This explanation has merit; tell me more

They always did throw tantrums - they just didn't come as often when their president still had over a 30% approval rating and they controlled all 3 houses of government.

Completely off-topic, because I tried e-mailing this to you and failed miserably, there was an article on the Daily Kos that I skimmed over and found mildly irritating. I'll just copy the transcript of my returned e-mail here.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2/5/1763/65693

Daily Kos's NNadir, while espousing sci-fi virtues of radioactive cesium (which I claim to know nothing about) makes an especially witty clip at - of all things - global warming.

"Of course, when people oppose nuclear power, they want you to think very differently than I do. They want you to imagine that all of any released radionuclides are going to make a beeline right for your flesh and magically be concentrated there. They want you to run with your
imagination.

Well, if you must imagine things, how about climate change?"

Imagine that.

Well, I don't know that much about radioactive cesium either-- but I do know that in our laboratory we use it to scramble the genome of fibroblast cells to stop them from replicating.

I can only hope it will work as well on wingnuts.

Hehe. It struck me as a bit surprising that DKos would have a wingnut writing for them.

Guys, I'm pretty sure he's not saying "imagine global warming because it isn't real lol," but instead "The dangers of nuclear power generation are greatly overstated, and in any case, fossil fuel power generation has its own problems." Likewise, the rest of the article isn't "hurr cesium AWESOME," it's "Starting with the assumption that nuclear fission is the only emission-free power source that can feasibly power the entire United States, it would be a good idea to deal with the waste in a productive way instead effectively destroying it; here are some possibilities."

I might be misreading it and he simply likes nuclear power because radiation is cool and hippies are dumb, but his comment about mercury from coal power plants--in the paragraph right after the climate change one, at that--seems to indicate that he is indeed concerned with fossil fuel emissions of all sorts, including carbon dioxide, and that nuclear fission is simply the best power generation technology we have, not the best imaginable.

Reading the comments, there can be no doubt that he accepts global warming, and that that is precisely why he wants nuclear power.

But I do not think that any risk associated with nuclear energy, nor all of them combined, is comparable to the risk of not using nuclear energy to address climate change.

I really hope your calling him a wingnut was simply a misunderstanding of his position, and not a response to his advocacy for nuclear power.

I don't know. World Nut Daily has always been over-the-edge bonkers. Just look at its ads, for fuck's sake. Keyring geiger counters. Why Christians should pack heat. A feature on preparing for nuclear apocalypse.

Certainly the election has pushed some of the people at NRO and especially Atlas Pam and Michelle Malkin over the edge, but I haven't noticed any change in WND's nuttiness quotient

Of course, I may have misread as well. It seemed initially like a crack at global warming, though the fact that no one else called him on it in his comments or otherwise could indicate that I misinterpreted.

I read half a dozen or so of NNadir's posts, and I didn't see much either way on global warming specifically, but he is definitely, er, not unaware of how much shit gets pumped into the air by burning coal and other fossil fuels. And yes, he does explicitly say that if renewable energy sources can be tapped to fuel modern civilization, that would be swell, but fission reactors are what we know how to build right now.

I don't think the author was downplaying global climate change, just challenging readers to use their imaginations to think out the implications of NOT offsetting fossil fuel consumption for power generation with nuclear. France is actually fortunate in that 80% of their electrical power generation is from nuclear energy.

He's no scientist, but I have been reading a good deal of James Howard Kunstler's _The Long Emergency_ lately, and he posits that while not ideal, nuclear power generation may help human civilization just plain keep the lights on just a bit longer than any other option. Kenneth Deffeyes also feels the same way about nuclear. It's not that many people like this road, it's just that there are so few good options left. Didn't the guy who came up with the whole "Gaia" hypothesis also come out as pro-nuclear not long ago, to the consternation of more than a few?

I hope Richard Heinberg is right, that a "Power Down" is possible. It may be possible, but the problem is it's not profitable. Crash may be insanely more profitable, and given the class interests of those who really run the show on spaceship Earth, practically a foregone conclusion.

More than a few environmental activists and experts are falling into deeper despair, basically resigned to the position of "we're so totally f*cked..."; All I know is that year after year the weather gets crazier, weirder, and more violent and more dangerous.

We most definitely live in "interesting times", to borrow from the famous Chinese curse.