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From The Fields

Climate Change and Uranium

FromTheFields Wednesday August 23, 2023


The fear factor caused by COVID has largely dissipated. At the statistical level, it's indisputable that Sweden which had minimal COVID restrictions had a lower excess death rate than did most other countries which locked down, masked up and vaccinated rigorously.

The administrative apparachics who obtain their power by instilling fear in people are now looking for something else to instil that fear. The climate change/global warming narrative fills the bill nicely. The weather is always hot somewhere. And hot weather is always used to feed the global warming narrative. Enough people are afraid that governments have been able to allocate enormous sums of taxpayer money to the green agenda.

I am neither a meteorologist nor a computer modeler so I cannot persuasively argue with climate modelers who are adept in those skills. But I can read and understand the historical record of climate change. And it does change. The climate of earth has been much warmer...and colder...than it is now over the course of human...and pre human...history. Over the eons, the correlation of climate with human caused carbon dioxide emissions has been nil.

But we are still being forced to adapt to the electrification of everything under the theory that electricity, unlike fossil fuels, does not emit carbon dioxide. Never mind that coal is still the largest fuel used for electricity production. Never mind that the cobalt needed for batteries comes in large part from forced child labor in African cobalt mines. Never mind that windmills at sea seem to be killing the whales. Never mind that the mining for lithium for batteries, silver for solar arrays and a whole host of other metals is fossil fuel intensive.

And never mind that the cleanest way possible to create electricity is actively over-regulated or stopped altogether. Nuclear. Up until a couple years ago there was a 30 year hiatus on the construction of new nuclear power plants. Again, due to fear promulgated by the same green activists that demand an end to the use of fossil fuels. The reality is that no one died at Three Mile Island or Fukushima and only 31 died at Chernobyl plus a few thousand in the following years from early cancer deaths. Meanwhile vast numbers die from accidents in mining and transporting combustibles and battery inputs.

And just in the last few days, the Biden Administration put one of the country's largest reserves of uranium off limits by declaring, by executive order, no less, a new national monument in Northern Arizona.

If environmentalists are serious about decarbonizing the generation of electricity, they will support the expansion of nuclear power. If they won't, they are either seriously uninformed or seriously up to something more sinister than saving the climate.