Dutch language

How to pronounce small farmer in Dutch?

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Wow thank you very much it's a real
pleasure and honor to be here I'm gonna
share some stories and also some data
that we've collected over the last 10
years to give us some insight into both
why we need nuclear power and also why
we're so afraid of it so my own story
starts when I was about 17 I had a very
romantic view of the natural environment
and of country life of sort of a
nostalgia those brought back for me when
I saw this beautiful Pissarro in the van
Gogh Museum two weeks ago it's very easy
to fall in love with a kind of life that
we don't have to live anymore I started
by bringing resources and and funds to
small farmer cooperatives in Guatemala
in the late 1980s and since then I've
traveled around the world and I've
interviewed small farmers about their
lives at one point I was working towards
being an anthropologist in the Northeast
of Brazil studying land conflicts and
from one perspective it is a very
beautiful life it's a simpler life it's
a quieter life and I can I find myself
still transported by those Gogan and the
van gogh and the Pissarro that bring us
to that sort of sensibility but over
time it was very clear that there's also
a soul-crushing part of living at
extreme poverty without running water
without electricity that i think it's
easy for those of us in the rich world
to forget one thing we know is that
getting lifting people out of poverty
requires a lot of energy there's really
no debate about this and the scholarly
literature the amount of energy per
capita you can see brings us out of
extreme poverty the poorest people in
the world
use tiny amounts of electricity and the
wealthiest people use a significant
amount you can look at a different
measure of this energy use per capita
and GDP a strong correlation there's
parts of the world like the United
States where we use more energy than in
places like Europe mostly as a function
of our lower population densities we
just have to drive a lot more because
high-speed rail and trains don't make as
much sense some people ask me well what
about is GDP really correlated with
personal fulfillment and happiness turns
out we have other measures of personal
fulfillment and happiness and they're
precisely correlated with GDP you can
see another way of looking at this as we
become wealthy we increase the amount of
energy we're using both as electricity
and as liquid fuels we run a small
environmental NGO in Berkeley we have
the good fortune to be financially
independent so we don't accept any
contributions from any energy or any
corporate or financial interest that has
a stake in our work we're able to follow
the truth where our leads even when it
means that we sometimes write critical
remarks of our friends that are doing
nuclear for example we as we mentioned
before we publish in in many mainstream
publications and we we consult to
policymakers around the world one of the
things that we've and I this is our
website I've actually put or shortly
after this meeting I will post the
slides that I've created
oops for Belgium if you pull down clean
energy crisis some people say can I get
a copy of the slides that will all be up
there by the end of today so one of the
things that we've realized over the last
several years is that several decades is
that there's a pattern in terms of
energy progress and environmental
progress we all go from using wood and
dung as our primary sources of energy to
using fossil fuels and we hope
eventually to using nuclear power this
is mostly a good process for people and
the natural environment you can see in
places like the Congo this is a
photograph of my Isha she was orphaned
after her parents were killed by
charcoal traders who were using Virunga
National Park to create charcoal just
for commercial purposes as we move away
from wood and
charcoal and dung it takes pressure off
of critical habitat for endangered
species like the mountain gorillas of
the Congo we then you see concentrate
ourselves more in cities even small
areas of land like Hong Kong can go up
and protect the natural environment
around them you can see all of that
steel and glass and concrete of course
requires significant amounts of energy
which means that the new challenges that
we face
once we're urban eyes are significantly
air pollution how do we decarbonize
reduce the energy intensity of our
energies reduce the carbon intensity of
our energy supplies to avoid significant
levels of global warming or if you're
skeptical that climate change is
something that you need to worry about
to reduce the amount of air pollution
that we just have to breathe as a
regular part of our lives
what about different sources of energy
and our carbon emissions according to
the Intergovernmental Panel which did a
comprehensive review of different energy
sources and our carbon content nuclear
produces the least amount of carbon
emissions per unit of energy it actually
produces four times fewer carbon
emissions per unit of energy as solar
farms do this is a look around the world
makes me feel a little better the United
States isn't the worst in terms of the
share of our electricity from clean
energy sources the worst is Australia
always nice to have somebody to look
down upon you can see the winners are
Belgium is doing great
Switzerland is France Sweden are all
winning and they're doing it almost
entirely thanks to nuclear power you can
see a closer look at the electrical
grids of France versus Germany we hear a
lot about German success and dealing
with climate change but the fact is that
France gets over twice as much of its
electricity from clean zero emission
sources as I defined earlier by the IPCC
ventas Germany we've also heard a lot
over the last 20 years that dealing with
climate change is going to require
making electricity more expensive we've
found all sorts of reasons to have given
that we need to make energy more
expensive but you can see here French
electricity
is produces ten times less carbon per
unit of electricity than does German
electricity so even though it gets over
twice as much of its electricity from
clean zero emission sources produces
just one tenth of the carbon power what
about prices well this seems to
contradict all of the conventional
wisdom on what it takes to do with
climate change you can see that the
French pay almost half as much as
Germans do for their electricity German
electricity prices have risen 50% since
they first started doing a significant
