America’s top environmental groups have lost the plot on climate change
noahpinion.blog
noahpinion.blog
In fact, the availability of cheap fossil fuels is what allowed average Americans to to visit the preserved wildlands in the post war period. That continues to this day, at least until we're all driving electric.
Audubon was created to protect the interests of recreational bird hunters against the demand for feathers for fashion.
The challenges facing the world with climate change subsume all of these narrow environmental challenges. The climate problem and its solutions are planetary and civilizational in scale, not limited to a particular narrow environmental concern, no matter how valid that concern is.
I've volunteered with the Sierra Club both locally in different areas and on some national/regional climate programs. I've also sat in on local Audubon meetings when they've looked at and discussed the details of local wind projects to decide if they should support or oppose it, balancing local wildlife needs with national climate priorities. And often energy companies will hold environmental review meetings for the public, where these groups and others would send representatives. (Was an environmental science and journalism student in college, and our area had a looooot of meetings about land use conflicts, being both full of endangered species and ripe for renewables development).
My underlying point is that these are inherently nuanced issues with local, regional, and national (and of course global) perspectives. The chapters and national groups understand that, and they are of course also concerned about climate change. They're not blind to these basic facts, but it's not as simple as simply developing over all our protected lands to build new energy projects if that means killing (too) many of the species they were trying to protect to begin with. It's also not as simple as simply rejecting renewables in favor of, say, using less energy.
It's a hard problem all around, and balanced solutions require an understanding of all the costs and benefits involved, not unthinking adherence to any dogma.
Even the elitism thing... yes, it's very true, especially historically. But there is a push in these groups (facing both internal and external pressures) to diversify both in ethnicity/culture and economic class so that conservation isn't just something for rich white hermits. Even Muir doesn't quite have the same worshipful status he once did.
More diversity also means that environmental justice becomes a more significant factor -- where to site nuclear projects, for example, or whether rich NIMBYs displace poor NIMBYs because they are better able to put up legal hurdles and marketing campaigns.
And as outdoor rec becomes more popular, accessibility vs preservation is an ongoing issue (but that's a while other can of worms). I think there will always be people who want to make nature an exclusive club for a small group of rich white hikers, and the only remedy to that is more diverse involvement in these groups (or other groups like Latino Outdoors). The chapter model actually makes that more possible because you're not directly tackling an old white board at the national level, but engaging with neighbors on shared issues.
Perhaps for a bit longer: the US is big [citation needed] and electric planes are a lot harder than electric cars.
> The challenges facing the world with climate change subsume all of these narrow environmental challenges. The climate problem and its solutions are planetary and civilizational in scale, not limited to a particular narrow environmental concern, no matter how valid that concern is.
Your point might be valid, but 'subsume' is rather the wrong word. The global climate doesn't particularly care if one factory in one town dumps heavy metals in the ground water over there.
Worries about the climate might well _dwarf_ local worries, but they don't _subsume_ them.
In many ways they do subsume them. For example, an impactful strategy to combating climate change is increasing density of urban areas by upzoning. This reduces vehicle miles driven and energy consumed for transportation and heating/cooling. But it also reduces demand for housing in wildland areas, subsuming that environmental fight.
Similarly, reducing fossil fuel extraction by replacing that energy with carbon-free sources subsumes the problem of limiting the destruction of rivers from coal mining, and the mitigating the devastation caused by offshore oil leaks.
That said, quenching the thirst for energy is very central to the history of environmental destruction, from deforestation caused by pre-industrial societies through to mountaintop removal for coal.
This is an article filled with unhinged scare words. The author even tries, albeit implicitly, to suggest that we should build a 14 square mile solar farm on the same land endangered tortoises live. When you start making these arguments you run into the same exact problem the author speaks of later: people were opposed to expanding urban sprawl because it destroyed the land they use for recreation. No one wants to take a visit to the solar farm and camp out next to the windmills. So, whats the solution?
