Shadow1980 said:
What I'm saying is that laymen debating the very validity of the science itself, with some of the detractors outright claiming "CONSPIRACY!", is pointless and unproductive. It's not much different than us debating whether plate tectonics is real or just a conspiracy to hide the "fact" that the Earth is hollow. Politics and money should never be an excuse to reject science. Just because those dirty hippies at Greenpeace are proclaiming the end of the world doesn't mean the scientists are full of shit. Just because you don't like the Big Bad Gubmint doesn't mean the scientists are lying to us. Just because you might lose some short-term profits doesn't mean you should work to sow doubt about the science. Lumping in the scientists with the non-scientist activists is counterproductive and intellectually dishonest. What I'm saying is that we should take the scientists at their word. The world is warming, we are the cause, and there is a chance, however slight, that the warming could be sufficient over the next century to have detrimental effects well beyond the costs to solve the problem. Millions of people displaced by rising seas, crop disruptions, increase in frequency and severity of extreme weather events, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, spread of tropical diseases, disruption of ocean currents, loss of mountain glaciers. These problems are most likely solvable, and global warming isn't going to cause the end of civilization itself (unless we find a way to burn every bit of recoverable oil and coal in the Earth's crust), but it would be prohibitively expensive and millions would still suffer in even middle-of-the-road scenarios. The warmer it gets, the greater potential for worse scenarios and thus greater cost to adapt. It's not alarmism. It's not a plot to establish totalitarian communism. It's real science. What I am saying is that we can solve the problem with technology we already have, and we don't necessarily have to use solutions frequently suggested by liberals. We could offer positive incentives or lend money to utilities to get them to invest more in and gradually change to nuclear, wind, solar, etc. I personally think that liberals and environmentalists bear at least some of the blame themselves for their knee-jerk rejection of nuclear power, which the data clearly shows is a statistically far safer form of power generation than coal or natural gas. Think of solving the problem as more like insurance. Yeah, you might have less money in your pockets each month just to buy something you might not ever need, but you get it anyway just in case shit happens. You may go your whole life without ever crashing your car of having a house fire or a catastrophic illness, but in the worst-case scenario you'll want that insurance. And just like how some insurance companies offer partial refunds for being a good driver, getting off of fossil fuels for electricity generation and automotive fuels would have benefits beyond preventing potential harm in the future. Even ignoring global warming, fossil fuels kill hundreds of thousands each year and cost humanity many millions of dollars just from the direct effects of pollution. |
I don't get why people would paint the rejection of nuclear fission power as such an irrational move.
The tech generates wastes that have to be safely secured for thousends of years (more like forgotten and leaking into our water supplies in a few hundred years) and those costs aren't factored into it's energy costs lowballing them in comparison to other tech. Statistics also mean very little when a "once in 2 million years" event of a meltdown has happened twice in 50 years of commercial use and render large fertile areas unuseable for decades. Additionally it's also a nice target for terror or during all-out-warfare due to the severe consequences of a meltdown.
From my perspective it looks like a dead-end road and the money is much better spent on research of fusion and solar power aswell as energy storage.
