banner pic is With You by Artkitt-Creations
Max & Chloe ♥ 4 ever
the same way hamas doesn’t represent palestine, netanyahu’s government doesn’t represent israel either. the funding of hamas was a far-right candidate’s propaganda tactic, not something that the people of israel decided would be a good idea.
deposing that far-right israeli leadership would be the first step toward fixing this whole mess. many israelis (around 75%) want netanyahu gone immediately after the war and it seems like their approval ratings have gone down as a result of this conflict, in contrast to the general trend of right-wing governments benefiting from war in most situations.
if the west can put pressure on israel (and that it can, without american weapons most of the surrounding muslim countries would love to genocide the hell out of israel), this is where that pressure needs to go. finish the war, get hamas out of at least the government of gaza (fully disbanding them will be a longer process, but at least don’t put them in control), and then execute a regime change in israel as well. get rid of both governing parties that caused this mess to begin with and then their successors can hopefully actually work towards peace.
you mean fork him under a new maintainer?
pretty sure there’s lots of linux running there
So you openly admit that you’re just detracting from it, focusing on a technicality.
I’m not considering the surface-level meaning of your words here. I’m considering your actions, because it’s a hell of a lot harder to lie with actions than with words. And your actions clearly show that you’re just propping up Germany’s policy of shutting off nuclear and therefore having to run coal where they wouldn’t have had to – and your claim here also confirms that you’re willing to be disingenuous and borderline trollish to do that.
But thank you for confirming that you’re out of arguments on that topic. I wish your country’s leaders could also be this reasonable, because their policy pollutes the same planet the rest of us are also stuck on.
No, but you could have sold the SUV instead to get the Prius. Your analogy fails beyond this point for the same reason your entire reasoning about nuclear fails: because you have chosen two cars that are the same level of harmful to the environment. Nuclear and fossils are not even close to the same level. So let’s rephrase this, so that it can actually convey the point we’re discussing:
You have two cars, a diesel pickup and an electric pickup. You need two cars and have the opportunity to get a Prius. You sell the electric pickup to get a Prius, instead of the obvious move of selling the diesel pickup.
Yes, technically you did not replace the electric pickup with a diesel truck. You just haven’t touched the diesel truck.
Still, what you did is functionally equivalent of selling the diesel truck to get the Prius (which was the expected behavior), and then replacing the electric truck with a diesel truck because you hate electric trucks for some reason. And that is my point. I don’t consider your actions in a vacuum, I consider it in the context of your potential. At the end of the day, your fleet still consists of a diesel truck and a Prius, while it could have been an electric pickup and a Prius, which would have been far cleaner.
In the meantime, your French friend sold their diesel pickup and now driving around with a BEV and a PHEV. And you complain that I point out that they did a much better job at reducing their environmental impact than you did. Which was my entire point from the beginning, not the technicality you insist on zeroing in on.
Your argument still boils down to the same logical fallacy that I’ve addressed already.
Germany could deploy X amount of renewables. They had a chance to replace something in the grid. They chose to replace nuclear and keep coal, which is the same difference as if nuclear was replaced with coal. You wasted your chance at shutting down coal plants and instead got rid of a far cleaner energy source, out of fear.
Also, France produces about 40-50 TWh more energy per year than Germany, which about accounts for their hydro advantage. The playing field is as even as it could be, which is why this example showcases the German energy policy’s abject failure. And sure, maybe you’ll only be pumping 10x as much CO2 to the atmosphere as the French for, say, 10-15 years – that’s a hypothetical compared to today’s reality, and even then, how will you justify that decade of environmental damage to future generations?
Even on your own map, almost every country in Europe that’s not already in a lighter category is trending clearly down. Germany is one of the very few outliers, joining the pack with Poland, Estonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. Is that really all that Germany is capable of? Or are your priorities just clearly misplaced?
There was a link in this very same thread (right here) that compares France to Germany. It’s a very simple case study: a country that does use nuclear pollutes 10x less per kWh than a country that actively destroyed its nuclear capability. It doesn’t get any more simple than that.
Unless your argument is that if Germany didn’t shut down nuclear it wouldn’t have deployed renewables, which I hope it isn’t because it would be a completely lunatic point to make, the situation is the same no matter how you twist the mental gymnastics. Germany’s grid is one of the dirtiest in Europe largely because of the lack of nuclear baseline, which, if it was kept, would make it one of the cleanest.
If your argument is that the renewables deployed in Germany should be counted towards replacing nuclear, then you must also accept that Germany failed to significantly cut into its fossil plants with renewables, which other countries managed to do in the same timeframe, because its entire renewable capacity had to go towards filling a gap the shutdown of nuclear left. It’s the same difference either way, and it suffers from the same fallacy that you’re pretty clearly intentionally making at this point: that you are unwilling to consider nuclear in the context of its alternatives, and are only willing to talk about it either in a vacuum, or in an idealistic situation where renewable capacity and energy storage are high enough that shutting off nuclear will not lead to an increased demand for fossils.
I’ve addressed that idealistic future in this very same comment section by the way: as soon as we reach a point where we can eliminate fossils and any renewables deployed cuts into nuclear’s share, as opposed to that of fossil plants, I’m against nuclear. But that’s not the reality of the situation yet. The decommissioning of nuclear plants in Germany was extremely premature, and harmed the environment, both with increased radiation and with gargantuan amounts of CO2 output.
