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Yeah, his wording is quite strong, but isn't it even more insulting to have your very existence declared problematic?

Let's be honest here, some environmentalists really do see too many humans as a problem. I mean, it's phrased in terms of too many people doing too many things and owning to much stuff, which all implies there's to many of us. The next logical question is "ok, so which one of us will have to go"?

Your points are mostly valid, but they were all solvable, had people wanted to solve them. The reality is that today there are jurisdictions (Ontario, France) that produce clean, safe, affordable, carbon-free energy because they built and maintained their nuclear plants. But the anti-nuclear crowd did not want to solve issues, they had one aim, which they achieved, and now we have a far bigger issue.

The uncomfortable fact remains is that if the rest of the developed world looked like Ontario, climate change would be a far smaller problem. And what bothers me personally isn't that the anti-nuclear left fucked up so badly in the 70s - after all climate change was barely on anyone's register back then. What bothers me is that even today after we see these facts staring at us plainly in the face, they still won't admit they fucked up.

This bothers me because even today they won't let you call yourself an "environmentalist" unless you sign up to their very specific implementation of environmentalism.

> isn't it even more insulting to have your very existence declared problematic?

A few loons might hold this view, but overall it's an extreme straw man to argue that this represents a majority view in environmentalism.

Pointing out that our existence tends to generate negative externalities that might be very harmful to us in the long run is not anti-human. It's pro-human in that the ultimate goal is to avoid those long term negative consequences. Too many humans might indeed be bad for humans in the long run because too many humans might produce too many negative externalities.

Is it anti-well-being to advocate living below one's means to save for the future? Saving implies spending less right now to realize a potential future gain. The environmental movement argues the same, but from the angle that we should spend less right now to avoid future losses.

I've often found it intellectually inconsistent for conservatives to oppose environmentalism, since it really reduces to a form of fiscal responsibility. If conservatives are worried about the national debt they should also be worried about the buildup of excess CO2 in the atmosphere and ocean. That's another kind of debt being passed on to future generations. I sometimes wonder if our high monetary debt load and our high environmental debt load might not be directly related. Keynes' famous quote "in the future we are all dead" could turn out to be accurate in a way he did not anticipate.

With a 'few loons' you mean many of the founders of the environmentalist movement that are still highly respected today. These people were the founders of some of the larger organisations today.

In fact these 'loons' were invited to give talks in popular TV.

There are some of the early environmentalists who changed position and realized these issues, but the waste majority did not. See 'Russel Brand' who help start the environmental movement and has tried to tell them for years that nuclear is the way to save the world. Of course he was basically made into a traitor.

> It's pro-human in that the ultimate goal is to avoid those long term negative consequences.

No. Saying we should have less people and let more people die faster in order to delay 'perceived ' negative long term consequences, is a anti-humanist way of thinking.

> Is it anti-well-being to advocate living below one's means to save for the future? Saving implies spending less right now to realize a potential future gain.

Clearly you have not actually read that stuff. They don't want to save for the future, they thought that there were already to many people on earth and they wanted fewer.

Conservatives have made many mistakes in this as well, but not so fundamental as liberals.

Indeed there are probably a few loons who hold this view explicitly. But there are large numbers that hold this view implicitly - ie, they would never say they want fewer people, but if you actually followed their their preferred course of action, fewer people would be required.

I should note that I'm not a conservative and I also find their lack of concern for the environment to be at odds with their own interests and ideology, but what I'm talking about is slightly different. To be an environmentalist doesn't mean sharing some goals, it means having to sign up to a very specific set of views, which ostensibly lead to that goal. Being anti-nuclear power is one of those specific views you have to hold, so being pro-nuclear puts you at odds with most environmentalists, even if both sides of the view lead to the same goal (less CO2 in the atmosphere).

We're on a finite planet and numbers are increasing rapidly. Very few countries have a reducing population - Japan, and well, that's about it. At some point the solution has to be fewer people.

Looking at the world's pressing problems with loss of species, diversity, soils, climate change etc; all are hugely exacerbated by numbers.

Even if we were to perfect interstellar or interplanetary travel we're unlikely to be sending billions.

So what is your solution? Anyone who doesn't hold the view that the planet needs fewer humans, in the foreseeable future, is simply ignoring the problem.

The numbers are increasing, but leveling off. High fertility rates only exist in a few regions of the world (Africa, South Asia) and even there they are falling rapidly.

