Yesterday's post advised Democrats to do what I thought was prudent on the issue of climate.
A reader disagreed.
Today's post is best read in conjunction with my post yesterday.
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| Yesterday's post |
I wrote that Democratic policy on abortion, emphasizing a woman's freedom and choice, is politically successful. I analogized to the climate issue, and suggested that successful policies to address CO2 levels would need to increase choices. Democrats' climate policies and messages, I wrote, should emphasize improved technologies in green energy, not prohibitions and mandates, which would backfire. I see progress in a democracy as a series of oscillations between advances and backlash in the public mood. Political winners seize opportunities but over-reach, empowering their opposition. My work in politics in my young adulthood led me to be wary of initiatives that gain popular support, but lose it. I was warning Democrats not to do what many red-state legislatures are doing now, banning abortion and creating backlash that is costing them elections they were predicted to win.
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| Amazon |
Fair criticism by Herb Rothschild
Your reasoning throughout today's blog is terribly flawed, Peter.
Let's start with the one about trans people. "Male-to-female trans athletes and trans people in traditional gendered spaces are another instance of forced interaction. It isn't your own thing. It is now our thing. This compulsory interaction creates political pushback and Republicans are exploiting it." I'll ignore the matter of athletic competition, which is a vexed question, and focus on other interactions. I remember a student from Tennessee saying in one of my college classes (1959, it was), "It's my choice not to sit by Negro students." I find the parallel apt. What are trans people supposed to do when cis people don't want to be next to them in, say, an airport bathroom? We're talking about public spaces here, Peter, and who gets to say who can be in them. Public policy, not private choice, must govern this matter.
As far as pronouns, you simply lost your thread of thought. No one is forced to call a non-binary person "they" any more than white Southerners were forced to call Black people Mr. and Ms. It is considerate, but no one made it compulsory. Gradually, change for the better occurred.
As for vaccinations, you at least acknowledged that this is not a mere personal choice. Actually, no state government made COVID vaccinations mandatory. The armed services did so, but that was neither Democratic nor Republican. But states do make vaccinations mandatory for public school children, with every state allowing exemptions for medical and religious reasons and some states (like Oregon) allowing exemptions for philosophic reasons, which in my view is a mistake. Vaccinations are a matter of public health and thus, to some extent, must be a matter of public policy, not private choice. Surely you can understand that, Peter.
When you write about climate change, a subject on which your good sense fails you time and again, you are wrong in several ways. First, I see no policies being enacted or proposed that compel people to change their ways. There is a marked distinction between declaring that by such-and-such a year all cars sold in California must be electric (a proper policy choice) and telling people with gas-fueled cars that they must get rid of them and buy an electric car (who is doing that, Peter?). The same difference holds for mandating that all homes built in Ashland starting in such-and-such a year must have heat pumps and telling current homeowners that they must install heat pumps. We've repeatedly enacted such policies. For example, we required car manufacturers to install catalytic converters in all cars beginning in a certain year, but we didn't require owners of cars without them to retrofit their cars.
As for "shaming" people about their personal choices on matters such as food choices, I'm not sure whom you're faulting here. I don't know of any Democratic politicians filing bills to ban meat. I think you're just expressing your usual irritability toward "progressive Democrats." But leaving aside the loaded term "shaming," why shouldn't people advocate for what they think are good choices? That's how change happens. It happened regarding wearing furs. No law banned that choice, but it has become increasingly socially unacceptable. Good!.
Returning to your remarks on climate policy, I reiterate criticisms I've expressed before on this topic. First, you are wrong that promoting green policies is politically unpopular. Two, even if it were, the threat of global warming is so dire that if Democrats abandoned their position on addressing the threat through public policy, it really wouldn't matter much if they lost the White House.
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32 comments:
Herbert is too right. The condition of our planet and the condition of our republic are the legacies we're leaving our offspring and right now, they're both a shambles. If our kids had any sense, they'd dick the war babies and baby boomers still plaguing Washington out of there. We've done enough damage.
On the other hand, some of the younger people are even worse, such as the ironically named "Freedom Caucus." I'm afraid all the pollution being produced, especially the outhouse gases spewed by White-wing media, are turning people's minds to mush.
I think that between Herb and me, we probably have the full spectrum of opinion covered on all the current issues. The one place I agree with Herb is about vaccines.
Herb chose to ignore the trans controversy about athletic competition in women’s sports. But that is actually the biggest controversy about anything to do with the trans issue. Should people whose bodies were built by testosterone be allowed to compete against people whose bodies were not? Is it fair that Lia Thomas wins all those awards thanks to testosterone? Should female athletes have to see Thomas’ male genitalia in the locker room?
Herb says pronouns aren’t required. Perhaps he hasn’t recently been part of meetings in academia where everyone was asked for their pronouns, and the social pressure to provide them was so enormous that only especially brave and argumentative people would hold their ground and refuse. I eventually came up with a good strategy: I would tell them to use my name instead of pronouns, because I did not feel like discussing my gender identification in public. They didn’t like it, but it shut them up.