As one commenter suggested the answer is nuclear power. We are so happy to pollute our land further with eyesores like solar farms and wind farms and not a single person is willing to consider nuclear power. Even ignoring the negative aesthetic of this so-called clean technology there's another aspect that isn't discuss and that's the damage to wildlife. People like the author, who has spent several pages justifying this, seem to be completely content with destroying the local fauna if it saves us from the alleged "climate apocalypse" just around the corner. I've been around long enough to remember several supposed "raptures" that were going to happen. It's getting harder to differentiate the two groups.
The same "uninhabited" land they want to build these on can be use to safely place a nuclear power plant that, should anything go wrong, damage mitigation would be trivial.
I am repeatedly impressed at the mental gymnastics used to avoid discussing nuclear power.
Also, solar and wind farms don't destroy the environment under them or anything; solar can make land more habitable by adding shade. What it does do is make the land harder to sell, which is a problem if you're a land banker pretending to be a farmer, a common situation in the US.
And the Sierra Club is anti-nuclear; they just got Illinois to block it again: https://twitter.com/SierraClubIL/status/1690054514772975624
Noah Smith publicly advertises himself as being on the left, so of course in these groups he sees the spectre of conservatism. They refuse to build solar farms because they just can't stop conserving things!
But there's an alternative hypothesis that also explains the nuclear problem: these are people whose personalities cannot abide tradeoffs of any kind. They are utopian progressives who believe that if a proposal has any downsides at all, then they should protest and block under the assumption that faced with resistance the smart set will come up with a better proposal. Claims that there are no alternatives are rejected on the grounds that capital-P Progress is automatic and easy, so if anyone is stating that you have to choose between birds/tortoises and climate, then they just need to try harder to find a solution that makes everyone happy.
The first thing you need to consider is nobody wants these things in their backyard, and I mean nobody. You're going to spend tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars facing the legal hurdles all the NIMBYs are going to hurl at you. Even if you manage to obtain a permit, which isn't that difficult actually, the NIMBYs are going to fight you every step of the way and will do everything they can to impede construction to force costs to skyrocket.
Then there's the fact there's steps in the construction process that have to be done within a certain amount of time otherwise you have to scrap and start over. Do you know who knows those steps very well? The NIMBYs, of course. If they win a delay in those steps then they've effectively shut down the plant before it even got built.
My company ran into this while building a new nuclear power plant back in 2008/2009. We ended up having to scrap it and built an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) coal plant instead. The thing I remember most was Obama making a promise the year before the plant opened that there wouldn't be a new coal-fired power plant built in the U.S. So much for that!
On the positive side, that was the last coal-fired power plant my company has built and they've retired several older units built in the 40's and 50's, since. When I started there, 40% of their power was from coal, now it's 20%. We own and operate the largest wind farms in the U.S. and we've deployed several solar farms and are in the midst of building more.
Investors don't even want to hear the word nuclear. There have been a lot of modern coal plants built in the past 20 years. Maybe 20-30 years from now as those plants start to age out we may be in a position to re-evaluate nuclear energy, but I don't see it happening before then.
What are you referring to? If it's some hysteria affecting the members of an opt-in religious group then that's hardly relevant to the discussion.
We should be concerned about the climate. We should do something about it. Nuclear power is nice because we don't have to kill all sorts of fauna and consume large swaths of land.
We shouldn't be alarmists. We especially shouldn't be espousing apocalyptic language when it's demonstrably not apocalyptic. If you actually read the article the alarmism would rise to the exact level needed to suggest a second-coming style rapture. But instead of Christ, it's biblical floods and super hot summers...wait they're starting to sound the same.
The comparison was honestly to get a rise out of people that can't see when the horseshoe ends begin to touch. It's far harder for people to take articles like this one seriously when it's filled with language that sounds more like a panicked sermon than a measured discussion on possible ways to get rid of dead dinos.
I am sure the tortoises would be better off if humans never came around but I have to say they are being treated pretty well in this case.
i'm all for protecting the ecosystem but that's surreal. What's the "tortoise" budget?
Is your answer that unless we can draw a direct causal link with certainty, these things must be treated as totally unrelated?
When that didn't happen he claimed he'd never made any such prediction and the people who claimed he did were making it up. Then he pushed out the date that was meant to happen to 2030. New York isn't going to be underwater by 2030 either.
