That humming noise you’re hearing is the sound of nuclear power electrifying the national grid. At present, this electrification is only metaphorical, a manifest sense of excitement, but plans are being laid, and contracts are being signed that will turn it into the real thing, a flow of power urgently needed for our prosperity and continued thriving.
Ever since a caveman first struck one stone against another to spark a cooking fire, energy use has been a marker of progress and human flourishing. That is a big reason why green fanatics want to limit energy use. They hate development and wealth creation, at least in their own society and ours. In their bleak view, Earth is less man’s home, ripe for renovation and the pursuit of happiness, than it is a small, lonely, vulnerable blue and green planet in desperate need of protection from our species.
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, like her sidelined boss, President Joe Biden, buys into this grim view of America and the world. She has pursued policies that make energy scarcer and more expensive. Her campaign is backing away again from energy fracking after having pretended for a while to be centrist on the matter.
If you want to see where such policies lead and grasp what happens when energy is severely limited, look at California, where environmental extremism has gone further than anywhere else in the country. Citizens, sick of brownouts and hideously expensive energy costs, are fleeing to better-run states. People show what they want by voting with their feet, and Californians are voting for plentiful energy by escaping from the Left Coast.
For the starkest visual representation of what life is like with scant energy, zero development, and no possibility of general progress, look at those well-known but still extraordinary NASA satellite photos of the Korean Peninsula, in which one sees the brilliantly illuminated and prosperous South bordering the benighted and impoverished tyranny of the North. The communist hellhole created by the Kim dynasty is an area of nearly complete darkness — no energy and no prosperity — which is invisible between dusk and dawn, lying cold between the sparkle of Seoul and the twinkle of China.
Or look at photographs just this week from communist Cuba, where Left-wing totalitarianism has produced its ineluctable results — darkened cities, lost services, closed businesses and schools, and a public increasingly restive and rightly resentful.
Here in America, the graph line of rising demand for energy has broken upward through the diving graph line of stable and reliable electricity supply. Our more or less free people are working, playing, browsing, and in other ways doing what they like, but now have bumped up against the descending fever chart of Biden-Harris energy policy.
Energy rules, regulations, and mandates imposed by Biden and promised by Harris, if she wins the White House, are dictated by the green lobby, but they are losing that great majority of people who want to get on with their lives and not be thwarted by extremists peddling exaggerated fears of environmental disaster.
Big Tech companies developing artificial intelligence, which demands massive computing power and thus is an enormous quantity of electricity, are ensuring they get a reliable supply by signing contracts with power companies to reopen nuclear power plants. America has been shuttering nuclear power supplies ever since the meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979.
Now, that process promises to be reversed. As the Washington Examiner reported, two retired nuclear plants, including Three Mile Island, are due to come back online, another nuclear facility has been saved from closing, and about half a dozen deals have been struck by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft for new power generation. More of this seems certain.
The most important thing now is for the government to get out of the way, more specifically for voters to make sure Democrats don’t get to control the levers of power in Washington, either at the White House or on Capitol Hill. The latest deals heralding a nuclear power revival underscore the need for an all-of-the-above policy that Donald Trump, when president, referred to as “energy domination.”
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The welcome revival of nuclear power probably cannot now be stopped because a nation of 335 million people demands it, nor should it be stopped. As we proceed along this beckoning path and as the greens screech in protest, keep in mind that France has generated 70% of its electricity from nuclear power for half a century or more and has done so largely without incident.
We can choose between thriving and declining. A reliable supply of plentiful energy is there for the taking. Nuclear power is more efficient and safer than ever. We have the technology. All we need is the will … and the right government.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
