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Off now... In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Outside of consumer goods, can you think of a market which operates significantly differently than energy in this regard? I have a hard time thinking of any which wouldn't require active and durable State involvement and regulation if not ownership (health care, communications, banking, transportation, etc...)
The move to liberalise these past two decades will be seen, I am convinced, as a big mistake.
And now it is nearing 19h00 where I am, the skies are sunny and the poor Spaniards have been spanked as predicted by yours truly (by the exact score, I might add), it's time for a little celebratory Pastaga!! The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill
I'd like to think of my space as the Gramschi space. I'd guess Stalin's probably way higher than me up the y-axe, maybe higher than everyone.
This being said, he probably had the right idea about nuclear power too.
The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill
For those who think nuclear is less safe than the alternatives, all I can guess is there are no coal miners in their family tree, or they don't live near a refinery or a gas pipeline.
Many Americans understandably have a phobia about nuclear and I sympathize, since you need to provide stringent safeguards and a regulatory framework around which to build an industry which is safest when standardized. This takes a certain aptitude for the collective which America patently is hopeless at. European countries (other than Belgium and France) have no such excuse except maybe the UK which shares America's economic ideological fetishes to some extent.
But just because it doesn't work in America anymore doesn't mean it shouldn't be a part of our energy future in the West, in much the same way just because gay marriage won't work in Saudi Arabia doesn't mean it isn't an idea whose time has come for advanced Western social democracies.
Sorry I got off topic but that's the pastis and then dinner talking, great game, great game. The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill
Cars kill lots more people than airplanes no matter how you measure it, but people have no problems driving in cars because "behind the wheel" you feel in control of the situation.
You can choose to go into a coal mine, but you can't choose to not live within 1000 miles of a nuclear power plant. (At least not in North America or Europe.)
It doesn't matter how many nuclear accidents there have been so far, or how many people have been killed (which is a debateable number), but whether you have a choice to live "near" one.
It's not so much a mistake as the Cult of Capitalism's Counter-Reformation.
It's not even about money really. It's about recentralising power so that the peasants don't have access to it, and so can be exploited ad lib.
Most 'reforms' are about consolidating that power base. Wind is considered a threat because it has the potential to be massively decentralised, with players at every level from house-sized microgeneration to huge national farms.
Nuclear is inherently centralised and anti-democratic because it can never be fragmented like this. In the minds of the noobies who are promoting it, that's a good feature and not a bad one.
Also, Big Technology is always more exciting to plan, finance and build than relatively small-scale run of the (wind)mill projects. Where's the fun in building something that you know will work reliably and can be put together fairly quickly? Isn't it much more interesting to have lots of meetings with government representatives and law makers who make you feel like someone really important, and will hand over big sexy cheques more or less on demand?
But on the other hand, I strongly belive we don't move past the age of petroleum without the state. The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill
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