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Very significant segments of the population base themselves more around whether they like the person than the politics. One of the primary determiners of whether people like someone is whether that person speaks positively or negatively of them.
Trump, with all his obvious flaws, rarely if ever insulted his would-be voters. Rather, he spoke very warmly of them - and he highlighted (and exaggerated) the insulty elitism of the democrats. It's actually kinda funny Simberto, when you write paragraphs about how republicans (and by extension their voters) are insane + evil, and in the same paragraph write 'But apparently they found some kind of hack into the human psyche that lets people still vote for them', you rather poignantly illustrate that very hack.
Most people are not all that politically conscious, and it is much easier to convince them that a particular piece of policy makes sense (even if it won't benefit them, might actively harm them) than it is to convince them that a person they've seen insult them based on their beliefs or life style is a likeable person.
I think Bernie in many ways could have fit the bill for 'person people could like'. (Man, if only he were 20 years younger..) The attacks on him are consistently related to his policies being 'insane'- they don't target him as a person. However, in this case, he struggles because there are influential democrats who fear Bernie's policies and thus don't give him the front-runner position. I mean, Democrats are a multifaceted bunch, but one of their faces is a real elitist jerk. This element has to go. Doesn't really matter whether statements are 'correct' or not.
I mean, everything about criticism of first past the post, voter disenfranchisement, fragmented media landscape, neoliberal policies favoring the elites.. I agree with all of that. But there is a huge messaging problem, too, and it's not just politicians, it's media personalities, people on twitter, 'Hollywood'..
On October 11 2021 04:17 JimmiC wrote: The bonus of the Republicans going full evil and fully embracing QAnon publicly, is it has totally smashed the both parties are the same argument. You can still say both parties are bad, or have corruption or whatever. But they are not remotely the same. If you at all believe in science, women's rights, democracy and so one, one party is clearly better.
Yeah, but it leads to a lot of bad stuff in a two party system if only one party is remotely sane. This means that no matter what the democrats do, you have to vote for them, because the republicans are just insane and evil. And i don't think that that situation leads to a party pursuing the good of the people.
This is my mindset, further compelling people to vote for Democrats by virtue of Republicans being psychopathic monsters is actively a bad thing. This just lets Democrats sell out harder because who else you gonna vote for? Republicans?
Its a serious downside to this two party nonsense system.
While the 2 party system isn't ideal, you can't really blame it for people not rallying behind the most progressive/leftist ideas proposed. Especially when there is absolutely ridiculous shit in there like "defund the police". The democrats main issue seems to be that their left wing is actively alienating anyone closer to the center while feeling all high and mighty about it, It seems to be a clear losing strategy everywhere but the utmost blue states. Maybe this is just the online bubble but the stuff "leftists" say about anyone not being 100% on their line is a surefire way to lose for all eternity.
Oh and you seriously gotta do something about your media machine... Be it Facebook, Fox or CNN.
Two party systems actively kill any outside parties though. You have to meet an incredibly hard to meet threshold to basically overthrow and consume an existing party to get in an, and obvious when you have super powerful entrenched parties they're not going to just let themselves be consumed by someone who they view as threatening their interests.
The progressive issue is progressives somehow being the ones guilty of demanding everything be 100% their way when we have the likes of Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema around, ostensibly our "center" politicians, who are dramatically influence policy in their favor else they tell you to fuck off. They're AT LEAST as bad as the progressives are, and they're doing what they do for way shittier reasons than progressives do things.
Also this supposition that centrism is the only way to win is silly, centrist Democrats are strategically mediocre, they've been doing their centrist shtick since Bill Clinton, they've lost to George Bush and Donald Trump with the strict adherence to centrism. Republicans continue to slide to the right, redefining what the center even is, committing to the center so hard just leads everyone to the right.
To be fair,
The US is a nation where half the population thinks that pissing off the other half is reason enough for pilicy.
Its probably less than half, half the voting population sure, but thats still only like half the country, lol
It is a nation where there was a fascist attempt to overthrow the elected government just this year, and the party of said fascists still get about 50% of the votes.
I still think this is underappreciated. One of the most egregious acts of sedition in our history and there have been fuck all for real consequences for it, that is an unfathomably harmful precedent to have set.
And it is a country where no one can see a way out of all of these problems.
Plenty of people can see ways out of a lot of these problems, they just don't have any power because our government is controlled by money, and moneys only concern is making more money, no thought or interest in anything beyond that.
