UPDATE 07-09-12:More on the professional Greenpeace fraud Arnie Gundersen here
I seem to have spent half the summer debating the topics I usually engage with here on Facebook, a new departure for me, which has not left a lot of time for blogging so I might summarize some of them here.
Much of these debates are with the usual New Age/Collapse/Dark Greens on the usual topics: anti-technology, humans are bad, we’re all doomed, computers (and Facebook!) are great but apart from that we should retreat to self-reliant “resilient” local communities and knit our own windmills from organic home-spun hemp. Often these debates end up being thinly disguised anti-captialist (Apple and Microsoft exempt) rants with an (un-) healthy dose of Gaia worship thrown in.
After posting this link to an article by Wiliam Tucker- author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Energy Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Energy Odyssey- I was recently drawn into a debate with a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist who cut straight to the chase: capitalism is the cause of all environmental problems, starting with Fukishima. In support of this position I was sent this link from Democracy Now! featuring a short report from from the Japanese Parliment showing that “A Japanese parliamentary inquiry has concluded last year’s nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was “a profoundly man-made disaster — that could and should have been foreseen and prevented.” This was presented to me as “empirical evidence” that, since it was a “man-made” error, and Japan is a captialist country, accidents like Fukishima are “the logical result of the coupling of economic and political power” in capitalist societies.
That’s an interesting take, because as far I as can see Fukishima was the result of a Tsunami which killed 30,000 people, and this Marxist posturing- just like the anti-nuke Greens reaction which has lead to a massive increase in coal consumption in both Japan and Germany-- looks to me like jumping on a political/ideological band-wagon and riding roughshod over the victims’ graves.
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