amount of renewables in the mid-2000s
and we've heard a lot about how solar
panels and wind turbines are becoming
cheaper but in truth Germans just
continue to spend more and more money
for their electricity you can they broke
it down quite helpfully here you can see
that the darker green bar which is the
amount paid to subsidize solar wind has
continued to go up even though the cost
of solar panels and wind turbines has
gone down so why is that well one thing
to keep in mind is that if Germany had
spent the five hundred and eighty
billion dollars it will have spent on
renewables by 2025 on nuclear power it
would actually already be getting a
hundred percent of its electricity from
clean zero emission sources and it would
have be producing enough electricity to
completely decarbonize its
transportation you can see a similar
phenomena is occurring in my home state
of California we've done a huge amount
of renewables over the last decade and
we've seen our electricity prices
increase five times more than the rest
of the United States so why is this well
a German economist who's by no means
pro-nuclear named Leon hearth did a
study where he found that one of the
main reasons that solar and wind make
electricity so expensive is because of
their intermittent see solar England
only generate electricity 10 to 40% of
the year to paint on where you're at and
so as wind becomes you can see on the
left as wind becomes 30 percent of your
electricity its economic value declines
by 40 percent it's even more severe with
solar
it becomes 15% of your electricity its
value declines by 50% that's because
it's producing not so long we don't
produce enough electricity when we do
need them and then it's producing too
much electricity when we don't need them
so both Germany and California has been
forced to pay our neighbors to take
electricity off of our hands so that we
don't blow out our grids we've been
having to pay Arizona to take our
electricity from us which is one of the
reasons for the increase in prices I
attended the Bonn United Nations climate
talks a couple of years ago with my
friend James Hansen the climate
scientist and I came out of the airplane
and I saw this really interesting
juxtaposition of two advertisements from
the French oil and gas giant total one
was that they're committed to solar and
then the other is committed to natural
gas what would the relationship between
these two technologies be when we hear
from advocates of renewables that all we
need are renewables we don't need fossil
fuels it raises the question of how are
you going to deal with your electricity
when the Sun is not shining or the wind
is not blowing and the answer in real
world terms and also certainly for total
is natural gas the two are pair well
together because it's easier to turn gas
up and down when the Sun stops shining
the wind stops blowing than it is to do
a nuclear plant France provides another
real-world example because it has
actually followed Germany's lead and
deployed a lot of solar and wind over
the last decade it spent thirty three
billion dollars 29 billion euros on
solar and wind over that period and the
carbon intensity of French electricity
has actually gone up during that time
why would that be well it's for the
reason that I just mentioned in order to
add all of that unreliable solar and
when to the electrical grid Frances had
to reduce the amount of electricity
coming from nuclear plants and increase
the amount of electricity coming from
natural gas just because it's that much
easier to turn up and down to deal with
solar and wind and on top of that France
was able to increase its electricity
prices well is that in fact French
electricity prices increased faster at a
higher percentage than they did in
Germany over the same period
so what about the issue I think a lot of
people have on their minds which is just
is nuclear safe well this is an issue
people ask me what my opinion of nuclear
is and I always just point out this
isn't an issue of opinion this is a
scientific question that's been studied
for well over 40 years and what we find
in every major scientific study is that
nuclear is the safest way to make
reliable electricity this is just the
most recent study from the British
Medical Journal Lancet it finds that
most of the deaths from various forms of
electricity production just come from
air pollution you can see the number of
deaths from nuclear is so low it doesn't
even show up on the chart people
sometimes say where are you getting your
facts from on all of our slides you can
see we've gone ahead and put the
citation right there so that you don't
have to take my word for it you can just
look it up yourself after we're done the
reason for nuclear safety is simply that
nuclear doesn't involve fire it doesn't
create smoke and smoke in the form of
air pollution kills seven million people
a year according to the World Health
Organization three million of those
people from breathing smoke from wood
and dung and indoor fires usually in
poor countries and the other 4 million
from just the ambient air pollution in
cities and elsewhere what about
Fukushima I've been there twice
extensively reviewed the literature this
is what the best available science shows
and again I've put the citation right
here you so you can see it as extensive
research by the United Nations and its
affiliated international associations no
radiation related deaths expected from
this accident simply because there
wasn't enough radiant particulate matter
that escaped from the plants after the
accident
however there were 2,000 people that
died as a result of panic and evacuation
so Fukushima is one example among
several that the fear of nuclear power
turns out to be much more harmful and
even deadly than the radiation that
escapes from nuclear plants what about
the big one
Chernobyl it's the it's the accident
that scared me most when it occurred
when I was a boy what we've seen from it
is 28 people died
the Chernobyl fire it was the worst
nuclear accident of all time and likely
to be the worst accident ever just
because there was no containment dome on
that reactor and then the reactor caught
on fire so it was literally sending
radioactive particulate matter all
around the world we saw 28 firefighter
deaths from putting out the fire 15
deaths from thyroid cancer in 25 years
scientists now predict a one percent
mortality rate from thyroid cancer which
is estimated to have impacted 16,000
people not like anybody wants to get
cancer but if you have to get a cancer
thyroid cancer is the one you want it's
