Paris posturing

The Global Convention on Climate Change met in a terrorized Paris in December 2015 to address what some—certainly not 97 percent—scientists predict will be the bad effects of what used to be called global warming, but is now called climate change.

As at a Democratic convention, the only acceptable solution to the perceived problem of future ecological horrors is a massive, guilt-ridden redistribution of wealth from the industrialized nations (the one percent) to the developing nations (the 99 percent).

The Obama team realized that an actual treaty would never pass the Republican-controlled Senate, so like the Iran nuclear deal, the outcome was a non-binding agreement that would not be law but rather a political commitment to reduce global carbon emissions by reducing the use of fossil fuels. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2009 Copenhagen Agreements were complete failures due to noncompliance by signatories with reduction goals. This year’s conference was dubbed as the “pot luck” conference, with each nation putting its own voluntary goals on the table in the hope that something workable would result.

It is amazing how the left and the right often blunder into the same unworkable solutions to problems government itself created.

Islamic State is largely a creation of failed neoconservative interventions into the complex problems of the Middle East.

Our dependence on carbon-producing energy sources is largely the result of green interventions to stop the growth of nuclear power. If nuclear power had been allowed to develop without government interference since the 1960s, there would likely be no significant carbon emission problem today to blame for global warming climate change.

Nuclear power is so clean that even climate alarmists like James Hansen endorse it. Libertarians did not object to the technology but objected to the government insurance subsidies that were lavished on it to compensate for theoretical meltdowns alarmists predicted might occur. The dangers of nuclear power proved to be orders of magnitude less than green opponents predicted. The Three Mile Island shutdown killed no one. Chernobyl, a Soviet built plant in the Ukraine, was as inefficient as anything socialism ever produced, yet only 50 deaths are attributed to the 1986 meltdown. The 2011 Fukuyama accident in Japan caused a deadly tidal wave, but no deaths from radiation have occurred. The use of coal power causes 13,000 premature deaths a year. Nuclear is much cleaner and safer than coal, and after the capital costs of plant construction, cheaper.

The Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN) conflated nuclear energy with nuclear weapons and flatly proclaimed no level of nuclear radiation is safe. The EPA is rewriting its standards on low level radiation because humans are exposed to radiation on a daily basis from cosmic rays and other natural sources without harm. PLAN was wrong on the science and with powerful allies like Harry Reid helped cause a wasteful political controversy over the storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain that retarded the growth of nuclear power nationally. Libertarians defended the right of Nevada to be stupid about Yucca because we did not like 49 States ganging up on one state.

The hundred-odd nuclear plants still in operation in the U.S. are of relatively crude design. Thankfully, new nuclear technologies promise much less waste and will use very little precious water if allowed to come online. Slow but steady progress on nuclear fusion could result in virtually unlimited clean energy from the atom.

Everyone on the political spectrum should support nuclear power, if a proven, extremely clean and reliable source of energy, not political triumphs, is the real goal.