‘Thought’ is one word for it
Asked yesterday on “Fox Sunday News” about the implications for American energy policy of what’s happening in Japan, Mitch McConnell responded, “My thought about it is, we ought not to make American and domestic policy based upon an event that happened in Japan.” Right. Let’s not be in a hurry to learn any lessons. Japan, remember, is very far away.
Is this just an egregious case of American exceptionalism? Or is this a thoughtless American’s Japanese exceptionalism? (Maybe McConnell thinks Japan is just very unlucky when it comes to all things nuclear.) But of course geography has nothing to do with it. McConnell was also in a hurry to tell everyone not to be in a hurry to learn any lessons from the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Let’s all calm down and let cooler, more forgetful heads prevail.
By coincidence, the Wall Street Journal has an editorial today offering similar advice. “Our larger point is less about nuclear power than how we react as a society to inevitable disasters, both natural and man-made. Because a plane crashes, we don’t stop flying. Because an oil rig explodes in the Gulf, we don’t (or at least we shouldn’t) stop drilling for oil.” They do endorse learning lessons eventually — but don’t let’s panic and “overreact.” (Who could disagree?)
Perhaps McConnell was using “thought” in the same sense as Jonah Goldberg was when he waved away the notion of an “anti-Muslim backlash.”
Let me get this straight: none of the nuke plants were physically damaged by the earthquake or tsunami directly. It’s just that the power grid went out, shutting off the cooling systems, resulting in meltdown…and the BACKUP POWER TO KEEP THE COOLING SYSTEM FUNCTIONING FAILED?????
So, there are facilities around the globe which are stoking furnaces literally hotter than Hell, which will melt down and irradiate entire land masses unless they are constantly cooled…but these idiots didn’t have the proper safeguards to ensure the continuation of the cooling in the event of a simple power loss??
Seems like more of a management problem than a pure technology problem to me.
I’m starting to think of the Republican leadership as the lotus eaters. And why not? This is a drug-riddled culture from top to bottom.
It is hard not to imagine that terrorists around the globe aren’t taking note right now of the ease with which they might create havoc by attacking atomic energy facilities. If you are not worried about this you probably don’t live near one.
P. –
The intractable problem is that there will always be the human factor in the design and maintenance of nuclear facilities. Not to mention the inevitable transport and warehousing of spent nuclear fuel. The human factor will always have to operate there too.
Madness.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Accept Americans, of course. History? We don’t need no stinkin’ history!
Oops – except. Starting out the week this way is a bad omen.
“Japan, remember, is very far away.”
Actually, I checked, and Japan indeed is very far away. Which is relevant when we’re talking about the likelihood of earthquakes threatening an entire nation.
Despite the Japan meltdown risk, here is why he is still pro nuclear…
http://betweentwosouths.blogspot.com/2011/03/fukushima-nuclear-meltdown-why-silvio.html
Here’s a site listing the current and the many, many decommisioned nuclear reactors all over the world, including the U. S. No, they’re not all big ones.
Note that they can be found and used to be found at many, many universities. I remember reading years ago that Stanford U. (that hot-bed of Nobel winners) had one right on the San Andreas fault. If you live in the Northeast there are many in easy driving distance.
It’s the hubris of these people — their notion that they always know what they’re doing — that gets to me. The problem is that big brains *can* and *do* make big mistakes. And if they’re so smart, why have most of these facilities been shut down over the course of time? Can this technology really be cheap in the long run?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors
“Actually, I checked, and Japan indeed is very far away.” Good for you, Mark. Maybe this will become a habit.
“Which is relevant when we’re talking about the likelihood of earthquakes threatening an entire nation.” But not when we’re talking about the potential effects of earthquakes on nuclear power plants near large populations, which is what we’re really talking about.
You may have seen the Japanese maps showing the probable course of a nuclear cloud should any of these facilities fail.
It heads straight for the west coast of the USA and Canada. Of course once it gets into the upper atmosphere, none of the N hemisphere would be safe.
I take back part of what I said — most of the facilities have not been shut down. I was looking at the plutonium reactor type, most of which have been shut down, plus many, many research facilities.
