RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/book-review-the-dark-horse-climatists-for-nukes/

A review of The Dark Horse: Nuclear Power and Climate Change, by Rauli Partanen and Janne Korhonen

“It is an enduring mystery to me why it is that most who insist that climate change is an existential crisis nevertheless continue to oppose what is perhaps the most obvious and scalable solution to the climate emergency: nuclear power.”
— Mark Lynas, British environmentalist, co-author of The Ecomodernist Manifesto

‘Climate changes everything,” says radical green writer Naomi Klein — everything except, of course, the vehement opposition of her tribe to the only proven, reliable, and scalable source of non-carbon energy on earth. This fanaticism has confirmed many observers in their judgment that the green movement’s hatred of nuclear energy is rooted less in concerns about radiation than in fear of the possibility that it could solve a problem they need to have. That said, in recent years there has emerged a center-left movement of climate-crisis true believers who appear willing to entertain nuclear power. This movement has produced a blossoming literature nominally supporting nuclear energy as part of their solution for global warming. Most of these works have been technically illiterate or dishonest, with authors claiming that they are all for nuclear power, but only once nonexistent futuristic types of nuclear systems that would supposedly be much safer and more economical than the pressurized-water reactors (PWRs) and related designs in use today are brought to the market.

However, The Dark Horse: Nuclear Power and Climate Change, by Finnish writers Rauli Partanen and Janne Korhonen, is a noteworthy exception. It is a fine and truly competent work making the case for nuclear power now, as it really is. There’s no use of fakery to justify decades of environmentalist sabotage of the nuclear industry with specious claims that PWRs are unsafe systems imposed on the world prematurely by the maniacal U.S. Navy captain Hyman Rickover, or other such nonsense. Instead, they take no prisoners, showing how the PWR, conceived by Rickover as the power source for the submarine Nautilus in 1954 and made the basis for the commercial nuclear industry worldwide ever since, was, and remains, a very sound engineering choice. This is so because the PWR, and related types such as the Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) and the CANDU Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR), all use water both to cool the reactor and to “moderate,” or slow down, its neutrons, making them more effective as fission initiators. As a result, whenever a water-cooled and -moderated reactor loses coolant, or even experiences excessive boiling, it loses moderation and thus power, so it is physically impossible for the chain reaction to ever run away.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-physicist-became-a-climate-truth-teller-11618597216?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Barack Obama is one of many who have declared an “epistemological crisis,” in which our society is losing its handle on something called truth.

Thus an interesting experiment will be his and other Democrats’ response to a book by Steven Koonin, who was chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department. Mr. Koonin argues not against current climate science but that what the media and politicians and activists say about climate science has drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false.

This is not an altogether innocent drifting, he points out in a videoconference interview from his home in Cold Spring, N.Y. In 2019 a report by the presidents of the National Academies of Sciences claimed the “magnitude and frequency of certain extreme events are increasing.” The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is deemed to compile the best science, says all such claims should be treated with “low confidence.”

In 2017 the U.S. government’s Climate Science Special Report claimed that, in the lower 48 states, the “number of high temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low temperature records.” On closer inspection, that’s because there’s been no increase in the rate of new record highs since 1900, only a decline in the number of new lows.

Mr. Koonin, 69, and I are of one mind on 2018’s U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, issued in Donald Trump’s second year, which relied on such overegged worst-case emissions and temperature projections that even climate activists were abashed (a revoltcontinues to this day). “The report was written more to persuade than to inform,” he says. “It masquerades as objective science but was written as—all right, I’ll use the word—propaganda.”

Mr. Koonin is a Brooklyn-born math whiz and theoretical physicist, a product of New York’s selective Stuyvesant High School. His parents, with less than a year of college between them, nevertheless intuited in 1968 exactly how to handle an unusually talented and motivated youngster: You want to go cross the country to Caltech at age 16? “Whatever you think is right, go ahead,” they told him. “I wanted to know how the world works,” Mr. Koonin says now. “I wanted to do physics since I was 6 years old, when I didn’t know it was called physics.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/the_roadmap_for_the_great_reset.html

As far back as 1996, Mikhail Gorbachev laid bare the agenda driving climate alarmism: “The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order.” He was underscoring the importance of advancing Marxist objectives by creating an emergency to convince people they must surrender freedom to be safe. That idea has been parlayed over the decades into a global campaign of the Left to control vibrant economies, end individual freedom and national sovereignties, and impoverish the world. In America, it is being served up as the Green New Deal (GND).

Author Marc Morano exposes that elaborate con game in Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse Than You Think. Morano is a former senior staff member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and narrator of the film Climate Hustle. His book shows how the GND — which dovetails with the U.N.’s Agenda 21 — has nothing to do with “saving the planet” and is actually about “transforming modern America into a centrally planned and managed society and imposing an ideology that will rein in the freedoms of individual Americans.”

Like Gorbachev, GND champions admit as much. Morano quotes Saikat Chakrabarti, former chief of staff to debutant Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as saying, “We really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” And he cites Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign aide Waleed Shahid explaining the GND as “a proposal to redistribute wealth and power from people on top to the people at the bottom.”  

For an agenda so ambitious, the name ironically draws on FDR’s failed New Deal of the 1930s, a massive program that expanded the size and scope of the federal government to stimulate an economic recovery but ended up prolonging the Great Depression. The prognosis for the GND — which includes components like universal healthcare, guaranteed annual income, affordable housing, clear water and air projects, and special social and racial justice goals — is worse. Says David Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, “To reach zero net-carbon emissions in 10 years, the government would regulate and ultimately prohibit the use of affordable energy sources. This would trigger a massive decline in industrial productivity and result in mass layoffs.”