Atoms For Justice: Dying of Thirst: Dispatches From the Energy Poor in Africa by Princy Mthonbeni.

[NNadir]

16. She does offer that so called "renewable energy" crap faint praise.

Last edited Tue Jul 14, 2026, 02:41 PM - Edit history (4)

It's almost de rigeur because we live in a world dominated by "renewable energy will save us" dogma. The only problem with that is that it isn't saving us. It's become a quasireligious faith where it can't be questioned or worse requires a genuflection in its direction whenever energy is discussed.

I do not speak for Ms Mthonbeni and perhaps she doesn't have a problem with wind and solar, but that has no bearing on my low opinion of them. They are, in my view, unsustainable on terms of land use and material allocation owing to their intrinsic unreliability.

I noted that I have followed Ms. Mthombeni for years. Her work has always centered on reliable energy for Africa and she insists on clean energy. There is only one form of energy that meets both requirements; it is nuclear energy. She rarely talks about solar and wind, and the tone in the piece I shared in the OP strikes me as subtly dismissive.

I have not invested quasireligious authority in her, if she actually supports solar and wind beyond a culturally required genuflection in that direction, I disagree. I suspect it's lipservice, much like the lipservice that antinukes give to opposing fossil fuels, though in practice they don't.

The Germans didn't close their coal plants when they began to wreck their landscape with solar and wind facilities. They didn't stop buying methane from Putin when taking bulldozers to clear virgin land for wind and solar industrial plants.

Antinukes have never given a shit about fossil fuels. They never will.

Now let's turn to the issue of wit. While I find antinukes in general to be witless, it strikes me as particularly crass for one to drool representations of their weak efforts to display whatever puerile wit they may have in a post evoking a person passionately trying to get through the hard indifferent heads of the smug bourgeoisie to explain what energy poverty is like. In this context the insipid effort at wit offends me.

Now I certainly don't expect antinukes to treat me with respect any more than I would expect a Bible banging Baptist to respect an atheist. Nor do I extend much respect in return to them. I've worked very hard to develop my views and the quaint dogma that rises out of their laziness and indifference would amuse me were it not so wide spread so as to cause vast destruction and death on a vast scale.

An antinuke by the way complaing about nuclear weapons, which have been used twice within three days of each other 81 years ago to end an oil war is yet another example of intellectually and morally abysmal selective attention. That oil war that became a nuclear war was overwhelmingly fought using fossil fuel weapons of mass destruction as has and is every war since. Napalm is a gel prepared by mixing gasoline with palmitic acid, the starting material for biodiesel. Jet fuel powers bombers. Diesel fuel powers tanks. Nitroglycerin is a biofuel.

It is technically feasible to isotopically denature any actinide to render it useless for weapon use. Nuclear war however will never be impossible however because uranium exists in quantities that no human activity could deplete.

It will be a better time when when antinukes start caring about shit that is happening as opposed to what in their irrational fear driven imaginations could happen. But then, if they did start so caring, did start to value reality over irrational fears, they wouldn't be antinukes any more. I understand this more than most. I once was a rote antinuke, as ignorant and as dogmatic as any antinuke here. It is only when I began an honest journey into the science related to the Chornobyl event that I woke up and found my way to decency.

I lay responsibility for the violence, the bombings and all of the other practices of war now underway in Ukraine squarely on the backs of antinukes, since German fossil fuel purchases from Putin paid for that war.

Have a nice day.