Atoms For Justice: Dying of Thirst: Dispatches From the Energy Poor in Africa by Princy Mthonbeni.

[NNadir]

11. I think it's quite clear how Ms. Mthonbeni regards bourgeois rhetoric claiming that we should rip the shit...

Last edited Mon Jul 13, 2026, 02:08 PM - Edit history (1)

...out of Africa for metals and land because of the contempt for science and engineering held by clueless westerners.

Hydrogen and battery bullshit - which ignores the laws of thermodynamics and the land, material and temporal limits of so called "renewable energy", the latter at great moral and health costs placed on the shoulders of Africans - doesn't work in the first world, the second world or the third world.

African know all about so called "renewable energy;" they've lived with it all their lives. They cook afterall with wood. It's killing them. They want clean energy.

Hydrogen and battery bullshit has not even scratched the surface of the reliance of so called "renewable energy" for long term back up on fossil fuels, and again, there are zero antinukes who care at all about fossil fuels.

She is a brilliant woman, I think, and she can tell that the world is burning, that people are dying in the streets in Europe without even coming close to cutting off the nonsense issuing out of the antinuke cults.

Her view is worldly, not provincial.

Like I said in the OP, "I could ask to be spared the bullshit, but my request will not be honored; I've been here long enough to know that."

I admire and respect Ms Mthonbeni, her eloquence and I am unsurprised that there are those here whose myopia and dogma prevent them from having a shred of respect for what she says. The problem lies not with her - she's intelligent and informed - but with people are insufficiently knowledgeable and insufficiently educated to understand the basics of a dire reality.

One dire reality is the planet is burning. People are being killed by extreme heat.

Antinukes can chant their slogans all they want; their chanting has done nothing to arrest this tragedy, despite its enormous cost. The cure for the bubonic plague was not chanting and prayer, it involved science, as some people at the time of the plague recognized, Guy de Chauliac being the most famous example.

The finest minds in the 20th century invented and developed nuclear energy, only to have their work vilified by superstitions of weak minds, reactionaries who wanted to return to primitive times when life depended on the vicissitudes of the weather while ignoring fossil fuels, the cause of the catastrophe, just as people in the time of the plague.

Reportedly in Germany, where the antinukes burn coal and gas while carrying on about uselessly about being "green," using wind and solar garbage, sometimes coupled with hydrogen bullshit, 5000 people are said to have died in late June 2026 from extreme heat. The death tolls are also present in other countries, including largely innocent France.

I see no evidence, none, that any of the chanting cults give a rat's ass about these deaths. They simply chant like medieval priests in response to a plague.

Ms. Mthonbeni is not interested in chants. She's educated and bright, and has come up out of a world about which our bourgeois wind and solar cultists couldn't care less.

Being bright, educated, eloquent, and on the front line of energy; she is traveling the world in hopes of saving it. She is disinterested, as she states quite clearly, in unreliable energy. She wants her people to always have access to a working light switch, refrigeration, and clean water, all the time 24/7, 52 weeks a year.

It doesn't surprise me at all that there are people here incapable of reading with a shred of comprehension of what she is saying.

I know the depths of deadly antinuke rhetoric, its vapidity, its laziness, its contempt for science and humanity.

I will quote another excerpt from her eloquent work.

...I wonder how many of the people shaping those conversations have ever carried water before school.

Not discussed water.

Not studied water.

Carried it.

Because there is a difference between understanding thirst intellectually and understanding thirst physically...

Question: If it's cloudy and windless for two weeks in winter, are our chanting antinukes prepared to live without running water?

The reference to a comedy in response to Ms. Mthonbeni by the way, the Strangelove reference, I take as a measure of contempt for the seriousness of Ms Mthombeni's work, contempt for the climate crisis, giggling over African poverty and suffering, and a general contempt for the seriousness of all the issues she raises.

It's not comedy; it's tragedy. It takes - here's that word again - decency to know the difference.

Nevertheless it is unsurprising. Most antinukes in my experience have shallow ethics to go with shallow intellects. They feel quite free to open their mouths to prove how little they know, how little they care, and how little they are able to question themselves.

Have a pleasant week.