Obviously this is not ubiquitous, but anti-nuclear sentiment at the very least, gets funding from the big oil and coal companies.
Not even trying to be pro-nuclear here, but the shift towards renewables from nuclear could definitely be done in a way that doesn’t result in shifting over to COAL!
Breaking news! Capitalist-Capitalist-Capitalist coalition loves capitalism!
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Absolute dogshit. Got us into Afghanistan and Kosovo, were responsible for the insanely neolib Agenda 2010 labour market reforms and are now chief architects of…well everything that’s going on right now. Even the declared neoliberals in government aren’t as hawkish and insane.
The worst part is a gigantic part of the youth votes for and places their hopes on them. FFF basically got swallowed by them, because they fell for the Greens posturing as environmentalists.
They’re the absolute worst of all the “hawkish neolibs with progressive aesthetics to funnel actual progressive forces back into the system” parties I know around the world and unfortunately they’re insanely good at it.
hawkish neolibs with progressive aesthetics to funnel actual progressive forces back into the system
That’s how it’s going to be in the foreseeable future, isn’t it? In the western world and adjacent countries. Politicians who go from speaking about evils of climate change to “we must nuke Russia for being evil”. And the upcoming generations of voters will clap and refuse any criticism, because “they support gay pride parades” and “reducing plastic waste”.
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They’re a neoliberal party who are still somehow seen as lefties because the party was founded by anti-nuclear weapons (and energy) hippies.
It even appears that Foreign Minister Baerbock got her foreign policy chops from Washington itself.
She was literally deputy chair of the Berlin-Taipei Parliamentary Circle of Friends lmao
Oh boy I didn’t know that fun fact yet.
🤡
Jup, Baerbock was practically raised by US NGOs. Somehow did not manage to teach her decent english tho.
From what I can tell all mainstream German political parties suck. Even Die Linke, who ostensively claims to be leftist, goes out of their way to claim that criticizing Israeli apartheid is anti-semitic
Tbf, Die Linke is below 5% now. They murdered themselves quite competently. And yes, trots were the reason.
they are also extremely against anyone mentioning Lenin
I hate them this clowns so fucking much. They have absolutely zero revolutionary aims, at best some soft reformist socialism but quote Rosa Luxemburg or Liebknecht with a straight face.
IIRC they’ve funded various regime change operations through the NED or something similar. Can’t find a source for this at the moment, though, so I could be misremembering
Greens in germany being the fossil fuel industry’s useful idiots.
At this point they are just fascists.
German energy policy is absolutely fucked.
Now it fits the education, financial, foreign, housing, infrastructure and environment policy!
And here I used to think Germany was “cool” and comfortable to live in.
Nah, it’s a dumpster fire. The whole thing is about to crash.
I understand being against fission power in favour of wind/water/solar power (both due to the strict security requirements and the time required to build nuclear power plants), but it’s certainly far better than fossil fuels
Ultimately the biggest problem with energy is the abundance that a grid provides that results in a poor distribution of resources. This is an essay which touches on the issues but scarcely mentions energy.
It seems like Marxists should have a better understanding of energy policy but for some reason it’s oft overlooked.
The energy is far from fairly distributed, of course – like any commodity under capitalism – although I don’t know if I’d call it the biggest problem
It is the biggest problem in the sense that having a central grid is a mistake. All other problems stem from that, including nuclear proliferation.
There’s nothing wrong with centralized energy grids, ie power plants, power lines, power transmission systems, etc. The problem is the imperialist misallocation of expertise and resources that prevent global south countries from scaling up their existing grids to meet their needs.
Not true. The problem is with the assumption that newer economies have the same wasteful needs that imperial economies desire.
Its the height of imperialist arrogance to say that new economies don’t need energy grids, or that they should be denied things like air conditioning, cooking, electricity, internet… that imperial core citizens already enjoy, or that attempting to get these things is “wasteful”.
This is the anarchist “subordination of workers to capitalist politics in the guise of negation of politics.” You can’t say "no energy system for you! to people dying from heatstroke.
Its the height of imperialist arrogance to say that new economies don’t need energy grids, or that they should be denied things like air conditioning, cooking, electricity, internet… that imperial core citizens already enjoy, or that attempting to get these things is “wasteful”.
No one needs a grid and no one is denied anything. Waste means objective waste not some opinion of waste. It means there is a better way to accomplish the same, not to do without.
On location solar and wind power is all that is necessary for any needs. It is also cheaper than building a big honking grid. Microgrid transmission can be used to balance local demand spikes in commercial and industrial areas.
