Y. Working with governments / corporations

Y1. World Politics

Resist not evil, overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21)

Y2. Combined gun and plow

I have the perfect invention for climate change R&D deniers: “Combination Gun And Plow”, U.S. patent number 35,600, patented in the middle of the Civil War. On Monday you can take your neighbor’s food at gunpoint, and on Tuesday you can wrest from the bone-dry soil whatever food the earth is still willing to yield up. Be prepared!

Y3. Quickly bankrupting a large industry: documentary: “Who Killed the Electric Car”

In “Who Killed the Electric Car”, California in 1990 passed legislation that forced the auto industry to sell electric cars in 1999. Despite the worst efforts of car makers, customers came in waving cash and they loved their electrics. Then the auto industry pressured the State of California to relent. Immediately Detroit's lawyers had a lease clause that repossessed every last car, then they crushed every last car and pretended for the next 10 years that the electric car was nothing but an unbuildable fantasy.

I tell this story to illustrate how governments work. Every last one of my inventions, even the greenhouse which is up and working since 2018, is an unbuildable fantasy until it finally isn't, and afterwards the invention is obvious and it always was obvious. The point is that we need sheer pressure, effective pressure, on governments in order to get the R&D done.

I especially urge political pressure on any government that falsely claims to be too tiny or too poor to perform one climate R&D project or prototype. Larger governments are too much under the influence of big money to inhibit climate change, but I place more hope in smaller governments. Coalitions of smaller, more willing governments can perform much of the merit-driven R&D that can inhibit the climate crisis. A demand for well-audited R&D integrity should be non-negotiable.

Y4. The future

I haven't indulged in political speculation but I will now. The megadroughts are accelerating. On 12/12/22 NBC News reported that 1.1 million acres of forest in Oregon alone had died from extreme drought. We're seeing millions of people worldwide fleeing their subsistence farms right now. The permafrost can let loose 300 gigatons of greenhouse gases in the next 20 years and this catastrophe can accelerate.

We saw with covid-19 how various governments can sit there like lumps until weeks before the pandemic starts to overwhelm each nation's hospitals. With climate change, waiting for permanent agricultural failures would be a fail. We need a rather military-like urgency to human survival, with an understanding that military command systems throughout history have sometimes performed like utter disasters.

Y5. The persistence of ineffective solutions

“Net-zero by 2050” was successfully pushed by the fossil fuel industry at COP26. The scheme has problems. If governments don't comply with their laws, starting in 2051 somebody's ghost can sue their government's ghost for noncompliance.

“Net-zero” ignores the fact that we're in a positive feedback loop from past greenhouse gas emissions. We need all the governments to be working in unison by enforceable international protocols, not a few individual governments volunteering. There's no government emphasis on R&D and then ramp-up, where most of the change must come.

We need granular dissection of our problem, one issue at a time, always looking for better solutions.

For further reading: https://theconversation.com/the-us-biofuel-mandate-helps-farmers-but-does-little-for-energy-security-and-harms-the-environment-168459

For further reading: http://www.greensocialthought.org/content/why-we-need-much-more-green-new-deal

Y5a. The University-Industrial Complex

Voice: "Fire!!"
Scientist: "Great! Let's study the problem."

If you're trapped in a conflagration, you need firefighters right now to keep yourself from being all burned up. With the climate emergency there's no rational substitute for genuine inventors and engineers. Universities, for some unimaginable reason, never hire inventors. In practice a huge panoply of inventors such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison are all idolized by the general public. I see no reason why rational parents wouldn't want to see their children study under great inventors. My best guess is that each generation of corporate titans, who fund private colleges and who control the legislatures that fund public colleges, have a well-established fear of being run out of business and bankrupted by new technologies created by the next generation of inventors. They pull the strings so that universities never, ever do the right thing. In this case the world's university boards of trustees as a whole are soon enough going to doom human civilization into a massive human starvation.

