Chernobyl in particular (you clearly think the only reason anyone would oppose nuclear energy is ignorance or malice, but that isn’t actually true).
    I’m not scared of nuclear power plants. I’d have no problem living next to one, or working in one, or whatever. I’d quite like to visit Chernobyl at some point, because ruins are fascinating.

    I am also not particularly concerned about the environmental impact of NPPs when they’re working as intended. They’re certainly cleaner than most alternatives (even when including frequently-ignored environmental disasters like the Church Rock spill — though it would be interesting to know the number of excess deaths caused by contamination from that one…).

    I just don’t think they’re apocalyptic-future-proof, and have great potential to make things worse in that (increasingly likely) scenario. So:

    1) How do we know how safe nuclear energy is, given the lack of data? When the worst-case scenario is extremely rare but extremely destructive, how do you weigh the risk? It’s like saying “only a handful of people have died from meteorite impacts in recorded history”. That’s true, but down to luck, not to the harmlessness of meteorites. It doesn’t follow from this that it would be a good idea to take an action that increases the incidence of meteorite strikes hundredfold.
    And how safe is nuclear energy under conditions of societal collapse? I expect the worst for our future, and the worst-case scenario for nuclear is very bad indeed, unfortunately.

    2) How do we prevent deliberate abuse and destruction of nuclear power plants? If you blow up a wind turbine you’re maybe going to crush a house, if you blow up a nuclear power plant (or remove the materials and blow them up elsewhere) you’ve got a giant dirty bomb. Same goes for much of the waste. It seems hubristic to rely on people using them as intended, given our uncertain future.

  17. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    To Zeppelin
    Renewables are not working, and are unlikely to work. So, you can stick your head in the sand and listen to the professional liars and shills from the Green orgs and do nothing about greenhouse gas emissions, and let global warming and ocean acidification continue unabated, or you can do loads and loads of nuclear. I assume you object to my phrasing, because if you accept it, then the conclusion seems blindingly obvious to me.

    And I still think that you’re operating on a mistaken understanding of the real dangers of radiation on human health. Yes there will be accidents. However, we know that these accidents have a constrained scope. They are not as bad as you are still pretending that they might be. Chernobyl is as bad as it can get, and the effect is much less than most people imagine, and newer designs are safer and more reliable.

    And how safe is nuclear energy under conditions of societal collapse? I expect the worst for our future, and the worst-case scenario for nuclear is very bad indeed, unfortunately.

    Safer than melting the permafrost and getting like 8 C temp increase. For me, combined with the brute fact that renewables are not ready and will likely never be ready, that’s close to the beginning and the end of the discussion.

    The way that you are speaking only makes sense if you think that there is an alternative. There is not.

  18. Zeppelin says

    “Chernobyl is as bad as it can get”

    Well, no. Chernobyl deliberately blown up by Chechen ISIS while the wind blows towards Kiev is as bad as it can get. Or maybe Chernobyl raided by Chechen ISIS and its materials detonated in a hundred dirty bombs around the Soviet Union over the course of a couple of years. Hell, the Chernobyl we got would have been far worse had the wind been blowing towards Kiev.
    That’s what I mean about the risk assessment — we’ve only had a handful of incidents, whose exact outcome was in large part influenced by factors outside of our control. We don’t know how to “price in” the risks of nuclear power any more than we know how to “price in” the risks of a dinosaur-grade meteorite impact.
    I think you understand this, hence your desire to argue that there is no alternative, that renewables don’t work and will never work and are a big conspiracy anyway. Because that’s the only scenario under which we don’t need to.

  19. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    Or maybe Chernobyl raided by Chechen ISIS and its materials detonated in a hundred dirty bombs around the Soviet Union over the course of a couple of years.

    https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/fs-dirty-bombs.html

    A “dirty bomb” is one type of a radiological dispersal device — also called an RDD — that combines conventional explosives, such as dynamite, with radioactive material. The terms dirty bomb and RDD are often used interchangeably. Most RDDs would not release enough radiation to kill people or cause severe illness. The conventional explosive itself would be more harmful to individuals than the radioactive material. However, depending on the situation, an RDD explosion could create fear and panic, contaminate property, and require potentially costly cleanup. Making prompt, accurate information available to the public may prevent the panic sought by terrorists.

    Dirty bombs are scary because of the extreme overreaction – not because of any radiation. Let me repeat what it says above: “The conventional explosive itself would be more harmful to individuals than the radioactive material.”

    This is the sort of pseudoscience that we need to eliminate from the public which the Greens have been promoting.

    I think you understand this, hence your desire to argue that there is no alternative, that renewables don’t work and will never work and are a big conspiracy anyway. Because that’s the only scenario under which we don’t need to.

    I am not the one employing conspiracy theory thinking. I’m going by the seeming majority of climate scientists and other scientific and academic experts who all say that the only plausible pathway to drastic greenhouse gas reductions must include a massive amount of new nuclear power.

  20. stroppy says

    Caught the clip of her at the UN glaring at Trump as he walks by! I know the feeling, and more power to her!

    Meanwhile the bullies try to punch down. Words escape me.

  21. Zeppelin says

    That page is very reassuring. Reads exactly like those “Protect and Survive” pamphlets on what to do in case of nuclear war. “Stay calm, wash your hands, wait for the authorities to emerge from the bunkers and collect your mummified corpse give further instructions.”

    I also like “However [a dirty bomb] could […] contaminate property, and require potentially costly cleanup”. Yeah, having to evacuate and demolish downtown Moscow and bury every brick in Siberia would be pretty inconvenient.

    But sure, let’s say dirty bombs are mostly harmless (lol). Every one of Chernobyl’s reactor blocks getting deliberately blown up is clearly a worse scenario than what actually happened. So we have not seen the worst-case scenario for a nuclear incident. Chernobyl wasn’t even the worst possible outcome of that particular malfunction — again, with different wind and precipitation conditions it could have been far messier.

    “I am not the one employing conspiracy theory thinking.”

    Oh come on, a few posts back you told us that Big Oil and the Russians were bankrolling Green movements. That’s four-dimensional chess nonsense.
    And your sources for it are, frankly, garbo. I appreciate that you took the time to dig some up, but they’re not going to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with you. Five are from explicit lobbying sites, the Forbes one was written by a lobbyist and doesn’t even claim that Green movements are funded by fossil fuel companies (the author kinda implies it, presumably because he can’t back up a definite claim), just that they’re useful idiots for them and that fossil fuel companies are trying to greenwash, and the WaPo one…doesn’t mention nuclear or renewables? Yeah, Schröder works for GazProm now. He was always friendly with the fossil fuel industry and with Putin in particular. He’s a leering scumbag. But he had nothing against nuclear power.

