Conservatism and the Environment
- Thread starter Bacle
- Start date
That's what molten salt reactors are good at, burning up expended nuclear fuel.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
There is reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, but most countries banned it due to pressure from anti-nuke greens.
DarthOne
☦️
Well, what was once banned can be un-banned.
PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
Nuclear power has been too vilified for it to happen. In USA for example, you can't even store the spent fuel properly, because Obama forbade the use of the new, purpose built, nuclear refuse depot.
Terthna
Professional Lurker
Yet more reason for me to absolutely despise the man. Seriously, Obama was a far worse president than either his predecessor, or his successor; the only thing he had going for him was his charisma, which itself was blown out of proportion by a mainstream media hellbent on propping him up like some kind of messiah. I swear; if there is any justice left in the world, history is not going to remember the man with anywhere near the reverence his worshipers would like to believe it will, if it remembers him at all beyond him being the first black US president.
DarthOne
☦️
And as i said before, things can change.
Arch Dornan
Oh, lovely. They've sent me a mo-ron.
His legacy is already sealed with the loss of Ukraine's Crimea, not closing Guantamano Bay, involving himself with more silly wars in Libya and Syria followed by the conequences of pulling out of Iraq when the Daesh horde rose.
Duke Nukem
Hail to the king baby
i wish Thorium reactors were more popular.
New GOP 'Climate Caucus' Established
The problem is that doing a light, trimmed down version of what greens demanded does not constitute "getting into the driver seat", it's just something that will make no one happy.
You seemed to have missed the part where younger GOP members disagree with your stance, want to be active and engaged on this issue, and are trying to reach back to the GOP that created the Nat'l Parks and the EPA so that the Right can actually curb the dumbest rad-green ideas.
Just being cynical and doubtful about environmental issues gets us nowhere, and the youth are not going to let the mindset of the old/establishment GOP dictate future GOP environmental views/policies/demands.
No one cares about what young GOP members think, do they proportionally represent GOP voters? The article you've linked suggests that... not so much.
That makes it sound like if they should join Sierra Club or Greenpeace to get their environmental activist bug out of the system (where they would indeed serve to curb the dumbest rad-green ideas, that's where these ideas rule after all), not GOP, where their job is to represent the interest of the country and their voters, and where dumbest rad-green ideas were already considered something between a joke and act of treason.
And here you happen to take the aim at the core issue of the problem but forget to take the shot.
Too much promotion of extreme green ideas in schools, media, and other means of influencing young people who have no way to know better.
This is where GOP should pick this fight, not trying to compromise with these ideas.
I'd suspect that this is very much a case of "monkey see, monkey do" affecting GOP's young recruits. They were trained to think this way for many years. And they shouldn't have been.
And thank you for a wonderful example of why the GOP has failed so badly in the culture war.
I've come to realize that people like you are why it took so long for a GOP form this new climate caucus, and that there is no point debating this issue with you, because you will never admit the GOP needs the change that this caucus represents.
My point exactly. They are losing the culture war around the subject, not the pragmatic argument around the matter of the subject - as in what environmental policy serves the national interest best. The problem is that cultural institutions indoctrinate young people to consider the green ideological compliance of this policy over national interests.
Or in other words, the real problem is in dominance of media/education around environmental policy, not the policy itself.
If you don't make a convincing argument why the GOP should compromise with the main green narrative about climate change, then of course i won't be convinced. I think said narrative is highly politicized, and inherently designed to put pragmatic interests of developed western countries last. While i want them to be put first.
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See, that's the thing, I have tried multiple times to convince you in this thread and others, using multiple sources ces and angles of argument, and none except concerns about forest fires has done anything to convince you.
Because the truth is, you don't want to be convinced, you just want the GOP to ignore and stonewall nearly any environmental legislation.
However, thanks to this new caucus, it's now obvious that environmentally minded young people are becoming a force in the GOP.
They seem to want a more Roosevelt, less Reagan, GOP, which is a very good thing for the future of the GOP.
Well then contrary to what you said it is not impossible, just very hard. Or your arguments are lacking.
There is a reason why i was most agreeable to the forest fires argument, because as we've discussed earlier, that is an example of environmental issue that:
a) Affects the citizens in a meaningful and well defined way as in no one wants to live in a burned down town.
b) The issue is located on US lands and can be dealt with through taking measures there, as opposed to issues that are global in nature, or downright foreign issues.
Most of climate change related policy, virtue signalling, and carbon indulgence schemes are spotty on a and completely fail on b.
Yes, that's what i was saying, take a step back and look at it from a distance - what's the deal with sudden rise of "environmentally minded young people"? Where did they come from, why weren't young people like this before, why does this new generation of young people want such things?
Makes me wonder if they would agree with Roosevelt also on things that would be outrageous by today's democrat and RINO standards.
LindyAF
Well-known member
Yeah, the issue with these things is that so much of it isn't presenting conservative or right-wing environmentalist positions, it's just trying to get Strange New Respect by conceding positions, and trying to become an authority on which positions to concede. There's little in the way of genuinely novel or even infrequently considered ideas. It's just going through what the left wants, and then picking stuff to concede on. That's not a winning strategy, even with environmentally minded people - because if they like democrat policy, why get the diet version?
Also, a lot of it feels super astroturfed and in bed with the most dead-end establishment GOP types.
A successful right-wing environmentalist movement has to be distinct and in active opposition to left-wing environmentalism, and ideally *actively toxic* to the left and the establishment.
For instance, I think it might be interesting to propose a restructuring of federal land, reducing federal land in the West (where there's far too much, Nevada is more than 80% federal land) and increasing it in the East (where there's comparatively little).
Nuclear, and in particular Yucca mountain is also a good place to start here. IFLS types are typically pretty pro-nuclear, but there's plenty of the dem coalition and particularly their old guard which is reflexively anti-nuclear, and Yucca mountain specifically is a massive F you to reid and anyone who owes reid any favors, so they basically have to fight it. Which is what we should want.
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I agree that nuclear is the most environmentally friendly form of energy production, something the rad-greens and oil companies HATE.
A nuclear focused environmental drive would be a good nucleus for a Right-Wing environmental movement to form around that is definitely a cultural counter to the rad-greens.
However, Yucca Mountain...that's an issue with both Reid and a...mislocated fault in the mountain which seriously reduces it's effectiveness as a nuclear storage depot.
However if we get molten-salt/thorium reactors going, we can just 'burn' the nuclear waste from other reactors in those, instead of needing a storage facility like Yucca.
LindyAF
Well-known member
I think we talked about that before in another thread. The mislocated fault was an issue but not nearly as serious one as it was presented as by the media - basically it required relocating something, which was an added expense, but once that was relocated I don't think it ended up being significantly more dangerous than originally planned. It is still definitely more secure than present storage.
That would be nice if it happens, but I dislike a political position of just waiting for a technology to mature instead of moving forward with what we already have which works and money has already been invested in. As the technology matures I'm sure we'll find disadvantages to it as well - just as I'm sure we will with Nuclear Fusion too. There's not going to be any energy free lunch. Those disadvantages might be significant or less significant, but there's always going to be something opponents can point to and go "we can't use that, what about X!" We can't always just be waiting for the next hot thing that we don't know enough about to know the disadvantages of yet.
Other ways the GOP could be more nuclear friendly is pushing to shift subsidies from "renewable" energy like solar / wind towards nuclear.