Jimmy Carter had his faults as president, the main one being his decision to implement what they must have thought was a clever plan to destabilize Afghanistan so as to covertly draw the Soviet Union, its Cold War adversary, into that country and get bogged down so as to create for them their own Vietnam. That set in motion a train of horrific conflict under which the Afghan people still suffer. [IPDATE: See the interview that Zbigniew Bzerzinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor, gave in 1998.]
But on the positive side, Carter also has had a long-standing interest in energy conservation, perhaps because of the gas lines triggered by the oil embargo implemented by the Arab states during his presidency. He set up the Department of Energy (the department that Rick Perry famously forgot in his ‘Oops’ moment in the 2012 Republican debates) and has been a tireless promoter of energy conservation and alternative energy.
One of the privileges of getting old is that you tend to call a spade a spade and not worry too much about the consequences and at the age of 89, Carter seems to be enjoying doing so. Yesterday he called climate change deniers ‘nutcases’, infuriating them. However since Republicans have long been unjustly accusing Carter of being the worst president ever, I doubt that Carter cares that much and I suspect probably enjoys stirring them up.
Interestingly, this has been a really cool summer in Cleveland, with the normal sweltering July and August seeing much lower temperatures and downright chilly nights. I have been looking out for letters to the editor in the local paper using this fact to scoff at global warming, similar to those that appeared like clockwork whenever there was a major snowstorm in winter. But there have been none so far, making me hope that the editors of the paper have begun to realize what an idiotic argument that is and not worth publishing.
I’ve always been a fan of Carter. He’s always seemed like a thoughtful man, ahead of his time. I was a child when he made his speeches about turning down the thermostat two degrees and putting on a sweater. He put solar panels on the White House (Chimpy the puppet president promptly yanked them off during his reich).
Katydid,
Removing the solar panels was such a childish act. It is hard to believe a grown up would do such a thing.
@Katydid
When you say Chimpy do you mean Bush? Because Reagan removed the panels.
I thought Katydid was alluding to Reagan’s association with one-time co-star Bonzo.
@ Mano and Katydid…
My recollection of the solar collectors on the White House was that they were for heating water and not photovoltaic panels. They were removed, again this is an old recollection, because routine maintenance/repairs were needed on the White House roof and the panels were never replaced. I think this is one of those memes (like accusing Clinton’s staff of removing all the “w” keys from the computer keyboards prior to the handover in 1981 to the Bush administration, a event that did not happen) that has taken on a life of its own.
For the record, I’m no fan of President Reagan and consider President Carter to be the last honorable man to hold that office.
I’m also curious to read more about President Carter’s plan to destabilize Afghanistan. Can you point me in the right direction Mano?
Thanks,
Jeff
I’m not sure if this is what he meant, but: in the summery of 1979 Jimmy Carter signed a directive that allowed the CIA to begin moving weapons into Afghanistan. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski (from an interview in the late 1990s or early 2000s)
He further stated that he considered this a good thing because he thought (at the time) it would increase the probability of the Soviet Union getting bogged down in its own Viet Nam. (Which, in a sense, it did.) The truly evil nature of Z. B. comes out later:
Of course this interview was prior to the September 11 attacks, but his disdain for the importance of what they stirred up, likely promoted by his short-sightedness, is truly appalling.
And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Hell! Forget about not predicting the future: they fully intended to get the USSR involved in a war! Where people died!
And neither do you regret having deliberately starting a war knowing that many, many people would die just to stick your finger in the Soviet Union’s eye?
Jeff,
I have updated the opening paragraph of this post to give the necessary links, including the one that has the interview dean @#6 refers to where they openly admit that this was the plan.
Jimmy Carter had his faults as president, the main one being his decision to implement what they must have thought was a clever plan to destabilize Afghanistan …
A close second: continuing the Gerald Ford/Henry Kissinger policy of supporting, subsidizing, and arming Indonesia for its massively brutal suppression of the East Timor independence campaign, which killed at least 100,000 people (out of a population under a million).
He also went all-out to support the nuclear power industry after the Three Mile Island partial meltdown, when he could have stopped a major expansion of nukes and promoted renewable energy. Finally, Carter’s naïveté and ineptitude opened opportunities for Reagan and his handlers to take over the US, the damage from which continues decades later.
…and calling “deniers” nutcases is going to convert them how? I wish people would abandon the ad hominem fallacy and stick with the science!
@Mano and @Katydid
Of course, Bonzo. I was thinking how Bush 2 is often depicted as a chimp.
