Instead, you “argue” by bald assertion and top it off with more ridicule.
Nonsense, you asked me ‘why’ I thought it happened and I told you. We could go down a rabbit hole of neocon ideological justification, but it’s not really a very controversial position so I didn’t see the need (it’s there in black and white if you look for it). The stated justifications from the US government at the time were clearly bullshit (WMDs, etc), and as far as I’m concerned the oft presumed naive justifications were shown to be as well (that it’s all about the oil).
If you have anything that backs up the assertion that it was all about the oil then I’d love to hear it.
We’re talking about enough nuclear to substantially replace the role of all fossil fuels in the economy (including the fossil fuels needed to build the nuclear plants in the first place) as well an deal with the annual increase in demand.
France has shown that we can handle a massive increase in use of nuclear power without any significant increase in risk.
You’re also restricting your analysis to reactor-based disasters when the much more pressing issues with nuclear are the waste created (which would, needless to say, scale up spectacularly if nuclear was used to substantially replace fossil fuels) and the maintenance of the infrastructure (e.g. tailing ponds).
And what exactly are the worst case scenarios involving the spent fuel that I’m failing to account for? It will be stored for as long as it needs to be, then it will be reprocessed for more fuel, as newer technologies come on board, or simply if a political decision is made to deal with it to begin with, the storage part will cease to play a significant part.
You’re also not addressing the worst case scenarios – you’re only addressing the scenarios we’ve seen historically in the context of a highly technological society that is able to leverage considerable flows of resources to mitigate problems before they become disasters. We don’t know what the response would be if a series of nuclear disasters happened after a great depression – but we know that the disasters would be much worse with the depression than without it.
Possibly, but even then what are you talking about exactly, what are you envisaging as a worst case scenario in such a context? I still fail to see how this could even begin to compare with large scale climate change.
With fossil fuels, the situation is reversed – a global depression would lead to a substantial decrease in the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The situation would not be reversed, merely halted at best. Once the CO2 ends up in the atmosphere it takes a looong time for to get locked back up again. Also, surely a global depression would increase our energy use from cheaper and more polluting forms of fossil fuels (like the widely available lignite and other coals), instead of oil and particularly natural gas?
If you applied the same reasoning to global warming, you would be forced to extrapolate the effects from the historical record – approximately 3 degrees C warming so far, no deaths directly attributable to global warming.
This is not actually the current consensus position of climate scientists, according to whom existing climate change has already become responsible for an increase in extreme weather events (things which regularly kill people and cause significant amounts of damage).
I have stated what I thought the worst case scenario has been in both situations, you have yet to actually do so. Even if I’ve ignored a few implausible scenarios and we were to accept them in our calculations, we’re still a long way from affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Finally, you’re not taking into account the very real possibility that mitigating global warming would necessarily require a hit to the economy – and a global depression of that kind could very easily lead to millions of deaths and displacements. Shouldn’t we count the lives caused by global warming mitigation against the lives saved by global warming mitigation?
I don’t think that’s a very real possibility at all, care to justify it?
That his record is “not good” is purely your opinion.
Sure, but I wasn’t presenting my opinions as facts. The point of the original post was only to highlight where they did and didn’t agree, they were the only facts I put forward, anything else was merely parenthetical commentary.
