The Greens And Some Inconvenient Truths
Joshua S. Goldstein and Steven Pinker write in the Bo Globe about some inconvenient truths for the green movement:
The first is that, until now, fossil fuels have been good for humanity. The industrial revolution doubled life expectancy in developed countries while multiplying prosperity twentyfold. As industrialization spreads to the developing world, billions of people are rising out of poverty in their turn -- affording more food, living longer and healthier lives, becoming better educated, and having fewer babies -- thanks to cheap fossil fuels. In poor countries like India, citizens want reliable electricity to power these improvements, and stand ready to vote out any government that fails to deliver it. When American environmentalists tell the world to stop burning fossil fuels, they need to give Indians an alternative that delivers the prosperity they demand and deserve.That brings us to the second inconvenient truth: Nuclear power is the world's most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source. In today's world, every nuclear plant that is not built is a fossil-fuel plant that does get built, which in most of the world means coal. Yet the use of nuclear power has been stagnant or even contracting.
Nuclear power presses a number of psychological buttons -- fear of poisoning, ease of imagining catastrophes, distrust of the unfamiliar and the man-made -- and so is held to an irrationally higher standard than fossils. When a coal mine disaster kills dozens, or a deep-water oil leak despoils vast seas, nobody shuts down the coal or oil industries. Yet the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant accident in Japan, which killed nobody, led Germany to shut down its nuclear plants and quietly replace them with dirty coal. Even France -- which gets three quarters of its electricity from nuclear power and has never had an accident -- now plans to shut down many plants under pressure from environmentalists.
Ideology often leads to idiocy, like our "environmentalist" LA mayor's "road diet" initiative. Yes, he's trying to put LA on a diet from roads, meaning that he's shutting off traffic lanes and turning them into bike lanes...which means that he's turning LA into more of a traffic hell than it already is.
Now, I got around New York on my bike. That's because with 20 blocks as a mile, it would have been six miles for me to ride all the way from downtown (Canal Street) to 100th Street. LA is far more vast and spread out. What we need to be on a diet from is this particular mayor.
How is it that people who insist on making us all ride bicycles never stop to think about the elderly and infirmed when they decide to do this?
Sure, I can ride a bike and do so as much as I can. Im lucky, I am middle aged, in good health and I live in a place where the entire town is just 7 miles in either direction( a place decidedly, not LA, the place of my birth). A shockingly high number of people do not fit this description or live in this situation.
Ive been to bejing. Ive seen an entire population on bicycles. Looks good in magazines but in real life, its not a pretty thing.
Los Angeles is a wonderful place. East Coasters should deal with it or leave it the hell alone but lets not try to make pretend that its New York or Boston.
frank martin at November 23, 2015 10:45 PM
Los Angeles is a wonderful place. East Coasters should deal with it or leave it the hell alone but lets not try to make pretend that its New York or Boston.
Or Amsterdam, or Belgium.
The effete tend to want to replicate their Euro grad school summer trains and bicycle experience in places where it doesn't scale. LA being the prime example.
Reality is that some dude named, "Chuy" needs to flog his 90's vintage Corolla beater down I-10 for an hour each direction to get to his job at the Prius dealership. And there's no way a bicycle is going to work.
Bolillo_Scz at November 23, 2015 11:10 PM
Absolutely, frank martin, on the old people.
Amy Alkon at November 24, 2015 5:03 AM
You can thank the left MSM and Hollywood for purposely destroying nuclear power and space exploration.
During the Three Mile Island incident in 1979, which was scary and intense, the amount of fear generated by Hollywood actors and the media was inaccurate, horrific, and totally out of proportion.
The images shown on TV of the cooling towers was constant, scary, and had nothing to do with the incident in a negative manner.
Bob in Texas at November 24, 2015 5:39 AM
The really funny thing about converting from nuclear to coal is you increase radioactive waste. Coal ash can be more radioactive than spent fuel rods from a nuclear power plant. Nuclear plants emit just about nil radiation into the atmosphere. By contrast you can find most coal power plants with a Geiger counter due to all the radioactive waste they emit into the air.
The worldwide fear over nuclear power is ridiculous.
