a few things..

"climate change" has nothing to do with what is going on. If that was not the thing they would find something else. So, one must always keep a few things in mind about the "environmentalists" or whatever they are currently calling themselves.

They are not interested in winning, what they want to see is other people lose.

They don't not love life, not even their own. They hate life and see placing artificial regulations in the way of living as a good thing.

Especially since we must keep in mind that there is a bottom number for the number of BTUs of energy available per capita below which civilization goes away because it is no longer possible. Human life consistently gets better because we use energy to do what would otherwise be very boring time consuming work. The washing machine was probably among the greatest most liberating inventions in human history. Right up there with refrigeration and electric light. We got those because we had enough of an energy surplus after staying warm and getting fed to start devoting that surplus to inventing and manufacturing things to make life easier. Amazingly enough those very things make it possible to use more energy even more efficiently.

Which leads to the next point. There is a wild difference between efficiency and denial. The "environmentalists" claim to want efficiency. But what they actually preach is denial. Freezing your ass off might use less energy, but it does not use it more efficiently. The only way we get increases in efficiency is by people using brain power to find a better way. The best way to encourage that is to allow the very inventors of that efficiency to reap the rewards of their work. Anything less is an attempt to pretend that A=%

In the meantime..

I am kind of with the "environmentalists" on light water reactors. Those things are what you get when you let physicists and mechanical engineers do chemistry. But we are in luck.. Folks are starting to do real work towards building a better reactor.


http://www.transatomicpower.com/

The current brand of alarmism in climatology stems directly from the previous scam (the ozone scam), simply they renamed themselves to IPCC to move on to the next item on their watermelon (green outside, red inside) agenda, which is a crusade against technological civilization.
CO2, far from being harmful, is a basis for life on earth : plants and plancton use it to grow, animals in turn consume plants, and living matter is litteraly made from CO2 (in order of importance, the 4 elements entering living organisms composition are Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen).
Not only it is the basis for life, but it is also an avoidable byproduct of the activity of every living thing, as well as every technological process.
Climate alarmists, by pointing finger at CO2 for some imaginary ill (actually there is no such thing as global warming, we are in fact in a coolong period), found the perfect target, because of its omnipresence and also its unavoidability.
Their next problem is to maintain the illusion until it has become undisputable, they are really busy "adjusting" temperature records every year to make it look like they are right. Their goal is the extinction of the technological advances of our civilization.
The fact that nuclear power does not incur a significant release of CO2 (which is totally irrelevant anyway, like the ozone "problem" before) and is in fact so much cleaner and safer is a problem for them, which they prefer to push under the rug, but which shows their total hypocrisy.

they do not want to have an "easy" solution to their
political quandary -- it is their lifeline;;; they own stock
in Solyndra, or whatever it is this week. -- j

p.s. it's directly parallel to the "race industry."
.

We have to deal with FM* all the time. We have had customers demand that our system print worksheets BEFORE the accessions that go on said worksheets are entered into the system! They were more than willing to enter the accessions after the worksheets printed...but it would be so much more convenient if the worksheets printed right away...

Jan
* (second word is "Magic")

Ha! Great schadenfreude post.

Jan

If we had space drive, then just take a nuclear sub, outfit it with the new drive...hey presto! the stars.

More realistically, I do not see why the space industry has totally disregarded these nuclear units with which we have a lot of experience. I rarely see this possibility mentioned any more: Is it just because of the weight? Is it politically forbidden?

Jan

Here in the Northwest we have "Kayaktivist's Battling the Death Star" (the artic bound Shell Oil Rig). I content that anyone in this country must be allowed to protest anything based on the supreme courts decision to allow those despicable Westboro Baptist freeks to demonstrate at some hero's funeral. However in order to demonstrate you must adhere to, and set the example for, whatever you are demonstrating against. In the case of the Kayaktivist's, before they can enter the demonstration area they need to be stripped of anything that is a derivative of oil. Opps, how can they demonstrate without their plastic kayak for starters? How can they drive to the demonstration if they can't use their car?

