It is interesting that all of the principles that I thought were fundamental to justice (like parties to a criminal investigation having access to all the facts, and not being able to hide them for their agendas) only really came about in the 60s. Really makes you think about how easy it would be for them to go the other way in the hands of a less understanding supreme court.
I think the last four years has exposed just how much policy can be swayed by a single elected official without much oversight. I don't care that the next four years will have a president closer to my political beliefs, I want to to see a reduction in executive power.
The thing that will sit deep within me for at least the next few years is that, no matter how you slice it, a vote for Trump is complicit acceptance of his divisive and harmful behavior. Of course you don't need to be a racist to vote for Trump, but you do need to fear the other options so much that you agree that his behavior and the way that he represents our country to the rest of the world is tolerable compared to what might come after him.
I was on the phone with my mom earlier and one of her friends called her up. She's a republican, but they avoid politics. She asked her, genuinely afraid, if she thought that Harris would steal the presidency and convert the country to socialism. She's not an idiot. She's a physician, but was still so caught up in fear mongering that she genuinely believed that the government would steal her income and that there would be riots in the streets as we turn into a third world nation. I'm going to think about her differently after hearing that.
This is probably the first time in my life where I am going to look at people differently based on who they voted for and I hate that. However, I can't get it out of my head that they voted for a president that has so disgraced the highest office in our country and that they did it because of a fear of the future burning so far inside them that they felt another four years of Trump was preferable to even as bland of a change as a Biden presidency will be.
If you feel that way it may be a sign that you are too far into your own "filter bubble". I'm not saying those views are reasonable, but they are easier to contemplate if you swim in a sea of right-wing viewpoints, some of which actually make some sense. Read Fox News, The Federalist, etc., hangout on r/Conservative, follow the YouTube right-wing rabbit-hole a ways, and you will be really pissed off but probably have a better sense for how people can get sucked into that kind of worldview. My experience is that it takes constant effort to avoid capture by the "default" left-leaning viewpoint that comes through most mainstream news sources. I live in a place where I am exposed to the Trump viewpoint only rarely, and I found myself aghast at some friends who said they were thinking about voting for Trump. But when they explained their reasons for it, it was clear we weighed the importance of things differently, but their reasoning made a lot of sense. But my initial reaction had been outright rejection, like an immune system fighting an invader.
So, your answer to someone feeling distaste for fascists and racists is they just aren't immersed enough in the fascist worldview to feel sympathy for it?
> So, your answer to someone feeling distaste for fascists and racists
There is a lot to unpack there. You already have a prejudiced and a bias going into your thought of them based on their choice of only two real options. Think about that.
You are looking at the world through a straw, almost with an ideological lens of religion. Politics are the new religion in ways, and yours is terrifying.
I don't think this about republicans or any other political group, but if you're a Trump supporter after all that has happened (birtherism, 'grab her by the pussy', banning an entire religion from US entry, separating children at the border, 'Jews will not replace us', refusing to denounce and hiring white supremacists, 'fine people on both sides', 'when someday I leave [office], whether it's in 4 years, 8 years, 12 years, 16 years', praising Putin, Duterte, Kim Jong Un), you are beyond the pale of civilisation. You have supported racism, fascism and a naked grab for power and the destruction of democracy in the US and around the world.
If you break the rules of civilised society and violate the right of others to exist or vote, you can expect to be shunned.
The "Fine people" myth (when you view the entire thing in context):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R6hxPYWD50
The entry ban:
Did you see what happened to that French school teacher? Have you read The Strange Death of Europe?
It doesn't matter though. In that fine people video, even when people were presenting with the reality from the carefully selected video clips they had heard about, they still wouldn't accept it.
The media has damaged our psyche. There are not peaceful protests in Portland right now. There have been riots for months! I use to live in Seattle, and the media did a very poor job of covering CHAZ. I made this:
Antifa is not an idea, it is real. There are cell groups who have done terrible things and the media paints them as peaceful protestors. They're not. They're straight up descendants of The Students for Democratic Society and The Weather Underground ideologically. The protestors in Portland are Domestic Terrorist. The National Guard was finally called in this week to stop them from burning things down.
Suppressing speech: that's fascistic
Getting people fired because they support a politician you don't like: that's fascistic
Calling everyone you don't like a racist or white supremacists: that's fascistic
The hard left, big tech and big media are the fascists.
It's crazy, I feel like I'm just constantly being gas-lit whenever it comes to talking about Trump. "Don't believe the media, it's all rigged against him" "<x bad thing> is all just a myth, you've been duped" "Don't believe your eyes".
It's like, come one, I live in Portland. There's no media conspiracy and the city isn't burning down from "antifa terrorists" or whatever. Take a step out of your filter bubble.
Nothing, but the US media is deeply divided and partisan like everything else - while it’s the biggest it’s watched almost exclusively by right wing republicans, democrats mostly see it as propaganda and lies and don’t watch it at all; and Republicans regard MSNBC in the same light.
> The thing that will sit deep within me for at least the next few years is that, no matter how you slice it, a vote for Trump is complicit acceptance of his divisive and harmful behavior. ...
How many Biden voters would approve of his full-throated support for the Iran and Iraq wars? How many support his current stance against Medicare for All? How many would defend the Obama administration's escalation of the Drone Wars (assuming they're even aware it's going on)?
The bigger question here is how many Americans were voting for the the least terrible option?
The general antipathy toward Trump though is not based on policy grounds, but rather his whole way of being. His casual disregard for truth and flagrant mendacity, his blinding narcissism, his disdain for international cooperation, etc.
Even if, as a progressive, you find Biden milquetoast and uninspiring, he at least isn’t an embarrassment to the office and to the country.
I expect my leader to do what he thinks is best for the country. I don't expect them to be perfect. Obama wasn't. George wasn't. Clinton wasn't. McCain and Romney wouldn't have been.
But I never doubted for a second that they weren't trying to do their best. Trump, I did, and that's why I voted against him.
I was. I knew none of the other issues mattered. The only thing I cared about was war, and Trump was the first anti-war president. Even then, he didn't reduce drone strikes, but he greatly lowered America's war footprint. I wrote about it here:
In fact he did not. This is yet another lie told to his supporters.
Trump expanded the global War on Terror and drone strikes in particular which are the biggest component of it. It doesn't make sense to exclude drone strikes, they are the largest part of the war.
That's mentioned in the article I wrote/posted. There are two big issues with the drone strikes: it looks like they went down because he classified drone strike information .. and all the information (which I source) give different numbers and different time periods. They is no background to these sources? Are reporters watching drones take off and land? I have a hard time thinking reporters are doing any actual reporting right now.
But yes, it's likely drone strikes have gone up. They went up under Obama. They will go up under Biden. It matters not who is president, we will drone more each year than before. There is no doubt.
He has avoided actual on the ground wars, carpet bombing (Libya) and created historic peace treaties with three nations who now recognize Israel. Obama got a peace prize while he was in active conflicts for his entire presidency and actively bombed 7 nations.
US foreign policy did not meaningfully change under Clinton, Bush, Obama or Trump and I agree will not under Biden. It's probably very hard to change given entrenched interests, and nobody has even tried.
Trump has done nothing to change policy - he kept occupying troops abroad, expanded strikes globally, undertook strikes on Iran and assassinated a top member of that regime illegally in Iraq - we haven't seen the fallout yet.
