Baldwin praises oil industry leaders as “very, very smart, very shrewd, very necessary industrialists”; calls nuclear reactors “filthy”
Apparently, when his current season of “30 Rock” ends, Alec Baldwin is interested in running for office, perhaps to become the mayor of New York City. His thoughts about energy technology and energy policy are thus gaining a new level of importance.
During a September 2, 2011 interview posted on Huffington Post, Alec Baldwin claimed that it is a “big lie” that nuclear power plants produce clean power. He said that even in a world with no terrorists, no bad weather, and reactors on dry ground, that nuclear reactors are “filthy, contaminating processes.” When asked for his thoughts on the alternatives to nuclear, specifically with regard to oil, he said the following:
In fairness to the oil industry, it’s something that is a bunch of very, very smart, very shrewd, very necessary industrialists who did their part and did what was asked of them to get us to where we are now. Now it’s time for them to step aside in terms of their primary role. I mean, oil will continue to maintain… The idea is to burn less. The idea is to burn significantly less. I mean 25 – 30% less in the coming 15 or 20 years so we can get where we do not have to go fight a war and kill a bunch of innocent people.
The interviewer then asked Baldwin what other technologies are available if we are going to get rid of nuclear and reduce oil. She wanted to know what will we use for “consistent power” since wind and solar are not consistent. Here is Baldwin’s response.
I disagree that they are inconsistent. That is the argument that people say all the time. They are like you are going to build all this wind power… Only in America is it inconsistent. You go all over the world and there are people who are getting plenty of energy in places that are sited properly, that are specifically sited for that activity. I mean how can you say to me that you wouldn’t be able to reap massive amounts of solar energy from Death Valley. You know, I mean you could put a solar array that covers thirty square miles in the southwest United States that would power one quarter of the whole country.
I hope that everyone will recognize the stupidity of that statement. Does Baldwin really believe that the sun only sets in the United States or that the wind blows more consistently outside of our borders? Does he think that even a child would believe that the sun stays up all the time in Death Valley?
Here is the video. Watch and listen. Share it with your friends and family. Shout from the mountain tops that electing someone who lives in that kind of fantasy land to a public office higher than dog catcher in a county with more than one resident dog would be a huge mistake.
Disclosure: I have never watched a single episode of “30 Rock.” I have, however, watched “Hunt for Red October” several times.
There are many, many politicians more stupid than Alec Baldwin, as annoying as his (stupid) opinions on nuclear are. We have lunatics in the congress right now. That said, it is actually difficult historically to find stupid mayors of NYC, so maybe we are safe.
Yeah … he’d definitely be a better candidate for governor of NY. I wonder how he is with high-priced prostitutes.
‘Disclosure: I have never watched a single episode of “30 Rock.” I have, however, watched “Hunt for Red October” several times.’
Wait, buwha? Why is this disclosure important? Disclosures usually reveal things which some people may construe as putting in question the real motives of the author (e.g. financial or other conflicts of interest). I guess you’re trying to convince people you aren’t a “fan” of Alec Baldwin? I think that would only matter if your article was favorable to him.
I think it was meant as a joke.
Brian got it. Sorry it was not obvious, but there is such a thing as sly humor that takes more than one reading.
I imagine most people got it…
On the interview itself – when anyone makes an assertion such as “nuclear reactors are filthy, contaminating processes”, they should explain what they mean. That statement is so vague and unspecific. . . I mean, is he referring to the spent nuclear fuel? Is he referring to mining operations? What exactly is he complaining about?
I so wish interviewers (and some of the best interviewers do), would immediately follow up by asking for clarfication, for specific complaints, when a vague assertion is made.
There is one comforting outcome to this. Alec Baldwin knows as much about solar\wind as he does about nuclear.
This smarmy thespian wants to think of himself as a socially-relevant Deep Thinker.
In the phony media world in which he thrives, relatively speaking, he probably is.
It sounds like Alec Baldwin is a supporter of fossil fuels. I can’t get the video to stream for some reason so I’m going to have to assume he doesn’t mention burning coal. An omission like that coupled with a stated need to reduce our oil consumption by 25% to 30% with no explanation on how that is to be achieved really means business as usual for fossil fuels. A wind expansion will require more natural gas as back up and if he really wants to shut down nuclear facilities then how does he propose also reducing burning oil? If anything that will require more fossil fuels even with a large wind and solar expansion and overly optimistic expectations on their performance. His idiocy wouldn’t bother me if it weren’t for the fact people will listen to him over scientists and engineers resulting in more damage to the environment and public health through continued reliance on fossil fuels.
