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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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but the question you have to ask now is why?

Because the West is a culture of engineers, and we should play to our strengths. (Also, the environment is too important to leave to the Greens.)

Renewables are already there.

Not from a national security or domestic security perspective, they aren't. For the former, no Western country controls its own supply chain of solar panels or [to an extent] wind turbines; for nuclear, you can reprocess fuel (and don't even need much of it in the first place) and construction can't meaningfully be outsourced.

For the latter, I don't trust my political enemies not to intentionally destroy the alternatives to intermittency (because they're already trying to destroy the ability to build new natural gas turbines, which is the problem they're meant to solve) and turn the West into South Africa in service of their death cult. Not that nuclear isn't immune to this (since it's been done many times before in the US), but it's not something that obviously funds my political allies like coal/oil/natural gas does, so even if those things go away I believe my enemies are more likely to feel forced to continue funding a power grid that still works after 5 PM in the winter.

Because the West is a culture of engineers, and we should play to our strengths

But renewable generation also requires engineering effort, why is that not playing to strengths? Fully solving issues related to storage, grid connection, forecasting, etc. will require plenty of engineering skill.

Manufacturing of renewables is not my area of expertise so I can't comment on your second paragraph. Although the domestic security issue is presumably not going to apply equally to every Western nation.

Manufacturing of renewables is not my area of expertise

It's not an area of expertise for any Western country, either. So in 20 years when China has figured out that "hey, now that they're completely dependent on this product, and most of the PV panels we've sold have dropped below the replacement threshold for power output, time to jack up the price", now that cheap product has become a massive liability, just like how the natural gas supply in Europe was sacrificed to further US foreign policy goals in Ukraine.

the domestic security issue is presumably not going to apply equally to every Western nation

Considering the US goes out of its way to encourage that domestic security issue in other Western countries, I agree- it's going to affect them more.