decentralized energy
The death of big power
It takes money to make money. If you've none to work with you've none to invest. This is a painful and avoided fact about our world, and it's led to an historic level of concentration of wealth. That used to not matter to those on top, but now that the consequences of all this concentration are coming home to roost, even the wealthy are starting to feel powerless.
Take nuclear power, for instance. Why would we have so many of these enormously complex, huge, unsafe plants in the world, polluting their filth all over the surface of the Earth? I think for the same reason we have these massive dirty coal and natural gas plants. They are the end result of millions of quick-and-dirty type decisions by people who had enough money to invest in holding on to it and making more. Am I an anti-capitalist? I don't know. Look at what we've got here - a potential heaven daily becoming more hellish. Doesn't that give reason for a fundamental critique of what we have been doing?
Not to belabor the pessimistic world view held by an increasing number of people, but we ARE in a world of trouble. People making short-term small-context decisions have yielded so many interrelated problems that it's getting to be difficult to even talk about them. I've been called semi-hysterical for wanting to dwell on some of the scary things going on in the world, but the fact is that those who DON'T want to discuss them are the ones making dangerously irrational decisions. Go ahead, talk about the baseball game, the price of gas here today, that new car, the potentially wonderful new developments in Hazelwood, careers for our young people, fighting crime. But if we don't get off the blame and avoidance game and admit we ALL have done things to bring us to this moment, then we're in the same category as the child that thinks that the fact that something isn't seen means it doesn't exist.
Though this may seem calculated to offend, I'm saying that if you are for nuclear power it is because you have been unconsciously avoiding the facts. From the very beginning of the industry, the moneyed interests have dominated discussion of their safety by restricting the discussion to smaller and smaller contexts. A little more subtly than, "I don't wanna hear it," but not much. Start with the big picture. They ran off a bunch of Indians because they wanted the land that had uranium under it. Sound familiar? It's in the same tradition that saw Columbus, Cortez, and other rapists from Europe coming to take over. So, after you impoverish what's left of the indigenous Americans, you give some no choice but to work for you (the only job in town) getting the uranium out of their former homeland. It's just business, that's all, and business is hard. The nuclear industry's first success (if you can call it that) was the killing of maybe a couple hundred
thousand people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war having ended, the world desiring peace threatened the nuclear industry with sudden collapse, so they decided to make lemonade out of this lemon and (rather than just shut down) build the "atoms for peace" campaign, claiming that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter". We know that never happened, because we all have electric meters so the big utility knows how much they can bill us. And how peaceful is an industry when, as a normal part of a nuclear power plant's operation, every single one emits cancer-causing radioactivity into the environment, every day? Oh, insignificant amounts, they say (when they admit it at all). And what about the mine tailings, millions of polluted tons laying around for kids to play on and dust to kick up and blow. Hey, it's our land, we'll do what we want with it, this is America, they say. Yeah, right, it's America all right, but you'd
never know it still belongs to the Indians. They've been killed off, bought off, and scared off ever since the "beginning" of this "new world" world Columbus "discovered".
Ask yourself why the vast majority of the planet's citizens are born in debt. Can this possibly make sense? It's almost like we live in that old children's story Upside Down Town. We transport our food thousands of miles before eating it. We destroy ourselves with antibiotics rather than use natural antibiotics such as raw garlic. We transport our energy huge distances rather than make it where it's needed (distributed energy). Our leaders say one thing then do another. The Environmental Protection Agency - created to protect us from those destroying our Earth for money - has instead come to be used by the polluters to restrain the public while protecting the polluters. We elect a president to take us out of war and he get's us into more. And now - increasingly - the poor are being told there's no money so their (our) life support has to be cut. Upside down world, everywhere you look. People having a hard time
getting to work, so what to they do? Cut public transit. Hey, makes sense to me, pal...because I'm upside down myself.
So what's the right-side-up side? I mean, let's hear some good news. It's all so scary it's hard to think straight, straight up. Well...That IS the good news, the fact that things are so bad that everybody knows it. The perfect storm is the teachable moment.
We've all been dealing with increased levels of radioactivity for many decades now. Those at the wrong end of our weapons have always gotten the worst of it, from Hiroshima to the deformed infants of Iraq. And radioactivity IS a natural part of life. So something will survive, we know not what. Think I'm a little hysterical? Read up, the planet is in a much more fragile moment in history than I could portray with words. Oceans are becoming acidic and dying; forests being destroyed (such as Canadian tar sands development for U.S. gasoline) so land is no longer absorbing co2 as much; methane and co2 emissions are increasing even without our help now as permafrost melts; so many other nightmares.
We need to shut down the big power plants, not just the nuclear. Just as there's no reason to buy garlic grown hundreds to thousands of miles away, there has never been good reason to have our electricity generated many miles away and then transported to us. There has always been an unfair advantage given to those with more money, and it has led to these massive, dangerous, polluting utilities. From the jailing of Peter Zenger for exposing the corruption of vested interests to the killing of union steward Karen Silkwood for her nuclear plant safety heroism to the the halting of the great scientist Nikola Tesla's work because it threatened to take the energy business out of the hands of the giants, to the stifling of the wind and solar industry because they didn't want people getting their own power from nature rather than from them, money has talked and the rest of us walked. Well now the moneyed have to cough up some changes. We all
do.
Jim McCue
St. Jim the Composter
412-421-6496
composter and biotech researcher
http://bioeverything.blogspot.com/2009/02/celebrate-earth.html
http://hazelwoodurbangardens.blogspot.com
http://facebook.com/alllifelover
http://plentyoffish.com/member498447.htm
http://hazelwoodhomepage.com
It takes money to make money. If you've none to work with you've none to invest. This is a painful and avoided fact about our world, and it's led to an historic level of concentration of wealth. That used to not matter to those on top, but now that the consequences of all this concentration are coming home to roost, even the wealthy are starting to feel powerless.
