We had all better hope these scientists are wrong about the planet’s future

[NNadir]

42. And the evidence for his "belief" is what? Since you are neither an engineer nor an energy...

...scientist, can you offer any evidence that his "belief" is an accurate one, or do you just take it based on your faith that Bernie Sanders is a great, great, great, great, great man and any thing he believes must be true.

However, we have established that you are decidedly not in a position to state that "There is conflicting science on how safe nuclear energy is."

It is now 30 years since Chernobyl blew up, an event that caused me to change my mind about nuclear energy, since as a good political liberal, I bought mindlessly into the same nonsense that Sanders now espouses. I expected tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of deaths, because that's what "everyone" said would happen. At that point I began to look into nuclear issues in the primary scientific literature, tentatively at first, ultimately nearly obsessively. The hundreds of thousands, the tens of thousands of deaths, did not occur.

I've been at it for thirty years now, through tens of thousands of papers, long discussions, monographs, texts, and private calculations. I know more about nuclear energy than Senator Sanders will every know or you will ever know.

Do you know what the biggest criticism of nuclear energy most often is in the primary scientific literature when nuclear energy is discussed? It's that it lacks public acceptance. Not that it is uniquely dangerous; not that it is expensive, not that it doesn't work, but that people don't like it. In other words, to put this in extreme terms, many scientists apparently believe that people are stupid, and can't be educated, and therefore we should go on killing 50 million people every seven years from air pollution, something any self respecting epidemiologist knows is occurring continuously while people claim that nuclear energy is unacceptable.

Now let's talk about what you say Senator Sanders "believes" as he agitates for a nuclear moratorium, possibly the most dangerous idea for the potential leadership of the world's highest per capita polluting nation: So called "renewable energy" is workable, affordable and sustainable.

You do realize, don't you, that in the last ten years, the world has invested close to two trillion dollars on so called "renewable energy," with the result that solar and wind combined do not produce 5 of the 560 exajoules that humanity consumes each year?

Last year, 2015, despite all of this so called "investment" in so called "renewable energy" was the worst year ever recorded since records have been kept (since 1958) for increases in dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere. The year just passed represents the first year ever observed with the increase exceeded 3.00 ppm in a single year.

It would appear that Bernie Sanders might be wrong, and might not know what he is talking about, since two trillion bucks squandered on so called "renewable energy" did nothing, absolutely nothing, to prevent climate change.

Two trillion bucks and things are worse than ever... Have either you or Sanders, with these claims of economic viability for so called "renewable energy" ever bothered to compare electricity rates in Germany and Denmark, two gas burning renewable energy hellholes with those in nuclear powered France?

Here they are: Click on the table on the left to enlarge it

You know who has the most trouble paying electricity bills, don't you? Does Senator Sanders? What do you and he think, is it tougher for some asshole in a McMansion with solar cells on his roof collecting feed in tariffs and tax breaks, or some single mom working two minimum wage jobs to pay the rent on a run down studio apartment while keeping the lights on?

The paper I cited at the beginning of this exchange, from the climate scientist Jim Hansen at NASA and Columbia, shows that nuclear power, which Sanders despises clearly with given rote recitation of very, very, very, very tired 50 year old wrong rhetoric, prevented the dumping of 60 billion tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of about two years of such dumping at the current (accelerating) rate. No other technology can claim that, not the useless solar industry, not the wind industry, not even the hydroelectric industry.

As for the ridiculous idea that so called "renewable energy" has worked, is working or will work, let me simply repeat another post I made in another thread the other day:

Between 2004 and 2014, the world spent $875.5B on solar energy; $711B on wind...

...$137.5B on biofuels, and 2015, from preliminary projections was even worse for all three forms of so called "renewable energy."

When small hydro, geothermal, and tidal energy is added the grand total spent on so called "renewable energy" amounted between 2004 and 2014 to 1.804 trillion dollars.

This is the claim registered by the so called "Frankfurt School UNEP Collaborating Center for Climate and the Environment".

Their data may be found at their website: Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2015

The amount of money spent on so called "renewable energy" exceeds the individual gross domestic product of countries like Russia, Canada, and Australia.

The amount spent on wind and solar alone exceeds the gross national product of Indonesia, a nation with more than 250 million people living in it.

The result of all this spending in the last ten years is that 2015 was the worst year ever recorded for increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the first year whose average value was more than 3.00 ppm over the previous year. For all of 2016, the weekly rates of comparison with the same week of the previous year are averaging 3.15 ppm.

