Joe acts like it’s surprising that those pushing green energy are against nuclear. That’s only surprising if you believe those pushing green energy are interested in saving the environment vs. neo-Marxists looking to destroy capitalism.
If you hold the latter perspective, the fact that the greens are anti-nuclear is perfectly aligned with their policy goals.
Additionally, check out how the greens are playing with our children’s mental health to progress those goals.
Agreed. Unfortunately people assume that the Greens, or at least the most politically motivated Greens, have a green agenda. They don’t. They have an anti capitalist agenda, coupled with a childlike need for attention-especially here in the UK where they block traffic and disrupt sporting events in ego driven displays of self importance.
Hi Lynne. Yes it’s been happening here in Bristol. Which if you don’t know is the university town where the Edward Colston statue was pulled down. In the uk there is little sympathy for owners of large SUVs, not because of ‘green’ issues, but mainly because the politics of envy sadly riddles our culture. To the detriment of everyone I think.
The Greens don't only have a Green agenda. Putin is not stupid, was caught supporting anti-fracking activism in Germany to keep his Russian gas customers plentiful. I am sure Russia also has funded a significant chunk of this anti nuclear sentiment there for the same reason, historically, to keep Germany dependent on Russian gas. Smart enough to buy G. Schroeder, smart enough to secretly fund "environmental activism". https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-secretly-working-with-environmentalists-to-oppose-fracking
Russia collusion wasnt real, but that didn't mean the Russians weren't involved, it meant Trump wasn't. There's not much disagreement over the Russia hacking and attempts to influence the election, even Nunes memo said that existed. The disagreement was level of impact and exact goals of the campaign, and some people still believe in collusion with no awareness that they look like the opposite number to those who claim 2020 election fraud.
Russia, China, and I am sure others. We do it too. I am reminded of "[O]h what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." And now dirty politics are employed within the nation.
When I lived in Germany after getting out of the Army, my German friends (and I'm sure this joke isn't new to many of you) called the Greens "Watermelons" - green on the outside, but red in the middle.
I have said all along that the green and the GW movement is a Marxist plot to drive the capitalist economies into the ground and out of the ashes, shoulder to shoulder the workers arise and form a communist paradise like Cuba, Venezuela, CCP or North Korea.
This is why I do not take the purveyors of "Catastrophic Global Warming" seriously. The ONLY energy source that can replace fossil fuels on their (ever-moving) Chicken Little timeline is nuclear. And yet they reject it.
Clearly they don't really believe in their timeline at all.
The radical environmental activists are out for total control of humanity, and the less of it - humanity - there is to control, the easier it will be to control them.
No, “they,” unqualified, do not reject it. *Some* of them do, which is to say many of them do, and those who want to salvage a livable planet better convince them otherwise.
Whatever false beliefs they may hold about how to get there, people who acknowledge the obvious proven fact of global warming and want to prevent it are still preferable to the people who use certain bad beliefs as an excuse not to acknowledge the gravity of the situation.
"obvious proven fact of global warming" Hogwash! It is not proven and it has never been proven. Oceans would rise 21 feet, never happened. The ice caps would completely melt, never happened. How many predictions have failed before you realise GW is a hoax?
The University of East Anglia used to be the epicenter of global warming research, experts. Until someone hacked their emails and found the "scientists" at East Anglia were fudging their figures to promote the GW hoax.
Harvard university published a paper saying the 10th century was the hottest century on record. Look up Harvard Gazette "It's Not So Hot".
You can't believe anything the Democrat GW fanatics tell you.
Global warming is *absolutely proven.* The data is so voluminous it might as well be infinite.
You clearly don’t have even the slightest issue or even intellectual competence. You’re not only conflating observed facts with predictions but you’re also misstating both the facts and the predictions.
You’re in complete denial, and you don’t have the intellectual apparatus to escape your denial. You don’t even have the awareness to know that you lack the apparatus.
What a classy statement, and ad hominem attack. It's what you left wingers do to anyone who disagrees with you.
Did you read the Harvard paper? Has Al Gore's prediction of oceans rising 21 feet really happen or his prediction the Artic ice cap would completely melt by 2014?
Climate has never been static. It is always changing. What cause the last five ice ages? What caused the glaciers, some two miles thick, to melt? Was it the automobile and human carbon emissions or was it the cycles of the sun?
Read the Harvard paper and tell me that East Anglia, one of the respected "research" centers of GW to put out of the voluminous research you tout, was a bastion of truth. just like the oily politician Al Gore is a bastion of truth.
Anyone who says the science is settled doesn't understand what the scientific method really is. The scientific method is that every theory is questioned. Einstein's theories are under constant review as are Newton's theories of gravity. That is the scientific method, the search for truth. I find it noble. You, in an effort to shut down debate, attack it. I find that offensive but then that is what the left does.
All the GW people want to do is shut down debate and that is just wrong.
If you can't debate me without attacking me personally, I don't want to talk to you. Join forces with comprof. He does nothing but attack the people who disagree with him and not the problem.
Not only do you not know what an ad hominem (or, clearly, class) is, but you’ve literally committed ad hominems among a host of other fallacies including conflation and straw men.
It’s not fallacious to observe your demonstrated ineptitude. It’s factual. Aside from the fact that Comprof is a fool, the only truth you’ve managed to convey, entirely unknowingly and by accident, is that you don’t know how to reason, compounded by the infinite arrogance of believing that the conclusions you’ve incompetently drawn are true and worth defending just because they’re yours.
Seriously, go learn how to reason. When I say you’re incompetent, it’s not a statement about your potential. It’s a statement about your present. So go fix it, and then maybe *you* will be someone worth talking to.
Climate Change disaster scenarios are predictions of future events based on computer models of very, very complex interacting factors. The scenarios by their nature are NOT empirically verified confirmation of climate models because what has not happened cannot be scientifically, empirically verified...Obviously
Who is so arrogant as to claim to know what will happen tomorrow and even more so 50 years from now. Highly competent meteorologists cannot predict the course of a hurricane over a period of a week as Floridians know well.
I haven’t once claimed that any particular prediction is perfect—nor have the scientists who modeled them, by the way. I’ve claimed that global warming is proven, which it is, and I would further state that the predictions—that the ice caps would melt, which they are; that sea levels would rise, which they are; that weather would become more extreme and unpredictable, which it has; and so forth; are *generally* accurate.
To invoke your weather analogy, just because meteorologists can’t predict all the granular specifics of a hurricane doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention when they tell you there’s a hurricane coming. And of course you *do* pay attention, because the fact is you know that they actually *do* have useful insights.
The problem with some of the original "studies" is that they were not replicable.
Then there is the part where the academic light from Penn State sued in a Canadian court for defamation. As the alleged defamation was associated with elements of the data set, the defense motioned, successfully, for the court to order the production of the data set for discovery.
Funny thing happened on the way to the opera: The defamation suit was withdrawn by the plaintiff in a New York second. I believe that the defendant was awarded attorneys fees by the court.
At best, the climate models only suggest how sensitive the climate might be to a particular change. The parameters that one needs to address to get an anywhere near accurate reading are well beyond the reach of human endeavor at this time. The best bit about science is that continued research will find even more complex and exciting avenues to explore...And there will be people willing
Perhaps your anger would be best directed at the Warmists in power who have been rejecting nuclear as a solution since the very beginning of their campaign of false prophesies. Why aren't YOU out there protesting to "convince" them, since you care so much more than the rest of us? Or are you afraid of what your fellow Leftists do to people who dare to oppose them?
Considering that the climate has been changing since long before humans appeared on the scene, the logical approach for a livable planet is to reduce pollution overall and to prepare for changes in climate that we absolutely *cannot* control. Oddly enough, humans are ADAPTABLE. We have survived on a planet that has been both hotter and colder than it currently is. We have survived on continents that have been subject to higher and lower ocean levels than exist at present.
Nothing that the Warmists are promoting is going to "save" the planet. They are supremely unconcerned with *preparing* for changes in climate (their ocean-front properties suggest they aren't worried at all). Their sole purpose is to gain power using fear, and as Gordon pointed out, they have dangerous uses in mind for that power.
Sorry—you think my position isn’t valid unless I waste my time carrying a sign outside Congress? The hell is wrong with you? I’m angry at both change deniers and climate change do-nothings, thank you very much.
Your comment is a bizarre litany of unjustified assumptions—including that I’m a “leftist”—and non sequiturs, especially the silly yarn about how humans are “ADAPTABLE.” As if the only thing at stake here is human life, or as if human life won’t get much, much worse from global warming, or as if a lot of humans won’t be killed by it—all said by someone whose clear underlying motivation is an unwillingness to sacrifice any of the luxuries they currently enjoy. You can’t even “ADAPT” your mind to an extremely well-evidenced truth, much less to the dangers and losses posed by a rapidly warming planet.
You have no idea what you’re doing or why you’re doing it.
"someone whose clear underlying motivation is an unwillingness to sacrifice any of the luxuries they currently enjoy"
That sounds more like a Warmist with a private jet than a rural person who lives in house that's probably worth less than your car (and drives a car worth less than your last vacation). I am well aware that I will probably lose what few "luxuries" I have in the coming chaos being promoted by the power-mongers. But I am not willing to simply hand over my life to greedy people who want to "depopulate" me out of existence.
I wish you Warmists could hear yourselves as others hear you: "Believe! (and give us money and power!) or you won't be saved!"
The reality is that Warmism is a religion. Failed prophecies and all. As a True Believer, of course you consider the rest of us damned.
I don’t own a car, and I haven’t taken an actual vacation in about a decade, but thanks at least for admitting—eventually—that I’m exactly right about what’s motivating your denial.
No one is asking you to “hand over your life.” I’m certainly not asking you to “give me money and power.”
The very way you conceive of so-called “Warmists”—as if regular people who accept the voluminous science of global warming and take seriously their own obligation to help mitigate it are actually just part of some cabal of conniving thieves and puppet masters—is tragically stupid.
You’re the one buying into a faith—a faith endlessly controverted by actual evidence your psyche simply can’t, for deeply selfish reasons, accept.
Nuclear energy confuses them, so the only way for them to understand it and thus keep their precious sense of complete understanding and control over everything is to label it "evil" and then rail against it. You can say this about everything modern Progressives disagree with.
I disagree. Never underestimate the stupidity of true believers. Some of the green energy leaders may be communists but the unthinking public singing this song think they are virtuously saving the planet.
THIS. The media have been demonizing nuclear energy for 60 years. Is it any wonder everyone is afraid? This is merely another facet of safetyism that led to masks, lockdowns, green energy subsidies, etc. And the false narratives around accidents like Fukushima, which was an engineering blunder (why not have a water reservoir above the plant to cool things in a fail-safe way?), but in which little damage was done, only fan the flames.
"after the accident in Fukushima, Japan in 2011, it set a timetable to close down the rest. "
I get your point but I am scared of nuclear plants in earthquake/tsunami zones. It is my understanding though that modern nuclear reactors are much smaller and thus easier to secure. And in this day and age of political and climate vigilantes they also need to be secure from hostile takeovers.
The US has a hollowed out mountain for the waste that was finished at least 20 years ago. One of the main issues now is nobody wants it trucked or trained through their towns.
Ontario also hasn't solved the nuclear waste problem. Most of Ontario is also on some of the most geologically stable land in the world (the Canadian Shield). They are planning to put the nuclear waste deep into this geologically stable 2.5 billion year old rock formation.
This won't work for most of the geologically unstable western United States. It's also not an option for most of geologically unstable Pacific Rim or Mediterranean.
France also generates a lot of power from nuclear energy. Like Canada and Germany, it hasn't figured out what to do with the nuclear waste and is gradually scaling back on nuclear power generation.
To be clear, I'm not categorically against nuclear power, but I don't think it will provide a simple risk free answer to "green" energy.
One thing to consider is that nuclear waste only stays dangerously radioactive for about a century or so. Not hundreds of thousands of years like the Greens keep saying (their yardstick is zero radioactivity whatsoever, which is absurd since the natural uranium that went in the reactor was already slightly radioactive). And that's before considering breeder reactors and reactors that use nuclear waste as fuel, such as France's SuperPhoenix reactor (that ironically was closed down by activists before it could get commissioned). In short, nuclear waste is a solvable problem. The nuclear industry has known that for years, but unfortunately since the development of new nuclear technologies was stopped in the '80s out of public/political pressure there hasn't been money flowing to implement these solutions. Which is a shame. And of course activists keeps lying about it because they know that 'nuclear waste' is the most convincing argument for the general public.
There is currently no cost effective way to extract plutonium out of spent fuel rods. Institutions may claim that a solution is just around the corner.
