Four more years of much more

Surprise! In an election in which the choice was between disaster and disaster, the outcome was disaster.

There were some extra disasters thrown in, of which perhaps the saddest was the failure of Bruce Herschensohn to be elected senator of California. I have been following him since 1975, when he wrote The Gods of Antenna, a devastating critique of media power. Even more bitter is the thought that he was defeated by a radical leftist, Barbara Boxer, who, not satisfied by legal theft from the taxpayers, stole illegally from her own colleagues by hundreds of bad checks drawing on their money.

There will be more scaring people with junk science "proving" that "the planet" is about to perish. (Bozone Gaga Gore called the gas hole manufactured by NASA before budget time and rescinded after it [AtE Oct 92] "an immediate, acute, emergency threat ... the single most important issue facing this country and this earth"). I would not be surprised, however, if William Reilly was asked to stay on as top EPAcrat. Outside the Earth First! terrorists Clinton will be hard pressed to find a slicker and more fraudulent ecoteur; and including a Republican in his administration will promote the pretense of being "President of All the People."

There will be new and serious attempts to strangle the nuclear industry, aided and abetted by the ignorance, cowardice and servility of the utilities (and to some extent of the nuclear industry itself. Fortunately these efforts will at best delay the inevitable: nuclear power will stay and expand.

Which brings me to the main point: does this disaster have a silver lining?

Second, the disaster will doubtlessly be greater than the Carter presidency. But without Carter there would have been no Reagan presidency, and hence no SDI which was the major cause of the Soviet debacle.

But the real silver lining, and one that we should never forget in the imminent vexations, is that these radical dwarfs have no power over history and the things that matter in the long run. Congress may try to repeal natural laws, but it cannot replace 500 gigawatts of electric capacity with ethanol, chicken manure, conservation, and solar power based on an insolation of 900 W/m^2. About 100 of those gigawatts are nuclear: nuclear power now delivers over 20% of the total electric energy consumed, the second largest source of electricity in the country. Gore can rave all he wants, and the Southern California Air Soviet can shut down bakeries whose pleasant flavor "pollutes" the air, but nuclear power will have to grow if the economy is to grow, mainly at the expense of coal-fired plants, which are environmentally unsound, and subject to railroad and miners' strikes and to a decaying infrastructure.

The inexorable forces of history, the laws of economics, and the laws of genuine science cannot be controlled by statesmen, let alone by funny dwarfs like Clinton and Gore.