California will phase out the sale of all gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035 in a bid to lead the U.S. in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging the state's drivers to switch to electric cars.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order Wednesday that amounts to the most aggressive clean-car policy in the United States. Although it bans the sale of new gas cars and trucks after the 15-year deadline, it will still allow such vehicles to be owned and sold on the used-car market. ///

Where will they get all that electricity? They already don't have enough!!

Can you imagine trying to to flee wildfires and you haven't been able to charge up your car because the electricity was of due to wildfires?

biotech company Oxitec has developed a modified version of the diamondback moth, which could lead to the pest’s extinction. Diamondback moths, the most resistant of all insects to pesticides, can wipe out entire fields of cold weather crops including, broccoli, cabbage, canola, cauliflower, and kale, resulting in billions of dollars in lost crops each year. The Oxitec diamondback moths contain a lethality gene, which when they mate with moths in the wild, prevents the female offspring from developing, so they die as larvae, with half male offspring in each generation inheriting the “lethality” gene meaning the entire population declines over each generation. //

Oxitec’s mosquitos have been modified so when they mate with females, their offspring are incapable of surviving to adulthood. Laboratory tests and field tests have indicated widespread introduction of this mosquito could dramatically reduce the population of the disease-spreading mosquitoes.

Federal government and state regulators in Florida recently approved the introduction of Oxitec’s mosquitos into a small area of the Sunshine State. This follows the actions of the governments of Brazil, the Cayman Islands, Malaysia, and Panama, which have allowed Oxitec to release its bioengineered mosquitos at selected sites. Brazil reported mosquito populations fell by at least 90 percent in the locations Oxitec’s mosquitos were released in the year following their introduction. //

Unfortunately, environmental extremists have targeted genetically modified products for extinction, fighting to delay the approval of or suing to block the introduction of bioengineered products, saying genetic engineering is akin to “playing God.”

While caution must be exercised with the introduction of any new technology, genetic engineering carries much promise, and the crops and animals developed using it are the most intensively studied and tested technologies ever to be produced. If the search for a COVID-19 vaccine is teaching us anything, it is that too much caution can be as deadly or even deadlier than too little caution. With millions of lives on the line, research and regulatory approvals should be expedited, not delayed.

If environmental fear-mongers successfully block the use of bioengineered animals, they will be condemning millions of people to unnecessary suffering and early deaths—now that would be playing God (or the devil) with a vengeance.

Fighting Climate Change without increasing fire protections is self defeating. //

“In California, cumulative CO2 emissions from wildfires for the year as of Sept. 13 reached about 83 million metric tons, according to data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. That’s the highest level since the beginning of the Centre’s records in 2003.”

California’s fire emissions have exceeded the amount of carbon emissions the state has annually from power generation. In order to account for the additional carbon, the State would have to shut down all carbon-producing power generation for more than a year. As a result of the fires from just this year, California has eliminated ALL carbon reductions they have made for more than a decade.

A former Extinction Rebellion (XR) spokeswoman left the environmental group to campaign for nuclear power because she says it is the only way to deal with the climate crisis.

Zion Lights, writing in the Daily Mail, also said that she had become unable to defend some of the group's claims.

XR "peddle messages of doomsday gloom that alienate" and offer "little in the way of positive solutions", she added.

The group calls on governments to take immediate action on climate change. //

Ms Lights wrote articles for both the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph on Thursday explaining her decision to leave behind XR and support nuclear power.

She told the Mail she initially joined XR because its message was "listen to the scientists" and the role of spokesperson gave her a platform "to talk about what I truly felt mattered". //

Ms Lights, who began campaigning about the environment as a student in the early 2000s, said she also had doubts about XR's approach of telling people "what not to do" and "peddling the notion that the solution to the climate crisis was to turn back the clock to a simpler time".

Writing in the Telegraph, she said the campaigners who argued that we needed to all live with less - as she once did - had to accept this was not going to happen "and look to solutions instead". //

Much of the green movement was "steeped in an anti-nuclear mindset", she said, "when any rational, evidence-based approach shows that a strategy including nuclear energy is the only realistic solution to driving down emissions at the scale and speed required".