Nuclear power plants are absolutely packed with safety systems and redundancies upon redundancies; and all sorts of failure scenarios are planned for and provided for. That's why they're so expensive to build. Unfortunately, in the past some were built with a greater focus on affordability than safety, which gave us Fukoshima and Chernobyl (where for example there was no confinement building that could have contained the accidents like those found in modern nuclear power plants).
In response to the last line of this article: No, they won't. They will fall asleep every night quite easily, resting assured in the belief that they are "on the right side of history". I spoke with a very good friend of mine, a German woman around the same age as me (35), just this weekend about the war in Ukraine. Specifically, I talked about the outsized financial contribution from the US and the need for increased contribution from the rest of NATO members. Her response was complete incredulity at such a suggestion, stating that Germany is taking in more refugees than any other nation and thus has already committed more financially than they should have to, and that if the US wants to spend less on Ukraine they should simply do so.
As with literally any and every issue, people are too comfortably enconsed in their opinion, and on the Left people are too self-assured that they are morally justified in their beliefs, for any of this to change. Germany is staring straight at a Russian invasion of mainland Europe and they still see no need to change course. I can assure you the political elite are not suffering from any self-doubt over their obviously self-destructive decisions.
Yes, there is a sanctimony one encounters in Germans absent in their WW2 co-losers, the Japanese. As a southerner with an accent, I’m accustomed to the smirks of the Germans in particular. “Hark! Perhaps the hillbilly will say something amusing!” In no other country has anyone I’ve just met ask to know who I voted for. It’s weird on the US ear.
Their default assumption that they are indisputably superior to Americans leads to an automatic lack of sympathy to their current predicament. Hopefully they’ll learn something but unlikely.
I’m from South East Texas with HEAVY Southern accent. My husband was International airline pilot. We were in Germany often. I was once asked, “What Nationality are you?” Seriously!!??
That is actually interesting. For one, they may not hear that many southern accents (and lets face it, there are several that can sound very differently). And secondly my understanding is that Southern accents are largely based on accents from parts of Britain. So to someone who doesn't swim in American accents I could totally see someone wondering if it is American or British.
And remember, some folks don't fully understand how big and spread out we are as a country, with many difference accents and cultures.
It seems the french feel the same way. It seems to me that for germans it stems from being soundly trounced in ww2 and for the french - needing to have their asses saved by Americans in the same war. Eastern europeans don't feel like that toward the US
FWIW, global strategist Peter Zeihan predicts that de-globalization will hurt Germany far more than France, in part because of the former having tied its energy needs to Russia and, thus, aligning itself with the East against the West. Also, that France’s de-population bubble is not nearly as bad as Germany’s.
That's certainly true Tanya in my experience- at least in the places I've visited in the last few year, Poland, Czech Republic, Estonia
The other part is very personality dependent. I have always found French snootiness absolutely hilarious- even when I'm on the receiving end of it. My wife gets frustrated while I'm literally laughing my tail off. It's very charming.
The German smugness does not have this attractive quality.
It is a good point that they are bringing refugees in, that is expensive. But it is a bit self-serving as well. If you analyze the German demographic patterns, they need young workers desperately.
What's to negotiate? This isn't a dispute. Russia decided one day to just take another countries land. That should pretty much never be ok. Ukraine shouldn't have to negotiate to get someone to stop attacking them and taking their land.
And what message would that send to Russia and other countries? "Attack someone and we will meet to decide how much of their land you get to have".
I find this position invalid. First the old take over the world rationale for overseas aggression is stretched thin. Too thin. The US actively meddled in Ukraine since the fall of the wall. Maybe with good intentions at first. But we actively participated in the 2014 coup likely (and I am just being nice there) leading to the invasion of Crimea. US bureaucrats were caught on tape picking the successor. Afterwards Joe Biden was caught on tape pressuring said successor to replace the prosecutor investigating Burisma, you know the same Burisma paying the big guy. Next comes talk about Ukraine and NATO and the EU. This exposed Russia to the possibility of nuclear arms on its border. This was contrary to the aforementioned possible well-intentioned US involvement. And Russia was given no assurances that would not be the case. So Russia invaded. We are paying a high price in treasure. The people in Ukraine are being destroyed, literally and figuratively. They could have never withstood this for this long without aid. Mostly from the US. And you feel justified in criticizing your German friend for what sounds to me to be a perfectly logical position. Is Germany not also a sovereign stare? Is she not free to make her own policies? Is this "Russian invasion" mantra anything more than fear mongering? My fear is that our actions have produced a threats greater than a "Russian invasion". IMO people who say they are on the right and support this proxy war are equally esconced in moral platitudes.
Russia has absolutely no interest, real or perceived, in an “invasion of mainland Europe.” It doesn’t remotely have the capacity to execute such an invasion, much less any sane reason to try.
Russia has invaded Ukraine because its current leaders and the West, particularly America, wanted to put NATO--a hostile military alliance with a trigger defense pact--on Russia’s most strategically significant border, after decades of surrounding encroachment and provocation. All America and its lackeys had to do to stop an invasion they claim to so deeply and vigorously oppose would have been to sign an agreement saying they would not enjoin Ukraine to NATO.
They didn’t, and, like everyone else, you should be asking why.
Putin now has a happy NATO member in Finland right on his northwestern border because of his Ukrainian folly. It was neutral before. Eight hundred miles of frontier he now has to find troops (if you could call them that) to defend. I wonder if he thought of that possibility before he ordered his stupefied tank commanders on the road to Kiev in February '22.
So lets see - America tricks Putin into invading Ukraine, putting all that 'provocation' in place so that he bites, thus allowing him to scare the shit out of non NATO countries so that they will join NATO and complete the encirclement. Putin forms his own trap as he sinks into the Ukrainian mud and quagmire of his own making. I wish I thought of it - then again I don't think anyone else did either..
It's amazing that you would consider basic strategic thinking and wargaming somehow implausible or overly convoluted. It's literally what our spies do, all day long. Never mind that this level of strategic thinking is thousands of years old.
America's spies would have been fine with Putin simply being cowed and allowing NATO to proceed unchecked. They're also fine with letting Ukraine burn if it means strengthening NATO and cowing Putin by pulling him into a quagmire. Indeed, America is so fine with the quagmire and the burning of Ukraine that its leaders have risked nuclear retaliation by openly funding and arming Ukraine in order to prolong the conflict. So you're wrong to cast this scenario as a "quagmire of his own making." It is very much *not* just of his own making.
Meanwhile, our subservient corporate media have outdone themselves, relentlessly pushing the narrative that Russia is losing, its military is depraved but also weak, Ukraine's leaders and soldiers are determined and brave, etc. etc.—all the oddly convenient, lockstep propaganda we've been served since the war began. They actually accused Russia of bombing Russia's own pipeline.
You are a target in one of the most garish propaganda offensives in American history. You ought to know it.
In a Machiavellian sense your post makes for a fun read. But the unsaid assumption of what you wrote is how stupid Putin must have been to fall for it. I think he's smarter than that. He thought he could do Ukraine in a few weeks - take Kiev, decapitate the leadership with Ukrainians laying down their arms, set up a puppet, friendly PM - and do it with a few divisions. He rolled the dice to win quickly, expecting NATO to take a hissy fit, but with spineless Germans its Achilles heel, quickly accepts the new (old) order in the Balkans. But it didn't happen that way. He made a mistake in underestimating his opponent.
Say what you want regarding how our media might be painting the narrative that Russia is losing, but a year and a few months into this, if Russia was doing well, why can't they advance out of Donbas?
Exactly what "hostility" does NATO present other than being a club whose members promise to defend each other should an outsider choose to attack? So the situation where Russia is de facto not able to invade/attack Poland or the Baltics because it knows that the US would respond militarily is being interpreted as "hostility?" It is hostility to prevent someone from being hostile?
I'm not putting on sparring gloves here, by the way; I'm honestly looking to understand that statement. If NATO has initiated direct force against Russia and I'm just not aware of it, I'll stand corrected. But to my knowledge, that hasn't happened.
Also, the use of the phrase "enjoin Ukraine to NATO" I do not understand. NATO has requirements for entry. Countries *petition* NATO to join it. Your phrasing makes it sound like NATO membership is something thrust upon a country, rather than something that is requested and granted, under certain conditions.
NATO is hostile to core Russian interests. Russia’s leaders could not strategically allow NATO to induct Ukraine. Decades of diplomatic and other soft attempts to stop NATO from moving farther and farther east hadn’t worked—and in fact NATO countries, America in particular, were engaged in heavy espionage along Russia’s borders, for decades. The history of this in Ukraine is especially clear.
One need only imagine having the most hostile neighbors imaginable, who have further enlisted many of your other neighbors into a hostile militant pact against you, to understand Russia’s position.
The belief that Ukraine should be allowed to *apply* to join whatever alliance they like is fine. The belief that NATO should have even considered its application—much less openly supported it, as America has done, including from the mouth of a president—when they know it will risk provoking a regional military conflict that could very well turn global and nuclear is extremely immoral. It would be immoral even if America didn’t routinely treat much more pedestrian and innocuous actions on the part of other countries as existential threats to itself.
Russia didn’t attack Ukraine because it *wanted* to (unlike America’s many, many discretionary wars). It attacked because it felt it *had* to. Decades of diplomatic attempts had only amounted to appeasement of a hostile and growing threat. And after Russia gave NATO years of verbal warnings, followed by *weeks* of troop build-up, NATO (which is to say America) *still* couldn’t find the basic moral courage necessary to back off of Russia’s borders.
Agreed. There of course has been a civil war in Ukraine since 2014. The Eastern Ukrainians/Ukrainian government has been bombing its own civilian population since then and at least 10,000 Ukrainians were killed in the Donbas by their own government well before Russia invaded.
You again use the word "hostile" as if it's an accepted description, but the whole purpose of my preceding comment was to question the very use of that word. NATO is hostile to Russia's "interests?" Okay, but without specifying what those interests ARE, that statement doesn't provide any clarity. A thief's 'interest" is to take my property; I'm certainly going to be hostile to his interests, and doing so is not immoral or wrong. So "hostility" as such (interpreted by a bad actor) is not itself justification for initiating violence, which Russia has done. And I'm speaking of literal violence, with guns and bullets, not metaphorical violence.
So your argument is that "supporting" the freely exercised application of a sovereign state (Ukraine, Poland, et. al.) to join an alliance is a repugnant act on the part of America? So when does that argument end? Are Nigeria and Burkina Faso not "allowed" to form an alliance if Ghana chooses to interpret it as hostile? What about Brazil and Uruguay? Can they make some sort of mutual defense arrangement, or do they have to get the blessing of Argentina? Just who is "in charge" in this worldview of yours?
I hate to say it, because I don't know you at all, but it sounds to me like you are putting all of the moral blame on the United States for "provoking a regional military conflict" without any consideration of the country who actually initiated the violence. It's a moral code that is so wrong, and leads to so much evil and death, that I don't really have any other words to type at this point.
It's as if you're saying that victims of violence are at fault for "provoking" their attacker. Well gee, if she'd have just let him do what he wanted, and wasn't "hostile to his interests," she wouldn't have gotten smacked.
It’s hilarious the way you presume economically destitute Russia to be a definitional “bad actor” and yet believe rich and powerful America is owed some grand benefit of doubt, despite its incomparable history of overt and covert geopolitical meddling.
I don’t care if you think it’s “accepted” that the US has hostile motives toward Russia. It’s the truth. But your ignorance about recent geopolitical history is not going to be resolved today.
You need to go educate yourself. Start with a memo current CIA director William Burns wrote in 2008, in which—unlike you—he bothered to consider Russia’s perspective—which, as if it had to, proves America’s government knew exactly what it was doing when it spent decades angling and meddling in Ukraine :
Then read up on America’s 70-year campaign to control the entire world through orchestrating violent coups, funding extremists, rigging elections (including Russia’s in 1996) and, oh yeah, destroying whole countries, including ones where its strategic interests were all but nonexistent.
When it comes to war and regime change, Russia’s international rap sheet hasn’t got *anything* on America’s, but you think Russia is inherently villainous while America is owed the benefit of the doubt? You just have no idea what you’re talking about.
"Russia has invaded Ukraine because its current leaders and the West, particularly America, wanted to put NATO--a hostile military alliance with a trigger defense pact--on Russia’s most strategically significant border"
And in doing so, brought in other countries on their border into NATO. Well played Russia
Almost every domino had already fallen. NATO--which is to say, America--had backed Russia into a corner, literally.
Ukraine is the one domino Russia could not strategically allow to fall. We knew it. We’ve known it for a long time. Our literal current CIA director wrote a memo about it in 2008, not that he’d have had to for all of this to be incredibly obvious:
What corner?! What was NATO going to do aside from stop them from attacking? And how was taking Ukraine going to help? It would just give them even more borders next to NATO members.
If a school bully beats up a kid because he is mad that all of the other kids won't let them beat people up, he's still the bad guy.
Right, so you really have no idea what’s going on here.