When politicians complain about the rich they should be required to disclose their net worth. When Obama talks about "Fair Share" he should be required to explain his share and how he acquired his fair share. Etc., etc., etc.

I think I might actually listen more to someone that practices what they preach and sets the example for others to follow, rather than than the blowhards. Especially someone like Obama or Hillary. Both of them have to be laughing their asses off at the stupidity of the people. I actually appreciated it when that Gruber guy needed to smart off and tell the world the truth behind getting Obamacare passed (but no one listened anyway). And now no one listen to the facts about the new Libyan/Benghazi documents that surfaced. You know, some other documents that Hillary `forgot' to turn over from her server. After all `she' didn't delete her copies, `someone else' did.

The truth is meaningless anymore in this country. The only thing we can do is Vote, and Vote Smart, and often.

To answer your question, Thoritsu, climate change is merely a straw dog set up in order to trash modern civilization and send humanity into the kind of civilization portrayed in "The Hunger Games." Time and again rational climatologists have proven that mankind has not influenced earth's climate enough to matter and that natural phenomena trumps anything mankind is able to produce. Just yesterday, in The Gulch such an article was presented.

+1

Nuclear energy is the most dense form of energy we know of and it's absolutely criminal that more isn't being done to advance and exploit it. Are there dangers? Assuredly. But no worthwhile endeavor is without risk. The entrepreneurial are those who find solutions to mitigate the risks and derive profits.

Some time ago, the Sierra Club paid for an energy study, expecting the results to show that solar and/or wind power was the safest, least polluting power source for the future. They foolishly included nuclear power in the list of power systems to be evaluated, and when the study conclusively showed that nuclear power had lower environmental impact, was safer, cheaper, and less costly than any renewable power system, sued the study team and the publisher to try to prevent anyone hearing about it.

Environmentalism has nothing to do with science, logic, or economics. It is the religion of Gaia worship, considered a useful tool, filled with useful idiots by promoters of Communist ideology.

Uranium is the problem. Researchers (mostly China, because we've become too stupid, I digress) are working on Thorium reactors which would be cheaper and safer.
Thorium research was stopped in the late 50's because the military had need for uranium, and breeder reactors were needed - and that's why we went down that path which was halted in the 70's.
Had that not happened, electric cars would have happened in the 70's-80's, battery technology would have improved in the 90's, and we wouldn't have been dependent upon furin oil. the Middle East wouldn't have had their wealth, Bin Laden wouldn't have come to power, we'd still have two towers standing in Manhattan, and we wouldn't be worrying about the Middle East melt down.

I doubt that climatologists as a group even care about energy production.
In order to have nuclear power plants a government agency has to ALLOW them to be built but as we know that is not about to happen anytime soon.
As for the population being reduced; the way governments are doing things it is taking place.
War; starvation to name a couple.

For the same reason they do not support hydrocarbon fuel rationing or a Manhattan style carbon sequestration and capture program... this has never been about CO2 reduction... it is about wealth/income redistribution... the Pope sees that opportunity now too.

James Hansen, at NASA, does pound the table for nuclear power. No one else in that crew does. They want to kill off everybody but themselves and those they like.

If they were really sincere in their fear, they would not dare call an annual conference at one ritzy city after another, and fly in on 1200 business jets and rent out every chauffeured limousine on the continent of the venue. As they did for COP-15. I remember. That was the Climate-gate year.

My job was to consolidate the nation's tritium supply at the Savannah River Site, back when Westinghouse ran it in the late 1990s. I did make it much safer. They gave me an award. I asked about getting promoted. They said they couldn't promote me, and that was why they gave me the award. It was not a bad consolation prize, but that was when I left that job for a private, non-tenure-granting university.

I presume your valid comments are pointed at the con-gresscritter, MichaelA.