Ben at November 24, 2015 5:46 AM
One thing about nuclear is that all commercial plants operating today are 1950s designs. When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was created in 1970, it made it known that the only chance a new reactor had of getting approved would be to make it a copy of an existing design, and so the whole industry became frozen in time technology-wise. Over the past half century we've learned how to design much better reactors that will be inherently safer and produce less waste. Plus, the control and monitoring technology has advanced by light-years.
Bob is correct in that Hollywood and the media succeeded in character-assassinating nuclear power. Today, the average Joe knows pretty much nothing about how a nuclear reactor works, but he knows it's a Bad Thing because that's what he was taught as a child, and everyone in Hollywood and Washington that he looks up to says so.
Cousin Dave at November 24, 2015 6:34 AM
deep-water oil leak despoils vast seas
Despoil, to severely damage or ruin? that despoil? the oil eating bacterium are on line 1, something about "give us more food, please".
I R A Darth Aggie at November 24, 2015 6:57 AM
Isn't it a little hypocritical for the world's largest consumer of fossil fuels to tell the world to stop using fossil fuels?
Patrick at November 24, 2015 7:32 AM
The three big Nuclear Incidents everyone 'recalls' are Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukishima.
Three Mile Island
What they dont know is is poorly trained techs on a poorly designed control panel thru a mathematically improbable string of events made damn near the EXACT wrong decision at every turn.
I read a write up once that claimed had they flipped a coin at every decision the results would have been better.
Most people are unaware that it is still active and producing power today
Chernobyl was a series of unqualified tech jury rigging shit becuase a safety test has been delayed from the qualified day shift to the overnight shift. Why they just didnt wait another few hours for the day shift, I dont know. As part of this saftey test the main automatic saftey overrides had been disabled, and the nght crew violated over half of all of the plants saftey procedures
Fukishima was a case of human greed, it survived an earth quake, one of the largest ever, it survived a tsunami, what it did not survive was the asshole who decided to save money by NOT moving the emergency generators to higher ground and water proofed buildings. Instead many of the generators were left in low lying areas which lead to thier damage and failure to function
lujlp at November 24, 2015 8:30 AM
Further, on Chernobyl: The reactor was an inherently less safe design, called a "graphite moderated" type. These are known to be less stable than the "water moderated" designs used for all commercial reactors in the Western Hemisphere. That was a factor in the accident.
Cousin Dave at November 24, 2015 12:14 PM
Fukushima wasn't so much a case of human greed, as it was a case of the typical Japanese mind set.
They almost never spend money on preventing an unlikely worst case scenario.
They also never add money to a project preferring to jury rig and take short cuts to stay within budget,
This is one of the reasons why the southern half of Honshu is on one power standard, and the northern half is on another.
Rather than redo it correctly, they just plopped giant transformers in the middle of the country.
Isab at November 24, 2015 1:40 PM
The environmentalists are going to destroy us with their religion. The hate and fear of nuclear is bad enough, never understood their hate for hydro power. It's pretty much off the table on any energy talks in the US. And the blind love for wind and solar is laughable: they are the least cost effective ones and we have been pouring money into them with little improvements.
Joe J at November 24, 2015 7:03 PM
I have no idea why people - here and otherwise - second-guess the Japanese on Fukushima. The whole island jumped eight feet. Got a safety margin for that one? I've seen the INPO report on it, and they were protected against lesser tsunamis.
Meanwhile: most of you are getting cause and effect backwards, if you are even considering it, in the development of SoCal and other areas of the country. When transportation energy is cheap, sprawl happens. That's generally bad for the environment as it encourages waste. Now you have to deal with that waste. Having a house or apartment a long ways from work isn't either justification for keeping the status quo or a guarantee against market modification of your commute - if any.
Get in a pinch, you'll find ways to live closer to work or work from home. That's not something you do over a wall telephone any more.
Radwaste at November 24, 2015 7:49 PM
"Meanwhile: most of you are getting cause and effect backwards, if you are even considering it, in the development of SoCal and other areas of the country. When transportation energy is cheap, sprawl happens. That's generally bad for the environment as it encourages waste. Now you have to deal with that waste. Having a house or apartment a long ways from work isn't either justification for keeping the status quo or a guarantee against market modification of your commute - if any."
