We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day Regardless of the opinions of Boris, if fusion comes on line in the middle of the attempts by the likes of the Rebellion to turn the western world into a weakened communist hive that the East will invade, high profile teenagers will likely be exposed as the anti-progress communists they are rather than environmentalists.
A certain teenager wants the West to emit less carbon so the East, who already emit over 60% of if, can emit more carbon. Check out her TED talk – she says it out loud (and much of the rest of the manifesto of the people who switched to Green politics in the 80s and early 90s after their preferred ism failed).
– the delightfully pseudonymous BeamUpDenied casting his or her pearls before the Gadarene swine on the Guardian
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If nuclear fusion becomes a reality the green types will find a way to get it banned or regulated out of existence. Fracking has pretty much died a death in the UK on the grounds that it is a scary sounding word. We are told that we must listen to the scientists when it comes to the matter of climate change but the science that says that fracking is safe must be ignored.
It is clear that the “movement” is anti science (whilst pretending to be pro science) and wishes to destroy technological civilisation – which would mean the deaths of about 90% of the population (or more).
What is disturbing is that the “movement” NOT just a few mentally disturbed youths – it is supported by billionaires and by academics (including some at elite universities such as Oxford) who explicitly say that technology (such as nuclear fission and nuclear fusion) is NOT the solution to C02 emission that they want – they want people to “change their way of life” (i.e. return to being medieval peasants or even hunter-gatherers, whether we want to change or not.
So that is the agenda – 90% of us (at least) are to die, and the rest are to be reduced to a primitive “noble savage” existence.
Not good.
It’s not just the fringe eco-nuts and end-of-the-world cults.
It’s the mainstream government establishment – the CCC
They are those who promoted the “zero emissions by 2050” law.
It’s the UK Parliament which passed this law.
They are all totally crazy.
There is absolutely no way to reach zero-emissions, not in 2050 neither in 2100.
You can’t make wishful thinking into a law – that is unless you are totally crazy.
And, legislating a binding resolution in 2007 about what happens in 2050 (when all current MPs will be long dead) is likewise crazy.
I certainly agree with Paul Marks that there is definitely a depopulation agenda being pushed.
I just don’t see how the agenda pushers will escape.
Even in a survival bunker scenario coming back and maintaining your tech including modern medicine and food production seems impossible after a generation……
That defies mere power hunger. Needs a religious element…..
If even one technological society survives, your plan fails hard. It will populate and dominate.
Wishful thinking is 98% of all law passed.
That’s why they pass so much now.
The solution to poverty is easy then. Just pass a law and make it illegal to be poor. Then we can move on to sorting out the health service by making it illegal to be ill. I suppose that outlawing stupidity is out of the question though.
I have always felt that the climate alarmists don’t want a solution to the imagined CO2 problem, at least not one that actually works. Sorting the whole thing out would spoil their fun, telling other people what to do is how they get their jollies. Fortunately for the rest of us, they are having great difficulty ordering the weather about, it just keeps refusing to do as it’s told.
“I have always felt that the climate alarmists don’t want a solution to the imagined CO2 problem, at least not one that actually works.”
Climate is the ideal problem (or pseudo-problem) for them: it has no solution (scarcely being a problem) – and – they can always signal virtue by whining “we don’t do enough” – because whatever is done will never “be enough” – never change climate in a significant way.
Climate is the perpetual “problem” that they need to always have an unsolved problem to whine about. Poverty is also a good candidate for this role.
Under Stalin, the Soviet Union announced that unemployment had been ended in Russia. The effect was that unemployment benefits were ended.
In Solzhenitsyn’s “The Soldier and the Love Girl”, one of the lucky few who work in the Gulag camp’s foundry asks how the tree-cutters manage in the forest without a doctor. “Noone is ever ill”, is the reply. “They’re just alive until, one day, they’re dead.” [quoted from memory]
Ecclesiastes Ch. 1 Vs. 9.
We already do this, in effect.
One of San Francisco’s problems is that it repealed many of those laws.
A colleague of mine, who is militantly anti-fracking, and thinks that oil company bosses are all evil, is, as far as I know, also against nuclear power. Period. She also thinks that people should cycle, have only one kid, etc, etc.
She is not a very happy person.
But nuclear fusion has been ‘on line’ for years: the Hydrogen Bomb.
The problem is, unlike nuclear fission which can easily be controlled, nuclear fusion cannot.
“But nuclear fusion has been ‘on line’ for years: the Hydrogen Bomb.”
Not to mention the giant fusion reactor up in the sky…
Itellyounothing – we both know the technological society that, in practice, is ignoring and will ignore these “Green” ravings. The People’s Republic of China.
The insane billionaires and demented academics of the West may think they are serving the Goddess Gaia – but, in fact, they are serving the PRC (without knowing it – or even the PRC making any effort to control them).
The PRC must find the Occidentals utterly inscrutable. The Western capacity for self destruction, and they should note that it has happened twice before – the Bronze Age collapse, and then the collapse of the Roman Empire so many centuries later, two great “Dark Ages” – and we now go into a third “Dark Age”.
There is even a term in China which translates as “white leftist” – it is not a complement, it means a self destructive (and self hating) lunatic.
As Jacob and others have noted – this thinking (this insanity) is now the consensus in many Western countries – including the United Kingdom (the Members of Parliament “debating” as I type these words are actually competing to see who would impose the most regulations and edicts – no one, of any party, is arguing for liberty).
Whoever you vote for – you are going to get some version of it, as the “educated” (who determine policy in J.S. Mill fashion) have decided it – and all parties follow the educated consensus. It is nothing to with reducing C02 emissions (if technology was invented that could produce cheap power without C02 emissions – the academics and so on would HATE it), and everything to do with ending our “sinful” “life style”.
I’m very anti-green. I’m a technophile: I couldn’t have survived in a non-technological civilization, and I don’t enjoy the prospect of another dark age.
I also have done some things in the fusion field. There are a lot of things that most people don’t seem to understand about fusion: The fuels we are actually trying to use (D-T), the tritium breeding problem, and the other significant difficulties. (If it were easy, people in the 60s, by no means stupid, would have done it already.) There are some apparent limits which make the minimum viable size of a fusion reactor very large: ITER or larger scale. The devices tend to be rube goldberg machines once you reach the required scale.
I think fusion energy research is important: Any potential source of energy for mankind is. I also think we shouldn’t be holding our breath for it, and should be building fission plants as fast as we can. (which, outside of the insane legal/political chains they are weighed down with, are dirt simple and cheap) There’s no telling when or if all the problems will be solved.
PS: The greens will be screaming just as hard about fusion reactors as about fission reactors. Tritium as a fuel will make their heads spin around. Energy is scarce and expensive right now because your politicians have made it scarce and expensive. They’re trying to moderate an entirely different sort of reaction: They’re trying to keep you all from becoming too rich to be beaten down.
Paul Marks (October 28, 2019 at 9:01 pm), I agree but with the proviso that the society that put Qin Shi Huang in charge as the first Emperor and Mao in charge as (in effect) the most recent, and gave the word mandarin to the world between the two, is not in a good position to mock the kinds of people that western culture empowers – not even western PCers. 🙂
Due to the US Navy’s push towards lasers, I’ve thought for several years now that we’ve cracked the hard part of fusion and are working on how to do the transition with the fewest possible revolutions and wars in between. I think Boris got briefed.
Lasers are cool and fusion would be fun. My Dad always wonders similar things.
Hope you are right, then we just have to dislodge the nutters without a civil war.
Even the PRC should fear a western collapse with nukes…..