Reply #35: Of course if we follow your program for rich people, we can all be Haitian

[NNadir]

The fact is that a clean renewable scheme is a program for rich middle class brats, trust fund kids who can afford catalysts and the like. For the rest of the world the renewable business - which is really simply the persistence of primitive technology - has been an unmitigated disaster.

You write about your "could be" bullshit as if it were standard practice. Your general approach is to take specific cases and pretend that they are general, while failing to be bothered at all about the general state of affairs.

In the third world, in his the hereditary landed classes - those who have had land in their generations - who profit. Some of them attempt to assume mantles of decency, but mostly it's just crap. I have no doubt that an element of the decay of the United States into third world status - a process that is well underway - will produce the same state of affairs here. I firmly believe that your reactionary approach to energy and the environment will lead to broad impoverishment and wholesale environmental destruction. It's a "let them eat cake" approach, filled as aways with "coulds" and "woulds". You are completely blind however - and frequently engage in outright denial of - what is happening.

Inexpensive appropriate wood burning technology (and solar cookers) could reduce the demand for firewood and reduce indoor and outdoor pollution in developing countries...

Biogas from animal manures and night soil could also be used for cooking and heat - China is the world leader in developing rural biogas projects. The processed manure is far less polluting than the raw material and is also used as a high quality fertilizer.

Solar LEDs bring light into poor rural homes - these can be purchased with micro-loans (note: this year's Nobel Peace Prize went the developer of micro-loans in Bangladesh). These devices would eliminate the need to purchase kerosene for lighting - and these saving would quickly offset the initial cost of the PV/LEDs.

I see such an approach as elitist and frankly, morally indifferent. The last of your statements that I have quoted is so ringing in its contempt for the magnitude of its (upper) middle class indifference to real and current human suffering as to be a classic. Exactly how many Haitians do you think are going to have LED's in the next one hundred years? If there's two of them, no doubt you will fill these pages with breathless "feel good" "isn't it wonderful?" wishful thinking - providing all sorts of links to rich kid websites about the wonderful situation of the two Haitians - but billions of people worldwide will simultaneously remain in serious and exigent risk unremarked by a single Greenpeace brat anywhere.

As for facts, isolated and as dogmatic as you are, you have little appreciation of what a fact might actually be as every single one of your posts in this, and many other threads so clearly demonstrate.

I have not pretended that nuclear power is easy to provide or simple, but I note some of those countries that a pursuing the nuclear option with the highest sense of urgency are precisely those nations that have huge and restless underclasses, specifically India and China. There are 28 nuclear reactors now under construction and 16 of them are in these two countries.

I'm sure that this trend will continue - since at least in the Chinese case - there are no hereditary aristocrats who see the world through rose colored glasses. I note, though, that of the 17 new nuclear reactors that have been ordered in the last year or two around the world, 7 of them are Japanese. The Japanese have made a commitment to become more like France in the share of energy provided by nuclear power and specifically have announced an intention to do so with the idea of reducing their use of fossil fuels.

That's neither here nor there though. In China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India and Pakistan, in Finland, France, the Netherlands, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, in Argentina and Brazil, and in South Africa and Nigeria, in the United States and Canada, nobody gives a flying fuck about what you say. These and many other nations - announced and unannounced - are recognizing that nuclear energy is an essential element of addressing the crisis that is now before us.

But look, your middle class blinders aside, sometimes you manage some marginal successes. That was a great story that you posted about another "world's largest" solar power station in Germany. I notice that you've finally managed to insert the word "peak" while mentioning the tiny "world's largest" facility. That is a surprise. I always look forward to your latest "world's largest" announcement, and really, I would have no objection whatsoever if non-hydro renewable energy someday makes it to ten or twenty exajoules. I doubt it will happen, having spent decades listening to this crap, but I would love to be surprised and proved wrong, since anything that is greenhouse gas free is good.