Environment & Energy

... but it's not significantly reducing our environmental footprints.

Why shouldn't people in Africa have what we had? My great grandparent's ranch got electric service thanks to FDR's New Deal. The ranch is still remote, about as far away as you can get from a WalMart in the 48 states. This electricity enabled them to have electric lighting, a radio, and later indoor plumbing with hot water coming out of the tap. That was followed by refrigerators, clothes washers and dryers, and so on. (My great grandma didn't believe in indoor plumbing but her grandkids certainly did.)

Conventional electric power system are simple, reliable, and made from abundant materials -- concrete, steel, and aluminium. Far less copper and other rare materials are used than any "renewable" energy scheme of equivalent capacity.

If the people of the U.S.A. were not so credulous we'd be building nuclear power plants at an increasing rate, eventually shutting down all remaining fossil fuel power plants. And we'd be encouraging other nations that followed a similar path.

Humanity has actually run out of options. If we don't quit fossil fuels the natural environment that supports us will collapse. The only energy resource that can displace fossil fuels entirely and support 8 billion people is nuclear power. That's the reality we find ourselves in. It's not a political issue -- left or right, Democratic or Republican, socialist or capitalist.

Anti-nuclear activism is just an alternative brand of climate change denial.