Coastal waters’ oxygen level has now become seasonally variable.
Along the coast, there are dead zones, where lifeforms can’t survive because the water doesn’t contain enough air. So everything dies. This is something scientists predicted as one of the scary scenarios that “might”would happen if global warming starts to go into a runaway reaction.
NPR: [npr]
Scientists say West Coast waters now have a hypoxia season, or dead-zone season, just like the wildfire season.
Hypoxia is a condition in which the ocean water close to the seafloor has such low levels of dissolved oxygen that the organisms living down there die.
Crabber David Bailey, who skippers the Morningstar II, is rattled by the news. He remembers a hypoxia event out of Newport, Oregon, about a decade ago. He says it shows up “like a flip of a switch.”
“If there are crabs in the pot, they’re dead. Straight up,” Bailey says. And if you re-bait the pots, “when you go out the next time, they’re blanks, they’re absolutely empty. The crabs have left the area.”
There will be other things moving in that can survive, but we won’t like them. Presumably what comes next is bacteria swarms.
“One of the more fundamental reasons is that the ocean is warmer now and warmer water holds less oxygen,” says Chan. “And then the second part is that a warmer surface ocean, it acts as an insulating blanket.”
The Gulf of Mexico has dead zones and the Bay of Bengal has a huge dead zone. A very large population of humans depends on the fish there, and they are already experiencing food shortages. It’s a slow scramble but the writing is on the wall. [guard]
The Bay of Bengal’s basin contains some of the most populous regions of the earth. No less than a quarter of the world’s population is concentrated in the eight countries that border the bay. Approximately 200 million people live along the Bay of Bengal’s coasts and of these a major proportion are partially or wholly dependent on its fisheries.
…
Last month a multinational team of scientists reported an alarming finding – a very large “dead zone” has appeared in the bay. Apart from sulphur-oxidising bacteria and marine worms, few creatures can live in these oxygen-depleted waters. This zone already spans some 60,000 sq km and appears to be growing.
The dead zone of the Bay of Bengal is now at a point where a further reduction in its oxygen content could have the effect of stripping the water of nitrogen, a key nutrient. This transition could be triggered either by accretions of pollution or by changes in the monsoons, a predicted effect of global warming.
This years’ Gulf of Mexico dead zone is the largest ever measured. [noaa]
Previously the largest Gulf of Mexico dead zone was measured in 2002, encompassing 8,497 square miles. The average size of the dead zone over the past five years has been about 5,806 square miles, three times larger than the Gulf Hypoxia Task Force target of 1,900 square miles.
The runoff from the hurricanes is going to make it worse. There are humongous algal blooms feeding off the dead fish that have suffocated and fallen to the bottom.
Like with fossil fuels, humans have become dependent on the fisheries. Like with fossil fuels, assuming that they’ll never run out – mankind’s reaction to fishery depletion has been “fish harder!”
When the shit starts really hitting the fan, expect a massive upsurge of religious fanaticism. And they’re going to be looking for someone to blame.
So the question is, are we heading for an “anoxic event?
Oops, cocked up the link: Anoxic event.
Ecology, Geology and the likes – there must be many more Ologies to deal with all of this – must be fun: A tangle of barely-understood or even hitherto unnoticed feedback loops ticking away softly. Until some bald apes came along and started prodding them, and everything started ramping up, slowing down, running backwards or do everything all at once.
The even scarier part is that with these cycles we have even less hope to do any repairwork than with something so “simple” as greenhouse gases. With the latter you just lower emissions and can even try to reverse the process with things like carbon capture.
But with problems like the dead zones you’ve already moved away from the root cause (bald apes). The best you can hope for is to address that root cause and hope the effect carries over to all the other affected systems in time to make a difference and allow them to stabilise. Stabilise, that is, in a regime we actually like. I.e. one without toxic algae, dead fish and anoxic critters everywhere.
Given how ineffective we are with just dealing with our emissions that’s not very likely. Even if you went all in with some of the grander geo-engineering schemes all you’d be doing is to adjust the global temperature back down. After that, even if it did work, it’s crossed fingers to see if everything else goes back to normal, too.
—
How about God? Oh, right, difficult to martyr. Fortunately there are other gods. And their followers. Maybe that’s why He created them? (instead of providing adequate climate control)
Dunc@#1:
So the question is, are we heading for an “anoxic event?
Looks like it, to me.
I was listening to a podcast the other day, and they were talking about how fossils are made. One of the paleontologists explained that a lot of fossils were formed from animals that died fast and were not torn apart by scavengers. They theorize that some of the really good fossils were formed during anoxic events – even the bugs and stuff don’t touch them, because there aren’t any bugs in the anoxic zone, either. So I suppose the bright side is that we’ll be leaving some pretty fossils. “Always look on the bright side of life!”
