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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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I am admittedly in a bit of a filter bubble with regard to this, but all of the irl men I can discuss politics with agree that nuclear is a very attractive solution to the problem. On both sides of the aisle.

The irl women I have broached the subject with, however... /images/17223237173445024.webp

Which kinda goes back to the point OP raised.

nuclear is a very attractive solution to the problem

Just to nitpick, this mainly applies to countries which still utilize coal and oil for such purposes to a large degree. And as far as I know, all of them are outside the West anyway and are investing more and more into nuclear energy, with the sad and pathetic exception of Germany.

Australia still uses tons of coal and oil (I seem to recall we have the highest greenhouse emissions per capita), and despite having lolhuge uranium reserves NIMBY and hippies have entirely stopped nuclear power so far.

Our federal opposition leader is actually running on a platform of "let's actually do nuclear", although it's questionable whether he can actually get plants built due to state bans.

Burning natural gas produces a great deal of CO2-equivalent. If you believe the climate change people and take leaks into account, more than coal.

But dams kill fish, wind kills birds (and offshore wind kills marine mammals though that's more a Republican thing), large-scale solar ruins the pristine desert environment, nuclear glows, and nobody likes transmission lines (and also cute endangered species can't cross the corridors), so what the environmentalists are pushing for is shivering in the dark. They'll agree with various alternative energy proposals until someone figures out a way of making them practical, at which point they'll be against.

It's not like the case for nuclear is so cut-and-dry that men being much more in favour can just be interpreted as evidence for "men more reasonable, women more crazy" without justification. There are complex arguments for and against that ultimately reduce to a lot of boring number crunching; since it's hardly ever the case that large swathes of the population have crunched the numbers, consider the possibility that men like nuclear more and women like it less due to some evopsych coincidence.