By Steve Hynd
Michael Lind, luminary thinker at the New America Foundation, has a response to critics of his incredibly ill-informed and energy lobby driven op-ed on climate change the other day.
Short version: I'm not a "global warming denialist" but...
If there were really a clear and present danger of catastrophic overheating, we could not afford to rely on feeble, indirect, "market-friendly" measures like cap and trade and renewable energy mandates on utilities, to say nothing of trivial, symbolic gestures like LEED certification of "green" houses. The only rational course of action would be for the federal government to declare martial law, nationalize the energy sector, conscript American industry and engage in an emergency nuclear power build-out at taxpayer expense. There would need to be Marshall Plan subsidies to help poor coal-burning countries shift to nuclear energy. Most people would consider an occasional Fukushima or Chernobyl a price worth paying, if the apocalyptic alternative were a runaway global greenhouse effect and the end of civilization or humanity on an earth as dead as Venus.
Get that? If the incredibly well informed and impeccably respectable VSP's who correctly foresaw the derivatives debacle and housing bubbles before the turned into economy-wrecking crises aren't doing shit, then obviously we've nothing to worry about. Trust us. (/snark)
Along the way, Lind makes some other howlers, like failing to wonder why Europe needs a country-sized solar plant in Africa when it has plenty of wind, tide and hydro resources of its own. Umm, Scotland, Mr. Lind? Well on it's way to generating 100% of its own power requirements from renewable means by 2020.
And as for the notion of a massive build of nuke plants, when studies show it'd be difficult to find enough safe sites to increase nuclear generation worldwide by more than 2%...
This guy gets backing from Democrats. No, really! It's nausea-inducing stuff to contemplate.
Yet another F from Lind, who seems to have assembled his op-eds by copying and pasting from big energy pamphlets. And yet another F for Salon for continuing to publish his shill pieces.
>> Get that? If the incredibly well informed and impeccably respectable VSP's who correctly foresaw the derivatives debacle and housing bubbles before the[y] turned into economy-wrecking crises aren't doing shit, then obviously we've nothing to worry about. Trust us. (/snark)
ReplyDeleteObviously the so-called global elite, otherwise known as the sociopaths who are currently running all the governments on this planet, think they've come up with a foolproof plan for dealing with human over-population.
What passes for 'civilization' on this planet simply amazes me.