I’m down here in Atlanta right now, speaking at a security conference, and yesterday I accidentally shrugged off a question with “you know, we’ll be lucky if we have a technological civilization 100 years from now, so network security seems like a low priority.” I’m afraid people think I’ve drunk the dark kool-ade.
On the bright side, an anoxic event of that magnitude would make me worry less about the stock market.
Reginald Selkirk@#5:
On the bright side, an anoxic event of that magnitude would make me worry less about the stock market.
Yep. Just sit down for a second, rest. Maybe take a nap. Maybe not wake up.
The other alternative is rolling clouds of burning methane. Those will be infrequent, though. It’s the hydrogen sulfide that’s going to really suck.
I know all this is “old news” and has been going on for a while. The Bay of Bengal dead zone news was new(ish) to me, when I encountered it last year. That’s … incredibly bad news for a lot of people.
What if Malthus was right? Hey that’d be a good halloween costume:
“Who are you?”
“Malthus.” (carrying a sign representing a hockey stick growth curve that falls down to near the zero axis rather precipitously)
komarov@#3:
Given how ineffective we are with just dealing with our emissions that’s not very likely
When I used to encounter “let’s terraform Mars” lifeboaters, I’d always try to remind them that we’d need to be a whole lot better at not fucking up biospheres than we are, to make Mars habitable. Demonstrate that we can keep Earth working smoothly for more than 2000 years. Oh, oops, is that the back end of a horse leaving the barn?
komarov @ #3:
Here’s a fun one: one of those “grander geo-engineering schemes” is ocean fertilization with iron to stimulate algal growth. What’s one of the possible triggers of a global anoxic event? From the article I linked earlier: “a major change in the fertility of the oceans that resulted in an increase in organic-walled plankton … [T]his mechanism assumes a major increase in the availability of dissolved nutrients such as nitrate, phosphate and possibly iron to the phytoplankton population living in the illuminated layers of the oceans”. Nitrate and phosphate levels are already massively elevated by agricultural run-off… So one of the more promising schemes we have to limit climate change may well increase the likelihood of one of the most severe effects of climate change.
I’m reminded of one of the core principles of permaculture design: “you can’t only change one thing”.
Marcus @ #7
There’s really no question here. The belief that Malthus was wrong relies on the assumption that you can increase agricultural productivity indefinitely. That’s obviously unrealistic. There’s a Malthusian limit out there somewhere, the only question is how far away it is (as we continue accelerating towards it). People love to claim that Norman Borlaug proved Malthus wrong, but Borlaug himself said:
That was in 1970. He thought the upper limit for the number of people we could feed if we fully implemented all of his ideas was 10 billion… We’re on track to hit that sometime around 2050. Of course, he wasn’t factoring in the adverse effects of climate change on agriculture. Anybody want to argue that he was right about us recognising our “self-destructive course … along the road of irresponsible population growth” sometime before 1990? Or even today?
Oh boy:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/10/31/startling-new-research-finds-large-buildup-heat-oceans-suggesting-faster-rate-global-warming/
Happy Halloween! When the ghosts come back to haunt us all.
I didn’t believe we had a hope in hell of hitting that target anyway… But, if accurate, this pushes the likely value for climate sensitivity up somewhat, which is… Let’s go with “not good”.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dsx2vdn7gpY
I’m with Bruce Sterling on this one. “Terraform Mars? Let’s see you terraform the Gobi Desert first”
No, Malthus was wrong because of another reason. The birth rate per woman is decreasing in western countries, and has been for some time. IIRC, in most western countries, they’re already close to or below the birth rate per woman for keeping the population constant. It’s poor, uneducated, non-industrialized, populations with un-emancipated women and women without access to birth control who have lots of kids.
If the left dropped their pseudo-science hangups about nuclear power, we could, but I agree that there’s basically no chance that this’ll happen.
On the subject of Gulf of Mexico oil spills, these guys talk about a little known oil spill going on since 2004.
And that’s a problem that we’re actually going to solve, right? Sure… Also, it’s far from certain that the demographic transition that we’ve seen in the West would be repeated elsewhere – there may well be other important cultural factors beyond those normally cited. However, it doesn’t matter, because those “poor, uneducated, non-industrialized, populations with un-emancipated women and women without access to birth control” aren’t going to get those things now, and those things are increasingly under threat in the populations that already have them.