Sorry for multiple posts, but I keep thinking of different things about this situation: Can someone comment on his “30 square miles” statement? That sounds *ridiculously* small to me – that’s like and area 5×6 miles. It sounds at least one order of magnitude too small to me, but I could be wrong.
Would such an estimate be based on theoretical perfection? That is, contingent upon 100% efficient power conversion systems which don’t exist in reality, covering 100% of the land (which is more or less impossible)?
@ Jeff S
Here is some info:
Sunup to sundown, the sun’s rays shed about 400 watts per square meter of ground in the United States. By theoretical limits, only about 25 percent of this can be converted into electricity. This means that solar electricity can light one 100-watt bulb for every card table. Covering every square foot of every building in the country with solar panels would be enough to provide our indoor lighting—about 4 percent of our total electrical consumption—during the daytime. Other forms of solar energy flows—wind, hydroelectricity, or biofuels—are more dilute.
So, using that figure of 100 watts per square meter theoretical maximum, if I didn’t make any math mistakes, I come to an output of 7.77 Gigawatts.
I did a bit of investigating (well, mostly just Wikipedia, so I can’t vouch for the numbers actually being accurate, but I’ll use those, for what it’s worth), and it looks like *average* power demand in the U.S. is about 31.5 GW. So, his statement, I suppose is true to the extent that you don’t factor in such “complicating factors” as peak energy demand (i.e. if the *average* demand is 31.5 GW, the highest level of demand required at any given moment in time might be considerably higher – maybe 50 or even 100 GW, and your generation must be built for peaks in demand, not averages), and the fact that, as far as I know, no one has actually built any 25% efficient solar generators, means you’d need something more than 30 square miles.
Still, I suppose it does show you need a relatively small amount of land to generate a lot of solar power, if you can cover nearly all the area with fairly high efficiency solar panels or CSP heliostats (and the associated generators).
I still think Rod’s right, though, in the end about the unreliability of solar power. I do think there is some future for solar power, particularly if the people testing out molten salt energy storage are successful in being able to store enough energy during the day to continue generating power at night, to mitigate that factor.
Alec Baldwin isn’t totally wrong when he says that some sites are especially well suited for solar or wind. I could see at least a strong potential that solar in death valley or the southwestern deserts, if you had a suitable storage system for keeping some of the daytime energy for night, might work reliably enough to be substantially usefull. The big question is, will the economics support such a project.
Jeff – The solar constant is 1.4 kilowatts per square meter. That’s the total amount of energy (in all wavelengths) that we’re getting from the sun at the Earth’s orbital distance. For an area of 30 square miles, that’s only 950 TWh per year. The US consumes over 4150 TWh in electricity each year.
The sun simply doesn’t produce enough energy to make Baldwin’s math work, even in the most simplistic, optimistic, and impossible analysis.
Maybe he will make a good politician. I mean, Gore used to be a Congressman, Senator, and Vice President, and he apparently thinks that the interior of the Earth is “extremely hot, several million degrees.”
@Brian: Did you hear the part where he said one-quarter? Not the entire U.S. power? He did qualify it that way.
So, 950TWh is roughly 1/4 of 4150TWh (though only very roughly – it’s more like 23%, but that’s not far off from 1/4).
Jeff,
Look at the land requirements!
A thermal solar station requires 50 square miles to generate the same 1000 megawatts (MW) you can get from a mile square coal or nuclear plant. And that’s only when the sun shines! A photovoltaic plant will require 75 square miles. A wind farm takes 125 square miles and then only generates electricity 30 percent of the times. To be assure of anything near constant output you probably have to cover 500 square miles in diverse locations. The Nature Conservancy — which is supporting nuclear — calls this “energy sprawl.”
Jeff,
Theoretical maximum indeed as right now only 30% of this energy (100 watts per square meter) can be transferred into electricity.
Jeff – It’s less than one quarter. That’s my point.
