"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Is Jane Fonda responsible for global warming? I mean, beyond her voluminous CO2 laden stupid liberal exhalations?

“The China Syndrome” opened on March 16, 1979. With the no-nukes protest movement in full swing, the movie was attacked by the nuclear industry as an irresponsible act of leftist fear-mongering. Twelve days later, an accident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in south-central Pennsylvania.

Michael Douglas, a producer and co-star of the film — he played Fonda’s cameraman — watched the T.M.I. accident play out on the real TV news, which interspersed live shots from Pennsylvania with eerily similar scenes from “The China Syndrome.” While Fonda was firmly anti-nuke before making the film, Douglas wasn’t so dogmatic. Now he was converted on the spot. “It was a religious awakening,” he recalled in a recent phone interview. “I felt it was God’s hand.”

Fonda, meanwhile, became a full-fledged crusader. In a retrospective interview on the DVD edition of “The China Syndrome,” she notes with satisfaction that the film helped persuade at least two other men — the father of her then-husband, Tom Hayden, and her future husband, Ted Turner — to turn anti-nuke. “I was ecstatic that it was extremely commercially successful,” she said. “You know the expression ‘We had legs’? We became a caterpillar after Three Mile Island.”

TMI was the worst nuclear disaster in American history. How bad? The worst-exposed person would have had about 100 mrem of radiation exposure. That sounds like a lot, especially if you don’t know what a millrem is (I suspect the Leather-Skinned One does not). But this calculator, which is more-or-less accurate, will tell you that that’s about 1/3 of the radiation the typical American gets a year. Hell, if I live in my house for 14 years, I’ll get as much extra radiation as the TMI workers did. Those who live in brick houses shouldn’t throw neutrons.

Yes, Chernobyl was far worse. But I wouldn’t take the behavior of a bunch of commies as my template. They managed to starve people in the midst of the richest farmland in the world. As long as we don’t elect too many Democrats, we should be fine.

Anyway, so what did all this celebutard hand-wringing do? It made the nation wish she’d stuck with films like Barbarella.

What it did produce, stoked by “The China Syndrome,” was a widespread panic. The nuclear industry, already foundering as a result of economic, regulatory and public pressures, halted plans for further expansion. And so, instead of becoming a nation with clean and cheap nuclear energy, as once seemed inevitable, the United States kept building power plants that burned coal and other fossil fuels. Today such plants account for 40 percent of the country’s energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions. Anyone hunting for a global-warming villain can’t help blaming those power plants — and can’t help wondering too about the unintended consequences of Jane Fonda.

So follow the narrative here for Hollywood. Make movies about how nuclear power is evil and going to kill us all; rake in the millions while appearing socially responsible. After the nation eschews carbon-free nuclear power, make movies denouncing global warming; rake in the millions while appearing socially responsible. Why is it that the celebutards are always righteous and wonderful and it’s the rest of us blue, er, white-collar slobs that are the scumbags?

The good news is that nuclear power is back in vogue. And nuclear fusion, a far safer energy source, is getting closer to feasible every day, despite the ignorant twaddle spouted by Greenpeace. Let’s just hope we can keep the Jane Fondas of the world silent this time.