Your last point was basically what i meant with "no one can see a way out of all of this". Yes, people see ways out of this, but no one sees a way to actually get the stuff you would need to get out of this implemented through the system.
I understand Democrats insistence on working within an obviously broken system, but combined with not being able to even protect the voting rights (or bodily autonomy in the case of abortion) of the people that elect them, it is unacceptable/unsustainable under any rational analysis imo.
At this point I'm less upset at Democrats for having what I think are objectively deficient political views (still better than the Sith party, so yay!) than I am at Democrats/their supporters for failing to confront the reality I think ChristianS summed up well.
It feels like we’re all doing the math on our current velocity toward the cliff and distance from it and maximum braking force, but the math isn’t actually very hard. We just keep recalculating because the result we keep getting is unfathomable
Until folks do, there's not much productive discussion around the 2-party FPTP stuff to be had imo. Seems a lot like 'rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic' to me otherwise.
Heh, I thought you might like that one when I wrote it.
I guess I don’t blame people very much for having trouble processing the unfathomable. If you look at the world and see catastrophe coming and very little about it seems contingent on our behavior, individually or collectively, what are you supposed to do about it? Hope you’re wrong?
I mean, I think it’s been more than a year since you declared electoralism dead as a means of achieving sufficient change. Where do you look now? Mutual aid and building dual power? Extra-governmental organizations using things like general strikes to force radical change? Pack your bags and move to Canada (likely to become more temperate with each passing year)?
I have to say I’m still rooting for the infrastructure bill to pass in some form, if only because I think the climate provisions are real and meaningful, even if they won’t keep us below 1.5C warming. And I’m still rooting for reactionary and insurrectionist movements to lose steam somehow, if only because the country erupting into political violence will surely be tragic for everyone I care about or know or have talked to on the internet. I wrote that post because Belisarius (who I think is quite astute, generally) seemed to believe strongly that a voting rights bill was the only way to save us. And I thought his logic was solid enough, except that a) I think it’s virtually impossible they a national voting rights bill will pass, and b) I tend to doubt that a voting rights bill would be sufficient to save us. But even if I’m right… what now? Just find a comfy seat and wait for the apocalypse to destroy us?
On October 12 2021 01:37 ChristianS wrote: Heh, I thought you might like that one when I wrote it.
I guess I don’t blame people very much for having trouble processing the unfathomable. If you look at the world and see catastrophe coming and very little about it seems contingent on our behavior, individually or collectively, what are you supposed to do about it? Hope you’re wrong?
I mean, I think it’s been more than a year since you declared electoralism dead as a means of achieving sufficient change. Where do you look now? Mutual aid and building dual power? Extra-governmental organizations using things like general strikes to force radical change? Pack your bags and move to Canada (likely to become more temperate with each passing year)?
I have to say I’m still rooting for the infrastructure bill to pass in some form, if only because I think the climate provisions are real and meaningful, even if they won’t keep us below 1.5C warming. And I’m still rooting for reactionary and insurrectionist movements to lose steam somehow, if only because the country erupting into political violence will surely be tragic for everyone I care about or know or have talked to on the internet. I wrote that post because Belisarius (who I think is quite astute, generally) seemed to believe strongly that a voting rights bill was the only way to save us. And I thought his logic was solid enough, except that a) I think it’s virtually impossible they a national voting rights bill will pass, and b) I tend to doubt that a voting rights bill would be sufficient to save us. But even if I’m right… what now? Just find a comfy seat and wait for the apocalypse to destroy us?
I'd take some issue with aspects of your framing but my point is that I don't think discussions can be very productive until the people engaged are at least where you are.
Catastrophe is coming. This is the overwhelming consensus of the best available scientific data even if countries like the US weren't failing to meet their insufficient Paris Climate Accord commitments.
"Electoralism" under the existing bourgeois democracy is incapable of averting and increasingly seems unwilling to even mitigate (except for the most affluent and powerful) that catastrophe. Moreover, it consistently undermines the social movements and organizing required for making real and unambiguously necessary changes.
So where do we look?
Mutual aid and building dual power? Extra-governmental organizations using things like general strikes to force radical change?
Those are good places imo. Certainly better than trying to elect more Liebermans, Manchins, and Sinemas for Pyrrhic majorities, which has been the "New Democrats" strategy for decades.
Just find a comfy seat and wait for the apocalypse to destroy us?
