The announcement that US President’s Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has got the backing of pro-business, coal-mining owner Democratic Senator Manchin has been greeted with a wave of optimism that the US target of cutting carbon emissions in half before the end of this decade (or 40% compared with 2005 levels), can be met. “This bill will really turbocharge that transition to clean energy, it will transform markets where already solar PV, wind and batteries are in many cases cheaper than incumbent fossil fuels,” said Anand Gopal, executive director of policy at Energy Innovation, an open source research body. “Increasingly I’m more optimistic that keeping the temperature rise under 2C (3.6F) is more reachable. 1.5C is a stretch goal at this point.”
The bill will cut US emissions by between 31% and 44% below 2005 levels by 2030, according to Rhodium Group, a non-partisan research firm. A separate analysis by Energy Innovation, another research house, has found a similar reduction, of between 37% and 41% this decade.
But will it do the trick of saving the planet? First, the IRA has to get through Congress and even after a huge watering down of the bill to accommodate Manchin, there is still no certainty that it will get past a Republican opposition. As it is, the bill actually allows for an expansion of oil and gas drilling in national parks and land as a sop to Manchin. There may be yet more concessions to the fossil fuel lobby.
Then there are actual measures proposed in the IRA. “This is a massive turning point,” argues Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “This bill includes so much, it comprises nearly $370bn in climate and clean energy investments. That’s truly historic. Overall, the IRA is a huge opportunity to tackle the climate crisis.” But is it? Much of the bill is really tax credits to companies to invest in clean energy projects as well as a rebate of up to $7,500 for Americans who want to buy new electric vehicles. There is $9bn to retrofit houses to make them more energy efficient, tax credits for heat pumps and rooftop solar and a $27bn “clean energy technology accelerator” to help deploy new renewable technology. A further $60bn would go towards environmental justice projects and there is a new program to reduce leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas drilling. Much of this is not direct public investment in climate projects but incentives to the private sector to do the right thing. The capitalist sector is being left to deliver on these targets.
And that’s the US. Elsewhere in the world, investment in meeting the already very modest target of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5C by 2030 is looking way too little. Indeed, the opposite is happening. For example, because of the threatened loss of energy in Europe from blocked Russian imports, the EU parliament has voted to designate gas and nuclear as sustainable! The need for energy to heat homes and fuel industry and transport after the Ukraine crisis has come into conflict with the aim to save the planet. The irony is that a global recession would reduce the demand for fossil fuel energy globally and so help reduce the impact on the planet.
And then there is the war itself. The military sector globally is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in economies. And yet Nato’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg promised the alliance’s Madrid summit recently that there would be a nearly eightfold expansion in forces on high alert to 300,000. And member countries are also hiking defence spending to at least 2 per cent of GDP , “which is increasingly considered a floor, not a ceiling”. Russia’s military spending in 2021 hit $66bn, says the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. But even then, the US was spending $801bn a year and other Nato members about $363bn. NATO will be outspending Russia’s military by about 10 to one in the region, notes Dan Plesch of SOAS, University of London.
What the war and sky-high energy prices have brought home is that carbon pricing is no answer to controlling global warming. In effect, we’ve now got a global carbon tax, inflicting real hardship on people around the world without necessarily doing much to speed the transition from carbon.
I have argued against this ‘market solution’ in previous posts. Instead we need a global plan of public investment into things society does need, like renewable energy, organic farming, public transportation, public water systems, ecological remediation, public health, quality schools and other currently unmet needs. And it could equalize development the world over by shifting resources out of useless and harmful production in the North and into developing the South, building basic infrastructure, sanitation systems, public schools, health care. At the same time, a global plan could aim to provide equivalent jobs for workers displaced by the retrenchment or closure of unnecessary or harmful industries. None of those outcomes are offered by the IRA.
The other counter to the optimism now again coming forth on abating climate change and global warming is the risk of what is called in statistics a ‘fat tail’ in the probability of where global temperatures are likely to reach in the next few decades. The IPCC tends to look at the most probable outcome ie say a 2.5C increase by 2050. That’s bad enough. But there is still a reasonable probability that it could be much worse. Last year’s IPCC report suggested that if atmospheric CO doubles from pre-industrial levels – something the planet is halfway towards – then there is a roughly an 18% chance that temperatures will rise beyond 4.5°C. What would be the impact of that ‘fat tail’ coming through?