And there’s the answer to the question of “who’s going to get the blame?” – people who don’t actually have any fucking power at all. I know I’ve been over this with you at least half a dozen times so I’m not going to belabour it, but this idea that it was “the left” or “environmentalists” who killed nuclear power is complete bunk. They’re just convenient scapegoats.
Also, even accepting that the demographic transition pans out as predicted, there’s still a very big question as to whether we hit the Malthusian wall first. Current UN projections are for the population to continue growing out to 2100 – and that’s not necessarily when they expect growth to stop, that’s just the point at which they stop making projections. Those projections have been revised upwards fairly significantly in recent years – the current (2017) projection for 2050 is for 9.8 billion in 2050, whereas the most recent (2012) FAO projections for agricultural production were based on an earlier (2008) estimate of 9.15 billion in 2050. Most importantly though, those FAO predictions do not include any effects from climate change, and assume that the growth of agricultural production maintains a more-or-less constant rate – whilst in reality, it’s very uncertain whether we can maintain that growth trend even before we factor in the expected negative effects from climate change. Yield growth has already slowed pretty significantly in the last few decades, but the FAO estimates assume that it will continue at current rates.
To Dunc
Regarding Malthus, my simple point was that Malthus’s core argument is apparently wrong. Making people more well-off, and more prosperous and secure, does not increase birth rates, and instead it appears to decrease birth rates. Decreasing birth rates does seem to depend on industrialization, but I agree that there are very probably other important cultural factors, and I don’t claim to have a full picture. I just want to note that a simple Malthus understanding of the world – that people will have more kids when you give them more material resources – is a very wrong picture of the real world.
I agree that we face many problems raising the rest of the world out of poverty and instilling the necessary cultural values – whatever they might be – in order to decrease birth rates.
If I understand you correctly, this is too conspiracy-theorist and also too defeatist for my tastes. Imagine a hypothetical person saying “it’s not the fault of typical white racist trash Americans that Trump got elected – it was all part of a carefully orchestrated plan by top Republican organizations, the Koch brothers, etc., and the voters were just patsies who played along with the plan”. Even if the hypothetical facts were true, I still wouldn’t buy that description and assigning of moral blame for a second. These people had the opportunity to make a choice, and they made a bad choice, and they have a very significant amount of personal responsibility for making that bad choice.
Alternatively, I misunderstood you, and you meant to say something like “nuclear power failed on its technical merits, and not because of outside pressures from the leftist environmental lobby, who may or may not just be a front for other powers, i.e. fossil fuel interests”.
I do not agree that nuclear power failed on its technical merits.
I agree that it seems pretty likely that a lot of the anti-nuclear position of the leaders of the leftist environmental movement is because, in some part and in some way, due to direction and funding from fossil fuel interests.
Even if the leftist environmentalists were just playing the rank and file as patsies, the rank and file still bear a large portion of personal moral responsibility for being duped and making the wrong decision.
Again, I’d like to say that I’m not sure exactly what sort of argument you mean to make here. I hope I covered all of the possibilities.
Nuclear power failed on simple economics: There were cheaper alternatives. For example, it was Margaret Thatcher that killed nuclear power in the UK, and she was neither a leftist nor an environmentalist. Your narrative is simply ahistorical. Nuclear power has only ever been viable with state support, and that support was removed during the 1980s by the right, not the left. It wasn’t the environmental lobby that decided to make quarterly returns and short-term profitability the be-all and end-all of national infrastructure planning. The left were not even anywhere near any of the levers of power at the time.
To Dunc
I think that your understanding is broadly incorrect. The reasons for the apparent expensiveness of nuclear power are several, including excessive and needless environmental regulation which is caused by the environmental movement, but also other reasons, such as manipulation of the “free market” by gas and solar companies, and also improper construction choices e.g. not choosing a few designs to standardize in order to reap the benefits of repeated standardized construction.
If you look at the historical data across many countries on the price of nuclear power, you see that the price of nuclear power IIRC nearly quadrupled in response to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The new safety regulations and regulatory environment – i.e. the “as low as reasonably possible” standard which is based on the pseudo-science “linear no-threshold” model of biological harm from ionizing radiation – was an environment where it was hard for nuclear to be profitable. If you look at other countries, i.e. some non-western countries, that did it differently, you see decreases in cost decade over decade that match the best learning curve models that you see for solar or any other industrial thing. South Korea in particular is a great example of how doing things differently can result in a 4x price difference from the west.
See:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106
In particular, look at graph “Fig 11”, and look at the dots for South Korea. Then, compare that to the dots for western countries, and see the massive cost increases right for nuclear power plants that started construction near 1975. Nuclear is expensive in the west because our policies make it expensive, and much of those policies are the fear-induced pseudo-science response to the “disaster” of Three Mile Island and the disaster of Chernobyl. I’m not saying that it’s all needless safety regulation, but it’s impossible to look at the actual data and say that the needless safety regulation has not had a huge impact on cost in the west.
The idea that nuclear power is only profitable with state subsidies is another lie perpetuated by the lying anti-nuclear leftist environmentalists. I’m not accusing you of lying. I’m just accusing you right now of being mistaken and unknowingly repeating that lie.
We’ve had this argument before. The cost increase happens long before the incidents you ascribe it to. I can’t look at the paper properly right now, but the idea that costs increased from 1975 because of an incident that occurred in 1986 is pretty weird – especially considering that Chernobyl didn’t actually result in any changes to reactor design or safety regulations in the West, since it was a completely different design. (If you think it did, please give specific examples.)
The 70s were a difficult decade for many reasons – double digit inflation, gasoline rationing, the 3-day week, massive labour issues… I see no effort to take any of these factors into account.
That’s interesting. I also said “Three Mile Island”, and that happened in 1979. I might have been mistaken in earlier discussions. Please try to engage with what I’m saying now. Sorry for the confusion.
Regardless, it’s hard to argue against facts, like the fact that South Korea saw continuing price decreases, year over year, for like 30 years. You are just wrong.
EnlightenmentLiberal
How does South Korea dispose of it’s nuclear waste and is the cost of doing so covered by the price nuclear power is sold for? I genuinely do not know the answers to those questions, but I have seen too many analyses that disregard the cost of decomissioning and nuclear waste disposal when calculating the cost of nuclear power. In assessing any power source cradle to grave analyses is the only way to make fair comparisons and despite it’s other benefits nuclear suffers from high ‘grave’ costs despite varying levesl of environmental regulation, no one treats nuclear waste lightly.
OK, I know I said I wasn’t going to belabour this, and I’m still not going to belabour it nearly as much as I could, but there are few things I’d like to put out there for consideration. I don’t imagine that EL is going to take them on board, but maybe somebody else reading might…
The big problem I have with the line of argument that EL is presenting here is that there are a lot of steps needed to get from the observations that (a) NPP construction costs in the US increased after the TMI incident, and (b) other places such as South Korea have seen decreases in NPP construction cost, to reach his conclusion that we could avert significant climate change impacts “[i]f the left dropped their pseudo-science hangups about nuclear power”. Furthermore, those steps are based on significant unstated assumptions, all of which have to be true in order for the conclusion to hold, and most of which look extremely questionable if you actually examine them. Without trying to be absolutely exhaustive about it, the most important and obvious of those unstated assumptions are:
1. That the regulatory response the the TMI incident was unnecessarily onerous.
2. That this regulatory response was was primarily designed to placate “the left” or “environmentalists”.
3. That construction costs are the main determinant of the comparative economic viability of nuclear power in the US.
4. That the difference in NPP construction costs between the US and (e.g.) South Korea is primarily caused by differing regulatory regimes.
5. That this regulatory burden could be significantly relieved if, and only if, “the left” / “environmentalists” were to change their views.
6. That this would then make nuclear power economically competitive in the US.
7. That NPP construction could be ramped up quickly.
8. That rapidly ramping up NPP construction in the US would be enough to result in sufficient emissions reductions to make a significant difference to the trajectory of climate change globally.
All of these points are problematic to varying degrees, but given that we’re currently seeing the Trump administration tearing up decades worth of environmental regulations, assumption #5 seems particularly absurd. In reality, if the Trump or the rest of the GOP wanted rid of the post-TMI nuclear regulatory regime it would be gone tomorrow, and there’s nothing “the left” could do about it. It’s also important to remember that the current administration has withdrawn the US from the Paris accords, made it entirely clear that they have no intention of taking any positive action on climate change whatsoever, and is extremely cosy with fossil-fuel interests. Against that background, the idea that a change of heart on the part of the entirely marginalised “left / environmentalist” constituency would result in the sort of large-scale policy changes needed is completely absurd.
I have to say that I’m not at all convinced that new nuclear would be viable in the US even at South Korean construction prices. Power plant construction is financed very differently in the US, in such a way that biases it very heavily against large up-front capital costs. While the lifetime costs of advanced combined-cycle gas turbine plants in the US are roughly comparable with those of modern nuclear plants in South Korea, the distribution of those costs is very different: CCGTs are very cheap to build, but have higher fuel costs, while NPPs are expensive to build, with lower fuel costs. Since almost all power plants in the US are constructed by private entities and financed either through borrowing or by issuing equity, the cost of capital is a very significant factor in their overall financial viability. If the US were to switch to public financing, then nuclear power would be much more attractive. (There is a very useful and informative discussion of the various factors affecting power plant construction and operating costs in the US in this 2008 Congressional Research Service report.)
