"Alarmed by the so-called crisis in Japan?" Let Tom Tomorrow's "invisible hand of the free market" explain nuclear safety

by Ken

Alarmed by the so-called crisis in Japan?
The invisible hand of the free market explains nuclear safety

by TOM TOMORROW

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

Much as I adore Tom Tomorrow, I wonder if he meant this week's strip to be quite as subtle as it seems to me. The only kinds of nuclerar-power-related questions he shows his wonderful "invisible hand of the free market" swatting down are ones concerning the safety of the American nuclear industry. Those are certainly excellent questions (and as Howie chronicled, Sen. Bernie Sanders has addressed an excellent version of them to President Obama.) Perhaps he just forgot to include any equally unwelcome-to-the-free-market questions about the possible necessity of a nuclear-power component to satisfying our energy demands (as I was musing the other day) -- though not necessarily the nuclear-power component the way it's presently constituted, and of course that would be in combination with development of alternative energy sources, making sure that we've properly reckoned their downsides as well as their ups, as well as a dramatic revamping of our energy consumption. Yeah, that's pretty hilarious, right?

I wonder if many readers will get the possibly deeper subtlety of the way Tom T has the free hand framing our choices: "Look, you have two choices! You can either accept the nuclear industry as it exists today -- without any further improvement or oversight -- or you can live in a coal-burning Dickensian nightmare of street urchins with black lung disease. Is that what you want?" In other words, if get our framing from a source other than the free hand, we may consider that this framing is inadequate, especially for such a complex situation, which really and truly does call for major input from qualified experts. (Note: qualified experts. Though that means that somebody's got to judge who's qualified. Oy!) There is, I think, a disinclination on both sides of the nuclear-power issue to allow questions.

Actually, I think there may be another whole dimension left out of Tom T's conjuring here. Aren't there in fact two free hands of the free market at work here? And isn't the one that's owned and operated by Big Energy USA Inc. the louder, bossier, and more intolerant one? Because, as I was pointing out the other day, there's a large domestic constituency already in place that seems quite comfortable with the option of that "Dickensian nightmare of street urchins with black lung disease. Already Fred Upton, the new Republican chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who is already using the Japanese experience as an excuse for arguing for unshackling the domestic oil and gas industry, which would presumably include leaving in place or actually increasing the massive network of tax, subsidy, and nonregulatory favors extended to Big Energy, which have done so much to enable its cohort of profiteers to extract all those mind-boggling profits from the U.S. economy. (Well, sometimes "free marketers" are free-marketier than others.)

Bear in mind that there's more than half a House of Representatives-ful of free marketers like our Fred, and quite possibly a solid majority in the Senate as well -- though not necessarily a filibuster-proof majority. (But then we progressives don't believe in the evil, antidemocratic filibuster, do we? At any rate, we sure as shootin' aren't very good at using it.)

Do I know what to do? No, not really, though I know it has to involve both (a) a ramped-up commitment to nuclear-power safety and (b) a desperately overdue commitment and workable plan for a sane energy policy.

We could do worse, I suppose, than starting by doing everything 180 degrees opposite from everything then-Vice President "Big Dick" Cheney incorporated into his top-secret New U.S. Energy Plan, hatched in collusion cooperation with all those Big Energy bigwigs he was secretly shuttling into the White House -- you know, the ones whose names it was so desperately important to him to keep from us that he fought to keep his secrets all the way to the Supreme Court, where his boys took care of him.

But that's not really a policy. It may be as close as we're going to get, though, because getting a real energy plan -- assuming we can decided whom we can trust in the formulation of one -- through a bought-off Congress is going to be . . . well, it isn't going to happen. Chairman Fred will see to that. And he'll probably have a lot of congressional company.

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