entirely treatable you just remove the
thyroid gland you take a thyroxine a
synthetic substitute nobody should die
actually of thyroid cancer the people
that will die are people that just
simply don't get the medical treatment
but there's been no increase in cancer
rates of any other kind than thyroid
there's been no increase in birth
defects no changes to fertility again
the biggest the biggest affects the
biggest health effects were just from
fear depression the sense that something
bad happened to me and again don't take
my word for it these are this is one of
the Chernobyl was one of the main
reasons that I changed my own mind about
nuclear power the research that's gone
that's been that's been done for
Chernobyl over several decades has been
done by hundreds of scientists around
the world if there were a conspiracy to
cover up the truth about Chernobyl it
would be the most remarkable conspiracy
in human history well the reason that
these accidents don't cause much harm is
just because not that much radiation
escapes from those nuclear plants during
those accidents so think of it this way
there's huge amount of particulate
matter in the air from burning fossil
fuels and biomass that we breathe tiny
quantities of radiant particular matter
escape from those nuclear plants and it
pales in comparison to the natural
background radiation we get every day so
you can see in my home state of Colorado
I'm exposed to twice as much radiation
from the ground because there's a lot of
uranium in the ground as was in
Fukushima after the accident so twice as
much radiation exposure in Colorado in
normal background radiation than in
Fukushima after the accident just in
this form of radon which is a decay gas
we see that if you go to the hospital if
you get treatment just being around that
equipment you get a higher exposure in
terms of radiology soil cosmic radiation
food all exposed us to significantly
higher levels of radiation than does
nuclear weapons fallout sure Noble or
nuclear power plants again the source
here is the United Nations Committee on
the effects of radiation in fact what we
find is that just living in a big city
like London or New York increases your
mortality - and 2.8 times more than
having been one of the workers who
cleaned up Chernobyl one of my favorite
things to do whenever I visit a new
country is to just I Google as I did
last night
Belgium natural gas explosion is it
because I think that there's more
natural gas explosions in Belgium no
it's because in every country there's
natural gas explosions that kill people
so just to put things in context this is
one of your most deadly accidents it
occurred in 2004 and you can see the
blast catapulted bodies and debris up to
hundreds of yards away sometimes people
say to me they go well maybe people are
afraid of nuclear because the accidents
are so spectacular and I never know what
they're talking about because at
Fukushima it didn't have anything
approaching this level of high drama and
yet maybe most of us at least maybe most
of us the United States and probably a
few of you and really have ever heard of
this accident it's just a kind of banal
natural gas accident and I suspect the
scrutiny of your natural gas plants
doesn't come close to the scrutiny of
your two nuclear plants maybe you think
well that's all in the past there's no
more natural gas explosions like that in
fact there was just last year 14 were
injured in a gas explosion in Antwerp
what about wind we imagined that solar
and wind are basically harmless what
could possibly go wrong
with a wind turbine or solar plant well
this was a still photo taken from a
video shot just before these two
maintenance workers died after they got
trapped in a fire on a wind turbine in
the Netherlands they embraced before one
of them jumped to his death and the
other one was engulfed in flames there's
a database that's been kept of wind
accidents when deaths included since
1990 my staff went through and verified
every single one of them it's all based
on press reports and what we find is
that wind is more deadly per unit of
energy than nuclear is and this is the
one of the sources from it so this leads
to this really interesting conclusion
which is it's not just that nuclear is
not as dangerous as you think it's that
nuclear actually saves lives because
when you're using nuclear energy you're
not burning fossil fuels you're not
exposing people to those 7 million
deaths a year and so what we find is
that nuclear has saved at least 1.8
million lives to date by the Prevention
of burning fossil fuels a conclusion by
the climate scientist James Hansen
so we're as Belgium at well you can see
you guys are doing pretty well half of
your electricity is coming from clean
zero emissions nuclear power and about
33% from fossil fuels if you were to
replace all of your natural all of your
nuclear plants with natural gas
it would create enough carbon emissions
equivalent to putting 10.5 million cars
on the road which I'm pretty sure is
more cars than you have on the road
right now if there's only 11 or 12
billion people in Belgium this is what
your electrical generation has looked
like over the last 30 years what would
it look like if you transition more
significantly to nuclear we'll take a
look at that in a moment I want to get
to this question of why if nuclear
energy is the safest way to make
electricity and has been and the science
has been clear about that for the last
30 40 50 years why do we hate it and
fear it so much I used to just think we
feared it but when I hear
people talk about nuclear that really
don't like it I'm always struck by how
angry they are like there's something
they're really mad at nuclear power and
which is always on the one hand seems
like a strange thing to be it's a
machine for example it's not a person
it's not an organized terrible group of
people it's just a set of machines so
why are we so afraid of it why do we
hate it so much so for example my staff
and I we visited Germany a couple of
years ago and we fanned out we
interviewed about a hundred Germans
really amazing the uniformity of opinion
we discovered among the German people
there's a very nice couple that I
interviewed and I asked them about
nuclear power I asked them how many
people they thought died at Chernobyl
they said a hundred thousand which is
about a hundred thousand more than
actually died I I we I said then what
about the what if it is a hundred
thousand let's just assume you're right
but there's do you believe that seven
million die every year from air