“Thinking about a problem” is always a novel idea. I encourage it.
While it’s easy to imagine that terrorists around the world have dreamed of sabotaging a nuclear plant, they are “hard targets” in every sense of the word. It should be equally easy to imagine that there is an entire cottage industry paid to think as creatively as they can to dream up ways to sabotage nuclear plants. There is such an industry. Question: “Can a U.S. nuclear plant survive a direct hit from a fully fueled 747? The nuclear power industry has answered that question.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7eI4vvlupY&feature=related
The power plants all survived essentially the worst earthquake that could be thrown at them. The LNG plants nearby did not do so well. Over the next several days we’ll see how the plants are demobilized and if that can be done successfully. It appears that so far, things are going pretty good. Are the plants permanently wrecked? Probably. Any injuries or long term radiation exposures? Don’t know yet.
“Wait and see” before forming opinions is not always a bad thing
For an informed discussion see http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/13/japans-nuclear-crisis-lessons-for-the-us?ref=earth
One particularly interesting observation by Michael W. Golay of MIT:
“… the concerns aroused (by the damage to the nuclear power plants) may well delay expanded use of nuclear power worldwide. If so, the greatest nuclear-related harm of the Japanese earthquake may be the lost opportunities for nuclear power in reducing climate change.”
See also http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_greens.html in regard to environmentalists’ changing attitude toward nuclear power plants in view of their concern about global warming.
“It heads straight for the west coast of the USA and Canada. Of course once it gets into the upper atmosphere, none of the N hemisphere would be safe.”
We are a long distance from a significant, but not large, release. Do you have any calculations that support your conclusion that the Northern Hemisphere would not be ‘safe’?
Here’s a map showing the placement and age of nuclear reactors in the U.S. :
Sorry. Here’s the map:
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/map-power-reactors.html
In any rationally planned energy economy, it would be insane (because it is) to place dozens of nuclear power plants on one of the earth’s major earthquake zones facing in the direction of any approaching tsunami.
The world order of competitive nation-states (“Win the future!”) forced the ruling classes of resource poor Japan to endanger the health of tens of millions with an expansive nuclear energy infrastructure. The last time this economic system choked resource poor Japan, the Japanese establishment decided on military conquest and imperialism to solve its fuel problems. Clearly, there must be a better way.
Here’s from the NYT discussion, from a nuclear engineer:
“We know that earthquakes can cause fires at nuclear reactors, and U.S. reactor safety studies conclude that fire can be a dominant risk for reactor core damage by disabling primary and back-up emergency systems. Yet dozens of nuclear reactors in the U.S. have operated for years in violation of federal fire protection regulations with no plans to address these safety risks anytime soon.”
See? Human nature — our propensity to make mistakes, and our greed — are the real danger. Not the physics. Not the engineering designs. The people who make the risk decisions.
Face it — we can’t afford the risks of nuclear energy, even though it, like coal, does not cause the greenhouse effect which is so devastating to our weather system.
There are alternatives — solar and wind. And other things are being explored. Just this week the Air Force reported on its experiments to harness the energy of waves — in the ocean. From Forbes Magazine:
“Air Force Academy researchers have harnessed more than 99% of the energy in a simulated ocean wave and are now preparing to deploy the world’s first free-floating, fully submerged wave energy converter that generates electrical power from deep ocean waves.”
We must not succumb to the quick fixes that the new energy industry dangles before us. In my own state, Entergy, with two reactors in the area, does not have a good record. And given the old energy industry (think BP) there is no reason to trust these guys. Energy was, is, and will be where the big money is. So watch the industry carefully and don’t trust their spokesmen.!
It might be worth mentioning that the Japanese plants were built by the U.S., so I’m not sure who the “idiots” are here.
I think it’s pretty clear that building nuclear power plants on geophysical fault lines and/or coastal areas where power can knock out failsafe power might be something to reconsider. If you look at the map Susan provided, you’ll see a couple of plants that look like they’re smack-dab on the San Andreas fault. There also look to be a fair few in the Gulf Coast which might be vulnerable to storm damage.