She denied she was making a U-turn, instead saying it was a "logical next step" in looking for solutions rather than "shouting ever more loudly about the problem".

Ms Lights said she has since taken a role at campaign group Environmental Progress UK, whose campaigns include supporting the building of the Sizewell C nuclear power station in Suffolk.

Nuclear power is planned to be a key part of the UK's future energy strategy.

This eco-documentary takes a harsh look at how the environmental movement has lost the battle through well-meaning but disastrous choices. //

Planet of the Humans’ faced a coordinated suppression campaign led by professional climate activists backed by the same ‘green’ billionaires, Wall Street investors, industry insiders & big foundations skewered in the film.

Hey, remember that time when the EPA blew a hole in the side of an abandoned mine and flooded the surrounding river basin with millions of gallons of toxic sludge? Ah… good times, my friends. At the time we wondered if they were going to fine themselves for all of the ecological damage they caused. Well, no such luck, natch. But there were some fines discussed. They came up in conversation when the mine owner tried to keep them from messing around with site. Todd Hennis had some experience with the EPA in the past and they had caused some similar leaks at another property of his. This time he told them he didn’t want them in there messing around, but they made their position clear.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/20/mines-owner-i-tried-keep-out-epa-was-threatened/

Mr. Hennis said he opposed having the EPA investigate leakage from the inactive mine near Silverton, Colorado, because he had tangled with the agency in previous years over its work at another mine he owns in Leadville, Colorado.

“I said, ‘No, I don’t want you on my land out of fear that you will create additional pollution like you did in Leadville,’” Mr. Hennis told Colorado Watchdog.org. “They said, ‘If you don’t give us access within four days, we will fine you $35,000 a day.’”

The EPA has admitted that its agents accidentally unleashed the acidic flood, which has since contaminated the San Juan River in New Mexico and seeped into Lake Powell in Utah, albeit in very low concentrations.

The Interior Department and the EPA’s Office of Inspector General are investigating the circumstances leading up to the accident, while at least two House committees are also expected to hold hearings on the spill.

It turns out that Watchdog Colorado was all over this earlier in the week and the story seems to check out. There was a dump of a significant amount of toxic chemicals back in 2005 and it was indeed another of Mr. Hennis’s properties.

http://watchdog.org/234100/epa-disasters/

But the EPA escaped public wrath in 2005 when it secretly dumped up to 15,000 tons of poisonous waste into another mine 124 miles away. That dump – containing arsenic, lead and other materials – materialized in runoff in the town of Leadville, said Todd Hennis, who owns both mines along with numerous others.

“If a private company had done this, they would’ve been fined out of existence,” Hennis said. “I have been battling the EPA for 10 years and they have done nothing but create pollution. About 20 percent (of Silverton residents) think it’s on purpose so they can declare the whole area a Superfund site.”

If Mr. Hennis is correct, the earlier incident was far more egregious. The EPA had collected large quantities of sludge and dumped it down a shaft in the New Mikado mine without telling Hennis that they were doing it. The chemicals later leached into the local water supply. So is somebody going to investigate precisely what these EPA characters have been up to out there in the mountains? Senator John McCain has called for an investigation, but even if they do find that some serious skulduggery has been going on, what do they do after that? I mean, who do we normally call to investigate an environmental disaster and determine what damages, if any, are due? We call the EPA. Are we going to have them investigate themselves?

What could possibly go wrong?