It’s also worth noting that much of the US’s current fleet of nuclear reactors is economically marginal at current electricity prices, even after construction costs are written off. For example, TMI 1 is being shut down next year despite having its operating licensee extended to 2034, because it is simply uneconomic to continue operating it. Changing construction costs isn’t going to help that.
I would also add that EL’s argument seems to be entirely dependent on the analysis of construction costs presented in the 2016 Lovering / Yip / Nordhaus paper, which has been subject to significant criticism. However, even if we accept the conclusions of that paper without question, they are still wholly insufficient to support the actual points at issue here.
Dunc@#24:
It is appropriate to belabor things, here. FYI. It’s what blogs are for.
Marcus @ #25: Thanks, but it’s not that I’m worried about being inappropriate – I’m trying to give up arguing with people on the internet because it’s a waste of time and I have better things to do with my life.
Correct.
Again, not needed. I’ll also take the option that the left / environmentalists are “useful idiots” for the fossil fuel lobby. I must have explained this at least once, maybe twice, thus far, meaning that you are not engaging with my actual arguments. You’re strawmanning. Stop being a dipshit.
Also false. There are other reasons as well. I stated that there were other significant reasons why nuclear power has difficulties competing in the market. Another big reason is the the manipulation of spot market prices by solar, wind, and natural gas. This is another strawman of my position. Stop it.
A substantial chunk so, yes.
Also correct, when we include the broader picture, such as the unfair manipulation of spot market prices.
Also correct.
For certain designs, also correct.
Also correct.
Protip: The world is more than America, and I say that as an American. The rest of the western world, i.e. Europe, is going in the absolute wrong direction on this too, and that has nothing to do with Trump.
Why do you limit yourself to conventional free market capitalist options? I wouldn’t. I’m a radical Marxist, not some scum-sucking libertarian. For a problem of this scale, we should be willing to bring out all of our tools, and to change whatever is needed in the pricing structure. Our questions should be about physical possibility and plausibility, and not about whether the current wall street fat cats will be able to make money off it.
And a substantial portion of that ongoing cost can be attributed to the safety regulatory regime, and also the spot market price manipulations by solar, wind, and natural gas.
You cite the Sovacool paper. Like his pal Jacobson, they’re willful liars and frauds. The problem here is of a couple of persons who are probably hired “experts” by the fossil fuel lobby. It’s quite comparable to the scientific “disputes” about whether smoking is healthy for you, and the harm of leaded gasoline, etc. We have a bunch of hired academic frauds to maintain the veneer of academic respectability. If you have the time, I’ll start citing papers by these people, and show them to be bald-faced liars and frauds. Because these frauds are often hailed as the foremost experts by the green movement, I have concluded that the entire green movement is intellectually bankrupt. If they promote frauds to their most respected expert positions, then everyone in the movement is some combination of “on the take” and “fooled”. The movement really is rotten to the core, and we need to stop pretending that there’s anything academically respectable to it.
I’m one of those people, because I live in the land of reality and facts, and not the fictional world of infinitely dangerous nuclear waste invented by the lying green leftists and environmentalists, arguably first consolidated in the public consciousness by the movie The China Syndrome. The disposal of nuclear waste is a complete non-issue, and anyone who says that it is an issue is lying or doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Coal ash contains more radioactive material than nuclear power plant waste, on a per energy unit produced comparison. Coal ash is also like a thousand times bigger by volume, on a per energy unit produced comparison. There’s also a bunch of other toxic stuff in coal ash that will kill people. Because it’s such a large amount of waste, there’s not much that can be done besides put it in big pits, and hope that nothing bad happens. And unlike nuclear waste which has the decency to become less dangerous over time, that coal ash is always going to be dangerous. Whereas, because the volume of nuclear waste is so far less, we can afford to properly dispose of it.
Also, radiation is not as dangerous as you probably think it is. More people have died choking on sliced bread than have died from radiation poisoning from nuclear power plants. This even includes Chernobyl. More people have died from a single hydro dam accident than have died from radiation poisoning from nuclear power plants, by a factor of about a thousand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Most green / environmentalist groups still peddle the well-known lie that radiation is just as harmful for you, no matter the dose rate, which allows them to make ludicrous calculations about the huge numbers that will die in the far far future from nuclear waste.
