I objected, as follows:
Fossil fuels are deadly in many different ways. So are nukes.
We don't have to accept either. The alternatives are feasible, and in aggregate more than sufficient. They can (and now *will*) be developed as rapidly as nukes were during ww2 and the Cold War - money is no object when you really really want something.
Oil is shite, coal is shite, nuclear fission is shite.
Water is good (rivers, waves, tides), air is good (wind, a/c heat exchangers), earth is good (geothermal heat exchange and extraction), and fire is good (geothermal steam and direct heating in volcanic areas). Insulation and passive heating is good. Sun is good (passive heating of water and buildings, solar film, solar concentration plants).
Storage and battery technologies will soon be up to the task of evening out supply and demand, and large scale provision of power by utilities will be smoothly linked with small-scale local production, and transmission technologies will even out geographical disadvantages (High Voltage Direct Current).
There will be immense economies of energy by way of local production of power, food, etc - rooftop solar collectors, wind-turbines and gardens. Every stream will be able to produce electric power for local use.
Nuclear fusion and extraction of electricity from the environment (Tesla lives!) are good, but a few decades from use on a mass scale.
There's no point whatever in us lobotomizing ourselves to put ourselves in the position of today's rulers and fuel/power profiteers. We don't have to pretend it's a choice between Death by coal, death by oil, or death by radiation.
Their "realism" is reptilian self-interest trumpeted as the General Good by corrupt media, prostituted expertise, and worshippers of the Established Fact tm.
Our realism is removing these bastards from power and setting in motion an international drive to realize the potential I've sketched above on a scale a thousand times greater than the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan or the Race to the Moon.
Their approach reduces human beings to passive victims, ours magnifies them into active makers and doers.
2 comments:
I'd suggest being a little careful with water. Note over 35 million being displaced by India's dam(ned) building projects in the last 50 years. The "Nehruvian dream" of building the "Temples of new India" ultimately became nothing more than a death trap into displacement for millions of rural poor. As regards the use of energy much has been said about the dangers of the use of nuclear energy. But it must be noted exactly what we want. Are we aiming at a comprehensive decrease of energy consumption or its Rational use ? My friend Pushkar had once explained the dialectic of ecology with an example of the Amazon rain forests. He said "Give it to the people of Latin America to exploit it under a democratic workers state and they would exploit the area only to the extent that it meets their needs. Give it to the Brazillian bourgeois to us they would soon make it into a desert to serve their greed for profit" . The example fits in well and i think it can more than summarize what should be our attitude towards the environmental issues. We aren't the type to make the call "Back to nature" ( Like Rousseau :P ) . We march towards the future but the future is one which we shall make collectively and rationally. Nuclear energy if you compare to Coal and other carbon based resources is still the 'cleaner option'. The problem is that it is also the riskier option. The problem lay not in nuclear fission in itself but its rational use developing the technology needed to guarantee its safe usage. And technology of course implies focusing on developing that scientific base which cannot happen as long as Corporations run our lives :-) . A scientist under them is no different from a worker in a factory working only within the framework of an assigned tasks. The difference being the tasks of the scientists are more sophistic hence, he gets paid more =).
You're right to mention caution - but this applies to all the elements and not just water. This is where democratic, collective, rational decision-making comes in.
As for nuclear fission, measured in the long term it's not cleaner. It's also very uneconomical if you take all the costs into account - which bourgeois economists and governments never ever do. The evidence for this will emerge very clearly in the debate which will rage over the next few months.
The relation of science to power is very sexual in character - in slave society it's a slave woman, in feudal society it's a serving wench, in bourgeois society it's a prostitute, and in socialist society it's a partner.
One of my greatest objections to carbon-based energy concerns the long term and is almost never mentioned in discussions. It's the fantastic utility of these substances as raw materials. It's mindless waste to burn them.
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