My adjoining point is that many people in the US/West have already taken this option (though comfort levels vary wildly) and simply refuse to reconcile it with their self-image (part of why my sig is what it is).
I think I agree with all of that. I might have accidentally implied (or you might have assumed, given my history as kind of a mealy-mouthed centrist) that I think we should look to electoral politics as the “right” way to deal with our problems or something. I don’t. Guys like David Shor are working extremely hard to find ways to bend democratic systems toward necessary change, but either they’re doing a very bad job or it’s just not within their power (or both). I’d like to believe that the right candidate or activist or whatever could get out there and change hearts and minds and convince the people to vote for the right stuff, but at this point I think you’d have to be willfully naïve to follow our politics even in passing and still believe in that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington kind of idealism.
I do think most people are realizing there’s no good way out of this. I think it’s part of why this thread is so dead, actually. Who’s an optimist at this point? The right thinks Joe Biden is a radical leftist conspiring to steal elections and inject them with nano-machines. The “sane” ones think Trump’s crazy but the left is worse for wanting to spend money on health care or climate change or w/e. I think mainstream Democrats thought they could unite the country by voting out Trump and electing a moderate, which has gone about as well as every other time they try that plan.
And then there’s the far left. You could say better than me where the discourse is at these days, but is anybody… optimistic? It seems like I see a call for a general strike every other day. I listened to a few episodes of this podcast explicitly focused on “what do we do about the apocalypse?” from a pretty far left/anarchist perspective; it’s mostly doomsday prepper type stuff. They’re trying to be less dumb than preppers have historically been (more community-building and self-sufficiency, less bunkers and arsenals), but it’s still the same basic premise: the institutions that have (albeit imperfectly) provided us the means to live in society are going to start breaking down, so we need to figure out how we’re going to take care of ourselves and our loved ones when the highways are destroyed and warlords start taking over.
I mean, maybe that’s the most responsible thing? I probably don’t think that destroyed highways and warlord states is what our catastrophe(s) will look like, but I also don’t have a very good idea what it actually will look like. If we accept that we did the math right and going off the cliff is inevitable, the only choice left is to start figuring out what going off the cliff looks like and whether there’s any ways to make it less bad. In a lot of cases that might look pretty similar to “finding a comfy seat and waiting for the apocalypse,” admittedly, but what else can we do besides try to figure out what a sustainable life is going to require?
I think I agree with all of that. I might have accidentally implied (or you might have assumed, given my history as kind of a mealy-mouthed centrist) that I think we should look to electoral politics as the “right” way to deal with our problems or something. I don’t. Guys like David Shor are working extremely hard to find ways to bend democratic systems toward necessary change, but either they’re doing a very bad job or it’s just not within their power (or both). I’d like to believe that the right candidate or activist or whatever could get out there and change hearts and minds and convince the people to vote for the right stuff, but at this point I think you’d have to be willfully naïve to follow our politics even in passing and still believe in that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington kind of idealism.
I do think most people are realizing there’s no good way out of this. I think it’s part of why this thread is so dead, actually. Who’s an optimist at this point? The right thinks Joe Biden is a radical leftist conspiring to steal elections and inject them with nano-machines. The “sane” ones think Trump’s crazy but the left is worse for wanting to spend money on health care or climate change or w/e. I think mainstream Democrats thought they could unite the country by voting out Trump and electing a moderate, which has gone about as well as every other time they try that plan.
And then there’s the far left. You could say better than me where the discourse is at these days, but is anybody… optimistic? It seems like I see a call for a general strike every other day. I listened to a few episodes of this podcast explicitly focused on “what do we do about the apocalypse?” from a pretty far left/anarchist perspective; it’s mostly doomsday prepper type stuff. They’re trying to be less dumb than preppers have historically been (more community-building and self-sufficiency, less bunkers and arsenals), but it’s still the same basic premise: the institutions that have (albeit imperfectly) provided us the means to live in society are going to start breaking down, so we need to figure out how we’re going to take care of ourselves and our loved ones when the highways are destroyed and warlords start taking over.
I mean, maybe that’s the most responsible thing? I probably don’t think that destroyed highways and warlord states is what our catastrophe(s) will look like, but I also don’t have a very good idea what it actually will look like. If we accept that we did the math right and going off the cliff is inevitable, the only choice left is to start figuring out what going off the cliff looks like and whether there’s any ways to make it less bad. In a lot of cases that might look pretty similar to “finding a comfy seat and waiting for the apocalypse,” admittedly, but what else can we do besides try to figure out what a sustainable life is going to require?
