Solar, Wind Jobs to Boom Over Next Decade

[NNadir]

12. Um, are you saying that Fukushima will cause 35 million deaths?

What, exactly, does this mean?

About air pollution, you say fukushima is two day of air pollution. But according to your own paper, fukushima is as well 1/4 of the deaths that nuclear avoid in the world every year.

I have no idea what you mean, but whatever it is, it represents the most spectacular misreading of this paper I've ever seen.

Before I address this bourgeois "negawatt" horse shit put out by that detestable fool Amory Lovins, I need to point out a few things.

First of all it is not my paper. It is a paper co-written by one of the most important climate scientists there is, Jim Hansen. It's not some crap put out by a scientifically illiterate newspaper journalist at the Guardian, it's um, a scientific paper published in one of the world's most important Environmental journals on the planet.

OK?

Your statement that:

"The truth is we don't really know what impact our nuclear wastes will have within the next 200,000 years.

...can only be represented as a statement showing that you lack basic knowledge of chemistry and physics, very basic knowledge.

Who is we?


How many scientific papers have you read to make such an incredible wrong statement? I've been reading on the chemistry and physics of actinides and fission products for 30 years. A crude estimate of the amount of time that I spend in scientific academic libraries would amount, estimating about 10 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, 30 years, would put it at about 15,000 hours of my life, in libraries reading pure science. Carbonite reports regularly that I have more than 600,000 files in my computer, the vast majority of which are PDF's from the primary scientific literature, or photoscans of monographs and papers that are from the primary scientific literature.

You seem to have spent less than 20 minutes contemplating an issue that involves the lives of every damned living thing on this planet, and then come here to lecture me about some fucking suburban garden that you claim will have plutonium in it 1500 years from now, with absolutely no evidence, no statement of mechanism about how this will happen to some putative bourgeois child centuries in the future.

Do you know how many children will die today from air pollution? And let's be clear on something, OK, these won't be children who reside in some bourgeois suburban garden. They will be poor children, desperately impoverished children.

In what kind of moral universe must one exist to value the life of some imagined child 1500 years from now over the 19,000 people who have died since yesterday from air pollution? And let's be clear on something, according the World Health Organization, 1.7 million of the 7 million people who die each year from air pollution will be children, mostly poor children.

While you were typing about plutonium in a suburban garden 1500 years from now, if you spent two minutes typing, that means six children died from air pollution.

Lovins' negawatt crowd have so much contempt for human poverty that they might as well be Republicans.

Sometime ago, referencing about 50 papers not from some asshole scientifically illiterate reporter from the Guardian, but the primary scientific literature, I wrote about the ethics of energy, arguing not that we needed to yank energy from those who do not have it, but that we needed to effectively double the per capita planetary average continuous power for the average human being from 2500 Watts (compared to about 10,000 watts for the average American to something on the order of 5,000 watts, in order to provide for the impoverished, and do so in a clean and sustainable way.

Current Energy Demand; Ethical Energy Demand; Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come

Here are some comments I made on that detestable fool Amory Lovins, in that post:

...In 1976, which – if I have the math right – was 3 years after 1973, the energy mystic Amory Lovins published a paper in the social science journal Foreign Affairs, “Energy Strategy, The Road Not Taken?”[3] that suggested that by the use of conservation and so called “renewable energy” all of the world’s energy problems could be solved. The thin red sliver on the 2011 pie chart, identified as “other” – solar, wind, etc, – obviates the grotesque failure of so called “renewable energy” to become a meaningful source of energy in the worldwide energy equation, despite consuming vast resources and vast sums of money, this on a planet that could ill afford such sums. As for conservation, in 2011 we were using 147% of the dangerous petroleum we used in 1973, 286% of the dangerous natural gas we used in 1973, and 252% of the dangerous coal we used in 1973. The rise in average figures of per capita energy consumption, as well as total energy consumed worldwide, show that energy conservation as an energy strategy has not worked either.

The reason that energy conservation as an energy strategy has failed is obvious, even divorced from population growth. According to the 2013 UN Millennium Goals Report[4], as shown in the following graphic from it, the percentage of the Chinese population that lived on less than $1.25 (US) per day fell from 60% of the population in 1990 to 16% in 2005 and further to 12% in 2010. From our knowledge of history, we would be fair to assume that the situation in China was even worse in 1976 than it was in 1990...

...By the way, it ought to weigh on the moral imagination…that figure…less than $1.25 a day…less than $500 per year…for all a human being’s needs…food, shelter, transportation, child care, education, health, care for the elderly…

...Seen from this perspective, Lovins’ writings are all marked by myopic bourgeois provincialism. The huge flaw in his 1976 conceit, and his conceits forever thereafter, was that for him, people living in the United States, and maybe Western Europe, represented the only human life that mattered. Chinese and Indians, for two examples, may as well have not existed if one reads his 1976 fantasy; he blithely assumed that they would agree to remain unimaginably impoverished while Americans pursued hydrogen HYPErcars[5] in every suburban garage and solar heated molten salt tanks[6] in every suburban backyard. Apparently, from his high perch in the überrich suburb of Aspen – Snowmass, Colorado – where he lives today in a super-efficient McMansion, he continues to issue rhetoric equally oblivious to the status of the larger fraction of humanity, this while collecting “consulting fees” from companies that among other things, mine and refine oil sands[7]. Consideration of the two to three billion people defined by the IEA today as living in “energy poverty”[8] – 1.3 billion of whom lack access to electricity for any purpose, never mind for the purpose of charging up their swell Tesla electric cars, and/or the 38% percent of human beings on this planet who lack access to what the IEA calls “clean cooking facilities” – is definitely not in the purview of a person who writes books with awful titles like, um, “Winning the Oil Endgame.[9]”

Lovins, a sometime consultant for dangerous fossil fuel companies, is a horrible human being, not just horrible, but ignorant as sin.

Right now, on this planet, John, there are 1.3 billion people who lack electricity. Just last week in Germany, I watched a BBC documentary about one village, out of the tens of thousands of such villages, where there are no improved sanitary facilities.

It's this one: Sue Perkins explores the Ganges, Part I

Apparently you believe that the world can be saved by making sure that none of the women described in that documentary ever have a fucking toilet bowl, because you're um, negawatting with Amory.

You know what?

This sort of thing, this obliviousness, this ignorance, this contempt, just makes me angry. Very angry. I'm tired of the twisted horseshit put out by people who wish to be regarded as reasonable who apparently have no idea of what reason, in particular, moral reasoning is. Today, 19,000 people will die, unnecessarily, because of anti-nuke nonsense.

I'm too old to be angry all the time; what is being done to future generations - and believe me what we are doing to future generations with climate change and with the depletion of resources to build useless crap like wind turbines is far worse than make believe plutonium in a putative garden 15 millennia from now - is criminal.

It breaks my heart that I will be leaving this planet shortly while the fight against ignorance has failed.

But rather than contemplate this stuff any more, I'll just continue to read science and hand off as much as possible to my son the engineering student and then die.

Before I die though, since I hope to live a little longer to discuss these things with my son - not too long, just a little longer - I really need to use the "ignore" button here to avoid the worst of the idiot anti-nuke rhetoric on this website.

It's time to use it again. Good luck with that electric car/wind turbine/solar cell bourgeois obliviousness, John.

When I encounter anti-nukes, pretending to be reasonable, there's always a kind of Trumpian transparency to it.

Have a nice life.