Here is a balanced and fact-based look at at the actual nuclear waste “problem”.
http://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf
Also, look at the real harms involved. People who have died from radiation poisoning from civilian nuclear waste? Practically zero. People who have died from coal power? Every year, 3 million people die premature deaths from airborne particulate pollution from coal, and that’s just counting particulate pollution, and not the other kinds of air pollution, and not the other kinds of pollution i.e. coal ash. According to the WHO, the number of people who died from Chernobyl, which is not a nuclear waste disposal problem, is about 300 to 3000. More people die every day from airborne particulate pollution from coal. Let’s set our priorities straight. The biggest priority should be to replace as much coal as possible with nuclear as fast as we can, on just this point alone. And yet, environmentalist countries like Germany are going in the absolute wrong direction with their increased use of the dirtiest coal.
https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollution/en/
PS:
There are real safety concerns about nuclear power, such as weapons proliferation and land contamination from accidents. Nuclear waste disposal is not one of these real concerns.
PS:
To Dunc
Why am I even accepting your framing of this question? Why am I even accepting that nuclear must be cheaper than coal in order for us to use it? I agree that this is an admirable goal which would aid worldwide adoption in place of coal, but this to me is not a hard requirement. If nuclear were a little more expensive than coal, we might still get worldwide adoption with a global carbon tax or some such, and this does seem to be within the realm of political feasibility.
I’m sorry for blindly accepting your incorrect framing of the discussion when I should have disputed that in the first post.
I remain unconvinced, mainly because if you don’t know what the costs are, which given that most of the world hasn’t got any existing long term storage, and indeed isn’t even planning on building any, you simply can’t do the calculation. Note I am not suggesting that storage of the waste that does need to be kept longer term is an impossible technical problem, simply that with out a significant change in political will we can not know what the costs are going to be, so can not calculate the true cost of nuclear.
I am also not suggesting that the alternative is coal, there are other options.
I just linked to a paper with a solution.
http://thorconpower.com/docs/ct_yankee.pdf
Here’s another solution.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/06/a-modest-proposal-for-nuclear-waste-disposal/
The web site author IIRC is a climate change denier, but the proposal is not joke. There have been studies on suitable areas of the ocean floor which have not been disturbed for millions of years. The first solution is preferable because we may want to later retrieve the “waste”, because there’s lots of value stuff in the waste, and current “waste” is itself fuel for other proposed next-gen reactor designs.
Again, power plant nuclear waste disposal is not a problem at all. It’s just a talking point from the professional liars from Green Peace and other green energy movements.
This is another lie peddled by the green energy movement. Solar and wind cannot replace coal and nuclear with current technology, and it’s unlikely that there will be any radical technological breakthroughs in the foreseeable future that will change this.
This is pretty rich coming from a guy who is about to demonstrate at some length that he has entirely failed to grasp the fundamental nature of the argument I’m making.
There’s really no point in continuing until I get you to understand this, so (somewhat against my better judgement) I’ll belabour it a bit more. OK, quite a lot more…
I am not arguing here about whether or not nuclear power is a good idea, or about how we as a society should respond to climate change. I am not making any kind of prescriptive argument – that is, an argument about how I think the world should be – at all.
Let me repeat that, since you seem to specialize in missing this particular point: I am not arguing about how things should be.
What I am trying to do is make a descriptive argument – that is, an argument about how the world actually is. Specifically, I am making an argument about the reasons why nuclear power has not seen greater adoption. This is fundamentally an argument about political economy. The important questions of political economy concerning any issue basically come down to 3 issues:
1. Who holds power?
2. How do they wield it?
3. What are their interests and goals?
I’m not particularly interested in getting too deeply into the weeds on the actual economics of nuclear power right now – partly because I don’t believe that either of us is sufficiently qualified to resolve a question which is the subject of ongoing debate in the specialist literature, but mainly because I’m only currently interested in the issue as far as it impacts those 3 critical questions of political economy.
The reason that I’m focussing on political economy here should be fairly obvious, but again, I’ll spell it out to avoid any possibility of misunderstanding: you have absolutely no hope of successfully changing anything unless you correctly understand why things are the way they are in the first place.
It is not my framing. It is the framing of neoliberal capitalism, which – in case you hadn’t noticed – is the dominant political and economic ideology on the planet at this time. Again, I’m not arguing here about how I personally think things should be, I’m arguing about how they actually are. In fact, I completely agree that it’s bullshit, but that doesn’t make it go away. This is the central reality of the situation which we have to deal with, whether we like it or not: we are in this mess because we live under a political and economic system that values short-term return on investment over long-term ecological viability. And – critically for my argument here – that is not the hippies’ fault.
