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David S (and Louis) I'm not accusing you of "supprting coal". No one on this list (albeit the CPI-ML does to a limited extent) does to my knowledge unless there is an ANCer who holds their party position on this (thank to Patrick for bringing this up). That wasn't my reason for bringing it up. I raised it because it IS the issue and people are dancing around it. If they are not dancing they are in *effect* ignoring it. The issue of nuclear and renewables can (outside the overall political context of capitalist solutions, or better put, solutions under capitalism) be distilled down to what can effectively be used to phase out these huge carbon producing sources of energy. South Africa is interesting because it's large coal-into-gasoline refinery is, supposedly, the largest single source of human made CO2 in the world today. South Africa, and the ANC gov't that leads it, proposed building a network of nuclear plants in order to mitigate relying on coal for energy production. IMO, this was a correct move. They simply can't finance it or chose not and instead it is trying to meet it energy shortages....real energy shortages which are expected to increase vastly as more people plug into the grid...and so are now going to build coal fired power plants. That is the issue. It is simply not enough to say "no" as much as we want to but to come up with real solutions. Renewables are not going to make it, IMO, and SA does need to expand it's grid and bring more people into it. Development of SA under *any* social system is going to require massive amounts of cheap abundnt energy. There is simply no getting around this. IMO and many like me believe that if we don't go nuclear we go fossil. Countries like Germany (planning to phase out nuclear and build coal plants!) and SA are moving in the *wrong* direction. David P. and Mark L: I agree....the 'movement' of the class struggle defines our activities, generally and thus even though there are thousands of so-called "energy activists" they exist primarily as adjuncts to NGOs/non-profits or local coalitions dealing with local energy and pollution problems. I spent 99% of my own political activity the last 6 months building for the March 4th budget cut strikes and actions in California. But developing an understanding of the "immediate" actions we need to take now to stem off climate disaster down the road still is important and we need to address these issues of what works and what wont'. Mark L: no one has died in nuclear energy plant or becuse of one in the US that I'm aware of. Clearly the real risk is minimal as to our health and well being and any statistic on this will prove this. Coal kills up t 30,000 people a year and is in fact the biggest cause of heavy metal pollution (including uranium!) in the US (and other countries) and yet you know if nuclear did this there would be a massive revulsion to it. Few on the left are really raising the issue of phasing out coal and it's unfortunate. For every nuclear power plant a coal plant was not built. This cannot be said of roof top solar or a single wind turbine. So we need to seriously address the risks and ability of the proposals to mitigate coal and natural gas factually. Louis P. I never worked at a nuclear plant. I've mentioned this on numerous occasions. Senior moment? David ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