Renewables > Nuclear > Fossils. It’s literally that simple. As long as we have fossils, replacing them with nuclear would be beneficial, and any decrease to nuclear capacity is a negative. If you can offset something with renewables, it should be fossils, not nuclear.
Because the actual amount of waste that has to be stored for that long is minimal and can be shoved kilometers down into the earth’s crust with the same tech that’s used to extract oil. Nuclear waste storage is a great headline topic but there have been a lot of innovations in the past ~50 years.
As for lower tiers of waste (as in, less dangerous, more numerous, mostly consisting of stuff like tools used to work on the power plants, which is what actually goes in the yellow barrels usually depicted with grey goo), several reactor projects existed that actively used that radioactive waste for even more energy generation, usually targeted extremely hard by anti-nuclear activists because it would take away their talking points. The science exists, the opposition is usually political and driven by fear tactics. But this is why we store those lower tiers of nuclear waste on the surface, not because it’s the best place to put it but because it’s where we can retrieve it once we find a use for it.
And again, consider the alternative. Fossils also fuck up the environment and it’s not a good thing that they do it faster. The only way their effect would go away that fast is mass genocide of the ecoterrorist flavor, and exactly what future generations are we talking about in that case?
All of that is great, and I’m all for it. Can’t wait for the first grids with no fossils whatsoever, once energy storage improves enough that it can take all the balancing load. When we reach that, it will mark the start of the era where nuclear is actually being replaced by renewables rather than fossils.
My point here is that switching off nuclear is premature for now. It’s a very clean source of energy once you look at the per kWh numbers and nuclear waste management solutions are actually extremely safe. (The videos where they test the containers by smashing actual trains into them are kinda fun – and those tests are done with liquid water, which is far more susceptible to leaking than solid ceramics.) Of course, if we reach a point where wind, solar, and hydro can fully replace fossils and start eating into nuclear’s share then that’s gonna be a very different conversation, and I’m fully with renewables in that situation, but we should always keep the alternatives in mind when we shut something off.
That’s why we’re not just shutting down coal plants altogether, because there’s just nothing to replace them. Although an energy policy where you just flat out ban renewables fossils and tell the market that that’s the supply, now go figure it out would certainly be interesting. Very expensive and terrible for the economy, but interesting nonetheless. (Definitely the based kind of chaos if you ask me.)
edit: okay, that was a weird word to accidentally replace, lol
Germany, specifically, was one of the worst offenders in this category. They do renewables at maximum capacity (like everyone else) but there’s still a massive gap to fill, and with issues of strategic dependence around hydrocarbons, the obvious answer to fill in the missing capacity was coal. Most of the time you get a mix of coal and natural gas, whichever is easier, but in Germany’s case that mix was almost entirely on the side of coal.
And without abundant hydro power, or an energy storage solution that could store a full night’s worth of energy even if the current deployment of renewables was able to generate that (which it’s pretty far from), there aren’t a lot more options. Germany’s strategy to shut off its nuclear plants out of fearmongering has been a heinous crime against the environment.
When oil companies love your green party you know you fucked up.
In theory, yes. In practice, nuclear plants that are shut off are almost always replaced with fossils, with the specific fossil fuel of choice often being coal.
Energy is not something where you can just pick one solution and run with it (at least, non-fossils, anyway). Nuclear is slow to ramp, so it usually takes care of baseline load. Renewables like wind and solar are situational, they mostly work throughout the day (yes, wind too, differential heating of earth’s surface by the sun is what causes surface-level winds) and depend greatly on weather. Hydro is quite reliable but it’s rarely available in the quantities needed. The cleanest grids on the planet use all of these, and throw in some fossils for load balancing, phasing them out with energy storage solutions as they become available.
You can’t just shoot one of the pillars of this system of clean energy and then say you never tried to topple the system, just wanted to prop up the other pillars. Discussing shutting off nuclear plants without considering the alternative is pure lunacy, driven by fearmongering, and propped up by no small amounts of oil money for a reason.
Replacing nuclear with renewables is simply not the reality of the situation. Nuclear and renewables work together to replace fossils, and fill different roles. It’s not one or the other, it’s both and even together they’re not yet enough.
So when you do consider the alternatives, moving from nuclear to the inevitable replacement, fossils, is still lunacy, just for other reasons: even if you care about nothing more than atmospheric radiation, coal puts more of it out per kWh generated, solely because of C-14 isotopes. Nuclear is shockingly clean, mostly due to its energy density, but also because it’s not producing barrels of green goo, just small pills of spicy ceramics. And if your point is accidents, just how many oil spills have we had to endure? How many times was the frickin ocean set on fire? How many bloody and brutal wars were motivated by oil? Is that really what a safer energy source sounds like to you, just because there are two nuclear accidents the world knows about, and a thousand fossil accidents, of which the world lost count already?
And deflecting to other industries is also quite disingenuous. Especially if your scapegoat is transportation, since that’s an industry that’s increasingly getting electrified in an effort to make it cleaner at the same logistical capacity, and therefore will depend more and more on the very same electrical grid which you’re trying to detract from.
unfortunately lemmy already has those people, but luckily enough they seem to organize in tidy communities that are easy to defederate
^ this. both governments need to be gone, that’s the only chance for the civilians, palestinans and israelis alike, to see peace in their lifetime.