Well, just on GDP terms, one study shows that “a persistent increase in average global temperature by 0.04 °C per year, in the absence of mitigation policies, reduces world real GDP per capita by more than 7 percent by 2100. On the other hand, abiding by the Paris Agreement goals, thereby limiting the temperature increase to 0.01 °C per annum, reduces the loss substantially to about 1 percent.” The estimated losses would increase to 13 percent globally if country-specific variability of climate conditions were to rise commensurate with current annual temperature increases of 0.04 °C.
But that’s just the loss of GDP. The point is that if global temperatures were to reach above the optimistic 1.5C or 2.0C increase and beyond, the impact on the planet is exponential not gradual. “There are plenty of reasons to believe climate change could become catastrophic, even at modest levels of warming,” said lead author Dr Luke Kemp from Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, (https://www.cser.ac.uk/). Then what one study has called ‘the four horsemen of the climate apocalypse’ will appear, namely “famine and malnutrition, extreme weather, conflict, and vector-borne diseases.” The ‘fat tail’ of probability would deliver rising temperatures that pose a major threat to global food supply, with increasing probabilities of “breadbasket failures” as the world’s most agriculturally productive areas suffer collective meltdowns. Hotter and more extreme weather could also create conditions for new disease outbreaks as habitats for both people and wildlife shift and shrink.
The modelling in this study concluded that areas of extreme heat (i.e. an annual average temperature of over 29 °C), could cover two billion people by 2070. These areas are not only some of the most densely populated, but also some of the most politically fragile. “Average annual temperatures of 29 degrees currently affect around 30 million people in the Sahara and Gulf Coast,” said co-author Chi Xu of Nanjing University. “By 2070, these temperatures and the social and political consequences will directly affect two nuclear powers, and seven maximum containment laboratories housing the most dangerous pathogens. There is serious potential for disastrous knock-on effects,” he said.
The IRA may make some small inroads into emissions reduction in the US, if fully implemented (and as I say, there are serious doubts about that). But globally, there is little sign that global warming can be stopped at the Paris target; more likely global temperatures will rise above a 2C increase and beyond, as governments struggle to reconcile the need for energy at reasonable prices and reducing emissions (unless a major global slump solves the contradiction for a while). The four horsemen of the climate apocalypse are on the horizon.
Michael Roberts Blog 
Sigh. It is depressing that people who are so good in some subjects fall in with al the ridiculous twaddle when they are outside their area of expertise. The three big brain blocks going around right now are covid minimization, climate hysteria, and anti Russia hate.
This is a defect of so called “Liberal education”; a failure to train the mind to reject emotional triggers, get full information before forming an idea. Logic must work through the full spectrum of reality.
Of course, there is also the fear of being attacked for not conforming. But there is no longer a “one truth” so everyone is getting attacked, blocked, trolled these days.
So,here I go. I have written a series of pieces debunking the climate noise. Start at https://yaxls.wordpress.com/2022/01/26/listen-greenhouse-gasbag/
I’m sorry, I quite reading when I came to the part where volcanoes are listed as ways “Mother Earth” moderates the climate. The personification Mother Earth is mildly objectionable in itself but listing volcanoes as “moderating” influences is far too prejudicial to be acceptable.
Climate statistics share one characteristic with economic statistics, the difficulty in generalizing. Extracting the peak global temperature from records of the Thirties is climate science too. Why are there Gross Climate Production figures any more reliable for then than now? Also, climate change in the Thirties was likely enough moderated by the decline in human global production due to the Great Depression and World War II. The decline asserted in global mean temperature after is a prima facie case that anthropogenic causes are in fact quite powerful. (I do not assert that you mean to imply the Great Depression and WWII saved humanity for a while, but that you think they are irrelevant, but that seems implausible.)
And despite the recent crop of lying climate scientists falsifying temperature data, the melting of glaciers and the rise of mean sea level seem to need explanation.
Sorry, I won’t be reading further.
Glaciers are not melting. In places they are not forming new ice for undetermined reasons. The sea level is not rising at all. In some places coasts are sinking a few inches a year due to plate tectonics. Read all about it at https://yaxls.wordpress.com/2022/01/26/listen-greenhouse-gasbag/
Still not wasting my time. Glaciers are not passive piles, they flow. A reservoir which is not being refilled is emptying, a glacier that is not forming new ice is flowing away too. Glaciers can be expanding in an ice age, or they can be melting but achieving a dynamic equilibrium without forming new ice is something of an oxymoron. Also, this doesn’t address pack ice.