Insulated buildings require less energy to maintain temperature, etc.
It is the height of arrogance to say that people need to waste energy, to say that everyone deserves an opportunity to be a glutton, and it’s only fair that since you got to waste then I get to waste too. That’s the same thinking that produces women CEOs who are just as evil as the men before them then calls it gender equality.
Edit: you are right about one thing though, expertise is being denied by the imperial core. Like the expertise to know that grids are wasteful, and there is a better way. Because they’d like to sell you a grid instead. Puerto Rico is a perfect example of this.
Whomever is down voting me, engage in discourse and I’ll provide you with insights. I don’t say these things out of any personal inklings but rather as an obligation to my comrades.
I see the issue with having a single point of failure, but I don’t follow your last sentence
So there’s a lot to unpack here. Strictly in the nuclear sense, having a ton of americium (typically powers smoke detectors) isn’t a proliferation risk. The small fission product can’t be weaponized. But when we want to gridize and produce gigawatts at a single station, then the fissionable materials can be weaponized to release a similar amount of energy in a small time period (aka bomb).
But aside from nuclear energy, grid energy is entirely unnecessary.
The top 2 biggest wastes of energy are transporting people to and fro, for whatever reason. If we utilize modern communication technology, people can be present by transmitting their photons, their visage, rather than their entire physical mass. Let alone the safety conveyance which adds several tons of mass. (aka vehicle). The second biggest waste is thermal equilibrium. Cooling and heating.
The amazing thing about thermodynamics, is if you properly separate cool from heat, known as insulation, there is very little need to move heat from one side to the other, and the energy required to move that heat is almost nothing. For example, the amount of heat that a human adds to a dwelling just by existing and metabolizing, can be removed with millijoules per hour from a heat pump.
If we factor in the technology of insulation, heat pumps, and air locks, 99.999998% reduction in HVAC energy usage can be achieved.
And all this is with technology invented almost a century ago. 3-4 generations have been born since this has been possible. That’s how completely fucked we are wrt technology in the current system.
So by “proliferation”, do you just mean that any country with a central grid will also be able to create a fission bomb?
Transportation is definitely a huge waste of energy. I didn’t know about the cooling and heating, though – is this just because it’s more profitable for the capitalists to make people pay for air conditioning rather than to properly insulate housing?
“proliferation” is a nuclear energy political term. It historically means that any technology that can be used for energy production can also be used for weapon production, but I think I clearly explained where that line of thinking comes from. Let me know if you need any clarification.
is this just because it’s more profitable for the capitalists to make people pay for air conditioning rather than to properly insulate housing?
Mostly it’s because landlords. They don’t have to pay the energy cost, so they don’t bother to insulate.
Personally I think it should be part of minimum habitability codes.
The Green Party of Germany is a bunch of anti-science luddites.
Schland reached peak stupid.
Do you have any recommended reading on nuclear energy? I’ve heard tons of conflicting info. I need to know more before I would have a stance on it.
Essentially all climate experts I know support nuclear power bc the climate is a priority. However in this emergency we are in they don’t necessarily advise for it as it has been defanged by years of fear-mongering, the effects of which we still see now. Essentially no advances have been made in nuclear tech for decades, meaning plants are old, take time to build, and the electricity costs a lot.
The IPCC is the panel you should be listening to on climate change, and in their 90 proposed plans to tackle the climate emergency we are in several relied on nuclear power in some way.
I saw a speech on climate at my local PSL chapter. The speaker basically said this. All the plants are really old and new ones would take a while to build.
Essentially no advances have been made in nuclear tech for decades, meaning plants are old, take time to build, and the electricity costs a lot
Rosatom has floating nuclear power plants, with plans that are fairly fresh and proven, and can basically shit them out on demand. Not even that expensive, compared to other options.
China has been making steady advances in nuclear power technology and IIRC recently launched a new generation plant.
The tech is only old if we let it be old.
True, nuclear degradation is mostly a western problem.
It’s also gonna be a problem for what we call “developing” countries who might not be able to afford them, though I’m hopeful China will do something there if they aren’t already. Seems well in line with the BRI.
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Very good article, does a good job of refuting the imperialist arrogance of many western greens who think we need to “scale back” our energy usage. No, billions of people are without electricity, the global south needs clean energy sources that actually replace fossil fuels like nuclear.
Thank you.
Being against nuclear power is peak stupid imo. It’s one of the best tools we have for getting rid of coal and fossil fuel plants and they know it. That’s why the attacks against it are so extreme.