  22. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    To Zeppelin
    What more can I do? Earlier, I cited several letters and sources from leading climate scientists that say that nuclear is necessary, and renewables cannot do it alone. James Hansen said that believing in renewables without nuclear is almost as bad as believing in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. In addition to citing expert opinion, I also tried to justify these assertions. What more could I do? What would it take for you to accept that you’re wrong? Are you infallible? Is your mind absolutely closed on this? What would it take?

  23. VolcanoMan says

    I agree with Thunberg’s every word. But ultimately, she’s mad at the wrong people. The fact is that politicians (theoretically) serve at the will of the people and, generally, the people (as a whole) are responsible for the decisions that are being made at the highest levels of government. And let’s be honest here: the people aren’t too fussed about climate change now, are they? Now I will admit that some peoples’ voices seem to count FAR more than others’, and that a plurality of people, even in America, at least see climate change as a serious threat and want more to be done about it (though even there, only a tiny minority supports the kind of action that is ACTUALLY necessary to prevent the worst things from coming to pass). Where were they though, when a noted climate change denier was on the ballot? When the choice is between a bad candidate and Donald Trump, ultimately you hold your nose and ensure that the narcissistic orange abomination doesn’t have access to the power of the presidency. So many people stayed home though, disgusted at the whole enterprise. And so many of them could afford to put their ideals above pragmatism, confident that even in the worst-case scenario, they wouldn’t be seriously impacted by a Trump presidency (talkin’ about white, moderately well-off, heterosexual, cis people here). For whatever Trump proudly stood for, they knew that his election to president would not prove an existential threat…to THEM (and indeed, the majority of the early impacts of climate change are not so serious…in America. In the Maldives, or India, it’s another story though, but who cares about those people who ARE facing an existential threat?).

    Now I fully understand why people, especially young Americans, have a certain degree of apathy towards politics. There is no question that whatever benefits democracy has brought to America, it is presently FAILING to solve the biggest problems we face as a species. But this situation has a cause, and it’s not politicians. It’s not even those who spend millions of dollars buying politicians. It is people who prefer not to pay taxes, people who value their short-term riches more than the long-term (or even medium-term) survival of humanity. There are enough people prepared to stick their heads in the sand and demand MOAR TAX CUTS that no truly progressive candidate ever has a shot at winning a general election in America. And it’s not just the USA. There are enough people in my home country of Canada who care more about their future economic prospects than the actual (dismal) state of the planet that sustains us all, that Liberals are promoting pipeline-building as a means to both maintain economic growth while raising money to fight climate change (like that makes sense). That tar-sand oil needs to stay in the ground, no matter what the economic consequences prove to be, but…a lot of Canadians just don’t care about climate change. What I’m saying here is simple: the reason democracy hasn’t solved these problems yet is that most people aren’t convinced that these problems should be priorities…and the people who ARE convinced don’t vote.

    So Thunberg doesn’t have to convince the politicians…they only care about their power, and they will say and do the things that allow them to maintain it. She has to convince a large majority of American adults (and people around the world) that her cause is worth fighting for, convince them to vote (and spend money on political campaigns) based on environmental values (and in fact, to show them that these values significantly intersect with other left-wing values like increased government regulation, fighting against capitalism, egalitarianism, support for labour unions, etc.). If that many people were willing to only vote for candidates who shared those values, the politicians would wise up pretty quickly. But I’m not holding my breath.

  24. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    To John. I recall debunking several other sources by you in the past. That didn’t change your opinion. Would your opinion change at all if I deunked this one too? Probably not. It’s like a creationist who gives sources. They’re dogmatically wed to their beliefs, and the evidence and reason that they give is not what convinced them in the first place. It’s what they expect should convince other people. I could debunk this one too, and it wouldn’t change your mind one bit. It would be a waste of my time.

    So, I also ask you, what would it really take to change your mind?

  25. KG says

    Earlier, I cited several letters and sources from leading climate scientists that say that nuclear is necessary, and renewables cannot do it alone. – GerrardOfTitanServer@33

    That’s something that can be rationally debated, unlike your ludicrous conspiracy theories. You’d do much better to drop the latter, where all your sources are, as others have pointed out, from nuclear lobbyists.

    James Hansen said that believing in renewables without nuclear is almost as bad as believing in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.

    But of course, climate scientists are experts in climate science, not in energy production. Renewables are currently expanding much faster than nuclear. Their key drawback (other than in the case of hydro) is intermittency, requiring a lot of storage capacity. But nuclear also requires a lot of storage capacity if transport is to be decarbonised. Less, but not orders of magnitude less, as transport – mostly land transport – makes up something like 1/3 of energy use. Unless you think every truck and automobile is going to be pootling around with a nuclear reactor under the hood. It wouldn’t altogether surprise me if you do.

    Over the crucial next decade, neither nuclear nor renewables are the key to rapid reduction in emissions. Cutting total energy use, and reducing meat and dairy consumption, offer much faster reductions. Why aren’t you focusing at least some of your attention there? I think the answer to that is obvious to everyone here but yourself: your motivation is to promote nuclear power, and hatred of those you (wrongly) believe are responsible for its failure to expand as you would like, nothing to do with climate change at all.

  26. KG says

    Some further points concerning nuclear power:
    1) The connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons is ineradicable. The overlap in the materials, technologies and skills required is just too great, despite claims that this or that kind of nuclear power is free from such a connection.
    2) Nuclear accidents, even if they do not cause large numbers of direct casualties (and nuclear advocates dismissal of the cases of thyroid cancer due to Chernobyl because most were non-fatal is repulsive), impose enormous opportunity costs, soaking up resources that could be used elsewhere. To take the case of Fukushima, the Japanese government, at a time of utmost national crisis, had to divert huge resources to evacuating those living near the plant, and could not send aid to the worst affected communities by the shortest route. We simply don’t know how many lives were lost because of that; the message of Fukushima is that whatever your disaster, a nuclear power plant can make it worse. Cleaning up the mess is going to take decades, and cost trillions of Yen. Similar arguments apply to the potential use of dirty bombs by terrorists – and presumably, GOTS thinks that setting aside Daesh and Nazis, evil moustache-twirling Greenies would just love to hijack nuclear materials and set one off in Washington DC in order to sabotage the industry.
    3) With best practice, it may be that the risks of nuclear accidents and diversion of materials by “bad actors” are tolerable. But leaving aside the possibility of societal breakdown raised by Zeppelin, we know that best practice is routinely not followed. Again, looking at Fukushima, sufficient precautions against tsunamis were not followed, and far more spent fuel rods were stored than should have been – this, in a technologically highly advanced and well-regulated state. Commerical profit, corruption and national pride can all lead to corner-cutting, and the more widespread the technology, the more certain it is that this will lead to disasters.
    4) The main reasons nuclear power has failed to follow the rapid expansion curve its advocates expected lie within the industry itself. Corner-cutting on safety is one: without such episodes as Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the evil Greenies would have been rather short of propaganda material. Probably more important is the industry’s poor record in terms of delivering on time and within budget. Yes, GOTS can point to examples where it has done so. But there are far too many where it has not, and they continue to this day – e.g. Olkiluoto in Finland and Hinkley Point in the UK. Promises to do better are easy to make – but the investment required for a single plant, let alone a huge programme such as GOTS wants, is huge, and the payback times – in financial or energy terms – is long.