The figures all represent an enormous failure. Of course this is an unpopular thing to say, and one can get in a lot of trouble and hear infinite amounts of whining that amounts to denial for saying it, as I have learned, but it is nonetheless, irrespective of whose hair it singes, the truth.

So called "renewable energy" is not sustainable because of its intense demand for metals and other materials, many of which are fairly exotic. The low energy to mass ratio - which by the way is made even worse by the thermodynamically absurd plan to "store" energy - means that there is not enough material on the entire planet to sustain it very much longer.

Solar and wind energy, combined, do not provide even 5 of the 560 exajoules humanity consumes each year. Their entire annual output assembled over half a century or relentless cheering for them does not exceed the single year increase in dangerous natural gas use.

Continuing this vast extremely expensive experiment and expecting a different result is not going to change a damned thing.

The world built close to 450 nuclear plants in a period of about 25 years, with the world's largest producer of nuclear energy, the United States, with roughly 100 such plants built, enjoying some of the lowest electricity prices in the world, although prices are rising nationally because of our desire to run down the so called "renewable energy" rabbit hole.

Worldwide, nuclear power plants produce about 28 exajoules of primary energy, and easily outstrip all the world's forms of so called "renewable energy" combined.

Now we hear that "nuclear energy is too expensive" and "nuclear energy is too slow."

These are announcements that what has already happened is impossible.

There is no reason that nuclear power plants should cost $10 billion dollars each, other than the fact that ignorant people - like arsonists complaining about forest fires - have done everything in their power to destroy nuclear intellectual and physical infrastructure by continuous specious appeals to fear and ignorance. This results in practically every nuclear plant built in modern times being a "FOAKE" case, "first of a kind engineering."

Suppose though that we spent $10B on each reactor, each designed, unlike wind turbines or solar panels, to run for 60 years, more than half a century. For the money squandered on solar and wind alone in the last ten years, we could have built 85 nuclear plants in the last ten years. The thermal output of a large scale nuclear plant is roughly 3000 MW(th), plus or minus a few hundred MW, registered as primary energy, which translates to an average annual energy yield of 95 petajoules. Eighty-five plants would yield thus close to 8 exajoules, and do so, without replacement, for 60 years. Each plant built would represent a gift made by our generation to the future generations.

That's not how we live today, of course; we place no value on the future, and couldn't care less about future generations but if we did...

I oppose spending another dime on so called "renewable energy." We have a technology that is far superior, more sustainable, and far cleaner. No amount of money will make so called "renewable energy" work, and, I note, with more than passing disgust, that since the wind does not always blow, and the sun doesn't always shine, it makes the "need" for dangerous natural gas (or worse, batteries) permanent.

I'm sorry if that offends anyone, but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't state clearly what I have found out. I often feel like the mythical Cassandra, who always told the truth but was never believed, but that is what it is.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

I note that for several millenniums, the world lived on "renewable energy," albeit with dire consequences. It was abandoned at the beginning of the 19th century because most human beings lived dire, short lives, of miserable poverty. This should tell you something. One of the main reasons for the extreme interest of Europeans in their new discovery of North America was that they were pretty much totally deforested. Thus, the idea that so called "renewable energy" is a good idea is not novel or new. It's quite the opposite; it's reactionary.

I have written at length along these lines, with a healthy dose of references from the primary scientific literature, a series on why so called "renewable energy" is not sustainable:

Sustaining the Wind Part 1 – Is So Called “Renewable Energy” the Same as “Sustainable Energy?”

I have also written about nuclear energy and human energy poverty, which is, of course, a particularly dire form of poverty with dire health, social, moral and intellectual consquences: Current World Energy Demand, Ethical World Energy Demand, Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come

I don't think you are qualified to discuss energy policy.

This said, I have often heard Sanders supporters on this site claim that those of us who support Ms. Clinton are either stupid or venal or completely unwilling to discuss the issues. I've taken the effort to engage you here on an issue, climate change, but I find your responses to be uninformed and weak.

I do appreciate, however, your willingness to engage me, however unpleasant this exchange may have been for you.

As I've stated, there are some things Mr. Sanders believes with which I agree, but given that the environment and climate change are the number one issues in my mind, I regard Senator Sanders to be completely ignorant of the issue in its entirety. His acceding to the highest office in this country would be an environmental disaster of the first degree, not because of bad intentions, but from actions conducted in a miasma of ignorance.

I could never, ever, in good conscience support a man like Senator Sanders to be the Democratic nominee. We don't need ideological rhetoric as a substitute for thinking, and on this important issue, Senator Sanders has clearly engaged in very, very, very little thought.

Thanks for chatting. Have a nice day tomorrow, and enjoy the weekend.