pollution yeah they believe that so then
that means that nuclear even if it did
kill 100,000 people Chernobyl would
still be saving lots of lives right and
they said yes but one death from
radiation is too many
I was so interesting in other words one
death from radiation is too many but
lots and lots of death from ordinary air
pollution is ok not exactly we're now in
the realm of psychology we're not in the
realm anymore of what you would consider
a hard science so that that means that
we have to kind of go back and look at
how did we get this particular
psychology look it's easy to blame
Hollywood this movie China Syndrome
scared the crap out of me when I was a
kid it hung on the wall of my dad's food
co-op and I think you can't blame me for
thinking that nuclear power plants and
nuclear bombs were the same thing I mean
after all the into all of the icon aisle
all of the imagery that's associated
with nuclear energy is imagery
associated with the bomb you can see
this is the German version which ends
with a girl dying of cancer from a
turnable type event and then this is the
Korean version which came out three
years ago you see the Asian version the
clear plants are like little volcanoes
but that just raises the question of why
is Hollywood
so anti-nuclear peel that onion a little
bit further when I was a boy this movie
was on television the day after when I
was 12 years old it's a film that as
soon as you're drawn into identifying
with the characters they proceeded to
incinerate them as a classroom of
children they show them being
incinerated like an x-ray machine
there's a scene of a mother holding her
son and then the boy screaming the
images aren't really coming through
suffice it to say it was absolutely
terrifying and ABC quite helpfully
encouraged parents to watch it with
their children so you had millions of
parents voluntarily traumatizing an
entire generation of kids about nuclear
power
I mean nuclear weapons but they've got
this the same word right it's the same
thing isn't it so clearly there's
something going on right away about the
bomb but it turns out it's actually even
more complex than I had realized I
started reading for a history I'm
writing about how did we first start
thinking about the bomb right after it
was invented and I discovered this
incredible quotation from the British
socialists George Orwell he said ages in
which the dominant weapon is expensive
or difficult to make will tend to be
ages of despotism whereas when the
dominant weapon is cheap and simple the
common people have a chance if the bomb
is a rare and costly object is difficult
it produces a battleship it is likely to
put an end to large-scale Wars at the
cost of prolong Lee indefinite prolong
indefinitely a piece that is no peace so
were them packing this for a second this
is the same essay that coined the term
cold war the term cold war was coined by
George Orwell but it's such an
interesting passage at Keenan October
19th 1945 so it's two months after the
u.s. bombed Hiroshima Nagasaki what he's
saying here is he's saying the bomb
building the bomb took this gigantic
industrial effort really only the United
States could have done it it wasn't like
gunpowder in Orwell was arguing he was
wrong
about this which I'll explain a bit but
it wasn't like gunpowder which he viewed
as a weapon of the common man
it was a weapon that required large
amounts of state power and so his
concern about it was that nuclear
weapons would make it harder to
overthrow the government like that's
what he's saying this is a view that we
tend to associate with the extreme right
wing these days in the United States you
can take my gun away from me with my
cold dead hands that's a culture I don't
think we have in Europe at least not as
much but in but the idea the problem
that the left had with nuclear weapons
was that it made it harder overthrow the
government it's a very important place
to start you then see
Bertrand Russell maybe one of the most
famous living philosophers in the 1950s
and Albert Einstein wrote a manifesto
where they said that a war with h-bombs
might put an end to the human race and
then they asserted that those who know
the most are the most gloomy so if
you're not really scared you just don't
know enough the abolition of war will
demand limitations to national
sovereignty so this is a period that
gave birth to this idea that we not only
had to get rid of nuclear weapons it
also required that there be a United
Nations or super state organization that
would basically have free reign to
investigate and confiscate and and
basically control nuclear energy and you
can see by 1957 after all of the bomb
testing people became extremely scared
this is in the biggest women's magazine
in January 1957 radioactivity is
poisoning your children was the headline
in in an environment when we think about
the environment nature where I talk
about how the antidote is near the
poison and you can see this is my
favorite thing in case that article
freaks you out you can just go read the
second article from the top which is
about how to relax in ten minutes it's
not that hard to imagine why people
would have mixed up nuclear bombs and
nuclear power plants nuclear engineers
are sort of uniquely terrible at
explaining what their tech
ology is so when nuclear engine when it
became nuclear engineers had a chance to
explain the technology this is what they
drew you would think that there's like I
mean the view from the left has always
been the nuclear energies dehumanized
saying it well I wonder where they get
that idea
there's no humans in it well there are
humans it's this shadowy executive here
hiding in the corner so much of the the
wounds for nuclear energy were
self-inflicted and you can see the early
the one the first anti nuclear energy
activists David Penton said in 1962 it
was a turning point in my life after he
saw a nuclear power plant being built I
had a feeling of the enormousness of
what we were fighting it was anti life I
began to see nuclear power as the
ultimate brutality short of nuclear
weapons so clearly these two things are
becoming blurred in people's minds right
away in psychology this is known as
displacement displacement is just they
turns when your boss yells at you you
can't yell at your boss so you go home
and yell at your spouse or you kick the
dog scapegoating is a kind of
displacement we displace our negative
emotions onto weaker objects I wish we
weren't that way but we are so we
displace our anger at nuclear weapons
this idea that the world could come to
