Updated: Anatomy of a Right-Wing Ambush – and taxpayer-funded, to boot!

(Re-bumped to the top for updates – promoted by odum)

Update #2 (from odum): I’m delighted to report an “I was wrong,” in that it sounds as though the debate was – as they say – fair and balanced. Couldn’t be happier that it ended up being a fair fight after all, regardless of how it was set up and promoted.


Updated by Sue Prent:

Well! That  was interesting. At almost the last minute, Meredith Anguin took Howard Shaffer’s place in the debate, as Mr. Shaffer was indisposed.

I had a parking challenge and arrived, a little late, just as Ms. Anguin took the mike to deliver her opening remarks. She focussed rather narrowly on the tritium leaks, attempting to persuade the audience that tritium is simply not such a big deal. Then she dismissed the collapsing tower as not central to operation of the plant, breezed over other condition issues and devoted most of her time and energy to arguing that closing VY would represent an economic calamity for businesses in Vermont

No doubt her views are sincerely held, but she failed to address the over-arching issues of mismanagement, negligence, lying  and simple obsolescence. Later, she seemed to imply that she thought the solution to all the issues might be a simple matter of new management(!?) She was of course at a disadvantage, since Howard Shaffer presumably prepared her slide presentation and notes, but all in all it was a pretty superficial stream of argument with a lot of attention devoted to the banana and “Exit” sign analogies in order to minimize the significance of tritium leaching into drinking water.

Arnie Gundersen, on the other hand came fully prepared.  Launching a well-planned slide presentation, he began by saying that the purpose of the forum was not to argue the pros and cons of nuclear energy, but rather to discuss why VY should or should not specifically be shut-down.  He then proceeded to explain, in a relaxed and articulate manner, all of the technical issues, managerial issues and some of the ethical issues that have lead him to believe that VY must not be allowed to operate beyond it’s planned expiry. Arguing that closure of VY will have much less  of an economic impact than is projected by VY supporters, Mr. Gundersen described the manner in which pricing and supply works on the New England Grid, and said that hundreds of jobs will be created after VY closes; first, to keep the plant safe and secure while it awaits decommissioning, and later to carry out the actual dismantling and disposal operations.

Each speaker was allowed a brief rebuttal, during which Mr. Gundersen defused the “Exit” sign analolgy with a little science, and reminded the audience that tritium was just the fastest moving (and therefore most quickly identified) substance leached from the broken pipes.  He pointed out that additional radioactive substances of much more deadly portent, were released at the same time but hadn’t yet travelled as far as the “plume” of tritium, which has already entered the Connecticut River.

Ms. Anguin’s rebuttal retrenched her economic arguments, and then, oddly enough, became focussed on Mr. Gundersen’s use of quotes from regional newspapers.  These were provided in his slide presentation to chronicle the growing public distrust that has accompanied VY and Entergy’s persistent misrepresentations, but Ms. Anguin seemed to find them really annoying.  When the rebuttal segment concluded,  Mr. Lynn opened the floor to audience questions.  Only one (from John McClaughry, of course)  was really angry and hostile to Mr. Gundersen, but that was quickly snuffed-out with a cool-headed response.   I think it was in reply to a question from an audience member that Mr. Gundersen said that it now does not appear that closing VY will in any way threaten the reliability of energy in New England.  This news seemed to take many by surprise, including an uncharacteristically subdued Emerson Lynn, who looked positively crest-fallen. The big economic boo-hoo they were depending on just didn’t deliver.

There was a sense in the end that the wind had unexpectedly left the sails of the VY Tiger team.  Nicely done, Mr. Gundersen!

_____________________________________________________________

It says something that conservatives so often feel they can’t win an argument unless they can fix the game. Get a load of this:

On Thursday, Feb. 24, hear two experts on nuclear energy debate the issue in the next installment of UVM’s Janus Forum: “Vermont Yankee: Shut It Down or Keep It Running?”

[…] Speaking in support of Vermont Yankee is Howard Shaffer, who has been a member of the American Nuclear Society (ANS) for 34 years.

[…] His opponent in the debate is Arnold Gundersen, chief engineer of Fairewinds Associates, the firm responsible for analyzing the shortfall in Vermont Yankee’s decommissioning fund, which resulted in a review of such funds at nuclear sites around the country.

Sounds interesting, yes? It is a slightly odd combination. As anyone who follows the issue knows, Gundersen is an obvious choice for the anti-VY side. Shaffer (of the “Christian Nuclear Fellowship” – no kidding), on the other hand, is a peculiar one under the circumstances, as Shaffer wrote to the Vermont Board of Professional Engineering and tried to have them demand that Gundersen could not call himself an engineer, because he was not a “Registered Professional Engineer.”