Being hundreds of miles from the coast I don’t even have a decent feel for the tides, so I can’t point out obvious peculiarities in an argument, especially since you just say sea level isn’t rising. Of course if the Earth is cooling, then mean sea level will eventually fall as water volume decreases with the average temperature. Till then…
”The Earth is not warming up. It is cooling down. No one is sure ……….
Summers are getting cooler, ‘ Are you sure?
rac’s rebuttal is nothing but a bunch of unsupported–and in fact provable wrong–claims.
agreed
A scenario?
The melting of glaciers in the Antarctic leads to shifting of weight; isostatic adjustment of the earth beneath the glaciers, rising in some places and sinking in other; the resulting tensions are not evenly dissipated by abruptly in shocks (called earthquakes); the lubrication of glacier undersides by meltwaters result in collapse into the sea of part of the glaciers; a tsunami induced by the collapse ravages lowlands.
Unfortunately this is not an implausible scenario. A collapse of part of the West Antarctic ice sheet would strike the Indian Ocean and such a tsunami would hit Bangla Desh, for one. The main proximate cause of war is the belief in an easy victory. Wars are not caused by the evil masses savagely attacking their betters. (War really is class struggle at base, but this is a crudely ideological cartoon of class struggle.)
Further consequence of this scenario? A Modi-esque India attacks Bangla Desh post-catastrophe, purportedly to restore order. I believe that already Modi et al. pose a hugely under-rated nuclear threat to Pakistan, indirectly to all humanity.
The moral of such scenarios is not a numerical probability but the conclusion that collapse and barbarism are at best largely overlapping circles in a Venn diagram.
In other words, market solutions are part of the problem.
Hm. The way this guy writes strongly suggests he is schizophrenic. But I never get any cogent argument against what I say about ‘climate’. People who think clearly are mostly silent about this topic. Generally, it is not worth getting attacked by nutters curated by the thought police. The climate BS will fall when the elite which enforces it falls.
But I have nothing better to do. I am well insulated against personal attacks. I do not care much what people say. So I will say what should be said, particularly about ‘climate’, wherever I am allowed to say it.
All on this forum, go read my stuff on the topic. “Waste” some of your time. https://yaxls.wordpress.com/2022/01/26/listen-greenhouse-gasbag/
Someday when I have the time, I will revise the series to make some things clearer. But a steady trickle of people are reading it.
Read this one, still garbage.
indeed
Michael, the Bill is likely to pass and do about nothing for climate change. Any serious reduction of GHG emissions has to come from implementing a “French style” build out of nuclear energy. Renewables generally are an unmitigated failure that only institutionalizes fossil fuel back up, usually in the form of natural gas. I’d read “ROADMAP TO NOWHERE The Myth of Powering the Nation With Renewable Energy” by Mike Conley and Tim Maloney. A truly pro-working class perspective lies with fission energy, not the diffuse expensive energy of wind and solar.
Bunch of garbage. Solar and wind are working out well so far at improving our situation, as far as they go. There are always unintended consequences, but no sign of an ‘unmitigated failure’ at this point. Every source of power has its issues, and nuclear is no exception. In fact, some of the issue listed by “Roadmap…” for solar/wind are the same for nuclear; it has to be converted to electricity, and transported to where it is needed.
Sally, I don’t knew where you are writing from but *all* solar and wind generation is by definition, intermittent. Therfore one needs some form of on demand power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, either on standby or slowly generating so it can raise generation when the sun goes away and the wind stops blowing. I live in the California where solar has a large installed base, mostly roof top solar but also many solar farms. In order to achieve this, the states Public Utility Commission authorized the building of dozens of gas turbine power plants! this is why super wind advocate and son of Robert F. Kennedy argued that building a wind farm IS building a gas plant…to an audiance of New England gas investors. I would read “Roadmap to Nowhere” by Tim Conely, available for free, the exposes the economic fraud that is wind and solar. The costs for solar and wind are simply over the top when one adds “storage”.
Solar and wind energy storage presumably would indeed be capital intensive. It sounds as if you are tacitly requiring that solar and wind be profitable counting even the infrastructure? Isn’t that something like requiring all roads to be built only if the tolls would pay for it?
