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Sweden turning away from “unreliable” wind and solar and back to clean nuclear power

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I’m very concerned about America switching to renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Renewables are expensive, unstable, unreliable, and harmful to animals – especially birds and bats. I would much prefer if the country relied on fracking and nuclear power, which are zero emission and harmless to animals. Sweden had been focused on renewables, but they’re now moving back to nuclear.

Here’s the story from the The Blaze:

The Swedish parliament determined last week that in order to ensure the country has a “stable energy system,” it will have to abandon its goal of “100 per cent renewable electricity production by 2040.”

To satisfy electricity demand, which is set to double to around 300 TwH by 2040, Sweden’s right-of-center government announced June 20 that it would instead lean more heavily on nuclear energy and subsidize the construction of new nuclear plants — plants green-lit in 2016 but sidelined for fear they would be too expensive, reported Reuters.

The country, home to just over 10.5 million people, presently has three nuclear plants with six nuclear reactors in commercial operation. The state-owned Vattenfall aims to bring the tally up to eight reactors and refurbish extant facilities.

Wow, what accounts for this big change in direction? Well, the country experiences very cold winters. After poor performance from the renewables during the winter, the people started to demand results – which is why they elected a right-of-center government to make changes.

Swedish support for nuclear energy is presently at a record high of 56%, up from 42% in 2022, reported Bloomberg.

Sweden knows what to do to fix their energy problems. Other countries are moving to nuclear power in order to get clean, reliable zero-emission low-cost power.

South Korea is going back into nuclear. This article from far-left CNN is from July 2022:

South Korea, one of the world’s most fossil fuel-reliant economies, is re-embracing nuclear energy, with the government announcing Tuesday it will restart construction on two nuclear reactors and extend the life of those already in operation.

By 2030, the Energy Ministry wants nuclear to make up at least 30% of the country’s power generation – a step up from its previous goal of 27%.

To meet this, South Korea is restarting construction on two new reactors at the Hanul Nuclear Power Plant on the country’s east coast. Construction on the two reactors has been stalled since 2017, when former President Moon Jae-in – who had pushed hard to phase out nuclear energy – took office.

But with a new President in office, South Korea’s nuclear industry is returning at full speed.

Japan is restarting their idled nuclear power plants, and planning to build more next-generation nuclear reactors. They need reliable power, and they don’t want to count on their neighbors to sell it to them. They want to develop their own energy at home, and lower the prices that their citizens have to pay.

The problem in America is that we’ve elected people to lead us who have no skills or understanding of how the world works. People like AOC, who were working as bartenders and waitresses are making policy decisions. Why did we elect stupid and corrupt people to run the government? Because they told us what we wanted to hear? I would rather have results than words. This is only going to be fixed when we elect leaders from the grown-up party.

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What can we learn about communist leaders from the record of history?

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Now that we have atheistic communists in the majority of the House, Senate and White House, it might be a good idea to take a look at what atheistic communist leaders have done in history. First, let’s see how the atheistic worldview of communist leaders affected religious people.

Here is what Josef Stalin did during his rule of Russia in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Library of Congress offers this in their “Soviet Archives exhibit”:

The Soviet Union was the first state to have as an ideological objective the elimination of religion. Toward that end, the Communist regime confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in the schools. Actions toward particular religions, however, were determined by State interests, and most organized religions were never outlawed.

The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and 1930s was the Russian Orthodox Church, which had the largest number of faithful. Nearly all of its clergy, and many of its believers, were shot or sent to labor camps. Theological schools were closed, and church publications were prohibited. By 1939 only about 500 of over 50,000 churches remained open.

What’s the attitude of Democrat candidates to Bible-believing Christians? My read is that they think that Christian values need to be suppressed by the government lest they offend Democrat voters, who seem to be very easily offended these days. You can already see their animus towards Christians in their Equality Act, which eradicates conscience rights in order to protect (some) LGBT people from feeling offended.

The Ukraine Famine

Take a look at this UK Daily Mail article about Josef Stalin.

Excerpt:

Now, 75 years after one of the great forgotten crimes of modern times, Stalin’s man-made famine of 1932/3, the former Soviet republic of Ukraine is asking the world to classify it as a genocide.

The Ukrainians call it the Holodomor – the Hunger.

Millions starved as Soviet troops and secret policemen raided their villages, stole the harvest and all the food in villagers’ homes.

They dropped dead in the streets, lay dying and rotting in their houses, and some women became so desperate for food that they ate their own children.

If they managed to fend off starvation, they were deported and shot in their hundreds of thousands.

So terrible was the famine that Igor Yukhnovsky, director of the Institute of National Memory, the Ukrainian institution researching the Holodomor, believes as many as nine million may have died.

[…]Between four and five million died in Ukraine, a million died in Kazakhstan and another million in the north Caucasus and the Volga.

By 1933, 5.7 million households – somewhere between ten million and 15 million people – had vanished. They had been deported, shot or died of starvation.

The Holodomor is just one of the atrocities committed by Soviet Union communists. You may also have heard that they operated a system of labor camps for dissidents that killed millions more. The total number of people killed by Stalin is estimated at 20 to 40 million.

Stalin actually wasn’t very good at mass murder compared to another communist, Mao Zedong.

Can you name the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century? No, it wasn’t Hitler or Stalin. It was Mao Zedong.

According to the authoritative “Black Book of Communism,” an estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao’s repeated, merciless attempts to create a new “socialist” China. Anyone who got in his way was done away with — by execution, imprisonment or forced famine.

