Environment & Energy

I also at one time thought that a reactor failure would kill millions of people. Then one failed in the worst way possible, at Chornobyl. Chornobyl launched my interest in nuclear energy and brought me to where I am today, in a way I certainly didn't expect.

While I had always thought of myself as an "environmentalist," Al Gore's campaign for the Presidency and his effort to popularize the issue of what was then called, rather euphemistically, "climate change," coalesced the work that led to my current thinking.

Thinking about Al Gore and his recommended "solutions" coupled with my understanding of Carter era policies, particularly his focus on Fischer Tropsch coal to oil, caused me to understand the severe limitations of "appeal to authority" arguments.

I voted for Carter twice and Gore three times, two as VP and one as President. I think Gore, in particular would have prevented the political collapse of the United States, the destruction of its Constitution now well underway. Gore's work as VP to secure Russian weapons grade uranium to blend down to LEU was inspiring and wise.

Overall however his strong belief in so called "renewable energy" which I shared at the time, has proved to be a disaster when put into action, but nowhere near as bad as Carter's FT coal to oil if put into practice would have been.

We would not have had Reagen and Bush one had Carter not been so obsessed with oil as to embrace the Shah of Iran. That made a mockery of his stated belief in human rights, because SAVAK was a criminal organization.

Reagan of course was a worse disaster, but the beliefs of the 1970s set us on a course to where we are today, a dying country on a dying planet.

We can say that both Carter and Gore were in a sense, scientific, inasmuch as they were willing to have theories to be tested by experiment, but both experiments have failed in the sense the hypotheses about how to address energy issues were disproved by those experiments, here and elsewhere, notably in Germany..

At least Dubya put solar cells on his ranch, although it didn't do shit for the environment, because solar hasn't done shit for the environment anywhere other than to make it worse.

I cannot believe that at the end of my life, things have fallen this far. The things I believed as a young man were part of the problem. I was wrong to buy into so called "renewable energy."

I will say had Gore become President, he might have prevented the fall of the United States, as would have the election of Hilliary Clinton. I think she would have been a better President than her husband was and overall he did a pretty good job. Of all the Democratic candidates of my lifetime, she was, I think, the best to not accede to the office.

Obama though was the best President of my lifetime. His appointment of Steven Chu to be Secretary of Energy was inspired. Chu understood the value of nuclear energy, righting the course of our party with respect to nuclear issues now well underway but hardly complete.