Ideologues and politicians are going to wreck the planet

 According to a UCLA bioclimatologist quoted by a story in today's LA Times, California is currently in the middle of a 22-year-old "megadrought" as bad as any of the last millennium. I don't doubt it and neither do, I suspect, anyone else who watched forest fires burn down half the state last summer.  What bugs me though is that, when reporters and public officials discuss what they regard as the real problem (the burning of fossil fuels and the carbon emissions that accompany it), they never mention the two best solutions. 

One is safe, 4th generation, carbon-free, low-radioactive-by-product nuclear power and the other is population reduction. This country (and the world along with it) could implement these fixes right now, but decades-old myths and prejudices hold us back.

The only thing some people know about nuclear power these days is Jane Fonda and The China Syndrome. They don't seem to realize that Three-Mile Island was 40 years ago. Their former fears no longer apply. Some of these proposed nuclear power plants are so small you can build them en masse in factories and haul them around to where they might be needed on the backs of trailer trucks. Other new designs use low-pressure molten salts, which can't explode and thus don't need containment vessels. If they ever start to overheat, a passive salt plug melts and the radioactive material drains into an underground cooling pond, thus ending the possibility of a meltdown.

As for the contribution of a grossly out-of-control population driving carbon emissions, public officials are too terrified even to think about the subject alone in their study at 3 am, let alone talk about the subject in public. Forget Michael Mann's near-vertical CO2 hockey-stick graph, the real vertical graph is world population growth. But reporters, academics and public officials dare not mention this for fear someone will thereby conclude they are anti-immigration and thus racist. 

It's a lose-lose situation. When it comes to nuclear energy and over-population our leaders need to be less critical of newer, safer technologies and less fearful of mentioning our out-of-control population. As Greta Thunberg might say, "How dare you! You weak-kneed politicians and activists, you have stolen our future!"