2016 Bernie was the last gasp of the 'Mr. Smith' trope for me, and it was hard to even muster that after my disillusionment with Obama.
You're where a lot of the US left (to the degree it exists) is, but I've found that revolutionary optimism is plentiful when we look outside of the US/West. I think everyone finds theirs in their own way, but as evidence you aren't alone, this relevant video recently dropped.
It's a cursory overview of revolutionary optimism.
I think I agree with all of that. I might have accidentally implied (or you might have assumed, given my history as kind of a mealy-mouthed centrist) that I think we should look to electoral politics as the “right” way to deal with our problems or something. I don’t. Guys like David Shor are working extremely hard to find ways to bend democratic systems toward necessary change, but either they’re doing a very bad job or it’s just not within their power (or both). I’d like to believe that the right candidate or activist or whatever could get out there and change hearts and minds and convince the people to vote for the right stuff, but at this point I think you’d have to be willfully naïve to follow our politics even in passing and still believe in that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington kind of idealism.
I do think most people are realizing there’s no good way out of this. I think it’s part of why this thread is so dead, actually. Who’s an optimist at this point? The right thinks Joe Biden is a radical leftist conspiring to steal elections and inject them with nano-machines. The “sane” ones think Trump’s crazy but the left is worse for wanting to spend money on health care or climate change or w/e. I think mainstream Democrats thought they could unite the country by voting out Trump and electing a moderate, which has gone about as well as every other time they try that plan.
And then there’s the far left. You could say better than me where the discourse is at these days, but is anybody… optimistic? It seems like I see a call for a general strike every other day. I listened to a few episodes of this podcast explicitly focused on “what do we do about the apocalypse?” from a pretty far left/anarchist perspective; it’s mostly doomsday prepper type stuff. They’re trying to be less dumb than preppers have historically been (more community-building and self-sufficiency, less bunkers and arsenals), but it’s still the same basic premise: the institutions that have (albeit imperfectly) provided us the means to live in society are going to start breaking down, so we need to figure out how we’re going to take care of ourselves and our loved ones when the highways are destroyed and warlords start taking over.
I mean, maybe that’s the most responsible thing? I probably don’t think that destroyed highways and warlord states is what our catastrophe(s) will look like, but I also don’t have a very good idea what it actually will look like. If we accept that we did the math right and going off the cliff is inevitable, the only choice left is to start figuring out what going off the cliff looks like and whether there’s any ways to make it less bad. In a lot of cases that might look pretty similar to “finding a comfy seat and waiting for the apocalypse,” admittedly, but what else can we do besides try to figure out what a sustainable life is going to require?
2016 Bernie was the last gasp of the 'Mr. Smith' trope for me, and it was hard to even muster that after my disillusionment with Obama.
You're where a lot of the US left (to the degree it exists) is, but I've found that revolutionary optimism is plentiful when we look outside of the US/West. I think everyone finds theirs in their own way, but as evidence you aren't alone, this relevant video recently dropped.
It's a cursory overview of revolutionary optimism.
I choked when the word "doomerism" was introduced. What?? That goes into the same "ism" category as "multiculturalism" for me.
As the current energy crisis firmly proves, there are no easy solutions to the causes of the negativity. What is revolutionary optimism's solution when the options are burning more coal and freezing to death because of power shortage? What is obviously done is burning that coal and hoping the consequences aren't as bad as feared.
At some point, the protests against high energy prices will get louder than the climate activists, and politicians will be forced to change their stance.
The very recent elections in Norway was a typical example of how such movements fail. There were 3 "climate" parties on the ballot, a far left, green "wing neutral" and a right-leaning liberal centrist. Despite enormous media support, the did only half decent in the elections, and the far left party just left government negotiations mainly because of disagreements about oil regulations.
It turned out most Norwegians were not that keen on closing down the industry which made the country prosper, and the "climate" parties might turn out to be irrelevant for the next 4 years despite the left-block firmly winning.
In germany the strongest party among young people was the FDP (basically the "free market party").
FFF is nice and dandy, but don't kid yourself, it's neither a dominant force nor a majority among young people. I laugh to myself looking at all these young "activists" and how they will lose out against the other young people that push their careers forward and will dominate politics in the future.
On October 12 2021 19:57 Velr wrote: In germany the strongest party among young people was the FDP (basically the "free market party").