Herb sees no policies that force people to change their ways. He could try to buy an incandescent lightbulb and see how it goes. He could try to have a new house built with a gas stove in places that prohibit that. His point seems to be that lawmakers understand the limits of what the public will put up with and are cleverly staying within those limits. But they are mandating everything they think they can get away with.
Regarding climate change, it is obvious to anyone who bothers to look that CO2 emission goals are not going to be met. China and India continue to construct new coal powered electrical generation plants. If this is actually such a big f*cking emergency, why aren’t the responsible authorities acting like it? All we ever hear about is wind and solar, and those technologies are not going to solve the problem. If the emergency is for real, we need an immediate increase in nuclear power generation and Manhattan Project-level research into geoengineering.
But none of that is actually happening, which leads me to wonder if the responsible authorities are actually serious about climate change, or if they are just virtue signaling for some political purpose.
While I usually strongly disagree with nearly everything MT writes, and perhaps unsurprisingly this diatribe is no exception, I'll choose instead to focus on one area in which I do agree with him and that's on the term "Manhattan Project" as it relates to climate change.
Point #1 (and this is coming from a person who has environmental issues as the #'s 1-10 most important factors I consider when voting: we 100% need to embrace nuclear power. Yeah, there's huge downsides such as meltdowns and the spreading of catastrophic nuclear waste across large areas, but on the other hand there's the increasing certainty of the extinction of the human race without drastic action and it is absolutely IMPERATIVE that we get to Net Carbon Zero emissions (and indeed will go into negative emissions via "capture and sequestration" technologies) As Soon As Possible in order to not doom our species. Nuclear isn't perfect or even remotely ideal, but it doesn't add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and is a transitional energy bridge to...
Point #2: we need a Manhattan Project level investment not into Pandora's Box type technologies like geoengineering, but instead into more efficiently harvesting and storing the almost unthinkable amounts of energy that are *FREELY AVAILABLE TO US*!!!
- Consider for a moment that enough solar energy falls upon a pick-your-random 40 square mile area of desert in Saudi Arabia everyday to power the energy use of the ENTIRE WORLD for that same day! Cars, houses, the internet, literally everything. The Sun alone provides us an unthinkable amount of free energy, not to mention such other natural (and harvestable) sources of energy like Wind, Wave, and Geothermal to name just a few.
The modern day Manhattan Project we need is one that steers vast resources and research capacities into drastically better and more efficiently harnessing these essentially limitless energy sources we have available to us. And as a side bonus, utilizing them doesn't have the potential to cause the near term extinction of ours and most other species on Earth.
That's the kind of Manhattan Project I'd like to see.
WokeGuy: just a heads up the Gen4 reactors don't have the same picky water problems that Gen3 reactors do. The US is definitely embracing nuclear, but the newer stuff is just getting off the ground. When it arrives the meltdown concerns are far less. It just took some time getting to this point and along the way we didn't want to build any more Gen3s, for reasons you mention.
For the rest: I ask how many tax dollars will it take for 4% of the global population to stop climate change? All of them? Would it be worth it to divert funds from Ukraine to Greenland ice?
Wasn’t it Ronnie Rerun who was paid by GE, re nukes, who made this sakes pitch? “Safe, clean, too cheap to meter.”?
For that, and plenty of other reasons, regarding mostly safety, I’m skeptical of nuclear power, especially the single family nukes, which seem particularly well suited for terrorism.
Nuclear - what an interesting idea! Now that we've blanketed the Earth with plastic and forever chemicals, let's do the same with spent fuel rods. They only remain deadly for 100,000 years or so.
From the US Department of Energy:
U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards. That’s a pretty small “blanket”.
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Unscientific anti-nuclear hysteria is interfering with the adoption of an energy source that will be necessary to successfully fight global warming.
Expanding nuclear power to an extent that would affect climate change would exponentially increase the amount of spent fuel rods, and we still haven't figured out what to do with the ones we've got. For some reason, nobody wants such deadly garbage in their vicinity, so let's make a bunch more. Very clever!
Omigod, Michael T! That'sa small blanket? Tell me you’re not serious! What’s a large blanket, then? A micron thick over the usa?
10 yards deep in a football field is not very big. I am totally serious.
20 yards deep in 100 football fields would keep us going for a long time.
What’s the alternative? Burning coal? Living in caves in the dark?
Wind and solar cannot be the total solution given that it’s dark half the time and the wind doesn’t always blow.
IN ADDITION:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/nuclear-power-and-the-environment.php#:~:text=Nuclear%20energy%20produces%20radioactive%20waste&text=These%20materials%20can%20remain%20radioactive,human%20health%20and%20the%20environment.
“The United States does not currently have a permanent disposal facility for high-level nuclear waste.” With, or without, football fields.
The alternatives include wind, solar, geothermal and hydropower, all of which could be developed if we had the political will. And they don't leave waste that remains deadly for millenia.
Wind and solar are intermittent, and cannot support base load requirements.
