This article, and the comments, are a vivid example of why left is so utterly marginalized in todays politics.

Whine and frighten, but take no responsibility for practical governance.

I live in Virginia. I invite everyone to come visit, and take a nice historic tour of old colonial sites. See how people lived back then, it is all nicely documented, even reenacted in places. Ask yourself after you are finished, which life would you rather have, theirs or yours?

Modern civilization requires baseload energy generation. The energy has to come from somewhere. France may have banned fracking, but they derive 80% of their electricity needs from nukes, including breeder reactors (yes, yes, the DEADLY plutonium), and have been doing so for decades now. Germany banned nukes (again) in a cynical political ploy, as they think they are rich enough to buy energy from their neighbors, however produced, and if it is produced from nukes their green protesters will stage noisy demonstration, go home on the electric train, flip the light switch at home, grab a cold beer from the refrigerator, and go on electricity guzzling internet to plan the next happenning.

The left and the environmental movement will bear heavy moral responsibility for the next nuclear accident in the US, which the said left will surely and noisily deny when the time comes. There is a problem brewing here due to overloading of spent fuel pools. This problem arose because utilities were asked to wait for “national solution” that never came, as any attempt to provide such solution is blocked by hysterical propaganda of fear. This is always the easiest part, scream fire in a crowded room, take a moral high ground, leave solving the problem and keeping the show on the road to someone else, in whose face you joyfully spit on a daily basis as “those greedy bastards and their lackeys in the media”.

Here is the real problem we have in this country. We are stuck between the lunatic left and the lunatic right, both trying to destroy modern society for their own deranged reasons. Stop listening to the drivel, educate yourself, and honestly ask yourself the question what is the realistic road that can be taken, a road that keeps the light on from this day forward, every day, not when the solartopia finally arrives.

Finally, as far as Fukushima is concerned: 20,000+ died in the worst earthquake in a century. A few miles wide strip of shoreline is contaminated with every kind of industrial waste known to man, but all you hear about on sites like this one is the “deadly radiation from Fukushima”. Get a grip. If you want to get honest news withouth the deadly hype, try this website: http://www.nuclearstreet.com . No, I do not work for nuclear industry, but I do have an advanced degree in nuclear physics, and I think I have finally had it with all this luddite drivel.

Sorry if someone feels offended, nothing personal.

FYI, turn our that the USA does not have the nuclear manpower required to build nuclear plants. They will have to be imported from Japan or France. Talk about putting the cart before the horses ass, ObomberBush.

I expect better from Sirota than this statement:

“Over the last few years, more evidence has surfaced that suggests drinking water may be getting contaminated by fracking—a drilling technique that involves injecting toxic chemicals into the earth.”

“Suggests”???  What was he thinking when he wrote that?  And what was the Truthdig editor thinking when he/she let that get past him/her??

And, sadly, Sirota joins those who want merely to “regulate” fracking better.  Take a look at the impacts of other “regulated” corporate assaults on communities and the environment—coal and uranium mining, land-applied sewage sludge, toxic-waste dumps, coal-burning power plants—how’s that workin’ for ya?

The real issue is, who get’s to decide whether a community is fracked—the people who live there, or a corporation, aided and abetted by the state legislature?  If we don’t have democracy in our communities, where do we have it?

In Pennysylvania, New York, Maryland…communities are asserting their inherent, inalienable right to local self-governance and enacting local laws—ordinances—that ban fracking and related activities within their communities.

We’re a sovereign people, and we need to start asserting our right to govern our communities.

This might, might be conscionable if you believed for a second that they were taking risks in order to bridge the gap between the oil economy and a sustainable future. But, no, we all feel in our bones that this is a last-ditch defense of what James Howard Kunstler calls the “happy motoring” universe of growth and sprawl. At a fantastic cost in externalities they will keep the inevitable upward spiral of energy costs at a bearable rate for an extra decade or two, and then the bottom will fall out of the hydrocarbon lifestyle. The people who run this country, and too many voters, show a depraved indifference to human life and the ecology of our planet that is dumbfounding in its short-sightedness. That these morons are going to take the rest of us with them disgusts and infuriates me.

Despite Fukushima, nuclear power is the answer.  Clean,
dependable, safe (compare it to any other energy source,
remember no one was killed at Fukushima by radiation) limitless,
low environmental impact, no CO2.  Wind and solar cannot get
the job done.  The world will go there with or without the US,
because whatever your ideology, in the long run 2+2=4.

The only dynamic that explains this blindness to the dangers of nuclear and the efforts to extract every last stored bit of energy from the earth is that Corporations that have bribed their way past regulation and responsibility to the nation are completely unable to see anything but short term bottom lines.

Once more someone needs to ask and demand to know what Cheney and the evil merchants of distruction conspired to do to us at the start of the Bush/Cheney Administration. How many of the wars and military actions and crimes committed since that time were well thought out and determined against the long term interests of America and American citizens?

Haven’t even mentioned Biederbeck—I believe that is the name. Rich people should not be allowed to have private conversations about the economy and ways to avoid regulation and responsibility.  It should be at lest in the open so we can’t say we didn’t know the crimes they are cabable of.

Come on David! If you’re gonna make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.

Furthermore, talking the way you do might hurt the Dow.

And everybody knows the Dow = the economy, right?

Besides, when it all goes horribly wrong, those responsible, and their lackeys in government and the media, will tell us the no one could’ve seen it coming. And that moreover, we need to retain and boost the pay of all those responsible because only they, with their “superior” knowledge of what went wrong, are in a position to fix it.