FFF is nice and dandy, but don't kid yourself, it's neither a dominant force nor a majority among young people. I laugh to myself looking at all these young "activists" and how they will lose out against the other young people that push their careers forward and will dominate politics in the future.
It's not boomers that doom us .
Calling FDP the "free market party" is only fitting in the context of German politics given that they rely on "the market" to fix certain issues more than other parties do. They do not propagate a free market philosophy by any means. It is even more misleading to contrast their young voters with "activists" considering that FDP also claim to have climate protection as a top priority and to want to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement. Examples of FDP demands that show them neither being a "free market party" nor not caring about climate policies are amongst other: increase of the price of CO2 certificates, extending CO2 emission certificates to all sectors (e.g. transport and heating - currently they only affect electricity and parts of the industry), and introducing an "ecology" tax. All in all, in Germany (at least currently) you do not win elections if you do not claim to care a lot about climate protection. As to why so many young voters chose FDP, it's a good bet that it had little to do with their economic policies and a lot to do with their extremely liberal social policies.
Short term Nuclear seems a good compliment to renewable to be able to close down Coal and Gas plants. Nuclear has a lot of problems but it is more long term or more localised if it becomes short term. (Well apart from its high cost.)
Build Nuclear to equal output of Coal and Gas. Since renewable will climb we have more energy than before, which is required in many industries to switch from high CO2 production to electric alternatives.
Hopefully by the time the Nuclear plants near end of life the renewable net is built out enough to not need replacing. Maybe even closing them down before end of life will be possible.
Nuclear is the way to go both short and long term. No one with a firm understanding of the chemistry/physics of nuclear energy and how it relates to other power sources is actually opposed to it. Solar+batteries will be the golden dream some day, but we aren't there yet. Nuclear will likely always be our best method of dealing with high power needs, too. All my homies who work in solar research say nuclear is great.
Opposition to nuclear is equivalent to people buying in to the propaganda from piece of shit Edison electrocuting an elephant. There is no modern justifiable reason to oppose modern nuclear designs.
All the major power sources have their trade-offs. The problems of wind were very clearly demonstrated by this year's energy crisis in north Europe. Solar is similar but with the added bonus of a very dirty production process. Coal & gas would be slam-dunk winners without the emissions. And so on. As for nuclear - even without the meltdown problem and with the properly engineered medium-sized reactors, you still have plenty of problems. Still have waste to dispose of, still really expensive and difficult to build, and the supply chain for fuel rods kind of sucks. I don't think meltdowns are the only reason that France is the only country that has an outsized portion of its power in nukular energy.
Frankly, there's way too many people looking for a quick fix with getting to a low-carbon state. You got your internet edgelords crying "LFTR! LFTR!" as if some magically overlooked nuclear technology will somehow change the equation entirely. You have governments in all sorts of places that push too aggressively in favor of the unreliables like wind or solar, generally in a way that either sacrifices energy reliability or that sacrifices quite a lot to achieve it (e.g. gigantic battery farms, forged in a very dirty indeed production process). Hell, you even have the deplorable types that are willing to sacrifice renewable-but-imperfect power sources like hydroelectric over contrived or highly solvable issues like vegetation or fish routes, with the real reasons being more along the lines of "we can't let them take credit for being X% renewable off hydroelectric when we could force them to build more wind farms instead."
In the long run - a century or two, perhaps - all these problems can be solved. But it's proving hard enough to shed coal (the most obvious and troublesome emitter) without all the aggressive grandstanding that shuns everything other than wind and solar. The ugly truth, though, is that coal (and to a lesser extent gas), have one really rock-solid advantage that's hard to overcome: they're reliable, low-infrastructure, and easy to scale up to whatever power requirements you have. It might be better to shed just coal in the medium term, because adding gas or nuclear or hydroelectric (or several of those) to the must-remove list is just going to lead to an energy crisis where you have to start making choices between coal, shutting down factories, and picking which people get to freeze to death in the winter.
In the long run - a century or two, I'm guessing that entirely shedding coal immediately, even if it results in a 7 digit number of people freezing to death every winter for the next decade, would be preferable.