Also if you're willing to overlook Trump's racism and fascism in favour of a slight change in foreign policy (even if it was real), I'd suggest some introspection at this point.
From what I read Trump’s has many character flaws. That’s an understatement.
He is, however, one of the few presidents in the past century, to have avoided starting a new war.
Biden has a record of participating in a government that supported intervention in Syria and Ukraine, and his family benefiting from it, (whether legitimately or not is not my concern).
For this reason I have reluctantly preferred Trump to Biden.
What do I do now, how would I continue to participate in a society full of people who think and feel like you?
Can you provide an instance where Trump's individual action prevented a military engagement or war that was actively lobbied for by leading Republican figures?
It seems unlikely for a President to start a military engagement without the support of their closest political allies and constituents. So it would seem that blame for previous wars should fall across both Congress and the President, and you can no doubt agree that many of the same Republicans (and Democrats) are in the same seats that they were then.
Remember the little game of chicken and insults over Twitter with Kim Jong Un, that ended up with Donald Trump giving everything Kim Jong Un wanted, because he's an artist of "the deal"? (Trump did get a lovely letter in a giant envelope and swooned about it, remember?)
How do you only worry about what you read about Biden and his record on wars, where you even bloody admit that you're not really concerned about "his family benefiting from it", and IGNORE everything else that should worry you? Like a denial of the reality of the actual virus killing Americans (1 website says at the moment more than 243000 dead, that's like having a 9/11 number of deaths, followed by a 9/12, a 9/13, with two towers and 4 planes crashing every day all the way past Thanksgiving, with the latest being 2 more planes smashing into 2 more WTC-sized towers on a 12/1/2001...).
Let me try to answer why I think that is: you like Trump, for whatever reason (maybe you're racist, maybe you're brainwashed by Fox to think Biden is the devil), and you looked for a justification for liking him, and you found one when you read about him "profiteering from war". Good enough for you, everything else is irrelevant.
I care less about someones family benefitting from it if they have the decency to be ashamed of it and keep it hidden. Trump is explicitly the opposite, he flaunts it everywhere.
Wow. I'm used to the idea of republican physicians, but one who'd genuinely believe in a VP plot to steal the presidency to establish socialism is... surprising and scary.
Where do you think she got the ideas? Fox? Other media outlets? Or does the sewer link into social media have an unknown source?
Physicians are just people like everyone else. In fact, many of them are far more concentrated in terms of education, social circle, and free time.
Smart people are very good at coming up with rationalizations and justifications for the things they believe or fear. We think we're better than generations past, but human nature is human nature.
You’re going to think less of people because of the extremely uncharitable rationale you imagine they must have. Great.
Your own mother notwithstanding,it’s almost certainly the case that not everybody who voted for Trump did it because of “a fear of the future” at least not anymore than anybody else who votes against any other candidate.
What's mask compliance like in Australia? I'm in a blue city within a sea of red. Everyone around me uses them, but drive 15 minutes away and you'll get looks for using one.
I don't know how I feel about this. I like the idea of complete transparency, but even without being able to capture dramatic photos of courtroom battles the US already has trial by media in some cases. I feel like adding photos and videos to that would throw gasoline onto that fire and turn our judicial system into a reality show. I almost prefer the system in some European countries where they are not even allowed to release the names involved in criminal cases unless they have been found guilty.
Just look at what it did to congressional inquiries. You just end up with a bunch of misinformed or willfully ignorant senators and representatives asking rarely useful questions of people just so they can be on CSPAN grilling that CEO that the media currently doesn't like. No one cares about solving the issues so long as there's enough footage sent home to the voters to get reelected.
They could release transcripts, which would be far less theatrical than video and audio. Sure, transcripts may contain some grandstanding, but it's not as spicy as a 20 second tweeted clip.
The Supreme Court disallows cameras, but release audio, so those who wish to follow the court can still do so.
I think the point of those questions is just to establish a baseline of truth in congressional testimony, it's not really "stunt" related. It would become a stunt in retrospect if it were found ACB lied to Congress, which is a crime. Get as many factual comments on record as you can, and then you have a bigger quiver later.
Right. Innocent until proven guilty. The public also runs with any and all salacious narratives and court cases can turn accusations into a sentencing in itself via shaming. The old ‘so, I heard you finally stopped beating your wife’ trope where the inference is enough to destroy people, true or not.
We see a lot of this on Reddit. Shaming is a powerful tool, but often should be reserved for punching up (power structures like the government, law enforcement, and large organizations ((not a small business)). Your average person is flawed and trial by public shaming seems cruel and unusual.
Like yeah, I get it, the random person you are filming is a racist but is the punishment the front page of Reddit? What’s your plan when the social climate changes and the stuff you do is now fodder to be recorded? There are some people that will record American women dressed revealing in other countries because, hey, culturally it’s shameful to dress like that. How there isn’t a bunch of public defamation lawsuits for this stuff boggles my mind. I can legally be a piece of shit, that doesn’t mean you get to just record me on one day out of my life and broadcast it on the internet.
Social media is going around banning misinformation. At some point, I want to see a crackdown on online public defamation.
But yeah, back to the point, no - you shouldn’t be able to record one of the worst moments of my life as I fight to clear my name in court.
Really? I have an issue with subpoenas. Subpoenas can make public to the court your phone records, your phone images, emails to your ex from 2008, your text messages etc.
You want to have a divorce court publish all your iphone text messages and photos? I think once a subpoena is requested the court must turn private -- at least to protect the innocent.
I'm saying cameras in court are more likely to lead to theatrics (especially since they've already famously occurred) than to discovery of truth.
A friend used to practice law in New Orleans. One of his courtroom anecdotes is that there was a stock phrase for prosecuting vice officers, something like "just before she placed her lips on it, I arrested her" but one memorable time when this hackneyed phrase was trotted out on the witness stand, Defendant blurted out "Oh, no you didn't! That was the best damn blowjob you ever got."
In the New Orleans case, the outcome wasn't part of the story. Even if the judge felt witness had been credibly impeached, the manner of impeachment corroborates a solicitation charge, so I'd guess: conviction.
In France we have presumption-of-innocence laws, but presuming innocence participates to justice not working: Look at the last people who have been killed during the summer and you’ll notice a worrying trend — they have 10, 20, 47 repeat offenses.
At one point you have to think of the victims too. For 20 repeat offenses recorded, there has been hundreds of beat-ups. I met a guy who said he’s been 200 times (his estimate) in custody between 13 and 18. He had only been condemned once, at 19. He bragged to me about how many French people he bullied, including locking up a fat kid in a basement for 3 weeks. You have to think of the victims.
Again, look at repeat offenses of usual criminals in newspapers, and remind yourself that they have been presumed innocent to the extreme and only condemned for cases which have been extensively proven, where victims dared to talk, knowing he has a condemnation rate of less that 0,5% per arrest.
This has nothing to do with presumption of innocence. Presumption of innocence means that you are considered innocent until legally proven guilty in court. It is a very fundamental value of a democratic justice system that guarantees that you can defend yourself of accusations and you are free of the arbitrariness of prosecutors and public opinion. If you undermine that out of an emotional reaction to some event you risk creating much more harm, by sending many innocents in jail and generally instilling distrust in the society, than you will prevent.