Hydropower is all built out and under attack by environmentalists, who want (for instance) the Snake River dams removed. Where do you think a new dam could be built?
It’s not clear how geothermal could scale up, and how soon that could happen. Newer forms of it involve fracking, which environmentalists oppose. Yellowstone could be a promising geothermal site. How do you think that would go over?
That leaves either nuclear or magical thinking.
Anyone who thinks alternative energy sources such as solar have reached their peak of efficiency and productiveness is obviously unaware of how technology develops. I remember when it was believed that a computer would never be able to beat a good chess player.
The sun hits the earth with more energy in one hour than humans use in a year. We haven't begun to exploit its potential, but it takes research and development - i.e. investment. We'd be fools to invest it instead in something so hazardous to future generations as nuclear reactors.
We don’t need a permanent disposal site for spent fuel rods. They are doing just fine in the casks at reactor sites. 75 years of experience has demonstrated a lack of any problem associated with them. They can be reprocessed into new nuclear fuel if we ever develop the political world to do that.
The sun hits the earth with more energy in one hour than humans use in a year.
So doing some simple math, all we need to do is cover 1/365th of the surface of the Earth with solar cells to supply us with the energy we need? And that area needs to be distributed all around the Earth, so part of it is always in the sun?
Who exactly is going to build the planetary electrical distribution grid a scheme like that would require? Does any of that sound practical? Magical thinking…
Selective thinking much, mt?
Perhaps nuke lovers' retirement relies on nuke investments?I ask because they are acting like they’re stuck with Trumponian logic.
… political will …
Stupid voice recognition… 🤷♂️
"So...all we need to do is cover 1/365th of the surface of the Earth with solar cells to supply us with the energy we need?"
There you go again, basing assumptions on current technology when I'm talking about developing something better. And we will, whether you like it or not.
No nuke investments that I know of. My financial manager takes care of those details.
My motives are pure. 😀
Who is the technologist? My guess would be that it’s me.
I have not heard any credible predictions of a huge increase in the efficiency of solar cells. Perhaps you could post a reference to such a prediction?
If you can’t, then it sounds like magical thinking to me.
What we see here is a failure of the imagination. In the future, solar power collectors will bear as much resemblance to today's solar panels as computer chips do to vacuum tubes.
The amount of power produced by the sun at the surface of the Earth is approximately 1 kW/m². The average nuclear powerplant produces about one gigawatt of power. Assume 100% efficient solar cells, and replacing that nuclear powerplant with solar would require 1,000,000 m², or 0.39 square miles. So land usage versus nuclear seems approximately equal to me.
But that’s on a clear day with the sun high in the sky. So even at 100% efficiency, you still have all the other problems of night time, sun low in the sky, clouds, and how to distribute the energy produced by the solar cells. The leap from 20% efficiency to 100% efficiency would not be a game changer.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 430 quintillion Joules of energy from the sun hits the earth each hour; humans use 410 quintillion Joules a year, and the average American household uses about 40 billion Joules of electricity.
It’s better to use watts for a calculation like this. Scientific notation: 3.8 * 10^2 means 3.8 times 10 to the 2nd power, or 380.
Total solar power delivered to the Earth: 1.73 * 10^17 watts.
Total area of the Earth, considered as a flat disk: 2.5 * 10^4 square miles.
Divide the two, and you get 6.9 * 10^12 watts per square mile.
Total power output of the world: 1.2 * 10^16 watts.
Total square miles of 100% efficient solar to match the world’s power output: 1,700. For 25% efficiency, multiply that by 4.
Maybe you can cover that much of the Earth with solar cells. But remember that for higher latitude places where the sun is not directly overhead, you will need more area. Near the equator is the best, but then you still have to make a grid that will transfer large quantities of power to the dark side of the Earth as night follows day. And this doesn’t take weather into account, or dust storms or other debris covering the solar cells.
How to distribute? Just as we do now: transmission lines. Silly man.
Distribute from where it’s noon to where it’s midnight? That’s one heckuva grid you’re proposing to build.
There's no percentage in trying to argue with someone unable to realize that the size and weight of our current solar panels are nothing like future ones will be. They're already vastly improving, as a link I sent earlier makes clear, but was conveniently ignored.
Nothing about the “size and weight” of solar cells has any bearing on the watts per square meter arriving at the surface of the Earth from the sun. You can break all kinds of laws, but not the laws of physics.
MT quotes the Dept. of Energy regarding U.S. commercial reactors, but doesn't like their measurement of the sun's energy that hitting the earth. What's the point?
I didn’t “dislike” any measurement. I just said that watts were a better way to make calculations about solar power than joules.
You haven’t responded to any of the points I made or pointed out any errors in my calculations. If you wanted to get specific, this might actually turn into a useful conversation.
Your only claim seems to be that some sort of miracle will happen, and a completely new and unanticipated solar technology will magically arrive in our hands. As part of that, you made a completely inapplicable analogy to the development of computers; there is no possibility of anything like Moore Law happening in the realm of solar power.
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