The binding military pact known as NATO, backed by the gargantuan military investments of the United States which all but infinitely outstrip Russia’s, has been encircling Russia for decades.
So let’s correct your analogy, by reversing it. Geopolitically, Russia has been bullied for decades. And you want to cast them as the bully for daring to take a swing? And you don’t want to blame the actual bully, who did everything they could to provoke that swing and didn’t do the one simple thing necessary to prevent it?
Why is this so hard for you to understand? Did you even bother to read Burns’s memo, to which I just linked? It lays out Russia’s completely justified thinking about the strategic necessity of keeping NATO out of Ukraine.
"Geopolitically, Russia has been bullied for decades."
Perhaps, but Russia is no stranger to the dark arts of bullying--i.e., squashing under tank treads any nation that dared refused to "join" the Soviet Union. Payback's a bitch.
Hilarious. I detest Putin(and hated him when Bush looked into his eyes, and Hillary had her ridiculously childish “reset button”) you need to read some history. This is classic Russian action to try and control their “near abroad”. That and a warm water port dictates their policy. At this point poor Russian boys and poor Ukrainian boys are being slaughtered for no reason while our armaments corporations pull in the profits. Cease hostilities and negotiate.
Well, it's more like invading a break-away part of itself, since Ukraine was always part of the Russian empire. For centuries, Kiev was the seat of Russian power.
Break-away? Not hardly. The Russian government granted Ukraine its sovereign freedom decades ago. It was a legal and binding treaty signed by both parties. Putin is not allowed do-overs because he doesn't like that a past leader of Russia granted Ukraine its independence.
I'd also argue that since Kiev was the seat of Rus power, than Russia is the breakaway and Ukraine the mothership.
What would make me happy is (a) both parties agreeing on final, enforceable borders that lets Russians who don't want to be Ukrainian to move down the highway and live under Putin, or (b) Ukraine and the West kicking all Russian troops back to Moscow.
Russia is hardly the hapless victim you claim, but if moving Ukraine's border a bit to the west so part of that region magically becomes Russian again, allowing both Putin and Zelenskyy to claim victory and go home, fine.
"During the Middle Ages, Ukraine was the site of early Slavic expansion and the area later became a key centre of East Slavic culture under the state of Kievan Rus', which emerged in the 9th century. The state eventually disintegrated into rival regional powers and was ultimately destroyed by the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. The area was then contested, divided, and ruled by a variety of external powers for the next 600 years, including the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Tsardom of Russia. The Cossack Hetmanate emerged in central Ukraine in the 17th century, but was partitioned between Russia and Poland, and ultimately absorbed by the Russian Empire. Ukrainian nationalism developed, and following the Russian Revolution in 1917, the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic was formed."
The only rider I'd add is up until Kruschev; Crimea WAS Russian, practically the only folk that aren't are Tatars and once-Goths. The Ukrainian border pre-2014 was pretty much midway between the claims of both Russian AND Ukranian irredentists.
Your comment is contradictory. On the one hand you complain about an outsized contribution from America to the defence of Ukraine and on the other hand you claim that Germany is staring straight at a Russian invasion of mainland Europe.
Yes, Germany and the rest of Europe should contribute more to the defence of Ukraine and their own defence but in the meantime Ukraine should continue to be helped by a nation blessed with more natural resources per capita than any other.
And the Ukrainians and Zelensky should be praised. Callous and selfish Tucker Carlson should be shunned and corrupt and cognitively impaired Biden should be impeached, Trump defended and DeSantis promoted.
“ Ukraine should continue to be helped by a nation blessed with more natural resources per capita than any other.” why? And why to such an exponentially greater financial amount than any other country?
Complaining about US contribution and pointing out that Russia poses a threat to more than just Ukraine is not contradictory. Both can be true.
No? Please explain. I can believe the US shouldn’t be responsible for ukraines defense while also believing Russia is a threat to additional countries. Not a terribly complex concept to grasp
Ironic how of all people, it was Trump who was called all sorts of names by the Davos Jet Set for pointing out this insane German position in 2018-2019. He also rightly pointed out that Europe had hollowed out their militaries which welcomed Russian aggression.
Irrationality wins the day. The twisted idea of abandoning nuclear energy for fear of the nuclear apocalypse while declaring the climate change apocalypse to be imminent is unfortunately not the only failure of this government. Romantic emotionality wins the day and loses the economy.
While pursuing a foreign policy that ramps the chance of nuclear armageddon into very probable territory. If Washington eats an SS25 I might even laugh.
I am an American living here in Germany for the past 20 plus years. I honestly thought that with the war starting in Ukraine last year, the government would have the foresight to re-think their closing of nuclear plants. Nope! So incredibly short-sighted. I have no words.
I'm an American living in France since roughly 1995...about 28 years. The present nuclear policy (very recent, within the year) is a return to a sensible, long-term energy outlook established after the oil price choques of the 1970's. France has its own Green Party (Écologistes, etc.), and within it one finds a mixed back of irrational fear/loathing/ hatred of (1) Capitalism (2) Technology (3) Economic Growth and (4) a complacent, lazy, ignorant conflation of the atomic weapons with atomic energy. Thanks to the war in Ukraine, the national conversation about energy policy seems to have turned unusually lucid and the influence of the "Greens" on the conversation seems to be close to zero.
I spend a career designing hardware and software for radiation detectors. After Fukushima, I gave a talk on nuclear power at my kids' unusually enlightened elementary school for Earth Day. I opened by asking who would be terrified to live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant. All hands went up, including the science teacher. I said surprise, you all do - in those days New Jersey derived more than half its electric generation from nuclear energy. I still have the slide show.
Nuclear really is safer and better for the environment than any other technology for equivalent power generation. The original Sierra Club, which was a lot more pragmatic than its radical offshoot Greenpeace, came to the same conclusion and supported the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California in preference to a dam.
I see comments below raising the waste issue. Largely because of the influence of a group at Princeton University fearful of nuclear weapon proliferation, the US uses a "once-through" fuel cycle which results in a large volume of waste (still negligible by comparison with coal, though). France recycles its spent fuel, concentrating the highly radioactive short half-life by-products and blending the resulting fissionable plutonium oxides with uranium-235 oxide into so-called mixed oxide fuel. There are two big benefits. First, the volume of really dangerous waste is greatly reduced. France stores all the waste from 60 years of nuclear power in a single facility in Le Hague. Second, the plutonium comes from neutron bombardment of U-238, which is 96% or so of the uranium in first-pass reactor fuel. So the process makes more fuel from the original fuel.
No state has ever built a nuclear weapon from spent reactor fuel. Plutonium for weapons is made in a special-purpose reactor, because if U-238 is exposed too long in neutron bombardment, like the 2 years it spends in a power reactor, you get a mixture of Pu-239 (which goes boom) and Pu-240 (which is too unstable to make a bomb). The mass difference between the isotopes is less than 1/3 that of U-238 vs. U-235, so it's very hard to separate them. So we hobbled out nuclear power industry decades ago with no benefit in non-proliferation. Oh well.
When opponents claim "millions of years" of waste storage is necessary, that is (to borrow a phrase) misinformation. Radioactive isotopes decay exponentially, with the time expressed in "half-life": the time for half of the remaining atoms to decay. Math people will recognize this never goes all the way to zero. It is Zeno's paradox, a near-infinite sequence of cutting in half, until you're watching the last atom. With U-238's half life of 4.5 billion years, that could take a while.
The bad actors are the intermediate half-life isotopes, which are present in small volume and separated out during fuel reprocessing. These have half-lives of tens to hundreds of years, and after 20 half-lives, radioactivity is a million times lower. So a more realistic confinement time is a few thousand years. The Egyptians build the pyramids about 5000 years ago. They're still around, and we have better technology now. Dangerous isotopes are melted into a glass to give resistance to erosion before burial. Look up "nuclear waste vitrification". The Yucca Mountain facility, if it were completed, could easily hold centuries worth of the waste from fuel reprocessing.
Great comment. It's such a pity Fukushima happened because I actually think it engendered much more fear than Chernobyl. The Japanese have such a reputation for careful meticulousness as opposed to the Communist hallmark indifference to individual lives - the former really undercut the safety argument more. To people obsessed with safetyism the actual death statistics being miniscule doesn't seem to be an argument it all. I think the reason is that the see zero possibility of their own deaths being the result of coal power. The issues with particulates from burning don't seem to set off their safety alarm systems.
Re Fukushima - it turns out that if you live on the coast in a quake-prone region, it's a bad idea to put your emergency backup generators in the basement. They should have been on high ground. Truly heroic efforts to build a giant extension cord to the other two plants succeeded in preventing further meltdowns.
As the article states, there will be no statistically detectable cancers from Fukushima. The only ones from Chernobyl were thyroid cancers, which are otherwise very rare, because the thyroid concentrates iodine from the environment and I-131 is a major volatile (i.e. airborne) component of reactor failure emissions. It also has a very short half-life (8 days). That cancer can be easily prevented by saturating the thyroid with potassium iodide (KI) tablets, the same stuff you find in the supermarket as salt substitute for people on sodium restriction(*). They are cheap and readily available. Japan immediately distributed KI tablets to all kids at risk, and found no I-131 concentration in kids' thyroids on later examination.
It was a major moral failure of the Soviet Union not to do that for Chernobyl. Unlike the seafood-heavy Japanese diet, already high in iodine, the kids in the Chernobyl region were largely iodine-deficient and overwhelmingly susceptible to taking up I-131. Fortunately, as cancers go, thyroid cancer is mostly curable. There were many cases, but relatively few deaths.
It was radiation detectors built by my former employer, deployed in Sweden, that first blew the whistle on the Chernobyl accident. Meltdowns have a unique radiation fingerprint. Radiation detectors are almost unbelievably sensitive, capable of finding extremely small amounts of specific isotopes.
(*) - I was wrong here. Salt substitute is potassium chloride, not iodide. The iodide is used to treat hyperthyroidism as well as for protection from fission decay products.
If it’s any consolation, nuclear opposition in Germany is very much an old person’s game, as well as for the Greens, who have dropped from 22% to 15% in the polls inside of a year. They have left government in Berlin and have lost a string of important mayoral elections.
Younger, more educated voters aren’t nearly as irrational towards nuclear power, and opposition to nuclear opposition, but sixty-somethings are really dead set on this.
Too late though. The whole industry is gone.
Germans still have no idea how increasingly negative they’re viewed abroad. In fact, they’re still smarter than you.
The poll that stated that Germans were willing to pay more for heat if it meant not nuclear plants is pure fantasy. When the bill arrives, the reality of lossing so many euros and still have a colder than comfortable home does create a re-think about energy sources.
The Greens would much rather rape and despoil Africa and turn children into slaves to advance their agenda. Don't lionize them. Despise their stupidity and conceit.
I think a lot of the problem comes from a mismatch between the greens stated agenda and their actual agenda. It seems despoiling Africa and slave children represent acceptable collateral damage when your goals are as noble as theirs. The tragedy is so many people take the greens at face value. (And of course many millions of ‘green’ supporters are acting in good faith).
I mean regular people Lynne, who in good faith, sort their recycling and think about their carbon footprint. Most normal people who accept that ‘going green’ is a good thing, are acting in good faith. They accept the parameters of the argument that have been sold to them by the media and central government.
I understand that. To an extent. So I guess it is the thinking about reducing the carbon footprint part that is problematic. Or the accepting the parameters of the argument without independent thought. Everyone with access to a news source has access to the African mines and miners information. And while not exactly on point, one of my contributions to the environment is I do not use disposable cups, plates, or Styrofoam. During Covid we started going to Las Vegas as soon as it re-opened but the restaurants were not yet open. So it was take-out or room service. The amount of paper and plastic waste was staggering to me.
I think people do have, and use, independent thought. They also have priorities, and while this stuff is important to us, we are commenting here for instance, for most people it is not. I don’t think it is fair to criticise regular people for not sharing our priorities. If all your mainstream information sources, as well as your peer group, are all saying the same thing, then it is understandable, and to be expected, that you too are likely to accept that thing as true. I worry that we are often too quick to denounce ordinary decent people as ‘sheeple’. I like people. People are good. It is the Malthusian environmentalists who see humanity as the problem. I try to limit my criticism to the liars, rather than the lied to. Also-I hope you came away from Las Vegas with more than you arrived with!
many of them don't know the true costs of the things they are trying to achieve. Some of that is due to the people in power purposely obfuscating it. The other part is that it simply seems that many people are just not that curious about how things actually work. Someone they trust tells them A, so they believe A. And this goes for many people (most in my limited experience). That is why the capture and failure of institutions is such a huge deal. It leaves a lot of folks without a compass.
Additionally EVs are very heavy and go through tires more frequently. Tires are not green. Heavier cars also means increased wear on roads. Concrete and asphalt are not green. Automobile registration is based on weight. So they will cost more to register.