Here, I’ve neglected the attenuation due to the atmosphere, the efficiency of the solar equipment, the cross-section that the solar equipment actually occupies (i.e., subtract off the spaces between the solar panels or mirrors in that 30 square miles), and the latitude of the facility. Once you’ve factored that in, you get how much power you can expect for cloudless, crystal-clear conditions in the middle of the day with the sun straight overhead. Now factor in the angle of incidence of the sun as it travels through the sky, the extra attenuation of the atmosphere at low angles, the fact that the sun sets at night, the seasons, the weather, etc.
Then you might get a reasonable estimate of how much electricity this 30 square miles of solar facility could produce in a year.
I neglected all of that and still didn’t reach Baldwin’s claim of “one quarter.” All I considered is how much power the sun is putting into a 30-square-mile cross-section of space on the surface of a sphere with a radius of 1 AU.
Of course, I seriously doubt that Baldwin make any calculation at all. The man is lacks the training or education to perform even my simplified calculation. It just happens, however, that he is stupid enough to shoot his mouth off anyway.
And one big loss that is not factored into this discussion is the losses from transmission and distribution.
Trying to transmit solar power from the Southwest to other parts of the country would require an much larger grid system which means solar power lost to normal line losses. EIA states that about 7% is lost to normal T&D operations. Which means just that many more solar panels and acreage to account for the losses to ensure people receive the power they need and want.
And on top of all that is the fact that 10 minutes of cloud cover would knock out the entire system thereby causing blackouts across the entire Southwest. Something that region just experienced and do not want to go through again.
This is why actors aren’t designers of critical infrastructure systems.
I’m not a designer of critical infrastructure systems, but I play one on TV. 🙂
And Jeff, let’s not forget all the Mac Jobs that will be created to constantly clean the dirt and dust off those solar panels!
Daniel – In Alec’s biz, those people are called “extras.” They don’t get paid much.
‘Can someone comment on his “30 square miles” statement? That sounds *ridiculously* small to me – that’s like and area 5×6 miles.’
30 mi^2 is indeed ridiculously small. Most likely he read something which talked about ’30 miles square’ (900 mi^2) — which is still too small.
Here’s one large solar project under construction: http://www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpaces/project_detail.cfm/projectID=62
Ivanpah is projected to have an annual production off 1,079,232 MW·h (123 MW·yr); with an area of 3500 acres (5.47 mi^2) that’s 22.5 MW·yr/mi^2. US generation is 3,950 TW·h (451 GW·yr) http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa_sum.html of which nuclear produces a fifth. Ergo, it would take 915 Ivanpahs to produce a quarter of US power, which would take 5000 mi^2 (or 71 miles square).
So ’30 square miles’ is not even 1% of the necessary area, and even 30 miles square is still too small by a factor of five.
In passing, I’d note that “reap massive amounts of solar energy from Death Valley” is a rather cavalier disposal of a national park! He could have just said the Mojave Desert.
Mean solar irradiance on a flat horisontal surface in the US is ~200 W/m^2.
A solar panel is about 10% efficient. Now your down to ~20 W/m^2.
But the panels aren’t actually horisontal; they’re tilted to maximize energy collection in the summer time; and you don’t want the panels to cast a shadow on other panels. Panels consist of one or more series connected chains of cells, with 30-ish cells in series being not uncommon; if you shade a single cell in that chain of ~30, the output for that chain drops almost to zero. You collect perhaps half of the solar irradiance falling on that area, with the rest hitting the ground. That’s about ~10 W/m^2 of land and ~30 W/m^2 of silicon.
30 mi^2 * 10 W/m^2 is 800 MW; or about a single nuclear reactor.
What about the politicians who are already in office? Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t even know that natural gas is a fossil fuel, saying on Meet the Press a few years ago that gas is a “clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/08/24/pelosi-on-natural-gas-fossil-fuel-or-not/
Pete51,
In her defense, perhaps she was speaking of some of the proposals to generate biogenic methane using things like algae or bacteria in tanks? Not *all* “Natural Gas” must be a fossil fuel – it can be created from living sources.
Jeff S-
If that was her intent, she didn’t make that distinction in the MTP interview. She also said that natural gas is “cheap, abundant and clean”. I don’t know the cost of production of biogenic methane, but it is certainly not being used on a wide enough scale to be considered abundant.