But that’s the tip of the iceberg. Dig this:

The is the sixth installment of the Janus Forum, a debate series founded by James Gatti, a finance professor in UVM’s School of Business Administration; Arthur Woolf, an economics professor in the College of Arts and Sciences; and Richard Vanden Bergh, also of the School of Business Administration.

Yeah, that would be Art Woolf, the patron saint of Vermont’s laissez-faire right wing and the poster boy for the hard-right Vermont Tiger blog. And Gatti? He’s only the Chair of the Ethan Allen Institute, John McLaughrey‘s baby Heritage Foundation for Vermonters.

Think that’s incidental, then why did Shaffer appear on WCAX promoting this event with Meredith Angwin, the pro-VY blogger who is running the Ethan Allen Institute’s VY-promotional Energy Education Project?

But wait, there’s more…

The forum will be moderated by Emerson Lynn, editor and publisher of the St. Albans Messenger.

Yes, that would be Emerson Lynn, Vermont’s leading media right-wing ideologue. Also a favorite of Vermont Tiger. Now, who are we missing… let’s see… oh, yeah! The Gundersens received a last-minute call from UVM Associate Communications Director Jeff Wakefield inviting Arnie to promote the event on a local radio show! Mark Johnson? Nah. VPR? Wrong again… it was… wait for it…

Rob Roper’s new show – yep, the former GOP Chair, True North Radio Host, and Vermont Tea Party favorite. Did you know he had a new radio show? Well, by jinkies he does! WDEV’s “Common Sense” radio show, sponsored by… The Ethan Allen Institute! What a coincidence!

See, the Ethan Allen Institute is not in favor of government sponsorship of…well… anything, really. Except that they seem to have no problem setting up a phony event to promote their agenda and ambush one of their favorite targets through the University of Vermont’s publicly funded platform.

Arnie will handle himself fine. Not only is he right on the issues, he’s smarter than the combined entirety of the sewing circle aligned against him. But this is still pretty gross, all in all. If the conservative pantheon wants to hold a “debate” on their terms, moderated by their person, promoted to their people through their media, and invite one of their favorite targets, just do it openly – through the EAI proper, with full disclosure – rather than engage in this weird, sneaky stuff.

32 thoughts on “Updated: Anatomy of a Right-Wing Ambush – and taxpayer-funded, to boot!

  1. This is one hedge-trimming I’d hate to miss!

    If you caught Emerson Lynn’s act in one of the gubernatorial debates you already know that he is the least moderate moderator one could possibly dig up.  Unless his Tiger-teammates have reined him in, he probably won’t be able to resist the temptation to grab the mike and  argue Howard Shaffer’s side for him  

  2. Vermont has it’s own little right-wing noise machine all geared up.They’re ready to crank it up.

    Christian Nuclear Fellowship.Really? Would Jesus worry about a tritium leak?  

  3. From this we can see that the conservative whining about Marxist-Socialist-Liberal Academia is utter nonsense. The right wing likes to highlight a handful of far-left professors and conclude that conservatism is being shut out of the marketplace of ideas, and ZOMG our universities are indoctrinating our children!!!

    In reality, there are a fair number of liberals (and a tiny number of radicals) in the Humanities. But look at the real centers of power on campus: Business, Law, Medicine, Engineering. You’ll find a whole lot of conservatives there. And they get a whole lot of support from the rich and powerful.

    The business school at the University of Michigan, for instance, got a $10-million gift from Sam Zell to set up an entrepreneurship institute. That’s the Sam Zell who bought the Tribune Company and tried to drive it off a cliff. And yes, the Sam Zell who said of the mortgage crisis,

    “This country needs a cleansing. We need to clean out all those people who never should have bought in the first place, and not give them sympathy.”

    Oh, and the institute’s director, Thomas Kinnear, is a venture capitalist in his spare time. I wonder if the curriculum at the Zell-funded institute features any criticism of free-market capitalism.

    There’s another whole facet to this issue: as public/government research funding becomes harder to find, more and more academic research is being funded by corporations. Even if the research results aren’t skewed by this, the corporations clearly get to set the agenda.

    So this farce of a debate at UVM fits into a general pattern: Liberals may dominate a few (underfunded, non-influential) pockets of academia, but conservatism and traditional wisdom hold sway where it counts.

  4. (Sorry for the second post, but this is a completely different topic related to the VY forum.)

    Okay, so I ask myself, why would anyone who wants to publicize an event try to book it on one of the least-listened-to programs on the radio? Why wouldn’t they want Arnie on VPR or Mark Johnson, where he would reach a lot more listeners?