Also, what do you propose? If it is not necessary to be declared legally guilty anymore, then what? The color of your skin? The mood of the prosecutor and judge? The number of times you are presented before the court? What if the cops don't like you? What if you are accused without proof and without mean to exonerate yourself?
The cases you describe of people committing 47 offenses (with no conviction you say, so the justice system decided that they were not actually offenses, Yet you are here claiming that they are without any knowledge of the facts) and then going to kill someone are very very rare. You can't have a 100% failure-proof system without complete totalitarian control over everyone in the population. Many of these people are just insane, they're not the organized terrorist group types, and the justice system is not equipped to deal with mental health issues. When it tries you end up with people in psychiatric internment for years and years without trial and with little recourse, which is another tragedy.
Imagine being released from prison and told, "Whether or not you return to crime, if anyone ever accuses you again, we're going to assume you're guilty and send you back." I think you get a lot more victims that way, even before you count the reformed criminals who are now victims of the state.
Criminal history should absolutely factor in to a case, and I believe it does in the US. But it is imperative for society at large that innocent people can expect to go unpunished.
I agree, but after 20, 47, 200 assaults or robberies, at some point, someone needs to start noticing a pattern and doing something about it!
Tomorrow is a new day! and Start with a clean slate! are laudable goals and ideals for us to have and we would all want that for ourselves ... but maybe not to the point of delusion and detriment to society?
If someone has been found guilty of 200 actual assualts, by all means, exponentially increasing punishment is fine with me.
However 200 (potentially false) accusations of assualt shouldn't matter. Otherwise a bad actor could just repeatedly accuse someone until the accusee hits the 200 (or whatever) limit.
Agree. Law mechanisms can be abused. In Poland we had a case where a shoplifter (Stanisław Belski) was caught stealing coffee and sentenced. Security and the owner tossed a couple extra items into his bag to get him over a threshold so he qualified for a harsher verdict. The thief protested, but was found insane and delusional. In classic Soviet style, he was detained for 8 years and drugged in a psychiatric hospital. It wasn't until a new young inspector showed up that his protest was finally heard. Even when the thief was released, the staff of the hospital tried to crush the man by publishing his sensitive information. The thief received high monetary compensation, but no one was actually sentenced for the abuse of the law system.
Probably does not apply in all cases? Imagine someone beats me up or something but is found not guilty for some reason. Would I be charged with lying under oath or false accusations? It just increases the stakes for any lawsuit.
If I remember correctly, the previous district attorney in Manhattan was very friendly with the wealthy people. Imagine how much they could legally wreck your life if this was left up to the prosecution.
Insufficient evidence to convict someone else is not sufficient evidence to convict you. They’d still have to convict a jury of your peers that you did so.
Applies in all cases, but it has to be deliberate. You can accuse as many people as you want if you actually (reasonably) believe they’ve done you wrong.
Assuming they're accusations (not convictions), the question is what's the pattern? Is it a pattern of criminal behaviour, or is it police bias/somebody systematically accusing this person for whatever reason? Aggregating multiple not guilty verdicts and/or cases that weren't perused into something that results in criminal sanctions is dubious, and in some sense may invert the burden of proof (you now have to show the allegations against you are _false_ to challenge them, rather than just showing guilt hasn't been proven).
I would expect these to show up as massive amount of unsolved crimes is stats.
And the places where people get away with a lot of crimes are places with corrupt underpaid police force rather then the ones with stopping civil protections.
On discussion forums people talk about it as if the issue was impossibility to find evidence against single dumb impulsive individual. When you look at places with a lot of unsolved cases, you see cops who don't care or who protect their friends or are corrupt or who prefer to prosecute random people. And you see good apples cops getting demotivated and loosing political confkicts against bad apples cops.
What you don't see is well discipline well intentioned police force that is just unable to get doctor report of injuries or use testimony as evidence.
Presumption of innocence is none of the concern in #MeToo situations. In fact our Ministry of Equality affirms that presenting a defense in justice is a problem of further bullying the victim, who shouldn’t be challenged in the process.
In the same year, we’ve had several bethroatings over the summer (last one yesterday) from people who were presumed innocent several times. The victims are the bottom of the joke here.
> Presumption of innocence is none of the concern in #MeToo situations.
You're conflating public opinion and the justice system.
> In fact our Ministry of Equality affirms that presenting a defense in justice is a problem of further bullying the victim, who shouldn’t be challenged in the process.
It doesn't seem to go against the presumption of innocence. You may not know but in rape cases, the victim and the alleged rapist are sometimes questioned at the same time, side by side, which can be quite traumatic.
> from people who were presumed innocent several times.
Being presumed innocent and being found not guilty are not the same thing. Everyone, even the worst of the worst, is assumed innocent.
All you need to do is look at the name ("INFORMATION DOMINANCE CENTER!") to know that the design is more about playing star ship commander than it is about being functional.
The real operations centers I have been in are much more mundane.
First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything.
Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because nuclear==bad. I trust the technology, but my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear.
Buying into a fission reactor means you pay billions up front, but you also promise to pay billions in upkeep, and then pay billions for decomissioning. If you aren't willing to do that upkeep or clean up after yourself then you can cause a radiological disaster.
What happens if we have a majority government that refuses to believe in the long term effects of radiation damage even as scientists explain to them over and over again what will happen? They just don't see why we should be spending that amount of money on reactor decomissioning or on upkeep and don't want to be seen as the one spending taxpayer money on something so costly. What if they decide to cut nuclear safety programs in a political stunt? I wish I could say that I know that won't happen, but on the hundred years in the future scale I'm just not sure.
Nuclear is amazing and could solve all of our short term energy needs, but it's ultimately people and our political structures that I don't trust, not the science.
> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything.
Am I crazy, or did the Green New Deal have as an explicit goal the decommissioning of all nuclear plants?
EDIT: Ah, apparently that was in the initial released plan, but they changed the language to technically leave the door open for nuclear, without supporting it (and with occasional statements expressing disfavor towards nuclear as a piece of the plan)
I don't think so, at least not according to Ocasio-Cortez [1]. It is a pretty new idea though and is probably in flux, so it may have been different in the past?
AOC can claim any position she wants, but the Green New Deal says (page 7, lines 6-9 as linked in another post) says "meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources". That's a clear anti-nuclear stance.
Following that logic, then Solar Panels are off the table. They don't last forever and their waste is not environmentally friendly. Mining the material to produce them also creates a large amount of greenhouse gasses.
> [solar panels] creates a large amount of greenhouse gasses.
Sounds misleading to me. A quick websearch and I found that currently they seem to be 10 x better than oil and coal etc:
> Making solar or photovoltaic cells requires potentially toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium. It even produces greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that contribute to global warming. Still, the researchers found that if people switched from conventional fossil fuel-burning power plants to solar cells, air pollution would be cut by roughly 90 percent. Although manufacturing solar cells requires heavy metals, the researchers noted that coal and oil also contain heavy metals, which get released during combustion
I never said that. I'm saying that based on AOC's 100% plan, pretty much everything is off the table, meaning that the plan needs to be revised. I plan to have 30kw of solar panels in my next home and a large collection of LifePo4 batteries that also have a dependency on strip mining. I also plan to do some of my own mining (drilling, blasting) for zinc and silver.