That's how it works with these people. They make bad predictions, pretend they never did, and then re-make them but this time it's another 20 years out. You only have to pull this stunt once to cover an entire career of prognostication and grants.
but thanks to the internet and archives etc you can provide a link to the publication that quoted him on that, right?
I'd like to see the actual quote, in context.
The New Yorker in 1989 quotes Hansen [0]:
given a global temperature increase of between one and a half and five and a half degrees Celsius, should raise sea level a foot, according to James Hansen.
It is by now widely accepted that sea level will rise significantly over the next decades.
The E.P.A. has estimated that it will rise between five and seven feet by 2100, and speculated about worst-case scenarios that might lead to an eleven foot rise; the National Academy of Sciences has been more conservative; other researchers have turned in even scarier numbers.
Suffice it to say that included in the range of guesses of almost every panel and scientist studying the problem is an increase in global sea level of better than three feet over the next century.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/09/11/the-end-of-nat...
https://web.archive.org/web/20110202162233/https:/www.salon....
While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, "If what you're saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?" He looked for a while and was quiet and didn't say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, "Well, there will be more traffic." I, of course, didn't think he heard the question right. Then he explained, "The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won't be there. The trees in the median strip will change." Then he said, "There will be more police cars." Why? "Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up."
From looking up that link and double checking it for you, apparently the guy telling this story now says he mixed up 20 years and 40 when retelling it, so he says Hansen's original prediction was always for 2030. Doesn't matter, the claim is still just as wrong. The West Side Highway isn't going to sink beneath the waves in a little over 6 years, nor is there going to be tape across the windows, and the crime rate in New York has fallen over that period.
A Salon reporter in 2001 quoting a third party about a recollection of a conversation they had more than a decade ago in ~ 1998 that runs contrary to direct statements that Jim Hansen made in 1998 to both congress and in interviews?
> Whatever, doesn't matter, the claim is as wrong as when it was first made.
To be honest it doesn't sound as if the claim was actually made.
Unless you have that as an actual statement in minutes of congress, a submitted journal paper, or a direct interview.
In lieu of anything better your GP comment appears to be strawmanning to poo poo somebody on the basis of something they never officially said.
Your dates are all off by the way. The interview dates from 2001. You're looking at the date archive.org snapshotted it, not the date the article was published. The recalled conversation dates from around the time Hansen was doing his testimony to congress (end of the 1980s/early 90s).
It's just an example. There's an ample supply. David Viner, a UK climatologist, predicted that "children just aren't going to know what snow is" ... in March 2000. The same news article quotes Jarich Oosten, an anthropologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, saying that "even if we no longer see snow, it will remain culturally important". And David Parker, at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Berkshire, said "ultimately, British children could have only virtual experience of snow".
Those children grew up and it still snows in Europe just like it always did. Climatologists have a long track record of making very long term predictions, insisting that nobody wait before acting to find out whether or not they're any good at predicting, and then eventually being proven dramatically wrong. It's a meme for a reason and this constant insistence that they never made wrong predictions is tiresome revisionism.
Here’s an example something verifiable, from his Senate testimony in 1988 as covered by the Washington Post:
> "The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now," Hansen testified at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. "We already reached the point where the greenhouse effect is important."
> Although scientists have previously theorized about the greenhouse effect and issued vague projections of rising temperatures sometime in the next century, Hansen is the first to concretely link warming and greenhouse gases and to authoritatively proclaim the phenomenon's arrival.
> He warned, moreover, of an "increasing tendency" for droughts and heat waves, especially in the Southeast and Midwest, during the balance of this decade and the 1990s.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/06/24/s...
(Historical review: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2018/06/judgment-on-hanse...)
Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard that particular story so I’ll help you out: it’s a misstatement made by someone else (Bob Reiss) when talking to a Salon.com reporter thirteen years later in 2001, and the original question was a speculative off-the-cuff prediction about the impacts of CO2 levels doubling, which fortunately has not happened yet:
> Michaels also has the facts wrong about a 1988 interview of me by Bob Reiss, in which Reiss asked me to speculate on changes that might happen in New York City in 40 years assuming CO2 doubled in amount. Michaels has it as 20 years, not 40 years, with no mention of doubled CO2. Reiss verified this fact to me, but he later sent the message: "I went back to my book and re-read the interview I had with you. I am embarrassed to say that although the book text is correct, in remembering our original conversation, during a casual phone interview with a Salon magazine reporter in 2001 I was off in years. What I asked you originally at your office window was for a prediction of what Broadway would look like in 40 years, not 20. But when I spoke to the Salon reporter 10 years later - probably because I'd been watching the predictions come true, I remembered it as a 20 year question." So give Michaels a pass on this one -- assume that he reads Salon, but he did not check the original source, Reiss' book.
Source: http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/mailings/2011/20110126_Singi...
More importantly, one man is not an entire scientific field. When talking about accuracy, we should be looking at the IPCC reports since those have a multi-decade history we can compare to actual measures change by now:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/12/4/2099131...
What’s also interesting is to see how the various lies funded by the fossil fuel industry have fared over that same time. Like the tobacco industry science deniers – in some cases the same people – they haven’t shown any track record of accuracy, flitting around from detail to detail trying to say that any unusual point on a graph disproves the entire field. We’ve heard various cases of wishful thinking around sunspots, satellite error, buoy error, urban vs. rural discrepancies, etc. and the common thread is that none of those have held up scientifically or meaningfully changed the trajectory. That’s the difference between scientists who are critically examining their own work and corporate lobbyists who are starting with the conclusion that their profit margins shouldn’t change and working backwards.
It'll probably be another goalpost move but let's try again. Take the Hansen's 1989 written testimony to Congress you're keen on. No arguments about sources there, right?
He presented three scenarios and said "Scenario A assumes continued growth rates of trace gas emissions typical of the past 20 years". He also wrote "We have considered cases ranging from business as usual which is scenario A to draconian emission cuts, scenario C, which would totally eliminate net trace gas growth by year 2000."
Look at any graph of CO2 and it goes up in a straight line since measurements began, so we are on scenario A, business as usual. This enormously over-predicted temperature trends even after all the changes they make to the temperature record. Hansen and his supporters reacted by trying to claim he never said those things and had been predicting scenario B all along. His written testimony shows that this isn't true, but that's how it goes.
Hansen is for sure an actual scientist, so these problems are enough to disprove what you said about what actual scientists have been saying.
It does matter because you’re trying to criticize an entire field of science by ignoring all of the accurate predictions made in official publications in favor of attacking an incorrect summary of a misstatement made by someone else which differed in both the time period and conditions (the book for which the original interview question was made specified doubling CO2, which is a level we’re nowhere near).
Similarly, the rest of your post is trying to sound science-y but it’s conspicuous how you always have to paraphrase things and allege all of these non-specific problems, again carefully without making a claim specific enough to fact check and ignoring things like the Montreal Protocol which impacted some of the growth curves.
Finally, dealing quite mining here is not any more fun than it is with creationists. I would politely suggest again that you focus on the IPCC reports – those represent the work of many people rather than a single person and have a much better claim to represent the consensus at the time they were published.
- <example of bad predictions> It has to come from actual scientists!
- <example from Hansen> I don't believe you, you must be making it up.
- <citation> Still can't believe it, primary sources only!
- <citation of another false claim by the same scientist, in his own words, from the source you selected> What about all the other predictions! You're paraphrasing! Sciency sounding! Creationists! IPCC!
You don't seem to know how to respond to counter-examples that disprove your initial belief so keep falling back on a grab-bag of memetic clichés that don't actually apply here. What does creationism have to do with anything? What is "sciency sounding" about something as basic as temperature? How can I be paraphrasing anything when the words are a direct quote from his written testimony to Congress? Go look up his Scenario A "business as usual" predictions and see for yourself how far off it is from even today's adjusted-upwards temperature record. The gap is massive.
Yes, the developers and the landowners benefit. The landowners get license fees or sell the land to the developers, then the developers build solar and sell power to the utilities. It's not a conspiracy, that's how infrastructure works.
I think this is a consistent expansion of your point. Renewable power is cheap. People really like cheap power. Not just developers and landowners. Again, not a conspiracy, just like any other commodity.
