Klein's antipathy toward all Green NGOs, which came out in her Amy Goodman interview in discussion about one Wildlife Conservation Society project which Klein says was one of the "most disturbing" things she discovered in the whole seven years of research and writing for her book, extends to all Green NGOs and everything they've done on climate. This was explored in a post by Joe Romm <http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/12/2611281/naomi-klein-capitalism-climate/> circa Sept. 2013. Joe was discussing why Klein says things like this:
*Klein: "Well, I think there is a very deep denialism in the environmental movement among the Big Green groups. And to be very honest with you, I think it’s been more damaging than the right-wing denialism in terms of how much ground we’ve lost. Because it has steered us in directions that have yielded very poor results….*" ( On Saturday, September 20, 2014 11:04:21 AM UTC-7, Ron wrote: [RWL: ...Re the last part, the issue seems in dispute on whether the environmental group had to allow fracking, as they received a donation of land. Did they have legal requirement to allow drilling on supposedly conservation land. They certainly came out looking bad, but I am too far away to know the issues. ) I don't understand why so many are so opposed to nuclear power. I.e. as in your comment:* You and I probably disagree about nuclear, whose costs seem likely to never drop in the future as fast as are the RE prices dropping**. * * Nuclear seems to be competing recently only with big subsidies.*When the Chinese produce low cost solar panels, we're told the price of solar power has declined dramatically. When these same Chinese start cranking out low cost nuclear reactors, somehow, all attention is directed to the cost overrun on a first of its kind plant behind schedule in Finland, and we're told nuclear is too expensive for anyone to use. The "big subsidies" are subsidized insurance rates on nuke construction loans. Ernie Moniz, today's Energy Secretary, chaired a 2003 MIT study <http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/> and a 2009 update to that study <http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/pdf/nuclearpower-update2009.pdf> which found that if builders of nuke plants could borrow money at the same rates as builder's of other types of power plants, coal plants for instance, the cost of newly built nuclear power would be competitive with fossil fuel plants, even the type of fossil plants that are allowed to freely emit their carbon to the atmosphere. The high cost of financing is related to concerns Wall Street has over the cost overruns that happened in the past in the US nuclear reactor construction program. These problems did not happen in all countries that were also building substantial numbers of new reactors in those times, i.e. France, Germany, and Japan. Moniz says climate is actually a real threat, and nuclear power could help us address the problem. Hence the MIT panel he chaired recommended subsidized insurance for the first few reactors in a proposed new program dubbed by some as the nuclear renaissance as a way to let US nuke builders convince Wall Street that they could bring in reactors on time and on budget. The plan is to eliminate the subsidies as Wall Street becomes more relaxed about backing these projects. The subsidized loan insurance has been characterized by some anti nuke opponents (Lovins) as the federal government is paying for the entire cost of the projects. It may well be that the US can't build complicated technology anymore as it devolves, and/or that we are too scared of the energy that can be extracted from the nucleus, but it is hard for me to believe that solar costs can only come down while nuclear can only go up. The reasoning in the MIT studies was what prevailed before the discovery that US shale gas was now economical, but the basic case is there. If the problem is there is too much fossil fuel that is too cheap, we cannot dismiss alternates on the basis that fossil is cheaper. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