Sorry I misinterpreted. How interesting with mining zinc and silver -- is that possibly related to the solar panels you'll add? I never met anyone who mines zinc and silver
LiFePO4 -- that's lithium iron phosphate batteries, then, zinc and silver makes me confused. One can use zinc and silver instead?
30 kw sounds nice -- I think my oven uses about 3 kw, and I guess then that 30 kw is more than enough for your whole house :-) which I suppose is the idea, obviously.
What do your neighbors think about your plans to mine zink and silver?
Or maybe your nearest neighbors are far away? (Or maybe you'll drill & blast far away from where you and any neighbors live?)
It is desirable however impractical given currently available technology. We need significant developments in energy storage to make it work. We could have zero carbon now using nuclear with no new technologies.
Why impractical??? Whith a diversified mix, energy efficiency, a big market for demand response, thermal storage, and a bit of electrical storage, there is no problem with current technologies. Coming tech could decrease the cost and make it easier to implement.
> thermal storage, and a bit of electrical storage
I'll acknowledge that renewable generation costs have been falling at an impressive rate. However you're understating the problem for storage. Besides cost, there are far more complex regulatory and political hurdles. Just read about the public response to "smart meters" when they were proposed a while back.
We'll likely have price-competitive storage technology by the middle of the next decade, maybe even sooner, but it will take another two or three decades to deploy it thanks to the patchwork of regulatory complexity we're left over with from the 20th century.
Sure it is not easy, but price-competitive (cheap renewable + some cost to manage intermittence) technologies are ready
Political hurdles... what is easier ?
- Saying let's have reltively cheap 100% renewable energy that create a lot of job
- Let's have super expensive nuclear energy, there are risk but those risk are small
Yes we are getting there but some countries are at the point of diminishing returns with current renewables. For example, Germany has to pay it's neighbours to receive peak generation.
Coming tech will improve that but we could get to carbon zero far quicker and cheaper with a mix of nuclear and renewables. One problem with nuclear is that safety concerns. However nuclear has caused less death than coal generation. It does require a huge capital investment but it pays for itself over the long run. Waste is an issue but it produces a tiny volume of waste compared to any other form of generation.
We could get rid of all current coal and gas plants and have power when it's required with nuclear. Until we have a better storage option the true can't be said of any renewables (unless you are lucky enough to have abundant geothermal options). With wind and solar you have too much during peak supply and too little during peak demand.
Even the article you linked states whole sale solar and batteries are not yet economically viable.
If there is a viable thermal storage option, I'm wrong but I've not heard about it. I would love to be wrong if that is the case.
She is a Congress woman with a degree in economics. Whether or not she was a bartender is neither a disqualifier for her current position, nor is it a source of shame.
What are your credentials if any to have an opinion on this matter, if you think that being a past bartender disqualifies her position?
I did not voice an "opinion on the matter" precisely because my credentials with respect to it are the same as her own: non-existent. An economics degree does not make one an expert on energy policy, just like a law degree or a software engineering degree doesn't make one a surgeon.
You however voiced your opinion that her platform is meaningless based on a past profession rather than acknowledge the merits of her current profession, educational background or any external input she may have received to put forward this platform with many others.
Why not address the merits or lack thereof of the platform instead of trying to tear her down?
How is anyone of a lower socioeconomic demographic ever meant to make a difference if people like you simply dismiss them based on a job they had to hold to make ends meet? It's elitist
First off, I do generally regard non-expert opinions on complex subjects as ridiculous (see Gell-Mann amnesia on why that is). But AOC helped me in that by not reading her own proposal, and allowing "cow farts" to figure prominently in it. That just invites ridicule.
As to why I did not address the merits: it's not a serious proposal, so there's really nothing to address as it presents no details for how to get from point A to point B, how much it will cost, how it will (or will not) help domestic industry, what the electricity will cost when all is said and done, how that will affect the standard of living, etc.
It's a "hope" and, as they say in the military, hope is not a strategy. This is sort of like "addressing" a poem - a completely meaningless endeavor.
By ridiculing the platform in this comment of yours, you contradict your previous comment that you have no opinion on it due to your lack of credentials.
Well the currently deployed, old nuclear plants certainly aren't as safe as the new, unbuilt ones the nuclear proponents always like to showcase. Even if you decide towards using nuclear in the future, you should build new reactors from scratch using those new safer designs.
There's that branch of minimalist environmentalism where their favorite nuclear reactor is whatever doesn't already exist. The instant it starts getting built, /somebody'll/ start protesting it.
> The instant it starts getting built, /somebody'll/ start protesting it.
Is normal when the hype does not correspond with the reality and the promises of behaving well and to be responsible are replaced by "hide under a rug and find a scapegoat" five seconds after having the green light.
Citizens have the right to ask about how their taxes had been spent, specially when the construction costs increased exponentially, the whole structure is ruinous after 50 years and there are lots of new surprises in tiny characters in an appendix of the social contract that they signed, but never received.
Nuclear plants can only make a limited amount of money in this lifetime but the cost seems almost unlimited.
A big problem I have with things like "the green new deal" is that they are buzzwords onto which many different policies can be mapped. I think to lots of people it implies no nuclear, and to some others it doesn't. Both are "right" because the buzzword has no implicit meaning.
I'm not sure how that can be true, given that it's a written proposal[0]. Not many have read it, and certainly both opponents and proponents have made up things that are or are not in it, but it's not just a buzzword.
> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything.
While that is true in principle, there is apparently some evidence that investing in nuclear energy causes countries to de-carbonise more slowly (perhaps because of the upfront costs of nuclear power stations, and the time it takes to build them).
"Researchers found that unlike renewables, countries around the world with larger scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to show significantly lower carbon emissions—and in poorer countries nuclear programs actually tend to associate with relatively higher emissions."
Isn't there an obvious hidden random variable there? The only countries that are really actively building nuclear power are growing developing countries like India, so of course their emissions are increasing.
EDIT: So yes:
> "The study found that in countries with a high GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production does associate with a small drop in CO2 emissions."
There's also the confounding element that the CO2 emissions could have dropped faster if the money was spent on renewables instead, plus the infrastructure for large centralised power generation is not really compatible with distributed generation.
It would be good to do a bit more work to justify that, then.
The NIA blog post doesn't even address the core point of the paper. It looks at a correlation of existing energy by US states, where our nuclear was largely built in the 1970s and 1980s.
In contrast, the academic paper looks at what has happened to countries , globally, that have tried to build nuclear since the 1990s.
And this is a crucial distinction, because the problem with nuclear is that economies have changed since the 1970s and we have new technologies with different costs.
So what if we look at what has happened to US states that, since 1990, have tried to build nuclear versus those that have tried to build renewables?
Nuclear has failed since the 1990s in the US, even with construction project with very strong community support and federal regulatory support from the NRC.
So when you ask the question that the paper asks: "does building new nuclear or renewables decrease carbon more with modern economies?" We see that the US recapitulates the same correlation that researchers found globally.
This huge bias of nuclear proponents, the inability to address the cost issue and very basic construction issues, is far more problematic for nuclear than a corrective analysis of what has happened to grids that have pursued different strategies.
Sorry, didn't mean to direct that at you. But since I had been downvoted so much I wanted to at least poke at the general narrative here. I still find it odd is that an unfounded accusation of bias is supported with a link to a clearly biased source, and that's somehow acceptable here.
