Energy policy (r)evolution

Prime Minister Kan has called for rethinking Japan’s energy policy. Needless to say, there are lots of people who are happy with the old policy of building more and more nuclear power plants and are thus unhappy with Kan. This includes not only all of those companies that have profited from the policy but also people who work there, local governments that have been very generously rewarded (bribed?) for hosting the plants, and more. The payments have been hot and heavy for decades, and many people are addicted. Faced with the prospect of a plant’s closing, they cry, “What will become of us?”

For an answer, they have only to think a bit. For the government to shift its emphasis from nuclear to solar and other sustainable energies will not mean the end of work. It will just shift the jobs. New facilities have to be developed, built, and maintained. Nuclear plants have to be decommissioned. And more – all of which will take extended work. At the same time, Fukushima provides a stark answer to the perils of not shifting out of nuclear.

Yet people with great vested interests and all-too-little imagination fail to see this. Instead, they point to the current reliance on nuclear power for approximately 30% of Japan’s electricity and say that shifting the emphasis will impose major power shortages and hardships – as though we were talking about shutting everything down today and bulldozing the sites tomorrow.

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Watching this, I am reminded of how, in the past, the U.S. military and its lackeys in the LDP met suggestions that this or that U.S. military facility might not be needed by saying it is unrealistic to totally eliminate the U.S. military presence. Nobody was talking about eliminating everything overnight – nobody, that is, except the U.S. military hawks who brandished this “if we’re not wanted, we’ll take our marbles and go home – and then what’ll you do?” bluster to veto any reductions at all.

Kan is not talking about shutting everything down tomorrow. He is talking about shifting the priorities to favor sustainable energy resources. He is not talking about a policy revolution. He is talking about policy evolution. Yet the opposition sets up a straw man, calls it Kan, and kicks it.

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