On June 4, the sparks from two Soviet passenger trains near a leaking gas pipeline in the Urals set off an explosion, for the safety of Soviet pipelines is no better than that of the Chernobyl reactors. The death toll, at first reports, stood at 500, with many more hundreds injured; but there were no second or final reports, for the US media have no time for such trivialities. Consistency considerations, however, force me to assume that Ralph Nader announced "the beginning of the end of natural gas;" that the Ger-man Greens have taken to the streets demanding an immediate ban on it; that Jane Fonda is making a movie "The Doomsday Train;" that the most Honorable Edward Markey is rehearsing animalistic screams for the impending hearing on the phasing out of natural gas in America; that some Californians have donned gas masks since microscopic amounts of methane have been detected in rain water; and that Armand Hammer is sending his personal mortician to help bury the dead . . . or could I be mistaken?
The vote to shut down the Rancho Seco nuclear plant was the first of some 10 plebiscites over 13 years in which the antinukes won by the ballot box rather than by stormtrooper and legalistic tactics. They were, as usual, aided by a media barrage, and by the general mentality of Sacramento
¾the Washington, D.C., of the West. The cost of some $300,000,000 (not counting the cost in lives from the replacement power) will, as in Shoreham or the S&L scandal, be diluted to less than $3 per US taxpayer (there are 102 million of us pulling the socialist cart). If it were still the custom to let the voters pay for the luxuries they vote themselves, they would have paid $927 a head for the city-owned plant. That might have made even Baroness von Fonda hesitate."I've always been puzzled by your exasperation with the 'population explosionists.' When I was young, there were 150 mil-lion of us in the U.S.A.; now there are over 246 million . . . Sounds pretty real to me. What am I missing?" W.S.O., Plainville, Conn.
The response time between cause and effect. When you strike a key on the piano, it responds with the sound within a fraction of a second; but if from tomorrow onward no more babies were born and all immigration were halted, it would take more than 70 years for the US population to die out. In reality the fertility rate has not dropped to zero, only well below the replacement rate. If it remained at its present level, it would still take some 30 to 40 years before the population stopped growing; the more immediate effects can already be observed in the rise of the median age and in the shrinking percentage of children (the class of 5-13 years has shrunk from 18.2% in 1960 to 12.6% in 1987, and by 2 million in absolute amount). Even for a short response time
¾a few days¾ the level of the streams may still be rising after the mountain snow pack has disappeared.Once again: the energies involved in atmospheric processes, including "weather," are incomparably greater than any energies handled by man, including the total of all nuclear weapons. The Soviets do not have such energies, could not keep them secret if they did, nor could they keep weather modification from back-firing. Such nonsense, often spread by well-meaning people, plays into the hands of Schroeder, Dellums and the other Chamberlains by ridiculing the genuine Soviet weapons, which are terrible enough. The latest hoax is that the $35 million electromagnet donated to the Soviets by the Carter administration (for MHD research) can be used for weather modification because it is "capable of producing a magnetic field 250,000 greater than that of the earth itself." Big deal: the magnetic fields in an electric toothbrush or shaver are far greater than that of the earth, too. As long as the Soviets keep their armies of occupation in the colonies, I am opposed to giving them as much as a single frisbee; but not because it rotates 90,000 times faster than the earth.
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Vol. 16, No. 11
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 16, No. 11 Date: December 01, 2004 02:59 PM (For actual publication date see newsletter.) Title: The mentors
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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