This is one of several examples where the film veers from the facts. A second depiction of a flaming faucet in the home of Renee McClure also misleads viewers about the connection between natural gas development and methane in water wells. McClure's well was sampled by the state of Colorado and it, too, showed only naturally occurring methane. The film's claims are so egregious that the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission was compelled to set the record straight. The COGCC information sheet corrects the film's misleading depictions and addresses false allegations of methane migration in Weld County. Later in the film, natural gas is again falsely accused when the film flashes the words "35 mile fish kill Dunkard Creek Washington County PA.'' The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency investigated this incident and tied the fish kills to coal mine run-off. Here is the official report. In an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, John Hanger, the secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said the film is "fundamentally dishonest" and "a deliberately false presentation for dramatic effect."

windmills are an egregiously inefficient way to generate power that no one would even consider apart from the profit to be made from government subsidies. As Warren Buffet revealed with admirable honesty:

“I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate [. . .] We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” //

In an article detailing the slaughter, the Audobon society notes that they’re “notorious bird killers,” citing studies estimating that somewhere between 140,000 to 328,000 birds meet a grisly end in the blades of windmills every year.

And, thanks to one of the last acts of President Obama, that includes the endangered species bald eagles and golden eagles. As the Associated Press noted when Obama put the new rule into effect in December of 2016:

Under the new rule, wind companies and other power providers will not face a penalty if they kill or injure up to 4,200 bald eagles, nearly four times the current limit. Deaths of the more rare golden eagles would be allowed without penalty so long as companies minimize losses.

But, since “reporting of eagle mortality is voluntary,” even the requirement concerning golden eagles is entirely toothless.

The AP does, however, note that “Trump could change the rule or scrap it, but the process would likely take months or years.”

“Apocalypse Never may be the most important book on the environment ever written.”

— Tom Wigley, climate scientist, University of Adelaide, former senior scientist National Center for Atmospheric Research

Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions.

But in 2019, as some claimed “billions of people are going to die,” contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that, as a lifelong environmental activist, leading energy expert, and father of a teenage daughter, he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction.

Despite decades of news media attention, many remain ignorant of basic facts. Carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade. Deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades. And the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas.

Curiously, the people who are the most alarmist about the problems also tend to oppose the obvious solutions. Those who raise the alarm about food shortages oppose the expansion of fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors in poor nations. Those who raise the alarm about deforestation oppose concentrating agriculture. And those who raise the alarm about climate change oppose the two technologies that have most reduced emissions, natural gas and nuclear.

What’s really behind the rise of apocalyptic environmentalism? There are powerful financial interests. There are desires for status and power. But most of all there is a desire among supposedly secular people for transcendence. This spiritual impulse can be natural and healthy. But in preaching fear without love, and guilt without redemption, the new religion is failing to satisfy our deepest psychological and existential needs.

Apocalypse Never summarizes the best-available science and debunks the myths repeated by scientists, journalists, and activists.
Some of those activists, scientists, and journalists have now responded to Apocalypse Never to defend those myths, including that humans are causing a sixth mass extinction and that climate change is making natural disasters worse.
Anyone who hopes to seriously evaluate Apocalypse Never for its scientific accuracy must read Apocalypse Never, including its over 1,100 endnotes, which comprise 100 pages of the 400 page book.
No book about the environment in recent memory has been praised by a wider and more prestigious group of scientists than Apocalypse Never. It cannot be dismissed. And yet that is what many of the critics of Apocalypse Never appear to want potential readers to do.
But in their haste to misrepresent the contents of Apocalypse Never, and make personal attacks, critics reveal that they fear people will read the book and discover the truth for themselves. I hope curious people do.

July 14, 2004

The fact that DDT saves lives might account for part of the hostility toward it.

by Walter Williams

Jewish World Review

July 2004

Ever since Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring,” environmental extremists have sought to ban all DDT use. Using phony studies from the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental activist-controlled Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in 1972. The extremists convinced the nation that DDT was not only unsafe for humans but unsafe to birds and other creatures as well. Their arguments have since been scientifically refuted.

While DDT saved crops, forests and livestock, it also saved humans. In 1970, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences estimated that DDT saved more than 500 million lives during the time it was widely used. A scientific review board of the EPA showed that DDT is not harmful to the environment and showed it to be a beneficial substance that “should not be banned.” According to the World Health Organization, worldwide malaria infects 300 million people. About 1 million die of malaria each year. Most of the victims are in Africa, and most are children. //

The fact that DDT saves lives might account for part of the hostility toward it. Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, wrote in a biographical essay in 1990:

“My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.”

