The Irony of Environmentalism: A Villain Post

You can't hug a child with fossil fuel arms, either.

I decided to call this substack Affably Evil because I knew that a) I was going to disagree with people and b) people have a tendency to characterize those that disagree them as “evil”.

I figured that I might as well embrace it, and instead of insisting that I’m one of the heroes, that at least I can be friendly in my villainy.

Well, buckle up, ‘cause today I’m going to flaunt being a villain.

This is not intended to be a balanced or nuanced post. This is not intended to carefully consider all sides of an issue. It is not intended to extend empathy or understanding to the people involved. It is not intended to be fair. It is not even intended to be correct.

This is intended to be a villainous rant about how stupid environmentalists were to oppose nuclear power in the 1960s, framed as a comic-book-villain-style monologue to the self-proclaimed “heroes” of the time.

In particular, I am going to blame environmentalists for climate change, probably with a few evil cackles and the occasional digression about the monumental hypocrisy of the so-called heroes and how they’re not so different from me.

*clears throat*

Let’s get into it.

Nuclear Power is Awesome, Morons

I’m going to break this down for you do-gooders, because I’m not sure any of you are capable of reasoning, much less doing basic math, and so it might have escaped your attention just how idiotic your little crusade is.

No, Nature Is Not Your Friend, Dummy

I hear that your acts of heroism are in defense of the “environment”.

To be blunt, I don’t think you have a clue what the environment actually is, foolish heroes.

The environment isn’t some benevolent and nurturing spirit, a Mother Nature who kindly swaddles each and every babe to bed at night and watches over them as they sleep.

Mother Nature is an abusive, murderous, sadistic, cruel, callous serial killer.

She lures you in with oh-so-huggable pine and oak trees, and then introduces you to the suicide tree. Or perhaps you’d like to be introduced to a plant with hypodermic needles so painful and hard to remove that it earned the name suicide plant?

And so far, she’s killed everyone who ever lived.

To be honest with you, nemeses mine, my own evil is small potatoes compared to Mother Nature’s rampant villainy. Malaria, smallpox, cancer, tapeworms…

The woman never runs out of new ways to torture and kill.

I’m almost jealous.

So no, nature is not good, or kind, or benevolent.

And she’s laughing at all of you now, thinking you’re protecting her from the ravages of humanity, when it’s more likely than not that you’ll die by her own hand.

Fools.

Yes, Energy Is A Good Thing, Stupid

How else do you expect me to power my Death Ray?

Seriously though, you do know what the electricity that nuclear energy produces is used for, right?

That it powers hospitals and chases back the darkness of the night? That it can heat your home in the winter and keep you from dying of heat stroke in the summer?

Living with less electricity doesn’t mean a pristine planet, it means children shivering in the depths of winter. It means a higher infant mortality rate, more pain and infirmity and backbreaking labor.

I may be a villain, but I have standards, and I wouldn’t condemn a child to that just to satisfy my self-righteous desire for foliage.

(While I may - and I stress may - have doomsday weapons powered by human suffering, I can assure you that it’s all adult suffering. And the theoretical adults in question have air conditioning while they theoretically suffer.)

No, Nuclear Waste Is Not An Issue, Can You Even Do Math?

Every country has its own share of problems. For all our internal strife, one thing the United States has never been accused of is lacking space. This country is enormous, especially for its population.

Now, I know that you heroes are irrationally terrified of glowing rocks, but have you ever actually sat down and thought about how much nuclear waste we produce each year?

Spoiler alert: it’s about half of an Olympic swimming pool. Per year.

We could literally pick a place in the middle of Texas no one lives, dig up some dirt, and bury every bit of nuclear waste we create. It’d be perfectly fine, and we have enough space in the country to do this for centuries, maybe even millennia.

This is not a problem. This isn’t even much of an inconvenience.

It’s just you do-gooders being terrible at math.

Radiation? Like, From The Sun? From Flying And X-Rays? Are You Serious?

I know a lot of you heroes got your superpowers from implausible interactions with radioactivity, but you do realize that radiation is all around you, right?

As in, it literally falls from the sky every day?

“You monstrous yet implausibly stylish villain,” I hear you say, “this kind of radiation is different. People die from it!”

Putting aside the fact that skin cancer kills more people than I do, we have this thing called a Geiger Counter that, you know, measures radiation, so it’s not difficult to tell when a human is being exposed to dangerous levels.

Also, as an aside, X-Rays expose you to radiation.

As does flying.

This is completely and utterly manageable, and yet everyone loses their minds just because gamma particles are invisible.

Chernobyl? You Mean That Monument To Communist Incompetence?

“But look at what happened in Chernobyl,” you all righteously proclaim. “Surely that’s as much proof as anyone should need that-”

Let me stop you right there.

The mess at Chernobyl had absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power, and everything to do with incompetent communists screwing everything up.

Don’t believe me? Go ahead and read the Wikipedia article if you want. It was a bad design for a nuclear reactor that failed during a botched safety test.

“But what about Three Mile Island? Fukushima?”

There was less radiation released from Three Mile Island than your average chest X-Ray.

As for Fukushima, well, maybe we shouldn’t build nuclear reactors on the Ring of Fire, but that’s about it.

All told, the global death toll from nuclear disasters is tiny compared to the amount of people that other energy sources have killed. Nuclear energy is safer by far than coal, oil, natural gas, and everything else except possibly solar.

And yet still you heroes campaign to get it banned.

Your hypocrisy sickens me.

You Can’t Hug A Child With Metaphors Either, You Insipid and Useless Waste Of Oxygen

There’s a famous protest sign I’ve always hated, even before I decided to embark on a path of dastardly deeds and vile villainy.

I get that it’s a pun on the word ‘arms’ referring to both one’s literal arms and also to weaponry.

That doesn’t change the fact that it’s dumb.

Part of the resistance to nuclear energy is the resistance to nuclear weapons, which is also dumb. All technology can be used for good or for evil. Opposing nuclear power because it’s weaponizable would, if the principle were applied consistently, also mean that you oppose:

• Air travel - fighter jets, anyone?

• Computers - what do you think guides rockets?

• Electricity - what do you think powers military equipment?

• Vaccines - did you think soldiers weren’t immunized to the diseases of the areas they fight in?

• Factories - have you not learned that car factories can be repurposed to make tanks?

And so on.

The existence of nuclear weapons is not a justification for not using nuclear power.

Besides, you can’t hug a child with your hypocritical ideas, either, and you don’t see me making slogans about that.

Why Climate Change Is Your Fault, Heroes

Climate Change is the result of greenhouse gases piling up in the atmosphere, the most publicized of which is carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide piles up in the atmosphere because, among other reasons, we burn a lot of fossil fuels for electricity.

You know what doesn’t burn fossil fuels for electricity?

Nuclear power.

If you environmentalist heroes hadn’t opposed nuclear power in the 1960s and 70s, a lot more of America’s electricity would not be contributing to climate change.

This is a Shakespearean, practically Greek, tragedy.

After all, the third classic blunder (after getting involved in a land war in Asia and going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line) is meeting your fate on the road you took to avoid it. By stopping nuclear power, you forced everyone to use fossil fuels, which led to climate change.

Nice job breaking it, heroes.