> there is apparently some evidence that investing in nuclear energy causes countries to de-carbonise more slowly
Please don’t ascribe causality without evidence. Even the authors admit upfront that this is a correlational study, with strong confounding variables like GDP.
That author has been writing this for years and has had to do multiple retractions. A few top climate scientists are working on a rebuttal right now so we can expect this to be retracted soon as well.
We're killing our planet because we externalise cost.
CO2, deforestation, habitat destruction, species extinction, overfishing, ocean pollution are proximate problems arising from that deeper ultimate problem.
Nuclear is an adequate response to the proximate problem of global heating, it the worst possible response to ultimate problem of externalising cost.
To advocate nuclear in good faith it is essential to acknowledge this tension, and the complex social and philosophical challenges to resolving that tension.
If humanity is going to survive the next few decades with a quality of life even remotely resembling what we have now, we'll need to stop looking at the pocket book for a short while.
> whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear.
And if that's not the case then what do you think will happen to the other programs critical in keeping climate change at bay? Taken to its ultimate conclusion this line of thinking leads to analysis paralysis, i.e. to shut down our government and do nothing. Which may be good thinking; especially for government policy likely full of unintended consequences. I don't think this should stop perfectly good technology from being developed and built out though. Or for the government to effectively kneecap it via regulation so restrictive it's tantamount to a ban, as the US has done with nuclear power.
> Nuclear is amazing and could solve all of our short term energy needs, but it's ultimately people and our political structures that I don't trust, not the science.
I agree yet have drawn strikingly different conclusions. Nuclear development should be encouraged to proceed. Collectively we need to figure out how to incentivize the actors to behave safely without kneecapping their ability to do something.
It's trite, but it's never too late to start. Certainly starting now is better than doing nothing in this case, and nuclear may be a good option. I'm not convinced that old nuclear tech is economically viable anymore compared to batteries + renewables. New nuclear tech may be. We need investment there.
I don’t think we have time to wait for new old school plants to be built, and we certainly don’t have time for new tech to be developed, tested, regulated before we even start building it. We should start now with the tech we already have (which is renewables).
It could possibly be too late to start with new nuclear plants, although I'm not totally convinced.
If we had them now, nuclear plants would be vastly superior to coal plants for baseload, at least in terms of emissions.
The question is, if a nuclear plant takes 20-30 years from project start to being online, how will it compare with what's available then and over the design lifetime (50ish years). Of course, we can't know for sure, but if storage becomes good enough in the next 30 or so years, the lifetime economics of a nuclear plant get pretty bad.
That said, maybe the economic risk isn't as important as the emissions risk. If renewable + storage doesn't work, and we are still running coal plants in 30 years, that's probably worse than if renewable + storage works and ratepayers paid for an underutilized nuclear plant.
Why 20-30 years? Russia started building of Belarus nuclear plant at 2011. It already works and will be completely finished at 2022. Is US nuclear industry significantly behind Russia?
From wikipedia, the most recent nuclear plant to enter operation in the US is Watts Bar reactor 2. It entered operation in 2016, while being under construction for a total of 17 years; 8 years between 1973 and 1985, then 9 more between 2007 and 2016.
The Vogtle plant reactor 3 and 4 project started in 2006, construction started in 2013, and planned operation is 2021; but these things are often delayed. And that was at an existing site. 20 years may be pessimistic, but not unduly so, based on recent experience.
Any US project will face many years of interruptions by protestors, court cases, etc. Given the timespan, the project will also likely face administrations that don't support nuclear and attempt to stall the project.
Unfortunately, people don't believe in climate change enough to acknowledge that nuclear is worth the risk (a risk that would be much reduced by allowing more modern plants to be built).
Yes. US construction in general takes longer and costs almost an order of magnitude more for large infrastructure. Why? Higher standards certainly. Higher pay too. But you can't tell me Russia is less corrupt with a straight face. So what accounts for the difference? I think it's disturbing that the US is forgetting how to make things in general.
It's clear that right now we should roll out wind and solar as fast as we can.
However, once those reach high penetration, costs increase rapidly as you attempt to reach 100% clean energy. At that point it helps a lot to have clean dispatchable power. Nuclear plants we start today can fill that role, in areas without available hydro.
Nuclear power isn't very "dispatchable", it takes long times to be turned on vs off. But it might be useful for seasonal use in the winter when there is less sun.
No. Unless you run your nuclear power plant at high capacity factor, the cost of power from it inflates unacceptably. It's an economic issue, not a technical issue.
That's the whole point of nuclear, hydro or coal though, they need to be run at high capacity to be economically viable, have long spin up and down times and are costly to maintain. You use them as the basis of the grid and use wind and solar that are more prone to fluctuations to fill up the demand when necessary, less batteries needed as the base load can always be delivered by nuclear/hydro. Coal is basically dead in the next decade or so.
>use them as the basis of the grid and use wind and solar that are more prone to fluctuations to fill up the demand when necessary
Er, how does this work? You can't control when wind and solar produce power, so how can you use them to "fill up the demand when necessary"? If anything, using a fluctuating source on top of already fluctuating demand just increases the amount of power storage you need.
A power source that ramps up and down quickly is more convenient than one that ramps up and down slowly, but both are miles more convenient than one which ramps up and down uncontrollably.
At least with solar you know when it won't produce power. You could have enough nuclear for nighttime demand, and build enough solar for the extra daytime demand. You'd have some remaining discrepancies to make up but relatively small ones.
Well then you should ask yourself: is building this nuclear reactor cheaper than buying some batteries or converting excess energy to LNG to store it for later? If it is, then a nuclear power plant is economical, if it isn't, you should do the alternatives instead.
Well hang on, the nuclear reactor generates power while the storage only.. stores. You have to include the (lifetime!) cost of the storage plus the presumably renewable energy source you're feeding it with. (Of course you need storage with both systems to cope with demand-side fluctuations, but you'll need a lot more with wind/solar to deal with supply-side fluctuations.)
Hydrogen is cool, but we should also be investing in efficient methane production. AFAICT it's not too hard to make and has immense advantages - existing transport, storage and use infrastructure and market as a heavily traded good. We can use it for most of our energy or carbon needs with today's technology and existing machines with no or easy modifications.
Hydrogen can be more efficient and probably simpler when appropriate but is more finicky, still needs research and will take a lot of time to ramp up.
Sorry, the two options were nuclear vs. renewables + storage (batteries and hydrogen). I don't think very large methane storage makes much sense; where does the carbon come from?
Biogas is mostly better than fossil, but we should generate methane from H₂O + CO₂ + energy. It would be useful and quick way to achieve energy storage and decarbonization.
Biomass is fundamentally limited by the very low efficiency of photosynthesis, so that it requires very large areas. It should probably be limited to providing liquid transportation fuels and feedstock for chemicals.
Perhaps that wasn't the best term for the point they're making. From the abstract:
"This paper presents a comprehensive techno-economic evaluation of two pathways: one reliant on wind, solar, and batteries, and another also including firm low-carbon options (nuclear, bioenergy, and natural gas with carbon capture and sequestration). Across all cases, the least-cost strategy to decarbonize electricity includes one or more firm low-carbon resources. Without these resources, electricity costs rise rapidly as CO2 limits approach zero. Batteries and demand flexibility do not substitute for firm resources."