As I understand it, newer plants are much safer, and it seems to me that perhaps we ought to consider refitting or decommissioning some of the older plants in favor of new ones.
Germany, Switzerland suspend nuclear plans
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=germany-switzerland-suspend-nuclear-plans-2011-03-14
But, hey – what do THEY know? Darned furriners.
Amazing; direct from the brain of Mitch McConnell, the turkey gobbler; wow.
Having worked for electric utilities most of my adult life, when I saw some Japanese windbag politician (those types are everywhere it seems) run out in front of a camera last Friday blathering some nonsense to the effect that “the nuclear plants are OK – don’t worry about them” I knew the poor Japanese people in that area were in deep trouble. Smart money would have been worried about the four reactors – even if there had been no tsunami.
Most politicians cannot begin to understand an electric utility, much less nuclear reactors. An 8.9 earthquake followed by a 30 foot high tsunami and the politico tells us to ‘pay no attention to that nuclear plant behind the curtain’. That is rich.
There are tons of lessons we can and should learn from Japan’s sad tragedy.
First however, we need to pray for Japan and send material help so they can dig themselves out, bury the dead, and begin the process of recovering.
I am not anti-nuke, but in all reasonablness, McConnell and his ilk should just keep quiet for once and get out of the way; best to keep what apparently passes for their “thoughts” on this matter to themselves for now.
“Good for you, Mark. Maybe this will become a habit.”
Matthew–
I think maybe it is becoming a habit. In fact, I checked your quote. You lifted only the first part of the sentence. The remainder of that sentence, which you did not include in your quote, nor link to, is “…and we ought to concentrate on helping the Japanese get past this catastrophe.” I think the Senator’s desire to put people first (the Japanese), rather than politics, is one more example of American exceptionalism. Nothing in Senator McConnell’s expression of concern for the Japanese people can fairly be understood to imply we cannot learn from catastrophes that befall other nations.
For a fair and balanced presentation of the Senator’s response, here: http://video.foxnews.com/v/4583168/quake-blow-to-future-of-us-nuclear-power
Great point, Mark. No two ways about it: McConnell didn’t say we shouldn’t make U.S. policy on the basis of something that happened in Japan until he said we shouldn’t make U.S. policy on the basis of something that happened in Japan.
Mark, nothing in what you call “the remainder of that sentence” — and what sounds to me like the following sentence — mitigates the fatuity of the words I quoted. It merely reminds us that human decency is not incompatible with stupidity. Did you really think anyone here was suggesting that McConnell said we shouldn’t help the Japanese?
“Did you really think anyone here was suggesting that McConnell said we shouldn’t help the Japanese?”
Not at all. But I did think your selective quote provided no context and was misleading. But now that the link is readily available, interested readers can watch the video and decide for themselves. Which is the way it should be.
“McConnell was also in a hurry to tell everyone not to be in a hurry to learn any lessons from the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Let’s all calm down and let cooler, more forgetful heads prevail.”
So what are your solutions to the world’s energy needs?
Prior to Deepwater horizon had you ever heard of Ixtoc I?
Do we stop oil extraction?
If we don’t which areas will we make off limits?
58 Americans were killed in coal mine disasters in the 21st century. About 4% of all U.S. coal miners develop black lung. Annual U.S. deaths from black lung are in the hundreds.
Do we stop coal mining?
Cooler heads have indeed been working on these problems for at least 150 years. If you have some solutions, those cooler heads would be very interested.
This NY Times graphic is pretty informative on the threat of melt down.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/12/world/asia/the-explosion-at-the-japanese-reactor.html
Note that apparently there is no Chernobyl-like disaster possible. For some reason the Russkies had no containment shield, as are in place in Japan.
Safe was a bad word I guess. better would be safe from some level of radiation
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Japan is more than 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometres) from the US West Coast, and nearer to Alaska in the north. Some experts suggest that, blown along by the fast-moving jet stream, radioactivity could reach North America in 36 hours.