I entirely agree that nuclear doesn't seem like quite the obvious solution many paint it to be, though. The most convincing argument I've seen is that developing nuclear takes a long time and we need big cuts in the next 10 years. I'm no expert on this, but I have the impression that even a concentrated effort to develop mass nuclear today would take many years before we saw real impact from that. And while I also have the impression that meltdowns aren't considered a big problem anymore, waste isn't solved (I'd easily take that uncertain problem over the increasingly certain disaster of climate change, though), and I'm not sure to what degree countries developing nuclear power plants looks from a nuclear weapon proliferation point of view. (Although, to be fair, most of the major polluters (not per capita) already have nuclear weapons.)
All this said - I'm still entirely on board with nuclear as part of the solution to the whole energy/climate problem, and I imagine we'd most likely be in a much better place today if we had focused massively on nuclear 20-30 years ago.
More people dying would definitely do a lot of good for the environment, especially if you could have the laser-precision of targeting first worlders. So would forswearing 90% or so of all things in the world that require using power. But I suspect those are outside of the realm of what kind of policy would be viable to implement. Within the realm of what is feasible, you can’t do much better than killing coal quickly and accepting that you can’t kill any of the other majors (gas, oil, hydro, nuclear) anything but painfully slowly lest you just get dragged right back into the same pollution trap you were trying to escape.
Nuclear is probably good for 20-30% of power in the long run. Makes sense in a lot of cases, more than currently in use, but it’s no catch-all.
On October 13 2021 10:01 Liquid`Drone wrote: In the long run - a century or two, I'm guessing that entirely shedding coal immediately, even if it results in a 7 digit number of people freezing to death every winter for the next decade, would be preferable.
I entirely agree that nuclear doesn't seem like quite the obvious solution many paint it to be, though. The most convincing argument I've seen is that developing nuclear takes a long time and we need big cuts in the next 10 years. I'm no expert on this, but I have the impression that even a concentrated effort to develop mass nuclear today would take many years before we saw real impact from that. And while I also have the impression that meltdowns aren't considered a big problem anymore, waste isn't solved (I'd easily take that uncertain problem over the increasingly certain disaster of climate change, though), and I'm not sure to what degree countries developing nuclear power plants looks from a nuclear weapon proliferation point of view. (Although, to be fair, most of the major polluters (not per capita) already have nuclear weapons.)
All this said - I'm still entirely on board with nuclear as part of the solution to the whole energy/climate problem, and I imagine we'd most likely be in a much better place today if we had focused massively on nuclear 20-30 years ago.
This is where the "LIFTER, LIFTER" bullshit comes in. Because "that solves all that". You see, LFT reactors are magical. Technology from the 60s, infinite run time, meltdown proof, can't be used to put nuclear weapons together, thorium is easy to find, no waste, you name it, lifter has it.
Here's reality though.
Most of that is nonsense. In fact, the entire argument around nuclear as "the saviour" is bullshit. Yes. Nuclear is great, certainly would help in the effort to combat global warming. Except, it won't help. It can't help. What people love to leave out when they argue that "all scientists say nuclear is great n stuff" is that a single power plant takes around 10 years to build - and those are not "cutting edge technology that we can't get to work 100% yet", those are known reactors. Most "new" reactors are old. Take Watts Bar Unit 2, commissioned in 2016. It's the same reactor as Unit 1. Unit 1 was commissioned 1996. It also has a high risk of Beryllium poisoning (also usually left out in leaflets, it only mentions "the invisible killer" aka radiation) - a broken pipe is enough. The waste products of LFTRs are water-soluble. There's no suppliers for the resources needed to run LFTRs.
Who's going to build lifter? Lifter is incredibly expensive - to build, to run and to maintain. Barely any company in the world builds them in the first place, my guess would be that you could build maybe three lifters (if you find someone stupid enough to order them in the first place) per decade. Not per country, in total, since in general "nuclear power plant building" isn't something that any company can do - it's indeed a rather small amount.
To top that, Lifter actually doesn't offer any advantage to the company who's running it. It literally has only downsides. It's more expensive, it's more complicated to run, we don't even know if they'd work as breeder reactors.
In the end: i'm certainly not opposed to nuclear. But it's nowhere near enough and would work as supplement at best. You can't scale nuclear like you can renewables, and while renewables itself have issues (obvious ones), they're incredibly easy to scale.
Arguing that "nuclear is the way to go" is basically kicking the can down the road. What really is the way to go is solar and hydroelectric for energy storage. Battery storage (as "golden ticket") is nonsense, anyone who ever played with batteries and chemistries knows why that's not going to happen. As long as we need to use an electrolyte inside the packs, batteries are not the way forward. Solid state batteries could solve that (and would potentially be greener/more efficient than hydroelectric for storage), but they're at least a decade if not two away.
