A Place to Stand

You will quite regularly see somebody from the "environmental" lobby saying how the nuclear industry once promised to provide electricity "to cheap to meter" & thus cannot now be trusted.

In fact excluding the very many times it has been quoted by the Luddites it was only said the once:

It was 50 years ago today [16th Sept 2004} that Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, chairman of
the US Atomic Energy Commission, said:
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their
homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic
regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel
effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a
minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan
far longer than ours as disease yields and man comes to understand what
causes him to age."
Strauss was speaking to the National Association of Science Writers in
New York City, and was being poetic about his vision of the future.
"Too cheap to meter" was just one of his litany of phrases, but it is
the only one which has been remembered. In subsequent years, attempts
were made to pin it to the nuclear industry as a whole, as if one man's
vision had been a promise. It has been repeatedly inflicted on the
public, because it's cute, catchy and empty of substance. Amazingly, it
gets dragged up even today, because some people and organizations have
nothing new to say.
Strauss comment was not a promise of the nuclear industry. I compiled a
number of quotes from the time period, before and after Strauss' speech;
none indicate anything but a rational technical approach to the
economics of nuclear power.

I would go further & say that on all those we have made considerable progress. I would also say that without the anti-technology movement we would almos tcertainly be much further ahead.

TO CHEAP TO METER - we know that unlimited electricity can be produced at 1.5p a unit, because the French are doing it. We could be too if allowed to. When you look at electricity bills now & then there were standing charges but electricity & charges cost much more as a proportion of earnings than now. I would be willing to bet that, as a proportion of earnings the standing charges alone then took up a higher proportion of income than honestly priced electricity now would.

END OF REGIONAL FAMINE This has been done by the Green Revolution (no relation to our Greens). Current famines only happen where there is war going on. Of course we could have gone much further using GM, for example with the rice with GM added protein which allows children to develop healthily - were it not for the anti-tech movement.

TRAVEL EFFORTLESSLY Ryanair. The attempt by the Luddites to roll this back on the grounds that air travel contributes to global cooling may succeed in countries heading down the toilet but it is a worldwide phenomenon. It didn't work in the 70s either when these same groups were demonstrating for curtailing air travel on the grounds that it contributed to global cooling either.

AGING Life expectancy is about 13 years longer than then. Nonetheless progress has been less spectacular. I have discussed this before & it seems likely that if we had been spending more money on reversing aging than on breast cancer more progress would have been made. It seems obvious that the reason it has not been is political fear.

According to the Record Cardinal O'Brien has said thet the entire Moslem community should say sorry for 9/11

The leading Catholic said: "There have been no apologies for the shooting of a nun in Somalia, let alone for 9/11 or the London bombings.

"I would like to see some reciprocal moves from the Islamic side. We shouldn't have to live in fear of attacks from Muslims."

Since the cardinal is a representative of the Catholic Church, he will, if he is not a completely hypocritical Nazi savage have already publicly apologised for the role of the Roman Catholic Church in funding the Croatian Nazis to the tune of $2 billion to deliberatley help them commit genocide & their supplying of the KLA Islamic terrorists with shells & ground to air missiles.

I must have missed him doing so.

Indeed I must have missed the entire Church's apology for their participation in genocide.

A Daily Mail article here on the BBC panjandrums admitting that even they have noticed that they are biased, though only in a pro-diversity & gay way.

My particular criticisms of them have been that they are overwhelmingly biased on the Green/anti-technology/anti-nuclear/global warming & other catatrophism side also pro-EU & anti-Serb (more, I think, because Germany, boss of the EU, was anti-Serb than because Moslems were). All of these are things that tend to increase state power, regulation & bureaucracy which, the BBC being a state bureaucracy is unsurprising.

That none of these appear to have been mentioned in their private self criticism session may be taken as evidence that I am wrong or as evidence of how deeply this institutional bias is ingrained.

A reminder of a former man on the scene's shame at the way the organisation deliberately fabricated the "news" about "atrocities" in Kosovo.

Suggested by Peter North
See these links:

http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2006/07/ming-campbell-clare-short-bbc-etc.html

http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2006/08/bbc-odd-things-were-done-to-fabricate.html

http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2006/05/bbc-wont-deny-being-genocidal-nazi.html

http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2006/04/bbcs-response-to-being-called-corrupt.html

http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2006/06/reporting-of-palestinian-deaths.html

http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2006/05/bbcs-response-to-being-called-corrupt.html

http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2006/07/nato-free-oric-srebrenica-massacre.html

http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2006_06_01_a-place-to-stand_archive.html

http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2006/05/sunday-am-experts-debate.html