One of the biggest problems with the "green" movement is that none of its leaders recognize the concept of unintended consequences. If something *sounds* like a good idea, they push it, without first asking what the unintended consequences might be.
I loved this analogy: It’s as if your irresponsible neighbor started a house fire with his outmoded stove, so you decide that you can only use your microwave from now on 😂
Ha! That's what Port Angeles, Washington did some years back. The whole town was plumbed with natural gas from the early twentieth century until some fools blew up a store downtown. There solution was to shut down the gas system and rip out the plumbing for it instead of figure out what the fools did wrong. Then they doubled down on stupid by demolishing their local hydroelectric damn which had made their electricity prices the envy of the nation. Why? To save the whales (orcas), which it has had no impact on because the problem has mostly to do with commercial overfishing and competition with other protected species (sea lions, which are overpopulated now,).
Germany is, as Trump might say, a shit hole country. Germans are excessively obsessed with their bowel movements. That should be telling. Other than the ability to run machine shops quite well, it is and has always been a bane of civilization.
From a national psychology standpoint, I think each specific fear that a culture has is more a symbolic fear of losing control of a national identity rather than a valid fear of the thing itself. It’s a totemic fear rather than a real fear. It represents a populace’s ability to say NO to reason. For some countries it is the ability to say no to a moralizing US. To other populaces it is an opportunity to say no to their own government. You can’t argue against the NO with reason. It probably needs to be replaced with a more benign fear or totem. Very few governmental leaders are that smart, of course.
The leader of the eco groups, much like BLM, can’t be convinced by reason because for them, the benefit of the irrational fight is both financial and status. The issue itself is merely a tool they can use to gain wealth and status. They are hucksters and the issue is just the con they have chosen. They can’t be convinced their cause is irrational because they don’t believe in it themselves.
Lastly, Europe. I used to read the comments section of the Financial Times. Most Europeans have an astonishingly misinformed view of the US yet are stubbornly sure they are correct. The most surprising thing from those comments was the degree of hatred most Europeans have for the US. Honestly, I think the only thing that holds Europe together is their hatred of us. We are their piñata on every issue. If we came out against nuclear power they would think it is the greatest thing since ice cream with sprinkles.
I had a trip to Cambodia Thailand Vietnam planned for Nov after 9/11. On the flight from Japan to Thailand, I had the misfortune to be seated next to a German couple. After finding out I was from the US, the Karen of the couple went on a rant berating the US and the US government. I mentioned yeah, Hitler was so great and put my headphones on.
I thought she was unusually rude for a "cultured euro", but now, I agree with her.
Not meaning to add a paranoid note, but it seems likely that a Russian-sponsored "communist" influence on Green ideology helped to drive its anti-nuclear agenda.
Yes I have read of this elsewhere, not so much from Russian communist ideology but from Russian economic/political calculus. Would have been great to get a mention in the article.
modern Russia is the direct inheritor of Soviet ideology. When soviet union fell apart, the Kremlin power structures and ideologies remained fully intact. The "change" presented to the world was purely cosmetic. I mean, a former KGB officer runs russia to this day, ffs.
I mean, if you call ownership of all the means of production and govmt control of who gets what and how much, confiscation of private property in the name of equity, minor - then sure :) I lived it. My parents and grandparents lived it. It had all the earmarks of what they say communism is.
Facts and real data always trump predictions that turn out to be inaccurate. Pick your topic: covid, climate, transitory inflation. Yet the inaccurate predictors are the golden girls and boys
First paragraph: Americans are irrationally fearful of vaping, because it can save lives. Why and how? Because it’s a better alternative to smoking and will help people off tobacco? Okay, but vaping is also bad for you. Think about it: You’re coating your lungs with chemical vapors. Not tobacco smoke, but still. I’m not “irrationally” opposed to vaping.
Otherwise, I enjoyed this brief history of Germany’s self-destructive move off nuclear energy, possibly only the most baffling example of how “irrationally” the Climate Change crowd has been able to influence - dare I say dictate? - policy. Meanwhile, neighboring France has ramped up its reliance on nuclear. The US should do the same, but too many of our own politicians are in thrall to the “greens.”
Your ignorance is showing. The author was referring to all the laws that are continuing to be passed that limit vaping, prevent the sale and shipping of the products, and vilify those who vape.
They say it's for the sake of the children. It's not. It's all about big-pharma and big-tobacco.
With the increase in sales in vaping - and that industry's continued strides to make safer, healthier products - sales of tobacco and smoking cessation products plummeted. Along with the extra tax revenue that tobacco uniquely offers.
It seems that so many would rather people smoke over there in a corner, killing themselves quietly, rather than allow them to use a product that is better for them.
You don’t know what the author was referring to, because he didn’t explain. Your explanation might be correct, but it’s yours, not his. Regardless, vaping is a bad thing; better than tobacco, but bad nonetheless, and my opposition to it is not “irrational.”
I've been vaping for 12 years and I believe your opposition to it is irrational and based in ignorance and, possibly, fear. Or you swallowed the propaganda against vaping without doing any independent research.
And your explanation and objection to the author's inclusion of vaping as an example is yours. What's your point?
The writer was simply trying to explain how people / countries are irrationally afraid of things (what ever that may be. It was a great article and you should go read it again. Just don’t read the first part. Haha.
Here’s the thing for me. I don’t like calling positions “irrational” from afar. It’s a bit like saying, from where I stand, your concerns are not legitimate. It kind of mixes political agency with expert authority. one thing most of us don’t have the $ to have researchers investigate our concerns. So when our lived experience doesn’t match what researchers or experts have found, we tend not to trust them. Another way is to say “this doesn’t make sense to me” and interview people who hold opposing views- and try to understand where they are coming from.
When it comes to vaping, perfect is the enemy of good.
The reality is that vaping is vastly less harmful than cigarettes. I have a brother with heart disease whose life has literally been saved by switching from the cigs he couldn't quit to vaping with the minimum amount of nicotine he can cope with.
The primary problem with vaping is marketing: there is no question that the industry is targeting teenagers with the message that vaping is cool. But are teens who would never take up smoking choosing to vape?
Celia - I always appreciate your comments! I don’t disagree with you. Perfect is indeed often the enemy of good. But vaping, although measurably less harmful than smoking cigs, is still harmful to humans. Therefore, objections to vaping aren’t “irrational.” Which was the author’s contention. A better example of Americans’ irrational fears might have been the “fear” of guns, those inert objects. But this former NYT reporter would never use that example.
First, note that, in shuttering its nukes, Germany must rely on natural gas. Proving, yet again, that with the exception of hydro, there are really only TWO reliable ways of generating electricity - natural gas or nuclear (if you exclude coal because there really is no clean coal.) Therefore, our home grown lunatics who are pushing us toward "renewable" wind and solar are nothing but saboteurs.
Second, there was no "accident" at the Fukushima complex. It was hit by a massive tidal wave produced by a similarly massive earthquake and the backup generators needed to provide power to cool the reactors were washed away. This was a design defect that is easily remedied. Moreover, the Fukushima reactors are an old design based on 1950s submarine reactors. New, next gen nukes are smaller, modular, safer and more efficient. We ignore them at our peril.
Third, note that Gerhard Schroeder was and is in bed with Putin. So having a traitor at the helm of one's country is not as far fetched as one might think. Consider this when you pooh pooh notions that the Big Guy taking a cut of China's filthy lucre might be in the Oval Office today. Another verity we ignore at our peril.
People behave as if nuclear reactors are some kind of barely contained monster, ready to attack (melt down or explode) at any time. I wonder how many activists truly understand how these machines work, what nuclear waste actually is, or how marginal the effects of radiation released by normal operation are.
I know that isn't the main argument here, but these are concerns that activists use to scare people into falling in line behind their agenda. Take nuclear waste for example. In a PWR, anything that makes contact with water from the primary side is considered contaminated because that water has been exposed to radiation by passing through the core. There is very little contamination there, but that material is considered contaminated.
One could walk through a nuclear waste storage site and receive very little exposure. The worst stuff, such as spent fuel, is kept in much more secure areas. I wouldn't expect the public to understand this, but I expect leaders to, and reassure the public of this knowledge. People in general don't know these things, and that's fine.
However, this reveals two things. One is that activists count on the ignorance of the public to promote their agenda. The other is that trust in institutions has eroded in the last few years, with cause in many cases, so people don't even trust what's true anymore.
“One is that activists count on the ignorance of the public to promote their agenda.” This is true for so many things, Covid, climate change, BLM, etc....
Another event that contributed to the the current fearmongering surrounding nuclear power was the capture of the nuclear power plant in Ukraine (not Chernobyl, the other one). That one Ukrainian official who said if attacked it would be like "10 Chernobyls" (paraphrasing) was horribly irresponsible. Of course, he was fearmongering for a different reason - begging for aid - but he relied on the ignorance and fear of the public for his own purposes.
That was never going to happen. The containment buildings are some of the most robust structures on the planet. The staggering amount of weaponry necessary to breach them would exhaust most armies on the planet. I'm not familiar with the plant, but given that they were PWR, there are likely numerous numerous safety systems, such as water injection and passive cooling.
Joe acts like it’s surprising that those pushing green energy are against nuclear. That’s only surprising if you believe those pushing green energy are interested in saving the environment vs. neo-Marxists looking to destroy capitalism.
If you hold the latter perspective, the fact that the greens are anti-nuclear is perfectly aligned with their policy goals.
Additionally, check out how the greens are playing with our children’s mental health to progress those goals.
https://www.sub-verses.com/p/our-children-are-not-tools-of-your
Agreed. Unfortunately people assume that the Greens, or at least the most politically motivated Greens, have a green agenda. They don’t. They have an anti capitalist agenda, coupled with a childlike need for attention-especially here in the UK where they block traffic and disrupt sporting events in ego driven displays of self importance.
Here the so-called environmentalists are destroying tires on parked SUVs and leaving notes. I think they started over there though.
Hi Lynne. Yes it’s been happening here in Bristol. Which if you don’t know is the university town where the Edward Colston statue was pulled down. In the uk there is little sympathy for owners of large SUVs, not because of ‘green’ issues, but mainly because the politics of envy sadly riddles our culture. To the detriment of everyone I think.
I think you are correct, both on the envy angle and your conclusion. I do not even MN want to revisit the statue issue. It makes me angry.
I drive a green vehicle much like this one:
https://twitter.com/WashingtonPHunt/status/1650196646016303107
Oh you made me laugh. Good one!
Enjoyed the laugh, happens not as much as it should.
🤣
The Greens don't only have a Green agenda. Putin is not stupid, was caught supporting anti-fracking activism in Germany to keep his Russian gas customers plentiful. I am sure Russia also has funded a significant chunk of this anti nuclear sentiment there for the same reason, historically, to keep Germany dependent on Russian gas. Smart enough to buy G. Schroeder, smart enough to secretly fund "environmental activism". https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/19/russia-secretly-working-with-environmentalists-to-oppose-fracking
No doubt true. Well maybe no doubt. That Russia collusion thing here was not. But even if true that just means it is an ill-informed agenda.
Russia collusion wasnt real, but that didn't mean the Russians weren't involved, it meant Trump wasn't. There's not much disagreement over the Russia hacking and attempts to influence the election, even Nunes memo said that existed. The disagreement was level of impact and exact goals of the campaign, and some people still believe in collusion with no awareness that they look like the opposite number to those who claim 2020 election fraud.
Russia, China, and I am sure others. We do it too. I am reminded of "[O]h what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." And now dirty politics are employed within the nation.
a good idea is to bait your tires with a device that sprays glitter all over them..what a surprise that would be
Where is “here”?
It was in Boston last week.
Scary
When I lived in Germany after getting out of the Army, my German friends (and I'm sure this joke isn't new to many of you) called the Greens "Watermelons" - green on the outside, but red in the middle.
Absolutely spot on! Weirdly people keep taking hem at their word.
That phrase was used by one of the executives of Green Peace.
I have said all along that the green and the GW movement is a Marxist plot to drive the capitalist economies into the ground and out of the ashes, shoulder to shoulder the workers arise and form a communist paradise like Cuba, Venezuela, CCP or North Korea.
Paradise on Earth!
Indeed. An absolute paradise for those of us who enjoy the prospect of standing in line for shoes and cooking the family pet. Come on Comrades!!!!
Great post, made me smile.
I posted this elsewhere on this thread. Hopefully you don’t mind if I link to it here as well. It’s a view from the uk about why the greens are so hostile to nuclear. Spoiler Alert: It’s because it’s safe and it works. https://open.substack.com/pub/lowstatus/p/save-the-planet-unleash-godzilla?r=evzeq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
This is why I do not take the purveyors of "Catastrophic Global Warming" seriously. The ONLY energy source that can replace fossil fuels on their (ever-moving) Chicken Little timeline is nuclear. And yet they reject it.
