Obviously this is not ubiquitous, but anti-nuclear sentiment at the very least, gets funding from the big oil and coal companies.
Not even trying to be pro-nuclear here, but the shift towards renewables from nuclear could definitely be done in a way that doesn’t result in shifting over to COAL!
I understand being against fission power in favour of wind/water/solar power (both due to the strict security requirements and the time required to build nuclear power plants), but it’s certainly far better than fossil fuels
Ultimately the biggest problem with energy is the abundance that a grid provides that results in a poor distribution of resources. This is an essay which touches on the issues but scarcely mentions energy.
It seems like Marxists should have a better understanding of energy policy but for some reason it’s oft overlooked.
The energy is far from fairly distributed, of course – like any commodity under capitalism – although I don’t know if I’d call it the biggest problem
It is the biggest problem in the sense that having a central grid is a mistake. All other problems stem from that, including nuclear proliferation.
There’s nothing wrong with centralized energy grids, ie power plants, power lines, power transmission systems, etc. The problem is the imperialist misallocation of expertise and resources that prevent global south countries from scaling up their existing grids to meet their needs.
Not true. The problem is with the assumption that newer economies have the same wasteful needs that imperial economies desire.
Its the height of imperialist arrogance to say that new economies don’t need energy grids, or that they should be denied things like air conditioning, cooking, electricity, internet… that imperial core citizens already enjoy, or that attempting to get these things is “wasteful”.
This is the anarchist “subordination of workers to capitalist politics in the guise of negation of politics.” You can’t say "no energy system for you! to people dying from heatstroke.
No one needs a grid and no one is denied anything. Waste means objective waste not some opinion of waste. It means there is a better way to accomplish the same, not to do without.
On location solar and wind power is all that is necessary for any needs. It is also cheaper than building a big honking grid. Microgrid transmission can be used to balance local demand spikes in commercial and industrial areas.
Insulated buildings require less energy to maintain temperature, etc.
It is the height of arrogance to say that people need to waste energy, to say that everyone deserves an opportunity to be a glutton, and it’s only fair that since you got to waste then I get to waste too. That’s the same thinking that produces women CEOs who are just as evil as the men before them then calls it gender equality.
Edit: you are right about one thing though, expertise is being denied by the imperial core. Like the expertise to know that grids are wasteful, and there is a better way. Because they’d like to sell you a grid instead. Puerto Rico is a perfect example of this.
Whomever is down voting me, engage in discourse and I’ll provide you with insights. I don’t say these things out of any personal inklings but rather as an obligation to my comrades.
I see the issue with having a single point of failure, but I don’t follow your last sentence
So there’s a lot to unpack here. Strictly in the nuclear sense, having a ton of americium (typically powers smoke detectors) isn’t a proliferation risk. The small fission product can’t be weaponized. But when we want to gridize and produce gigawatts at a single station, then the fissionable materials can be weaponized to release a similar amount of energy in a small time period (aka bomb).
But aside from nuclear energy, grid energy is entirely unnecessary.
The top 2 biggest wastes of energy are transporting people to and fro, for whatever reason. If we utilize modern communication technology, people can be present by transmitting their photons, their visage, rather than their entire physical mass. Let alone the safety conveyance which adds several tons of mass. (aka vehicle). The second biggest waste is thermal equilibrium. Cooling and heating.
The amazing thing about thermodynamics, is if you properly separate cool from heat, known as insulation, there is very little need to move heat from one side to the other, and the energy required to move that heat is almost nothing. For example, the amount of heat that a human adds to a dwelling just by existing and metabolizing, can be removed with millijoules per hour from a heat pump.
If we factor in the technology of insulation, heat pumps, and air locks, 99.999998% reduction in HVAC energy usage can be achieved.
And all this is with technology invented almost a century ago. 3-4 generations have been born since this has been possible. That’s how completely fucked we are wrt technology in the current system.
So by “proliferation”, do you just mean that any country with a central grid will also be able to create a fission bomb?
Transportation is definitely a huge waste of energy. I didn’t know about the cooling and heating, though – is this just because it’s more profitable for the capitalists to make people pay for air conditioning rather than to properly insulate housing?
“proliferation” is a nuclear energy political term. It historically means that any technology that can be used for energy production can also be used for weapon production, but I think I clearly explained where that line of thinking comes from. Let me know if you need any clarification.
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Mostly it’s because landlords. They don’t have to pay the energy cost, so they don’t bother to insulate.
Personally I think it should be part of minimum habitability codes.
It’s Always the Landlords™