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Fukushima Disaster Leads Japan To Backpedal On Emissions Pledge
mdsolar writes with this excerpt from the New York Times: "Japan took a major step back on Friday from earlier pledges to slash its greenhouse gas emissions, saying a shutdown of its nuclear power plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster had made previous targets unattainable. The announcement cast a shadow over international talks underway in Warsaw aimed at fashioning a new global pact to address the threats of a changing climate. Under its new goal, Japan, one of the world's top polluters, would still seek to reduce its current emissions. But it would release 3 percent more greenhouse gases in 2020 than it did in 1990, rather than the 6 percent cut it originally promised or the 25 percent reduction it promised two years before the 2011 nuclear disaster."
Not quite.
It actually depends on what benefits the set of politicians and their propagandists with the most power and biggest bullhorn the most. It has nothing whatsoever to do with achieving objective, real-life, positive results for society and mankind, nor with accruing benefits or empowerment to anyone besides those who control the levers of power & law and their cronies.
If it became known that someone came up with some sort of "John Galt" type way to generate super-cheap and pollution-free energy anywhere with a relatively small lightweight device, they and everyone around them would be killed or otherwise silenced, and all their research, experimental data, and any experimental models confiscated and/or destroyed faster than one can say "drone".
They want energy and energy distribution systems which they can control and use to confiscate even more of people's hard work better and thus control people better while enriching themselves, not better/cheaper/cleaner energy that empowers the individual and allows them the freedom to be less dependent and more self-reliant.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
1. Offshore wind cannot provide base load without investments that would likely bankrupt the country. If it can and you have means to do so, you should patent these asap. You are going to be a guaranteed multi-millionaire. Since you are posting here about it, I'm assuming that you're just regurgitating same naive talking points that much of green movement likes to use.
2. Doubling something marginal isn't hard. Japan could have increased it ten times and it would have still remained a marginal power generation source.
3. Power plant was not critically damage by the earthquake. This was very clearly outlined in the reports of several international watchdogs. If it wasn't hit by tsunami, the backup generators would have continued to supply the power to the cooling systems and current situation would have never occurred. Problem was that seawall shielding the plant itself was about 1/4 of tsunami's height, as no one in the region was ready for what happened. Which considering the damage to the rest of the area is pretty obvious.
Tsunami came and flooded the diesel generators feeding power to cooling systems of the reactor, stopping them and causing the eventual partial meltdown. Without tsunami, generators would have happily continued to supply cooling systems with power, and while it would have likely taken a while until reactor could be restarted, it did not inflict critical damage on it.
To reiterate, this is the reactor that was designed to withstand magnitude 7. It took magnitude 9. It survived it just fine. It took the tsunami flooding the generator rooms to cause the meltdown.
It would be really nice if people would stop regurgitating same half truths and lies all over and over again.
And let us remind ourselves of another fact: even without Fukushima, the combination of that earthquake and tsunami was among the most if not the most damaging natural disasters to ever hit Japan.