Clearly they don't really believe in their timeline at all.
The radical environmental activists are out for total control of humanity, and the less of it - humanity - there is to control, the easier it will be to control them.
Much like Obama doesn’t seem concerned about plunging millions into two mansions situated at the edge of two islands on the ocean.
Ultimately, their goal is to reduce the human population to what can be serviced by solar and wind energy.
No, “they,” unqualified, do not reject it. *Some* of them do, which is to say many of them do, and those who want to salvage a livable planet better convince them otherwise.
Whatever false beliefs they may hold about how to get there, people who acknowledge the obvious proven fact of global warming and want to prevent it are still preferable to the people who use certain bad beliefs as an excuse not to acknowledge the gravity of the situation.
"obvious proven fact of global warming" Hogwash! It is not proven and it has never been proven. Oceans would rise 21 feet, never happened. The ice caps would completely melt, never happened. How many predictions have failed before you realise GW is a hoax?
The University of East Anglia used to be the epicenter of global warming research, experts. Until someone hacked their emails and found the "scientists" at East Anglia were fudging their figures to promote the GW hoax.
Harvard university published a paper saying the 10th century was the hottest century on record. Look up Harvard Gazette "It's Not So Hot".
You can't believe anything the Democrat GW fanatics tell you.
Global warming is *absolutely proven.* The data is so voluminous it might as well be infinite.
You clearly don’t have even the slightest issue or even intellectual competence. You’re not only conflating observed facts with predictions but you’re also misstating both the facts and the predictions.
The ice caps absolutely *are* melting, for example: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ice-sheets/
You’re in complete denial, and you don’t have the intellectual apparatus to escape your denial. You don’t even have the awareness to know that you lack the apparatus.
What a classy statement, and ad hominem attack. It's what you left wingers do to anyone who disagrees with you.
Did you read the Harvard paper? Has Al Gore's prediction of oceans rising 21 feet really happen or his prediction the Artic ice cap would completely melt by 2014?
Climate has never been static. It is always changing. What cause the last five ice ages? What caused the glaciers, some two miles thick, to melt? Was it the automobile and human carbon emissions or was it the cycles of the sun?
Read the Harvard paper and tell me that East Anglia, one of the respected "research" centers of GW to put out of the voluminous research you tout, was a bastion of truth. just like the oily politician Al Gore is a bastion of truth.
Anyone who says the science is settled doesn't understand what the scientific method really is. The scientific method is that every theory is questioned. Einstein's theories are under constant review as are Newton's theories of gravity. That is the scientific method, the search for truth. I find it noble. You, in an effort to shut down debate, attack it. I find that offensive but then that is what the left does.
All the GW people want to do is shut down debate and that is just wrong.
If you can't debate me without attacking me personally, I don't want to talk to you. Join forces with comprof. He does nothing but attack the people who disagree with him and not the problem.
Not only do you not know what an ad hominem (or, clearly, class) is, but you’ve literally committed ad hominems among a host of other fallacies including conflation and straw men.
It’s not fallacious to observe your demonstrated ineptitude. It’s factual. Aside from the fact that Comprof is a fool, the only truth you’ve managed to convey, entirely unknowingly and by accident, is that you don’t know how to reason, compounded by the infinite arrogance of believing that the conclusions you’ve incompetently drawn are true and worth defending just because they’re yours.
Seriously, go learn how to reason. When I say you’re incompetent, it’s not a statement about your potential. It’s a statement about your present. So go fix it, and then maybe *you* will be someone worth talking to.
Fear is powerfully persuasive
Climate Change disaster scenarios are predictions of future events based on computer models of very, very complex interacting factors. The scenarios by their nature are NOT empirically verified confirmation of climate models because what has not happened cannot be scientifically, empirically verified...Obviously
Who is so arrogant as to claim to know what will happen tomorrow and even more so 50 years from now. Highly competent meteorologists cannot predict the course of a hurricane over a period of a week as Floridians know well.
I haven’t once claimed that any particular prediction is perfect—nor have the scientists who modeled them, by the way. I’ve claimed that global warming is proven, which it is, and I would further state that the predictions—that the ice caps would melt, which they are; that sea levels would rise, which they are; that weather would become more extreme and unpredictable, which it has; and so forth; are *generally* accurate.
To invoke your weather analogy, just because meteorologists can’t predict all the granular specifics of a hurricane doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention when they tell you there’s a hurricane coming. And of course you *do* pay attention, because the fact is you know that they actually *do* have useful insights.
The problem with some of the original "studies" is that they were not replicable.
Then there is the part where the academic light from Penn State sued in a Canadian court for defamation. As the alleged defamation was associated with elements of the data set, the defense motioned, successfully, for the court to order the production of the data set for discovery.
Funny thing happened on the way to the opera: The defamation suit was withdrawn by the plaintiff in a New York second. I believe that the defendant was awarded attorneys fees by the court.
At best, the climate models only suggest how sensitive the climate might be to a particular change. The parameters that one needs to address to get an anywhere near accurate reading are well beyond the reach of human endeavor at this time. The best bit about science is that continued research will find even more complex and exciting avenues to explore...And there will be people willing
Perhaps your anger would be best directed at the Warmists in power who have been rejecting nuclear as a solution since the very beginning of their campaign of false prophesies. Why aren't YOU out there protesting to "convince" them, since you care so much more than the rest of us? Or are you afraid of what your fellow Leftists do to people who dare to oppose them?
Considering that the climate has been changing since long before humans appeared on the scene, the logical approach for a livable planet is to reduce pollution overall and to prepare for changes in climate that we absolutely *cannot* control. Oddly enough, humans are ADAPTABLE. We have survived on a planet that has been both hotter and colder than it currently is. We have survived on continents that have been subject to higher and lower ocean levels than exist at present.
Nothing that the Warmists are promoting is going to "save" the planet. They are supremely unconcerned with *preparing* for changes in climate (their ocean-front properties suggest they aren't worried at all). Their sole purpose is to gain power using fear, and as Gordon pointed out, they have dangerous uses in mind for that power.
Sorry—you think my position isn’t valid unless I waste my time carrying a sign outside Congress? The hell is wrong with you? I’m angry at both change deniers and climate change do-nothings, thank you very much.
Your comment is a bizarre litany of unjustified assumptions—including that I’m a “leftist”—and non sequiturs, especially the silly yarn about how humans are “ADAPTABLE.” As if the only thing at stake here is human life, or as if human life won’t get much, much worse from global warming, or as if a lot of humans won’t be killed by it—all said by someone whose clear underlying motivation is an unwillingness to sacrifice any of the luxuries they currently enjoy. You can’t even “ADAPT” your mind to an extremely well-evidenced truth, much less to the dangers and losses posed by a rapidly warming planet.
You have no idea what you’re doing or why you’re doing it.
"someone whose clear underlying motivation is an unwillingness to sacrifice any of the luxuries they currently enjoy"
That sounds more like a Warmist with a private jet than a rural person who lives in house that's probably worth less than your car (and drives a car worth less than your last vacation). I am well aware that I will probably lose what few "luxuries" I have in the coming chaos being promoted by the power-mongers. But I am not willing to simply hand over my life to greedy people who want to "depopulate" me out of existence.
I wish you Warmists could hear yourselves as others hear you: "Believe! (and give us money and power!) or you won't be saved!"
The reality is that Warmism is a religion. Failed prophecies and all. As a True Believer, of course you consider the rest of us damned.
I don’t own a car, and I haven’t taken an actual vacation in about a decade, but thanks at least for admitting—eventually—that I’m exactly right about what’s motivating your denial.
No one is asking you to “hand over your life.” I’m certainly not asking you to “give me money and power.”
The very way you conceive of so-called “Warmists”—as if regular people who accept the voluminous science of global warming and take seriously their own obligation to help mitigate it are actually just part of some cabal of conniving thieves and puppet masters—is tragically stupid.
You’re the one buying into a faith—a faith endlessly controverted by actual evidence your psyche simply can’t, for deeply selfish reasons, accept.
lol what a farce.
Nuclear energy confuses them, so the only way for them to understand it and thus keep their precious sense of complete understanding and control over everything is to label it "evil" and then rail against it. You can say this about everything modern Progressives disagree with.
Progressives aren't progressive.
Progressives generally promote regressive policy that history has proven to be be nonsense.
Gordon Comstock
I disagree. Never underestimate the stupidity of true believers. Some of the green energy leaders may be communists but the unthinking public singing this song think they are virtuously saving the planet.
THIS. The media have been demonizing nuclear energy for 60 years. Is it any wonder everyone is afraid? This is merely another facet of safetyism that led to masks, lockdowns, green energy subsidies, etc. And the false narratives around accidents like Fukushima, which was an engineering blunder (why not have a water reservoir above the plant to cool things in a fail-safe way?), but in which little damage was done, only fan the flames.
"after the accident in Fukushima, Japan in 2011, it set a timetable to close down the rest. "
That's an own-goal.
I get your point but I am scared of nuclear plants in earthquake/tsunami zones. It is my understanding though that modern nuclear reactors are much smaller and thus easier to secure. And in this day and age of political and climate vigilantes they also need to be secure from hostile takeovers.
The US has a hollowed out mountain for the waste that was finished at least 20 years ago. One of the main issues now is nobody wants it trucked or trained through their towns.
I remember reading that.
Even the smaller nuclear reactors pose some risks. And they also generate nuclear waste.
I think one of the concerns that Germany has had about nuclear power is the mounting accumulation of nuclear waste.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-launches-new-search-for-permanent-nuclear-waste-disposal-site/a-55077967
Sixty percent of Ontario's power comes from nuclear (CANDU Reactor):
https://www.canadianinvestor.com/2023/04/26/the-future-of-nuclear-power-in-canada/
Ontario also hasn't solved the nuclear waste problem. Most of Ontario is also on some of the most geologically stable land in the world (the Canadian Shield). They are planning to put the nuclear waste deep into this geologically stable 2.5 billion year old rock formation.
This won't work for most of the geologically unstable western United States. It's also not an option for most of geologically unstable Pacific Rim or Mediterranean.
France also generates a lot of power from nuclear energy. Like Canada and Germany, it hasn't figured out what to do with the nuclear waste and is gradually scaling back on nuclear power generation.
To be clear, I'm not categorically against nuclear power, but I don't think it will provide a simple risk free answer to "green" energy.
One thing to consider is that nuclear waste only stays dangerously radioactive for about a century or so. Not hundreds of thousands of years like the Greens keep saying (their yardstick is zero radioactivity whatsoever, which is absurd since the natural uranium that went in the reactor was already slightly radioactive). And that's before considering breeder reactors and reactors that use nuclear waste as fuel, such as France's SuperPhoenix reactor (that ironically was closed down by activists before it could get commissioned). In short, nuclear waste is a solvable problem. The nuclear industry has known that for years, but unfortunately since the development of new nuclear technologies was stopped in the '80s out of public/political pressure there hasn't been money flowing to implement these solutions. Which is a shame. And of course activists keeps lying about it because they know that 'nuclear waste' is the most convincing argument for the general public.
Most reactors produce some plutonium as a byproduct.
Discussion of trying to process nuclear waste for the CANDU Reactor:
https://www.nwmo.ca/~/media/Site/Files/PDFs/2015/11/04/17/29/82_ReprocessingCANDUSpentFuel.ashx?la=en
There is currently no cost effective way to extract plutonium out of spent fuel rods. Institutions may claim that a solution is just around the corner.
I'm not holding my breathe.
half life of uranium-238: 4.5 billion years
half life of plutonium: 82 million years
Most nuclear power plants are designed for efficient operation, not how to make use of resources in the event of a failure.
It's sort of an institutional blind spot.
Nuclear power plants are absolutely packed with safety systems and redundancies upon redundancies; and all sorts of failure scenarios are planned for and provided for. That's why they're so expensive to build. Unfortunately, in the past some were built with a greater focus on affordability than safety, which gave us Fukoshima and Chernobyl (where for example there was no confinement building that could have contained the accidents like those found in modern nuclear power plants).
In response to the last line of this article: No, they won't. They will fall asleep every night quite easily, resting assured in the belief that they are "on the right side of history". I spoke with a very good friend of mine, a German woman around the same age as me (35), just this weekend about the war in Ukraine. Specifically, I talked about the outsized financial contribution from the US and the need for increased contribution from the rest of NATO members. Her response was complete incredulity at such a suggestion, stating that Germany is taking in more refugees than any other nation and thus has already committed more financially than they should have to, and that if the US wants to spend less on Ukraine they should simply do so.
As with literally any and every issue, people are too comfortably enconsed in their opinion, and on the Left people are too self-assured that they are morally justified in their beliefs, for any of this to change. Germany is staring straight at a Russian invasion of mainland Europe and they still see no need to change course. I can assure you the political elite are not suffering from any self-doubt over their obviously self-destructive decisions.
