Oct 25 2008
Original article, by Joe Mowrey and sub-titled Which Candidate Supports Petraeus, the Bailout, the Death Penalty, Nuclear Power, the Occupation, the Cuban Embargo …, via counterpunch.com.
Ooooh…a guessing game. I wonder who it could be? Hmmmm? Let’s find out below the fold!
Apr 23 2008
In Meteor Blades’s post, Denis Hayes explained why nuclear power is no answer to global warming and climate change. Here’s some more…
The nuclear power industry and its astroturf supporters have been attempting to co-opt the discussion about global warming and climate change, and use it to rationalize nuclear’s continued existence. And the industry has powerful friends in Congress. As the New York Times reported, last summer:
A one-sentence provision buried in the Senate’s recently passed energy bill, inserted without debate at the urging of the nuclear power industry, could make builders of new nuclear plants eligible for tens of billions of dollars in government loan guarantees….
The biggest champion of the loan guarantees is Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy Committee and one of the nuclear industry’s strongest supporters in Congress….
Power companies have tentative plans to put the 28 new reactors at 19 sites around the country. Industry executives insist that banks and Wall Street will not provide the money needed to build new reactors unless the loans are guaranteed in their entirety by the federal government.
Which is curious. Because if the industry has such promise, you would think it wouldn’t need the government to assume the entirety of its financial risks. The problem, however, is that nuclear power still has the same problems it’s always had, which is why Wall Street won’t back it. And part of the reason it’s not worth backing is that the latest excuse for its existence is a sham. As Reuters explained:
Nuclear power would only curb climate change by expanding worldwide at the rate it grew from 1981 to 1990, its busiest decade, and keep up that rate for half a century, a report said on Thursday.
Specifically, that would require adding on average 14 plants each year for the next 50 years, all the while building an average of 7.4 plants to replace those that will be retired, the report by environmental leaders, industry executives and academics said.
If that sounds like an impossibly enormous amount of plants to build, that’s because it is. But the story gets worse.
Dec 03 2007
A warmer planet is what we need most. Then we won’t need heat in winter.
Al Gore didn’t say that? Maybe it was somebody else.
I am not a fan of the Conservative Alternative (Al Gore’s own description of himself). So far I have managed to avoid lynching by idolaters of a great movie maker but lousy scientist. Just not taken with wingers but to each his own.
Oct 16 2007
Wapo: A coalition of far-left Indian communist parties have effectively killed the US-India nuclear deal, leaving Administration officials with egg all over their faces once again. But you won’t learn that reading the Post piece. FOX isn’t even running the story right now. Drudge neither.
Reuters by way of contrast, puts the facts up high: “Indian Communists Reject US Nuclear Pact”.
Why is the right-wing noise machine blacking the India-Nuke deal story out, and the Wapo burying the facts?
Because getting beating by a bunch of supposedly dead and buried communists confirms the terrible inconvenient truth: US Soft Power is melting faster than the polar ice-caps.