Groucho Marx’s famous truism that “politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies” missed one key element: “and making things worse than they were”. In the case of climate change alarmism: much, much worse.
The pigtailed ignoramus saint of the climate cult screeches that “people are dying”, but either ignores or is too stupid to realise that if people are dying, it’s because of the destructive policies she and her puppet masters espouse. As already reported at The BFD, thousands of people died in Britain last year because of “energy poverty” caused by climate policies.
Japanese are suffering at the hands of similar knee-jerk policies.
Shutting down Japan’s nuclear power plants has caused thousands of people to die in the cold, far more than were harmed from the Fukushima nuclear disaster itself, according to research that warns against decisions based on the precautionary principle.
Despite its terrifying image, nuclear power has an extraordinary record of safety. Even accounting for the unmitigated horror of the single worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl, nuclear still ranks as one of the safest energy sources known to humanity. But who needs facts when there’s some good scaremongering to be had?
After a tsunami hit the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor in 2011, the Japanese government closed down the nation’s nuclear industry amid a wave of public anxiety about the energy source, causing an increase in electricity prices by as much as 38 per cent.
“The increase in mortality from the higher electricity prices significantly outweighs the mortality from the accident itself, suggesting the decision to cease nuclear production caused more harm than good,” the authors conclude, putting the number of deaths at about 4500 over three years to 2014.
“No deaths have yet to be attributable to radiation exposure (from Fukushima), though projections estimate a cumulative 130 deaths since.”
As for the Greens and their idiotic “precautionary principle”:
The study, by economists at the universities of Columbia and Nagoya, criticises the precautionary principle, which dictates taking steps, however extreme, to avoid outcomes, such as catastrophic climate change, that are poorly understood. “A major concern with this principle is that by focusing solely on the risk from action, it fails to consider the risk from the alternative,” it says.
In her second-most disastrous knee-jerk decision, German chancellor Angela Merkel also shut down that country’s nuclear industry. Germany is sliding back to burning coal, usually dirty, inefficient brown coal. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, such a reversion from nuclear to “burning coal and oil” is a sure sign of sliding into barbarism.
The authors suggest the decision to switch off nuclear power was “based on emotion and instinct rather than reason and rationality”.
theaustralian.com.au/world/more-die-of-cold-than-radiation-after-japan-tsunami
No kidding.