Dr. Charles Wurster, one of the major opponents of DDT, is reported to have said,

“People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this (referring to malaria deaths) is as good a way as any.”

Spraying a house with small amounts of DDT costs $1.44 per year; alternatives are five to 10 times more, making them unaffordable in poor countries. Rich countries that used DDT themselves threaten reprisals against poor countries if they use DDT.

One really wonders about religious groups, the Congressional Black Caucus, government and non-government organizations, politicians and others who profess concern over the plight of poor people around the world while at the same time accepting or promoting DDT bans and the needless suffering and death that follow. Mosquito-borne malaria not only has devastating health effects but stifles economic growth as well.

After Michael Shellenberger, leading environmental and climate change expert, presented his evidence-based testimony concerning energy policy in America in a congressional hearing Tuesday, Democratic house members mocked his findings.

Shellenberger was invited to speak at the special House Committee hearing to evaluate the Democrats’ proposal allocating $2 trillion to renewable resources and other climate programs.

Democrats were likely interested in including his testimony, Shellenberger said, because of his history advocating for a similar proposal between 2002 and 2009. After years of supporting climate change reform and other environmental legislation, Shellenberger is now an outspoken opponent of such policies for their unproductive and often ignored negative impacts.

Recently, Shellenberger published several articles and a book explaining his change in sentiment. Seeing the corruption surrounding climate alarmism and other environmental issues, he said he feels compelled to stand in opposition to what people expect in support of the truth. Serving as a climate change activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30, the majority of Shellenberger’s life has been fully dedicated to the pursuit of positive environmental change.

Despite his work, however, Reps. Sean Casten (D-IL) and Jared Huffman (D-CA) criticized Shellenberger for his testimony, discounting his qualifications as a well-known environmental expert.

“Mr. Shellenberger, I am not going to ask you questions because it would be a waste of time,” Caston said.

Rather than give him time to ask questions, the two congressmen used their time to criticize Shellenberger without giving him a chance to respond. Once Shellenberger referred to his book, which contains much of his energy research, during the hearing, Huffman accused him of using the testimony for his own promotion. //

Shellenberger argued during his testimony that nuclear energy is far more favorable to renewable energy due its cheap and ready supply as a clean source of electricity. There’s a more pressing facet of the nuclear argument as well, he said. Russia and China have proven to be leaders in this type of energy and the United States is falling behind.

“We do not have a National Nuclear strategy to compete with the Russians and Chinese. Every time a nation does a nuclear power project. It’s an extension of soft power…” he said. “I think the United States needs to step up its game and be competitive with the Russians and Chinese in building new power plants abroad, and that’s going to require building more nuclear power plants at home.” //

Several members claimed renewables are cheaper than existing grid electricity, so Shellenberger inquired about the billions of taxpayer dollars they supposedly require to operate.

“Instead of answering that question, Democrats claimed that solar and wind projects were somehow part of the battle for environmental justice. In reality, I noted, solar and wind projects are imposed on poorer communities and successfully resisted by wealthier ones.”

He also listed numerous human rights abuses imposed by renewable energy resources in contrast to the jobs and opportunities that nuclear energy is guaranteed to provide for generations to come. He pointed to corruption among Democrats’ largest donors, including Rep. Casten, who depend on this bill to make a lot of money as renewable energy and natural gas investors.

“Now, if the Democrats’ $2 trillion climate proposal passes into law, a lot of very powerful people stand to make a lot of money, from winning tender for industrial projects such as building wind turbines and transmission lines all the way to the outright cash payments that we saw during Obama’s green stimulus.”

Responses to the coronavirus pandemic are exposing both the folly and the danger inherent in many of the environmental movement’s favorite causes.

Amidst the panic, most people probably forgot to acknowledge “Earth Hour” on the last Saturday in March. People are traditionally urged to turn off all their lights for an hour that day to “spark global conversations on protecting nature.” But, realizing the “exceptional challenge” of the coronavirus, organizers this year sought to “realign our Earth Hour work appropriately.”