I do! Wind farms in particular are spectacular and preferable to farmland
I'm sorry, I just don't trust our governments, or future governments, to manage nuclear.
Shit happens, whether it's natural disasters, or human catastrophes like the War in Europe.
We need to acknowledge that war, and a steep decline in our ability to function as a civilization are a very real possibility.
Climate change itself might bring this about. What would a few years of extreme famine do to our society?
I agree with the conservationists on this. The solution is to build solar in the land we have already ruined with our cities, and make do with less power.
Good luck with that, internet commentator.
A lot of these people have their hearts in the right place but it's a good reminder that we often hang onto ideas despite information — and circumstance — evolving around us. Lobbying against wind farms to protect birds that will likely be wiped out eventually by fossil fuel emissions is a good example of this.
I'm hoping at this point we can all put politics aside, as well as our preconceived notions of how we see the world, and actually start to make progress on this issue of climate that will define our generation. It's not an easy challenge at all — and it's likely we've gotten to a point where adaptation is our remaining hope; but it's not a lost cause and we have many tools in our belt to try and make a meaningful change in course.
I dunno if it's really an either or. Endangered species are often endangered because of extreme habitat loss, which means by definition there's not a lot of land left for them to live on, which means most projects won't intersect them. Of course the connection isn't that basic (desert is good for both tortoises and solar farms) but it does suggest one has more flexibility than the other.
What percentage of utility scale renewables projects are blocked by endangered species? One recent study suggests environmental impacts are a source of opposition in half of the studied projects: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152...
That's a lot, but doesn't necessarily mean it was the only (or primary) source of opposition.
A lot of these bigger projects have to undergo environmental review via federal (NEPA) and state (CEQA) processes, which are expensive and slow (by design, to ensure their validity) and many projects stall when developers move on to locales with laxer rules and neighbors -- essentially giving up before the environmental impacts could be fully analyzed.
My underlying point is that these things are rarely black and white, and there may be valid reasons to consider each project on a case by case basis. However, there might also be a valid reason to overhaul these laws to allow weighting climate priorities against individual protected species. If so, though, that should be very carefully and rarely done... once we lose those, they're never coming back. We can always find alternate energy sources/sites if we're willing to pay more. No amount of money will bring back extinct species (yet).
Dooms Day Prophecies have a wierd way of being bullshit just like the religions that surround them. IE: 100+ years of climate change and the 4 horses of Global Warming, Global Cooling, Acid Rain, 12 years left.
The real problem with 'green' solutions is the mountains of unrecyclable waste created after raping the earth to make the 'green' batteries, wind blades and solar panels that end up in land fills.
Not real green but at least people are getting power and making money on the 'investments'.
I’ll note as an aside that as we expand our bioengineering capabilities, the stock of genetic resources we’re drawing on as our toolkit is exactly the biodiversity we’re rapidly depleting, so even beyond the warm fuzzies of not rendering entire species extinct and the basic awareness of how finite and bounded our little bubble of cosmic survivability is, it seems like a waste to keep throwing away the library of useful genetics that took a couple billion years to furnish the first time.
You don't pave over land to install ground based solar. Not only is that unnecessary, but would also make the solar way more expensive.
Who honestly thinks that solar panel farms involve actual square miles of pavement?
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/utility-scale-sol...
Erthos' panels are not solar freakin roadways, because they're fenced off, and only maintenance robots drive on them.
"pave over" has a pretty distinct meaning even in its figurative uses, referring to the encapsulation of the ground surface with asphalt or concrete, as happens in cities or with major highways. Solar panels aren't really the same, when you consider that they are now being used to shelter crops via agrivoltaics [1], increasing yields and decreasing water use while also providing supplemental income to farmers via electricity sales.
> even if there isn't square miles of pavement you are in fact destroying ecosystems
More likely modifying ecosystems, not destroying them altogether. Remember that the actual "paving over" of ecosystems - via roads, etc - and the fossil fuel extraction industry have and continue to do far more damage to ecosystems than any renewable generation has. The Kern River oil field near Bakersfield CA isn't exactly the picture of prime wildlife habitat anymore:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/KernRive...