In essence, nuclear is either safe but too expensive/slow to build, or it's not actually safe. Anyone who suggests otherwise is disingenuous. Of course a scientist will say that nuclear is safe because (comparatively) safe reactors exist in theory, but nobody is going to build them because they're not profitable.
Global warming isn't linear, it's exponential. The sooner we get a grip, the better the chances to get a handle on it. Getting told by one of the biggest polluters in the world (the average american is the biggest climate sinner in the world) that we should wait a few more decades to create more power while five or more nuclear power stations could be replaced by reducing your energy consumption by 25% is.. rather ironic.
On October 12 2021 19:57 Velr wrote: In germany the strongest party among young people was the FDP (basically the "free market party").
FFF is nice and dandy, but don't kid yourself, it's neither a dominant force nor a majority among young people. I laugh to myself looking at all these young "activists" and how they will lose out against the other young people that push their careers forward and will dominate politics in the future.
It's not boomers that doom us .
Calling FDP the "free market party" is only fitting in the context of German politics given that they rely on "the market" to fix certain issues more than other parties do. They do not propagate a free market philosophy by any means. It is even more misleading to contrast their young voters with "activists" considering that FDP also claim to have climate protection as a top priority and to want to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement. Examples of FDP demands that show them neither being a "free market party" nor not caring about climate policies are amongst other: increase of the price of CO2 certificates, extending CO2 emission certificates to all sectors (e.g. transport and heating - currently they only affect electricity and parts of the industry), and introducing an "ecology" tax. All in all, in Germany (at least currently) you do not win elections if you do not claim to care a lot about climate protection. As to why so many young voters chose FDP, it's a good bet that it had little to do with their economic policies and a lot to do with their extremely liberal social policies.
You say they don't propagate a free market policy and then proceed to give examples of market based solutions to current problems. Recognizing there are market failures and correcting them with trading schemes and taxes is pretty much what a free market approach looks like.
On October 12 2021 19:57 Velr wrote: In germany the strongest party among young people was the FDP (basically the "free market party").
FFF is nice and dandy, but don't kid yourself, it's neither a dominant force nor a majority among young people. I laugh to myself looking at all these young "activists" and how they will lose out against the other young people that push their careers forward and will dominate politics in the future.
It's not boomers that doom us .
Calling FDP the "free market party" is only fitting in the context of German politics given that they rely on "the market" to fix certain issues more than other parties do. They do not propagate a free market philosophy by any means. It is even more misleading to contrast their young voters with "activists" considering that FDP also claim to have climate protection as a top priority and to want to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement. Examples of FDP demands that show them neither being a "free market party" nor not caring about climate policies are amongst other: increase of the price of CO2 certificates, extending CO2 emission certificates to all sectors (e.g. transport and heating - currently they only affect electricity and parts of the industry), and introducing an "ecology" tax. All in all, in Germany (at least currently) you do not win elections if you do not claim to care a lot about climate protection. As to why so many young voters chose FDP, it's a good bet that it had little to do with their economic policies and a lot to do with their extremely liberal social policies.
Uhm... They are not hardcore libertarians like their "funny" american cousins but they pretty much follow the neo-liberal/free marked approach to the core. Calling them something diffrent is either uninformed or dishonest.
On October 13 2021 04:07 Mohdoo wrote: Nuclear is the way to go both short and long term. No one with a firm understanding of the chemistry/physics of nuclear energy and how it relates to other power sources is actually opposed to it. Solar+batteries will be the golden dream some day, but we aren't there yet. Nuclear will likely always be our best method of dealing with high power needs, too. All my homies who work in solar research say nuclear is great.
Opposition to nuclear is equivalent to people buying in to the propaganda from piece of shit Edison electrocuting an elephant. There is no modern justifiable reason to oppose modern nuclear designs.
Please just stop claiming to speak for the whole of science. You are not (saying this as a chemist).
Like other people already pointed out ramping up nuclear energy production would be too slow to help us reach our climate goals. Also, no matter what people claim there is no good solution for the waste we currently generate and the power plants once their lifetime has run out. This can be easily seen in Germany right now. We will probably be working on removing the plants for another 40-60 years and one can only imagine how much money and climate damage will accumulate until then. If you say the reactors shouldn't have been shut down Prematurely then I agree with you. But let us not kid ourselves and claim that nuclear is the solution for climate change or a reasonable long term solution for energy production.