One of those more appropriate ways was to turn off the lights while turning on a computer.

Too bad a laptop uses about the same amount of power as a light bulb.

Plugging in and powering up would seem to defeat Earth Hour’s goal. But then you’d miss Greta Thunberg talking about “mass extinction” and the “need to stop burning fossil fuels.”

Actually, fossil fuels are vital, especially now. Not only are they powering many of the hospitals treating coronavirus victims, but there are countless ways fossil fuels are helping humanity fight for survival against an invisible enemy.

An N95 respirator, for example, often depends upon polypropylene fibers derived from fossil fuels. A lot of the plastics used today are made with oil, natural gas, and coal. Aspirin and penicillin are made with petrochemicals, as are the coatings and capsules for many other drugs. MRI scanners are cooled by natural gas byproducts.

Another thing made with fossil fuels is the much-maligned plastic shopping bag. While city and state governments spent the last few years acceding to environmentalists’ “Ban the Bag!” campaign to tax or outlaw plastic grocery bags, new fears of spreading the coronavirus have led some jurisdictions to ban the reusable bags that were touted as the future of shopping.

San Francisco, which was the first municipality to ban “single-use” plastic grocery bags in 2007, just enacted an emergency ordinance banning people from bringing reusable cloth and plastic bags and mugs into stores for fear they would spread the coronavirus. Mayor London Breed said she “can’t reiterate enough how important it is for all of us to continue to comply, for all of us to continue to be good citizens” by not abiding by the 2007 law that only allowed for reusable bags.

These are the same types of people who also ban plastic straws. San Francisco banned them in 2019, and paper straws can only be given out upon request. There is an exception for medical need, and that need will now only be increasing there and everywhere. Bendy straws are a staple in hospitals.

In those same hospitals, you’ll also find paper towels—another environmentalist target. While green scolds tut-tut America’s alleged obsession with them, don’t expect health-care professionals to mess around with hot-air hand dryers like you find in so many public bathrooms—and with good reason.

A study by researchers at the University of Connecticut and Quinnipiac University found that these dryers blast fecal and other unhealthy bacteria circulating in a bathroom. A petri dish left standing in a bathroom for two minutes might grow one colony of bacteria, but researchers found one under a dryer for just 30 seconds grew more than 250!

Updated Aug. 16, 2007 12:01 am ET

Last year, the World Health Organization reversed a 25-year-old policy and recommended using the pesticide DDT to fight malaria in the Third World. A new study published in the public health journal, PLoS ONE, provides more evidence that the decision was long overdue.

The U.S. and Europe solved their malaria problem a half-century ago by employing DDT, but the mosquito-borne disease remains endemic to the lowland tropics of South America, Asia and Africa, where each year a half-billion people are infected and more than a million...

She died within the following month.

All of this is nonsense. Humans have forever been “subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals”: literally thousands of dangerous chemicals are ubiquitous in nature – hydrogen cyanide, oxalic acid, carbon monoxide, lead, hydrogen sulphide, aflatoxin, the soup of toxins in smoke from fires for warmth and cooking, and many more natural nasties can cause illness or death.

Contrary to Carson’s suggestion, no amount of DDT can cause leukemia or any other form of cancer to develop in a matter of months, if ever, and the chemical is not acutely toxic: no one is known to have died of DDT poisoning. The massive quantities of DDT dispersed into the environment caused no silent springs or cancer epidemics.

Carson’s suggestion notwithstanding, DDT was not a product of World War II weapons research, having been first synthesised in 1874. The much more acutely toxic parathion, suggested as a suitable alternative upon the banning of DDT, is a close relative of the chemical warfare agents (so called nerve gases) sarin and VX, however.

In any event, DDT and other commonly encountered synthetic pesticides are no more dangerous to the average human’s health than are the natural chemicals in our food, eminent cancer researcher Bruce Ames estimating that “99.99% (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves.” Many of these chemicals are known to cause cancer in laboratory rats. Cooking food also produces dangerous chemicals, some of which are carcinogenic and also found in tobacco smoke.