@10: Some people can clearly never be persuaded, so there’s no point trying. And calling them “nutcases” is not an example of ad-hominem argumentation.
Okay. Calling people “nutcases” is not ad hominem? So where’s the scientific argument? It is pointless to hurl invective at people who have a different point of view. The only way to win the argument is with scientific fact and data. Just because you don’t agree with someone doesn’t mean you can’t be persuaded by facts. So where are the facts? Did Jimmy Carter present any?
Does he have any?
sailor1031 @13:
Everywhere, for those who have eyes to see, and ears to listen. Does one have to present all the facts/arguments every time global warming is mentioned?
Nope. It’s just an insult. In their case well deserved. The facts are out there in the form of a near unanimity amongst the scientist who study this. The US Navy agrees. So does NASA, the White house, etc. It’s not Jimmy Carter’s job to present the facts. All that’s left is to give up on the deniers just like you can give up on the flat earthers, the moon landing deniers, etc. There’s nothing left other than to point and laugh and marginalize them more.
[OT]
sailor1031 @13, calling someone a nutcase because they wilfully have an unwarranted belief is not an argumentum ad hominem; however, calling someone’s belief unwarranted because they are a nutcase qualifies.
Thanks John M for that perfect definition…
srsly?
I’ve had an (granted, at the time, a very basic) understanding of the mechanics of global warming since I was a kid in the 70s/80s, and that was just off of PBS and books I managed to drag out of the public library.
Basically, the whole, entire body of scientific literature involving atmospheric, paleontologic, climatic, geologic, and meteorologic studies (and probably countless more, these are the first that popped into my head…) is evidence that this is something legitimate, and more importantly, something to be very concerned about.
And, since you think evidence matters, point out some valid evidence that shows there is any actual “debate” as to global warming, let alone something that would falsify or disprove it.
Hint: don’t bother, we have numerous records of CO2 levels increasing, and, surprise: temps have been increasing according to worst-case scenario models for a couple decades now.
@ lochaber No. 18
That’s true, you’re absolutely correct.
I first became familiar with the concept of Global Warming/Climate Change in a ’60s science class, although the nuclear power industry must get some credit for pushing the issue as a marketing ploy (no green house gases from reactors don’t you know) in much the same way that the aluminum industry used recycling to trash (pun intended) the steel industry’s anti-litter campaign.
For years I have had a standing offer of $100 to the first person who can present me with a peer reviewed scientific paper published in a juried science journal challenging global warming/climate change that is written by a scientist in the field who is not in the employ of the petrochemical industry.
My Benjamin is safe.
Jeff
@Pierce R. Butler
Wait what? Carter is one of the presidents most responsible for ending nuclear power and development in the United States when he issued a ban on all nuclear reprocessing. (I can also blame IIRC Nixon for ending the LFTR program in Oak Ridge national labs and Clinton for ending the IFR program in Argonne national labs. I know the Clinton incident was especially shameful.)
Also, nuclear is the only practical option. Wind and solar are pipedreams. If we want to stop global warming without breaking our economy, nuclear is it. Also the dangers of nuclear are quite overblown. Please check your facts.
@ EnlightenmentLiberal No. 20
Having served in Adm. Rickover’s nuclear navy—USS Bainbridge, CGN 25—I know that nuclear power can be safe. I just don’t think nuclear power is safe in the hands of private corporations where safety will always take a backseat to profit. (President Carter, one of the first nuclear officers trained under Rickover, understood nuclear power better than any president before or since.)
Wind and, particularly, solar power are not pipe dreams as is being proven in Europe where power companies are paying homeowners for the power they are creating. Give Jeremy Rifkin’s 2011 examination of progress in the rest of the world: The the Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World a read.
If the Navy ran every nuclear reactor in the country to Navy standards, we wouldn’t have any problems (including the safe storage of spent fuel rods—Yucca Mountain would have been a safe storage facility, but getting the rods there was the risk). Since that isn’t going to happen, no sane citizenry will ever allow profit-driven corporations to put the nation in such danger, nuclear is off the table.
Jeff
Sane citizenry? That’d be nice.
@Jeff
You are overblowing the dangers of nuclear by far, and overselling the plausibility of wind and solar. Being proved in Europe? Where? In Germany where it makes up less than 10% of annual production? In Germany where they are going to build enough coal capacity in the next decade alone to be more than their combined total of wind and solar at the end of this decade? In Germany which is one of the highest CO2 producers per capita in all of Europe thanks in no small part to shutting down their nuclear reactors and massively increasing use of lignite coal, one of the dirtiest forms of coal?
