Environment & Energy

As the German assholes have shown, definitively, a commitment to so called "renewable energy" is a commitment to fossil fuels, excessive mining, the destruction of wilderness, and, clearly, an effort to rob the poor to enrich the rich.

Germany is a coal dependent nation; coal plants kill people whenever they operate normally.

The aesthetics involved in calling industrial parks for wind turbines "sculptures" is right out of Ayn Randian contempt for the environment; I am personally appalled and offended by the marketing that shows vast stretches of once virgin wilderness with microplastic spewing unsustainable short lived industrial junk that will become landfill within 20 years.

The single nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon in California produces, far more reliably, more electricity, on a twelve acre footprint more energy than thousands of square miles of wind turbine industrial plants spread across thousands of square miles of once pristine desert ecosystems.

Electricity generation in California, by Source.

Anyone, and I do mean anyone who applauds this outcome in that coal dependent hellhole Germany, to my mind is not an environmentalist, but is merely an easily manipulated rote thinker.

I would add that anyone who is betting the future of one's country, and in fact, the future of the world on nuclear fusion - and to be clear I support plasma physics research - is demonstrating contempt for the future of humanity, and is clearly unfamiliar with even the basic tenets of industrial and academic science.

The result of this "renewable energy will save us" pro-mining, pro-development attitude is written in the planetary atmosphere, which is collapsing leaving the planet in flames.

In the 23 years I've been writing at DU listening to mindless antinukes pratting on about tearing the shit out of the planet for so called "renewable energy" the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide (not to mention the other heavy metal and carcinogenic particulates associated with fossil fuels) has risen, since the week beginning November 17, 2002, by 55.71 ppm as of this writing, from 369.74 ppm to (as of the week beginning January 25, 2026) to 428.39 ppm.

This has come at a cost of vast subsidy to the rich paid by the poor on a scale of trillions of dollars, this on a burning planet where around 1 billion people lack access to improved sanitation.

The myopic airheads in the fossil fuel coddling antinuke industry who praise so called "renewable energy" have such obscene indifference to reality as to actually complain about nuclear subsidies. They are obviously incapable of understanding economics, just as the can't compare the vast ongoing death toll associated with fossil fuels, about which they have never given a rat's ass.

The bourgeois poorly educated antinukes applauding this outcome, to my mind, lack even a trace of decency or even a trace of moral awareness.

The last best hope of humanity, capable of doing less and less while bourgeois brats pick lint out of their navels complaining about things they are incapable of understanding, chanting silly slogans, is nuclear fission energy. It's here; it works; and it saves human lives and in fact, vast stretches of increasingly disappearing wilderness, and slows the rate of the degradation of the planetary atmosphere.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

The German nuclear phase out was not only an economic crime; it was a crime against humanity and, in fact, against the planet's ecosystems.

Clearly, it disgusts me.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.