  27. John Morales says

    Anyway. Thundering Thunberg, precocious and organically risen to world notoriety.

    Quite (ahem) remarkable.

  28. Jazzlet says

    GOTS is a nuclear extremist and it doesn’t matter how rational the points others raise are, he will go on preaching nuclear because, to him, the rest of us just don’t understand and he can solve that by just giving us more information. He can not credit that any of us do actually understand having even investigated and thought deeply on the subject, his particular failing is that doesn’t take into account the human factor in all of this, and he appears incapable of doing so.

  29. lotharloo says

    Other issues that I have with nuclear, in addition to what was said about:

    1) The total amount of accessible nuclear fuel is very very limited. The long term viability of nuclear power relies on magical technologies to extract fuel from ocean water in a cost-effective and massive scale. This is opposed to current wind/solar technology that is working right now.

    2) People often cite studies that say nuclear waste storage is safe for 1000 years but obviously, this has not been verified experimentally. So this “safe storage” is also a gamble, e.g., if after 200 years we figure out that oops, all the previous designs had a flaw, we suddenly have centuries of toxic leaks on our hand. On top of that, there are by product of nuclear fission that is radio active for a million years.

  30. aziraphale says

    “(I expect our own nukes are great, renewables don’t work, environmentalists are criminals to show up soon…)”

    I would like to propose a modest amendment.
    Renewables do work and are becoming cheaper than coal.
    Environmentalists cover a wide spectrum. Most of them are broadly in the right.
    There are interesting new nuclear designs that claim to be safer. We should put some effort into these, in case they are needed to avoid one of the climate tipping points, passing which would do far more damage than another Chernobyl..

    Also. Greta Thunberg is excellent.

  31. Akira MacKenzie says

    Oh lovely, it now appears the deniers are dismissing Thunberg because she has Asperger’s. “She delusional!” Or, “She’s a poor mentally ill little girl being used by radicals!” Fuck them! Fuck them up their puckered arses with a razor-wire-wrapped railroad spike!

    Oh joy! Now Il Douche has belittled her.

  32. F.O. says

    @Akira Might be useful to remind anyone listening to those people that they also have decided already to ignore the scientific consensus.

    I’m angry.
    Really angry.
    And I don’t know what to do.
    I’ll strike the 27th even if I can’t really strike, need to take a day off, and will join the protest.

  33. blf says

    aziraphale@43, That prediction of mine (see @8) was referring to the individual whose handle is now GerrardOfTitanServer (see @13 and following), formerly known as (from memory) “EntitlementLiberal”. I do not appreciate the removal of the paraphrasing quotes, nor the attribution of the unquoted paraphrased synopsis to myself. I do broadly concur with your amendments, as evidenced by others in this thread.

  34. kenfabian says

    Good on Greta. I hope she can cope with the crap that comes back at her. But it is not a matter of well off, influential older men getting out of the way; they are the ones who most have to change their minds and act.

    As for nuclear – the conservative-right pushed nuclear under a (hippie painted kombi) bus when they chose to lie about climate science – even as they lie about the climate problem being for and about and by the sort of people you find in hippie painted kombi buses. People who lie about the greatest threat to enduring prosperity ever, to protect fossil fuels (and for convenience and advantage) are never going to use the truth to push for nuclear to fix it. Even if the “just use nuclear” delusion were actually true – and I do not believe it is – climate responsibility denial threaded through nuclear advocacy undercuts and compromises every sincere effort to address the climate problem – and nuclear, despite that prevalence of deniers in their ranks, is damaged much more so than renewables.

    Renewables may not take us all the way to zero emissions easily but no-one can really know how we will get there; the only sure thing is the energy industry will not look anything like it does now.

    Meanwhile they are what we can do; nuclear is not even a credible option so long as the largest bloc of support is confined behind a Wall of Denial. Until nuclear activism can purge itself of the climate science deniers and anti-environmentalist haters it is not going to win over many of us who take the top level advice on climate change seriously.

  35. Akira MacKenzie says

    F.O. @ 45

    And I don’t know what to do.

    Oh, I can suggest a few things. Of course, mentioning them would get me put on several international law enforcement watch lists.

  36. DanDare says

    Renewables work just fine thanks.
    Some states in OZ are now approaching 100% renewable 24×7. Many friends and familly have net income from soler and battery set ups. We are building pump and store dams where solar refills our hydro systems.
    Its just crossing the cost threshold. All that’s propping up our coal industry is greed over coal exports.

  37. asclepias says

    Renewables do work. However, to save the environment as well as the climate, we need to start decentralizing energy so it doesn’t disturb more habitat than it already has. As for nuclear, I’m of two minds. At the moment, I don’t think we’re going to get out of this without it, but it isn’t a long-term solution. Uranium and thorium have to be mined and have to be gotten to the plant somehow, so we’re talking more habitat disturbance and more oil spent.

  38. blf says

    Fox News apologises to Greta Thunberg for pundit’s ‘disgraceful’ remark :

    […]
    Fox News has apologized after a guest criticized the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg as a mentally ill Swedish child.

    Appearing on Fox News on Monday, the rightwing commentator Michael Knowles launched an extraordinary attack on Thunberg […]

    Knowles, a guest on Fox News’s The Story, was invited to discuss Thunberg’s speech and the climate crisis. He was dismissive of both.

    If it were about science it would be led by scientists rather than by politicians and a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left, Knowles said.

    The commentator Christopher Hahn, appearing on The Story to theoretically offer a liberal perspective, immediately criticized Knowles.

    “Yeah, I mean, you’re a grown man and you’re attacking a child. Shame on you,” Hahn said.