Solar does not work when the sun does not shine. Wind does not work when it does not blow. Storing energy is really, really hard and really, really expensive. It’s barely doable for a period of hours. You need to start talking weeks, which is insane.
Look at the problem of solar at high latitudes. For example, German photovoltaic in winter gets about 1% daily average of its nameplate capacity. It’s pitiful. It’s impossible to store enough energy seasonally, which means solar has no meaningful place in baseload power in Germany.
Wind is no better. Contrary to propaganda otherwise, often enough there are weather patterns over whole continents when the wind does not blow which can last for weeks.
If we want to maintain our western standard of living, we need reliable baseload power, and wind and solar have absolutely no place in that equation. The only clean, safe, environmentally friendly, and sustainable option is nuclear.
Finally, rather than scaremongering, look at nuclear in perspective. It is no exaggeration to say that it’s quite probable that more people have died from sliced bread than from radiation release from nuclear power. (Back of napkin calculation: 3000 choking deaths per year, 2% are from bread, so maybe 60 deaths per year from sliced bread. Over maybe a hundred years is about 6,000 deaths from sliced bread. That’s more than most reasonable estimates of Chernobyl and other nuclear accidents combined.) When you examine the whole production chain, mining, maintenance, manufacture, etc., nuclear is even safer than solar and wind -- less deaths per watt-hour of energy produced.
Nuclear waste isn’t that bad, and with newer reactor tech it’s even less bad. New breeder reactors produce waste that lasts for only hundreds of years instead of thousands of years before going to background levels, such as IFR and LFTR. Hell, the IFR can burn our existing LWR waste and reduce it down to again to only dangerous for hundreds of years. Compared to the alternatives, nuclear isn’t that bad.
…
Green Peace and related groups are no longer environmental groups. That’s not their primary purpose. Nowadays, they are primary anti-corporatism, pseudo anarcho-communists. Take a look at your quote here:
What kind of bullshit is this? This has nothing to do with the environment. This is one step away from the communist manifesto. This is not sound economic policy for solving our problems.
This is bullshit by people with no knowledge or understanding of engineering and real world constraints. Managing an electric grid is serious business, and they trivialize it. Adding a bunch of unreliable generators of very small size would make a hard problem into an almost insurmountable problem.
@ Ducn No. 22
Well, the two of us are a beginning, no?
@ EnlightenmentLiberal No. 23
Read the book…
But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.
In fairness to Carter & Co., that “pro-Soviet regime” had been installed by a bloody coup in March of that year, and rebellions in the countryside began almost immediately afterword, long before any outside aid started to arrive. So I think it’s safe to say that: a) the pro-Soviet regime was in trouble; therefore b) it was fair to consider a Soviet invasion inevitable, because that would have been the only way to keep their guys afloat. Getting aid to the rebels could be seen as a deliberate attempt to provoke a Soviet invasion — or it could (more plausibly IMHO) be seen as an attempt to DETER such an invasion, in the hope that the Soviets would simply give up, realize they didn’t need Afghanistan that badly, and let it go.
As for whether ZB and others really intended, at the time, to get the USSR bogged down in Afghanistan, in order to cause the Soviet regime to fall apart, that could be true, or it could be ZB pretending, after the fact, to be the Grand Genius who made it all happen exactly the way it ultimately did. I, for one, don’t consider him all that credible. He really sounds like a pretentious buffoon following in Kissinger’s Elder Statesman and Farsighted Cold-Warrior footsteps, and making the same mistake Kissinger did — pretending the USSR was the only part of the world that mattered.
Carter is one of the presidents most responsible for ending nuclear power and development in the United States…
You are aware, are you not, that that decision was not made in a vacuum?
Finally, rather than scaremongering, look at nuclear in perspective. It is no exaggeration to say that it’s quite probable that more people have died from sliced bread than from radiation release from nuclear power.
No, that’s no exaggeration — that’s pure fucking bullshit with no connection to reality at all. Does the word “Chernobyl” ring any bells? How about “Kishtym?” Oh, and “Fukushima?”
I really want to be pro-nuclear, but arguments like yours are part of the problem — they have no credibility, and they seem designed, not to support nuclear power, but to dumb down the debate and demonize its critics. I agree that nuclear power is important — which makes it all the more necessary for its advocates to GROW THE FUCK UP.
What kind of bullshit is this? This has nothing to do with the environment. This is one step away from the communist manifesto.
Actually, that’s pretty close to what a lot of farmers, all over America (at least), want to do with wind-turbines on their land: cut their own electric bills, and maybe sell surplus wind-power to the grid. (And yes, there’s wind in large parts of rural America, and farmers have lots of land to build wind-turbines on.) Calling such a grassroots solution “one step away from the communist manifesto” only proves what an idiot you are.