As for being clean, I suppose biogenic methane could be considered CO2 neutral, minus whatever energy is spent in processing and transporting it.
Pete, I agree, after reading the rest of that article you linked, even though my point about some natural gas not being a fossil fuel is valid, she wasn’t talking about that natural gas. Plus, the article has an update at the end I missed before, that she had her spokesperson clarify that she *does* consider it a fossil fuel.
I’ve got to tell you, there’s nothing like being lectured by a guy who lives in this house (which he apparently uses only “part time”) about how we all need to cut down on our energy consumption.
Alec ain’t got brains, but he’s got a huge set of balls.
indeed, schweaty ones
This is now the perfect time for Mr. Baldwin to prove all of us naysayers wrong.
There are 640 acres in 1 square mile. Mr. Baldwin’s net worth is approximately $65 million based on a quick google search and will only increase due to his royalties. With the economy in its current state, acreage in Arizona has decreased in value plus solar panels can be installed on land that is not used for agriculture or other purposes which means the cost would even be lower.
So Mr. Baldwin should sink a few million of his own funds into a few square miles of solar panels. Say a facility about 10% to run an effective scale model, so 3 square miles which should run him about $2 million for the land as that is only 1,920 acres. Go with 2,500 acres to handle the infrastructure and extra solar panels necessary due to inefficencies.
Then install solar panels, hook them up to the grid and stand back to wait for the profits and accolades from people like Mark Jacobson to roll in.
His investment in the solar panels will be a maximum of 70% of their value if he puts this plan into place before the end of 2012 since that is when the Section 1603 grants for wind and solar are projected to be cut from the current budget.
I very roughly estimate it would only take about 10% of his net worth to get his plan started. Considering he probably has adept tax lawyers and accountants then he might even reduce his risk further. Especially since he could create an LLC and bring in other anti-nuclear Hollywood types that are equally as sure as he is on the ability of solar power to run our country.
Now is the time for him to step up. He issued his own challenge. Let’s see if he will step up or if he will run back to doing more credit card commercials. Ted Turner and Kevin Costner can provide him morale support based on their own environmental activities where they are using their own money.
The thirty square miles notion is simply not true. Prior to hitting the atmosphere, the solar influx is 1342 w per sq meter. My conversion came up with ~104,000 MW for 30 sq mi (less than half of the 250,000 MW which is about one quarter of the US electric capacity). This does not include nightime or efficiency of the collectors.
If being very smart and shrewd means that petroleum experts can do math… well even SDSU rejects like me can do that. 😉
I started my comment before Brian’s showed up. My 250,000 MW is based on installed capacity. We have about 1 TWe installed capacity in the US.
My numbers are from recent IEA estimates of electricity consuption (the US imports quite a bit of electricity overall).
An excellent source for energy calculations is the book by the Physicist, Professor David Mackay: ‘Sustainable Energy — without the hot air’. It is lacking in Economic analysis, but most of the numbers you could ever want are there. It can be found and downloaded for free at:
http://www.withouthotair.com/
He obviously did not mean to say that the sun doesn’t set in the United States. Even someone calling nuclear reactors “filthy” can’t possibly be that stupid.
While it is true that the sun also sets over Death Valley, it is also true that this is probably a good location.
Let’s leave the eco system as it is and stop occupying space to accomodate an inefficient energy source that is polluting the environment and draining the planet from its rare minerals.
@Karl-Friedrich Lenz:
No. Death Valley would be a terrible place to build a large power plant of any kind, but particularly one that would occupy 30 square miles of land with solar collectors.
http://www.nps.gov/deva/index.htm
From the description of the Death Valley National Park:
“Death Valley National Park: A Land of Extremes
Hottest, Driest, Lowest: A superlative desert of streaming sand dunes, snow-capped mountains, multicolored rock layers, water-fluted canyons and 3 million acres of wilderness. Home to the Timbisha Shoshone people and to plants and animals unique to the harshest desert.”
Is that really something that should be subjected to the kind of construction project required to build a solar power station and all of the transmission lines that would be required to distribute the power produced? Do you realize how much of the time that most of the infrastructure required (including the transmission lines) would be idle? How much fossil fuel would be burned during the construction project? Where would the crews live? How would they get their supplies? Where would the water required to keep the panels clean come from? How would placing a demand for 30 square miles of solar photovoltaic panels affect the market?