“Some of the radioactivity could carry in the atmosphere to the West Coast of the US,” said nuclear expert Joe Cirincione, head of anti-nuclear group Ploughshares Fund.
He cited the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster to underline how far radioactivity can travel.
“The radioactivity spread around the entire Northern Hemisphere,” from the devastated Ukrainian plant, he said.
Harvey Wasserman, a senior adviser to environmental group Greenpeace added that after Chernobyl “fallout did hit the jet stream and then the coast of California, thousands of miles away, within 10 days.
“It then carried all the way across the northern tier of the United States,” he continued.
One climate expert used a modelling program from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to determine where the radioactivity would spread.
“The great majority of these runs have taken plumes of radioactivity emitted from Japan’s east coast eastwards over the Pacific, with the plumes staying over water for at least five days,” said meteorologist Jeff Masters.
“It is highly unlikely that any radiation capable of causing harm to people will be left in atmosphere after seven days and 2000+ miles of travel,” added Masters, founder of the Weather Underground online weather forecasting service.
“Even the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which had a far more serious release of radioactivity, was unable to spread significant contamination more than about 1,000 miles,” he said.
The NCR spokesman declined to comment in depth on possible scenarios for how quickly or at what levels radioactivity could reach the US mainland.
“Right now the government as a whole has people looking at the situation and asking these questions. We don’t have the answers yet. We don’t have anything that we can say publicly right now.”
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/1116549/1/.html
Just b/c the Japanese reactors do not follow the Chernobyl pattern does not mean they won’t fail in a big way. Officials yesterday were saying that, at worst, we’d have a Three Mile Island scenario (what a comfort).
This morning, it’s clear that large amounts of radioactivity are now coming out of the plants, that people are not believing government reports, and that they’re fleeing the area.
I think, tragically, the Japanese disasters are giving us new worst-case scenarios to ponder.
Also, the containment structure for reactor two was what was destroyed in the first explosion.
As events seem to be unfolding today (Tuesday 3/15), the situation appears very serious. Prayers surely are in order, particularly for the workers who are attempting to contain the situation at great personal risk.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16nuclear.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha22
Btw – my state (Illinois) has the dubious distinction of leading the US in number of nuclear power plants with 11. Illinois is also extremely prone to tornadoes, and parts of the state sit atop geological fault lines.
Wind and sunshine are looking awfully benign about now.
Serious question: if the short-term choice is between nuclear-generated power and fossil fuel-generated power, isn’t the latter the more responsible choice?
Joe: This post was about McConnell’s silly implication that we shouldn’t learn anything about our own policy from the situation in Japan. But, since you asked: Do you think auto manufacturers and oil companies have any stake in making sure fuel-efficientcy standards don’t get too high? How cool are their heads?
I don’t think McConnell is saying we don’t learn from this, but that we don’t make significant policy decisions in the immediate aftermath of this disaster. We don’t even know all of the facts yet. What’s silly is making poor policy decisions based on faulty and inadequate information. The last three decades are replete with cases of making policy (particularly in relation to the environment) based on isolated incidents or speculation about fututre harm.
But then again, we live in a “Don’t let a good crisis go to waste,” society.
The fact is we have nuclear reactors and we probably need to build more of them.
Also, Latin America is getting to the point where they will be building some new nuclear reactors. The more their economies develop, the more electricity they require.
Bearing this in mind, we should work closely with Japan’s engineers to learn all we can from this.
Ken, I agree with your comments 100%. But will our politicians, and those heads of the nuclear industry—-have such excellent wisdom? I wonder!
No, Ken, that’s not a fact; it’s a judgment, one that the events in Japan call into question.
I do agree that it will be hard to resist the advantages of nuclear power if our only model of economic development entails unlimited increases in the use of energy. For promoters of this model, economic health equals economic growth: more production, more consumption, more transportation, more of everything. The logic of capitalism is “grow or die.” But the result of this mainly unquestioned imperative may eventually be “grow and die.” No energy source is free of danger, of course, but the dangers of nuclear reactors are unique. Nuclear power requires us not only to undertake risk ourselves, but to put people many generations into the future at risk; and no one knows enough to be sure how great that risk is. Public policy is always about weighing benefits against costs and harms, and one can only do this if one can calculate the harms as well as one can calculate the benefits.