I see professional survey paper writers serving as the librarians in science, not doing any original research themselves but doing a great job of reporting what other people are currently doing. The world has far too many survey paper writers.

Universities need dirt-cheap McLecturers, McQuiz writers and McTerm paper graders, and they use the quantity of McSurvey papers that each professor produces to determine who gets tenure. Universities regularly try to evade the wage demands of faculty unions by hiring freeway faculty and indentured graduate servants. In my opinion surviving faculty members often have taken on a bit of a jungle fighter mentality. Many look exhausted. Some grow rather bitter and these often get cashiered.

I see big money science as, from an inventor's perspective, being seriously obsessed with the display of perfection in their art. I remember as a teen being dragged to my younger sister's ballet recital every year and always on my birthday too. I was perfectly polite about going, but I got nothing at all from watching my sister's ballet class doing their thing on stage. Ballet may be obsessed with perfection but then it has never done anything at all for me.

Y6. Zen and saying the opposite

Zen has a theory that something can be described by what it certainly isn't. If you take a folding fan and use it as a plate, it becomes obvious that a fan doesn't make much of a plate. In this vein I'm going to describe how a government might succeed at crashing and megaburning.

"Many good new inventions come directly from billionaires because billionaires are brilliant because they're rich. Many other inventions come from young tenure track Ivy League professors in their spare time, and corporations can trust these people. "

"If something is already invented then it's going to make lots of money, so why do we need to waste any of the government's money on it? If something isn't invented yet then why risk the government's good money on a gamble? If one government takes an R&D risk, some other government will surely reap the reward with little risk, so let's never take any financial risk, just let the marketplace take all the risk. Exception: sometimes a billionaire has an overwhelmingly good idea. If that's not you, why would we fund the likes of you?"

"Polar bears don't spend money so why would we want to stop the Arctic permafrost from thawing out? There's no market and no possible microeconomic profit motive."

"Carbon capture and sequestration is esoteric and high-tech enough for some company to build a world-wide monopoly in the field, so bet all your chips on it. The more esoteric the technology, the better the potential profits that can be squeezed from it."

"A university's sole job is always to pile up its own money, not to prevent a catastrophe that could possibly kill half of the alumni. Dead alumni are our biggest contributors, after all."

"Philanthrophic buck squeezing means that the donors' money goes much farther, so remember to always shaft the key stakeholders until they scream."

- - OK, enough with the negative psychology - -

The good news is that any government at all can undertake practical engineering research, development and a ramping up program, and that such R&D coupled with ramping up good products has been proven in the past to be wonderful for a local economy. Once we establish numbers of new inventions within the marketplace, they won't be stopped. So, we need to win through on only a handful of state or local governments, or willing coalitions of these same governments, to make real progress.

Often as not these intelligent governments will reach for their favorite governing tool, the market economy,. They'll set up the emergency ramping up of merit-driven R&D and they'll create market incentives and disincentives so that the job actually gets done. "Actually gets done" is the exact and sole point of emphasis here. For market-free tasks such as keeping the Arctic's permafrost from thawing, governments will have to sign international protocols and expend money to get the job done.

Y6a. Market Economy Fails

As of 2022 creative climate accounting is ubiquitous in the world. Anybody can make any climate claim, no matter how outrageous. It would be nice to see some integrity plus a trust but verify philosophy.

Too many pundits are expecting the world's poorest people to do our own government's heavy lifting. Street people recycle cans for nickels, is that good enough to stop climate change?

Do atmospheric carbon dioxide levels stop at each country's borders? That's the message driven by today's global wealth extraction, military coups and wars. I see quite a bit of climate dieting followed by climate bingeing so that in the end nothing gets accomplished.. That's why climate R&D is vital. Once a certain industry uses less fossil fuel worldwide because it's economical to do so, that progress never gets reversed.

If we institute transnational shadow governments that good actor corporations are willing to be constrained by, we must do this with integrity.