Partly the issue is the technology question. I suppose it would always be possible to store intermittent energy by using the excess to, say, pump water up an elevated reservoir, then release it to generate electricity. The question is whether such crude systems don’t in the end require more strain on the carrying capacity of the earth considered as the integrated biosphere it truly is, than other alternatives.
Again, I’m not sure a disintegrated market system can even collect the sort of information needed to make rational decisions. I’m pretty sure that even local planning (there’s always planning) needs global data to be rational. If anything, the trend in modern capitalism is to keep information either secret, or for sale at monopoly prices.
The rationality of energy systems also depends on the feasibility of other means to control greenhouse gases. One method of carbon recapture is the planting of trees, which is not being carried out on the scale humanity needs. No geoengineering scheme I’ve ever heard of even considers who will carry them out. Saving the rain forests in Brazil costs the likes of Bolsonaro’s constitutency and no bourgeois state will profit from compensating the people of Brazil for any of the short-term costs of leaving them. Coastal algae also play a key role in the carbon/oxygen cycle but no single state has the power, much less the profit motive, to clean up ocean pollution to save that either.
The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by public transit, much less the redesign of the private automobile to a more efficient power train, is obviously beyond the capitalists. It has been a commonplace as I understand it for decades that the standard internal combustion engine is inherently less efficient. But it’s not happening.
The thing is, the same thing applies to the creation of a better energy infrastructure for solar and wind: The failures under the capitalist system are not necessarily those of the socialist system. In a way, central planning is itself a technological innovation. Like fire, it will be destructive when misused precisely because it is so powerful a tool. But then, that’s life in the material world and there are no guarantees for anything, except that we all die.
The long run costs of nuclear, not just what happens to areas mined for uranium, but the extremely dirty radioactive remnants by the way would also be more amenable to analysis and action under a socialist planning system with a world-wide reach. (The wide advocacy of a reactionary utopia of sovereign states is a form of capitulation to bourgeois ideology in my opinion, sorry.) Capitalism, as we see in Ukraine where the nationalists (to be excessively polite) are firing at a nuclear plant because the Russian army occupies it is a harbinger.
And last, the costs of failures in nuclear have to be included. That doesn’t just mean the average but, as best can be estimated, the rare extreme events. In a long period of time, rare events, including those due to a concatenation of rare(r) events, will be bound to happen. And with nuclear it can be hard to tell the costs. Fukushima in particular seems to me to be too likely to be underestimated. As near as I can tell, the neutron radiation from the meltdowns are still underground, destabilizing more atoms. It’s not engineered to create a chain reaction but the certainty that Fukushima is over because the radioactive materials will stay underground in a tectonically active zone indefinitely may be a trifle premature.
Why shouldn’t nuclear energy be considered sustainable? It’s the only clean energy that is not intermittent. Plus it takes up much less space than endless solar panels and wind turbines, offers union jobs (or jobs that are very able to be organized), as well as energy that can/should stay in the public sector.
JG– It’s not “clean.” Spent fuel rods represent toxic waste in its ultimate form. That’s one. And given the age of the technology being used– fission fueled boiling water reactors– it’s unsafe, vulnerable to catastrophic failure, and, if maintained properly, not quite the bargain it appears to be.
On another point: I advocate the removal of the rabid raccoonblurb from this site. Calling someone who disagrees schizophrenic based on “writing style” is just not tolerable.
Yes, I have been accommodating to the climate denier. But his sarcastic tone and level of debate are wasting other people’s energy and time. So he can take a rest from comments on this blog for now.
“Anti-Capital” you don’t really know what you are talking about, sadly. In the U.S. there are since the 1960s, around 80,000 tons of high level SNF (spend nuclear fuel). That is after 60 years. Because of the density of SNF, ALL of this wouldn’t fill up one of those large Costco stores. Not only is little, solidified, but unlike the extremely hazardous waste from solar cell production in China, we know where ever gram of it is.
Reactors with the 2 major accidents such as Fukushima and Chernobyl, and all other smaller accidents or events combined, have killed few people than even wind, which is newer in deployment that nuclear or, solar (mostly from installation accidents). The number of deaths per KWhr produced is the lowest of ANY form of generation. It is the safest form of energy ever developed by our species.
