Tom Friedman’s idiocy atomique

[ensho]

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5153.shtml


France’s atomic power industry is a failed radioactive flame. Its 58 reactors are unpopular, unsafe, uneconomical, dirty, direct agents of global warming, weapons proliferators and major generators of atomic waste for which there is no management solution.

But self-proclaimed “green advocate” Thomas Friedman seems to think otherwise. In his just published New York Times op ed, “Real Men Tax Gas,” Friedman applies the term “wimp” to those who fail to fight global warming. But in true corporate style, he can’t face the hard truths about France’s industrie atomique. To wit:

1) In denial verging on psychosis, Friedman says France has “managed to deal with all the radioactive waste issues without any problems or panic.” In fact, France’s unsolved waste problem has thousands of ultra-hot fuel rods building up at reactor sites, just like here. Its hugely expensive attempts to reprocess spent fuel cause devastating radiation releases into the English Channel and elsewhere, prompting continual demands from around Europe that they stop.

2) Friedman says, “France today generates nearly 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants.” But he ignores “wimpy” French public opinion that has turned decisively against building new reactors while strongly approving new wind production. The big “Non” to new nukes stems in part from massively inefficient, unreliable reactors, some of which have recently been forced shut because they are overheating the rivers meant to cool them. Is this Friedman’s “macho” solution to global warming?

3) Friedman complains that the US has “not been able or willing to build one new nuclear plant since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, even though that accident led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or neighbors.” Friedman misses those 2,400 “wimpy” central Pennsylvania families who sued for widespread death and disease they suffered after TMI’s radiation releases showered their homes and fields. The utility responsible quietly paid out more than $15 million in secret settlements.

Friedman has also missed important new findings by nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen and epidemiologist Stephen Wing, indicating far more extensive TMI radiation releases and far more widespread health impacts than previously believed.

-snip-

The true green technologies of a Solartopian Revolution are proven, ecologically sound and economically essential. They are also ready for rapid installation.

But they are decentralized and subject to community control rather than corporate domination. While Friedman and his moneyed elite continue to grasp at the failed, centralized straw of atomic energy, technology and history have passed them by.

“Real men” -- and women -- know we will never get to a green-powered Earth by trying to ride a dead radioactive horse -- even if it’s French.
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agree

[stopbush]

1. Friedman is an absolute wanker.

Is he ever right on anything? I think not.

He's worse than a birther, because his unfounded and wacko ideas are given credence by the media. He's like David Broder but worse.

[charlie]

2. Why do I live in a world

where anything from that shallow one-dimensional twit is taken seriously? How the fuck did that happen?

Real Men Tax Gas (2009)

Do we owe the French and other Europeans a second look when it comes to their willingness to exercise power in today’s world? Was it really fair for some to call the French and other Europeans “cheese-eating surrender monkeys?” Is it time to restore the French in “French fries” at the Congressional dining room, and stop calling them “Freedom Fries?” Why do I ask these profound questions?

Because we are once again having one of those big troop debates: Do we send more forces to Afghanistan, and are we ready to do what it takes to “win” there? This argument will be framed in many ways, but you can set your watch on these chest-thumpers: “toughness,” “grit,” “fortitude,” “willingness to do whatever it takes to realize big stakes” — all the qualities we tend to see in ourselves, with some justification, but not in Europeans.

But are we really that tough?...

Our War With France (2003)

It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.

If you add up how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war (making it impossible for the Security Council to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided a war), and if you look at how France behaved during the war (when its foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused to answer the question of whether he wanted Saddam or America to win in Iraq), and if you watch how France is behaving today (demanding some kind of loopy symbolic transfer of Iraqi sovereignty to some kind of hastily thrown together Iraqi provisional government, with the rest of Iraq's transition to democracy to be overseen more by a divided U.N. than by America), then there is only one conclusion one can draw: France wants America to fail in Iraq.

France wants America to sink in a quagmire there in the crazy hope that a weakened U.S. will pave the way for France to assume its "rightful" place as America's equal, if not superior, in shaping world affairs...

[MinM]

3. Atrios: the typical Tom Friedman column...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x369429

:dem: & R

[bertman]

4. Recommend. Wouldn't it be a huge step forward for humankind and our planet if we

were able to power our homes and industries by using local power sources: solar, geothermal, wind, tidal? We could reduce our dependence upon electricity moving upon a huge, wasteful, expensive, HIGHLY VULNERABLE, grid system. We could empower local contractors and put millions of people to work worldwide by simply financing this new green revolution.

Unfortunately we have to contend with Big Oil and The Nuclear Industry and the politicians who are in their pockets.

Don't give up on the dream.