If you recognize the limitations of PV and claim that you want solar-thermal then you have an additional set of problems to solve. Where would the molten salt or oil for heat storage come from? How many tanker shipments would be required per unit of storage? Where would the water for the heat sink come from – if you think nuclear plants need a lot of cooling water, you need to realize that solar thermal plants are even less thermally efficient due to lower average input temperatures. Deserts may be a reasonable plant for a heat source (only relatively speaking and ignoring most of the factors that I listed above), but they are terrible places for heat sinks.
(All Rankine cycle heat engines need both in order to function. If you do not know what a Rankine cycle is, find another topic to discuss other than energy production systems.)
You point out some very valid objections to build a solar project in Death Valley. I am more interested in the DESERTEC project, which wants to build in the Sahara, and doing something like that in the Gobi desert.
It is probably still true that Death Valley gets a lot of sun.
It is probably also true that Mr. Baldwin knows that the sun sets.
You’re probably right that the ‘mineral’ deserts like the Sahara can’t be ‘damaged’ too much.
However, what I remember from years of hiking in the high desert of Southern California was the fact that if you disrupt the landscape, there is so little rain and vegetative growth that the scars are virtually permanent. If you even toss some garbage along the trail, you can come back in 20 years and it will still be there.
The Sahara is an ecosystem nevertheless:
Research at the University of Liverpool has found how Saharan dust storms help sustain life over extensive regions of the North Atlantic Ocean.
Everything is intertwined. Let’s leave the ecosystems alone for all the lifeforms on the planet.
I’ve known about “DESERTEC” for some time now, and I’ve always considered it to be simply an attempt to scam the EU out of poorly administered subsidy money.
The concept itself is ridiculously impractical (their promotional literature reads like a “pie-in-the-sky” collection of buzzwords and popular technical jargon), which is a dangerous potential drain on the European economy, but if (by some miracle) it were to succeed, the consequences would be even more disastrous in my opinion.
It’s a perfect example of the dream of greens and other liberals that can only be described as “energy imperialism.” California provides an excellent example of what I’m talking about. Not wanting to have power plants in their neighborhood, Californians have put in place legislation and regulations that have made it almost impossible to build a power plant in the state that is not based on wind, solar, or natural gas. Thus, the power plants necessary to support their economy have been built out of state, and California now imports more electricity than any other state in the US (according to the Energy Information Administration).
Similarly, the “DESERTEC” dream is for Europe to “outsource” its electricity generation to North Africa, so that Europeans don’t have to live with all those unwanted power plants in their back yard. Convenient, eh?
Of course, this type of imperialism isn’t new. Europe has long exploited North Africa for its oil resources, so why is it surprising that some people want to exploit it for its solar resources?
The main difference, however, is that oil didn’t depend on an almost Rube-Goldberg-like infrastructure that is very unlikely to ever be built. Thus, fortunately, DESERTEC is going nowhere; even though it might eventually suck up substantial amounts of investor or EU subsidy money, as scams are designed to do.
Nevertheless, one has to wonder about the kind of people who continue to promote this kind of energy imperialism. Are the just ignorant of economics, are they just ignorant of history, or are they just idiots?
@Brian,
Well said!
IMHO, its not ignorance that is driving the green groups to propose a plan that will ensure North Africa is a permanent supplier of energy to Europe whether they want to or not.
It is the green groups supposed moral superiority. Solar is morally better in their viewpoint. Therefore the higher cost is one that we all should be willing to pay since we must pay for our sins of pillaging Mother Earth. Secondly this will “help” the North Africans by sending that nasty capitalistic money from Europe to those poor North Africans who need it (which won’t happen of course but when it comes to subsidies it is difficult to show people how the money is really flowing when ideaology gets in the way).
The green groups are using twisted logic to technically justify the plan which just means twisted logic must be used to rationalize carpeting North Africa with solar panels that will do little if anything to enrich the North Africans.
A similar argument could be laid out about California pushing their power generation needs into neighboring states.
The big difference between the CA situation and the proposed DESERTEC plan is that Arizona is more then happy to sell nuclear power from Palo Verde into CA whereas the green groups do not want to give the North African countries that opportunity to build nuclear power plants whose sole purpose would be to sell power into Europe. It is solar or nothing for North Africa per the green groups mindset.