I believe that in any non-governmental decisionmaking body we must pointedly represent all missing political groups. Sooner or later each missing group will become represented once they see that they have a seat at the table.

Population control is going to be an extremely slow process and we don't have much time. If masses of people soon starve to death because of chronic worldwide agricultural failures, that's one painful form of population control but it's also far too late to turn the planet around.

Y7. Eventually make governments responsive through better online decision-making among ourselves.

The United States ignores climate change, and then it equally leaves some of its war veterans to freeze to death on park benches in the winter. Too many modern U.S. war veterans have been reclassified as non-veterans because their crazy war experiences ultimately earned them a less-than-honorable discharge.

If the Arctic permafrost thaws out, greenhouse gases will nearly triple. Yale360 on 1/21/20 estimated that 20% of the permafrost will thaw by 2040. If megadroughts increase exponentially the world won't grow much food at all. If our Federal Government starts researching a vaccine when the hospitals are 51% full, they might have two weeks remaining to finish their research. Similarly, once we have a 51% chance of a food shortage, that's way, way late. The clock ticks now.

Y8. All the unwritten rules

I was peripherally involved with an arts festival once. Two fire inspection marshals met with the organizer in my presence. The organizer had filed the correct permits, sunk all the festival's capital into building tents and then the fire marshals came in and said the tents were nonstandard, the show would have to fold unless … unless the festival paid exactly these same two fire marshals $600 to do nothing but hang around all day for safety reasons. The festival paid up, and after that year the festival folded. (The name of the shakedown city is being withheld to protect the whistleblowers, not the fire marshals.)

Understand that your city and state plays numbers of these hardball games. In my personal experience certain individual building inspectors fight newbies like Hades just because they sign the papers and know the ins and outs, but they back down in the face of extreme pressure plus they have to be proven quite wrong in the engineering sense, and those engineers cost money. My closest analogue would be the ways that government officials kept people of color from voting in the 1950s.

An awful thing happened when Rhode Island laid out $100 million so that a wealthy baseball pitcher could run a computer software company. The original Horatio Alger myth was great and then the reality was pretty horrid.

When the City of Providence hires a plowing contractor, the City don't require a Master's degree or a $100 Professional Snow Plowing license. These people plow because the City promises to pay them some rent money, for real, in almost all cases.

So, if the City pays an inventor, don't pay her one month's rent money and then tell her it's going to cost three years rent money to fight City Hall intransigence, but she'll certainly make it up far in the future with all of that pie in the sky. Landlords don't accept pie in the sky, they evict. If City Hall wants to cause 100% of the trouble for an employee, then maybe City Hall should agree beforehand to cover all of its own internal hassle expenses.

In general if the inventor or any other person trying to survive says “I can't survive,” they'll either quit or not show up and nobody will arise later to take their place.

So in sum my message is, somebody has to do this real invention and engineering work or else lots of us starve to death. The City should not only authorize the work to be done but the City should actually guarantee people real money in exchange for hopefully getting the needed work done. Cash for work is a famous market-oriented axiom that has successfully enticed other city employees to perform real work. Avoid the counter-arguments that ripping peripheral people off is always good for the City's bottom line because out-groups don't count, and that the City Council has plausible deniability.

Y9. Think globally, act locally

If you're lighting a fireplace fire and you throw one match onto one big fireplace log, the fire will go out because you didn't plan the fire's ramp-up. If you want to displace gigatons of greenhouse gases, someone must perform practical development and then plan a smooth ramp-up.

Simply building a second copy of, say, my West Greenwich greenhouse as a learning exercise is real initial ramp-up progress, and building a solar heat storing house or a solar heat storing retrofit for a fire station is groundbreaking progress. In the process, you're likely to grow the regional economy for real.

Y10. A fractional ranked choice voting system

As an important climate solution I recommend that all democracies adapt a corruption-fighting method of electing voter-responsive public representatives, multi-winner Fractional Transferable Voting. Wikipedia lists early inventors of fractional vote systems. I devised the concept independently 15 years ago, and I'm still an idea champion for the system.

For 240 years in the United States we have tended to keep electing one politician for one office, where the winner is defined as the lesser of two evils. The economics involved in massively buying political influence causes the U.S. to see quite a number of relatively close 52% to 48% two-party elections, where both parties are notably beholden to big money. Much of climate change is traceable to the winning politicians quietly taking polluter-friendly positions. To achieve consistently voter-responsive governments we need to change our ballot counting methods.

I live in Providence, Rhode Island. Our former mayor, Buddy Cianci, pled guilty to one count of felony assault -- the mayor used an on-duty Providence cop in order to torture a man for two hours in the mayor's home. The judge gave the mayor a suspended five year sentence because it was his first felony. Five years later the suspended sentence had run out and Cianci ran for mayor as an independent candidate. He split the vote perfectly and won with 35% of the vote to 35% of the vote to 30% of the vote. Mayor Cianci was much later convicted of racketeering conspiracy and was sentenced to 64 months in jail. He left us a city deeply in debt, not that far from declaring bankruptcy. I have a sense that with a single transferable vote system Cianci could never have gotten back into office because the majority of the voters didn't want a convicted power-loving felon as either their first or second choice.

Cambridge, Massachusetts has successfully held single transferable vote elections for their City Council since 1940. Results have been amazing. The Cambridge City Council always seems to look much like the electorate in terms of skin tones, age, gender and sexual preference. Cambridge's long-term stance on expanding transit and on bikeways has always been excellent. The city seems to have perpetually held one of the very top bond ratings in the country for the past 80 years. That's possibly because Cambridge has its own Ivy League university, but then again, Providence has a wealthy Ivy League university of its own and Providence has struggled. The limited-time periods of STV elections in other American cities in 1900-1960 generally resulted in well-run cities.

Multiple-winner STV elections create city councils and other legislative bodies that tend to accurately reflect the multiple political viewpoints of the electorate. In practice, putting people with differing political opinions together in the same room has never interfered with the functioning of the Cambridge City Council. However, in the period between 1900 and 1960 the idea of one or two black city council members sitting equally in the same room with white city council members was anathema to the white majority of voters that dominated politics in every city in America, north or south. For primarily racial dominance reasons, the Single Transferable Vote method of elections was revoked in city after city. The fear of electing one or two token public servants with communist ideas also scared many voters. Finally, STV election revoke campaigns were lavishly supported by the urban political patronage machines that stood to make a killing under a corrupt system. The press often tended to stick up for the political machines. Only Cambridge survived this wave of American political retrenchment.

I specify a Fractional Transferable Vote method as opposed to a Single Transferable Vote method because the fractional method allows for honest recounts. The Cambridge, Massachusetts single transferable vote method doesn't allow for any recounts in case an error is made, because for each count, some second choice votes are randomly thrown away and the others are assigned to their second choice candidates. The small-scale randomness of their election system is a perfectly avoidable issue given Fractional Transferable Voting. In FTV an equal fraction of each voter's vote is transfered to their second choice candidate.

So, if you want an honest local, state or federal government, be prepared for a hard fight to get it and expect several well-funded revoke attempts after that. Regardless, you want to fight that fight. Demand a multiple-winner, fractional transferable vote form of STV.

As a smart tactic, don't confront your local political machine immediately. Implement STV for your student council, for your neighborhood council, for friends of your local park, for your church, for your co-op, for any group that isn't directly under some elected political machine's thumb. Get local people used to STV voting.

If one of the two political parties implements STV political primaries for local, state or federal candidates, it's possible that a majority of voters will come to see the integrity of the STV voting system, so that the winner of that primary will in time always win the general election. It's possible to switch one of the two major parties over, or it's possible to build a third party from the ground up. Or, set up a general shadow government based on STV elections or possibly based on polls taken to simulate expected STV results.

Y10a. An algorithm that apportions districts to reduce politically-driven gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is the art of carving up districts so that one party gets more than its share of voting power in a legislature. The term "gerrymander" was named after a Massachusetts legislator, Elbridge Gerry, who signed into law a narrow voting district that stretched over 180 degrees around certain communities in Northeastern Massachusetts. The district looked a bit like a salamander and so they named it a gerrymander.

Given a state with equal numbers of voters for party A and party B, if the state is precisely carved into five districts with equal population, where one district has 90% voters for party A and 10% for party B, and the other four districts all have 40% voters for party A and 60% voters for party B, the state will almost always elect 1 district for party A and 4 districts for party B. Such a carve-out goes blatantly against the underlying intent of democracy. The gerrymandering also creates five relatively safe districts where incumbents are more likely to get elected again and again because almost no real contest between party A and party B ever exists in practice. In this way gerrymandering tends to promote political corruption.

In theory a judge might be able to declare a gerrymandered state map to be unconstitutional. In practice, sometimes certain courts have been packed with completely partisan judges hand-selected by one party or another. Also, there's no clear dividing line between strongly gerrymandered districts, slightly gerrymandered districts and honestly drawn districts. For this reason I recommend adopting a mathematical formula for impartially drawing district maps.

A centroid is the exact center of population of any district. A computer can calculate the sum of the squares of distances between each voter in that district and the centroid. Dividing this sum of squares by the total area of the district gives a measurement of the relative compactness of each district, taking into account both rural and urban districts. In other words, a round district of any size with a city at its center would be considered a relatively compact district, and a long, narrow district with cities at each end would be considered not compact at all. A map of all the districts in a state would be declared to be optimal when the sum of the squares of all compactness measures has been minimized.

In general, many such districts would be at least somewhat round in shape, given the vagarities of local geography. A perfect district might have one large city in the middle of a district and then it would include suburbs and quite a bit of rural land. My hope is that most such districts would tend to be more or less balanced between each state's more progressive and more conservative voters, so that we would often see many real political races in November as opposed to frequent cakewalks for each district's incumbents.

Within such a mathematically drawn set of districts we still don't want to split towns if possible. We might add a mathematical penalty to the formula for each instance where a town is split across two districts.

Y11. Suffrage for 16 year old citizens

The right to vote was originally reserved for the landed gentry. Political pressure led to all men getting the vote. Political pressure led to all women getting the vote. During the Vietnam War, young men were old enough to be drafted and sent to Vietnam but they weren't old enough to vote. That changed too.

Over 1000 children demonstrated against the City of Birmingham in the Children's Crusade of 1963. Many children faced arrest, twice in two days. Some faced biting police dogs and fire hoses. Key to the Civil Rights movement was the right of nonwhite people to vote, to not be illegally excluded from voting.

Old enough to drive is old enough to vote. Sometimes 16 year old citizens can make bad individual decisions about starting to smoke cigarettes and about early marriage, but by and large they seem to understand politics pretty well. If we can choose to allow every senior to vote despite the rise of Alzheimer's syndrome and despite confidence games that steal Social Security checks from the wallets of too many gullible seniors, then we also need to allow every 16 year old citizen to vote. The essence of keeping 16 year old citizens from voting is slanting the nation's political power toward older people.

Y12. Corporations

"As the island slowly sank, the loser finally broke the bank in the gambling room
The dealer said, “It’s too late now. You can take your money, but I don’t know how you’ll spend it in the tomb” - “Black Diamond Bay”, Bob Dylan

Actual industry experiences are why pie in the sky doesn't sell. I urge you to always remember how wildly the deck might get stacked against any innovation that destroys more than half of the natural gas industry.

A market economy solves one key human problem, the efficient production and distribution of things. However, an open market doesn't solve a number of other problems critical to human survival. In many countries the citizens have experienced a wage race to the bottom. If employers can pay enough workers a 90% food ration for their work, with hunger for the missing 10% of their food, perhaps an enterprising employer can try offering only an 80% food ration to their workers, saving money and gaining a financial advantage. If some of the available unemployed potential workers are hungry enough they'll take the 80% food ration rather than completely starve.

A market economy doesn't inherently solve climate change. Nor does a market economy solve political corruption. Whenever a government picks winners and losers, buying off the government ensures that the corrupt winners are picked.

For climate change, the marketplace fails wherever polar bears don't know how to be savvy consumers. We the living will obligate ourselves to somehow deal with market economies and sleeping government watchdogs if we want to properly survive the climate emergency.

Y13. Corporate honor roll

Jesus told of a widow who put one coin into the synagogue's treasury. “She gave all she had.”

My corporate and government engineering honor roll starts with various bleeding edge inventors and experimenters in many diverse climate fields, who have given large parts of their lives, often with day jobs on the side to support their prototyping habits. As one example of many I'll name Jon Ricker of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. I like his canvas wind-strengthening cowl that pulls out of position in high wind gusts, among other innovations. Innovation isn't always high-tech, for example, Grant Dulgarian of Providence, RI is a grandfather of modern curbside recycling.

Honorable mention to Paul Hawken of Hawken Tools, who organized the assembly of the book “Drawdown”. “Drawdown” did its best to focus rather squarely on solving the greenhouse gas problem. Amory Lovins's early focus on energy conservation also deserves honorable mention.

I expect that I'll have a longer honor roll someday. It would be nice if some independent committee of people would assign praise to various innovators and early idea champions worldwide, inventors who should decades from now be formally respected by their governments.

Y14. Corporate self-accounting

Trusting a corporation that has quantified all of its climate achievements is a bit like trusting a President-for-life to count the votes. Has a truly independent auditing agency verified the company's climate accounting procedures?

Y15. Ecological problems inherent in mining and construction projects

Mining and construction can have climate and other ecological consequences. How much carbon dioxide and methane has been released because of the mining or hydroelectric construction project? How much natural carbon sequestration will be canceled by this project? Will species go extinct?

Y16. The costs and the risks are all acceptable, but "acceptable to who?" -- Charlie King

Poor or indigenous people can be robbed of the land beneath their feet for the digging of a mine, for construction of a hydroelectric dam or for a forestry project. Their communities might be poisoned by oil or by toxic metals. Their land is seen as nothing but an easily expropriated resource.

Y17. Creative corporate and government accounting for costs and benefits

In war, truth is the first casualty, and this seems also to be true of major business propositions.

When one side appears to push a particular new technology as a savior and the other side considers the technology to be fraudulent, it's important to see which side of the issue seems to be supported mainly by cash and by anonymous commenters, by avatars that you couldn't possibly know personally.

Y18. Dealing with troll farms in community comment forums

How can we handle boiler rooms full of hireling commenters who pretend to be highly intelligent and polished while spouting corporate nonsense?

A friend points out that liars rely exclusively on hard-to-prove generalizations with hand waving. It's important to deconstruct their arguments. Get completely granular. Get specific and stay on those specific points, even as the trolls shift around like crazy to avoid being pinned down.

Next, liars go for emotion. Boiler room trolls are paid to write “I'm the lone virtuous truth-teller.” Then they switch to two or more other avatars who both say, “Yes, I happen to agree 100% with this stranger's arguments.”

Axiom: when you're lying and you're in political trouble, tell some truth or other. “I wear a size 42 blue suit” is the truth. Never mind that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the argument at hand. It's a totally random fact but at least it's a fact.

Trolls are usually under orders to figure out who the forum's chief advocate or leader is and then disparage that person like crazy. It destroys a comment forum's cohesion. The trolls hope that enough hurtfulness will drive the advocate away.

In a troll situation I tend to append to each of my comments, “I'm pointedly ignoring certain new posters on this comments forum who haven't established any credibility with me.” By my not responding to their various emotional baits to draw me into some meaningless side argument or shouting match, I help to keep the comments forum more focused on the issue at hand. I often see other commenters rallying to defend the comments forum.

For further reading: Green gaslighting: Another face of climate denialism. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/1/25/green-gaslighting-the-new-face-of-climate-denialism

Y19. Emigrating to Planet B

I have good news and bad news about Planet B. I've looked into lunar colonization. I personally have numbers of potential inventions and in about a century people will be able to live on the moon within pseudogravity wheels and underneath thick lunar radiation shielding. The bad news is that we first have to eke out 100 successful years of human civilization, and that journey might turn into a terribly tough road with uncontrolled climate change.

Y20. A chemtrails fable

I want to mention in passing a bizarre anti-”chemtrails” ad campaign. There's zero evidence whatsoever that some type of chemtrail dispersal gadget has been covertly attached onto thousands of commercial jets owned by several competing companies. No reporter has ever photographed even one of these gadgets. Thousands of aircraft maintenance people would have to know about how to repair and replace such a gadget. An entire supply system would have to refill the gadget with fresh chemtrail chemicals multiple times a day, at hundreds of commercial airports. A financial audit would reveal the extra aviation fuel required to lift such devices and their chemical holding tanks. So, what's behind this funny set of claims?

Apparently Charles Koch had money burning a hole in his pants, so he funded the construction of some remarkably complex websites along with a troll farm to push the imaginary term “chemtrails,” apparently with the goal of discrediting every possible future geoengineering scheme, and in turn his effort would also throw general discredit at anybody working on various types of effective climate change R&D. Ad agency efforts at lying typically try to find and exploit shreds of truth, and in this case there's a shred of truth concerning certain particular geoengineering and direct carbon capture and sequestration schemes. A number of large corporations are loudly pushing certain geoengineering schemes which are high-tech and therefore friendly to monopolization and worldwide patenting, but some of these schemes have serious side issues.

Y21. The nuclear energy sham

Whenever two remarkably opposed sides emerge on an issue, there’s a good chance that one of the “sides” is a sham, an ad agency making lots and lots of stuff up and then sticking to it, supported solely by a source of big money. Nuclear power seems to be in this “two opposed sides” position.

I can only state the side that I believe. When the top of the Chernobyl reactor blew off, I’ve seen various estimates all around one million fatalities. The Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in Pennsylvania caused perhaps 50,000 casualties per Mother Jones magazine. Talking in Japan about casualties after three Fukushima reactors blew their tops off violates Japan’s state secrets law, so talking is a felony in Japan.

The nuclear waste problem is not solved.

Thorium reactors don’t exist. Deuteurium fusion reactors don’t exist. Nor do either of them solve the nuclear waste problem, not in reality. “Better” is no good if you still spread plenty of cancer around.

Nuclear energy is a fossil fuel pig from mining to nuclear waste storage, such that there’s no real fossil fuel point to building a nuclear power plant.

Old plants are terribly dangerous. The Diablo Canyon station sits on a big earthquake fault, so it’s as wildly dangerous as the old Fukushima station.

The line between nuclear power and nuclear weapons is seriously blurry. Once terrorists considered attacking a Belgian plant but they chose an airport instead. The Russian army has been occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station and is apparently threatening that something terrible might go wrong if they don't get some concessions.

In sum, nuclear power can’t exist except by fraud. It’s a huge energy pig falsely claiming to be carbon dioxide free. It’s nothing but a money pig ($31 billion right now for the Vogtle), and then every so often a nuclear disaster hits.

For further reading: In Georgia, Bloated Costs Take Over a Nuclear Power Plant and a Fight Looms Over Who Pays. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21012022/georgia-power-vogtle-nuclear/