OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #124, APRIL 24, 2023
Our
Print Magazines Imagine the Future
Mother Jones: Electricity and
Regional Transmission
Nukewatch Quarterly: Renewables and
No Nuclear Weapons
In
These Times: Reparations
To
Have a Future: Electrify and Regional Transmission Lines. Mother Jones Magazine (May-June
2023) contains
several articles on climate change, especially decarbonizing USA “Electrify Everything” includes Bill
McKibben’s “Yes in Our Backyards” and Lois Parshley’s “Powered Up.” McKibben celebrates the building/solar
panels boom. Parshley urges regional
transmission lines.
To
Have a Future: 1. Massive Production of
Renewables, 2. Total Abolition of Nuclear Weapons
Nukewatch
Quarterly (Spring 2023) in a debunking article
on “nuclear fusion” as an energy
breakthrough, “Clean Energy or Weapons?”
M. V. Ramana argues that the fusion research will not produce the energy
its boosters claim, while on the other hand it “will contribute far more to
U.S. efforts to further develop its terrifyingly destructive nuclear weapons
arsenal.” The fusion research has been
a “dangerous distraction.” “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that
to stop irreversible damage from climate change, the world will have to achieve
zero net emissions by 2050. Given this
short timeline to turn round our economies and ways of living, spending billions
of dollars on fusion power only amounts to diverting money and resources away
from proven and safer renewable energy sources. Meanwhile, nuclear fusion experiments will
further the risk posed by the nuclear arsenal. We need nuclear weapons
abolition, but programs like [the fusion research] offer nuclear weapons modernisation, which is just a means to assure destruction
forever.” Orig. pub. in Beyond Nuclear, (12-16-2022). M. V. Ramana occupies the Chair in
Disarmament at U. of British Columbia, Vancouver.
Another Necessary Big Idea for the Future: Just
Transition In These Times Magazine (March 2023) supports climate
reparations in “The Big Idea: Climate Reparations.” “The idea that wealthy nations should pay to
mitigate the planetary emergency, which they caused and which
disproportionately affects poorer countries.”
(A major advocacy of the Green New Deal.
–D)