Yes, there is a sanctimony one encounters in Germans absent in their WW2 co-losers, the Japanese. As a southerner with an accent, I’m accustomed to the smirks of the Germans in particular. “Hark! Perhaps the hillbilly will say something amusing!” In no other country has anyone I’ve just met ask to know who I voted for. It’s weird on the US ear.
Their default assumption that they are indisputably superior to Americans leads to an automatic lack of sympathy to their current predicament. Hopefully they’ll learn something but unlikely.
Yes, there is still a hint of 'master race syndrome' in many Germans.
Indeed BigT. But is seems to have metamorphised into an intellectual, moral rather than genetic superiority.
But at root there is something of the same impulse.
I think all expressions of superiority are character flaws. I drop a y'all every now and then to weed them out.
I’m from South East Texas with HEAVY Southern accent. My husband was International airline pilot. We were in Germany often. I was once asked, “What Nationality are you?” Seriously!!??
That is funny. When I was younger I took offense. Not now. Sometimes I like to lay it on really thick.
That is actually interesting. For one, they may not hear that many southern accents (and lets face it, there are several that can sound very differently). And secondly my understanding is that Southern accents are largely based on accents from parts of Britain. So to someone who doesn't swim in American accents I could totally see someone wondering if it is American or British.
And remember, some folks don't fully understand how big and spread out we are as a country, with many difference accents and cultures.
It seems the french feel the same way. It seems to me that for germans it stems from being soundly trounced in ww2 and for the french - needing to have their asses saved by Americans in the same war. Eastern europeans don't feel like that toward the US
FWIW, global strategist Peter Zeihan predicts that de-globalization will hurt Germany far more than France, in part because of the former having tied its energy needs to Russia and, thus, aligning itself with the East against the West. Also, that France’s de-population bubble is not nearly as bad as Germany’s.
That's certainly true Tanya in my experience- at least in the places I've visited in the last few year, Poland, Czech Republic, Estonia
The other part is very personality dependent. I have always found French snootiness absolutely hilarious- even when I'm on the receiving end of it. My wife gets frustrated while I'm literally laughing my tail off. It's very charming.
The German smugness does not have this attractive quality.
Very unlikely not only for Germany, actually for the whole of Europe!
It is a good point that they are bringing refugees in, that is expensive. But it is a bit self-serving as well. If you analyze the German demographic patterns, they need young workers desperately.
It's not irrelevant but ya know what's a good way of preventing refugees? Providing for the defense of the country from which they are coming!
Or negotiating a cessation of hostilities and negotiating.
NATO countries can put pressure on Ukraine to negotiate, but how do you get Putin to the table?
What's to negotiate? This isn't a dispute. Russia decided one day to just take another countries land. That should pretty much never be ok. Ukraine shouldn't have to negotiate to get someone to stop attacking them and taking their land.
And what message would that send to Russia and other countries? "Attack someone and we will meet to decide how much of their land you get to have".
I find this position invalid. First the old take over the world rationale for overseas aggression is stretched thin. Too thin. The US actively meddled in Ukraine since the fall of the wall. Maybe with good intentions at first. But we actively participated in the 2014 coup likely (and I am just being nice there) leading to the invasion of Crimea. US bureaucrats were caught on tape picking the successor. Afterwards Joe Biden was caught on tape pressuring said successor to replace the prosecutor investigating Burisma, you know the same Burisma paying the big guy. Next comes talk about Ukraine and NATO and the EU. This exposed Russia to the possibility of nuclear arms on its border. This was contrary to the aforementioned possible well-intentioned US involvement. And Russia was given no assurances that would not be the case. So Russia invaded. We are paying a high price in treasure. The people in Ukraine are being destroyed, literally and figuratively. They could have never withstood this for this long without aid. Mostly from the US. And you feel justified in criticizing your German friend for what sounds to me to be a perfectly logical position. Is Germany not also a sovereign stare? Is she not free to make her own policies? Is this "Russian invasion" mantra anything more than fear mongering? My fear is that our actions have produced a threats greater than a "Russian invasion". IMO people who say they are on the right and support this proxy war are equally esconced in moral platitudes.
Russia has absolutely no interest, real or perceived, in an “invasion of mainland Europe.” It doesn’t remotely have the capacity to execute such an invasion, much less any sane reason to try.
Russia has invaded Ukraine because its current leaders and the West, particularly America, wanted to put NATO--a hostile military alliance with a trigger defense pact--on Russia’s most strategically significant border, after decades of surrounding encroachment and provocation. All America and its lackeys had to do to stop an invasion they claim to so deeply and vigorously oppose would have been to sign an agreement saying they would not enjoin Ukraine to NATO.
They didn’t, and, like everyone else, you should be asking why.
Putin now has a happy NATO member in Finland right on his northwestern border because of his Ukrainian folly. It was neutral before. Eight hundred miles of frontier he now has to find troops (if you could call them that) to defend. I wonder if he thought of that possibility before he ordered his stupefied tank commanders on the road to Kiev in February '22.
Congrats—you’ve just accidentally stumbled onto one of the reasons America was willing to let Ukraine burn rather than back off Russia’s borders.
So lets see - America tricks Putin into invading Ukraine, putting all that 'provocation' in place so that he bites, thus allowing him to scare the shit out of non NATO countries so that they will join NATO and complete the encirclement. Putin forms his own trap as he sinks into the Ukrainian mud and quagmire of his own making. I wish I thought of it - then again I don't think anyone else did either..
It's amazing that you would consider basic strategic thinking and wargaming somehow implausible or overly convoluted. It's literally what our spies do, all day long. Never mind that this level of strategic thinking is thousands of years old.
America's spies would have been fine with Putin simply being cowed and allowing NATO to proceed unchecked. They're also fine with letting Ukraine burn if it means strengthening NATO and cowing Putin by pulling him into a quagmire. Indeed, America is so fine with the quagmire and the burning of Ukraine that its leaders have risked nuclear retaliation by openly funding and arming Ukraine in order to prolong the conflict. So you're wrong to cast this scenario as a "quagmire of his own making." It is very much *not* just of his own making.
Meanwhile, our subservient corporate media have outdone themselves, relentlessly pushing the narrative that Russia is losing, its military is depraved but also weak, Ukraine's leaders and soldiers are determined and brave, etc. etc.—all the oddly convenient, lockstep propaganda we've been served since the war began. They actually accused Russia of bombing Russia's own pipeline.
You are a target in one of the most garish propaganda offensives in American history. You ought to know it.
In a Machiavellian sense your post makes for a fun read. But the unsaid assumption of what you wrote is how stupid Putin must have been to fall for it. I think he's smarter than that. He thought he could do Ukraine in a few weeks - take Kiev, decapitate the leadership with Ukrainians laying down their arms, set up a puppet, friendly PM - and do it with a few divisions. He rolled the dice to win quickly, expecting NATO to take a hissy fit, but with spineless Germans its Achilles heel, quickly accepts the new (old) order in the Balkans. But it didn't happen that way. He made a mistake in underestimating his opponent.
Say what you want regarding how our media might be painting the narrative that Russia is losing, but a year and a few months into this, if Russia was doing well, why can't they advance out of Donbas?
Exactly what "hostility" does NATO present other than being a club whose members promise to defend each other should an outsider choose to attack? So the situation where Russia is de facto not able to invade/attack Poland or the Baltics because it knows that the US would respond militarily is being interpreted as "hostility?" It is hostility to prevent someone from being hostile?
I'm not putting on sparring gloves here, by the way; I'm honestly looking to understand that statement. If NATO has initiated direct force against Russia and I'm just not aware of it, I'll stand corrected. But to my knowledge, that hasn't happened.
Also, the use of the phrase "enjoin Ukraine to NATO" I do not understand. NATO has requirements for entry. Countries *petition* NATO to join it. Your phrasing makes it sound like NATO membership is something thrust upon a country, rather than something that is requested and granted, under certain conditions.
NATO is hostile to core Russian interests. Russia’s leaders could not strategically allow NATO to induct Ukraine. Decades of diplomatic and other soft attempts to stop NATO from moving farther and farther east hadn’t worked—and in fact NATO countries, America in particular, were engaged in heavy espionage along Russia’s borders, for decades. The history of this in Ukraine is especially clear.
One need only imagine having the most hostile neighbors imaginable, who have further enlisted many of your other neighbors into a hostile militant pact against you, to understand Russia’s position.
The belief that Ukraine should be allowed to *apply* to join whatever alliance they like is fine. The belief that NATO should have even considered its application—much less openly supported it, as America has done, including from the mouth of a president—when they know it will risk provoking a regional military conflict that could very well turn global and nuclear is extremely immoral. It would be immoral even if America didn’t routinely treat much more pedestrian and innocuous actions on the part of other countries as existential threats to itself.
Russia didn’t attack Ukraine because it *wanted* to (unlike America’s many, many discretionary wars). It attacked because it felt it *had* to. Decades of diplomatic attempts had only amounted to appeasement of a hostile and growing threat. And after Russia gave NATO years of verbal warnings, followed by *weeks* of troop build-up, NATO (which is to say America) *still* couldn’t find the basic moral courage necessary to back off of Russia’s borders.
Agreed. There of course has been a civil war in Ukraine since 2014. The Eastern Ukrainians/Ukrainian government has been bombing its own civilian population since then and at least 10,000 Ukrainians were killed in the Donbas by their own government well before Russia invaded.
You again use the word "hostile" as if it's an accepted description, but the whole purpose of my preceding comment was to question the very use of that word. NATO is hostile to Russia's "interests?" Okay, but without specifying what those interests ARE, that statement doesn't provide any clarity. A thief's 'interest" is to take my property; I'm certainly going to be hostile to his interests, and doing so is not immoral or wrong. So "hostility" as such (interpreted by a bad actor) is not itself justification for initiating violence, which Russia has done. And I'm speaking of literal violence, with guns and bullets, not metaphorical violence.
So your argument is that "supporting" the freely exercised application of a sovereign state (Ukraine, Poland, et. al.) to join an alliance is a repugnant act on the part of America? So when does that argument end? Are Nigeria and Burkina Faso not "allowed" to form an alliance if Ghana chooses to interpret it as hostile? What about Brazil and Uruguay? Can they make some sort of mutual defense arrangement, or do they have to get the blessing of Argentina? Just who is "in charge" in this worldview of yours?
I hate to say it, because I don't know you at all, but it sounds to me like you are putting all of the moral blame on the United States for "provoking a regional military conflict" without any consideration of the country who actually initiated the violence. It's a moral code that is so wrong, and leads to so much evil and death, that I don't really have any other words to type at this point.
It's as if you're saying that victims of violence are at fault for "provoking" their attacker. Well gee, if she'd have just let him do what he wanted, and wasn't "hostile to his interests," she wouldn't have gotten smacked.
It’s hilarious the way you presume economically destitute Russia to be a definitional “bad actor” and yet believe rich and powerful America is owed some grand benefit of doubt, despite its incomparable history of overt and covert geopolitical meddling.
I don’t care if you think it’s “accepted” that the US has hostile motives toward Russia. It’s the truth. But your ignorance about recent geopolitical history is not going to be resolved today.
You need to go educate yourself. Start with a memo current CIA director William Burns wrote in 2008, in which—unlike you—he bothered to consider Russia’s perspective—which, as if it had to, proves America’s government knew exactly what it was doing when it spent decades angling and meddling in Ukraine :
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html#efmAB5ACs
Then read up on America’s 70-year campaign to control the entire world through orchestrating violent coups, funding extremists, rigging elections (including Russia’s in 1996) and, oh yeah, destroying whole countries, including ones where its strategic interests were all but nonexistent.
When it comes to war and regime change, Russia’s international rap sheet hasn’t got *anything* on America’s, but you think Russia is inherently villainous while America is owed the benefit of the doubt? You just have no idea what you’re talking about.
EDIT: Well, looks like 'somebody' is either attacking or blocking access to Wikileaks's website in the time since I posted the above link. Here's a summary of the memo from a non-CIA-affiliated news outlet: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/02/27/us-nato-expansion-ukraine-russia-intervene/
Yeah, get that guy a copy of Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow so he at least will have the background to even discuss this topic.
"Russia has invaded Ukraine because its current leaders and the West, particularly America, wanted to put NATO--a hostile military alliance with a trigger defense pact--on Russia’s most strategically significant border"
And in doing so, brought in other countries on their border into NATO. Well played Russia
Almost every domino had already fallen. NATO--which is to say, America--had backed Russia into a corner, literally.