A nuclear plant costs the same to run at full capacity all year round as it does to run it at partial capacity. Just run the plant at full capacity all year round, and save money by building less solar.
Right. If we build nuclear plants to fulfill peak energy demand (which coincides with a lack of energy production from solar) then there's not reason not to just run the nuclear plants 24/7 and skip building solar altogether. This is why nuclear power and intermittent sources end up being a dichotomy in practice.
Solar does provide a good way to mitigate carbon emissions in the meantime, even if it's role in a fully decarbonized economy is dubious. It's fast to build and makes a good complement for gas plants. Turn off the gas when the solar cells are collecting, and you can save a good deal of emissions.
Solar also has niche use cases that make sense even with nuclear power. Rooftop solar is a good way to offset air conditioning energy use. In this case, the solar energy collected by the panels are intrinsically connected to the power demand of the air conditioning unit. Plus the energy production and energy demand are co-located.
You're missing the point, which is that if you don't use a nuclear plant to 100% capacity (or run at 100% capacity and throw away most of the energy), you end up paying more for every Joule you actually use.
How much would it cost to build nuclear power generation capacity to meet peak demand, vs. building a grid with renewables, long-term transmission and storage? The levelized cost of solar and wind power is way below that of nuclear power (and that difference will become much larger if you're only fully utilizing nuclear power during the daily peak demand), so the question is how much storage and transmission add for renewables.
One of the interesting possibilities for new nuclear plants is on-site thermal storage. Store heat from the reactor in a heat sink when solar is generating, use the heat to generate power when it isn't. That handles the daily load variation and lets you trade half the required nuclear capacity for cheap solar.
It also means you have more turbines on site than the reactor needs on its own, so you can add a furnace burning whatever you like (hydrogen, biofuels, synthetic methane), and that handles the days when renewable output is below average.
+1 I wish this were further up. Reliable power is always better than unreliable power. "Base load" is a misleading concept because people conflate supply-side and demand-side fluctuations, which are generally unrelated except in "niche use cases" like you mention. You always need some sort of storage or on-demand generation to deal with demand fluctuations. With wind/solar, you need extra storage to smooth out supply fluctuations.
Nuclear would be utterly terrible for filling in the last part of a renewable-dominated grid. As in, ludicrously expensive, compared to other non-nuclear, non-fossil alternatives.
The article you point to talks about "firm, low carbon sources". This kind of source for this last bit would be something like hydrogen, not nuclear. A nuclear reactor operating at 10% capacity factor to "fill in" for renewables would be producing power at $1/kWh or more, which is uncompetitive vs. hydrogen by a massive margin.
Right. It's one or the other generally (although some solar could help nuclear if demand peaks on sunny days).
However, unless nuclear gets a lot cheaper, it's looking like the nuclear dominated grid is going to be more expensive than the renewable dominated grid, even taking the cost of intermittency into account.
They very carefully didn't mention hydrogen at all. They compared nuclear vs. renewables + batteries. It's almost as if they were setting up renewables to fail. Imagine that, in a study where half the authors are from the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering.
Yes, if you had nuclear, you'd operate it at high capacity factor. That isn't nuclear filling in for renewables, that's using nuclear instead of renewables. It's really mostly one or the other.
Heck, the State of Illinois gets over 50 percent of its electricity from nuclear and 1/8th of the entire country's nuclear generation. We can do it, even in the USA.
I long for the day we get a breakthrough with some next level power source. Be it fusion or some other thing to come.
Humanity always depended on having a leap in either: transport, communication or energy. We are going through a massive change in communication, if we get a cheap and super scalable and sustainable source of energy we might find our next leap...
I don't know. The science and engineering has quietly moved quite a bit over the last 40 years.
These [0] SMRs can, for example - there are several other approaches - can be assembled on a standard assembly line, shipped in a couple of C-Containers, and stood up on a concrete pad (well, not exactly, but close enough that I don't feel like complicating the point.
"In answer to a question I posed to Nuscale at the town hall we have learned that the plan to save costs by fabricating the modules at a remote factory and shipping them to the Idaho site has been abandoned. The artful response to my question said that Nuscale engaged with approximately 40 … pressure vessel fabricators worldwide and … determined that Nuscale will use existing factories … in lieu of building its own factory.
The major module subcomponents will be manufactured at multiple manufacturer locations and shipped to a single location for assembly prior to installing into the facility.” This signifies the failure of one of the major cost-saving features of the Nuscale project, which was to forestall this exact scenario."
The cost of that project has already escalated 70%, btw, with three towns dropping out and the output only 30% subscribed. I think there's a good chance it will never be built.
The best time to build nuclear would have been in the 1980s.
However, when we tried to build again back in 2008, it turned to failure. In areas with highly supportive populations that want the nuclear jobs in their community, with an NRC that changed processes to try to make it easier to get approval, we are still 12 years in, way behind schedule, and 2-3x over budget, without a solid feel for when we will star pushing electrons with the new reactors.
Last I heard, NuScale is hoping to hit a cost of $55/MWh. That's about the current cost of wind/solar and the storage to make it dispatchable. Meaning that by the time they finally ship, it will be a more expensive option for firm low-carbon energy than the current options we have.
So not only is NuScale aiming at a not-so-desirable target, by the time it can deliver its first 10GW, it's quite likely that the renewables will be curtailed for much of the year, meaning that we have extra generation capacity that goes unused, which is likely to spur a huge round of economic innovation for that energy.
I would hate to get stuck with the path dependence of nuclear. Renewables are so cheap that they open up a ton more doors for society.
It’s really already too late. Even if we the developed world decarbonizes in the next 20 years, India, China, and Africa will not. That means what we really need to be looking at is technology to power carbon capture.
Rosatom will sell you a floating reactor you can tow into a harbour and hook up to your grid [1]. So short term can be pretty short if you want. And don't worry about the fuel, they simply tow it back to St. Petersburg when the fuel is expired and keep the dirty stuff there.
Because there is no clear line between saving and not saving. It's just degrees of badness the longer we wait. I heard there are some inflection points when it becomes warm enough for methane to escape from the tundra in Siberia.
Yeah I'm a big fan of nuclear energy, but it just takes forever to get reactors online. We just don't have that kind of time. By all means, let's invest in nuclear, but we need to be building acres and acres of solar panels NOW. "We've got some reactors on the way" is not enough.
We already have something 10000000X worse: Nuclear Weapons, that cat is out of the bag. So either we dismantle all nuclear arsenals in the world or we stop giving the "potential socio-political inestability"as a reason to not building more nuclear plants.
You are stopping the butcher to use big knives for fear he may go insane in the future and kill some customers with them, when millions of weapons are highly available.
A small fraction of countries have nuclear weapons and yet they still engage in conventional warfare because they really don't want to trigger a nuclear holocaust.
On top of that, terrorist organizations, guerrilla fighters, criminal organization and so on never managed to launch an ICBM.
I dont think you understand what a logical fallacy is. The number of nuclear weapons in the world is in the 5 figures order, that is fact. Nuclear weapons are a fact.
> and yet they still engage in conventional warfare because they really don't want to trigger a nuclear holocaust.
Most experts assessed the chance of a nuclear war during the Cuban missiles crisis at 1/3. Maybe that is a number you feel comfortable with, I dont. In +70 years of nuclear plants the 3 "big" accidents (3 Miles Island,Chernobyl, Fukushima) are nothing compared with that.