Regarding nuclear reactors - below You can find some links and major info.
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/UnderConstructionReactorsByCountry.aspx TLDR: -52 reactors currently under construction, majority of them in Asia and most of them are of PWR type. -Most of reactors currently being bulit is "Generation III" while most of those being decomisioned are Generation II. All Generation I reactors are already shut down. -First molten salt commercial reactor scheduled to start in 2030 (China). -Combined power of new reactors 53870MW
Sadly the future for nuclear looks grim in the west. The pseudo enviromental campaigns and antinuclear lobby dealt very serious blows there. In Asia we trust i guess.
On October 12 2021 19:57 Velr wrote: In germany the strongest party among young people was the FDP (basically the "free market party").
FFF is nice and dandy, but don't kid yourself, it's neither a dominant force nor a majority among young people. I laugh to myself looking at all these young "activists" and how they will lose out against the other young people that push their careers forward and will dominate politics in the future.
It's not boomers that doom us .
Calling FDP the "free market party" is only fitting in the context of German politics given that they rely on "the market" to fix certain issues more than other parties do. They do not propagate a free market philosophy by any means. It is even more misleading to contrast their young voters with "activists" considering that FDP also claim to have climate protection as a top priority and to want to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement. Examples of FDP demands that show them neither being a "free market party" nor not caring about climate policies are amongst other: increase of the price of CO2 certificates, extending CO2 emission certificates to all sectors (e.g. transport and heating - currently they only affect electricity and parts of the industry), and introducing an "ecology" tax. All in all, in Germany (at least currently) you do not win elections if you do not claim to care a lot about climate protection. As to why so many young voters chose FDP, it's a good bet that it had little to do with their economic policies and a lot to do with their extremely liberal social policies.
You say they don't propagate a free market policy and then proceed to give examples of market based solutions to current problems. Recognizing there are market failures and correcting them with trading schemes and taxes is pretty much what a free market approach looks like.
Yes, these are examples of market based solutions, but to my understanding imposing regulations and taxes/tariffs are by no means a "free market" approach (in the sense of Laissez-faire).
On October 12 2021 19:57 Velr wrote: In germany the strongest party among young people was the FDP (basically the "free market party").
FFF is nice and dandy, but don't kid yourself, it's neither a dominant force nor a majority among young people. I laugh to myself looking at all these young "activists" and how they will lose out against the other young people that push their careers forward and will dominate politics in the future.
It's not boomers that doom us .
Calling FDP the "free market party" is only fitting in the context of German politics given that they rely on "the market" to fix certain issues more than other parties do. They do not propagate a free market philosophy by any means. It is even more misleading to contrast their young voters with "activists" considering that FDP also claim to have climate protection as a top priority and to want to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement. Examples of FDP demands that show them neither being a "free market party" nor not caring about climate policies are amongst other: increase of the price of CO2 certificates, extending CO2 emission certificates to all sectors (e.g. transport and heating - currently they only affect electricity and parts of the industry), and introducing an "ecology" tax. All in all, in Germany (at least currently) you do not win elections if you do not claim to care a lot about climate protection. As to why so many young voters chose FDP, it's a good bet that it had little to do with their economic policies and a lot to do with their extremely liberal social policies.
Uhm... They are not hardcore libertarians like their "funny" american cousins but they pretty much follow the neo-liberal/free marked approach to the core. Calling them something diffrent is either uninformed or dishonest.
I am very much aware of the fact that FDP is a neo-liberal party. In the German political landscape they are without a doubt the ones that want the least amount of regulations and subsidies while advocation for more privatization and market based solutions to problems. But considering that we are in the US-politics thread, my point is exactly that they are nothing like the American libertarians. The FDP wants to introduce new regulations and tariffs + Show Spoiler +
I guess tariff, rather than tax, is the more fitting translation of "Ökozoll"
, they want to keep many of the current subsidies (albeit less so than other parties) and introduce new ones (e.g. for expanding EV charging infrastructure), keep free education, expand welfare (to minors only but still). Politically, FDP is closer to the Democratic party, and in many instances even to the left of them, than to the American libertarians. My other issue was your juxtaposition of their voters with climate activists, which to me sounds like you are saying that young voters chose economy rather than climate protection. The fact of the matter is that the FDP also claims to want to prevent climate change and to have climate issues as a top priority.
EPT
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