an end that we can't create the world
that we want we're very angry about that
and it became very clear pretty early
that we weren't going to be able to get
rid of nuclear weapons why was that well
it's because the experts everybody
really knew that if two countries with
nuclear weapons got rid of them and then
went to war they would both just race to
build nuclear weapons
this was actually understood even before
the bomb was created but was articulated
in a book in 1946 so there was already
this awareness that we can't get rid of
horrible machines these horrible weapons
so maybe I can stop the local nuclear
power plant from being built not
completely rational but you can see the
psychologic of it this is a spokesperson
for Greenpeace and the Netherlands one
of my Twitter antagonists would never
dare to block him
interesting yon hovercamp said on
February 15th sabotaging nuclear is a
vital part of any successful attempt to
save the climate's nuclear diverts the
political attention without being able
to add to the solution but it might add
is too expensive too risky comes too
late
I mean how first of all what an
interesting thing to say publicly and to
admit sabotaging nuclear is the goal of
Greenpeace because of course Greenpeace
spends a lot of time raising the alarm
that terrorists are trying to sabotage
your nuclear power plants they keep
raising these concerns about people
going to attack the Belgian power plants
as they attack the Belgian power plants
flying drones and so them breaking into
nuclear power plants what is going on
here if not some deep-seated existential
anxiety about nuclear weapons well
what's been the record of nuclear
weapons is the world a more deadly and
dangerous place since we invented them
at Oxford University there's a Bill
Gates Fund a data initiative called our
world and data where they have tracked
using a database that was created by a
University of Georgia professor of all
of the deaths in conflict both soldiers
and civilians since 1400 it's one of my
favorite graphs to look at what you see
is that battle deaths rise steadily
until 1945 and then something happens in
1945 and the death toll dramatically
declines you can see here another way of
looking at it the number of people dying
in Wars has just plummeted over the last
75 years which is why everybody's so
happy right nobody ever talks about this
even if you don't think it was caused by
nuclear weapons then at least you'd have
to acknowledge that nuclear weapons
didn't make the world more violent
all of this peace has occurred either
despite or because of nuclear weapons
one of my favorite things about this
graph by the way is you can literally
see
the rise of gunpowder there's something
called what they call the military
revolution which we think of more as
Napoleon the creation of big armies this
is why Orla was wrong
gunpowder wasn't actually the people's
it was actually the spread of gunpowder
allowed these very large armies and the
creation of nation-states in Europe and
around the world and you can see the
death toll from Wars goes up as soon as
gunpowder starts to be used and then it
just goes gunpowder becomes more and
more deadly until you get to world war
one world war two and then it declines
so that the most horrifying apocalyptic
fears of nuclear weapons did not come
about well that's not the only
motivation so we can see though clearly
fear of nuclear weapons and the
displacement of nuclear weapons is one
of the reasons we're so afraid but it's
not the only thing something else is
going on after World War two there was
both optimism and pessimism among the
economists and those who had worried up
until then about resource scarcity they
greeted the arrival of nuclear energy as
revolutionary and the reason was is that
nuclear energy is fundamentally infinite
we're never gonna run out of uranium but
we're awash in uranium there's so much
more uranium than we realized and even
if we did run out of uranium
there's uranium in this in the salt
water and even if we ran out of all that
uranium you can just reprocess the
existing nuclear waste which contains
98% of its energy everybody understood
this physical reality of nuclear energy
after World War two and so does a very
famous book came out in 1965 which
basically said that resource scarcity is
no longer an issue resource scarcity is
no longer an obstacle to human
development up until this moment there
had still been worries that we might run
out of fossil fuels that we might use up
too much land for agriculture with
nuclear with energy being infinite it
meant you could have infinite fresh
water and also infinite fertilizer so
humankind would never ever run out of
food fresh water
energy and we knew this in the mid-1960s
but this was not greeted by everybody as
good news and you can see in their early
60s
Time magazine with its rather racist
cover of overpopulation sure there's
some white ladies in it but we can tell
who the real problem is from this time
magazine cover and you can see right
away these two issues are being jammed
together nuclear weapons and too many
people so it's that population explosion
it's the Population Bomb so there's what
you're seeing from many of the so the
radical wing of the environmental
conservation movement which has a view
that the the core problem is too many
people nuclear power and infinite energy
and endless resources was not greeted as
a positive thing this is where the
discourse that humankind is a cancer on
the natural environment comes from and
it's not like there's no truth to it
humans we can be terrible right and the
the amount the the sheer amount of wild
animals on earth has been cut in half
since 1961 so it's not untrue that
having a lot of people results in
significant damage to the natural world
and a significant loss of critical
habitat but I think there's also
something darkly misanthropic an anti
human as well behind this focus on
overpopulation as radical as my
environmental politics was
overpopulation was never something I was
signed up for and we see it in American
environmentalists but we see it also in
European ones if a doubling of
California's population in the next 20
years is encouraged by providing the
power resources for this economic growth
California's scenic character will be
destroyed too many people that was the
idea too many people nuclear energy
would just contribute to there being too
many people it would be a little short
of disastrous for us to discover a
source of clean cheap abundant energy
because of what we