> On top of that, terrorist organizations, guerrilla fighters, criminal organization and so on never managed to launch an ICBM.
And never managed to sabotage a nuclear installation and cause an accident so your point is moot.
That's not a subsidy. It's a claim by a third party (who, coincidentally, exists to advocate for strict regulation of the nuclear industry) that the government is underestimating the risk associated with nuclear power. Differences of opinion regarding actuarial tables aren't subsidies.
The wiki article claims that CATO also supports this, but that claim does not appear to be supported in the cited material.
There is an economic reason you cannot have both: Nuclear power plants need to run near capacity to be economical. If you have a lot of intermittent power from wind and solar then nuclear plants will only be able to get a reasonable price for their output 40% of the time (at night when it's not windy).
Conversely, if the nuclear power plant is running anyway and has enough capacity to cover a windless night, you may as well get rid of the solar and wind.
This equation will change if we ever get storage to be cheap enough so we can store intermittent power, but there is nothing on the horizon that will do that.
One thing I seldom see brought up is that different energy sources work best in different places. Solar works great in the Southwest. In the upper Midwest where it snows and is overcast a lot? Maybe not so much. Wind works better there, but wind may not be enough alone and requires even more storage as it usually peaks out of phase with peak demand.
There is also geothermal energy (Alaska, West Coast, Rockies; I assume we are talking solely the USA here) and hydroelectric power (Alaska, West Coast, South East, and more).
But we often don’t talk about the energy wasted in bad location of industries. E.g. growing water demanding crops in the Mid-West or South East instead of California where water is scarce, or energy intensive industries in Alaska (where energy is plentiful) instead of Texas where it is scarce.
Another thing not mentioned is wasted energy because of lacking infrastructure. This also applies to the rest of the world. A good example is not building high speed rail connection between high travel areas, so people use polluting air travel instead, another is lack of waste management facilities so garbage is left to rot instead of reused or recycled lowering demand for making the same thing again in a far away facility.
You can transmit power over long distances with surprisingly little energy loss with high-voltage DC. Any sane national plan for renewable energy would include a large amount of long-distance power transfer, if for no other reason than to minimize the variance in power production.
When I look at it I notice that current variation in cost per mwh is much larger than transmission line losses or storage losses.
You look on a map and you notice places where the days of sun shine aren't very conductive to solar are usually within 1500 miles of places where solar works great. Seattle to the Mojave desert is 1200 miles for instance.
I think we don't have a good way to transport energy which makes green energy slightly impractical as the main source of energy.
If we find a way to connect the world on a common electricity grid, we might be able to skip nuclear and go full green (ofc this ignores the cost of producing/disposing those green energy generators)
With a diversified mix (with solar pannel facing different position also), energy efficiency, demand response, thermal storage and a bit of electrical storage, we definitely don't need a world grid
Intermittency of renewables is less of a problem if one rids oneself of the medieval seeming idea of energy self-sufficiency. Energy does not have to be produced where it is needed. We can transfer it already. The grid would need upgrades but we can definitely transfer large amounts of energy over long distances.
Europe is also building HVDC (high-voltage direct current) links connecting windparks and consumers with e.g. norwegian pumped hydro power plants for storing excess energy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current )
The more we do this, the more susceptible the grid will be to massive outages.
I’m not an expert, and I’m sure there’s some way in principle where it could be architected so this isn’t so, but it just seems empirically that the more interconnected the more we see unexpected and enormous outages.
All of Europe is already connected, here where I live in Sweden I don't even remember the last power outage. Happens like maybe once a year that you wake up or get home and the microwave clock has reset.
The thing you describe, a brief loss in power ‘about once a year’ almost never happens in my area of NYC and could actually damage sensitive equipment.
The most recent large blackout we had was IIRC specifically due to mismanaging the interconnected grid, which is part of where my concern comes from.
I feel like a broken record saying this, but every time the topic of renewables comes up, I feel like the pro-renewable camp completely forgets us.
I'm in Saskatchewan. For a good chunk of the year, everything is frozen. We currently heat our homes with natural gas but require electricity to run the furnaces. Power outages are a very big deal, and in the winter are generally correlated with terrible weather (big snowstorms and deep cold tend to have a negative effect on our infrastructure).
The province itself is quite flat as well. Ignoring the part where reservoirs freeze over for at least 5 months of the year, pumped hydro (which seems to be our best current energy storage approach) isn't going to work very well with no significant hills to pump the water over. We absolutely require continuously reliable electricity to, at a minimum, keep the water pipes in our homes from freezing. A 24h outage in the middle of winter is going to, at a minimum, cause significant widespread property damage; past around the 72h mark, there's probably going to be significant death as well.
On top of all of the other reasons why I like nuclear, that is the reason why locally-generated nuclear is at the top of my list of "ways we should produce electricity around here".
It's at least a few orders of magnitude away from ever plausibly getting there. For all intents and purposes, such a concern is imaginary.
And even then, one doesn't preclude the other. Retrofitting power distribution to have less energy loss, buildings with better insulation, more efficient logistics networks for food delivery, these are green new deal issues. None of that is anti-nuclear - they simply aren't related.
By "sucks up all the resources" you'd have to have all humans efforting to do things like this that nothing can be allocated to anything else. That is simply not how reality works.
> By "sucks up all the resources" you'd have to have all humans efforting to do things like this that nothing can be allocated to anything else.
Nonsense. Please apply some intelligence and common sense. We're not talking about shutting down all other activities and only doing Green New Deal stuff. We're talking about the limited amount of resources that can be redirected by various choices of government policy. Given the magnitude of the resources that would be required for the grandiose plans for renewables touted in the Green New Deal, there wouldn't be anything left over for nuclear.
How so? Nuclear requires certain types of expertise and I'd hope, certain certifications for construction.
Also, historically, they've each been multi-year ventures.
These are likely different humans and different companies than people doing urban gardening projects and rooftop solar.
I honestly don't see the conflict here. I don't know too much about nuclear construction and maintenance but I'd imagine it takes years of specialized training and experience to be competent. If that's true, I can't imagine someone sliding from say, retrofitting insulation to older apartment buildings to nuclear in any reasonable time. I think we have to conclude they're as different as any other sophisticated skills; you're still starting at zero if you want to switch.
The GNDs problem has been the same since Jill Stein was talking about it in 2012 - it's too grandiose for a society and time that has rejected grand visions.
We would need to fix our systemic cultural inability to be able to subscribe to a collective imaginary before a GND is broadly entertained.
However, you crack and divide GND as separate goals, such as increasing the usefulness and efficiency of mass urban transit, most people are on board. And each of these concrete goals doesn't preclude Exelon and GE from building nuclear power plants.
Once you reframe the GND as simply a basketcase of low hanging fruit of city and neighborhood level projects, then we get into nuclear's real issue in this conversation - It is the biggest project of the bunch.
Ignoring possible futures and going with historical pasts, nuclear plants are what are called "megaprojects" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaproject) and that's their main Achilles heel for our times. Americans at least, have stopped believing in them. They think "big = broken disaster". Some american may even feel obligated to respond to this, "But it's true" and then my point will be made.
The GND proponents could finally understand marketing and branding and successfully reposition their project to our collective appetites as a collection of small bite-sized community projects but nuclear cannot do this.
