Moderate Democrats (also liberals)

@maporsche,

Quote:

It doesn't matter how Feinstein votes; all 53 Republicans are going to vote no.

Yes, it matters, because:

Quote:

you have to vote out 13 Republican Senators

And Democrats can only do that if they support bold moves on climate change, so that the public will see that they are different from Republicans, and vote for them.

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@Olivier5,

We disagree

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

Quote:

A few more adults in the room there.

Which type of adult? The type of adults who after years of denying the problem entirely, now find themselves too old to care, après moi le délude? Or the type that has been alerting the world for three decades now about the dangers of climate change?

Some kind of adult...

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@maporsche,

Thanks for letting me know.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

And Democrats can only do that if they support bold moves on climate change, so that the public will see that they are different from Republicans, and vote for them.

Feinstein is a Democrat and I expect a very large fraction of the Democrat minority in the Senate will vote against it too.

How do you feel about President Macron's announced intent to start phasing out the French Nuclear power establishment which today produces almost 70% of French electrical power?

Same question goes for his now withdrawn tax on petroleum, enacted ostensibly to reduce emissions in the French transportation system. It appears a large segment of the French electorate didn't like it very much.

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

Changing the subject, again?

We need more adults in the room indeed.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

It appears you don't deal with criticism nearly as well as you dish it out. Not a good sign.

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@georgeob1,

What criticism are you talking about, George? You did not criticized me, you criticised Macron. We're not the same person.

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@Olivier5,

I'm not Macron's keeper, nor his spin doctor. I think his surtax on gas was a big mistake, one that I chalk up to a response to ex-environment minister Hulot leaving the government in a very public disavowal of Macron environmental policies a few months before. Macron wanted to prove his green credentials and kneejerked the tax button.

The French already pay more taxes than pretty much everybody else on the planet. We also emit 3 to 4 times less CO2/frog than the average American. What else can we do? Can we solve a global problem all by ourselves, with our own little French muscles?

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@Olivier5,

The low emissions are largely the result of France's huge long term investment in nuclear power - something that I believe is both admirable and beneficial to all. How do you feel about Macron's announced intention to cease the replacement of France's ageing nuclear plants?

German Chancellor Merkel (who as a physicist should know better) shut down Germany's oldest nuclear power plants as a device (successful) to pull the rug from under the Green Party there. The replacement electrical energy came mostly from coal fired plants.

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

German Chancellor Merkel (who as a physicist should know better) shut down Germany's oldest nuclear power plants as a device (successful) to pull the rug from under the Green Party there. The replacement electrical energy came mostly from coal fired plants.

I'm not sure if it was Merkel "to pull the rug from under the Green Party" - it started with the Atomkonsens ("nuclear consensus")by the first Schröder cabinet in 2001 - the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its chairwoman, Angela Merkel, objected to the agreement.
However, in the wake of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima, Japan, the Merkel government decided in June 2011 to shut down eight nuclear plants and limit the operation of the remaining nine to 2022.

The replacement is very different to what you say.

See more charts and data at source: Net Public Electricity Generation in Germany in 2018

1 Reply

@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

The replacement is very different to what you say.

A very long time passed from 2011 to 2017, and the chief replacement then was from coal fired plants in Germany and Poland. German wind power was increasing fast, but given the fact that it takes roughly 1,000 modern wind turbines with an actual mean power output of 1MW each to replace a nuclear plant it wasn't feasible as a solution to the incremental loss.

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

Yes, it takes too long.

Source linked above

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

How do you feel about Macron's announced intention to cease the replacement of France's ageing nuclear plants?

I doubt that's a fact. Please link.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Kids trying to wake up adults... As Saint Ex famously put it, “grown-ups never understand anything by themselves.”

https://images.theconversation.com/files/259050/original/file-20190214-1733-1tdsdqt.jpg

A school strike in Melbourne, Australia. Julian Meehan / School Strike, CC BY-SA
http://theconversation.com/school-climate-strikes-why-adults-no-longer-have-the-right-to-object-to-their-children-taking-radical-action-111851

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@Olivier5,

Macron had announced the shutdown of 14 of France's 58 nuclear reactors by 2035 in November. In addition to the two reactors of the Alsatian Fessenheim power plant in summer 2020, four to six others of the oldest will be closed before 2030.

Quote:

Mais « réduire la part du nucléaire, ce n’est pas pour autant y renoncer, a insisté le président de la République. Cela reste une piste prometteuse pour continuer à pouvoir compter sur une énergie fiable, décarbonée et à bas coût. » Si la France « n’a pas de besoin immédiat » et pas « le recul nécessaire » avec l’EPR de Flamanville, il n’exclut pas un renouvellement partiel du parc de centralles.

Source
(But "reducing the share of nuclear energy does not mean abandoning it," the President of the Republic insisted. This remains a promising way to continue to rely on reliable, low-carbon and low-cost energy. "If France does not have an immediate need" and not "the necessary perspective" with the Flamanville EPR, it does not exclude a partial renewal of the power plant fleet.)

1 Reply

@Walter Hinteler,

Thanks for the info. Macron will be long gone by 2035, so his promises must be taken with a grain of salt. Even closing down the oldest of French nuclear plants, Fessenheim, has been much easier said than done. It was promised for 2015, then 2018, and now they speak of 2020...

The EPR design has run into engineering problems and construction delays, costing billions of euros to Areva. If that design was seen as non-problematic, the French state would be heavily investing in replacement plants right now. It's only because we don't seem to have a functional design for the next generation of nuclear plants that we are now thinking about alternatives.

Not a second too late, IMO. Nukes are inherently risky and produce waste that's costly to manage.

1 Reply

@Walter Hinteler,

Nice work.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Not a second too late, IMO. Nukes are inherently risky and produce waste that's costly to manage.

But far less risky and costly to manage than those of coal or gas fired plants.

Nuclear power involves extremely low probabilities of potentially catastrophic accidents (though the containment structures in nearly universal use in Western Countries and new Asian plants have amply demonstrated their ability to contain the worst accidents without public injury - no one died as a result of the Fukushima accident though 15,000 perished in the Tsunami that caused it all.)

In contrast fossil fuel plants (coal-fired particularly) involve the certainty of widespread harmful effects from atmospheric emissions and the storage & management of coal ash and debris, both of which have so far defied effective management at any cost.

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

fossil fuel plants (coal-fired particularly) involve the certainty of widespread harmful effects from atmospheric emissions and the storage & management of coal ash and debris, both of which have so far defied effective management at any cost.

No argument on the danger of emissions, but on wastes, can't coal ash be disposed of as landfill?

3 Replies

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