Climate Change - increasingly horrible disasters loom

I love nuclear but you are right that lefties are 50/50 on nuclear, which is unfortunate

I also love nuclear and constantly hear it being advocated for on the "left".

I think we can both agree that lobbyists who fight against it (and let's be real, all politics is completely captured by special interests) are a huge problem.

Blaming opposition to nuclear power for using lobbyists is misguided. The nuclear industry has no shortage of lobbyists and pr consultants. It is, after all, an industry which invariably requires huge state investment and government guarantees to operate. They are an effective lobby too.

Nuclear power is appealing because it resolves the biggest problem of our current energy industry, namely emissions.

But it replaces them with other issues. Waste is a problem, accidents are a problem, conflicts are a problem, the industry struggles to address counterfeit and fraud in certificates and spare parts, and the necessary supply chains needed for plants to operate are weak to international instability.

These problems tend to be addressed very hazily with vague promises of modern technology resolving all the issues, but there is not much offered in terms of actual detail and specifications.

Many ignore all that, which is a mistake, but that still leaves the problem of scale. There is little to indicate that the nuclear industry can deliver energy solutions to neither the scale needed to replace fossil fuels to any meaningful degree, and there is nothing that indicates that it can deliver it at the required time-frames.

nuclear energy power as a lobby is a joke, there is almost no private money involved in the sector worldwide.

I mean Airbnb is a more powerful lobby by an order of magnitude than nuclear power is.

real lobbies nowadays are backed by companies that capitalize easily one trillion or a lot more, of private money.

there aren't 100 billion of private money in nuclear. it's small, and what there is , is state money. they are utterly insignificant

AirBnB doesn't require enormous government investment and guarantees, it just needs the government to look the other way. Small does not mean ineffective. The nuclear power industry and its lobbying organizations is also good at gaining traction on social media and traditional media.

As a result, a lot of people have been convinced that nuclear power is problem-free, cost-effective and can be implemented at meaningful scales to tackle the problems it claims to resolve. Now, it isn't impossible that decades into future, nuclear power could deliver those claims. But right now, the claims are light on specifics.

Nuclear power is a very easy and elegant principle, so it is easy to portray its operation as easy and elegant. However, the totality of the operation is very complex and the supply chain is massive and fragile. Nuclear power is historically extremely expensive per energy unit, to the point where it pretty much necessitates government subsidy and guarantees, it can't survive in a free market. Nuclear power plans are also safety-critical to the point where the government would be forced to pick up the bill when companies go under. Construction also takes enormous effort and time, so it is an important question whether nuclear power can even deliver results to the scale we need and in the time-frame we need it.

Trying to research these issues is a bit of an interesting rabbit's hole. You'll find a lot a eerily similar sounding answers, slogans and pamphlets, but very little that points to actual implementable solutions. You'll find tidbits about "potential new reactor types", but that's a bit like reading about "potential new engines" when you're looking to buy a car.

More research is fine, and so is modernization efforts of existing fleets of plants. As a solution to current environmental issues, I can't see how nuclear power is anywhere close to deliver. Right now, it seems like a bit of a red herring to me.

The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has recently reached 430 ppm for the first time in about 5 -10 million years.

During the last 3 million years until the 20th century, the concentration oscillated between 160 and 280 ppm.

Maga Elon musk are lefties now ….

The garbage island was a big deal for a little bit not too long ago. They have those oceanic garbage trawlers I believe as a direct result of that information campaign

Yes but when leftists realized the fault was entirely and uniquely east Asian they decided to talk less about it because they can't blame MAGA or western capitalism for Vietnam china and the Philippines actions

The reason it can't ever be completely emptied is because it's where all of Luciom's opinions end up.

I think this is why Luciom and his minions fails to acknowledge climate changes and why they believes in other dubious theories (conspiracies) …

They just fails at comprehending what bayes theorem is and how it works shrug .

That theorem just absolutely crushes all the arguments they have if you honestly just integrate variables
(ie: the number of bias scientist , the number of studies that confirms climate changes is real , etc.)
in a honest way .