    […]

  39. Hoosier X says

    blf@8

    Other real Nazis in addition to Dinesh D’Souza are attacking Greta Thunberg.

    I fixed it for you/

  40. mvdwege says

    The enormous amount of verbiage and links GOTS and other nuke fanbois spew falls into nothing to the ultimate argument: current nuclear technology is unsafe by design and this cannot be ameliorated in any way.

    Any system that is termed fail safe will, if you stop it, automatically come into a safe resting state. Modern nuclear designs do not do that, they require active input to stay safe, in the form of cooling; even if the reaction itself has stopped.

    Fukushima was a wonderful demonstration of this. The plant SCRAMmed the reactors promptly, only to then see at least one of them melt down due to decay heat from the fuel rods, because the diesel pumps that acted as backup for the normal cooling pumps got disabled by the flooding.

    Had the plant been built higher or behind a higher seawall, this might not have happened, but that does not lessen the fact that safety depended on active input. AKA, the design is not fail safe.

    Currently there is no reactor design on the market that meets the fail safe criterium. Ergo, nuclear power is fundamentally unsafe.

    Nuke fanbois promise us fail safe designs like molten salt reactors. To that I say: the time for nuke advocacy is if these are in commercial production. Until then, you’re advocating for the same old unsafe designs, and we have seen through the smoke and mirrors. So go away already.

  41. jamiejag says

    @50, asclepias

    The energy density of nuclear materials is orders of magnitude greater than that for coal or any other non-renewable energy source. Logically, the mining required does orders of magnitude less damage.

    Renewable energy sources cannot, with current technology, meet current global demands for power. Relying on hoped for advances in efficiency and storage capacity does not solve the current crisis caused by anthropogenic global warming. If these technological advances occur sooner, rather than later, redundant nuclear sources can be decommissioned, but until that time

    There is no renewable energy technology that doesn’t require mining of materials for their construction and incur transportation costs for shipping the materials to wherever they’re needed. The costs on this side of the ledger and impact to the environment pale in comparison to the amount of energy produced in the case of nuclear.

  42. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    Maybe it doesn’t like so many links, even though I’ve hidden them in code tags? I don’t know. Trying this.

    To Jazzlet
    No, they’re just wrong, and I have posted volumous citations to show that they are wrong. Notice how almost none of my opponents have cited anything. It’s a dogma.

    To DanDare
    Some isolated areas with unusually large amounts of hydro can basically remove greenhouse gas emissions without use of nuclear. However, to the extent that your claims are correct, this is not extrapolatable to the rest of the world. For the rest of the world without access to enough hydro, their options are nuclear, or fossil fuels.

    I also sincerely doubt your claims. I strongly suspect that you have grid interconnects with your neighboring Australian states, which means that you are using coal and natural gas, even if you put your head in the sand and pretend that you are not.

    To lotharloo
    There’s enough nuclear fuel for at least a century, or at least a few decades if we magically switched all primary energy usage to nuclear right now. For climate change and ocean acidification, what matters is not 100 years from now. What matters is right now. What matters is the next 20 years, or maybe 10 years. What if we did switch to nuclear, and you were right, an we ran out of fuel in 50 years? That is 50 more years than what we have now. Nuclear would have been an outstanding, unqualified success.

    Also, breeder reactors are real. Russia has been running several for a while.
    WEBSITE en.wikipedia DOT org/wiki/BN-600_reactor

    With breeder reactors, you can refine literal common, everyday, average rock, and use it as nuclear fuel. We’ll never run out of rock. We’ll never run out of nuclear fuel. We’ve known this since circa 1950, and yet the Greens all pretend this isn’t true, which is quite frustrating.
    WEBSITE energyfromthorium DOT com/energy-weinberg-1959/

    Nuclear waste is not a problem. In the real world, homeopathy isn’t real. Radioactive material is not as dangerous as you think it is. Most of what you know comes from the Green orgs, and they have systematically lied to you.
    WEBSITE www.theguardian DOT com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world

    To kenfabian
    Or, we could solve the climate problem, or at least make great strides in solving the climate problem, without satisfying your other fetishes of radically restructuring society. This is the problem with the modern environmental movement – it’s not an environmental movement. Instead, they’re more worried about radically restructuring society as their primary goal. Whereas, I actually give a damn about the environment, which means that I’m more than happy to accept a solution which doesn’t radically restructure our society, and I’m also more than happy to accept a solution which the climate change deniers like. This right here:

    Meanwhile they are what we can do; nuclear is not even a credible option so long as the largest bloc of support is confined behind a Wall of Denial.

    That is absolute pigheaded nonsense to me. A bipartisan solution is somehow unacceptable? What in the flying fuck? It’s like you want to watch the world burn.

    To asclepias

    What does “decentralizing energy” have to do with (paraphrase) “not disturbing the habitat more than it already has been?”. This is one of the fundamental errors of modern Green environmentalism. The neo-Malthusian belief is that the way that you protect the environment is by making humans live in Green harmony with their environment. That’s a huge shit of romantic nonsense. No. That has never been true. Going back even tens of thousands of years, humans have never lived “in nature and in harmony with nature”. Rather, the way that you protect the environment is that you remove humanity from nature, and you move humanity into cities. Rather than decentralizing energy production, that means centralizing it, just like we have now. Also, centralized production is generally more efficient, cheaper, and with a smaller landprint, and thus better for the environment. The way to protect the environment is to live high-energy lives in cities – not poor energy lives in the wilderness. (This view is called “eco-modernism” btw.)

    Also, if you’re concerned about mining, keep in mind that solar and wind require like 10x more building materials in terms of concrete, steel, etc., which means that if you want to reduce mining, use nuclear power. Fundamentally, to the first degree of approximation, the impact on the environment is proportional to the energy density, and because nuclear fuel has a million times higher energy density than anything else we have, that is why nuclear power is the cleanest and safest for the environment, in terms of mining, land footprint, leftover toxic waste, etc.

    Greens regularly whitewash – I meant greenwash – solar and wind, but they are not as environmentally friendly as you think they are. Solar and wind waste kills and harms way more people than nuclear waste, but because a lot of it happens in China and the third world, the elitist racist colonialist Greens don’t give a fuck. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

    WEBSITE www.forbes DOT com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23/if-solar-panels-are-so-clean-why-do-they-produce-so-much-toxic-waste/

    WEBSITE www.instituteforenergyresearch DOT org/renewable/wind/big-winds-dirty-little-secret-rare-earth-minerals/
    WEBSITE bccrwe DOT com/index.php/8-news/9-are-wind-turbine-rare-earth-minerals-too-costly-for-environment
    WEBSITE www.theguardian DOT com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth-village-pollution
    http://www.bbc DOT com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth

    To mvdwege

    We don’t demand that same sort of safety standard for anything else. We don’t demand that for airplanes. Why demand it for nuclear? Double standards. It’s because your understanding of the real dangers of nuclear power are almost entirely from the Greens, and they have systematically lied to you.
    WEBSITE www.theguardian DOT com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world

    To KG
    My claims are not conspiracy theorist. They are supported by evidence, some circumstantial, and also believed by in part by leading climate scientists, such as James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel.

