The post was clearly talking about giving ground in the sense of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Greens have opposed and will still oppose more nuclear/coal/oil, but they have to be included to be able to get any legislation at all through. The question of reclassifying nuclear as “clean” wasn’t under discussion.

But what is “clean” or “dirty” is just a matter of your priorities and context. Is global warming a bigger threat than nuclear waste? We are told that global warming is a global disaster. Nuclear waste, on the other hand (if it is anything more than an engineering issue) is a far more local problem. So from the point of view of dealing with global warming, nuclear doesn’t emit CO2 and is therefore relatively “clean”. You could say the same about wind, hydro, and solar power – all of which do damage to the environment – they are only “clean” in this relative sense.

Could you say a little more about that?

Give it up. GM is trying to be an agent provocateur of some sort. Someone has a lot of time on their hands. A twisted sense of humor too.

They are and I am sure that they, and even Nisbet, are well meaning and sincerely think that the they are right; but right now they are doing more harm than good, unfortunately.

Where I claim to have connected one more dot than most is making the connection between the sustainability crisis and religion. Not that others haven’t before that, this was talked about back in the 60s and 70s, but for some very strange it is absent from the discussion today, both among atheists and people concerned about Peak Oil and Climate Change. But religion is very intimately connected to those problems, because those problems stem from our failure to understand our place in the world, and the major source of misinformation on the subject is religion, of course with the caveat that the initial causal relationship might have been the inverse, which doesn’t really matter at this point though.

That’s why it is vital to talk about these things and not treat religion as a sacred cow, because if we don’t sacrifice that cow, we’re all dead. This is for fundamental-level reasons, but as the events unfold there will be some very practical issues, as we all know people who think they will got to heaven are much more ready to go to war and fight hard, etc.

Because the other crucial insight, although this one is really indefensible scientifically, but very likely to be true, based on historical evidence, is that, as I said before, overshoot is the ultimate cause of collapse, but social upheaval is usually the proximal. And we are in a particularly bad situation right now compared to ancient civilizations because the majority of people back then were simply ignorant and uneducated, and were also used to living in poverty, while now we have huge number of people who are not only ignorant, but misinformed, with a sense of entitlement and expectations for having more stuff tomorrow.

So I am very pessimistic about the future, but these things have to be talked about openly

Of course it is. Any time you propose influencing people by power of law or government, it’s politics.

You sound like you might be a right wing troll sock puppetting what you (wrongly) think are the ideas of the people you oppose.

So I’m signing off this discussion…