This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
No, this is not what his model suggests at all. He wrote an entire book about this and you can just read the blurb to see what he thinks on this topic - https://www.amazon.com.au/Ecotechnic-Future-Envisioning-Post-Peak-World/dp/0865716390
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/06/frances-edf-to-be-fully-nationalised-borne-.html
France's electrical power system is currently about to be nationalised because it has taken on so much debt, and they were forced to import power from other nations during periods of high demand. To argue against the claim that nuclear power generation is unprofitable without government subsidies you have produced a system which is unprofitable, fails to provide adequate power during times of peak demand and is about to receive even more government subsidies in the form of nationalisation. This is evidence FOR Greer's position!
The most concise summation of Greer's position on nuclear I can find is the following paragraph, from the article "Too little, too late."
Again, the answer here is real easy: just provide the commercially successful nuclear plant which pays for itself with power generation (nuclear power plants are worth having around anyway due to their ability to generate useful isotopes for medical/research purposes). Take EROEI into account and demonstrate that the nuclear power plant can produce enough energy to be economically viable - and remember to take the various invisible subsidies petroleum supplies into account as well. So far this hasn't happened, and while again, I'd love to be proved wrong, I just don't see why this hasn't happened. A successful nuclear power plant of the type you're claiming would be so significant that it would have a major impact on global geopolitics, and yet this just hasn't happened (why has regulation managed to stop nuclear power from achieving viability in every single place on earth?).
You've claimed that his arguments are wrong when you do not have even the slightest clue what his position actually is and routinely make absurdly incorrect assertions about his views because you do not have enough familiarity with his work to debate it coherently. If you are going to speak with confidence about someone, you should have more knowledge and understanding of their position than you've demonstrated here. You're accusing him of combining ignorance and arrogance while you look at a vanishingly small section of his work and assume that you know better than he does on the basis of that tiny slice without even being able to accurately identify which wing of politics he belongs to.
You're splitting hairs. There are three possible outcomes. Technological development and energy use keep going up and we become an interstellar civilization. They stagnate and we get stuck somewhere below where we are now. Or we are wiped out. He clearly dismisses 1 and 3. Therefore he agrees with 2. It's as simple as that.
So what? Companies take on excessive debt and are restructured from time to time. French electricity prices are low, France exports electricity every year on net. They undertook various manipulations of prices, forcing EDF to sell at artificially low prices to competitors or other countries, forcing them to buy at higher market prices, imposing price caps in 2022 to protect consumers...
EDF was profitable literally every year but 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/279640/consolidated-net-income-of-edf/
And yes, there was corrosion and power outages at reactors because they are old and need replacing (which France simply hasn't done because they too have been drinking the renewables cool aid). You crow at one year of unprofitability but sneer at 15 years of profits?
Right, we're agreed here, this is what he thinks. He does not provide even a single citation or anything at all to back up his point. This guy thinks he knows more about nuclear energy than the actual scientists who write papers about it (with statistics and everything) and doesn't deign to provide any evidence! He's clearly read none of the literature about the reverse learning by doing that plagues US nuclear energy. He doesn't understand the importance of interest rates, regulation, political risks in prices. Even then it's still profitable: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-14/why-nuclear-power-once-cash-cow-now-has-tin-cup-quicktake-q-a#xj4y7vzkg
This article alone torpedoes Greer's entire ideology, it explains how cheap gas has been outcompeting otherwise profitable nuclear energy, even in one of the most hostile environments for nuclear energy, the US. It also helps shed light on the complexities he doesn't understand, how there's a role for subsidizing long-term energy sources that temporarily aren't profitable for when gas prices rise.
Just step back and think about what Greer is saying. Nuclear power plants (all of them, in every country) are commercially unprofitable, not just at some times based on volatile oil prices, macroeconomic conditions or political interference but always and forever! Do you realize how insane this sounds? All these investors just line up to get zero returns? Of course nuclear power is, has and will be profitable, despite the best efforts of a very well organized sabotage campaign.
This is a meaningless and impossible demand. How am I supposed to know what the 'invisible subsidy' of petroleum is? Even Greer admitted that it just comes down to prices at the end of the day. The price of nuclear energy is low. That's why people spend billions building these plants and operating them. I have already linked papers that show that nuclear is as cheap as fossil fuels if the plants are built correctly at $2000, as in Korea.
He's a crank that projects his own ignorance on nuclear 'fanboys', making snide remarks about them and refuses to provide any factual substantiation at all for his claims. There's no need to look at his 'work', which is free from any basis in fact or scholarly convention.
Wrong. He has said, over and over, that it isn't stagnation that awaits, and the future that he's describing lies outside the limited options you have presented. The future that he describes falls very much outside those options.
This is from an article that I have already linked! Why do you continue to speak so authoritatively about the content of his work if you aren't going to read it? You do not even have an accurate picture of the most basic and central elements to his worldview and positions yet feel comfortable dismissing his work wholesale on the basis that the tiny sliver of it you read does not contain the type of analysis you're looking for.
You have set up a standard which no scientific journal article ever published would pass - you read some of the excerpts and writing, don't see any of the numbers or calculations that were done elsewhere, and then assume that they do not exist and the paper is thus worthless and not worth reading. Yes, he hasn't included the calculations done on EROEI on nuclear plants in his most recent essays, and that is because he has been participating in this discussion for longer than I have been alive, and he doesn't feel the need to re-establish the foundations of his work in every single paragraph of his output afterwards (and given that you haven't even read the articles I linked, I doubt you went back and read his earlier work).
Again, I'm not asking you to go read his entire output if you don't find it engaging - but at the very least you should stop making authoritative claims about work that you have not actually read. If you're going to say that his work is entirely free of fact and scholarly convention then you can totally do that and make a case for it - but only after actually reading and engaging with it! You continue to make basic misunderstandings and mistakes of his position that he was tired of repeatedly resolving a decade ago, and I am not going to continue to reply to this conversation unless you actually read his work before dismissing it: pointing out errors that only exist because you just do not bother to read the articles linked is not a worthwhile use of my time.
Yes and it backs up my point. 'technologies well suited to function within the long-term energy budget of our planet will doubtless blossom in turn' = non-industrial lifestyle, no space travel, no exploitation of the enormous resources of space. What is so hard to understand about this? He is describing stagnation in a preindustrial world with some trinkets.
Because he hasn't done them, because they show that nuclear power is cost-competitive with fossil fuels, as is obvious from reading the papers I linked (which actually provide figures to back up their claims and some analysis of what's actually going on).
Scientific journals demand citations and references from credible sources. Undergraduate level essays demand references. Greer's work would not pass muster at a third-rate university.
Tu quoque.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link