> These are likely different humans and different companies than people doing urban gardening projects and rooftop solar.
Humans can decide to enter different fields; more can choose to enter one field and fewer can choose to enter another. New companies can be started and old ones can go out of business. Resources are fungible; there isn't a fixed pool of resources that are suitable for nuclear but not for renewables, or the reverse.
What determines where those resources get allocated are economic incentives. If the government puts its thumb on the scale and gives lots of incentives for renewables and lots of disincentives for nuclear--which is exactly what the US government has been doing for decades, and what the Green New Deal would mean doing even more of--then resources will be available for renewables but not for nuclear.
> Ignoring possible futures and going with historical pasts, nuclear plants are what are called "megaprojects" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaproject) and that's their main Achilles heel for our times. Americans at least, have stopped believing in them.
This is a valid point as far as the type of nuclear projects that have been done in the past is concerned. However, nuclear has progressed, and many of the designs being worked on now are not megaprojects and would not require the same huge up front investment that traditional designs have.
Sure. I've been hearing that for 20 years and I sincerely, eagerly and in good faith welcome their arrival.
However, until then, we have to go off of the existing historical reality. We can't run the numbers with any kind of integrity based on what is currently vaporware.
Designs that are actually operating and producing power are not vaporware. The reasons those designs aren't already doing that in the US are political, not technical.
Anti-nuclear politics in the US has made people believe that every nuclear reactor is a Chernobyl waiting to happen. That was a pernicious lie even in the 1980s, and it is much, much more of a pernicious lie now. In terms of the fairest measurement, which is harm done per unit of energy generated, nuclear power, even with reactors of traditional designs, is orders of magnitude better than any other energy source, including renewables, which in turn are significantly better than oil and coal (coal is by far the worst). And with newer designs, not vaporware but actually operating today, that risk per unit of energy generated is even lower.
A sane US government policy would have had nuclear displacing oil and coal starting in the 1970s, as France and Japan did, and reprocessing the waste instead of beating ourselves over the head with a baseball bat by saying the only option was to store it for 100,000 years, which of course is not practically possible. Then we could have a meaningful conversation about how much of that nuclear base load capacity it makes sense to transition to renewables. Plus, if you really think CO2 emissions are a planetary emergency (I personally don't, but GND advocates do), there would be decades worth of CO2 emissions that the US would not have made at all. Not to mention decades worth of coal still in the ground where it belongs, and oil that could have been used for things much more productive than burning it for energy.
You say we have to go off of the "existing historical reality", and while it's true that we didn't do all those sane things in the past when we should have, that still is no argument for not doing them now. We have an obvious alternative source of base load power that would free us from oil and coal staring us in the face, and instead we're noodling about renewables that can't possibly meet the same demand requirements. That doesn't make sense to me.
Sure, you could handwave the "mass societal pushback" and change it to "cheering societal acceptance" and then fudge away the costs associated, but that's simply not what is going to happen.
You have to account for greenpeace and all the organized opposition. You have to account for the politics
That's why you need to go off of concrete material historical reality - if you're free to apply counterfactuals as you please than practically any conclusion is permissible because we can tweak and modify whatever we need.
Just like the "business as usual" advocates are hypothesizing a globally deployable massive carbon sucking technology to somehow exist in the future without a shred of evidence that it's at all plausible. It's extremely dubious gambling with the future of society.
Reality overrides counterfactual hypotheticals every time. When ambitious next-generation nuclear is ready to go, then there's a possible opening but right now it's simply not there.
> The GND proponents could finally understand marketing and branding and successfully reposition their project to our collective appetites as a collection of small bite-sized community projects but nuclear cannot do this.
The GND proponents aren't even talking about specifically how individual GND projects would be executed; they aren't talking about whether it would be a collection of small bite-sized projects or a few large ones.
What they're talking about is the government putting its thumb on the scale even more in favor of renewables. And that means even more incentive to do those projects, and less incentive to do others. That's where the conflict is.
I've been a proponent of it for 8 years and no, that's inaccurate.
Instead, many advocate for oil, gas, and nuclear to no longer get tax subsidies, government insured loans, preferential treatment with land use, or be able to freely externalize on to the community the damage and debris their products leave behind.
These companies also shouldn't have a Right to profit guaranteed by international trade treaties or be able to sue countries in tribunals when the countries decide against their wishes.
Instead, oil gas and nuclear need to stand on their own two feet, take full fiscal responsibility for the entire lifecycle of their products and fund it not from government handouts but from the prices paid for their product. They should also get no preferential treatment and legal rights to their business interests.
Communities should have a right to say no without being sued in international courts.
It's the exact opposite. Take the thumb off the scale, include All the costs, remove all the special privileges and then let the market decide.
> oil, gas, and nuclear to no longer get tax subsidies, government insured loans, preferential treatment with land use, or be able to freely externalize on to the community the damage and debris their products leave behind
I'm find with that, as long as it also includes no more government subsidies, etc. to renewables. Which have been given out for decades to renewables projects that, unlike oil and gas, do not even produce any actual energy, but are just "research" that promises to produce something Real Soon Now and has been for decades.
> let the market decide
I'm fine with that too, as long as it really is a free market. I do not think an actual free market is what the GND is proposing.
It's a big tent ... there's some people that want to push social justice, living wage and political equity in the program. I think that's utter folly.
Then it just becomes the DSA agenda under a cape labeled "renewable energy" and it's a political non-starter. There's no way.
The advocates show that each of the issues separately have broad support so they think that by putting it all together you'll get the union as a coalition.
I think they'll more likely get somewhere from the intersection to practically nobody.
It'd be as if Republicans were trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, end obamacare, and ban gay marriage as a single package. Good luck!
I'd almost cynically claim it's only political theater to be leveraged in their reelection campaign. The DSA has a pretty solid ground game but you need to toss them red meat to get them to come out for you.
People like say, hamburgers and ice cream, but not on the same plate. I don't think the AOC GND is good politics. And as we've seen, the support seems to be leveling out.
That's why I side on the mostly-libertarian GND camp which was closer to what Jill Stein was advocating for 8 years ago. Remove all protections, remove all subsidies, open up a market, give consumers choice.
Then they can fight for a living wage if they please, but separately, not together.
I think it's far more politically feasible and achievable.
If your concerns are valid, perhaps we should just stay with coal and gas. Renewables amid other problems are not going to work without massive energy storage systems, which we don't and won't have anytime soon
> Either water down the second amendment ... or give the police what they need
That's a false dichotomy and misses the main point of the argument to reduce police militarization.
Nobody is upset when SWAT responds to a school shooting or a terrorist act. The problem (I suppose a really good problem to have after all) is that those things almost never happen, even though they are the ones we see on the news and can quickly retrieve in our minds. You're more likely to die in a plane crash than in a terrorist act in the US.
That begs the question: if militarized units don't have enough violent crime to respond to, but are still a full time unit then what do they respond to? The answer is why people are upset and it's because we are sending them to respond to drug offenses and to execute search warrants instead. Situations thay they inevitably end up escalating (on average) and killing people in.
New Zealand just went through an interesting experiment; they armed some of their police as a trial run, then got feedback from the community that that armed unit served. The majority response was that while people understood WHY the police were armed, they didn't want armed police doing things like traffic stops, responding to domestic disputes, etc.., because their mere presence was threatening.