Even the scientist at the forefront of research into the concern about desert ecosystems says [2]:
""It's certainly going to damage some of the ecology. I think that's a tradeoff we have to accept. It's part of becoming less reliant on oil, and more reliant on solar and wind power."
1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/potential-agrivol...
People supporting development of clean energy don't necessarily believe these areas are empty: they think that the best way to preserve the environment is to use that land to generate power and eliminate some portion of fossil fuel emissions.
There is a crapload of desert in the U.S. West. The tortoises need to live somewhere, but it is hard to me to imagine the harm to the tortoises of solar development is worse than the detriment to all ecosystems from CO2 emissions.
There's also a crapload of space on top of buildings, in the cities where people want to consume the power generated by solar arrays. Why isn't there more of a push to install solar arrays on rooftops? Or over parking lots?
What were the reasons these groups opposed the projects? What did the national groups have to say about their local chapters' priorities? Were any of them aware of the climate impacts, and if so, what was their counterarguments? Surely it's not as simple as "tortoise good, solar bad".
NIMBYism is everywhere, but only rarely does it intersect with protected species habitat. Solar is not particularly land constrained, and much of California etc. already has more than its grid can store. Wind is much more susceptible to land use conflict because it's harder to site, but its bird impacts are minimal and can mitigated. Meanwhile, plain ol "it's ugly and noisy and causes EM pollution and gives me headaches" NIMBYism happens even without endangered animals.
Is it the case that these groups support renewables except in exceptionally sensitive areas? Do they make a case by case judgment call? Do they fight climate policy and renewables development across the board? Did they consider more than just the tree impacts of high density urban development? None of this was really explored or discussed in the blog.
I've been to several public meetings discussing these sorts of land use conflicts, along with chapter meetings of both pro and anti development groups. They usually are complicated and backed by numerous stakeholders of both sides, each with studies presentations and lots and lots of public comments and controversies. They were never as one sided and simple as this article paints them to be. YMMV, but I have a hard time believing that without details...
I model people by what they accomplish and I have found that this is an accurate way to see how they'll behave, and this is what I have found.
Revealed preferences manifest through action alone. One can always construct reasons couched in any language to support / prevent anything.
I fully believe that disorganized/decentralized organizations (conservative, liberal, socialist, whatever) inherently have this problem (local chapters hijacking the brand) and it’s a direct tradeoff with their ability to produce results quickly (without national bureaucracy) and in a way that maps onto local interests more closely than the national/centralized option does.
Phrasing here is pretty revealing. "ThEy JuSt LiKe ThE lAnD lOl, oh also there's endangered animals there."
It's the whole article that started YIMBYism in fact: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
Oil and gasoline are some of the most subsidized products in history. Too many Americans demand cheap gas, like it's a human right.
If solar had been similarly subsidized over the last 20 years, we'd see solar panels on every other business and house in every state except Alaska.
This is the situation, and environmental groups did not cause it. And they did not pivot towards undermining their own mission at scale, like they're being accused of.
Imagine you're 15 and look at the graph above. What deadline do you set for humanity to fix the issue?
We have limitless resource - Nuclear energy both in the form of Uranium/Plutonium and the sun itself. Climate doomers are Marxists who don’t want solutions. They just want state power expansion and erosion of rights through the bullshit excuse of climate.
It’s year 2050 and there are climate activists for space to keep space pristine. Mark my words. The roots are in place at cities like Berkeley.
Me and my group will never allow nuclear because we don't trust people to manage it properly.
You and your group will never reduce your energy usage and consumption of resources because that might be an erosion of your rights!
It's like with Covid, when people were asked to put on a mask to protect themselves and others, a lot of people said OK, and a lot of people made a big deal about it.
I think we should continue our transition to non polluting energy sources, but our democracy means no government is going to make deeply unpopular choices, so nothing will happen very quickly.
Climate change will happen.
Strange and contradictory. I thought people said the same thing about CDC, vaccines and the entire COVID fiasco. You didn’t have any issue with trusting the people to manage the pandemic properly then?
Our fear with nuclear is that people will not be cautious enough and cut corners. (Or the risks are greater than people are willing to admit)
The stuff about oil and gas is besides the point. I don't think anyone in this conversation disagrees with you about subsidies.