The US Constitution, specifically the 13th amendment, allows:

  Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall be duly convicted, shall exist within the United STates or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

All governments "redistribute wealth" friend, not just the left or right or up or down.

It all depends on which side of the bars you live on, amirite?

We do not have infinite resources. Committing 7-11 years and countless billions to build a NPP leads to those funds and other resources to be unavailable elsewhere.

Each wind farm, each set of solar panels, each battery storage will begin to pay dividends immediately as each one is finished. While the huge plant will be nothing-nothing-nothing-... for years upon years.

Builders, engineers, capital, and such is better suited to be investing in other sources of energy.

Renewables is more economical than nuclear, so investing in nuclear is a waste of resources. This is also why nobody does it. And no, nobody who hasn't lost their marbles is seriously considering sending people to Mars to save humanity.

I grew up in the 90s and there was a book in climate in my shelf that talked about thousands dying today, nearly three decades back. At some point we should stop pretending this is a new and surprising danger and start treating it as the risk we willingly steered ourselves into.

If you live next to a road and every other month a car crashed through your living room wall you'd probably fix the root cause after the first time it happened. If you are clever you fixed it even before it occurs. What you would not do is only deal with the damage caused month for month and pretend there is no need to address the root cause.

The reason why many pretend our only option is handing out band aids while the blade keeps spinning, is because it is hard to imagine anything else, if your salary depends on you not addressing the problem.

It feels more and more like watching a bus driver playing chicken against a solid, immovable concrete wall. It is obvious who wins, the only question is into which directions the scrap explodes most, while the driver eyes for the ejector seat. And all the kids pretend driving into the wall is the only reasonable option.

It is possible for humanity to create unsurvivable conditions in our earths atmosphere. Should we do that if there is enough profit in it? If not, where would you draw the line and how would you set/enforce the limits?

The thousands dying are just a means to an end. They don't really care about them.

> the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society

if you mean PoW mining instead of crypto in general then maybe. ethereum uses about as much power as a small village in europe so it should never be a target for climate action.

the public benefit of blockchains is real and it comes from the fact that no one controls them and they let users ignore the law. thats the part governments dont like. corporations also dont like it even if they work in the industry, coinbase and binance started their own chains so they would have full control over the way they evolve.

crypto is a cypherpunk/anarchist technology that got hijacked by investors to sell their scam coins and fake decentralized web services. without it your only option for buying things that are illegal in your country (weed, abortion pills, guns, hacking tools) is sending cash in paper mail or using some complicated scheme where you have to trust third parties. i think thats worth some tax evasion.

Its a well trod problem: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

Not exactly background noise but totally incomparable to the normal CO2 outputs of major nations like the US or China. I.e. ~20 Million Tons CO2 vs 4 Trillion and 13 Trillion Tons respectively.

Widespread use of nuclear power for civilian merchant shipping is a non-starter. It's simply too expensive to train and pay enough qualified nuclear engineers. The US Navy barely manages this for a few dozen nuclear powered vessels with a huge budget and limited concern for cost effectiveness.

Plus there are the security concerns. Every civilian nuclear power plant has armed guards on duty around the clock. Those guards have to also be trained and paid. Many foreign countries have laws against bringing weapons into their ports.

If we want to reduce CO2 emissions from merchant ships then use nuclear or renewable power on shore to manufacture carbon neutral synthetic liquid fuel. Use that to run the ship engines.

I really feel like if the US really wanted to support US shipbuilding (like what the Jones act was supposed to do) it would subsidize building a fleet of nuclear shipping boats.

Lots of manufacturing projects, lots of related industries boosted, a renewed investment in nuclear engineering bringing a lot of nuclear job experience, and a way to potentially dig deeper into the backbone of global trade again.