Godzilla vs. The Green New Deal: The Cost and Necessity of Nuclear Power
WARNING: Spoilers ahead
One of the final lines in 2016’s Godzilla: Resurgence is a quiet and somber reflection that Godzilla is “something we’ll have to learn to live with.” In the final images of the film, we see the figure of Godzilla standing above the Tokyo skyline, a stone creature having been defeated but now made immobile via the coagulants floating in his bloodstream having shut down his nuclear core.
These are powerful words given what the monster in question has done and what he represents. He’s the embodiment of post-Fukushima meltdown fears that the Japanese public holds against Nuclear power and the dangers it represents. The fact that the movie ends on that quote is an incredibly powerful message given the preceding film.
At the height of the monster’s violent rampage against modern day Tokyo, the creature was breathing fire and plasma that had lit the heart of the city on fire. It had irradiated the city so heavily that nothing was going to be able to survive there for years. It’s a weirdly uncomfortable and disturbing scene for a franchise that normally makes its destruction of major cities a silly joke.
Just like the real Fukushima meltdown, the movie recognizes that nuclear power isn’t just a laughing matter. There is a very real risk of using a power source that can meltdown if improperly used and irradiate enormous sections of populated land. Yet pound for pound it’s also the safest and cleanest form of energy available in the world today. The movie stating that it must be “lived with” is a bold statement that asks it’s audience to be braver.
The Politics of a Godzilla Attack
One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the way it depicts the politics of a disaster. The movie takes a decidedly satirical edge against the notion of bureaucracy quite early in the film. From the very start of Godzilla’s rampage, the government’s first response is to break down into meeting after meeting, consulting experts, and receiving approval from multiple points of power. It’s an utter condemnation of government bloat that this monster wasn’t even engaged by the military until hours after it started. Even then it’s forced to back down at the mere notion engaging could accidentally hurt civilians.
This last detail isn’t Japan’s fault of course. Japan isn’t allowed to engage in warfighting under its post-war constitution. The country ultimately is forced to rely on foreign intervention the escalates Godzilla into mutating into a much more dangerous creature that causes significantly greater damage.
The movie is a scorching critique of government bureaucracy and it’s mere ability to handle disasters. In the end, all they’re able to do is stabilize the situation enough to avoid having the United States nuke Tokyo. This movie is a harsh series of lessons that it’s very clear that many prominent American politicians haven’t heeded.
The Green New Deal
There’s no shortage of hate nowadays on the right for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. Beyond even the cursory embarrassing lines about “cow farts” and banning airplanes, her proposed resolution for how to direct the country’s attention would’ve involved a total restructuring of the energy grid, phasing out fossil fuels, and requiring every building in the country be retrofitted.
Surprisingly, the plan involved completely obliterating nuclear power and fracking. Fracking is, of course, the left’s favorite power source to hate on (as seen in Matt Damon’s propaganda piece Promised Land). Nuclear power is less hated on the left although Obama-era restrictions on nuclear destruction did hamper the production of new plants.
The leftist allergy to nuclear power is unreasonable. It’s the only carbon neutral power source widely available and it’s despised by members of the green left in favor of less efficient sources. People treat nuclear power like it causes the three-eyed-fish from The Simpsons to materialize in close proximity but that’s not true. Power plants have a historically positive record with only three failures on record (two of them being non-lethal and the third being ridiculous if you look up the details of what the Soviet scientists were doing to it).
It’s amusing that everything AOC proposed in her signature legislation was obliterated by this Godzilla movie two years before she was even elected. She wants to save the world through committees and by banning already accessible power sources. Maybe its a symptom of her egotistical power trip or maybe she really is just ignorant on the dangers of her agenda but you don’t save the world by banning available clean technology. You just make yourself into “the boss” that way.
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Comments
Maybe its a symptom of her egotistical power trip or maybe she really is just ignorant on the dangers of her agenda.
Never underestimate Stupidity..
Both are factors, ignorance and stupidity. We need to cross our fingers, hoping she does not reproduce.
A book everyone should read, though it’s slightly dated: The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, by Petr Beckmann.
Secretly, environmentalists long for the “Thanos Solution”
Well if all the greens commit suicide…
Socialism is all about gaining control through the struggle. Nuclear power actually works. The fascists can’t have that. No room for regulation of your daily life.
So they will shout “Danger Will Robinson. DANGER!!!”
For 50 years the Nuclear Regulatory Commission kept the USA from approving any new nuclear power plant designs. Basically, every commercial reactor in the country uses Rotary Dial Phone level technology.
There is great promise in Liquid fluoride thorium reactor aka. Molten-Salt Reactor.
History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of Socialism
Well played!
Damnit, add loaded right when I hit thumbs up and moved the screen. Scrolled back and accidently hit thumbs down before it moved again.
No need to admit the error, everyone would have assumed it was TDS Rags.
This movie was brilliant.
Not just a really good updated take on Godzilla but one that successfully preserved the tone of the original while adding political satire that in Japan was VERY biting. Basically it mocks the bureaucracy for its sclerotic behavior in the wake of the Tsumani – this behavior actually caused the completely preventable Fukushima disaster. In the film the bureaucracy’s sclerosis lets Godzilla rampage while developing into a form where finally the weapons were ineffective and indeed Goji fire breath’s a lot of the cabinet when they are trying to evacuate.