Again, I’m not arguing about what we should do, I’m arguing about why we aren’t doing it. The fact is that those “wall street fat cats” are the people in charge right now, and unless you somehow deal with that, you’re just spinning fantasies with no more basis in reality than the idea that we can run the world on zero-point energy.
Returning to the 3 questions of political economy I referred to earlier, it seems to me that your proposed answers are:
1. Hippies
2. Protesting
3. Warm fuzzy feelings about Mother Earth
I apologise if this seems like straw-manning, but you’ve really not been very clear on the second and third points, and the first seems like a more-or-less reasonable (if snarky) paraphrase.
Whereas my proposed answers are:
1. Capitalist oligarchs.
2. Spending unimaginably vast sums of money.
3. Making even more unimaginably vast sums of money.
I feel pretty confident that my answers are much closer to reality than yours, and unless and until you have a proposal that is either compatible with those facts or has some realistic chance of changing them, everything else is just hot air.
(A significant but not-entirely-critical additional plank of my argument is that none of the people who actually hold power at present – i.e. the capitalist oligarchs – give the least fuck about what the hippies think about anything. Like I say, not critical, but worth noting.)
That’s very nice, but surely you must realise that you’re currently not in charge of anything, and nobody even vaguely like you (or me, for that matter) is in any danger of getting to be in charge of anything any time soon? In fact, by labelling yourself a “radical Marxist”, you are placing yourself not just in the group of people that the capitalist oligarchs who actually run things couldn’t give the least fuck about, but into the group of people that the capitalist oligarchs who actually run things will fight to the death with all of the very significant resources at their disposal, and thus making it even less likely that your ideas will ever see the light of day.
Anyway, didn’t you just state at #19 that “[t]he idea that nuclear power is only profitable with state subsidies is another lie perpetuated by the lying anti-nuclear leftist environmentalists”? It would probably be a good idea to resolve your own apparent internal contradictions on this point before you try to persuade anybody else of anything… Or are you just throwing stuff out at random in the hope that something sticks?
Now, is there any chance that you are going to engage with the argument that I’m actually making, or would you prefer to continue your evidently well-rehearsed pre-existing argument with the hippies in your head?
Bullshit. You’re just denying the agency of every person on the planet in the voting booth in a complete and final way. This is the most extreme case of defeatism that I have ever seen.
There is no contradiction here. The fact that you think that there is one is further evidence to support my supposition that you are not engaging in good faith. For whatever reasons, I can only speculate.
Take your servile defeatism, and shove it. I’m here to make the world into a better place by spreading truth and by countering lies. By defending lies and misinformation in this wholly unreasonable and disingenuous way, you are in my way. That makes you my enemy.
PS:
And spare me your dishonest whining “I didn’t defend any lies or misinformation”. As but one example, you cited the Sovacool paper as a direct rebuttal to my claims. There are very people who are less reliable than Sovacool as a source. He’s a well-known hack – except – that is – in Green circles. Don’t give me any pretentious shit how you are not also arguing about the merits.
OK, you’re a complete fucking loon with no interest in dealing with my actual arguments or political reality, but lots of interest in engaging in conspiracist ideation about people’s motives instead. Got it. Let me know how your radical Marxist nuclear renaissance works out for you.
We’re done here.
Political reality is more malleable than the laws of physics and engineering. Political reality is whatever we make it. You are a defeatist dishonest shit. Worse, I think you’re just using that as a front as a facade, to avoid engaging with the issues. You are the kind of person who doesn’t vote, or worse, votes third party.
I have no tolerance anymore for dishonest bullshit and those who peddle it, such as yourself.
As I said, you are my enemy, and the enemy of every progressive person, with that incredibly shitty attitude.
Fuck you. I’ve voted in every election I’ve ever been eligible to vote in, and I live in a country which is not stuck in two-party gridlock. Don’t try and tell me what kind of person I am. You don’t know me, or really much of anything about me.
Yes, political reality is malleable, but it’s not infinitely malleable, and changing it is a slow, difficult process. You are not going to persuade all those voters who have spent their entire lives voting for various flavours of neo-liberal capitalism, and many of whom think that climate change doesn’t even exist, to suddenly switch to supporting a self-described “radical Marxist”, just by getting the hippies on your side with your climate-change mitigation plans. Most of them hate the hippies at least as much as you do.
I’m not interested in talking to you if you’re just going to substitute personal abuse for any kind of rational argument.
Suggesting solutions that require changing international treaties is idealism at it’s most pointless. If we want nuclear power we have to deal with the existing political and economic framework, sure we can work to change that, but realistically that will take decades or too long to be of any practical use.
