Niner!!
Wow! Rationalism! You make great points here about tribalism. It seem like there is so little rational thinking on this issue. So, it is refreshing to see your post.
I think the fixation on Al Gore is bizarre, it is one of the weirdest phenomenon I have ever seen. Some people have even taken to calling him "algore", like it is a species or something. This is some wacked out hate, even for the right wingers. And you are correct that the lefties tend to be anti-nuke, and that they tend to be more into a "statist" groupthink.
The thing is, at the core, I think there is a groupthink going on on the right as well when it comes to nukes, and the irony is that it is a socialist movement. The nuclear industry would not, and could not possibly, by any stretch of the imagination exist without being a corporate welfare social program. Not only because of the front end cost of production, but because there simply is not a great demand for it. People do not want it, people know it is inherently unsafe, uranium is only stable in it's natural state. Once you disturb it through mining it gets into everything, including and especially the groundwater, and the people in the surrounding areas begin suffering higher cancer rates and reproductive problems leading to birth defects. Once you disturb the uranium it begins to heat up the equipment being used to mine it. Now you have to force hundreds of pounds of water pressure per square inch onto the machine tools as they dig into the rock. There goes all that fresh water, and where do you think it's going?
Then you have this ironic socialist right wing contingent claiming that the wind farms take up too much space... it makes no sense because if they cared about space they would not be so eager to contaminate the water and ruin everything for miles and years to come. Completely irrational when we are discussing curing aging and death.
It is true that once anti-nuke France has moved to nuclear and love it, but remember, they do not have any mines, and they do not store their waste in their country. Pretty sleazy.
Now here is the point about wind and solar and other technologies coming into play. They are not getting the tax subsidies (subsidies, not just the tax breaks, but also corporate welfare) that the nukes get, but they are in far higher demand, people, American people are actually expressing themselves regarding wanting more of these types of things. Therefore these are growth industries whose investors are raking it in hand over fist. Seriously, it is ridiculous, in this messed up economy, there is a growth industry and no one is talking about it.
You would think that the "pro-business anti-socialist" right wing would be all over this example of pure market capitalism, but they have been brainwashed into fixating on this "algore" creature they have conjured up and instead associate this stark and stellar example of objective value with some fallacious leftism that died with FDR, when it is the nuclear industry that is the social program.
It is very very very bizarre. The bicameral mind is a terrible thing to witness.
There is a brief and well put article that I have been linking to. It is short but to the point and helps to demystify most popular misconceptions about nukes and the advertising campaigns that go with it.
http://thelastgassta...nslaught-o.htmlAll the Best
Hmm. that would be a square 17.7 miles on a side. Around here we call that a "county"! Of course, you can still use 99% of that land for farming and grazing. If you have a large chunk of agricultural land in the middle of nowhere on a windy plain, you might as well stick some windmills on it. I've been pro-nuclear power for 20+ years. I was against it for a few years but came around based in part on some good arguments presented on Usenet sci.environment or sci.energy. (Yeah, I've been on the net for, umm, 24 years?)
I'm not by any means against wind power. Offer it to me at a competitive rate and I'll buy it, but there seems to be a bit of a double standard. It's fair to say a lot of people hate the looks of a wind farm even in the middle of nowhere, but on the other hand, mainly the left opposes drilling for oil in Alaska, a place that couldn't be more "middle of nowhere", because it will ruin the pristine environment, that nobody is going notice anyway. The area where they want to drill would be much smaller than the 313 sq miles for this wind farm.
I don't get the people who think windmills are ugly. I think they look cool, at least in the windswept areas that they naturally go in. I can understand someone not wanting one in their backyard, but in West Texas? The ones I used to drive by in California looked awesome! They were used as a backdrop in more than one car commercial because they looked so cool. ANWR is a refuge for wildlife that would not deal well with oil rigs and service roads. The prairie dogs and armadillos aren't really gonna care one way or the other.
And my point is that certain powers that be, mainly on the left, are trying to force us into cutting back on oil, coal, and nuclear power because of an imaginary problem called man made global warming that doesn't exist.
Well, some of them like nukes because of the global warming problem. Also the really hideous pollution that coal generates. Even if global warming didn't exist, we should still cut back on oil because it's wrecking our economy. Some people, perhaps a declining number of them, are opposed to nuclear power for safety reasons. I think they are wrong, but they don't listen to me. These people do tend to be on the left. People on the right tend to not believe that global warming is real, despite the science and evidence that says it's a real effect. I think there's a deep-seated link between fear of nukes on the left and disbelief in AGW on the right. It's weird, at least on the surface, that these should be political, but I think it has something to do with how our brains are wired. The left distrusts the corporatists who bring us nuclear power, and the right distrusts the statists who would be required to deal with AGW consequences. Both groups are being tribal; they take positions because others in their "tribe" have taken those positions. If George Bush and Dick Cheney were concerned about global warming, and Al Gore was an oil man, the political contours of this issue would probably look a lot different. The Right tends to be a lot more tribal than the Left, which is probably why there are a lot of pro-nuke people on the left, but few anti-nuke people on the right. The fact that some conservative Christian groups have now taken up the mantle of Global Warming may portend changes on the horizon.
LongeCity