Of course if they don’t believe in stats then nothing can help them.

It was a stupidly worded tweet yes. The pacific garbage patch is a big deal, as is the general pollution of the oceans, water reserves and ice with plastics and micro-plastics. It is talked about plenty.

It might not dominate the headlines, but nothing really does except the latest generation of world-leading politicians we have been blessed with, everything is about them these days. If it isn't, they make it about them.

If the tweet had been about the North Atlantic garbage patch it would have been more accurate, as it is for some reason rarely mentioned.

So the path toward net zero requires going through the worst blackouts in western history in peacetime

Let's add this existential, intolerable risk to the long list of the cons of "net zero" shall we?

I dont think it's required is it?

Hardly an existentital risk in any case. Unlike the alternative.

Exactly. It's like if all the experts believe housing values can't drop and mortgages are a solid investment you know that's true. Or if you see lots of influential and smart people putting their money in a company with a novel way to do blood testing, you can know their technology is solid without knowing what it actually is. Plus, if you are a climate scientist I'm sure there are no career impacts at all if you try to publish something that goes against the grain.

24h blackouts aren't existential?

dude wants to live like the roman legions and is scared of the dark.

romans didn't have everything in their life based on electricity, for ex they didn't live at the 8th or 14th floor of a building.

You know that, and yet ...

I'm sure we can work something in between.

To the current government maybe

Beyond that they will upgrade the energy grid.

Yes but the distinction is that science with human interaction ( housing crisis or company failures) cannot expunge fraud (which is what happened mixed with bad unnatural actions by many participants in the markets) and stuff like that while in nature fraud isn’t happening .

Now yes u can advocate all climate scientists are frauds but it wouldn’t be hard to proved them all wrong like in any other scientific changes on new data’s being revealed .

But for what is worth :
[YOUTUBE]/R13BD8qKeTg?si=RwOG4VWBualBItvZ
[/YOUTUBE]

6m30s -7m10s

Ps:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

fred

Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States

If the people in your examples had been like climate change deniers, they would never have stopped investing in mortgages and Elizabeth Holmes would have been a lauded innovator.

A case in point is the US that now wants to sell itself as a necessary strategic defender of the Arctic. However, somewhat awkwardly it has no strategic capacity to do so in arctic conditions. This due to American conservatives having spent the last 30 years denying the climate change that would eventually make this necessary, and American liberals having acquiesced them at every turn.

Even now, expanding such capacities will likely been be very difficult due to how strongly climate change denial is ingrained in American politics.

I'm not sure that i agree with the last paragraph. Denying the existence of climate change isn't the prevailing view generally in the U.S., or even the prevailing view among Republicans. I would say the prevailing view among Republicans is something like the following: "Sure. The climate is changing, but the idea that we need to take urgent action is liberal hysteria. Also, if something needs to be done at some point, I'm sure we will figure it out." If the goal is to diminish or limit human impact on the environment, there isn't much difference between the idiocy of the second position and the idiocy of denying that climate change is occurring at all.

But Trump isn't even pretending to care about protecting the environment of the Arctic. When Trump refers to protecting the Arctic, he is talking about protecting non-biological resources for future exploitation by the U.S. Acknowledging that climate change is occurring (while simultaneously denying that we need to do anything about) obviously is inconsistent with trying to protect the natural world from human impact. But it isn't necessarily inconsistent (or as inconsistent) with protecting non-biological resources for future exploitation.

I am not really talking about what "most Americans believe", I am talking about what America does politically. While your liberals and majority might accept climate change, they sacrifice it politically at pretty much every junction. The exception might have been the New Green Deal, but that is pretty much being dismantled now.

As for my comment on the arctic, I am referring to the strategic defense of the Arctic, meaning to protect it from aggressive military expansion by Russia and China. Due to climate change denial, the US has not invested in military capacities to do this for the last 3 decades and can't at this point even muster a functional long range icebreaker. The reason has largely been because investing to be ready for what we are now seeing would have required acceptance of past climate change projections.