    Re climate scientists are not experts in energy production. Then who is? The self-selected “Green” advocates? Oh great. What is the neutral set of accredited scientists that you would listen to? I also cited a survey of all AAAS scientists, and there’s a slim majority that are pro nuclear power. On what basis do you believe that the real scientists and experts are on your side? Because all of our Green orgs say so? Oh great.

    Yes storage is required for transport. Two things. One, I haven’t been fully convinced that we have a solution yet there, and so stopping greenhouse gas emissions from the grid is something easy that we can do now, and with things that are easily electrified, that’s like half of all human greenhouse gas emissions right there, which is way better than nothing, and way better than what renewables can do. Two, we already pay a premium for transport fuels. We could use a storage that has a huge price increase for transport because it would not disrupt business as usual, but if you tried to use some of these same storage techs for the grid, the costs would be so high that society might collapse. The costs that society could suffer for transport are not the same as the costs that society could suffer for the grid.

    Also, putting nuclear reactors into the couple dozen largest cargo ships might be a good idea, but yes, putting nuclear reactors into planes and cars would be very silly.

    Cutting total energy use – in the sense of decreasing total energy consumption worldwide, year over year – is impossible. You can curb that growth of energy demand, but not reduce it in absolute terms, because the poor people in the poor countries are going to industrialize, and that means energy use is only going to go up. Primary energy use is around 18 TW today. 10 KW per person US, approx, and 5 KW per person Europe, approx. It seems highly unlikely that you’re going to limit the rest of the world to a mere 2 KW per person (2 KW * 10 billion people = 20 TW > 18 TW today), and I also think it would be rather racist and colonialist to even try, to tell these other poor countries that they have to remain poor while the rich white countries remain rich. It’s never going to happen. They’re just going to burn coal unless we give them a plausible alternative that would allow them to become rich like us. (Also, making them somewhat rich like us, or something like that, is a prereq to fixing the overpopulation problem, which is another reason we have to do it. Keeping people poor is how you make sure that they have lots of kids.)

    Also, cutting energy usage is not a substitute for going to a greenhouse-gas free approach for generating electricity, and you’re a dishonest or ignorant dipshit for framing it as an alternative. At best, energy efficiency and reducing consumption is a companion to going to greenhouse-gas free electricity technologies. However, no plan will be sufficient without deploying greenhouse-gas free electricity technologies, and it would be foolhardy in the extreme to do energy efficiency first, and then something else later, because of the very small amount of time that we have left.

    I mean, Jesus, listen to yourself. It’s the environmental groups right now that are (rightly) saying that we don’t have any time left, but god damn you are saying that the priority should be to implement a half-ass plan that won’t be enough, and wait on the misguided hope that some non-nuclear fix will come along in the future. On behalf of the rest of everyone else on the planet – fuck you. This problem is serious enough that we need to go with what we have now, and that means conventional fission reactors.

    There is a connection between nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. However, as shown by North Korea, if someone wants a weapon, they can get it, regardless of whether we spread nuclear power tech or not. The cat is out of the bag. There’s no point keeping it closed any more. It’s like Pandora’s box – it’s been opened, and evil has been released into the world, but you would close it to keep hope inside. There’s a good argument to be made that spreading nuclear power tech under the non-proliferation treaty is actually a good way to prevent the spread of weapons because of the requirements and inspection regime that comes along with it.

    I am not “dismissing” thyroid cancer cases. I am putting things into perspective. Please stop being a child, and instead please try to act like an adult. Everything has risks. Every energy technology kills people, and makes people sick, wind and solar included. I’m asking that you be an adult, and put things into perspective, and see that nuclear is still the safest technology. Moreover, those 4000-6000 excess thyroid cancer cases have not been observed directly, and are a worst-case LNT estimate, and given that the LNT is pseudoscience, it’s quite likely that the real number is much smaller. And finally, most, maybe almost all, of those thyroid cancer cases could have been easily prevented had the Soviet Union simply told the public “don’t consume dairy for the next ~3 months” because the radioactive iodine intake was almost entirely dairy, and the radioactive iodine would have functionally vanished after a mere couple of months.

    Also, if you look at the cleanup costs of Fukushima, such as topsoil removal – that is not being done because the real health science says it must be done. Almost all of that cost is being done only to allay the scientifically unfounded concerns of the public. Ditto for dirty bombs – radiation is not as harmful as you think it is. Homeopathy is not real – dilute the toxin enough, and it’s actually harmless. LNT is simply false.

    I am not arguing that nuclear, when done “properly”, is the safest and cleanest form of electricity production. I’m saying that nuclear, when done improperly, as it has been done historically, is the safest and cleanest form of electricity production. I’m including Fukushima, and Chernobyl, and every other accident. I’m saying that nuclear is not as dangerous as you think it is, and I’m saying that solar, wind, and everything else is more dangerous and toxic than you think it is.

    Yes, GOTS can point to examples where it has done so. But there are far too many where it has not, and they continue to this day – e.g. Olkiluoto in Finland and Hinkley Point in the UK. Promises to do better are easy to make – but the investment required for a single plant, let alone a huge programme such as GOTS wants, is huge, and the payback times – in financial or energy terms – is long.

    That is because of the regulatory and legal and economic environment that was created by the Greens and their fossil fuel allies to kill nuclear power. They succeeded. Of course nuclear power is failing today. That was the goal of the Green movement. They succeeded. However, it’s not magic. We can simply reverse their policies, and then nuclear power would be cheap again, just like it’s cheap in other places that don’t have the same Green problems, like South Korea today.

    4) The main reasons nuclear power has failed to follow the rapid expansion curve its advocates expected lie within the industry itself. Corner-cutting on safety is one: without such episodes as Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the evil Greenies would have been rather short of propaganda material.4) The main reasons nuclear power has failed to follow the rapid expansion curve its advocates expected lie within the industry itself. Corner-cutting on safety is one: without such episodes as Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the evil Greenies would have been rather short of propaganda material.