(Also, I thought individual initiative, homegrown solutions, and steps toward self-sufficiency were GOOD things that down-home American capitalists did better than hidebound centralized bureaucratic commies. When did they become evil and commernistic?)
@Raging Bee
Ah, the ever irrational Raging Bee.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster
The only way you get to hundreds of thousands or millions is by applying bad science, specifically the known-to-be-false linear no threshold model (LNT).
Fukushima? IIRC no deaths yet attributed to radiation release. In the end, the number of deaths is going to be quite small. It was still a very serious accident, but far less severe than Chernobyl.
And Kyshtym? I specifically said nuclear power plants, not nuclear weapons manufacture plants. Please try to keep up.
It is no exagerration to say that nuclear power is probably safer than sliced bread.
…
About selling personal wind power back to the grid. It would never happen in a free market because that kind of power often has negative value. Oftentimes, during midday and afternoon, Germany already has so much electricity that it doesn’t know what to do with it, and they are paid to not produce, or to dump it. That’s right -- wind and solar owners are sometimes paid to not produce electricity. Negative value.
As I said before, running a grid is a non-trivial affair. You need to match supply with demand. A bunch of unreliable generation plays havoc with that, and can crash the grid if not properly managed. When all of those independent generators are personally owned, they cannot be managed, and it’s a nightmare. It’s questionable whether the grid could even stay up. Not to mention other problems such as frequency control from a million little generators.
Reliable electricity is worth much much more than non-reliable electricity. If you want power when the sun isn’t shining and when the wind isn’t blowing, you need “backup”, enough backup to cover the whole load. Thus you need to build enough reliable production as though you had no solar and wind. The problem is that most of electricity is the cost of the plant and not the fuel. (The exception is nat gas which is closer IIRC to 1/3 capital cost and 2/3 fuel cost, which is why it’s often used for peaking and load following.) That means the value of wind and solar is the value of fuel saved for the “backup” plant, which is often like 1/5 to 1/10 of the overprice price of electricity. And that’s when the electricity is wanted and not when there’s overproduction and solar and wind are paid to not produce.
@hyphenman
Like most reasonable people, I expect someone to engage a little bit in conversation rather than just say “read a book”, especially when I’m pretty certain that book has nothing new to offer. Does that book offer a way to make tidal 10x cheaper than today’s prices? Does that book offer a way to make energy storage 100x cheaper than today’s prices? Does that book offer 100x improvement in solar conversion efficiency? Then I don’t see what it has to offer to this conversation.
Ah, the ever irrational Raging Bee.
Coming from the guy who just called home-wind-turbines “one step away from the communist manifesto,” that statement is simply laughable in its childishness and lack of awareness. Are you even grown-up enough to be called a hypocrite?
It is no exagerration to say that nuclear power is probably safer than sliced bread.
That comparison is so invalid and dishonest, I’m inclined to wonder if you even take yourself seriously. I could probably argue just as plausibly that meth-labs are safer than sliced bread — and even if I had the statistics to back it up, it would say absolutely nothing useful about drug policy.
The scientific consensus on the effects of the disaster has been developed by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR). In peer-reviewed publications UNSCEAR has identified fewer than 60 immediate deaths from trauma, acute radiation poisoning and cases of thyroid cancer from an original group of about 4,000 cases of thyroid cancers in the affected area
That sounds like an extremely narrow “finding” that doesn’t account for land left uninhabitable and unsafe for growing crops, contaminated fisheries, and other longer-term effects of exposure to radioactive contaminants.
About selling personal wind power back to the grid. It would never happen in a free market…
All the more reason to stop giving so much unearned respect to the concept of “free markets.” And besides, electric power distribution was never a “free market” situation anyway.
As I said before, running a grid is a non-trivial affair. You need to match supply with demand. A bunch of unreliable generation plays havoc with that, and can crash the grid if not properly managed.
First, individual wind-turbines can still cut their owners’ electric bills, which would still be a positive contribution all around. And second, I heard that grids were being modified to account for such new developments.
If you really gave a shit about nuclear power, and knew what you were talking about, you’d be citing recent advances in power-plant technology, such as plants using thorium instead of uranium — but you don’t mention any of that, probably because all you want to do is bash the critics of nuclear power, without regard to actual reality. You’ve left yourself with zero credibility. Again.
Seriously, boy, even nuclear-industry executives have admitted there are serious problems with generating nuclear power safely; so when morons like you say pig-ignorant shit like “nuclear power is probably safer than sliced bread,” you do your cause more harm than good.