The "solution" broadly speaking is higher intensity - of energy, land, everything. If you have compact energy sources (nuclear) powering compact food production (high-yield agriculture, some vertical farming) feeding people living in compact cities (higher density, more ridesharing), then it's doable. You can already see lots of signs of this in the developed countries.

This will still require lots of adjustment from people, but asking them to live in duplexes, share rides and eat less meat is much more doable than asking them no you know, not exist.

The Breakthrough does lots of great research on this topic: https://thebreakthrough.org/

That may buy a little time, but unless or until the numbers actually start falling it doesn't actually solve the problem.

It's not asking them not to exist, I can't foresee compulsory euthanasia camps, it's merely asking them to limit procreation. China shows it's doable - though I'm sure there's better ways to achieve limits. At least that gives our future generations a chance of experiencing some of the things that make life interesting with still functional ecosystem and wildlands.

> Huge scale and persistence of accidents.

This also affects the cost equation. One Chernobyl or Fukushima and nuclear is suddenly by far the most expensive source of energy, even more costly than the most expensive renewable sources.

Pre-Fukushima nuclear power in Japan was economical. Post-Fukushima Japan would have been better off building hundreds of billions of dollars worth of solar, wind, pumped hydro, and batteries, and building undersea cables to link its grid with neighboring countries. All that would have cost a lot more up front but amortized over 100 years including Fukushima it would have been a lot cheaper.

It would still be economical post, its only regulation that prevents that.

Nuclear was the right answer before and it still is for Japan. Its by far the best option for them in the short run and in the long run.

One time cost are one time cost and changing everything because of one incredibly unlikely event is nonsensical.

The anti-human sentiment in this context is generally referring to environmentalists who thought large amounts of clean nuclear energy would cause population growth beyond the carrying capacity of Earth wrt other resources. I doubt it's meant to be insulting.

1) Just because the fission chain reaction can be used as a weapon does not mean you should be anti-nuclear reactors. We've seen that lots of people can make nuclear bombs without having any reactors at all (just need some centrifuges) so why are we avoiding making clean nuclear energy (which has positive clean-energy attributes that mirror the destructive side) for a misplaced fear of weapons?

2) Temporary evacuations should happen in events like Fukushima and then people should be given the data on the dose rates at their home compared to scientific studies showing the likelihood of a dose rate causing them harm relative to other risks. I guarantee lots of people would choose to move home much sooner than they are if they had this information. Chernobyl is kind of another story because there was no containment on those reactors. Reactors should either have containments or be inherently stable designs. Chernobyl was neither. Still, climate change has the potential to cause much more damage than these accidents.

3) Waste disposal has several known responsible and appropriate technical solutions. We just need people to stop blanket-stating that it's a forever unsolvable problem so we can move forward like the Finns are doing [1]. Then there's deep-borehole disposal which is not developed but very promising.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

4) This is what the parent is talking about; the industry has been regulated and delayed by professional anti-nuclear intervenors for decades and then they always say: "Ha! Nuclear is bad because it's expensive and always has delays!" The industry itself could certainly do better (the Japanese and Koreans had/have been building plants in record time and on budget and are shocked when they hear US contractors sue each other on a construction site), but the cost overruns are not inherent to nuclear energy. That's a social thing.

5) Nuclear advocates definitely need to win trust; the carbon-free, super-safe energy source is currently less popular than straight-up burning oil. Anti-nuclear people need to catch up on some of the latest low-dose health effect studies if we want to talk about lying. The linear no-threshold model is what we've been operating on since inception and it's very conservative. As we've gathered more data, it makes sense to re-visit such models and see where the waste is in regulation and design.

> Declaring a bunch of people to be "anti-human" because you don't agree with them is insulting.

They are in fact 'anti-human' go back and read the early environmentalist thinking. They are literally saying we should't give aid to starving people in India/China because they believe the environment would suffer from that.

Its a deeply anti-humanist and anti-science movement.

> 1) Weapons proliferation.

First of all, the waste majority of population happens in country that already have either nuclear weapons or civilian power plants so its not all that relevant for climate change.

Second of all, civilian nuclear power has often turned out to be a good thing for anti-proliferation.

Your point about Iran being a perfect example, Iran wanted to buy a nuclear reactor from France and France would have done all the processing of the fuel. However the US in a shortsighted and idiotic move stopped this, and only then the Iranians started to develop the technical capability for the fuel cycle.

