Going Nuclear

I’m a diehard liberal (and a New Yorker who voted for Giuliani twice and would have sent him to the Senate over Hillary, had he run), and I completely agree with Rudy’s pro-nuclear stance. A lot of people who commented are, typically, misrepresenting what the left wants or stands for – energy independence/alternative fuels is a top issue on the left, if not *the* top issue, because it solves so many problems.

Say we replace oil with a portfolio of nuclear, wind, solar, biofuel, etc. We’re not giving money to Iran and Saudi Arabia; we’re not contributing as much to global warming; we’re creating non-offshorable American jobs harnessing the energy. Everybody wins, except Exxon-Mobil, but they’re basically a horse-and-buggy manufacturer in 1900 – history’s passing them by. They can either jump on alternative fuels like BP and other compaines have, or enjoy their dwindling market while they can.

Now, to clarify a few things: the left is against drilling in ANWAR because IT WON’T HELP! There’s enough oil there to keep the country going for maybe a few months. I honestly get the impression that ANWAR drilling is intended as a “go fuck yourself” to environmentalists more than a solution to our energy problems.

The left’s concerns about nuclear power are: 1) what do you do with the waste? Carting it all over the country to a mountainside and hoping nothing goes wrong along the way isn’t a good enough answer. Someone has to find a way to render this stuff non-harmful, or at least harmful for less than 100 years. 2) what happens if the Republicans deregulate the nuke industry to the point where there aren’t succificient safety protections? Coal might burn clean, but it sure as hell doesn’t come out of the ground clean, and the coal industry has so much political muscle in coal-rich states that there’s very little oversight, and not much to stop them from flooding small towns in coal dust. Now that’s bad, but turning small towns into 3 Mile Island or Chernobyl is much worse. Basically, build nuke plans, just make sure Homer Simpson doesn’t get put in charge of safety.

Back to Giuliani for a minute. He is pro gun-control, which is a big part of why New York is now the safest large city in America. That doesn’t mean he “wants to take your guns away.” What you have to understand is, New York is different from middle America. There are no hunters in Brooklyn. If you own a gun, you’re either in the NYPD or the Bloods. What Rudy fought to do wasn’t to take guns away from responsible gun owners – it was to stop the flood of illegal guns from out-of-state into the hands of drug dealers and criminals. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much exactly what the Democrats have been trying to do all this time the right has been hand-wringing about “taking your guns away.”

As for school choice, again, New York is a different animal from the rest of the country. We have hundreds of public schools in a few square miles, ranging from some of the best in the country to some of the worst. So every 8th grader applies to their high school of choice like they’re applying to college. The smart hardworking kids get into the elite high schools, the slackers get into the run-of-the-mill ones, but it’s based entirely on aptitude, not money.

Bush’s voucher program, by contrast, simply gives upper-middle-class kids better access to private schools. A voucher of a few hundred bucks isn’t going to pay private school tuition for a working-class kid, so it’s of no help.

Anyway, I do really like Guiliani, and would love to see him run. But that’s mostly because he’d represent a sea change in Republican politics. Besides specific issues he disagrees with Bush and the hard right on, Rudy has a different overall philosophy: he believes in good government, and he’s effective at delivering it. We should be so lucky as to have someone like that in office.

schroeder on June 15, 2006 at 4:05 PM