Ukraine is the one domino Russia could not strategically allow to fall. We knew it. We’ve known it for a long time. Our literal current CIA director wrote a memo about it in 2008, not that he’d have had to for all of this to be incredibly obvious:
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html#efmAB5ACs
EDIT: Well, looks like 'somebody' is either attacking or blocking access to Wikileaks's website in the time since I posted the above link. Here's a summary of the memo from a non-CIA-affiliated news outlet: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/02/27/us-nato-expansion-ukraine-russia-intervene/
What corner?! What was NATO going to do aside from stop them from attacking? And how was taking Ukraine going to help? It would just give them even more borders next to NATO members.
If a school bully beats up a kid because he is mad that all of the other kids won't let them beat people up, he's still the bad guy.
Right, so you really have no idea what’s going on here.
The binding military pact known as NATO, backed by the gargantuan military investments of the United States which all but infinitely outstrip Russia’s, has been encircling Russia for decades.
So let’s correct your analogy, by reversing it. Geopolitically, Russia has been bullied for decades. And you want to cast them as the bully for daring to take a swing? And you don’t want to blame the actual bully, who did everything they could to provoke that swing and didn’t do the one simple thing necessary to prevent it?
Why is this so hard for you to understand? Did you even bother to read Burns’s memo, to which I just linked? It lays out Russia’s completely justified thinking about the strategic necessity of keeping NATO out of Ukraine.
"Geopolitically, Russia has been bullied for decades."
Perhaps, but Russia is no stranger to the dark arts of bullying--i.e., squashing under tank treads any nation that dared refused to "join" the Soviet Union. Payback's a bitch.
Hilarious. Russia can’t advance in Ukraine, them invading Europe is a complete “bogeyman”!!
Being in Ukraine literally is them invading Europe
Hilarious. I detest Putin(and hated him when Bush looked into his eyes, and Hillary had her ridiculously childish “reset button”) you need to read some history. This is classic Russian action to try and control their “near abroad”. That and a warm water port dictates their policy. At this point poor Russian boys and poor Ukrainian boys are being slaughtered for no reason while our armaments corporations pull in the profits. Cease hostilities and negotiate.
Excellent post Madjack!
Well, it's more like invading a break-away part of itself, since Ukraine was always part of the Russian empire. For centuries, Kiev was the seat of Russian power.
Break-away? Not hardly. The Russian government granted Ukraine its sovereign freedom decades ago. It was a legal and binding treaty signed by both parties. Putin is not allowed do-overs because he doesn't like that a past leader of Russia granted Ukraine its independence.
I'd also argue that since Kiev was the seat of Rus power, than Russia is the breakaway and Ukraine the mothership.
Fair enough. We'll reframe Ukraine as the righteous aggressor and Russia as the victim if that would make you happy.
What would make me happy is (a) both parties agreeing on final, enforceable borders that lets Russians who don't want to be Ukrainian to move down the highway and live under Putin, or (b) Ukraine and the West kicking all Russian troops back to Moscow.
Russia is hardly the hapless victim you claim, but if moving Ukraine's border a bit to the west so part of that region magically becomes Russian again, allowing both Putin and Zelenskyy to claim victory and go home, fine.
jesus, how can one perver so much history in one short paragraph. Astonishing.
From Wikipedia:
"During the Middle Ages, Ukraine was the site of early Slavic expansion and the area later became a key centre of East Slavic culture under the state of Kievan Rus', which emerged in the 9th century. The state eventually disintegrated into rival regional powers and was ultimately destroyed by the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. The area was then contested, divided, and ruled by a variety of external powers for the next 600 years, including the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Tsardom of Russia. The Cossack Hetmanate emerged in central Ukraine in the 17th century, but was partitioned between Russia and Poland, and ultimately absorbed by the Russian Empire. Ukrainian nationalism developed, and following the Russian Revolution in 1917, the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic was formed."
The only rider I'd add is up until Kruschev; Crimea WAS Russian, practically the only folk that aren't are Tatars and once-Goths. The Ukrainian border pre-2014 was pretty much midway between the claims of both Russian AND Ukranian irredentists.
Parsing and word play. We're talking Poland, the Baltic states et al.
Russia is IN Europe.
Pemulis_DMZ
Your comment is contradictory. On the one hand you complain about an outsized contribution from America to the defence of Ukraine and on the other hand you claim that Germany is staring straight at a Russian invasion of mainland Europe.
Yes, Germany and the rest of Europe should contribute more to the defence of Ukraine and their own defence but in the meantime Ukraine should continue to be helped by a nation blessed with more natural resources per capita than any other.
And the Ukrainians and Zelensky should be praised. Callous and selfish Tucker Carlson should be shunned and corrupt and cognitively impaired Biden should be impeached, Trump defended and DeSantis promoted.
“ Ukraine should continue to be helped by a nation blessed with more natural resources per capita than any other.” why? And why to such an exponentially greater financial amount than any other country?
Complaining about US contribution and pointing out that Russia poses a threat to more than just Ukraine is not contradictory. Both can be true.
They are obviously contradictory.
No? Please explain. I can believe the US shouldn’t be responsible for ukraines defense while also believing Russia is a threat to additional countries. Not a terribly complex concept to grasp
Ukraine is doing all the heavy lifting in its own defence. America is contributing weapons it will never use.
Russia isn't a threat to a wet paper bag.
Ukraine is not a wet paper bag. It is a country seeking to distance itself from Tucker Carlson’s beloved Russia.
Best best today!
Ironic how of all people, it was Trump who was called all sorts of names by the Davos Jet Set for pointing out this insane German position in 2018-2019. He also rightly pointed out that Europe had hollowed out their militaries which welcomed Russian aggression.
The Germans laughed at him. Idiots.
They are still laughing at him. A high-pitched, nervous laugh because they know if they stop laughing, it would be an admission that Trump was right.
Irrationality wins the day. The twisted idea of abandoning nuclear energy for fear of the nuclear apocalypse while declaring the climate change apocalypse to be imminent is unfortunately not the only failure of this government. Romantic emotionality wins the day and loses the economy.
While pursuing a foreign policy that ramps the chance of nuclear armageddon into very probable territory. If Washington eats an SS25 I might even laugh.
Same here too with the Green Agenda.
I am an American living here in Germany for the past 20 plus years. I honestly thought that with the war starting in Ukraine last year, the government would have the foresight to re-think their closing of nuclear plants. Nope! So incredibly short-sighted. I have no words.
A nation that would elect Schroeder and Merkel?
www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/liquefied-gas-does-lng-have-place-germanys-energy-future
Liquid natural gas to the rescue! Germany is betting the farm on this, at least for the short term.
I'm an American living in France since roughly 1995...about 28 years. The present nuclear policy (very recent, within the year) is a return to a sensible, long-term energy outlook established after the oil price choques of the 1970's. France has its own Green Party (Écologistes, etc.), and within it one finds a mixed back of irrational fear/loathing/ hatred of (1) Capitalism (2) Technology (3) Economic Growth and (4) a complacent, lazy, ignorant conflation of the atomic weapons with atomic energy. Thanks to the war in Ukraine, the national conversation about energy policy seems to have turned unusually lucid and the influence of the "Greens" on the conversation seems to be close to zero.
I spend a career designing hardware and software for radiation detectors. After Fukushima, I gave a talk on nuclear power at my kids' unusually enlightened elementary school for Earth Day. I opened by asking who would be terrified to live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant. All hands went up, including the science teacher. I said surprise, you all do - in those days New Jersey derived more than half its electric generation from nuclear energy. I still have the slide show.
Nuclear really is safer and better for the environment than any other technology for equivalent power generation. The original Sierra Club, which was a lot more pragmatic than its radical offshoot Greenpeace, came to the same conclusion and supported the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California in preference to a dam.
I see comments below raising the waste issue. Largely because of the influence of a group at Princeton University fearful of nuclear weapon proliferation, the US uses a "once-through" fuel cycle which results in a large volume of waste (still negligible by comparison with coal, though). France recycles its spent fuel, concentrating the highly radioactive short half-life by-products and blending the resulting fissionable plutonium oxides with uranium-235 oxide into so-called mixed oxide fuel. There are two big benefits. First, the volume of really dangerous waste is greatly reduced. France stores all the waste from 60 years of nuclear power in a single facility in Le Hague. Second, the plutonium comes from neutron bombardment of U-238, which is 96% or so of the uranium in first-pass reactor fuel. So the process makes more fuel from the original fuel.
No state has ever built a nuclear weapon from spent reactor fuel. Plutonium for weapons is made in a special-purpose reactor, because if U-238 is exposed too long in neutron bombardment, like the 2 years it spends in a power reactor, you get a mixture of Pu-239 (which goes boom) and Pu-240 (which is too unstable to make a bomb). The mass difference between the isotopes is less than 1/3 that of U-238 vs. U-235, so it's very hard to separate them. So we hobbled out nuclear power industry decades ago with no benefit in non-proliferation. Oh well.
When opponents claim "millions of years" of waste storage is necessary, that is (to borrow a phrase) misinformation. Radioactive isotopes decay exponentially, with the time expressed in "half-life": the time for half of the remaining atoms to decay. Math people will recognize this never goes all the way to zero. It is Zeno's paradox, a near-infinite sequence of cutting in half, until you're watching the last atom. With U-238's half life of 4.5 billion years, that could take a while.
The bad actors are the intermediate half-life isotopes, which are present in small volume and separated out during fuel reprocessing. These have half-lives of tens to hundreds of years, and after 20 half-lives, radioactivity is a million times lower. So a more realistic confinement time is a few thousand years. The Egyptians build the pyramids about 5000 years ago. They're still around, and we have better technology now. Dangerous isotopes are melted into a glass to give resistance to erosion before burial. Look up "nuclear waste vitrification". The Yucca Mountain facility, if it were completed, could easily hold centuries worth of the waste from fuel reprocessing.
Great comment. It's such a pity Fukushima happened because I actually think it engendered much more fear than Chernobyl. The Japanese have such a reputation for careful meticulousness as opposed to the Communist hallmark indifference to individual lives - the former really undercut the safety argument more. To people obsessed with safetyism the actual death statistics being miniscule doesn't seem to be an argument it all. I think the reason is that the see zero possibility of their own deaths being the result of coal power. The issues with particulates from burning don't seem to set off their safety alarm systems.
Re Fukushima - it turns out that if you live on the coast in a quake-prone region, it's a bad idea to put your emergency backup generators in the basement. They should have been on high ground. Truly heroic efforts to build a giant extension cord to the other two plants succeeded in preventing further meltdowns.
As the article states, there will be no statistically detectable cancers from Fukushima. The only ones from Chernobyl were thyroid cancers, which are otherwise very rare, because the thyroid concentrates iodine from the environment and I-131 is a major volatile (i.e. airborne) component of reactor failure emissions. It also has a very short half-life (8 days). That cancer can be easily prevented by saturating the thyroid with potassium iodide (KI) tablets, the same stuff you find in the supermarket as salt substitute for people on sodium restriction(*). They are cheap and readily available. Japan immediately distributed KI tablets to all kids at risk, and found no I-131 concentration in kids' thyroids on later examination.
It was a major moral failure of the Soviet Union not to do that for Chernobyl. Unlike the seafood-heavy Japanese diet, already high in iodine, the kids in the Chernobyl region were largely iodine-deficient and overwhelmingly susceptible to taking up I-131. Fortunately, as cancers go, thyroid cancer is mostly curable. There were many cases, but relatively few deaths.
It was radiation detectors built by my former employer, deployed in Sweden, that first blew the whistle on the Chernobyl accident. Meltdowns have a unique radiation fingerprint. Radiation detectors are almost unbelievably sensitive, capable of finding extremely small amounts of specific isotopes.
(*) - I was wrong here. Salt substitute is potassium chloride, not iodide. The iodide is used to treat hyperthyroidism as well as for protection from fission decay products.
If it’s any consolation, nuclear opposition in Germany is very much an old person’s game, as well as for the Greens, who have dropped from 22% to 15% in the polls inside of a year. They have left government in Berlin and have lost a string of important mayoral elections.
Younger, more educated voters aren’t nearly as irrational towards nuclear power, and opposition to nuclear opposition, but sixty-somethings are really dead set on this.
Too late though. The whole industry is gone.
Germans still have no idea how increasingly negative they’re viewed abroad. In fact, they’re still smarter than you.
The poll that stated that Germans were willing to pay more for heat if it meant not nuclear plants is pure fantasy. When the bill arrives, the reality of lossing so many euros and still have a colder than comfortable home does create a re-think about energy sources.
This says a whole lot and few here will pick it up, as most are 60 or near 60-somethings.
Forgive my ignorance, but can they fire these reactors back up?
Why are the greens opposed to the world’s only carbon free, safe and sustainable power source? Because it is carbon free, safe and sustainable. And that’s the last thing they actually want. If you don’t mind me posting here.. here’s a view from the UK. https://open.substack.com/pub/lowstatus/p/save-the-planet-unleash-godzilla?r=evzeq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The Greens would much rather rape and despoil Africa and turn children into slaves to advance their agenda. Don't lionize them. Despise their stupidity and conceit.