@Brian
The idea of using the Sahara is based on the fact that there is much more sun there than in Europe (especially Northern Europe). And the fact that it is a rather large unused space.
I am not sure if I agree that I am an “idiot” for liking that scheme. But I can assure you that calling me such does not help convincing me of any other points you make beside the ad hominem attack.
This project is indeed based on the solar resources in that area, but little else. As was mentioned up thread, everything is connected, and there has been no serious attempt to model the the impact that a project of this size will have on the region, and elsewhere.
Along with the transmission, this project will be incredibly expensive – most likely orders of magnitude greater than nuclear plants. And for what? To pander to irrational fears.
While I think that Brian was thinking of the political supporters, to some extent if the shoe fits…
I remain convinced that Desertec is a complete mirage designed to fool those who would be fooled while ensuring that they keep buying natural gas, oil and coal.
No one is going to invest the money required to make anything other than a feeble, pilot scale project. Like fusion and CCS, it is simply a dream for the marketers of fossil fuel. I remain unconvinced that the effect is “unintended” and unplanned. It just amazes me how many people of good intent and soft heads have been duped. It also amazes me that people who are technically competent and well aware of the advantages of nuclear over fossil fuel in terms of environmental impact still believe that the opposition to nuclear energy comes mainly from those “liberal environmentalists” and not from their technically astute, but greedy colleagues in oil, gas, coal, and wind turbine development.
Bill – Good points. I fear that you are correct about the benefits (or lack thereof) that the natives would receive as a result of such a scheme.
Karl-Friedrich – So if it’s “unused” then it’s OK to carpet it over with a parking lot or a huge industrial facility or whatever. Is that what you’re saying? Convenient that it’s not in the back yard of the people who want to develop it, isn’t it?
If you want to feel offended, then be my guest, if it makes you feel any better. I don’t care. You might want to learn the difference between an argumentum ad hominem and an insult, however.
DV82XL – You forgot the warm fuzzy feeling that people like to enjoy when they think that they’re using solar power.
One point that has been overlooked is the energy security aspect of this plan. Europe has spent the last four decades moving away from using oil to generate electricity because of instability in this and other parts of the world. Now someone wants to move the actual generation of electricity to there?! They must be daft!
I mean, it’s not as if there is any fighting or conflict in North Africa these days, is there? 😉
@Brian
You are right that political instability is a big problem for the DESERTEC concept.
If you are right and it doesn’t work out, that would remove one large potential source of carbon free energy from McKay’s list.
Better get some success in the pro-nuclear advocacy then.
I can imagine security for a facility like Desertec would be a nightmare. Talk about the ultimate soft target. Relatively fragile (compared to nuclear containment structures) solar collectors spread out over tens or hundreds of square miles. You’d need a huge guard force to keep an eye on that all the time, especially in a region prone to guerrilla and terrorist activity. If Europe were to ever come to rely heavily on such a system, they’d either be on the hook for a huge security tab, or beholden to whatever terrorist-group-of-the-week took it into their heads to hold the electricity supply of a continent hostage.
Rod – You should realize that every sale requires both a seller and a buyer. Both are complicit in the transaction. This goes for propaganda as well.
So if your purpose was to defend so-called “liberal environmentalists” as being relatively innocent, then I must object. They are as guilty as the so-called “greedy” people involved in oil, gas, coal, and wind turbine development. The main difference is that the former are also guilty of being incredibly naive, something that I find to be particularly repugnant.
If there were no sheep, what mischief could the shepherds make?
Brian is right – DESERTEC is designed more to harvest European subsidies than Saharan sunbeams.
@Brian
I disagree. Propagandists, con artists and flim flam men are far more culpable than their victims. People with fine technical educations sufficient to allow them to design the impressive reduction gears and fine control systems associated with 5 MWe wind turbines should have the technical honesty to tell their liberal arts educated neighbors that wind is just a scam that happens to be technically challenging and interesting.
I do not think of the people who I used to socialize with who were professional environmentalists at a large local non-profit as “naive” but it did take a little effort on my part to help them overcome the limitations of their formal education and the decades worth of propaganda often published by their own government in Department of Energy publications. Many of those publications were produced on the watch of people who came directly through the revolving doors of government service from the executive ranks at fossil fuel companies.
