AP: Vermont's flood-wracked capital city ponders a rebuild with one eye on climate change

[OKIsItJustMe]

Vermont’s flood-wracked capital city ponders a rebuild with one eye on climate change

BY LISA RATHKE
Updated 8:26 AM EDT, August 5, 2023

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — A beloved bookstore in Vermont’s small capital city moved across the street to a new spot farther from the Winooski River after an ice jam sent river water into the store in 1992. A nearby office supply and gift store did the same in 2011 because it liked a different space that came with a bonus: it was higher and farther from the river.

But their moves to higher ground weren’t enough to save them from flooding after torrential rains in July caused what some saw as the state’s worst natural disaster since a 1927 flood that killed dozens of people and caused widespread destruction. Some communities suffered more severe flood damage this year than when Tropical Storm Irene ravaged the small, mountainous state in 2011.

“I think most people in this area were very concerned about climate change, but we also were a little pretty much thought we were a little safer here because we had not really suffered the drastic events that some other parts of the country have,” said Rob Kasow, co-owner of Bear Pond Books. “But I think now we’ve been a little disabused of the notion that Vermont is safe from climate change.”

Now the mostly gutted shops, restaurants and businesses that lend downtown Montpelier its charm are considering where and how to rebuild in an era when extreme weather is occurring more often. Vermont’s flooding was just one of several major flood events around the globe this summer that scientists have said are becoming more likely due to climate change.

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[NNadir]

1. For many years Vermont was the only state in the Union not to generate electricity from fossil fuels

Then they shut the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant because of popular ignorance.

Now they depend on access to dangerous natural gas.

It was another victory for antinuke ignorance.

[Blues Heron]

2. Dude they barely use natural gas- in 2021 it was 0.1 percent of the mix

They use about half hydropower, the rest wind solar and biomass.

Closing that dirty nuke was a great victory for the planet and future generations who will not forgive us for the disgusting nuclear future we are gifting them to clean up.

Can you imagine if that thing had melted down and we lost half of vermont - permanently? Thank god those intelligent yankees saw through the George Jetsons 1950s nuclear fantasy bullshit and acted accordingly. Dodged a major bullet there, unlike Pripyat and Fukushima who werent so lucky. They bought into the idiotic fantasy and paid the price.

[NNadir]

3. Dude, they import electricity off the PGM grid, and biomass combustion is a huge health risk in...

...in Vermont, not that antinukes give a rat's ass about air pollution, nor do they give a rat's ass about deforestation and the destruction of wilderness.

Biomass Incinerator is Vermont's Biggest Polluter

Vermont Biomass, Partnership for Policy Integrity.

As usual, in Vermont as is the case elsewhere, shutting a nuclear plant killed people.

Of course, our resident antinukes, like antinukes everywhere, couldn't give a rat's ass about anyone who actually is killed; in their immoral calculus people can die on a scale of millions or tens of millions just so no one is exposed to radiation.

I am regrettably aware of the insipid scare stories around nuclear power from radiation paranoids who don't give a rat's ass about climate change.

As usual, I am inclined to substitute the being words is, were, andare for the selective attention use of the of paranoid antinukes whose use of the conditional verb could is responsible for climate change and vast deaths from air pollution.

Biomass plants in Vermont, which produces about a third of the electricity it consumes, are killing people with air pollution.

The nuclear industry is now 70 years old. I invite any of the antinukes I hold responsible for climate change and 70 million deaths per decade from air pollution to show that nuclear reactor meltdowns, of which there have been five, one in the US, one in Ukraine, and three in Japan (in a single natural disaster), have killed as many people as will die today from air pollution, about 19,000 people.

Nineteen thousand people have died will die every damned day since the crime of shutting Vermont Yankee was carried out, and every damned day decades before, and will continue to kill that many people as long as the illiterate antinukes can elevate their ignorance above human decency and concern for the environment.

Shutting Vermont Yankee while it was still in good operating condition was and still stands as a crime against humanity.

Have a nice Sunday evening.

[Blues Heron]

4. Sorry bro, not buying what your selling

Last edited Sun Aug 6, 2023, 03:25 PM - Edit history (1)

Thank god more intelligent people are in charge of Vermonts energy. Getting rid of that dirty nuke before it blew was the very best thing they could have done, and they did.