would do with it and he was specifically
talking about nuclear power this is a
Marie Lovins whose book when it was
translated into German was given the
subtitle energy vendee it was from a
Marie Lovins that the term energy vendee
came so you're welcome we brought you
American environmentalists to Europe and
all of our just I'm here to be the
remedy I hope giving society cheap
abundant energy would be the equivalent
of giving an idiot child a machine gun
if you'll notice something that all of
these men have in common is that they're
all rich high energy consuming people
I've interviewed literally hundreds of
small farmers around the world Latin
America Africa Asia I've never had any
one of them tell me either that there's
too many people or that we consume too
much
those are strictly the concerns of very
wealthy people our campaign stressing
that this is my favorite quote because
people you kind of go well is there like
a secret memo somewhere where the
environmentalist said that they were
gonna scare people about nuclear power
in order to make it more expensive yes
there is a secret memo somewhere it was
written in 1974 our campaign stressing
the hazards of nuclear power will supply
rationale for increasing regulation and
add to the cost of the industry they
knew at this point they wanted to shut
down nuclear power they had to scare
people about it and in doing so they
could just make it more expensive let's
make them go look at the hydrogen
flaking on the reactor vessels again
let's bring in more studies let's just
more regulations more more more more
MORE the fear worked to create a
particular economics and they were not
subtle about trying to evoke those fears
of nuclear weapons a nuclear accident
could wipe out Cleveland and the
survivors would envy the dead the phrase
that the survivors would envy the dead
came from her Oshima and nagasaki that's
where that language came from so I mean
Ralph Nader at this point in the United
States was one of the most trusted and
respected individuals anywhere like
literally when you would ask people who
you trusted in the United States in the
late sixties early seventies they said
Nader so what's amazing is not so much
that nuclear power has had the trouble
it's had it's a miracle that nuclear
power still exists when you really
consider the war that was waged against
it if you're trying to get people
aroused about what is going on you use
the most emotional issue you could find
these are some of the reflections of
anti-nuclear activists decades later I
really didn't care about possible
nuclear accidents because there are too
many people anyway I think that playing
dirty if you have a noble end is fine by
one of the leaders of the nascent
anti-nuclear movement in the 70s so we
saw two parts of the story so far we saw
the part of the story that says that let
me just go back okay
we saw the part of the story that says
that we projected our fears of nuclear
weapons onto nuclear power plants we
also see how nuclear energy was feared
precisely because it would provide so
much abundant energy but there's a third
dimension to our fears of nuclear power
which is just our love of renewables I
just wrote a column for Forbes that's
called the reason they hate nuclear is
because it means we don't need
renewables the problem for advocates of
renewables by nuclear power is that if
you have nuclear power you don't need to
do a lot of solar and wind in fact as
France shows if you do a lot of solar
and wind and a nuclear heavy energy
system you're actually going to increase
carbon emissions and this love of
renewables is so deep and it's a love I
used to have that it's worth reflecting
also on how old it is and how all it was
always associated with the attacks on
nuclear power so all the solar energy
technologies that can replace fossil
fuels are in hand some are already
economically competitive with
conventional sources and many are
rapidly approaching that point 1975 the
claim that you can power a modern
economy strictly on solar and wind has
been made since the early to mid-1970s
we now see from Germany and France
example I gave that it's still not true
but it's worth reflecting on how old it
is a larger wholly solar economy can be
constructing the United States with
straightforward soft technologies that
are now demonstrated and now economic
are nearly economic in the same essay
which is really the foundation of the
German energy vendee Lovins argues that
we could by moving towards renewables
get rid not only of nuclear energy but
also nuclear weapons so you can see with
the the desire for renewables is really
also a desire for a nuclear-free world
and really I think a world where we're
achieving a vision of harmony with the
natural environment this trace I've
traced this all the way back to the
German philosopher Martin Heidegger in
an essay on technology he wrote modern
technology puts to nature the
unreasonable demand that at supply
energy which can be extracted and stored
as such air is now set upon to yield
night
Oh Jen the earth keeled or or DoD
rhenium shield atomic energy
what is Heidegger saying what Heidegger
is saying is that the problem with non
intermittent sources of energy with
either fossil fuels or uranium is that
they're too reliable what he's arguing
against is a row is is this idea of
being able to have a constant reliable
source of electricity the argument for
solar and wind and other forms of
unreliable renewables was precisely that
they were unreliable and if you read if
you're really Reedy plea in the
environmental literature well you'll
find is this view this vision that once
we are a hundred percent renewables we
will have to live according to nature we
will have to live according to natural
energy flows and fluxes the notion of
renewables is being reliable is a really
rather recent one well where does that
leave us well a lot of people worry
about the nuclear waste it's such an
interesting worry for me because the
more I've learned about energy the more
I've come to understand that nuclear
waste is the best kind of waste it's the
best kind of waste from electricity
production but it's also just the best
kind of waste that humans make why would
that be it's because it's there's so
little of it all of the nuclear waste
from the Swiss nuclear program can fit
in a room no bigger than this one all of
the waste from the US nuclear program
can fit on a football field stacked
about 50 feet high waste from nuclear
energy has literally not hurt anybody
nobody has been hurt
much less killed from you you would