Take nuclear power, for instance. Why would we have so many of these enormously complex, huge, unsafe plants in the world, polluting their filth all over the surface of the Earth? I think for the same reason we have these massive dirty coal and natural gas plants. They are the end result of millions of quick-and-dirty type decisions by people who had enough money to invest in holding on to it and making more. Am I an anti-capitalist? I don't know. Look at what we've got here - a potential heaven daily becoming more hellish. Doesn't that give reason for a fundamental critique of what we have been doing?
Not to belabor the pessimistic world view held by an increasing number of people, but we ARE in a world of trouble. People making short-term small-context decisions have yielded so many interrelated problems that it's getting to be difficult to even talk about them. I've been called semi-hysterical for wanting to dwell on some of the scary things going on in the world, but the fact is that those who DON'T want to discuss them are the ones making dangerously irrational decisions. Go ahead, talk about the baseball game, the price of gas here today, that new car, the potentially wonderful new developments in Hazelwood, careers for our young people, fighting crime. But if we don't get off the blame and avoidance game and admit we ALL have done things to bring us to this moment, then we're in the same category as the child that thinks that the fact that something isn't seen means it doesn't exist.
Though this may seem calculated to offend, I'm saying that if you are for nuclear power it is because you have been unconsciously avoiding the facts. From the very beginning of the industry, the moneyed interests have dominated discussion of their safety by restricting the discussion to smaller and smaller contexts. A little more subtly than, "I don't wanna hear it," but not much. Start with the big picture. They ran off a bunch of Indians because they wanted the land that had uranium under it. Sound familiar? It's in the same tradition that saw Columbus, Cortez, and other rapists from Europe coming to take over. So, after you impoverish what's left of the indigenous Americans, you give some no choice but to work for you (the only job in town) getting the uranium out of their former homeland. It's just business, that's all, and business is hard. The nuclear industry's first success (if you can call it that) was the killing of maybe a couple hundred
thousand people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war having ended, the world desiring peace threatened the nuclear industry with sudden collapse, so they decided to make lemonade out of this lemon and (rather than just shut down) build the "atoms for peace" campaign, claiming that nuclear power would be "too cheap to meter". We know that never happened, because we all have electric meters so the big utility knows how much they can bill us. And how peaceful is an industry when, as a normal part of a nuclear power plant's operation, every single one emits cancer-causing radioactivity into the environment, every day? Oh, insignificant amounts, they say (when they admit it at all). And what about the mine tailings, millions of polluted tons laying around for kids to play on and dust to kick up and blow. Hey, it's our land, we'll do what we want with it, this is America, they say. Yeah, right, it's America all right, but you'd
never know it still belongs to the Indians. They've been killed off, bought off, and scared off ever since the "beginning" of this "new world" world Columbus "discovered".
Ask yourself why the vast majority of the planet's citizens are born in debt. Can this possibly make sense? It's almost like we live in that old children's story Upside Down Town. We transport our food thousands of miles before eating it. We destroy ourselves with antibiotics rather than use natural antibiotics such as raw garlic. We transport our energy huge distances rather than make it where it's needed (distributed energy). Our leaders say one thing then do another. The Environmental Protection Agency - created to protect us from those destroying our Earth for money - has instead come to be used by the polluters to restrain the public while protecting the polluters. We elect a president to take us out of war and he get's us into more. And now - increasingly - the poor are being told there's no money so their (our) life support has to be cut. Upside down world, everywhere you look. People having a hard time
getting to work, so what to they do? Cut public transit. Hey, makes sense to me, pal...because I'm upside down myself.
So what's the right-side-up side? I mean, let's hear some good news. It's all so scary it's hard to think straight, straight up. Well...That IS the good news, the fact that things are so bad that everybody knows it. The perfect storm is the teachable moment.
We've all been dealing with increased levels of radioactivity for many decades now. Those at the wrong end of our weapons have always gotten the worst of it, from Hiroshima to the deformed infants of Iraq. And radioactivity IS a natural part of life. So something will survive, we know not what. Think I'm a little hysterical? Read up, the planet is in a much more fragile moment in history than I could portray with words. Oceans are becoming acidic and dying; forests being destroyed (such as Canadian tar sands development for U.S. gasoline) so land is no longer absorbing co2 as much; methane and co2 emissions are increasing even without our help now as permafrost melts; so many other nightmares.
We need to shut down the big power plants, not just the nuclear. Just as there's no reason to buy garlic grown hundreds to thousands of miles away, there has never been good reason to have our electricity generated many miles away and then transported to us. There has always been an unfair advantage given to those with more money, and it has led to these massive, dangerous, polluting utilities. From the jailing of Peter Zenger for exposing the corruption of vested interests to the killing of union steward Karen Silkwood for her nuclear plant safety heroism to the the halting of the great scientist Nikola Tesla's work because it threatened to take the energy business out of the hands of the giants, to the stifling of the wind and solar industry because they didn't want people getting their own power from nature rather than from them, money has talked and the rest of us walked. Well now the moneyed have to cough up some changes. We all
do.
Jim McCue
St. Jim the Composter
412-421-6496
composter and biotech researcher
http://bioeverything.blogspot.com/2009/02/celebrate-earth.html
http://hazelwoodurbangardens.blogspot.com
http://facebook.com/alllifelover
http://plentyoffish.com/member498447.htm
http://hazelwoodhomepage.com
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 8:49 AM
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