Home grown energy is always better than being beholden to foreign supplied Uranium. Thats why harvesting the wind and the sun and hydro is better than buying uranium from Kazakhstan and Russia, two of the top sources for toxic nuclear fuel.

Thankfully the world is saying no to nuclear. Even the most diehard nuker kookers can see that.

[NNadir]

5. Yeah, I know. Nevertheless the truth is that Vermont's energy policy kills people and trashes...

...the environment.

No amount of information can address dogma, including reactionary dogma.

I have never been a fan of denial, not here, not anywhere.

Facts matter.

Nor have I ever been a fan of reactionaries.

[Blues Heron]

6. you seriously think they are going to switch out their biomass plant for a nuke?

I think they are willing to take their chances with that as part of the mix instead of uranium from Kazakhstan or whatever - at least they can grow their own trees, and its carbon neutral.

Anyway, going back to nukes is probably not going to happen in Vermont now or in the future, thank god for sanity in New England.

[NNadir]

7. I seriously believe that the effort of reactionaries to return to the 16th century is deadly and...

...destructive.

It is true that antinukes, the moral and intellectual equivalents of antivaxxers, although antinukes have killed vastly more people, have "won," the argument in the provinces.

They have "won" elsewhere too, for instance in that coal burning hellhole in Germany.

It is humanity that lost, all future generations lost.

I don't "expect" anything, particularly from people wallowing in paranoid ignorance. I am well aware of the awful power of ignorance, and while I fight it as hard as I can, it is very clear from all of human history that ignorance often prevails. Antinuke ignorance, with its "success" has left the planet in flames.

There is no reason to assume that the forests of Vermont and upstate New York, of New Hampshire, of Maine can't burn as the Canadian forests are because antinukes have driven climate change with their appalling ignorance. There is no reason that all of New England's forests can't burn before Vermonters run through them with chainsaws, cut them down, to stuff their carcasses in their very dirty power plants.

What then?

Of course, antinukes are not very literate people in general, their ignorance of engineering, science, hardly limited to their ignorance of forestry. Their knowledge of history being extremely poor.

In the 16th century, Europe was dependent on biomass. People literate in history are well aware of the results.

Jed O. Kaplan, Kristen M. Krumhardt, Niklaus Zimmermann, The prehistoric and preindustrial deforestation of Europe, Quaternary Science Reviews, Volume 28, Issues 27–28, 2009, Pages 3016-3034.

People who don't know history, especially this history, want to rush headlong into the same disaster.

The thing in the link above, in this post, is also called a "reference."

I am still waiting for an antinuke to produce a reputable reference showing that in the 70 year history of commercial nuclear power that it has killed as many people as will die in the next 24 hours from air pollution, about 19,000 human beings. Very few of these are in Vermont by the way. As Vermont imports about half of its electricity, it has shifted pollution to other areas.

It's a typical bourgeois conceit, "if it doesn't affect me, then I don't care."

I do care. It's why I've made such an effort to educate myself on energy and the environment.

I'm fully aware that ignorance has "won." The planet is burning; people without access to air conditioning are dying all over the world from extreme heat, crops are failing, massive droughts are breaking out in some places, devastating floods in others.

I really can't express "congratulations" to those responsible for this, including the barely literate asses who place their radiation paranoia above human lives, who insist in trumpeting their ignorance, and are proud of the loud coterie of their fellow uneducated fools who care not a whit about the future, who, I am quite sure, being dogmatists, will not be moved to sensibility.

As for uranium, I am in the process of writing a post on the subject, but it will not appeal to antinukes since it contains references to the primary scientific literature, which they neither respect nor are competent to read. Since I am literate I know all about uranium, its sources, its nature and its energy content. Sloganeers shouting about "uranium" as if it were a curse, mean nothing to me. The uranium content of this planet, which is inexhaustible, is the last best hope of the human race. The post, at his point, like many of my posts, contains more than 20 references to the primary scientific literature, but is built centrally around this paper:

The paper to which I'll refer in that post is this one: Design and Fabrication of Hypercrosslinked Covalent Organic Adsorbents for Selective Uranium Extraction Ran Leng, Yichen Sun, Chenzhan Wang, Zhao Qu, Rui Feng, Guixia Zhao, Bing Han, Jianjun Wang, Zhuoyu Ji, and Xiangke Wang Environmental Science & Technology 2023 57 (26), 9615-9626.

I repeat: No amount of information can address dogma.

Enjoy the coming week.