Too many nuclear weapons

John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" Nuclear Weapons spot was dead on brilliant, funny and ultimately scary. Command and Control describes incidents in detail, but who knew about the drunkards and morons in charge of these weapons?  Humanity is playing a form of Russian Roulette.

Let's not add to Egypt's arsenal

Was my blog post of 17 July. Today in the New York Times  article on the Jhadist routing the Kurds we see "even the pesh merga are not up to the fight with ISIS. Kurdish officials have complained of a lack of ammunition and begged American diplomats for more weapons. But the United States, so far, has held off on significant arms shipments to the Kurds, fearing that it could undermine the central government in Baghdad. Now, the Kurds have been battling a group of militants from ISIS who are using powerful American weapons they took from the battlefield, left by the Iraqi Army. “They are literally outgunned by an ISIS that is fighting with hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military equipment seized from the Iraqi Army who abandoned it,” Mr. Khedery said."

1st observation is that there must be some Bathist Sunni elements teaching ISIS how to use these armored carriers

2nd what will keep these same weapons we supply Egypt from being turned around and used against us when General Sisi's regime blows up?

Iraq Agrees to Help Kurds Battle Sunni Extremists

Air force is useless in a battle against a rebel terrorist group like ISIS.  The Kurds need money and arms to supply their home grown "Pesh Merga" security force with a cohesive motive force that is leagues ahead of Baghdad's politicized army.  Forget a unified Iraq and let the Kurds support themselves with sale of oil going directly to them.

In Libya, Parliament Convenes Amid Battles

This article in today's New York Times brings a thought.  Sisi of Egypt invades to grab oil revenue and becalm fundamental Islamists!  Its a classic authoritarian move.

British Citizens Flee Tripoli on Ship as 25 Libyans Are Reportedly Killed in Fighting

Libya, another country drawn up by Europeans,  is breaking apart as well.

Sunni Extremists in Iraq Seize 3 Towns From Kurds and Threaten Major Dam

"The Kurds, who have been longtime American allies, recently asked for military assistance from the United States to fight ISIS, American officials, determined to keep Iraq together as one country are reluctant" without Baghdad's approval. Seeing as how the Kurds are the only ones capable of using American intelligence and weaponry effectively in restraining ISIS makes it the usual throw our friends under the bus for a hopeless cause type move we are famous for.  Iraq is broken so support the Kurds because they are the sane ones in Iraq right now while the Shia and Sunnis are in a blood feud that we can not control.

When the Wind Don't Blow and the Sun Don't Shine

“The Economist’s” Buttonwood invented a new term called the DOG (Discount for Obnoxious Government) Factor and referred to Vladimir Putin’s capricious trampling of property rights and the rule of law as costing Russia approximately One Trillion Dollars in market value and creating a huge drag on its economy.  Noxious decisions are a drag on all economies and not just for Iran or Argentina mentioned as well in the editorial article. To stay away from partisan politics here in the U.S. by using our insane corporate tax policy that incentivises our companies to place capital abroad as an example of a noxious drag on our economy, let us instead examine Germany’s energy policy as an example.  That Germany counters its lower carbon emissions policy as well as devalues the country’s stock makes the decision doubly incomprehensible.

The monkey wrench to the system is Chancellor Angela Merkel’s emotional decision to shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants by 2020.  A decision that belies the country’s reputation for excellent engineering logic and execution.  That a government with such a talented population could come to such a hasty decision is difficult to comprehend inspite of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and Japan’s equally large engineering  talent. The breakdown in logic is that shutting down nuclear energy increases Germany’s carbon emissions and makes the country more beholden to carbon rich despots such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Sun and Wind can not provide Germany’s energy needs.  Paul Joskow of MIT pointed out the costs of intermittency, the cost of on and off production when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine. These costs are huge, currently not calculated and require even more investment in gathering and storing such energy. Ultimately though, the biggest problem with sun and wind energy is that it is too dispersed.  For a world that wants to preserve its habitat with great swathes of natural parkland and concentrate populations in city islands, you need concentrated energy, nuclear being the best example.  Concentrated so that forests are not mowed down to grow ethanol for automobile fuel or migratory birds chopped to smithereens by wind farms. Sun and Wind are high acreage to energy production systems which are most susceptible to NIMBA (not in my backyard) syndrome which is certain as more wind and sun energy production is put in place. Merkel’s thought that these sources can provide Germany with a majority of its energy needs is a pipe dream.

Germany has sponsored much solar energy development with rich subsidies despite not having a sun drenched climate.  It was a minor acknowledgement at not an unbearable cost to their green movement and the goal of reducing carbon emissions.  But combining carbon emissions reduction with the elimination of nuclear energy production is impossible, if you understand the numbers.  The end result is a huge devaluation of an investment stock while throwing out the original goal of reducing carbon emissions which Germany is currently not doing by using coal to cover those intermittency gremlins of Dr. Joskow.  And those gremlins keep on pawing away at the need for natural gas to keep coming from Russia and a diminution of any geo-political decision making such as supporting Ukrainian sovereignty.  France on the other hand has energy independence, meets low carbon emissions goals and protects its natural beauty because it embraces nuclear energy. It has plenty of obnoxious policies holding its economy back, but its nuclear bet is not one of them.

Many Germans would argue that it is a matter of time before France suffers a catastrophe similar to that of Japan’s Fukushima disaster, but much has been learned so that it will be less likely. Inspite of Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island the record for nuclear energy is very good, similar to airline versus automobile travel when comparing direct deaths from atomic exposure to coal miner deaths.  Deaths from breathing impure air are difficult to calculate but make the case for carbon much worse. There are many years left before the 2020 limit that Germany has set for it’s nuclear energy plants and it would be logical for them to educate their innumerate “green” voters of the folly of this course taken by Merkel in the heat of Japan’s disaster.