According to Ames, a single cup of coffee contains more potential natural carcinogens than a human will consume of potentially carcinogenic synthetic pesticide residues in a year. This doesn’t mean that we should stop drinking coffee and eating fruits and vegetables in order to avoid the carcinogens they contain.

The point is that the tiny amounts of the synthetic and natural chemicals we encounter continuously throughout our lives generally pose a vanishingly small threat to our health. Many on the left do not see it that way, Paul Ehrlich warning that DDT and related chemicals "may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945" predicting that American life expectancy could drop to the low 40s by 1980. With the chemical “threat” failing to materialize the left now tells us we must fear a new “threat” to our health: genetically engineered foods.

Norman Borlaug, widely credited as the father of the Green Revolution, which saved upwards of a billion developing world lives, was contemptuous of anti-chemical “fear-provoking, irresponsible environmentalists”, publicly calling their efforts to ban DDT and other agricultural chemicals “vicious” and “hysterical”. Given that the modern environmental movement was built on Rachel Carson’s fear-provoking, irresponsible and at times hysterical cornerstone – Silent Spring – it’s only natural that the movement shares these characteristics. The viciousness? It’s the left’s traditional tool for silencing opposition. If that doesn’t work there’s always violence.

One of the main questions I received, including from a BBC reporter, was whether some alarmism was justified in order to achieve changes to policy. The question implied that the news media aren’t already exaggerating.

But consider a June Associated Press article. It was headlined, “UN Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked.” It was one of many apocalyptic articles that summer about climate change.

In the article, a “senior UN environmental official” claims that if global warming isn’t reversed by 2030, then rising sea levels could wipe “entire nations… off the face of the Earth.”

Crop failures coupled with coastal flooding, he said, could provoke “an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ ” whose movements could wreak political chaos the world over. Unabated, the ice caps will melt away, the rainforests will burn, and the world will warm to unbearable temperatures.

Governments “have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effects before it goes beyond human control,” said the UN official.

Did the Associated Press publish that apocalyptic warning from the United Nations in June 2019? No, June 1989. And, the cataclysmic events the UN official predicted were for the year 2000, not 2030. //

Have governments sufficiently invested to detect and prevent asteroids, super-volcanoes, and deadly flus? Perhaps, or perhaps not. While nations take reasonable actions to detect and avoid such disasters they generally don’t take radical actions for the simple reason that doing so would make societies poorer and less capable of confronting all major challenges, including asteroids, super-volcanoes, and disease epidemics.

“Richer countries are more resilient,” climate scientist Emanuel said, “so let’s focus on making people richer and more resilient.”

The tragedy is that we're traumatizing our young people and doing things that actually make environmental problems worse," said author Michael Shellenberger. //

Although only a few have ventured to face the cancel culture mob of today by expressing truth outside of the mainstream leftist consensus, environmentalist Michael Shellenberger recently chose to promote truth by exposing lies within his field of climate change research, putting his professional popularity at risk.

After a lifetime spent researching and advocating for the institution of climate change policy and fostering climate change awareness that the left supports, Shellenberger released an article Sunday titled, “On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare.” This formal apology preceded the release of his book, “Apocalypse Never,” which debunks the myths surrounding climate change that have evoked a global scare known as climate alarmism.

Shellenberger is the co-founder and president of Environmental Progress, a research and policy organization dedicated to fighting for clean power and energy justice, and he serves as an expert reviewer at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He’s considered himself an environmentalist for the past 30 years, but he only recently spoke out against the climate change alarmism. //

After publishing his “apology” article with Forbes, where Shellenberger has been a long-time contributor, they took it down. A spokesperson from Forbes said the piece didn’t adhere to their “strict editorial guidelines.” It has since been printed at Quillette. Although he will continue to contribute to Forbes on energy issues in the third person, Shellenberger said he is disappointed in their decision and disagrees with their censorship. [https://quillette.com/2020/06/30/on-behalf-of-environmentalists-i-apologize-for-the-climate-scare/]

Climate change is just one manifestation of the cultural shift to the left that is universally accepted, meaning any dissenting opinions aren’t considered. Shellenberger himself was drawn in by the left’s alarmism and is now acting to ensure people have the truth to rid themselves of such impending fear.