For Mao, the No. 1 enemy was the intellectual. The so-called Great Helmsman reveled in his blood-letting, boasting, “What’s so unusual about Emperor Shih Huang of the China Dynasty? He had buried alive 460 scholars only, but we have buried alive 46,000 scholars.” Mao was referring to a major “accomplishment” of the Great Cultural Revolution, which from 1966-1976 transformed China into a great House of Fear.

The most inhumane example of Mao’s contempt for human life came when he ordered the collectivization of China’s agriculture under the ironic slogan, the “Great Leap Forward.” A deadly combination of lies about grain production, disastrous farming methods (profitable tea plantations, for example, were turned into rice fields), and misdistribution of food produced the worse famine in human history.

Deaths from hunger reached more than 50 percent in some Chinese villages. The total number of dead from 1959 to 1961 was between 30 million and 40 million — the population of California.

[…]Mao kept expanding the laogai, a system of 1,000 forced labor camps throughout China. Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in labor camps, has estimated that from the 1950s through the 1980s, 50 million Chinese passed through the Chinese version of the Soviet gulag. Twenty million died as a result of the primitive living conditions and 14-hour work days.

Whenever I bring up the historical record of communism to Democrats, they always tell me that their leaders have good intentions. But the communist leaders of the past aren’t any different from the communist leaders of today. Communist leaders all start out with noble ambitions of wanting to help the poor. The problem is that they don’t know anything about economics, so whatever they try doesn’t work. Communist policies like nationalizing private industries, printing money, purging wealthy people, imposing tariffs, and imposing price controls cause enormous poverty. And then they need someone to blame for their failure to produce the results they promise.

If we were serious about helping the poor, then we would elect leaders who had experience lifting the poor out of poverty. A business leader or a governor of a state. It’s not a popularity contest. We need to choose someone who has already had success at helping the poor. And the best way to help the poor is by helping them to find work so they can earn their own success and chart their own course. After all it’s not words that affect our lives. Or the feelings we have about words we like. What affects our lives is policies that produce results. Intentions and rhetoric don’t matter, ultimately.

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How are carbon taxes and drugs legalization working out in Canada?

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It’s always good for Americans to look north, and see what the secular left is doing in a country where they are the majority. Previously, I blogged about how Canada is expanding their program to kill poor people, people who disagree with the government, people with disabilities, etc. Today I wanted to look at carbon taxes and drug legalization. Let’s start with drug legalization.

Here’s an article from Daily Wire about Canada:

Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for people ages 10 to 59 in British Columbia after the Canadian province decriminalized several hard drugs.

Deaths from illegal drugs are now higher than homicides, suicides, accidents, and natural disease combined, British Columbia’s Public Safety and Solicitor General Ministry said Monday in a press release.

From January to May this year, 1,018 British Columbians died from drug overdoses, a 2.9% increase over that period last year. At least 12,264 British Columbians have died from illegal drugs since April, 2016, according to the ministry.

In January, British Columbia became the first Canadian province to decriminalize fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and morphine.

The British Columbia government promised at the time to “treat addiction as a health issue, not a criminal justice one.”

What is very interesting is that this lady said that the reason why they did this is because they want to help the people who take drugs to not be afraid or ashamed:

“Decriminalizing people who use drugs breaks down the fear and shame associated with substance use and ensures they feel safer reaching out for life-saving supports,” Jennifer Whiteside, the British Columbia minister for mental health and addictions, said of the plan at the time.

The root cause of the policy is the desire to “don’t judge”, so that the evil people can feel as good the good people. The important thing being to help people feel good regardless of what they choose to do. Unfortunately, the no-drugs people have to do all the work to give the yes-drugs people free drugs. And they have to pay for their health care, because Canada has single payer health care.

I had a quick look at the biography of the “minister for mental health and addictions”, to see if she had any credentials in law, law enforcement, mental health, or addiction.

Nope:

Jennifer holds a degree in history from Simon Fraser University.

This is a common problem in Canada, where the Liberal Party of Canada frequently appoints “diversity” candidates to important positions, even though those candidates have no earned degrees or private sector experience related to those positions. So, take the finance minister: she has no degrees or achievements in finance. Take the climate change minister: she has no degrees or achievements in climate science – or any scientific field. It doesn’t matter if the person doesn’t know how to achieve results in the real world. It matters if they are a “good” person (a secular leftist) and if they say “good things” (secular leftist talking points).

Well, speaking of Climate Barbie, their climate change minister, what about the carbon taxes?

Even with a small drop in wholesale prices for gasoline on the markets today, he says to look for pump prices to jump to $1.49 on average in most places.

The federal carbon tax is to increase to 14 cents per litre of gasoline from its current level of 11 cents per litre. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, it will cost the average household between $402 and $847 in 2023, even after the rebates.

Keep in mind that these are not “per gallon” prices. Canadians are going to pay $1.49 per litre. There are 3.79 litres in a gallon. So their price per gallon of gas is actually 3.79 x $1.49 = $5.65 a gallon. That’s nearly twice what I’m paying for gas.

And it gets worse.

The Toronto Sun notes:

According to the PBO, by 2030 when the carbon tax is fully implemented, the total cost to households after rebates will be significant. In Newfoundland and Labrador middle income households will pay $680 more annually after rebates, $929 in Saskatchewan, $1,028 in Manitoba, $1,118 in PEI, $1,127 in Nova Scotia, $1,269 in Ontario and $1,460 in Alberta.

Households with higher incomes will pay as much as $9,000 a year in carbon tax outcomes.

Is anyone surprised that Canada is going downhill at this precipitous pace? The prime minister is just a part-time drama teacher and ski instructor, who has nice hair and a famous last name. He doesn’t know  how anything in the real world works. And Canadians pay for his stupidity, because they elected an imbecile.