The amount of coal waste (but ash and flu gas effluent) kills 16,000 people a year in the U.S!!!! Yet no one seems to care. No outrage. No demonstration. No one died at Fukushima with three meltdowns side-by-side and it is the end of the world [except for the people who were forced out of their homes in a PANIC about the accident, 1800 of whom died to due stress brought on by the evacuation]. This is what the anti-nuclear movement and their “radiophobia” has begat us, sadly. Countries in Europe with lowest CO2 footprint are not wind crazy Germany or Denmark but nuclear France, Sweden and hydro heavy Norway. Ontario, the only province or state in N. America ended their dependence on fossil fuel by…building out nuclear. That is going to be the future. Finally, most folks are waking up to this.
DW66-
The US GAO has a less sanguine view of spent nuclear fuel: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-12-797
But as usual you mix your categories to bolster your view– as in you fanciful comparison of deaths due to wind (installation) and nuclear (operating, without regard for any fatal injuries during construction).
I think nuclear power can be generated safely, but not by continuing to utilize boiling water reactors. That was my point. Boiling water reactors are obsolete and present a catastrophic risk that should be eliminated by replacement.
Hit the post button too soon: As for the efficiency of nuclear power– construction of Fukushima cost about 2 billion dollars. In 2016 Japan increased the estimate of costs for the ongoing control of the radiation risk at $200 billion.
Estimates are that 1800 died from causes associated with the evacuation, and you oppose that to deaths from the meltdown itself as if your zero was not a result of the evacuations that limited exposure? Are you really going to claim that people should not have evacuated? Any complete examination of costs, efficiency and safety would include installation costs, total risks, including evacuation from a catastrophic failure, and cleanup costs, and long term risks to the population from controlled and uncontrolled releases.
Then DW, you wave the bloody shirt of coal waste as if anybody is advocating use of coal.
And you drone on about the hazards of solar cell waste in China? What does that have to do with anything? China also utilizes thousands of smaller coal mines with high employee accident rates; allows human beings to recycle electronic components and heavy metals without effective protection, etc. etc.
Gee, I’m sure all those problems will be solved as soon as China goes nuclear– then you can bet safety will improve and risks will be properly mitigated, because after all, nuclear power has the lowest operating death rate.
Great piece….For what it’s worth: “Why millions of our grandchildren will being moving back from the ocean and heading north.” (written just before the invasion of Ukraine). https://www.inequalityink.org/resources/global%20warming%20-%20why%20our%20grandkids%20will%20head%20north%20-%2011-20-2021%20-%20essay.pdf
And, to make things even worse, there’s the simple fact the American economy is shrinking absolutely since 2020, which means that those USD 370bn won’t be worth what it is worth today by the time it is all spent, so, actually, the bill is worth well below USD 370bn or, to put things more concretely, what the American living today thinks it is worth.
There’s absolutely no chance this IRA – which resembles more a capitalist version of a post-Stalin five-year plan than a serious long-term project – will work. It would already be a miracle if it gets out of the paper, let alone have any positive effect in the real world.
Those models that predict GDP until 2100 CE are crazy. Bourgeois intellectuals cannot even predict the next recession, what makes them think they can predict global GDP growth per 0.01C for the next century? I doubt they have any scientific value. There are more urgent tasks for the present-day generation, i.e. make the communist revolution worldwide. It is not the present-day generations’ task to solve global warming, but for the post-communist revolution ones. We should not put the cart in front of the oxen.
We have to put the $700 billion Democratic Spending Plans in perspective. In the 9 months to June the nominal deficit for this financial year is $514 billion, in 2019 for the same 0eriod it was $747 billion. Adjust for inflation of about 12%, and it is $514 billion versus now versus $837 billion then in real terms. Or annualized $685 billion vs $1116bn a difference of $431 billion. Over the 12 year period this bill covers, the current deficit saving would amount to $5172 billion vs the additional $4300 billion spending proposed by the Bill when adjusted for the increase in corporate taxes of $300 billion p.a. (See CBO graph https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58219) Thus everything being equal, the deficit reduction currently occurring would swallow the benefit of the Bill meaning no net stimulus to the economy except in specific areas.
You climate deniers may have to bite your tongues. Irradiance is increasing for the first time since 1950. Suncycle 25 is proving to be much more dynamic than predicted. It is destined to peak by 2024-5. I expect by then the deniers will be pretty burnt, because global buffers and sinks which moderated changes in the sun cycle have all been depleted.