Finally! A topic at LI where I actually know what I am talking about. It was the media’s (mis)treatment of the question of power from nuclear fission that not only made me a conservative, but permanently ended my belief that the media was capable of telling the truth.
Picture an undergraduate engineering student in the early 1980s (that’s me). It was then that the media’s jihad against nuclear power went, er, nuclear. Even as an apolitical undergrad I could easily see the media was telling a contempt-producing mixture of lies, half-truths, and distortions about nuclear power and the nuclear industry. Real experts were shunted aside or smeared as fiends determined to kill the human race by radioactive poisoning, while wild-eyed scientifically illiterate greeniacs became (in the eyes of the media) sober, Nobel-level intellects. In terms of propaganda, journalists who reported on nuclear energy made Joseph Goebbels look like a no-talent amateur. It wasn’t called fake news back then, but that’s what it was.
Now, over thirty years later (with advanced degrees in engineering and mathematics under my belt) my opinion against the media has only hardened. Time has not brought wisdom to journalists; if anything, they have only gotten even more evil and willing to point blank lie to us for political gain. And it’s not just nuclear power, or anything technological or scientific, that I have found the media to treat as something to be changed to fit a political framework. Every single time the media reports on a hot button topic or incident that I have personal knowledge of, I have found it to be so biased and inaccurate as to be worthless. Look up the Gell-Mann Effect someday. That closely matched my experiences with American journalism.
The Left is starting to pivot towards nuclear. Normally, I would be happy: finally something big we can agree on. But instead I am skeptical. More than likely, the pro nuclear side will be swamped with stupid people that will screw everything up and ruin it once the Left floods the zone.
The anti-nuclear groups prior to the implosion of the Soviet Union and the “end of history” (the wrong idea that capitalism had triumphed over socialism – unfortunately, socialism is deep in the human DNA) were allied with the Communists (actually received regular funds from the KGB or its predecessor orgs).
They were so devoted to anti-nuclearism they probably simply couldn’t give it up, despite the disappearance of their Utopian Paradise imploding, gone like a puff of smoke. So they grind on trying to block any use of nuclear power, never mind it meets their (bogus) anti-carbon, anti-pollution goals.
The fundamental issue I have with the New Green Deal and everything related to global warming is how we are no longer allowed to talk about the most basic issue at the heart of this – is global warming even real?
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Skepticism has always been a tenet of science where you were obligated to question hypotheses, experiments, interpretations of data, and so forth. It is this central questioning attitude that gave sceintific inquiry its power and now anyone who dares question global warming is a “denier” who many claim should be locked up or worse. Claiming someone to be a “denier” because they do not adhere to your viewpoint without even listening to their argument is the worst case of anti-science that could ever be envisioned and yet far too many of those supporting global warming have intimidated everyone into silence while claiming those not supporting global warming theory as being the ones who are anti-science. You can’t make this up.
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Now we have left even this terrible anti-science stage in the dust for today everyone (other than real scientists with more than two functioning brain cells) are assuming that global warming has been proven such that it is now a fact when in reality it is something that has yet to be proven and the majority of the ‘data” proving global warming are incomplete, heavily messaged information that is of questionable utility and highly politicized.
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What’s worse is that I have been a research chemist for 35+ years and I have freshmen students telling me how I do not understand science, data analysis, experimental design, and so forth, even though I have been in the business a long time and have been quite successful at it while they could not set up a simple experiment or interpret the data if their lives depended upon it. Simply put, scientific research is likely the most challenging human endeavor that has ever existed with those participating in it requiring over a decade of college education (in America at least) and, even then, relatively few find themselves successful at it. To think that the lay person with little training in science could come to such powerful and opinionated conclusions is both mind boggling and an exercise in ignorance.
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The bottom line is simple. Before we start reshaping our entire economy and way of life because of global warming, how about we first determine if it is real or not? Instead of being so concerned about an unproven hypothesis such as global warming, we should be addressing other very real issues staring us in the face including the depletion of this world’s natural resources (most importantly petroleum), the scarcity of clean water, mass extinctions, global pollution, etc. Additionally, when speaking of increasing CO2 content in our atmosphere, we should understand that it is not all negative for there are numerous, extremely beneficial aspects (e.g., being a huge part of the green revolution that has allowed us to feed 7 billion people, the greening of desert areas by making plants more drought tolerant, etc.). Likewise, if the Earth is warming then why is it that few, if any, are pointing out how humanity has thrived in past periods of increasing warmth (that were substantially more warm than today’s climate such that, for example, Greenland’s permafrost melted) while cool periods were characterized by famine, widespread disease and pestilence, and universal misery.
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In short, instead of creating bankrupting policies such as the New Green deal based on assumed global warming, shouldn’t we be embracing open dialogue without shameless and ignorant attacks and demonization of those holding differing viewpoints in the manner in which science is supposed to operate? Shouldn’t we be looking at both the benefits as well as the bad aspects of anything that is proven to be occurring so that a rational decision can be made using a cost benefit argument? After all, who before has succeeded by making ignorant decisions based on bad information that resulted in the placing of all of one’s economic eggs in one basket?
“What’s worse is that I have been a research chemist for 35+ years and I have freshmen students telling me how I do not understand science”
Arrogance of youth.
MSR-LFTR (pronounced M-S-R-lifter)
Molten Salt Reactor – Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
Look it up on YouTube.