Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Angela Merkel - Navigating a world in crisis | DW Documentary" video.

  1. Agriculture contributes about one third of total global emissions (not counting the operating agricultural machinery), and we're doing less about that than curbing industrial and electrical power emissions.
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  2. Nuclear power is neither clean, nor renewable nor completely carbon neutral. The half life of some isotope products from spend fuel rods remain highly dangerously radioactive for 10,000 years, making them a pollution and storage hazard problem for that enormous length of time. Uranium 235 fuel, when spent in a reactor, has to be replaced by sources of uranium minerals in nature. Although there is a tiny amount of uranium in a few rocks like granite, it is far too low a concentration in general to be able to cost effectively refine and concentrate into fuel rods. High concentration uranium minerals like pitchblende, are relatively rare deposits and once mined (which is itself contraversial, not at least due to the pollution hazard), then when depleted will raise the cost of uranium energy to uneconomical levels. Suprisingly nuclear power plants are (not initially) carbon neutral. They consist of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of concrete (for the radiation shield and containment vessel) and cement, when it sets, emits carbon dioxide.
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  3. Merkel is a person of high moral stature and integrity; unusual in a politician. When i examine her political record as Chancellor of Germany, i'm struck by how polar opposite she is from the Austrian bloke from Braunau, born in the 1880's (whom i've read widely about) which brought Germany to utter ruin (as well as most of Europe), and national disgrace. German people should not forever be held liable for this dark chapter of history, but no-one should forget the great evil of National Socialism and it's fellow travelling totalitarian governments, including currently powerful totalitarian governments at the other end of Eurasia, whom it is likely that powerful democratic states will soon be at war over increasing enormities commited by it over there. She should and will be remembered as a great German Stateswoman (now that word's in the English and German lexicon). But, like any other great person in power before, she will have her significant weaknesses as well as her strengths. I'm not going to analyse them here, except that Merkel being in power for so long, their effects (both positive and negative) are amplified and will have long lasting consequences on Germany, it's economy, culture, EU and foreign relations, for decades to come.
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