The only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting what you want.
A radicalized Democrat faction abandoned the last remnants of the working class for Elizabeth Warren voters. It embraced extreme environmentalism, went to war against cars, coal and basic energy, sending prices skyrocketing. Combined with the Ukraine war, things got bad.
And solar and wind obviously couldn’t deliver.
While the Biden administration largely remains married to green energy special interests, aside from the Inflation Increase Act deals it carved out with Manchin and Bill Gates’ lobbyists, state Dems are moving to keep existing nuclear plants running.
Last week, Camden, N.J.-based Holtec International announced that it plans to reopen the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, which was prematurely shuttered on May 20. Holtec wants to use some of the $6 billion appropriated in last year’s infrastructure bill to support the continued operation of existing nuclear reactors. The company’s move was endorsed by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who released a statement saying that she had sent a letter to the Department of Energy to support Holtec’s application for “a federal grant under the Civil Nuclear Credit Program” to save Palisades and thus protect “600 high-paying jobs at the plant and 1,100 additional jobs throughout the community.”
The pending return of Palisades is the second big win for the U.S. nuclear sector in as many weeks. On Sept. 1, the California legislature voted to provide funds to assure the continued operation of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. That plant provides nearly 10 percent of the juice in California and it is coming in particularly handy during the vicious heat wave that’s been baking the Golden State.
The move to save Diablo Canyon follows last September’s vote by the Illinois legislature to appropriate some $700 million to subsidize the continued operation of the Byron and Dresden nuclear plants in that state. Thus, over the past 12 months, four nuclear plants that were slated for permanent closure have been rescued from the wrecking ball.
Whitmer is worried about an election, but Newsom isn’t. Still with enough blackouts, even long-suffering California lefties might start reexamining their politics. Misery is one thing, total breakdown is another and the energy grid is stretched pretty thin in many places.
The current phase of environmentalist dogma has embraced the fictitious idea of carbon emissions. That leaves nuclear plants much more in the clear than wind turbines. But environmentalism was never about science, it was about neo-romanticist opposition to the industrial revolution. And nuclear plants, the atomic image, triggered massive amounts of instinctive revulsion precisely because of the incredible promise of cheap energy.
After spending generations blocking that promise at every turn, the greens led their party into a stalemate with a choice between civilizational shutdown and nuclear energy.
Their dogma may have paved the way for a larger defeat.
Depriving society of sources of power like that is insane. Although almost all leftist policies are insane, shutting down energy production may be the most, or one of the most insane. In part because the public can’t escape being aware of the consequences, energy runs all the machines, despite magical thinking on the part of the delusional that machines can operate without energy.
I was recently reading a book of scifi short stories and articles by James P Hogan(British aeronautical engineer, specializing in electronics), “Minds, Machines, and Evolution,” written in 1988. He had an article in it titled, “Know Nukes,” talking about nuclear energy, that disclosed some things I didn’t know.
One, the US outlawed the Cherynoble design back in the 50s. Two fuel rods can be recycled and used again, reducing nuclear wasteby 98%, but the antinuke dems forbid it, for no real reason. Three it went into the space requirements for equivalence for solar, coal, and nuclear energy. Solar was astronomical in space compared to coal, but nuclear took the cake in efficiency and pollution by a longshot. Granted that was late 80s solar tech, but looking at how much arable land is wasted on it in Georgia today, it’s extremely inefficient(and people have to keep all those panels clean of pollen, dust, and rain grime) and that’s not counting the space and resources for storage.
We actually have working designs for small(20 to 40ft, by8 to 10ft diameter) self contained nuclear ‘batteries’ that can power a small town for 20 years. But dems/the left don’t want cheap, safe energy. They want dependency, power over us, and control.
Fun fact i learned recently. At one point in the earths history almost all life was wiped out becuase of an over abundance of oxygen and not enough CO2 in the air.
The Great Oxygenation Event. Photosynthesis began and generated enough O2 in the water and atmosphere(after it oxidized the surface iron) to kill off most of the oxygen intolerant species(bacteria and single celled organisms(though I think some of them got up to about a dozen celled size), which were the dominant life forms at the time.. Some of the bacteria are still around, like botulism and tetanus. I believe they used hydrogen to metabolize CO2 into methane. I saw it on some documentary 15 or 20 years ago, so my memory may be off.
The unproven dogma of climate change is like watermelon -green on the outside and red on the inside