Read that again. Not only do non-weapon states have the legal right to nuclear power, under the relevant treaties, the weapon states are obligated to help them.
Denying anyone access to nuclear power out of fear of proliferation is clear violation of international law, and very directly weakens the only effective framework we have for limiting the spread of nuclear weapons.
Secundus: Even if we assume that the NPT is a dead letter, which I am not ready to grant, there is also the fact that the countries that already possess nuclear technology and the countries responsible for AGW are sets that overlap very, very greatly. The states that currently possess nuclear weapons are responsible for somewhere in the region of 70% of all CO2 emmisions, and clearly, a weapon state building (more) nuclear power plants is not increasing the risk of proliferation, the horse has left that barn, and burned it down on the way out. Add on the states that have reactors, but no bombs, and we are talking 80% of all emmisions. If those countries, and only those countries turned their electricity production sectors into copies of the french one, that would, indeed, solve global warming. Or at least, halve the size of the problem. It would also be nessesary to transition shipping to nuclear, and automotion to electric, but saying that proliferation makes nuclear an impractical solution to AGW is just wrong.
But in practice, it does not actually mean that all nations gain access to nuclear power technology, does it? Certainly all the nations "that matter" do, but lots of nations fall into the "they can be ignored" category.
Except climate chaos is a global problem, and as we proselytize Western lifestyles with movies and other entertainment, we cannot safely presume a perpetual global underclass that produces less than the average CO2 per person, and consumes less than that as they export to fill in material deficits by the "have" countries of the world.
Neoliberalism (aka Globalization, when people wish to distract from the fact that it is a policy choice) rests on that presumption, but dominance over the medium term is not evidence of sustainability over the longer term - a longstanding lesson we have just had repeated in the context of financial markets.
And the Modern Liberalism which Neoliberalism supplanted was premised on less developed nations accepting their place in return for receiving development assistance to improve the standard of living of people in countries in that place - but that is not tenable if the technological basis for improving the standard of living is not one that can be reproduced. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
that is not tenable if the technological basis for improving the standard of living is not one that can be reproduced.
or god forbid it makes them dependent on maintenance wot ain't there.
great point, Bruce, one that seems obvious, but isn't mentioned enough. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
But stating the tacit assumption reveals the problem: that would be a silly reading of history. All institutional change involves unintended consequences, and the more wide-reaching the change, the greater the potential for some of the unintended consequences to be both strong and malignant.
And even if it were an entirely deliberate choice, there is still the "Dear Liza" conundrum - if it were possible to identify precisely the institutional changes required to make the society functional in that respect, implementing those changes in precisely the way required would itself require a foundation of an institutional capacity for institutional improvement which, by observation, does not exist.
IOW, there's a hole in the bucket, and you need the bucket to fetch the water to wet the whetstone to sharpen the knife to cut the straw to patch the hole in the bucket.
Following the experience of post-WWII reconstruction in Europe and Japan, there were high hopes in the 50's and 60's of lending the bucket to allow new buckets to be made (so to speak - no we are out of the range of the song and use sharpened axes to cut down trees and sharpened saws to cut them into timber) ... but it turns out that reconstructing in a society that was already a functioning industrial society and developing industrial capacities in nations that were not previously functioning industrial societies are quite different challenges.
And as it turned out, the most successful industrial development in the past fifty years occurred in a country that was locked out of the mainstream development program in the 50's and 60's, but which had a massive agrarian revolution in the 50's and 60's following a massive land reform and which was developing in a society which previously had a highly developed commercial economy. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