That same cheap energy made large scale food production possible, and gave us the means to comfortably live in cities without being noticibly less healthy than those that live in rural areas.
It decreased the number of jobs required in agriculture by a factor of more than ten, and freed American workers from being wage slaves at the local coal mine.
It gave them freedom and choices. All in all a pretty good trade off for a little *sprawl*. (I define sprawl as an elitist snob's term for any development they find less appealing than the Louvre or their own residence).
Isab at November 24, 2015 9:42 PM
Good thing I'm not an "elitist snob". Sprawl happens and exists regardless of who notes its presence.
Distance costs energy and time. All I want is for people to remember that.
Radwaste at November 25, 2015 4:07 AM
You are a bit off Rad. Commute time is fairly constant. As travel speeds increase distance does too.
Joe, you have your answer in what you wrote. The environmentalists are Luddites. They oppose energy generation period. But that message doesn't sell. So instead they push for the least reliable and most expensive forms of energy instead.
Ben at November 25, 2015 5:41 AM
"(I define sprawl as an elitist snob's term for any development they find less appealing than the Louvre or their own residence). "
This. It nearly always comes from someone who lives in a 4000-square-foot trendy downtown condo, in a building with private security. (And the dirty little secret is, they also have a golf course house that they retreat to on weekends, using their private jet to get there.)
Cousin Dave at November 25, 2015 6:35 AM
As far as Fukishima: It must be remembered that what happened there, as terrible as it sounds, was only a very small part of the devastation caused by the tsunami itself. Still... I would have thought that a tsunami would have been a foreseeable event in the plant's hazard analysis. The TVA Browns Ferry plant in Alabama uses the same reactor design as Fukishima. Being that it is in Tornado Alley in north Alabama, a tornado strike cutting the plant off from transmission facilities was a foreseeable event. In the April 2011 tornado outbreak, a tornado went through the property and damaged the switch yard, and other tornadoes all but destroyed TVA's transmission grid in the region. However, the plant design had the good sense to place generators in different areas around the facility. So after the switch yard was torn up and the plant was cut off from the grid, they had generators elsewhere on the property that they started, and used to bring the reactors to an orderly shutdown.
Cousin Dave at November 25, 2015 6:45 AM
Good thing I'm not an "elitist snob". Sprawl happens and exists regardless of who notes its presence.
Distance costs energy and time. All I want is for people to remember that.
Posted by: Radwaste at November 25, 2015 4:07 AM
What you seem to leave out of your calculations is the very nasty totalitarian restrictions on people living where they want, and working where they want that would be necessary to reduce sprawl, never mind actually eliminate it.
In my experience living overseas, the alternative to the suburban sprawl we see in America is a bunch of plywood and cardboard shanty towns within walking distance of the factories and farms, conveniently located next to a giant communal garbage heap.
Take a look at Rio or Mexico City and you will see the future of LA with a Luddite elitist energy policy.
Isab at November 25, 2015 8:09 AM
I don't know what is in a progressive's mind (or if he has one -snark), but a descriptive theory is that he wants the world to move back to the 1600's or 1700's.
o Far fewer people fit comfortably into the Earth's carrying capacity.
o Minimal energy consumption with almost no carbon emissions.
o Employment for everyone, mostly good, hard farming, with a thin elite to philosophize.
o Life based on family and community relationships without the distractions of email, TV, or telephones. People talking to people.
o Sustainable communities which are mostly self-sufficient.
o Simple tastes satisfied by unembellished products and little waste expended on variety.
o Almost all food is produced and consumed in the Locovore region.
o Local transportation is by healthy walking. Longer distances are traveled in groups by coach and wagon to save energy.
o A vast equality covers the land. Few people envy their village neighbors.
o Healthcare is minimal, but not needed. People live healthy lives for a shorter time, then die quickly and inexpensively.
o The public is thoroughly educated in the established wisdom. Sceptics are not needed or allowed. The social order is stable and satisfying.
o A thin elite uses greater education and wealth to maintain social order and assign meaningful work to everyone in society.
Andrew_M_Garland at November 25, 2015 8:09 PM
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