Jean –
About contemplating worst-case scenarios —
(This is going to make a very round-about point.) The Piagetians showed a long time ago that a condition of developing a conscience is developing empathy. Enpathy requires that we be able to imagine the feelings and thoughts of others. So no imagination, no empathy, and no empathy, no conscience.
I’m quite sure that the same dependence on imagination is present when we try to think about possible future events, including possible new Chernobyl’s or worse. Poor imaginations will result in poor understanding of real possibilites we might have to deal with, and that includes future threats of all sorts, whether nuclear, biological, political, whatever.
Without developed imaginations democracy cannot work. But our schools require less and less of the humanities which develop our capacities to imagine alternatives, or even to imagine what is inevitable. This is, I think, the over-riding reason to return the humanities to the curricula of all students — including the curricula for scientists and business majors. Novels and poetry are not they are necessities. IF a scientist cannot imagine the possible *psychological* failures — failures to imagine alternative weather/geological events — of themselves and other scientists in designing nuclear reactors, then those scientists will not have considered all the possible worst case scenarios. Apparently that is exactly what happened in Japan — the designers didn’t realize their own fallibility, their own blindness to alternative possibilities if a catastrophic earthquake hit.
Yes, that was round-about, but I fear it is true.
Just announced that the Japanese event has reached a level 6 the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. The scale goes from 1 to 7, with Chernobyl being a level 7 event.
Matthew
Every time I see these “capitalism” is evil remarks I cringe.
Try this thought exercise. Go on line and search for satellite views of the earth at night – there are a lot out there. Then go look at map or list of nations for illness and death from the two leading causes of death for children under 5 – malaria and diarrhea. You will notice a fascinating correspondence. Of particular interest might be the relative lack of these problems in places like Singapore and South Africa compared to their neighbors and better yet North vs. South Korea.
Where the lights are on children aren’t dying. Capitalism saves lives.
What’s happening in Japan is horrible and scary, but so are 1.5 million people dying every from diseases that virtually don’t exist in countries with reliable power. Even the worst estimates of the Chernobyl disaster deaths are a tiny fraction of this annual amount.
Sean,
“Evil” is your word, not mine. Would the word “suboptimal” keep you from cringing?
One doesn’t need a satellite image to know fewer children die in rich developed countries than in poor undeveloped countries. Whether or not capitalism saves lives, money certainly does. But this doesn’t take us very far. It doesn’t tell us whether capitalism is the only feasible model of development, or whether, if it isn’t the only such model, it’s the best available one. Nor does it tell us whether developed countries, whatever they owe to capitalism historically, could now bring down their own child mortality rates yet further by equally distributing material resources among their populations. Try this thought exercise: If all the world’s current wealth were distributed not according to the dictates of the market but rather according to material need, do you think more or fewer children would die?
I reject the tradeoff you suggest: More nuclear disasters like the ones we’re seeing now in Japan (because “reliable power” must include nuclear power), or more kids dying of malaria and diarrhea. With enough political will, we could get rid of all the nuclear power plants in the world and still have enough energy to keep healthy economies going. With enough political will, we could get rid of malaria in Africa. And, believe it or not, we could do these things at the same time.
“Novels and poetry are not [luxuries;?] they are necessities.”
I agree with that statement in the abstract. I also agree that the humanities are undervalued in our educational system (though I believe a good bit of that blame lies with the professors who have politicized the humanities in our universities). I will go so far as to agree that scientists, above all, undervalue the humanities. But it’s a reactor too far for me to conclude that the Japanese scientists who designed these nuclear power plants could not empathize with those who might suffer if their designs proved faulty.
If all the world’s current wealth were distributed not according to the dictates of the market but rather according to material need, do you think more or fewer children would die?
Absolutely, positively not. From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs – that really works well.
