Last edited Sun Jan 21, 2018, 10:21 PM - Edit history (1)
People expect that they are speaking to another idiot when they pull out stuff like their "uranium miner" fetish, which is, to be perfectly honest, Trumpian in its scale.
Between 1950 and 2005, the period covered in my post, according to the US Department of Labor, 16,702 people died in coal mining accidents.
It's pretty funny when nominally liberal people start lecturing all the time on "markets forces" and "economic realities."
The economics of gas and coal and oil are all dependent on the dubious practice of not including their well known and well understood external costs, which are the costs in human health and human life.
Suppose we valued a human life at $10,000 - a figure that is obviously arbitrarily low. This means the economic cost of seven million deaths per year is 70 billion dollars a year. If we raise the figure to $100,000 for a life it's $700 billion a year, or 7 trillion every decade.
Please don't lecture me about markets and economics.
As it happens these calculations do not include the cost of dying. My father, a cigarette smoker, died from lung cancer. I watched him die. The cost of his struggle cost the government, his insurers, not to mention my stepmother, a little over $200,000.
Again, please don't lecture me about markets and economics.
The all sacred "market" doesn't level the "playing field." It allows one subset of people to kill a larger subset of people without any attempt to account for the economic, never mind the moral cost.
And excuse me if I don't necessarily agree that I need to understand that "most people" care deeply for humanity and the planet.
If they cared deeply, they wouldn't make so many glib and poorly thought our remarks as I see all the time on the topic of energy and its impact on humanity. Please note that I care not just for people killed by energy technology, but also those people who die from a lack of access to energy.
The average continuous power consumption of human beings on this planet is about 2500 watts, roughly a quarter of the power consumption of the average American.
I have argued that if we were - in a campaign to eliminate human poverty - to double this average to 5,000 watts, and provide that power from the fission of plutonium, each person living to the age of 100 would responsible for the fissioning of about 100 grams of material in their entire lifetime.
Current Energy Demand; Ethical Energy Demand; Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come
I've heard this platitude about stones and the stone age many times; I believe it came from a Saudi oil minister.
It's insipid, and frankly doesn't mean anything at all.
The technology to eliminate fossil fuels in their entirety was invented by some of the finest minds ever to grace this planet. It's operated despite opposition from people who are rather lazy, uninformed and engaged in poor thinking for half a century.
It hasn't been allowed to advance to do what it might have done, because, for one example, people evoke fetishes about uranium miners to the exclusion of all other energy related deaths.
This doesn't strike me as "caring." It strikes me as indifference.
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