His commitment to environmentalism speaks for itself; Shellenberger is no climate change denier. In light of his recent change in attitude, however, some woke leftists have been quick to label him one. That alone is telling, he said in the article, as to just how powerful the alarmism is.

“The real story is just that it’s not the end of the world and that it’s been used to advance a radical left agenda…I think that most people that are alarmist or apocalyptic out there in some ways are victims of this discourse. It’s like they’ve been invaded by a mental virus,” he said.

During a virtual meeting held by Southern California Edison's Community Engagement Panel, experts considered a number of Doomsday Scenarios that could threaten the nuclear waste stored at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant. But things got weird with fear of things like short-range missiles //

San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, or SONGS, has been inundated with this stuff for a long time. But the intensity seems to be growing, even eight years after the nuclear power plant shut down. The recent focus has been on the spent nuclear fuel, better referred to as slightly used nuclear fuel.

This fuel has been out of the reactor for between 8 and 27 years. The really hot stuff decays away before 5 years while the spent fuel is still in pools of water. The half-life of the remaining hot stuff, Cs-137 and Sr-90, is only 30 years, so these are a lot cooler than when they were in the reactor. After 200 years, the fuel isn’t very radioactive at all since all the hot gamma-emitters are gone. //

So as a scientist who has worked on nuclear waste for 35 years, has handled and experimented on this waste, measured these systems to get exact numbers, designed disposal systems, was an author of the Yucca Mountain License Application, monitored the waste, have lived beside nuclear waste for these last 35 years, have had my children and grandchildren live next to nuclear waste – I can tell you without reservation that you have nothing to worry about from the nuclear waste at San Onofre.

Compared to all other risks that you face in Southern California, the risk from nuclear waste at SONGS is vanishingly small. //

As an example, one accident scenario assumed the lid of a dry cask was completely removed, or blown off, and that all of the fuel rods were damaged. All of the volatile, or gaseous, radionulcides in the gaps and spaces around the rods, like Xe, Kr and I, are released. As bad as this is, and as unlikely as it would be to occur, the dose at 100 meters from the fuel would be only a one-time 3 mrem (0.03 mSv) dose.

Eating a bag of potato chips a day gives you more than 4 mrem/yr (Yes, potato chips are the most radioactive food with about 13,000 pCi of beta radiation per 12-oz bag, nothing to worry about, just to give some perspective) //

Just lob an RPG at a chlorine tanker car as it passes through San Diego on Interstate 5 and you’ll kill more people than Chernobyl did. Or hit a natural gas plant – that would do real damage.

And nuclear waste is orders of magnitude less risky than an operating nuclear reactor.

There’s lots of myths that add to this nuclear fear and they always pop up during any nuclear discussion:

You can’t make a nuclear weapon out of commercial spent nuclear fuel – we tried to.

You can’t even make a dirty bomb out of commercial spent nuclear fuel – we tried to.

You can’t get cancer by living next to a nuclear power plant – we’ve studied that extensively. The only time that’s happened was at Chernobyl 34 years ago, and that was a meltdown at a weapons reactor that didn’t even have a containment building. All reactors in America have containment structures and are completely different types of reactors. //

Contrary to popular opinion, nuclear energy is the safest form of energy there is, even renewables kill more people per TWh than nuclear, although renewables are really safe compared to fossil fuel.

On a level playing field, nuclear power would go bust. Those owners get financial supports or subsidies that safe renewables like solar power, geothermal and wind power don’t get. Two particularly large government handouts keep the reactor business afloat, and without them it would crash overnight.

1. In a free market, the U.S. Price Anderson Act would be repealed. The act provides limited liability insurance to reactor operators in the event of a loss-of-coolant, or other radiation catastrophe. The nuclear industry would have to get insurance on the open market like all other industrial operations. This would break their bank, since major insurers would only sell such a policy at astronomical rates, if at all.

