insanity

Bizarre talking points of WaPo columnist Krauthammer

Sir Isaac Newton is one of the towering geniuses in all human history. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer? Not so much.

Krauthammer has written a classic anti-science screed, "Carbon Chastity: The First Commandment of the Church of the Environment," that recasts many favorite anti-scientific denier memes in odd terms. You still hear and see all of these today, so let me touch on a few of them. And as I will discuss in Part 2, the article is most useful because it is a very clear statement of the real reason conservatives don't believe in climate science: They hate the solution.

As a physicist, my favorite denier talking point is his strange version of the old claim that "scientists are flip floppers, constantly changing their theories." He writes:

Fox News anchor calls for assassination of Barack Obama

“… and now we have what … uh…some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama … uh … um … Obama [after being prompted by the FNC anchor] … well both if we could [laughing] …” — Fox News anchor Liz Trotta, commenting on Hillary Clinton’s invocation of Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination […]

Direct and indirect ways of killing people

“We’re just damn glad to live in a free country where you can have a gun if you want to.” — Mark Muller, owner of Max Motors in Butler, Missouri, which is giving away a free handgun with each purchase of a vehicle

No more subsidies for nuclear power, McCain et al

Once your power source has reached, say, 10 percent of the electricity grid, let alone 20 percent, it should be time to cut the cord to government funding.

Yet after more than $70 billion dollars in direct subsidies, billions more in insurance subsidies, plus another $13 billion available through the energy policy act of 2005, Sen. McCain and others still feel that climate legislation must not merely create a price for carbon dioxide that would advantage all carbon-free sources of energy, but that we must also throw billions more dollars of pork at the industry. At some point, infatuation has turned to obsession.

I am not against building new nuclear power plants; far from it. But when is enough enough, in terms of massive taxpayer support for a mature industry? We had such an incredible clamor for welfare reform in the 1990s, to change "government's social welfare policy with aims at reducing recipient dependence on the government." If we reduced the poor's dependence on government, why not the super-duper rich?

Polar-bear listing would hurt the poor, says industry

If the U.S. Interior Department decides that polar bears are endangered, litigation will be immediate from a group arguing that bear protection will “result in higher energy prices across the board, which will disproportionately be borne by minorities.” So says Roy Innis, chair of the Congress for Racial Equality — a recipient of Exxon funding […]

Should we take Italian nuclear waste?

So an industry CEO tells E&E News that nuclear is the only non-carbon baseload power (not!) and that therefore nuclear is our only future and since the United States does such a great job of dealing with low-level radioactive waste, we should become the world's repository.

That would be the logic of one Steve Creamer, CEO of EnergySolutions, "a full-service nuclear fuel cycle company" (in contrast to all of those "partial-service nuclear fuel cycle companies," sometimes called electric utilities).

Why shouldn't we take the world's low-level radioactive waste? asks Creamer. Other countries take our recycled computers [!], so it's the perfect division of global labor:

McCain campaign gets in on the anti-intellectualism

Industry bottlenecks will delay any reactors for years, maybe longer

Kind of an important point:

It turns out that Osaka-based steel-making giant Japan Steel Works Ltd ... is also the world's only maker of ultra-large forgings, a crucial component in the construction of most new nuclear reactors ...

Japan Steel, for example, is currently equipped to supply only five reactor forging sets each year, with each set including an ultra-large forging.

So, the nuclear industry that shills sources have assured us is ready to leap in to action with ridiculous modest subsidies to avert global warming can currently build a grand total of ... five reactors a year?

That's a little short of one a month.

McCain calls for 700+ new nuclear plants costing $4 trillion

"A nuke in every garage" is the GOP nominee's energy and climate plan.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) made a stunning statement on the radio show of climate change denier Glenn Beck this week:

... the French are able to generate 80 percent of their electricity with nuclear power. There's no reason why America shouldn't.

The Wonk Room, which has the audio, writes of the interview, "McCain Seemingly Agrees With Glenn Beck That Solutions To Climate Change Can Be Delayed." That is lame all by itself. But the statement quoted above is even more radical. McCain is repeating his little-noticed uber-Francophile statement from his big April 2007 speech on energy policy, "If France can produce 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear power, why can't we?"

Why can't we? Wrong question, Senator. The right question is, Why would we? Let's do the math.