    Bullshit. Helen Caldicott, Green Peace, and others released reports that a million people died or will die from Chernobyl. The facts simply do not matter to them. It does not matter what the truth is. Nuclear could have not had any of those accidents, and the Green movement would have lied anyway. Remember the sources from the Sierra club that I provided in the other thread? Let me do so again.

    WEBSITE www.forbes DOT com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/11/if-nuclear-power-is-so-safe-why-are-we-so-afraid-of-it/

    In 1966, misanthropic conservationists within the Sierra Club had embraced Malthusianism. Writes Rhodes:

    The small-world, zero-population-growth, soft-energy-path faction of the environmental movement that emerge across the 1960s and 1970s knowingly or unknowingly incorporated the antihumanist ideology of the neo-Malthusians into its arguments… “more power plants create more industry,” [the Sierra Club’s executive director complained,] “that in turn invites greater population density.”

    WEBSITE www.forbes DOT com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/14/the-real-reason-they-hate-nuclear-is-because-it-means-we-dont-need-renewables/

    “Even if nuclear power were clean, safe, economic, assured of ample fuel, and socially benign,” said the god head of renewables, Amory Lovins, in 1977, “it would still be unattractive because of the political implications of the kind of energy economy it would lock us into.”

    What kind of an energy economy would that be, exactly? A prosperous, clean, and high-energy one. “If you ask me, it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it,” explained Lovins.

    WEBSITE www.forbes DOT com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/09/anti-nuclear-bias-of-u-n-ipcc-is-rooted-in-cold-war-fears-of-atomic-and-population-bombs/

    When asked in the mid-1990s if he had been worried about nuclear accidents, Sierra Club anti-nuclear activist Martin Litton replied, “No, I really didn’t care because there are too many people anyway … I think that playing dirty if you have a noble end is fine.”

    http://environmentalprogress DOT org/big-news/2018/1/11/jerry-browns-secret-war-on-clean-energy

    Sierra Club’s Executive Director, David Brower […] As the Sierra Club board started to clamp down on Brower’s spending, he started attacking the Board’s decision to support the building of Diablo Canyon. “If a doubling of the state’s population in the next 20 years is encouraged by providing the power resources for this growth,” Brower said, California’s “scenic character will be destroyed.”[3]

    For the original Greens, it was never about nuclear power safety. It was about their regressive, Luddite, racist, colonialist, neo-Malthusian delusions about the causes of overpopulation. These people wanted to keep us poor – and again I mean they wanted to keep everyone else poor. That was their goal. And the fossil fuel lobby was more than happy to help them in their anti-nuclear crusade. At first, the Sierra Club was in favor of nuclear power, but a dissident group inside of it, this dissident group here, was unhappy, and with fossil fuel money, they broke off and founded Friends Of The Earth, the first anti-nuclear Green org, and within a few years, they had managed to change the entire conversation in the Green movement, including the Sierra Club. You’ve been had.

  43. jamiejag says

    @53, mvedge

    Current nuclear technology is not represented by plants like fukushima. Construction on it began in 1967 and it was commissioned in 1971.

    Fukushima failed due to mundane NON-NUCLEAR design flaws that they were warned about before the earthquake/tsunami took them down. It wouldn’t have taken nuclear engineers to prevent the 2011 incident, just ordinary electricians to install better sited generators.

  44. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    There is no one single modern design. So, depends on which one we’re talking about.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000

    Through the 1990s, Westinghouse had been working on a new design known as the AP600 with a design power of about 600 MWe. This was part of the Department of Energy’s Advanced Light Water Reactor program that worked on a series of Generation III reactor designs. In contrast to Generation II designs, the AP600 was much simpler, with a huge reduction in the total number of parts, and especially pumps. It was also passively safe, a key feature of Gen III designs.[2]

    In the AP1000, Westinghouse’s Passive Core Cooling System uses a tank of water situated above the reactor. When the passive cooling system is activated, the water flows by gravity to the top of the reactor where it evaporates to remove heat. The system uses multiple explosively-operated and DC operated valves which must operate within the first 30 minutes. This is designed to happen even if the reactor operators take no action.[16] The electrical system required for initiating the passive systems doesn’t rely on external or diesel power and the valves don’t rely on hydraulic or compressed air systems.[3][17] The design is intended to passively remove heat for 72 hours, after which its gravity drain water tank must be topped up for as long as cooling is required.[13]

    However, again, I must also object to your demand that it be perfect. You’re never going to get perfect. Your absolute demand is unreasonable, and not based in any proper analysis of facts or policy. The real comparison that we should be making is comparing it to coal, and the consequent global warming and ocean acidification.

  45. stroppy says

    DNFTT !

    (I think that without too much effort, we can see who’s been had here.)

    Once again Gish galloping boilerplate drivel about nuclear power has dragged the thread OT. It’s simple, push the same old nuclear energy buttons to get things revved up and keep them going, meanwhile throw in the anti-liberal screeds — the gooey toxic center at the heart of every sciency nugget of radioactive trollery.

    So troll, no comments about Greta Thunberg? But I suppose that would just get people angry over AGW which would defeat your purpose here.

  46. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    PS: Next gen designs are often even better, like the ThorCon design which is presented as having 70+ days of passive heat decay removal, or for a little extra cost, indefinite aka infinite heat decay removal. (Closed cooling pond and cooling loop plus heat flow through heat-driven circulation plus concrete chimney equals indefinite heat removal.) We’ve known how to do these things for a while now, but most reactors in the world are like 30-40 years old and don’t have these things, and and that’s because we stopped building reactors in the West like 30-40 years ago.

  47. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    To stroppy
    I’m attacking Greens, not liberals. I am a liberal. I am left-leaning. I am a card-carrying radical Marxist. My critiques are coming from actually caring about the environment, and from a place of truly recognizing the severity of the threat that faces human civilization.

    I am attacking the regressive, racist, colonialist, Luddite, neo-Malthusian belief system that has overtaken most of the modern environmentalist movement. The modern environmentalist movement is not liberal. It’s not leftist. They don’t want to raise poor people out of poverty. That are not taking actions that effectively combat global warming and ocean acidification.

    I simply reject your automatic association between “leftist / liberal” and “Green”. A true leftist / liberal is not technologically regressive – they value progress. A true leftist / liberal would not condemn the developing world to remain in poverty. A true leftist / liberal values science and the advise and opinions of scientific experts. The Greens are none of these things.

  48. pilgham says

    Something scared the Japan government. They are shutting down all their NPPs. Honestly, the motto of nuclear power ought to “Next Time We’ll Get It Right!” Still, small amounts of radioactive stuff is used all over. You can experiment all you like, just don’t let Haliburton build them. And make sure your data is up to date. Renewables are well past the experimental stage, they are past ready to be used. Governments are switching to renewables all over the world.