And believe it or not there are still other power solutions. Burning methane seems like a good one as it converts a very powerful greenhouse gas into a less powerful greenhouse gas, plus it has the advantage over nuclear of being exremely responsive.
This is a lie. You yourself might not be lying, and perhaps you’re just unknowingly repeating the lies of others. If you want to actually combat global warming in what little time we have left, if any, it’s nuclear or bust.
Converting powerful greenhouse gases to less powerful greenhouse gases is not enough. We need to stop practically 100% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Anything less means that the speaker is grossly ignorant, or not taking the problem seriously. Today, worldwide electricity production is around 3 TW. This will easily climb to 20 TW in the next 40-50 years, and by the end of the century, we will probably see it reach 50 TW, and maybe as high as 70 TW, assuming we transition usage of fossil fuel to electricity. In other words, we need massive, massive increases in electricity production, and if we don’t give any better solutions that are cost competitive (notice that I didn’t say cheaper), then the developing world will use coal, and we will lose. Energy usage worldwide is only going to go up up up. Reducing current human-caused greenhouse gas emissions in the west to 80% of normal still means a total increase in greenhouse gas emissions because of the rest of the developing world, even assuming they use the same approach that we need to get to 80% of current western countries normal.
We need to stop practically 100% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector, the transport sector, and the industrial sector, and IIRC even that only gets you to about 87% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. As I just argued, even that might not be enough. If we are serious about this problem, we need to also start investigating geo-engineering solutions, with my current favorite being negative emissions, e.g. sucking CO2 out of the air and sequestering it. This can be done. It simply requires exorbitant amounts of energy, but not so much that it’s physically impossible. We’re just talking another 10 TW or more worldwide power in order to do this on the necessary scales.
We need to be doing this now.
This bullshit of reaching 50% by such and such year is a cruel joke. It shows a complete lack of commitment to actually dealing with the problem. The problem is way worse than that, and we don’t have the time.
These so-called environmentalist groups are really just anti-capitalist groups masquerading as environmental groups. To many of these assholes, sticking it to the man is more important than actually solving the environmental problem. I’m very sympathetic to sticking it to the man, but if I have to choose between sticking it to the man by having decentralized energy (which is a pipedream), or fixing global warming, I choose the environmentalist approach, and that means nuclear – lots and lots of nuclear.
Anyone who tells you that there is another option is lying to you, or unknowingly repeating the lies of others. The green energy movement is nothing but liars and those who have been duped by those liars, and I am prepared to demonstrate these claims.
I don’t give a fuck. I have nothing productive to say to someone who says “you won’t be able to convince people to solve global warming, it’s too hard, you should just give up” (approx). You are scum, and you’re my enemy. You currently stand in the way of the very progressive ethos with the biggest defeatist, nihilist attitude that I have ever seen. And then, you add some dishonesty on top of it while on the one hand refusing to engage on the merits, but also simultaneously citing papers to attack the merits.
Get bent.
I just realized how this is actually a super-big problem:
Wait, are you suggesting that we can effectively fight global warming without international agreements of some kind? Are you suggesting that individual actions of persons in their individual capacity can be enough? I hope you are not this foolish.
In the news: “UK nuclear power station plans scrapped as Toshiba pulls out”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/08/toshiba-uk-nuclear-power-plant-project-nu-gen-cumbria
So even the Koreans don’t think they can make money building APR-1400s here… I’m sure it’s all the hippies’ fault somehow.
Little ELmo sounds like the guy sitting on his rooftop with flood waters rising all about, rejecting every serviceable life boat, claiming that only GOD (aka Uncle Nookie) can save him.
Fuck you and your punkass dishonest ass. You haven’t even bothered to take a few seconds to try to understand my position. I know this, because if you had, you would have realized just how asinine that sentence is, and also realize that it’s a gigantic strawman.
Because this issue is so important to me and humanity at large, I wish that you die in a fire. And as a survivor of third degree burns, I know how horrible of a death that is.
To Lofty
No. I’m saying that those lifeboats are a lie. You have no evidence that the lifeboats work. I have evidence that the lifeboats will not work. I argue that they’ll sink as soon as you try to load more than 20% or 30% of the persons from the boat into them.
EL, you’re showing creationist quality thinking as usual. Absolutely no evidence against your devoutly worshiped
almighty dogsparkly power source will be admitted. Anyway, keep on raving, it’s mildly amusing on an otherwise dull evening.Ok. If you want to argue facts instead of asserting victory by fiat, I’ll be here.