Third, no country primarily derives its nuclear weapons program from civilian reactors, that is more theory then reality.

> 2) Huge scale and persistence of accidents. Chernobyl affected agriculture in the whole of Western Europe, and took decades for an adequate final containment to be built. Bhopal was bad - and possibly worse in effects! - but at least the area isn't a permanent wasteland.

You are just spreading more of those wrong lies. Nuclear power has been both the safest and the lowest land use source of energy for a very long time.

People die of accidents in coal, gas and wind all the time. More people died in a single coal mine accident then in ALL nuclear accidents in human history combined.

For the most part these wastelands are just governments, driven by totally false scientific analysis blocking of way more land then needed.

Again, this is regulation based on scientifically invalid correlation between the effect of radiation and cancer. The science on this is long accepted.

> 3) Waste disposal. A forever problem. I'm old enough to remember Greenpeace fighting it being dumped at sea, but the problem of where we put it remains.

Again, this is very early things that were done wrong, but that is no argument for today. Also, most of this waste is from weapons production (including what they threw in the sea). In fact nuclear civilian power had to pay a fee to the government for storage, this fee has been payed an the government is sitting on billions of payed fees.

This money, every experts agrees, is enough to build a facility. The problem is political, because again, of pretty insane regulation that came out of the political battle over Yucca Mountain (a political choice in the first place).

Even without a 'final solution' its a far smaller problem then many people make it out to be. Nobody has ever died from nuclear fuel, and nobody will for 1000s of years, even if we don't put it into long terms storage.

I'm mostly against a 'final solution' for much of the material we already because it is literally full of energy. This is another one of these insane illogical things, modern reactors could eat up the waste majority of that stuff and give us green energy for a 100 years but of course development of such technology has been opposed every step on ever level.

I have heard the argument 'that would only lead to more people wanting nuclear', making it clear that the waste is just an excuse to block and oppose nuclear power on every turn.

> 4) Cost overruns. A systematic problem in the industry. Doesn't affect renewables to anything like the same extent.

The Cost overrun happens because in the last 30 years only 1-2 reactors have been built. Insane regulation, lost knowledge and production capacity have made it almost impossible to get any kind of scale back.

This is perfectly evident everywhere that deploy nuclear at a larger scale, the US in the early days, France, Korea and China. Its always cheap and a incredibly good long term investment because these reactors will last longer then pretty much all the other things you could build.

When we are talking about solving climate change, so we need something that scales and can produce a lot of power.

Any single renewables program will have less overruns, but that is irrelevant when you are talking about a whole global system. If you compare the estimated cost of transforming everything, nuclear is clearly better.

No need for much grid change for example, just replace every coal plant with a nuclear plants. Uses existing infrastructure, its simple.

> 5) The meta-point: systematic lying about the effects of all of the above. That this happens to overlap with the era of discovering that all sorts of previous advances (CFCs, tetraethyl lead, DDT, asbestos) had nasty side-effects which were also lied about or minimised is not a coincidence. Nuclear advocates take the arrogant position that they don't need to win trust.

Ok, lets look at some issues of trust.

Frist, many of the things above are agree on by pretty much anybody with education of the subject. Meaning nuclear should have educational trust.

This is however undermined because there are 100x more liberal arts (and co) anti-nuclear leftists.

Second, the nuclear industry has operated very well, both in the US and globally, with security better then pretty much any other industry in the world.

However, the lies about it being unsafe persists.

So experts agree, data agrees but you still put the burden on the nuclear advocates to show credibility, while people like Greenpeace have lied and deliberately mislead and misrepresented nuclear energy to the public.

How about the critics show some integrity for once and lets stop taking organisations as being good, just because they claim to be 'environmentalist' when infact their policies are helping to destroy the environment and the people.

Look at Germany, the amount of people that will die there from the use of coal is very high. Guess what, Greenpeace and co have fought with everything to shut down all nuclear plants when it was clearly predictable that this would lead to massively more coal production.

So its my believe that anti-nuclear people should actually answer some of those issues and do it with credibility. Nuclear is safer, it is cleaner, its more land efficient, more reliable, more long lasting and it has FAR greater chance of further advances (its 60s tech for the most part).

This battle against nuclear is not only hurting us here, but also space exploration. Our current way of doing space exploration with as little nuclear energy as possible its an downright embracing state of affairs for a technological society.