think somebody some like one of those
canisters fell and crushed somebody but
we can have not been able to find a
single death from nuclear waste why are
we so afraid of it how can you
understand that fear of nuclear energy
without imagining that we're displacing
and projecting our fears of nuclear
weapons onto them it's very simple to
think about energy in the environment so
this amount of uranium can provide all
the energy I need for my
our life that's it all of my jet travel
all of my electricity consumption people
say well we should use less energy well
if you're using nuclear power why so I
can use that much less uranium when the
uranium fuel is being done used it comes
out the other end like this this nuclear
waste I used to think it was liquid and
green because I got my information from
The Simpsons turned out not to be very
good source I now know that and this is
not a very good example because this is
liquid so but if this were look this is
it so so it's just simple
there's nothing liquid about it's just
the used fuel rods that's with nuclear
waste
that's what high-level waste is there's
some low-level radioactive waste but
it's like the stuff that comes out of
hospitals nothing to worry about so now
do environmentalists that hate nuclear
power are they they really concerned
about the waste here's what Ralph Nader
said he was confronted by my friend
Richard Rhodes on television hey you
don't want to solve the nuclear waste
problem until or asks my friend and then
Ralph Nader said no because it'll just
prolong the industry and expand the
second generation so all of the
fear-mongering around waste always had a
particular purpose which was to kill
nuclear power so I got a little sick of
answering the question of what do you do
about all the nuclear waste on Twitter
so I asked my my staff I said well how
much waste is there from solar so we did
these very simple calculations don't
take our word for it you can reproduce
them yourselves how much waste would be
produced from solar panels and on
Twitter it's always fungus will go
there's no waste from solar panels
that's great what do you mean there's no
waste from solar the Sun shines it makes
electricity turns out to generate all
that electricity from sunlight to
convert the sunlight into electrons
where's two to three hundred times more
waste people imagine they're just gonna
throw their solar panel on the compost
pile and it will biodegrade solar panels
are composed of heavy toxic metals
including lead cadmium and chromium and
unlike nuclear waste whose radioactivity
declines over time the toxicity of lead
cadmium and chromium never goes down
because there are elements on the
periodic table right so and then what
happens to these panels we looked into
it they join the other parts of the
electronic waste stream after 20 to 25
years shipped benevolently by their
owners in Europe in the United States to
poor communities in Africa where they
will run another five to ten years and
then they will usually be smashed and
the valuable materials the copper will
be extracted but that will create toxic
dusts that will be inhaled by people
there's no solution to the solar and
wind waste we hear a lot about the
nuclear waste it is a solved problem
what we're gonna do with all these solar
panels and wind turbines is not so it's
easy to understand this this is a
function of energy density
there's just a lot more energy that I
can get by splitting atoms in uranium my
entire life then I can from sunlight so
it's it's true that sunlight if you just
stand in it's warm it's nice you're not
gonna die it's not right away
if you stand right next to a nuclear
reactor when it's operating you will die
okay so there's definitely a lot more
energy coming out of a nuclear reactor
but what that means from an
environmental standpoint
is that the amount of materials required
to generate the same amount of energy
from solar and wind as from nuclear are
orders of magnitude higher so you can
see here this is the most the best
available science on how much materials
just cement glass concrete steel are
required to generate the same amount of
energy solar requires something on the
order of 10 times more energy than
nuclear the energy density of the fuel
determines the environmental impact that
one sentence should be taught in every
Environmental Studies course in the
world and I've never heard anybody I had
one of my people I hired and where my
progress was an Environmental Studies
major and she never learned any of this
basic physical reality of energy in her
entire 4 years at one of the best
schools the United States the energy
density of the fuel determines its
environmental impact the more dense the
fuel the fewer materials and the less
land the less dense the fuel the more
materials and the more land is required
it's just physics there's nothing fancy
about it no amount of innovation is
gonna make the Sun Shine more regularly
or make sunlight or wind more energy
dense so I mentioned land issues too
you would need 413 times more land for
wind farms than nuclear we based this
calculation on comparing duo to rental
wind farm in Belgium so you never a real
world comparison and you don't need to
take our word for it you know it's fun
you can go onto Google Maps and there's
a little function on the lower right you
just draw a circle around any energy
project on Google Maps and you can just
see how much land it is and then how
much energy produces and you divide and
it's very simple so 285 times more land
for solar as nuclear
I used to think there's a lot of
concerns about wind turbines impact on
bird life I used to think well house
cats kill a billion birds a year you're
just exaggerating but then I learned
that house cats don't kill Eagles in
fact Eagles kill house cats and they eat
them so wind turbines what wind turbines
kill are eagles hawks migratory bird
species owls condors in fact wind energy
is the only form of energy that's
allowed to kill condors in the United
States so we have not put huge bird
killing machines into the airspace over
the last 50 years like we have with wind
turbines I was shocked when I started
looking into the wildlife impacts of
wind farms
it's a massive story journalists have
completely failed to cover it scientists
have been speaking out about the impact
of wind turbines on bird species for a
long time in fact in 2017 a team of
wildlife biologists wrote a paper in a
peer-reviewed scientific publication
where they warned that a migratory bat
species the hoary bat in the United
States would go extinct if wind energy