  49. mvdwege says

    @GOTS

    I don’t ask for perfect. I ask for fail safe. Which is not much to ask for a system that can do that much damages if it isn’t fail safe.

    I see you are producing verbiage to avoid the question, so once again: what modern design currently on the market (so no molten salt ponies now) is fail safe by design?

  50. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    Renewables are well past the experimental stage, they are past ready to be used. Governments are switching to renewables all over the world.

    A shared delusion, just like any other religion, like Christianity.

    Let me put it like this. When one scientist and his companions publish a paper showing how you can transition to 100% renewables, 20+ scientists later came along and published a rebuttal paper in the same journal. The first scientist was Mark Jacobson, the leading “expert” in the American Green movement (whose funding comes in large part from natural gas btw). Here’s what the 20+ rebutting scientists had to say about why they published their rebuttal.

    https://www.nytimes DOT com/2017/06/20/business/energy-environment/renewable-energy-national-academy-matt-jacobson.html?smid=tw-share

    “I had largely ignored the papers arguing that doing all with renewables was possible at negative costs because they struck me as obviously incorrect,” said David Victor of the University of California, San Diego, a co-author of the new critique of Professor Jacobson’s work. “But when policy makers started using this paper for scientific support, I thought, ‘this paper is dangerous.’”
    […]
    The experts are not opposed to aggressive investments in renewable energy. But they argue, as does most of the scientific community represented on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [ https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_summary-for-policymakers.pdf ], that other energy sources — atomic power, say, or natural gas coupled with technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere — are likely to prove indispensable in the global effort to combat climate change. Ignoring them risks derailing the effort to combat climate change.

    I could find more saying the same thing. It’s an open secret among the real scientific experts that the 100% Green renewable dream is a pipedream, a fantasy, a delusion – the so-called Green experts notwithstanding.

    And remember, this 100% WWS paper from Jacobson was hailed for years, and is still hailed in many Green circles, as the go-to paper for America as the definitive proof that America could transition to (100%) renewables. The problem is that the paper is fundamentally flawed, and the author Jacobson is an academic conman.

    Again, read his Scientific American article where he says without context that nuclear produces 25x as much CO2 as wind. Then read one of his peer-reviewed papers that says that nuclear produces 9x to 25x as much CO2 as wind when you take into account the whole lifecycle, including mining, refining, and enriching, which cites another one of his papers. And then read that paper, and see how his “CO2 emissions from nuclear” column including substantial amounts of CO2 emissions from coal power plants (what?), and also substantial amounts of CO2 emissions from burning cities which is included under the assumption that increased nuclear power will lead to a recurring periodic limited nuclear war. This is not an honest person. No – that’s way too nice. He’s a charlatan, a conman, and this story that I told you should be fucking disgusting and beyond-the-pale. He should be fired from Stanford and never hired again in academia. And yet the Green movement in America still considers him to be their foremost expert today. It’s a religious cult. You see the same behavior from creationists where they keep telling the same lies over and over again, citing a few minority “experts” who make easily debunked outrageous claims, and when you debunk these claims, the true believers don’t change their minds.

    Sources:

    https://www.scientificamerican DOT com/article/a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030/

    https://web.stanford DOT edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/sad1109Jaco5p.indd.pdf

    https://web.stanford DOT edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnPolicyPt1.pdf

    https://web.stanford DOT edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/ReviewSolGW09.pdf

    https://www.washingtonpost DOT com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/03/when-scientists-sue-scientists/

    https://www.vibrantcleanenergy DOT com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/ReplyResponse.pdf

    https://atomicinsights DOT com/stanfords-universitys-new-natural-gas-initiative/

    https://atomicinsights DOT com/following-the-money-whos-funding-stanfords-natural-gas-initative/

    https://www.forbes DOT com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/28/the-dirty-secret-of-renewables-advocates-is-that-they-protect-fossil-fuel-interests-not-the-climate/

  51. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    To mvdwege
    I answered your question. I gave an example, the AP1000. 3 days of passive cooling regardless of operator intervention.

    To stroppy
    TitanServer. It’s a personal thing.
    https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Titan_(Server)
    This is a name that I use in many other contexts, gaming and not gaming. (I changed the name here because I was tired of being associated with libertarians, and because I wanted to practice effective communication and to not advertise myself with a name that could easily be understood as “libertarian”.)

  52. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    To abbeycadabra
    Typically, it takes longer to refute a Gish Gallop than to make it.

  53. a_ray_in_dilbert_space says

    Gerard of Tartan Server,
    Question: Do pictures of nuke plants give you a hard on?

  54. Rob Grigjanis says

    Gerrard: You’re just repeating yourself, over and over and over again. It’s a waste of space, a distraction from the OP, and very boring. Do you think that tedious, lengthy repetition is getting you anywhere? Do you think you have convinced anyone after the dozen or so times you’ve done this? Can you maybe take your obsession elsewhere?

  55. quotetheunquote says

    Ooookaaaaay…. and getting back to what this thread is actually about….

    Yeah, I’m mad. I’m mad at all the snide commentors on Youtube (I know, I know shouldn’t have looked) who treat Thunberg with derision and/or condescension. What the f. have you done lately?, I want to scream into their faces.

    And if I could remove everybody who wrote “and the oscar goes to…” from the gene pool – well, the collective IQ of the human population would probably spike about 50% in a generation.

  56. blf says

    (Reconstructed cross-post from poopyhead’s current Political Madness All the Time thread.)

    All in the Onion:

    ● Average American Must Have Life Ruined By Natural Disaster Every 6 Minutes To Fear Climate Change: “Outlining what a shift in public consciousness regarding global ecocatastrophe might require, a study published by researchers at the University of Oregon Monday found the average American must have their life destroyed by a natural disaster every six minutes in order to finally fear climate change. ‘According to our data, American citizens must lose their home to a flash flood, almost immediately watch a tornado ravage their hometown, and then succumb to heatstroke in 110 degree temperatures before recognizing climate change as a viable threat,’ said head researcher and professor Vanessa Verrier, citing the tendency of US citizens to forget about global warming roughly 10 minutes after their homes were devastated by wildfires. […]”

    ● Nation Perplexed By 16-Year-Old Who Doesn’t Want World To End: “Following her UN address about the existential threat posed by a rapidly warming planet, citizens across the United States confirmed Monday they were perplexed by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old who apparently has no desire to see the world end. ‘I know she’s from another country, but she’s still a teenager, right?’ said 33-year-old Sophia Williams of Kenosha, WI, her confusion reportedly shared by millions of Americans who recalled that during their own adolescence they had hated the world and everyone in it and had felt the end couldn’t come fast enough. […]”

    ● If Earth Continues To Warm At Current Rate Moon Will Be Mostly Underwater By 2400 (image (no text)).

