If it is a Climate Emergency*, act like it is an emergency. Nomenclature is all fun and games what with the progression from global warming to climate change to climate weirding to CLIMATE EMERGENCY!!! but words have meaning and if the latest iteration is meant to forcefully describe the situation rather than to stampede the bison over the cliff act like it.
and another thing....
sorry, never mind, Here's Reason mag, April 2:
It would significantly reduce carbon emissions, but onerous regulation stands in the way.
This Thursday, Earth Day, politicians and activists will shout more about "the climate crisis."
I don't think it's a crisis. COVID-19, malaria, exploding debt, millions of poor children dying from diarrhea—those are genuine crises.
But global warming may become a real problem, so it's particularly absurd that Earth Day's activists rarely mention the form of energy that could most quickly reduce greenhouse gases: nuclear power.
When France converted to nuclear, it created the world's fastest reduction in carbon emissions.
But in America, nuclear growth came to a near halt 40 years ago, after an accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.
The partial meltdown killed no one. It would probably have been forgotten had Hollywood not released a nuclear scare movie, The China Syndrome, days before.
"People saw that and freaked out," complains Joshua Goldstein, author of A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change (with nuclear power).
One of the people still freaking out is solar activist Harvey Wasserman. "I live in terror of the next accident," he says in my latest video.
His anti-nuclear argument has basically won in most of the world. Nuclear plants are being shut down.
"Why?" I ask Wasserman. No one was hurt at Three Mile Island.
Wasserman replies that after the accident, he went to nearby homes and people showed him "their tumors, their hair loss, their lesions."
"It's bunk," I tell him. "It's been studied. People lose hair and get cancer and they attribute it to Three Mile Island, but it's not true."
"Having been there," Wasserman responds, "it's my clear assertion that people were killed."
Actual scientists don't agree. In fact, they find less cancer near Three Mile Island than in other parts of Pennsylvania.
But what about Fukushima? That was more serious. Today, clueless media quote Greenpeace claiming Fukushima's radiation could "change our DNA!"
Also bunk. "There was heightened radiation, but it was all at this low level below what we consider to be safe," explains Goldstein.
The low level of radiation released at Fukushima was hardly a threat. What killed people was the panicked response.
"Everyone freaked out and ordered a massive sudden evacuation. That caused suicide, depression….Fear of radioactivity really did kill people."
One nuclear accident, Chernobyl, did kill, and its radiation may still kill thousands more....
....MUCH MORE
Okay, another thing: Who came up with "climate weirding"? It sounds stupid.
And another thing. In Saturday's "Green economic growth is an article of ‘faith’ devoid of scientific evidence" I mentioned David MacKay and his book "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air":
....You should read it. And there is really no reason not to. Concurrent with it being published, Dr. MacKay put it online on a dedicated website: "http://www.withouthotair.com/".
Here's the chapter on nukes: 24 Nuclear?
....In contrast, the amount of natural uranium required to provide the
So the material streams flowing into and out of nuclear reactors are
same amount of energy as 16 kg of fossil fuels, in a standard fission reactor,
is 2 grams; and the resulting waste weighs one quarter of a gram. (This 2 g
of uranium is not as small as one millionth of 16 kg per day, by the way,
because today’s reactors burn up less than 1% of the uranium.) To deliver
2 grams of uranium per day, the miners at the uranium mine would have
to deal with perhaps 200 g of ore per day.
small, relative to fossil-fuel streams. “Small is beautiful,” but the fact that
the nuclear waste stream is small doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem; it’s
just a “beautifully small” problem.....
The guy was a freakin' Cambridge physicist, at the freakin' Cavendish Laboratory, where they mint Nobel Laureates. The Queen of England endowed a professorship for him, the first Regius Professorship in Engineering in Cambridge's freakin' history!
He knows stuff. Or did. He died way too early.
*Here's Scientific American , April 12, 2021:
We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to Say So
.... The statement we have issued was coordinated by Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative with more than 400 media partners. Here it is:
April 12, 2021
From Covering Climate Now, Scientific American, Columbia Journalism Review, the Nation, the Guardian, Noticias Telemundo, Al Jazeera, Asahi Shimbun and La Repubblica:
