Social Issues – blog@davemckay.ca

NIMBY

I can understand why the City of Thorold did not proactively remove the large rotten senile neighbourhood trees. The budget for one large tree removal could be $10,000, and public works, I am certain, does not want the noise of residents fighting back with “not my tree!”

So, the downblast happened and many massive old trees surrendered. We were without power for the better part of 37 hours. Gods know what the cost of all that emergency remediation was. Certainly it will be a lot more than it would have cost to responsibly replace the old trees, that needed to come down, and did come down, with new native trees in a timely manner.

And what this illustrates for me, that has much larger implications is that we can have a problem and know what needs to be done to fix it, but be unable to fix it because we are collectively too stupid.

This is what is wrong also with our climate emergency and our fantasy energy policies. We have had the technology to mitigate against greenhouse gas emissions and climate heating since the 1970s. But stupid arguments about cost and safety and the cries of the wild NIMBY have made it impossible to follow evidence-based policy to deal with the situation.

As an example, I sincerely doubt that the Doctor of Quantum Chemistry Angela Merkel was unaware of the realities of nuclear electricity generation. But for decades it was expedient for her Party to encourage and exploit the anti-nuclear movement in Germany to maintain power. Energiewende has cost significantly more than it would have cost to decarbonize Germany’s electricity sector with new nuclear, and mostly all it has accomplished is replacing clean safe already-payed-for nuclear with short-lived unreliable wind&solar. But the NIMBY public would not have voted for her Party if they had taken an evidence-based position instead.

And I think this is a question of leadership. Leaders need to take valid policy decisions and educate the public as to why those are right. They cannot effectively govern if what they are doing instead is chasing the disinformed ignorance of an electorate.

We need to do better than this.

Two solutions, one obstructionism

We don’t really recycle. There is no market, and there are no facilities for recycling almost everything we pretend to recycle.

I said to someone, “We should stop pretending to recycle; stop shipping our pretend-recycling waste overseas to be disposed of… badly.”

They looked appalled and, with some disgust, said, “So! You think it should just go in landfill‽ If we are not recycling enough then the solution is that we should [pretend to] recycle more.” as if those are the only two options.

Of course the “solution” is to reduce material waste in the supply chain and to build local facilities for handling the remaining waste locally. Mostly that would be waste-to-energy plants.

Wind&solar are not viable technologies for providing the energy that a technological civilization uses. We should stop pretending that they are and invest in real clean energy solutions like nuclear technology we have had fully resolved for decades.

This idea will appall people who really have invested a lot of their psyche in their identity as a forward-thinking green energy activist. “No no!” they will scream. “The solution is to double down and [try futilely] to build even more wind&solar.” “Besides, batteries!” Or, somehow worse, they will gleefully state that since they could afford enough of their own rooftop solar to satisfy them, that everyone else should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and do likewise. Even though that is a logistical and economic impossibility.

Of course the “solution” is to turn back the pages to before the anti-nuclear movement created an environment of such pervasive disinformation about nuclear power that we stopped building out the only infrastructure that can replace fossil fuel and that could have mitigated this ongoing climate catastrophe.

STEM-challenged people who “mean well” are gonna get civilization and most of the life on this planet… ended.

But what about Chernobyl?

A Peter thought he had a gottcha by crying out, “What about TMI, Fukishima, Chernobyl.” He did not. It is like the Peters think these PRATTs have not been addressed numerous times.

Fukushima killed no one. It was an expensive industrial accident. But Japan has moved on from that setback. On the other hand, the tsunami resulted in “19,759 deaths, 6,242 injured, and 2,553 people missing.” The principal contamination from the tsunami was hundreds of thousands of tonnes of urban waste, fuel, and debris that entered the ocean. The water released from Fukishima had radiation levels lower than the limit for drinking water. Which, because of radon, if you have ever been on a well, you were exposed to similar.

As for, “What about Chernobyl‽”

First, while initially it was thought that the accident would render the exclusion zone uninhabitable, what actually happened is that in the absence of human settlement the area has recovered a diverse ecosystem, with even large rare mammals finding sanctuary in the accidental nature preserve. The presence of human settlement was actually worse for the environment, than the disaster. Which is a real slap in the face.

In fact the undamaged reactors remained in operation for many years and, before the Russian invasion, the exclusion zone was a tourist attraction. But I advise you not to go near the elephant’s foot. Which you can’t anyway.

Secondly, while horrific, the increased mortality from the disaster is something between 4000 and 15,000 over a period of about 70 years. That number will be rapidly decreasing because the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing so many more deaths. If a Russian drone kills you today, you cannot get thyroid cancer in 20 years.

To put the 4–15 thousand in context, since long before 1986 air pollution from just German industry, primarily coal-fired electricity generation, has been killing ~75,000 Europeans every year. Five times the high-bound for increased mortality over a century from the accident.

While offshoring dirty industry to China has moved some of those deaths to Asia, the closure of the last two nuclear plants in 2022 was expected to INCREASE the annual deaths by ~1000 in Europe. That was four years ago. So, just those two Energiewende nuclear closures may have killed more people than Chernobyl ever will, already.

But there remain people who whatabout “Three Mile Island or Chernobyl or Fukushima,” to promote their own anti nuclear agenda and undermine the world’s energy supply. For instance, at its peak, before energiewende, Germany was getting 167.27 TWh from clean, safe, already paid for, nuclear that was running like a Swiss watch. In 2025 after a quarter century and what must be approaching €600 BILLION, wind only contributed 133 TWh and solar only contributed 89.62 TWh. For that kind of money Germany could have tripled their nuclear and been producing a 4.37 TWh SURPLUS of low carbon electricity in 2025. Instead they are still burning 204.73 TWh worth of fossil fuel. With the consequent air pollution and annual death toll far in excess of Chernobyl and the rest.

On the other hand, from 13 years ago, “NASA scientist Dr. Pushker Kharecha and Dr. James Hansen (the leading climate scientist in the US) recently authored a study which conservatively estimates nuclear power has saved 1.8 million lives, which otherwise would have been lost due to fossil fuel pollution and associated causes, since 1971.” That number is almost certainly well in excess of 2 million by now.

Pretending that nuclear is dangerous is the actual thing that is delaying our energy transition away from fossil fuels.

Stop referencing AI

Yesterday, I was listening to an episode of More Or Less (BBC) and they were talking about a stupid racist claim made by a UK Reich-wingnut about refugees and crime. It was nasty. It was wrong, in fact completely made up from nothing. The FOI police stats it was “based” on are imaginary.

But the nasty bigot who started the LIE, for nasty lie is what it was, made the excuse that she had gotten the racist misinformation from ChatGPT, so her hate-splaining was not her fault.

ChatGPT, because it is not any kind of intelligence, just made up the answer the “Conservative” stain had wanted to hear. Fabricated a reference to police data that was entirely a product of trying to satisfy the prompt, by making up a plausible sounding reference to data that, in fact, did not exist.

And it gets worse. People tried using Grok to “verify” the, and this is the important part, entirely fabricated, claims. And Grok did “verify” them. Hallucinating in a very convincing way the same non-existant FOI police data as ChatGPT because it was using the ChatGPT fabrication as reference data.

You cannot use the shit output from any large language model or “AI” as a reference. And unless you want to get led down the garden path into grave misconceptions, you need to stop using those, very suspect, platforms for “information.” Indeed, you should do everything you can to block all the AI you possibly can and stop using “devices” and platforms that have begun to depend on it.

Because it is not intelligent, and it has no accountability, and it is not compiling data, it is generating text and it is doing so in a way that only needs to “sound” plausible.

If we do not stop this now, we will accelerate toward the cliff after which it will be mostly impossible for lay-persons to distinguish between actual real data and disinformation. And that is a very powerful tool for bad actors, like Annunziata Rees-Mogg, to cynically use against us.