Why do socialists so hate coal miners – calling in Australia – environmental criminals? Yet give Lithium and Cobalt producers a free pass. Guess it dates from 1992 when they started cosying up to the green movement and lost their bearings. Pat yourself on the back for saving the environment. This is a Lithium leach field in South America. Other fields exist in China. This is what your Electric Car batteries are made of. It is so neuro-toxic that a bird landing on this stuff dies in minutes. Take a guess what it does to your nervous system. Approximately 2.2 million litres of water are needed to produce one ton of Lithium. Removing these raw materials can result in soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss, and damage to ecosystem functions. Wonder if it’s as cheap as crushing granite as used by British Lithium in Cornwall. Hope Charles is keeping up his environmental credentials.
Kind regards Brian
Nobody hates coal miners. We might hate coal mine OWNERS, but that’s something else, a different class all together
To your list of what we – and especially the US – needs, I’d add investment in genuinely affordable, energy-efficient, non-market rented housing. Sadly, the IRA, unlike the Build Back Better plan scuppered by Manchin and co, has virtually nothing for investment in truly affordable housing (and not a dime for public housing).
Here is an article describing solar cycle 25. Given that there has been global warming for decades and given how muted solar cycles have been since 1950, it is clear that global warming has nothing to do with irradiance but with greenhouse emissions. But irradiance can add to global warming as the sun’s output can vary by 0.15% depending on the solar cycle. I consider economics, politics and the environment to be on a knife edge which is why I consider those who deny global warming and its causes as betraying the cause of the international working class. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2022/08/02/the-sun-is-now-more-active-than-nasa-predicted-it-could-be-in-its-strongest-cycle-since-records-began/?sh=149ab8dacd59
Anti-Capital, I’m not mixing “categories”. The safety of workers and the public regarding various form of generation is well established. Nuclear remains on the bottom. But I wanted to note that I agree with you about Boiling Water Reactors (of the kind that were destroyed at Fukushima). I happen to not believe that they are *qualitatively* worse than Pressurized Water Reactors but I don’t like the idea that water/steam that directly touches the core should then travel directly to the turbine. But they are legacy reactors most of which can run for another 20 years and be replaced with Gen III PWRs or Small Modular Reactors.
Nuclear is the only way to reduce carbon emissions from the generation sector. I think the utter failure of Germany after 20 years of their *transition* has showed what a failure it has been, with hardly a single coal plant shutdown (and now planning to run them longer) with the most expensive energy in Europe. We know nuclear can replace coal and natural gas on a MW for MW basis. Not so with renewables and that remains to be the problem.
In their book, “Roadmap to Nowhere” [ https://www.roadmaptonowhere.com/%5D , Mike Conley and Tim Maloney prove the problems of grid, financing, and the ecological issues regarding this fraud of wind and solar. We already see the huge expenses.
on the issue of waste. [In the U.S.] we have 80,000 tons of Spent Nuclear Fuel. As I noted, we no where every gdram of it is. It is very little in volume due to the density of the fuel. The GAO link provided is just a fact based abstract of what exists. It is hardly “sanguine” and, I agree, the sooner the rest of the SNF is moved to dry cask storage, the better. Contrary to the GAO “suggestion” we don’t need one big depository. They can stay where they are until the plants are decommissioned…as they have been for decades…with nary a worry give then are DRY and can’t “leak”. At that point, as we move to fast breeder reactors and “waste eaters” they will simply be fuel for the next generation of reactors.
On Fukushima. It made sense to evacuate a thousand of the people right near the plant for a *few days” but under *pressure from U.S. NRC Chairman* a complete and permanent evacuation was completely and thoroughly misplaced and caused the deaths of almost 2000 mostly senior citizens. At *no point* did the radiation levels ever even come close in dosages that do the body any harm whatsoever. Such radiophobia is the stock and trade of Big Anti-Nuclear, sadly, and it is not at all science based. The most people directly in the way of the “plume” of radiation was, for a few days, upto 25mSv exposure averaged out over a year. There isn’t an medical report in the world that can show this is at all harmful as even this level of radiation is below any evidence that it does harm (outside of a threat of thyroid cancer issues which are immediately taken care of by distribution of iodine tablets). As the World Health Organization noted no one is going to die from radiation because of the event. Unlike…the 10s of thousands that die from coal, which could *easily* be replaced as I noted above, with nuclear.