BTW, EL, have you ever even READ the Communist Manifesto? I did, and it doesn’t even mention alternative energy sources. Care to tell us exactly how wind-turbines are “one step away from the communist manifesto?”
Having served in Adm. Rickover’s nuclear navy—USS Bainbridge, CGN 25—I know that nuclear power can be safe. I just don’t think nuclear power is safe in the hands of private corporations where safety will always take a backseat to profit. (President Carter, one of the first nuclear officers trained under Rickover, understood nuclear power better than any president before or since.)
QFT to the Nth degree! I’m beginning to think that if we’re to rely on nuclear power, it has to be done entirely by the national government, managing it as a public asset for a public good. If for-profit corporations can’t do it right even in high-tech, competent, honor-driven JAPAN, ferfucksake, then they can’t be trusted to do it right anywhere.
@ Raging Bee No. 33
You ought not to conflate the will of one dedicated individual with the amorphous, soulless and amoral entity that we call government.
The U.S. Navy’s record speaks for itself.
Jeff
No, hyphenman, “government” is not a single amorphous alien entity; it’s a collection of people, trying to govern other people, and people who join a government don’t get new or radically altered brains, nor do they become more Borg-like in any meaningful way. If you want to criticize a government, criticize the REAL government, not the amorphous image or sloganeering straw-Borg-cube of one’s imagination.
I didn’t quote anything about wind farms. I quoted this:
That is asking me to imagine a world very reminiscent of a sort of anarcho-communist commune, where everyone is self sufficient, no government, etc etc. Doesn’t matter if it’s wind or nuclear or whatever. Entire orthogonal point. The quote is a bit about economics, where people should be self sufficient, because evil corporations and evil government, or something. I don’t know why else you would want to lose benefits of specialization of labor, and economies of scale, by supplying your own electricity.
I’m guessing the evil of renewable energy sources is that random middle-class people can take advantage of them without making some wealthy guy richer.
That is asking me to imagine a world very reminiscent of a sort of anarcho-communist commune, where everyone is self sufficient, no government, etc etc.
Actually, that’s way beyond what that author said. He didn’t say anything about “no government.”
Oh well, at least you’re only wildly exaggerating what someone else said, instead of just plain making shit up like you did with my comments. For you, that’s an improvement.
@Raging Bee
I don’t see it as gross exaggeration. He painted a dreamy picture of a decentralized economy for its own benefits. Again, it’s this streak of anti-corporatism and anti-capitalism that has overtaken the environmental movements. It’s pretty sad.
PS:
That’s because I know what I’m talking about, and you don’t. India is using thorium right now in their reactors, in their solid fueled pressurized light water reactors. When used in that way, it’s no better than conventional uranium solid fueled pressurized light water reactors. The key benefit of LFTRs and MSRs is the molten salt fuel which allows for easy reprocessing. There are also really good uranium solid fueled reactors like the IFR. It’s not a tripe matter of “thorium vs uranium”. There are real big differences in the machines that we can use to harvest nuclear energy, as different as a modern jet plane vs a helicopter vs a blimp.
In the future, please don’t say “thorium reactors are better”, because that’s wrong. Please say “MSR (molten salt reactor)” or “LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactor)” is better.
Further, a crucial point of misunderstanding is the notion that conventional reactors are bad (except for the limited fuel problem). That’s because we need to start building a conventional reactor like one per week, for about 20 years, in order to get a grip on global warming. We’ll need at least that amount of time to get IFR or LFTR online and ready for mass production. Thus this kind of education campaign is necessary.
PPS:
If you want to pretend to be the honest one, could you please get back to the other threads where I asked you detailed questions about your arguments and positions, which you have previously been dodging?
http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2014/07/28/gop-candidate-thinks-people-can-own-missiles/#comment-340499
http://freethoughtblogs.com/marginoferr/2014/07/10/culture-is-the-problem/#comment-29093
I’ve given the courtesy of being intellectually honest. I’ve tried in good faith to explain my position in as much detail as you need to understand and to answer any question put to me. You have not. You have been purposefully evasive in damn near every conversation we’ve ever had. Please answer my questions.
@Raging Bee
Also, I do advocate for government control and operation of nuclear power. The right to a minimum standard of living is a human right, and thus having access to energy is a human right. I don’t necessarily stand behind everything this book says, but I very much like the idea, where he advocates something even more extreme (more government control):
Prescription For The Planet
Tom Blees
Full PDF legally available online here:
thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/P4TP4U.pdf