Again, they have no excuse for failing to recognize that the wind and sun are inadequate, but they still propagated the lie to unsuspecting people who were not energy professionals.
Rod – I think that you’re being a lot more charitable to your old cocktail-party friends than you’ve been to poor Alec Baldwin here. At least your friends had the benefit of a full Liberal Arts education. Alec’s one degree is in Fine Arts, which he didn’t obtain until he was about 36 years old.
Although Baldwin might praise oil companies and their leaders, I don’t think that he is an executive in any of these companies. Neither is he employed in their marketing departments, and certainly, he is not employed in their engineering departments.
How can you take time to comment on the “stupidity” of his statements, and at the same time, object to your buddies (who were probably saying many of the exact same things, and getting paid to do so) being called “naive”?
This is the same actor who thinks the “Tooth Fairy Project” is a valid scientific study. While we’re listening to him discuss energy matters perhaps we can get to answer questions on parenting as well.
I never liked him as an actor. Now it turns out he is as thick as two short planks.
He led the charge against the High Flux Beam Reactor at Brookhaven Lab, which resulted in the shutdown and destruction of a benign and incredibly productive and useful scientific research facility. It put this country further behind Europe and Asia in the field of neutron scattering research. And incidentally destroyed the careers and livelihoods of dozens of very good scientists and technicians at BNL.
He knew how to get the crew off that filty nuclear boat. Perhaps he will have some ideas about the soot and stink of NY and fix the grid and Brown outs…before they all move to New Jersey.
There is no place like NY City to begin a bright political career. Getting to the tops of that filthy heap and Wall Street with all those smart people seems Alec’s choice.
So much for filthy nuclear. From NHK World News:
Expert radiation scientists are meeting in Fukushima and wish:
1) That radiation levels after accident have been made public since they were much lower than levels deemed safe by scientists
2) That comparative risks of traffic accidents would have been used to compare with actual risk of exposure to the current level of radiation
Makoto Akashi wishes to convince people that there will be no health impact from radiation from the Fukushima accident
Brian: ‘It’s a perfect example of the dream of greens and other liberals…’
Brian I am a ‘librul’ and also support nuclear power. Both positions are logical in my opinion.
Steve – Feel free to change my phrasing to “greens and some other liberals.” The meaning is the same with or without the extra word. I never said that all liberals feel this way, and I doubt that anyone would disagree that folks who call themselves “Green” typically also consider themselves to be liberals.
Ideological Greens are not liberal at all — they are right-wing anti-capitalists.
I believe that this is true in the UK.
In the US, the best term would be fascist anti-capitalists, but most of these people would identify themselves as “liberal.”
Is there no public challenge to this man? Far too many laypeople (voters) and politicans and media types endear themselves to this man to let his words slide unrebuked.
Please confiirm: That the Japanese have so zealously established such a high limit for radioactivity that anyone wearing a 1960’s style radium dial watch is barred from office buildings and trains. Seems in keeping with preventing Fukushima evacuees from returning to their homes in an area where radiation readings are tens if not hundreds of times _lower_ than the natural background of some inhabited areas on Earth. Get a grip and let those people home, Japan!
James Greenidge
James,
Robbers and thieves are back in the abandoned villages and towns around Fukushima.
Easy money considering that there are no radiation dangers in most of the evacuated zones outside of 3 KM.
Residents should opt for civil disobedience and go back home like they did in Chernobyl.
I agree with James Greenidge … somebody needs to take on Alec Baldwin. Unfortunately, a lot of people MIGHT think that Alec knows what he’s talking about. I doubt, however, that Alec would show up for an actual debate with people who DO know what they are talking about.
Well, he’s still good-looking, but he needs to just act and keep his uninformed opinions to himself. No wonder Kim Bassinger left him – I wonder, does he play the role of a pompous, narcissistic jerk in real life too? No matter how many times you play an intelligent person on the big or small screen, PLAYING one, doesn’t make you one!
Deborah – You really think so? I am of the opinion that he has been going the Marlon Brando/Orson Welles route.
Oh come on! He’s not that big yet. Besides I like ’em with a little meat on them – gives you something to hold onto! LOL!
Sorry Rod – this blog post subject has definitely gone South …
Let’s keep it CLEAN people – CLEAN and GREEN!
🙂