Meet Bernie Sanders' 2018 challenger

[NNadir]

131. Frankly, I'm somewhat out of the Dem mainstream on this one. I believe that Senator Sanders...

...position on energy is wishful thinking and frankly scientifically illiterate. Regrettably it is consistent with the views of many Democrats, but to the extent this is true, it is, to my embarrassment as Democrat, our equivalent to creationism.

If you go to a doctor, and he correctly diagnoses your cancer, and then announces that the treatment is to go to witch doctor in Peru, you will not get better.

If you pay lip service to climate change but actually work to make it worse, you're not helping; you're in fact hurting.

It comes down to this:

Vermont until two or three years ago was the only state in the United States which did not use dangerous fossil fuels to generate its electricity. Almost all of the electricity in Vermont was generated in a single power plant in a single building, the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.

That is no longer true. Like every other state in this country, Vermont relies on fracking or else the lights go out.

Senator Sanders thought this was a good idea.

I consider fracking and all other dangerous fossil fuels to be a crime against all future generations. It is the people who are infants today who bear the costs of this stuff.

Senator Sanders position is that the world can survive on what he, and many other Democrats call "renewable energy," particularly solar and wind.

This is garbage thinking. We just spent two trillion dollars on so called "renewable energy" in the last ten years with the result that increase in dangerous fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere is accelerating at the highest rate ever observed. Air pollution deaths now number 7 million human beings per year.

So called "renewable energy" didn't work; it's not working; and it won't work. It is not sustainable, and it is not even "renewable." Quick: Which killed more people instantaneously in Japan, solar cell intermediate manufacture or Fukushima?

I've made this case all over the internet, usually accompanied by appeals to the primary scientific literature.

Probably the clearest exposition on my thinking that I've written on this score is written here:

Current World Energy Demand; Ethical World Energy Demand; Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come

I consider Senator Sanders anti-nuclear policies to not be simply blather, but to be dangerous.

Nuclear energy saves lives.

Senator Sanders apparently believes that nuclear power, and only nuclear power, needs to be perfect and without risk or else everything else, including the dangerous natural gas his state is now burning, will be allowed to kill at will.

Nuclear energy need not be perfect; it need not be without risk to be better than everything else. It only needs to be better than everything else which it is.

The last real President of the United States and his first energy Secretary Stephen Chu, Nobel Laureate, got it. Sanders doesn't get it. I suspected that Ms. Clinton would have gotten it; she probably already did.

I hope this explains my position.

Thanks for asking.