2. The U.S. Nuclear Waste Policy Act also would be repealed. NWPA is the government’s pledge to take custody of and assume liability for the industry’s radioactive waste. Without NWPA, the industry would have to pay to contain, isolate and manage its waste for the 1-million-year danger period. The long-term cost would zero the industry’s portfolio in a quick “correction.”

Even if the industry retained the above two subsidies, economists say the reactor business is finished. Jeremy Rifkin — renowned economic and social theorist, author, adviser to the European Union and heads-of-state, and author of 20 books — was asked his view of nuclear power at a Wermuth Asset Management global investors’ conference:

“Frankly, I think … it’s over. Let me explain why from a business perspective. Nuclear power was pretty well dead-in-the-water in the 1980s, after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. It had a comeback. The comeback was the industry saying: ‘We are part of the solution for climate change because we don’t emit CO2. It’s polluting, but there’s no CO2.’

“Here’s the issue: Nuclear power right now is 6 percent of energy of the world. There are only 400 nuclear power plants. //

nuclear would have to be 20 percent of the energy mix to have the minimum, minimum impact on climate change — not 6 percent of the mix.

“That means we’d have to replace the existing 400 nuclear plants and build 1,600 additional plants. Three nuclear plants have to be built every 30 days for 40 years to get to 20 percent, and by that time climate change will have run its course for us. So I think, from a business point of view, I just don’t see that investment. I’d be surprised if we replace 100 of the 400 existing nuclear plants which would take us down to 1 or 2 percent of the energy [mix].

“Number 2: We still don’t know how to recycle the nuclear waste and we’re 70 years in. //

Number 3: We run into uranium deficits according to the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] between 2025 and 2035 with just the existing 400 plants. So that means the price goes up. //

Finally, and this is the big one that people don’t realize: We don’t have the water. Over 40 percent of all the fresh water consumed in France each year goes to cooling the nuclear reactors. It’s almost 50 percent now. When it comes back [when reactor cooling water is returned to the lakes and rivers] it’s heated and it’s dehydrating our ecosystems, and threatening our agriculture. //

“So it’s no accident Siemens [Corp.] is out [of reactor business], Germany is out, Italy is out, Japan is now out … I’d be surprised if nuclear has much of a life left. I don’t think it’s a good business deal.”

The nuclear industry cannot assume that the words and phrases it commonly understands as scientific or engineering terms have positive connotations for the public, writes Neil Alexander, principal consultant at Bucephalus Consulting."We have all heard that a picture paints a thousand words. This should not be surprising because our mind was always designed to handle images, the face of our mother, the outline of a lion in the savannah, the route from our cave to the berry bush. Images have always been essential to our survival and are bound to be powerful.Less appreciated is the power of words to create mental pictures and how that affects perceptions of nuclear power. The power of words should not be a surprise either as language was developed so that we could describe things to each other in the absence of an image and then further developed to describe things, such as emotions or complex principles, by creating virtual images." //

Used fuel is described by many outside the industry, and too many within it, as waste. Look waste up in the dictionary and you will find one meaning is 'an unusable or unwanted substance'. Presently, used fuel is unwanted and so it can denotatively be called waste. But the image created by the word waste is not one of carefully engineered racks of shiny fuel assemblies; it is of the waste we see in our everyday lives: trash. That isn't a good image.

Meanwhile, allowing it to be described as waste implicitly allows a place where it is stored to be described as a dump because a dump is 'a place where people are allowed to leave their waste'. However, the use of the word, regardless of its legitimacy, creates a very unfortunate image. //

I wouldn’t want a nuclear waste dump near me. I wouldn’t want one anywhere on earth.

I wouldn't mind a used fuel repository though. //

Clever anti-nuclear authors will insert the words 'long-lived' whenever they legitimately can. This simple phrase, differentiates nuclear materials from anything else mankind handles and makes it seem uniquely dangerous. Those same authors don’t feel obliged to use the word 'everlasting' when referring to other toxic materials.