James Hansen and Pushker Kharecha - The Acid Test: Global Temperature in 2025

[NNadir]

3. In my position, I hear a lot from people who tell me they're not antinukes who nevertheless drag out every idiotic...

Last edited Sat Feb 22, 2025, 12:57 PM - Edit history (1)

...objection to nuclear power, "too expensive," "too slow," too dangerous," "Fukushima," "Chernobyl" "radiation leak at Hanford" blah, blah, blah, blah, blah ad nauseum.

Then they carry on about so called "renewable energy," and how wonderful and cheap it is, even though the German economy is collapsing under the weight of its energy policies, even though trillions of dollars invested in wind has done nothing even to slow the collapse of the planetary atmosphere, in fact led to its acceleration, and even though despite these trillions of dollars spent, vast stretches of wilderness rendered into industrial parks, combined the solar and wind industry, in an atmosphere of insipid cheering, has never, not once, in nearly half a century of tiresome delusional bullshit, produced as much primary energy annually as the nuclear industry produces now and has produced since the early 1990's in an atmosphere of the above described vituperation.

In general I refer to this class as "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes. To my mind, and this is just my unshakable opinion, their self descriptions strike me as meaningful as the orange asshole's description of himself as "a very stable genius."

The applicable cliche: It's not what one says, it's what one does.

So called "renewable energy" is not "cheap;" it's not clean; it's not sustainable. It's certainly not reliable; and, and as it is dependent on the use of fossil fuels, it is worse than useless at addressing the collapse of the planetary atmosphere. It's an exercise in tearing the shit out of the planet with mining for rare materials, running bulldozers over virgin land, all of it as reactionary as Eurocentric White Supremacy practiced in the colonial era in which all of the world's energy supplies depended on the vicissitudes of the weather.

In modern times this reactionary dream is being practiced in Dunkelflaute Germany with serious, but predictable consequences:

The rest of Europe is pissed at the cost of keeping the lights on in that German coal dependent hellhole.

The environmental cost of so called "renewable energy" is clear enough, and given the funding of Putin by Germany that led to a war in Ukraine and perhaps even the collapse of the more than 2 century old American Democracy, so is the moral cost.

What is unclear and never acknowledged by "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes is the economic cost, the vast sums of money squandered on this short lived destructive junk called "renewable energy."

The IEA - and please spare me the selective attention and cherry picking that "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes love to engage; I've been studying the data on energy for decades - reports the money squandered. Note that the money squandered includes the money squandered on energy storage that all of our "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes celebrate in their contempt for the laws of physics, notably the 2nd law of thermodynamics, since nuclear energy is reliable and so called "renewable energy" isn't. It also includes the cost of building vast grids to connect all of this land intensive junk.

The numbers are here:

The amount of money spent on so called "renewable energy" since 2015 is 4.12 trillion dollars as reported as of March 2024, compared to 377 billion dollars spent on nuclear energy, mostly to keep vapid cultists spouting fear and ignorance from destroying the valuable nuclear infrastructure.



IEA overview, Energy Investments. (Accessed 3/24/2024.)

The graphic is interactive at the link; one can calculate overall expenditures on what the IEA dubiously calls "clean energy."

For convenience, I have downloaded the *.csv files connected (3/24/2024) to these figures and organized them in an Excel sheet for use in calculations.

It is here:



A graphic is also available, albeit only until 2013:



Power investment, 2019-2023 (Accessed 02/22/25).

Now one of the things that characterizes "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes is the use of the logical fallacy "appeal to authority," as if some Governor, some lawyer for the NRDC, some political figure, even some scientist somewhere says something it is therefore true.

In fact, if one reads IEA blurbs and interpretations, they all wax romantic and enthusiastic for so called "renewable energy."

I don't give a fuck what "authorities" at IEA say, anymore than I give a shit how "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes describe themselves as not being against nuclear power despite dragging out idiot objections, like say, when, having worked themselves for their whole lives to destroy nuclear manufacturing infrastructure in this country, they complain the cost of the Vogtle reactors.

I care what the numbers say.

And you know what numbers really freak me out? The numbers I report frequently in this space year after year, the numbers I most recently reported here:

The Disastrous 2024 CO2 Data Recorded at Mauna Loa Stretches Further into 2025.

As for bullshit about "balanced approaches" appeal to the fucking numbers should make clear how fucking "balanced" this crap is.

Nuclear energy is financed by trivial sums compared to grid, storage and so called "renewable energy," in the table above, 8.432 trillion. Nuclear was financed at 0.524 trillion dollars, and note that the "other clean energy" listed there is devoted, most likely, to fusion, not fission, on the theory that fission is "too dangerous" despite its remarkable safety record when compared to all other energy sources. (It's not risk free, but it doesn't need to be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.) In "percent talk" that apologists for the filthy fossil fuel dependent so called "renewable energy" like to hand out, that's 6.2%. That's not "balanced." That's fucking wasteful and destructive, since solar and wind have never, despite the unbalanced money devoted to it, have never, not once, in any year produced the 30 Exajoules of primary energy that nuclear produced in 2023.

Now, academics including James Hansen and Pushkar, are people. It's often considered socially unacceptable to criticize the popular but miserably failed "renewable energy" industry. It takes a certain amount of courage, and independence, to do so. I have read thousands of scientific papers that clearly would be cleaner and safer and cheaper using nuclear heat rather than the stupid "solar thermal" nightmare to which they appeal. I understand. The idea is to get grants, not to necessarily appeal to reason or good sense on the part of those deciding on research funding.

We have people here, at DU, who alert on my posts, claiming that criticizing "renewable energy" represents "right wing talking points," and/or that support for the only clean, expandable, and sustainable form of energy now industrially available to address extreme global heating, nuclear energy" is a "right wing talking point."

I'm not here to embrace popular dogma, religious, quasi-religious, or otherwise. I'm here screaming into the void to try to knock some sense into the inhabitants of a burning world in my own small way.

Now if Jim Hansen and Pushkar Kharecha support nuclear energy, they are in my opinion, serving humanity. I frequently applaud them as such. If, on the other hand, they want to spend even more money on the useless and failed so called "renewable energy" scheme, they are not serving humanity, but rather are evoking the cliche that reads: "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity." The world was once upon a time powered by the weather. Of course, some people, including academics, need, to avoid pissing off the loud and insipid holders of "renewable energy will save us" dogma, but at the end of the day, the appeal for so called "renewable energy" is reactionary, which is even worse than conservative.

Dependence on the weather for energy to support civilizations was abandoned for a reason. The reason was that most people, even more so than today, lived short miserable lives of suffering and poverty.

The results of half a century of this dogma are in: The planet is burning; people are going insane, possibly from fossil fuel related neurotoxins like cadmium, mercury and lead; the weather is grotesquely destabilized; and the planetary atmosphere is collapsing.

I don't care how people describe themselves, nor do I care about what "appeal to authority" arguments they make. I make up my own mind about who and what people are, and about who is making sense and who is not. I've worked very, very, very, very hard to increase my competence to do so and I stand by my positions and my evocation of the facts as I observe them.

Have a wonderful weekend.