  57. says

    Re nukes:
    I call the light-water reactor a ‘refuted’ technology; proven to fail badly. But there are other designs on the books. I hear good things about the liquid-salt thorium reactor (LFTR), including, for instance, its ability to use up light-water reactor waste.

  58. unclefrogy says

    nuke advocate does 3 days “automatic cooling” mean fail safe?
    what happens after 3 days?
    as was said upthread you are forgetting to include the human factor in your advocacy for nukes.it has always been the human factor not the theory that is the problem.
    in theory nukes are safe and should be a part of the solution, trouble is people are involved at all levels and small mistakes can lead to catastrophic results and some times way after the mistake was made. when you consider the time frames involved even with extremely optimistic low odds catastrophe is a sure thing
    at best nukes are a stop gap solution that only put off the problem and from my personal experience problems put off till later seldom get smaller or easier to solve
    uncle frogy

  59. jamiejag says

    @78, unclefrogy

    The “human factor” is a factor in everything done by humans, not just nuclear power. Let’s imagine a class 5+ tornado comes along, rips an improperly fastened wind turbine off it’s base and drops it on liberty university. Putting aside the argument about whether or not that would be an actual tragedy, that would be a “human factor” disaster that could dwarf the destructive potential of all “human factor” disasters caused by nuclear power. Is that theoretical danger reason to abandon wind turbines as part of the solution to the imminent crisis of AGW?

    Nuclear power is a carbon free, well understood plan b (or c, or d, or whatever) just in case your pie in the sky, magically free from “human factor” renewable solution doesn’t work out IN TIME to prevent the worst and possibly irreversible consequences of AGW from occurring. NOT moving forward on it as well NOW when whatever slim chance we have of solving this mess still exists would show a distinct lack of foresight and imagination.

  60. Pierce R. Butler says

    Those interested in a detailed factual breakdown of the actual impacts of Chernobyl, and the assiduous cover-up of same by major organizations including the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Red Cross, the World Health Organization, and the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, might want to read “Why Government Secrecy Is More Damaging to Public Health Than Nuclear Fallout” by Robert Alvarez in The Washington Spectator, or better yet ,the book he reviews there Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, by MIT science historian Kate Brown.

  61. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    https://washingtonspectator.org/alvarez-nuclear-fallout/

    Experts in the World Health Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Red Cross, and the U.S. National Cancer Institute aided and abetted this cover-up in favor of gross and generalized assumptions designed to provide public reassurance that the worst was over.

    Lancet too, I’m sure, along with most other medical journals.

    What do you call someone who says that practically every source of peer-reviewed science is wrong and part of a cover-up? You call them a conspiracy theorist.

    And people in this thread called me a conspiracy theorist.

    PS:
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world

  62. vucodlak says

    @ GerrardOfTitanServer

    Maybe you should consider that you’re doing far more harm to your cause here than good. It’s pretty clear that you don’t actually care about the environment, as evidenced by your willingness to shit all over any environmentalist who doesn’t whole-heartedly embrace your idol, and by your derailing of every single thread about the environment to flog your hobby horse. Seriously, that thing is just a pile of toothpicks by now.

    Thing is, I’m not anti-nuclear power. I am, however, aware of the reality that any nuclear power plant that began construction now would do so under the plague extreme incompetence and corruption that’s currently afflicting the government in this country. I do not trust an appointee of Donald Brainworms Trump and Rick I-Can’t-Count-To-Three Perry not to screw up. I sure as hell do not trust the corporations who’d actually build and run the things not to cut every conceivable corner in this “we don’t need no stinkin’ regulations” atmosphere.

    That means that, at best, the planning and initial groundwork for new plants could begin in late 2021. Then you have the years towards spent choosing a site, building the plants… we might get a couple up-and-running in a decade or so. Provided the new, safer, low-waste reactor designs work as expected, they would indeed be a boon to the environment.

    But bloody hell, you’re not convincing anyone that nuclear power is the way to go. If anything, encountering fanatics like you makes me think that it’s a real bad idea to have nuclear power at all. I don’t know if you’re getting paid for this lunatic tilt or if you’re a high priest of the Church of the Children of Atom, but either way I wouldn’t trust someone with your level of fawning devotion with one of those little electric motors that come in high-end Lego sets. Just the thought that someone like that might one day be within a hundred miles of nuclear material makes me itch.

    Give it a rest, already.

  63. unclefrogy says

    thanks jamiejag it’s good to know that a tornado destroying a wind turbine and crashing it at a uni. is equal to a nuke core meltdown
    uncle frogy

  64. Akira MacKenzie says

    Sigh…

    Look, I don’t care how the fuck you power our civilization: renewables, nuclear, magical woofel dust, whatever. Just as long as:

    1) Humanity is not dragged back to some squalid, preindustrial state.
    2) Whatever source of electricity doesn’t kill us all, whether long or short term.

    Thank you.

  65. GerrardOfTitanServer says

    To vucodlak
    So, if someone cares deeply and passionately about something, and harps on it all the time, then they’re a liar and/or deluded, and their explanations of motive is clearly false.

    And I have said very little beyond which leading climate scientists have said, ie James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, and others. Is it therefore safe to conclude that James Hansen, the guy who testified before the US congress decades ago about the problem of global warming, doesn’t really care about global warming too?

    Also, on an unrelated topic: what is the color of the sky in your world?

  66. asclepias says

    Um, let’s see, what might decentralizing energy have to do with habitat? When we put up huge solar farms and wind farms, we are effectively removing that area from the habitat pool. I suppose if caring about open spaces and wildlife makes me a Green, then I will proudly accept that label. There are so many available roofs and flat spaces that I don’t see the point of removing or endangering habitat and wildlife. (Prime example: here in Wyoming, the Industrial Siting Council chose what it considers a prime spot for the Chokecherry Sierra Madre wind farm–in core sage grouse habitat, a raptor migration corridor, on the edge of a prairie dog town. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service can mitigate, but can’t say no.)

    There is a uranium mining plant here, and it is impressive how tightly everything is contained. however, uranium is tightly coupled with selenium. After deradiating the water used, the company sprays it into the surrounding fields, leading to higher selenium in the soil than would be there had this stuff not been mined, which in turn leads to teratogenesis of bird embryos.