continues to expand so in the name of
saving the natural environment we're
destroying it with renewables I think we
all have a sense of the relationship
between energy density environmental
impact so in the brilliant remake of
Blade Runner which came out a year or
two ago it opens with this dystopian
scene of California just covered by
solar farms and I think there's a sense
in which if you were ever to generate
significant amounts of energy from solar
you would have to cover California with
solar farms like this this is the bat I
mentioned the hoary bat this is a
testimony from a scientist everybody
knows that translocation of desert
tortoises doesn't work when you're
walking in front of a bulldozer crying
and moving animals and cacti out of the
way it's hard to think the project is a
good idea this is by one of the
biologists who made that solar farm that
was depicted in Blade Runner so it's
been the
and the conservation x' that have been
raising the alarm about renewables it's
very simple to think about somebody this
morning they said what do you think
natural gas and I said natural gas is
better than coal it's not as good as
uranium in fact it's really interested
there's just a very simple hierarchy
where you go from we go from humans in
our development we go from renewables
usually the form of wood and dung to
coal to oil to natural gas to uranium
and as we go up the energy hierarchy our
use of land goes down our use of
materials goes down the health and
safety of those energy technologies
improves so this is a very simple
pattern that exists everywhere in the
world and it's something I think that
most of us have never really understood
or heard much about what about the
relationship to weapons I talked about
how the world has gotten safer people
say well if there's more nuclear energy
there's gonna be more nuclear weapons
there's no correlation between the two
if there were North Korea would have
tons of nuclear energy it has none South
Korea would have nuclear weapons instead
it has nuclear energy if anything it
appears the relationship goes the other
way if you have a lot of nuclear energy
you have an incentive not to get a
weapon and you also have to have
international inspections so people sort
of say well what would it look like if
Belgium were to decarbonize your
electricity supply if that were
something you wanted to do it would take
three nuclear reactors that's it you
already get half of your electricity
from nuclear power plants if you wanted
to phase out that biomass as well you
could do that
turns out biomass creates more air
pollution than fossil fuels but just
three nuclear reactors and Belgium would
have french and sweden levels of nuclear
power where would you how would you do
that if you wanted to do it it's not
that complicated there's really only
four countries in the world that know
how to build a nuclear plants on time
mostly on time
France China South Korea and Russia so I
suspect you probably don't want to hire
the Chinese and the Russians maybe you
would the South Koreans do a really good
job they have a
longer way to fly to come here to help
the French sure right here so the the
French have had a new design that
they've been building it's taken them
longer to build then it it should have
if they just stuck with the earlier
design but the good news is that if for
example Belgium and Netherlands decide
to build a couple of nuclear reactors
together you would have the same people
the same construction managers the same
construction workers building that
nuclear plant that built the plants and
Finland in France what we know from the
economics of nuclear is that a lot of
change in the design makes things harder
to build and more expensive so just
doing the same thing over and over again
is the key to making nuclear cheap it's
not rocket science
people say how are you gonna how are you
guys gonna kind of convince people about
this it's already happening and not just
in the West we see South Korea the
president that was elected in 2016 I
think early seventeen was very
anti-nuclear put the question of nuclear
power in front of the Korean people at
that they created a citizen's jury to
deliberate for six months on whether to
have nuclear power because they assumed
that once people thought about it that
they would be against it instead support
for nuclear power in South Korea thanks
to South Korean professors went from
forty percent in support of nuclear to
sixty percent
similarly in Taiwan last fall when the
people actually deliberated on this
issue
they voted 59 percent in favor of
continued with nuclear power
last October a group of pro-nuclear
activists and us got together and we
said let's have a pro-nuclear
demonstration because nobody ever hears
or sees about this and obviously the
industry is not doing it so we got
together and we held a nuclear pride
fest in Munich Germany and lots of
people came several hundred people there
and in Munich with us and we had so much
fun that we said let's do another one
we met a couple weeks ago and we said
let's do another one but then every said
let's do let's do two more so we're
actually going to do a nuclear pride
fest you're also get to in a minute in
Brussels on Sunday April 28th and I and
you are all invited
we would love to have NVA represented
there love to have you guys give a talk
at whatever time you want and if the
Green Party or greenpeace wants to give
a talk we'll welcome them too I heard
there were some protesters here for me
today I was very happy to hear that I
wish there were more because there needs
to be a public conversation about this I
think back to that oops
I think back to this Pissarro and I I
think I think like you I think all of us
love that country life and we want to
treasure it and support it but I also
think we should remember that the folks
in the world that still have to do this
work it's very hot under all that wool
clothing very difficult life and that we
may want to protect our country sides
and protect the natural environment
but we also want a high energy
civilization like you all have achieved
and why we want to sustain so thank you
very much

Wow thank you very much it's a real

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small farmer::noun | Spocien Dictionary

small farmer

noun

a farmer on a small farm

Type	Words
Type of	farmer, granger, husbandman, sodbuster
Has types	crofter

How to pronounce small farmer in Dutch?

small farmer::noun | Spocien Dictionary

abandonment

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