Our liberal friends managed, over 30 years ago, to stop nuclear power in the USA in its tracks. Because of a movie!
In consequence, “meltdown” has become as much of a Thing as “bloodbath.” Dear Democratic friends.
But France went right on building nuclear plants.
Now, in New York State they recently decommissioned the Indian Point nuclear plant — and greenhouse gas emissions went up! OMG! End of the world! Says the lefty Brit Guardian:
Since the plant’s closure, it has been gas, rather then clean energy such as solar and wind, that has filled the void, leaving New York City in the embarrassing situation of seeing its planet-heating emissions jump in recent years to the point its power grid is now dirtier than Texas’s, as well as the US average.
Honeybunch at the Guardian: Wind and solar are not “clean energy.” As you would know if you ever cracked a book on “science.”
The chaps at Powerline ask why the French didn’t succumb to The China Syndrome and the charms of actress Jane Fonda as we did, and just kept right on going.
It’s a good question. I suppose it must be in part that Les Hautes Écoles where the French Deep State is educated are a lot less wokey and unscientific than the tippy-top universities where our US ruling class in indoctrinated in regime Narrative.
Or it could be that Rule One — Règle un — in France is: don’t do what les yanquis are doing; do the opposite. They learned that from General de Gaulle.
In any case, the war on nuclear power is just another typical conceit of our educated ruling class. Like climate change. It’s all about the need — in any ruling class — to matter.
The fact is that 97 percent of the rules and regulations that our educated class in the regulatory agencies promulgate are useless. Of course we want to avoid dangerous appliances and various kinds of pollution. But really, we could hand all that off to DEI flunkies and then tell them to do it over. As the Economist wrote over 20 years ago, when countries reach about $10,000 GDP per capita in 2000 dollars then they start to prioritize a clean environment.
And then a funny thing happens, that was explained to me by a German engineer in Davos in 1989. When you start to clean up the rivers, you find that dead fish show up whenever there is a toxic spill into the river. The dirty little secret is that, before they started to clean up the rivers, there were no fish in the rivers to get killed in a spill.
The problem is that politicians and bureaucrats and activists and journalists and educated class liberal Democratic voters that drive EVs know nothing about science. Maybe you have noticed!
Here’s a bit of science for your liberal friend.
N2 concentration in the atmosphere is 780,000 parts per million. OMG! That’s 78%
O2 concentration in the atmosphere is 220,000 parts per million. OMG! That’s 22%
CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is 400 parts per million. That’s 0.04%
Methane (CH4) concentration in the atmosphere is 2 parts per million. That’s 0.0002%.
Nitrous oxide (N2O) concentration in the atmosphere is 0.3 parts per million. That’s 0.00003%.
If you think that any of these gases are involved in boiling the planet, I gotta bridge in Baltimore to sell you. Cheap.
By the way, water vapor, which is a significant greenhouse gas, can get up to 5 percent of the atmosphere. Of course, when it condenses into a cloud on a nice sunny day…
The whole point about being a ruling class is that you get to order the plebs around. One year you tell them all to go fight Nazis. Another year you tell them to go build Levittowns. Another year you tell them to build 15 minute cities and light rail and forget those suburban houses and white picket fences. Right now, it’s all about NetZero and the clean energy transition.
Next year? How about: Just Stop Elon! I mean, if that guy gets to Occupy Mars, experts agree, it’s the end of the universe as we know it.