If all the “wealth” were redistributed you’d end up with less wealth. Wealth is created. Wealth is not a zero sum game. It never has been. You can’t effectively “redistribute it.” My having more of it doesn’t mean children in Kenya have less.
Where will all this power that we need for clean water, modern medical conveniences etc. come from if nuclear. coal, oil, andgas are out of the question? Will we generate by force of political will?
I’m sorry, but the combination of “political will” and notions of economic justice and zero sum game economics has most often resulted in the gulag and killing fields. Give me Adam Smith before Pol Pot any day.
Mark –
YEs, I left out “luxuries”.
I’ve been reading about the nuclear reactors. They are GE Mark I and Mark II old type reactors. No doubt the designers had the safety of people in mind. But it turns out that there have been serious concerns about those designs almost from the beginning. CNN says a whistleblower resigned from the design project because he saw problems but was ignored.
My problem with nuclear fuel is human nature: we simply cannot eliminate serious bad decisions either in the design or operation of such facilities even when the people involved mean well. People make mistakes very easily, and that includes scientists.
As more becomes known, Japan seem to have been a failure of imagination and judgment. A nuclear scientst just on CNN said that they prepared for an earthquake, they prepared for a tsunami, but they failed to prepare for the combination of the two at the same time. The tsunami damaged the back-up cooling operation, and the operators decided (wrongly) to turn off the cooler system for two hours, and that’s when the trouble began. So it was a failure of imagination on the part of the designers and of judgment on the part of the operators. And we can never eliminate those sorts of risks in a nuclear industry. Because the possible outcomes can be so catastrophic, we have to use alternative sources. (That doesn’t even look at the problem of waste disposal.)
I also learned on Wikipedia there are Mark I and Mark II reactors in California, Michigan, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arizona, Oregon, Colorado, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Maryland. And maybe others I just didn’t find. There are 104 reactors in the U. S. Twenty-percent of our energy is now produced by nuclear reactors.
By the way, in my experience scientists are generally more open to the humanities than people in the humanities are open to science. The problems are the administrators who have to satisfy politicians and boards of directors who typically want more emphasis on “practical majors”, that is, on programs leading to good jobs. They’re the terribly short-sighted ones..
“From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs – that really works well.”
Sean –
You realize, of course, that that slogan was popularized by Karl Marx in his “Critique of the Gotha Program”. But it was not original with him — he got it from some earlier socialists.
The trouble with conservatives is that they really believe only in the first half of the saying (assuming, of course, that those with abilities actually use them — and have the opportunity to use them).
You should be sorry, Sean. Your invocation of Pol Pot and the Gulag is disgraceful.
I wasn’t talking about which economic system generates the most wealth. I wasn’t even talking about which economic systems might generate enough wealth, though that is a more important question. I was talking about which distribution of the world’s current wealth would prevent the most preventable childhood deaths, a problem you were the first to mention in this thread about the safety of nuclear energy. There is a certain quantity of material resources in the world right now. Some have more of it, some have less, while others have almost none of it. If you or I had less of it, there would be more for others. This is not rocket science, or nuclear engineering. It’s arithmetic. So spare us your sharing-makes-things-disappear nonsense and stop trotting out totalitarian bogeymen everytime someone uses the words “justice” and “economic” in the same sentence.
No Matthew, it’s not arithmatic. It’s economics. If you take apart the machine and sell its parts you don’t get prosperity.
As for the totalitarian bogeymen, why is it that advocates of free markets are automatically saddled with every excess or problem associated with free markets, but it is unfair to saddle people who advocate statist solutions with the historic consequences of statism? State solutions ultimately rely on the point of a sword. They must, in the end, rely on the threat of violence or harm to work. Name me one progressive program or idea that doesn’t require coercion. If you want to redistrubte wealth, you must get it from those who have it, and if they don’t want to surrender it you must take it. It is people with “big ideas” about making the world just through the power of the state who make it horrible, it’s people who just want to make a living that make it livable.
Sean, that is what citizens in a functioning democracy do — they use the power of the state to promote the common good, one of those big ideas you so detest. It is only subjects of nondemocratic rulers or citizens of nonfunctioning democracies who must think of the state onlly as something that uses and abuses them.
