Nuts and Bolts of a Green New Deal

[Confederate States of German America]

You do realise I was saying that implementing socialism was the least likely of the two, yes?

Yes, state actors were pursuing nuclear energy solely for its ability to generate weapons material. Calder Hall, the first commercial nuclear power station, was a fancy (and commercially successful) front for the British plutonium-generating programme.

Graphene isn't as attractive to governments as it can't be weaponised to bring other states to their actual knees. Same reason thorium reactors weren't pursued. Couldn't make useful nuclear weapons from it, it was binned.

I am talking about capitalism because it is the driving element here. Coal mines aren't closing because of the Green New Deal. They're closing because the companies that operate them are divesting away, or because they're seeking more lucrative means. They're not necessarily failing, but they're not generating enough mad bank for the shareholders to want to continue. Plus virtue signalling on the environment, as some would undoubtedly claim.

We cannot continue to use coal as a fuel source. We must stop this. We must pivot to other energy sources and eventually wean off fossil fuels entirely. No matter the other untapped uses of coal, this kills off the majority of coal demand, which is for coal as fuel.

My personal preference would be to close every coal plant and replace it with a nuclear reactor. With a tweaking of the economic argument, there are plenty of (global) uranium deposits that are possible to be extracted, but not at a favourable profit margin. They'd still be profitable, but not very, so no-one bothers. Such is capitalism.

---

What are you proposing? Just keep all coal mines operating full steam from now to forever? The commercial drive is just going to shovel it into coal-as-fuel, as it already does. This is a bad thing.

"Support communities" as talked about by the Democrat campaign is indeed meaningless, and you're right to be suspicious. The politically cynical take is that it was just to try and lure them away from Trump. Similar claims have been made in the UK for decades, and nothing has really happened here either. But this is why I argue for drastic social and economic change. After all, "more jobs" is nebulous and meaningless. If all the coal miners get rehired at a new Best Buy, that isn't really a positive.

You're not presenting a coherent argument at this point and deliberately avoiding the questions I raised to you.

[Imperializt Russia]

I don't see how "some guy on Nationstates can't plan the American economy because he's some guy on Nationstates" invalidates a Green New Deal that ends coal-as-fuel.

I really really don't.

[Confederate States of German America]

I don't see how "some guy on Nationstates can't plan the American economy because he's some guy on Nationstates" invalidates a Green New Deal that ends coal-as-fuel.

I really really don't.

So now you've completely ducked the debate and have completely transitioned into something else that was never said nor suggested in an effort to obfuscate the holes in your argument.

[Imperializt Russia]

I don't see how "some guy on Nationstates can't plan the American economy because he's some guy on Nationstates" invalidates a Green New Deal that ends coal-as-fuel.

I really really don't.

So now you've completely ducked the debate and have completely transitioned into something else that was never said nor suggested in an effort to obfuscate the holes in your argument.

Asking me "so how exactly should communities be supported" and highlighting that I am not providing "exactly how communities should be supported" sounds an awful like what you said.

So let's reset. What's your basic point? I originally interjected in a post where you were essentially saying "but we don't have to close the coal mines, we could make these things out of coal" (that, I note, we don't currently make).

[Confederate States of German America]

Asking me "so how exactly should communities be supported" and highlighting that I am not providing "exactly how communities should be supported" sounds an awful like what you said.

...because I did say that and you've repeatedly said communities should be supported and workers retrained; asking the very basic question of "how" on something you support should not be that hard nor is it expecting too much of you.

So let's reset. What's your basic point? I originally interjected in a post where you were essentially saying "but we don't have to close the coal mines, we could make these things out of coal" (that, I note, we don't currently make).

State-Private partnerships to develop the technology, as has been repeatedly done in the history of the United States. The gist of your argument on this point is literally the same as someone in 1940 saying "Well, we don't have nuclear technology yet, so we shouldn't do anything with nuclear".

[Imperializt Russia]

Nuclear power came a long time after nuclear weapons did. There was no state-private collaboration in the nuclear programme, outside of the fact that the university professors who drummed the sums were not literal government agents.

The state-private collaboration came after the war, when Europe was trying to literally rebuild, and atoms for peace was primarily a research effort, not commercial. Vienna's Atom Institute is home to one such AFP-issue reactor, with a peak power of 250kW thermal, which was banned by the Austrian government from being connected to the power network.

The social-leaning governments of the late 1940s and early 1950s in the UK and France invested heavily in nuclear primarily for their weapons programme, as well as energy security in the civil field. The US, having already got its weapons programme up and running by this point, presumably was just eyeing up the prospect of "cheap" energy, yes.

But to say "well, we can just relive that" is not correct. Those state-private partnerships existed for specific, political reasons in a particular geopolitical environment. One which no longer exists, and we definitely shouldn't try to recreate.