I think a lot of the problem comes from a mismatch between the greens stated agenda and their actual agenda. It seems despoiling Africa and slave children represent acceptable collateral damage when your goals are as noble as theirs. The tragedy is so many people take the greens at face value. (And of course many millions of ‘green’ supporters are acting in good faith).
How can one possibly be acting in good faith in the face of despoiling Africa and exploiting children?
I mean regular people Lynne, who in good faith, sort their recycling and think about their carbon footprint. Most normal people who accept that ‘going green’ is a good thing, are acting in good faith. They accept the parameters of the argument that have been sold to them by the media and central government.
I understand that. To an extent. So I guess it is the thinking about reducing the carbon footprint part that is problematic. Or the accepting the parameters of the argument without independent thought. Everyone with access to a news source has access to the African mines and miners information. And while not exactly on point, one of my contributions to the environment is I do not use disposable cups, plates, or Styrofoam. During Covid we started going to Las Vegas as soon as it re-opened but the restaurants were not yet open. So it was take-out or room service. The amount of paper and plastic waste was staggering to me.
I think people do have, and use, independent thought. They also have priorities, and while this stuff is important to us, we are commenting here for instance, for most people it is not. I don’t think it is fair to criticise regular people for not sharing our priorities. If all your mainstream information sources, as well as your peer group, are all saying the same thing, then it is understandable, and to be expected, that you too are likely to accept that thing as true. I worry that we are often too quick to denounce ordinary decent people as ‘sheeple’. I like people. People are good. It is the Malthusian environmentalists who see humanity as the problem. I try to limit my criticism to the liars, rather than the lied to. Also-I hope you came away from Las Vegas with more than you arrived with!
many of them don't know the true costs of the things they are trying to achieve. Some of that is due to the people in power purposely obfuscating it. The other part is that it simply seems that many people are just not that curious about how things actually work. Someone they trust tells them A, so they believe A. And this goes for many people (most in my limited experience). That is why the capture and failure of institutions is such a huge deal. It leaves a lot of folks without a compass.
Which means that the capture of the institutions accomplishes the capture of those people who think like that. Or in my opinion don't think.
Additionally EVs are very heavy and go through tires more frequently. Tires are not green. Heavier cars also means increased wear on roads. Concrete and asphalt are not green. Automobile registration is based on weight. So they will cost more to register.
One of the biggest problems with the "green" movement is that none of its leaders recognize the concept of unintended consequences. If something *sounds* like a good idea, they push it, without first asking what the unintended consequences might be.
I loved this analogy: It’s as if your irresponsible neighbor started a house fire with his outmoded stove, so you decide that you can only use your microwave from now on 😂
Ha! That's what Port Angeles, Washington did some years back. The whole town was plumbed with natural gas from the early twentieth century until some fools blew up a store downtown. There solution was to shut down the gas system and rip out the plumbing for it instead of figure out what the fools did wrong. Then they doubled down on stupid by demolishing their local hydroelectric damn which had made their electricity prices the envy of the nation. Why? To save the whales (orcas), which it has had no impact on because the problem has mostly to do with commercial overfishing and competition with other protected species (sea lions, which are overpopulated now,).
Germany is, as Trump might say, a shit hole country. Germans are excessively obsessed with their bowel movements. That should be telling. Other than the ability to run machine shops quite well, it is and has always been a bane of civilization.
From a national psychology standpoint, I think each specific fear that a culture has is more a symbolic fear of losing control of a national identity rather than a valid fear of the thing itself. It’s a totemic fear rather than a real fear. It represents a populace’s ability to say NO to reason. For some countries it is the ability to say no to a moralizing US. To other populaces it is an opportunity to say no to their own government. You can’t argue against the NO with reason. It probably needs to be replaced with a more benign fear or totem. Very few governmental leaders are that smart, of course.
The leader of the eco groups, much like BLM, can’t be convinced by reason because for them, the benefit of the irrational fight is both financial and status. The issue itself is merely a tool they can use to gain wealth and status. They are hucksters and the issue is just the con they have chosen. They can’t be convinced their cause is irrational because they don’t believe in it themselves.
Lastly, Europe. I used to read the comments section of the Financial Times. Most Europeans have an astonishingly misinformed view of the US yet are stubbornly sure they are correct. The most surprising thing from those comments was the degree of hatred most Europeans have for the US. Honestly, I think the only thing that holds Europe together is their hatred of us. We are their piñata on every issue. If we came out against nuclear power they would think it is the greatest thing since ice cream with sprinkles.
"degree of hatred most Europeans have for the US"
I had a trip to Cambodia Thailand Vietnam planned for Nov after 9/11. On the flight from Japan to Thailand, I had the misfortune to be seated next to a German couple. After finding out I was from the US, the Karen of the couple went on a rant berating the US and the US government. I mentioned yeah, Hitler was so great and put my headphones on.
I thought she was unusually rude for a "cultured euro", but now, I agree with her.
Not meaning to add a paranoid note, but it seems likely that a Russian-sponsored "communist" influence on Green ideology helped to drive its anti-nuclear agenda.
Yes I have read of this elsewhere, not so much from Russian communist ideology but from Russian economic/political calculus. Would have been great to get a mention in the article.
The anti-nuclear position goes all the way back to the 60s. I doubt very much that modern Russia has much to do with that.
modern Russia is the direct inheritor of Soviet ideology. When soviet union fell apart, the Kremlin power structures and ideologies remained fully intact. The "change" presented to the world was purely cosmetic. I mean, a former KGB officer runs russia to this day, ffs.
I don't know very much about Russian history, but I'd say that after Lenin, "communism" played a minor role in rule and governmental policies.
I mean, if you call ownership of all the means of production and govmt control of who gets what and how much, confiscation of private property in the name of equity, minor - then sure :) I lived it. My parents and grandparents lived it. It had all the earmarks of what they say communism is.
A lot of different factors contribute to distaste for nuclear power, but I think Russia has been an active factor in the German Greens' hostility.
Facts and real data always trump predictions that turn out to be inaccurate. Pick your topic: covid, climate, transitory inflation. Yet the inaccurate predictors are the golden girls and boys
The gold comes from saying what they want to hear.
First paragraph: Americans are irrationally fearful of vaping, because it can save lives. Why and how? Because it’s a better alternative to smoking and will help people off tobacco? Okay, but vaping is also bad for you. Think about it: You’re coating your lungs with chemical vapors. Not tobacco smoke, but still. I’m not “irrationally” opposed to vaping.
Otherwise, I enjoyed this brief history of Germany’s self-destructive move off nuclear energy, possibly only the most baffling example of how “irrationally” the Climate Change crowd has been able to influence - dare I say dictate? - policy. Meanwhile, neighboring France has ramped up its reliance on nuclear. The US should do the same, but too many of our own politicians are in thrall to the “greens.”
Here is a link to a well-written two part article answering your question about vaping. (And I don't have anything to do with vaping)
https://sensiblemed.substack.com/p/vaping-the-great-innovation-public?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2FVaping&utm_medium=reader2
Agree. That line threw off the entire piece. It just didn’t fit. If I didn’t read the credentials preamble, I might have stopped reading.
Your ignorance is showing. The author was referring to all the laws that are continuing to be passed that limit vaping, prevent the sale and shipping of the products, and vilify those who vape.
They say it's for the sake of the children. It's not. It's all about big-pharma and big-tobacco.
With the increase in sales in vaping - and that industry's continued strides to make safer, healthier products - sales of tobacco and smoking cessation products plummeted. Along with the extra tax revenue that tobacco uniquely offers.
It seems that so many would rather people smoke over there in a corner, killing themselves quietly, rather than allow them to use a product that is better for them.
You don’t know what the author was referring to, because he didn’t explain. Your explanation might be correct, but it’s yours, not his. Regardless, vaping is a bad thing; better than tobacco, but bad nonetheless, and my opposition to it is not “irrational.”
I've been vaping for 12 years and I believe your opposition to it is irrational and based in ignorance and, possibly, fear. Or you swallowed the propaganda against vaping without doing any independent research.
And your explanation and objection to the author's inclusion of vaping as an example is yours. What's your point?
The writer was simply trying to explain how people / countries are irrationally afraid of things (what ever that may be. It was a great article and you should go read it again. Just don’t read the first part. Haha.
Here’s the thing for me. I don’t like calling positions “irrational” from afar. It’s a bit like saying, from where I stand, your concerns are not legitimate. It kind of mixes political agency with expert authority. one thing most of us don’t have the $ to have researchers investigate our concerns. So when our lived experience doesn’t match what researchers or experts have found, we tend not to trust them. Another way is to say “this doesn’t make sense to me” and interview people who hold opposing views- and try to understand where they are coming from.
Vaping is not "chemical smoke". It isn't smoke at all, it's vapor. Hence the name, and why it's significantly cleaner in the lungs.
When it comes to vaping, perfect is the enemy of good.
The reality is that vaping is vastly less harmful than cigarettes. I have a brother with heart disease whose life has literally been saved by switching from the cigs he couldn't quit to vaping with the minimum amount of nicotine he can cope with.
The primary problem with vaping is marketing: there is no question that the industry is targeting teenagers with the message that vaping is cool. But are teens who would never take up smoking choosing to vape?
Celia - I always appreciate your comments! I don’t disagree with you. Perfect is indeed often the enemy of good. But vaping, although measurably less harmful than smoking cigs, is still harmful to humans. Therefore, objections to vaping aren’t “irrational.” Which was the author’s contention. A better example of Americans’ irrational fears might have been the “fear” of guns, those inert objects. But this former NYT reporter would never use that example.
I too thought the vaping thing was off. You are right guns would have been better. Except my bet is he does not consider those fears irrational.
Does it matter that the social contract is not economically viable? Or does what they want take precedence over reality?
A cautionary tale for the US on several fronts.
First, note that, in shuttering its nukes, Germany must rely on natural gas. Proving, yet again, that with the exception of hydro, there are really only TWO reliable ways of generating electricity - natural gas or nuclear (if you exclude coal because there really is no clean coal.) Therefore, our home grown lunatics who are pushing us toward "renewable" wind and solar are nothing but saboteurs.
Second, there was no "accident" at the Fukushima complex. It was hit by a massive tidal wave produced by a similarly massive earthquake and the backup generators needed to provide power to cool the reactors were washed away. This was a design defect that is easily remedied. Moreover, the Fukushima reactors are an old design based on 1950s submarine reactors. New, next gen nukes are smaller, modular, safer and more efficient. We ignore them at our peril.
Third, note that Gerhard Schroeder was and is in bed with Putin. So having a traitor at the helm of one's country is not as far fetched as one might think. Consider this when you pooh pooh notions that the Big Guy taking a cut of China's filthy lucre might be in the Oval Office today. Another verity we ignore at our peril.
People behave as if nuclear reactors are some kind of barely contained monster, ready to attack (melt down or explode) at any time. I wonder how many activists truly understand how these machines work, what nuclear waste actually is, or how marginal the effects of radiation released by normal operation are.
I know that isn't the main argument here, but these are concerns that activists use to scare people into falling in line behind their agenda. Take nuclear waste for example. In a PWR, anything that makes contact with water from the primary side is considered contaminated because that water has been exposed to radiation by passing through the core. There is very little contamination there, but that material is considered contaminated.
One could walk through a nuclear waste storage site and receive very little exposure. The worst stuff, such as spent fuel, is kept in much more secure areas. I wouldn't expect the public to understand this, but I expect leaders to, and reassure the public of this knowledge. People in general don't know these things, and that's fine.
However, this reveals two things. One is that activists count on the ignorance of the public to promote their agenda. The other is that trust in institutions has eroded in the last few years, with cause in many cases, so people don't even trust what's true anymore.
“One is that activists count on the ignorance of the public to promote their agenda.” This is true for so many things, Covid, climate change, BLM, etc....
Another event that contributed to the the current fearmongering surrounding nuclear power was the capture of the nuclear power plant in Ukraine (not Chernobyl, the other one). That one Ukrainian official who said if attacked it would be like "10 Chernobyls" (paraphrasing) was horribly irresponsible. Of course, he was fearmongering for a different reason - begging for aid - but he relied on the ignorance and fear of the public for his own purposes.
That was never going to happen. The containment buildings are some of the most robust structures on the planet. The staggering amount of weaponry necessary to breach them would exhaust most armies on the planet. I'm not familiar with the plant, but given that they were PWR, there are likely numerous numerous safety systems, such as water injection and passive cooling.
well, given that Russians were actively lobbing hundreds of shells at the plant at the time, I don't think he was simply "fear-mongering"
They weren't hurling them at the containment buildings.
PWR?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurized_water_reactor