Matthew – Since you seem to be up on a rather huffy high horse, let’s consider what I actually said:
—————————
Ken – “The fact is we have nuclear reactors and we probably need to build more of them. Also, Latin America is getting to the point where they will be building some new nuclear reactors. The more their economies develop, the more electricity they require.
Bearing this in mind, we should work closely with Japan’s engineers to learn all we can from this.”
Matt replied – “No, Ken, that’s not a fact; it’s a judgment, one that the events in Japan call into question.”
—————————–
I do beg you pardon Matthew, but it is a fact – not a “judgment” – that we in the US have nuclear reactors.
One might say it is a “judgment” to say we probably need more nuclear plants, but it is a fact that already have some. Actually I would say it is my current “opinion” that we probably need more nuke plants.
Finally, it is a fact that Latin America has some nuclear plants and that they are considering building more.
And so please try to not be so hysterical and please, do not try to put words into anyone’s mouth.
Ken, I did not put words in your mouth. At worst, I misunderstood the intended meaning of your ambiguous sentence. If being misunderstood upsets you so much, you should write more clearly. It may be your judgment that “we probably need to build more” nuclear power reactors, or it may be your opinion, but it’s certainly not a fact. Which is what I said before. If you write the fact is A and B, and either A or B is not a fact, then what you write is false. If that isn’t what you meant, I recommend some punctuation.
Sean –
Do you believe that human nature is such that competitive companies need government regulation so that the public is not cheated by the companies?
Sean @ 3/15 said: “Every time I see these “capitalism” is evil remarks I cringe.”
“But if by ‘capitalism’ is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply ** is certainly negative.”
** (to the question as to whether Capitalism is “good” or “bad”)
Centesimus annus, §42.
And therein, of course, lies the rub. IF US capitalism is “ — circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality –“ it can provide the necessary service to humanity from a Catholic Christian point of view.
If not, then —–
“Your invocation of Pol Pot and the Gulag is disgraceful.”
Matthew–
Your sense of frustration is palpable. I’d suggest that your arguments would have more force if you come to the table a bit more mindful of how terribly wrong things have gone in the past, and make the case for why it’s going to be different this time. If you’re simply relying on the fact that Matthew is good and Pol is bad, your argument will not be terribly compelling to those who do not share your economic or political views. How are things going to be better if society decides to invest, in only the fortunate few, the power to distribute wealth? Where has this worked before?
“How are things going to be better if society decides to invest, in only the fortunate few, the power to distribute wealth? Where has this worked before?”
Actually it worked quite well in many medieval monasteries, most notably St. Hilda’s. She developed her own rule based on this passage in Acts 4:32-35:
“And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all. Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.”
Before the Viking invasions, St. Hilda had, single-handedly, set up the great double monastery at Whitby, which had several satellite monasteries in Northumbria. She produced thousands of books for use in England and throughout the continent. She also set up schools for children, selecting those with talent for her scriptorium; mediated feuds between kings; nurtured five bishops; and provided a living for hundreds of lay people. Excavations showed that the largest monastery had a bakery, a smithy, workshops, extensive farmlands, a large and probably ornate wooden church–in short, it was collection of communities that thrived peacefully and prosperously under principles later promoted by Karl Marx.
You can read all about it in Bede.
The notion of collectivism, socialism, communism doesn’t work is largely based on the failed modern Soviet experiment.
But, Jean, if everyone sold everything and there were no buyers left (or just an infinite series of selling) the economic system would be dead. I think that passage is on a part with “If thy eye offend the, pluck it out”. Not meant literally. Even in socialism there is producing, buying and selling, and some personal ownershipl
“Even in socialism there is producing, buying and selling, and some personal ownership!”
I’m sure there is. I’m sure there was at St. Hilda’s monastery. Just saying that hers was practical example of redistribution of wealth and privelege inspired by Scripture and to reject some ideas merely because the Soviet couldn’t make them work demonstrates a short-sighted view of history.
Much more to say about this, but the thread has already strayed.