you asked for it:
AP/Guardian 03.Nov.13
Top US climate scientists support development of safe nuclear power
Open letter to environmentalists and world leaders says wind and solar power are not enough...
The letter signers are James Hansen, a former top NASA scientist; Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution; Kerry Emanuel, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Tom Wigley, of the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Environmentalists agree that global warming is a threat to ecosystems and humans, but many oppose nuclear power and believe that new forms of renewable energy will be able to power the world within the next few decades.
That isn't realistic, the letter said."Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs, and "with the planet warming and carbon dioxide emissions rising faster than ever, we cannot afford to turn away from any technology" that has the potential to reduce greenhouse gases.
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Elephant in the room?
Pachyderm in the patio?
Mammoth in the den?
Jumbo in the kitchen?
A sudden drop in human population numbers, great enough, lowers every danger signal currently on the table. Not all danger. Just the immediate, weirdly numerical, intangible turmoil of thermal disruption of a balance in the sky we didn't even know was there. Until it began to go out of whack.
"We" being the particular segment of the human presence on earth that at the same time didn't know and did the disrupting. Whatever you want to call that. It wasn't the Guarani or the Bushmen of the Kalahari. No reasonably intelligent logical mind can look at the facts as presented and not consider that lessening carbon footprint could be more easily achieved by shrinking the foot itself, the size of it being the numbers of consumers of things that create the carbon release. But it's the taboo of taboos. Leading directly to eugenic solutions that have hideous precedent and no clear examples of how-to that are morally as well as strategically successful. So it can't be talked about. So what can be talked about is the "harnessing" of contained nuclear fire. By the same clueless technocratic fools that got us into the mess, Stewart Brand is on it, Hansen, lots of lesser lights as well. No one, that I'm hearing, anywhere, is pushing the controlled reduction of human population numbers, even though it's as rational as reduction of consumption and alterations of technologies away from unlimited carbon release. Lots of folks in the aghast community are nervous about conspiratiod elites with eugenic plans and schemes. For good cause. And as long as the discussion is hidden, taboo, it takes place only in the toxic fermentation tanks of private discourse, or in marginal uncritical hysteria-covens.
The thesis is that the disregard for well-being in so many areas of the contemporary news landscape proceeds directly from the confidence of hard-minded clear-sighted recognition of that numerical inevitability.
Not to say there's a weakness in the visible speakers, Brand, Hansen et al. It's responsible engagement. They can't talk about massive scaleback in human numbers publicly. No one can, without great personal risk.
And something has to be said about the immediate problem.
So let's nuke up! Because, because, because we have to!
"...cheap and reliable power the world needs..." to continue in the hell-bound blindness that got us to the bring of this awful verge to begin with.
Because the alternative is Death Panels, and Vonnegut's Monkey House, and the social acceptance of genocide, and the way things are set up that means the least responsible for the disaster members of the present company eat shit first. And people who have benefited most from the wrong-way power-thrust of how we got in the climate mess will then emerge from the chaos of pop-drop with a happy future intact.
Thus the intense meta-systemic grab for total info, social network map and diagram, the metastisizing technology of control. Ominous gathering of potential ability with no clear statement of intent.
The knee-jerk immediacy of "The NSA's doing it to preserve their(invisible masters') status quo", a common assumption of motive about that, versus they're doing it to get ready for the big elimination frenzy.
Wouldn't you want to start the population diet from the bad and unnecessary, then move up? Instead of random non-Darwinian selection?
Kesey said it eloquently and wittily and compassionately in '74. If you agitate for pop-drop, the first casualties will be us, the gadflies, the rebels, the non-consensus refusers and critics and weirdos, and a whole lot of voiceless-in-this-wilderness folks.
The immune system of centralized greed is powerfully ready for that, and discussion of pop-drop feeds that readiness, So it's understandable, and good, that it remains off-camera. But it's there, and in its absence placing nukes center-stage is disturbing as hell.
Reducing the human population from 7 billion clueless and governed by a few hundred thousand greedhead assholes, to a half-billion clueless governed by a few hundred thousand greedhead assholes won't fix things.
But enabling the present set-up with nukeshine replacing petropuke won't fix it either.
Solutions, solutions.
Change your attitude about life.
