You first point: that's not even close to being enslaved or forced to do whatever your government tells you to do under threat of imprisonment. Yes, it is very, very different.
Humans aren't really built for communism on a large scale either. We are tribal, capitalism gets around that with incentive and greedy individual reward for doing something that generates social improvement at scale (nation-state) level--trade, commerce, interaction, communication. Communism, Marxism will never provide that. You either have to use the carrot (capitalism) or the stick (despotism) at scale to get results. Communism (real communism) fails beyond a few hundred (may only tens) of souls, again we didn't evolve for that,
There are more than two economic systems, and none of them are natural or aligned with humanity's nature. That's something capitalists tell themselves to feel better about the level of exploitation needed to create a 1% class.
So, is exploitation and lying and theft part of our nature? Capitalism only rewards sociopathic behavior. It cannot be prosocial.
F150 is the best selling vehicle in the USA, you have to learn to walk before you run. It's a foot in the door. I think a lot of people of very high green bent don't realize you can't force people in a democracy to do things they don't want. If you go too fast then they will rebel and you get someone like Trump elected who will set it back 20 years.
I appreciate your point and I agree the outrage of "do not take away my truck" would cause whiplash, even if it is unnecessarily large and and wasteful and unsafe.
But arguably the arms race of large trucks in the US, Canada, Australia, is largely a viral meme that advertisers have managed to instill with insane profit.
It is not a product of exercising freedom but a product of Marketing psyops capturing reptilian brain urges from consumers. Quite succesfully I might add.
it really doesn't, those would be nice to have but to get rid of the "where are we gonna store it" crowd for a while then this doesn't sound like a bad idea if it's even remotely economically feasible. I reckon after drilling a couple hundres of these bore holes we'd get pretty good at working out the kinks
The difference is that if you recycle it you effectively get 30% more energy from the same amount of fuel. It also reduces the volume and radioactivity of waste so it's an all around good thing to do. Newer thorium reactors can also utilize the waste to be even more efficient.
we aren't going to meet "climate goals" anyway, lets opt for the sure thing. We should have done what France did, maybe even poached half their nuclear engineers.
Even if we aren't going all in on nuclear and not other renewable energy sources just means we'll blow past it. You can see this happening on the US right these days where there's some admission that something needs to change but it's pushed towards longer timeline changes like nuclear because it pushes out the date that existing interests like coal plants (and by extension coal mines, hello West Virginia) would be pushed out of the market.
I'd love to see tons more nuclear including fuel reprocessing which the US was very resistant to for a long time due I think to proliferation concerns.