    A little background. In recent years, WDEV has aired two local shows representing different viewpoints: True North Radio (con), and Equal Time Radio (lib). The producers buy the airtime from WDEV and sell the advertising themselves. For WDEV, this accomplishes two things: it provides equal access for “both sides,” and brings in a little money. Neither show helps create or build an audience; of the two, TNR was the deader zone. The quality was poorer, and the potential audience (rock-ribbed conservatives in Vermont) smaller. (Most conservatives in central VT are listening to the Beck/Rush/Hannity parade on WSNO.)

    True North Radio was suddenly canceled in December because it couldn’t pay WDEV for the airtime. WDEV simply filled the hour with a DJ playing music. About a month later, Roper reappeared with Common Sense Radio, having apparently found a sugar daddy in the Ethan Allen Institute. So CSR is a brand-new program trying to build an audience from TNR’s tiny base.  

    Which brings me back to the question: why would EAI want to promote its debate on the smallest available platform? Two reasons, I suspect.

    — They hope to skew the audience for the event. They’ve packed the dais with conservative voices. They have to be concerned, though, about a campus audience being full of anti-nuclear voices. If the proceedings are obviously skewed, the audience might react vociferously. So, by promoting the debate on CSR, they reach fewer people, but they’re the “right” people. And maybe there’ll be more pro-nuke people in the audience.  

    — They hope to raise the profile of CSR. Try to get the show more attention and hopefully attract more listeners. Otherwise, EAI’s “investment” in the show will be for naught. And given the track record of TNR, Roper’s new show probably needs all the help it can get.  

  5. I am not very familiar with the nuclear consultant Howard Shaffer other than through some of his frequent letters to the editor and comments he made here at GMD in which, while trying to dispel what he thought where misconceptions about Vermont Yankee  he suggested a possible libel lawsuit be initiated by one of his colleagues. http://www.greenmountaindaily….

    So I clicked through to Christian Nuclear Foundation (CNF) newsletter. It has a nice bit about one of their recent gatherings and some background bio about and thoughts of Howard Shaffer.

    In his talk, Howard outlined how his methods and approaches to advocating and debating for nuclear power have changed over the years, even as he himself has matured as a follower of Jesus Christ. His earlier argumentative, antagonistic and confrontational approach has gradually given way to a more respectful approach

    All this appears to bode well for a peaceful debate.

    Shaffer wasn’t involved but after an earlier VY debate a controversial joke was made privately about killing an opponent of nuclear power and later published by John McClaughrey in his Ethan Allen Inst. monthly newsletter.

    Shaffer spoke at the 2007 CNF Prayer Breakfast or what they refer to as the CNF power breakfast.

    Howard believes that as Christians, we should not resort to using the crude confrontational tactics of the “world” to convey truth, but rather we should always conduct ourselves in a manner that pleases and glorifies God.

    This leaves me with the queasy feeling that possibly he may see this as good versus evil battle.

    It would give that I am VY slogan a different twist.

    http://www.usnuclearenergy.org

  6. Seems like the only unanswered question is, “What would Jesus do?”  Unfortunately, it is a little late to ask him.

  7. “Ms. Anguin’s rebuttal […] oddly enough, became focused on Mr. Gundersen’s use of quotes from regional newspapers”

    Of course being pitched in at the last moment may have been a factor but Angwin’s focus on the newspaper articles makes sense in light of the effort by her  associate  pro-nuclear blogger  to go after the press for supposedly poor and biased  quality reporting on nuclear issues.

    They are proposing a carrot of sorts rather than stick.The plan is for the American Nuclear Society (ANS) to give a yearly award prize to a news organization that they feel covers their industry best.

  8. As far as debate being fair & balanced, who knows, the writeup regarding the players & ‘sponsors’ may have headed them off @ the pass since they are generally up to no good & ‘anything goes’ with them.

    Nonplussed that Meredith Angwin was in actuality the debater, according to Sue Prent’s report, though in her blog post of 2/21 she did state she was ‘off to Burlington’. Heh.

    http://yesvy.blogspot.com/2011

    Using Howard Shaffer as the face for pronuclear side of the debate would be appropriate & attract the attention of those they would hope to influence. Being a nuclear engineer, long career in the industry including at VY, well known apologist & ANS member. Arnie Gundersen is equally if not more than credentialed as Shaffer & involved w/the industry on an ongoing basis.

    By comparison, Angwin’s credentials are thin as she is little more than a noise machine for the pronuclear club & part of the VT rightwing/pronuclear cabal who hold duplicate memberships in each others ‘organizations’. Her qualifications could have been summed as ‘chemist, pronuclear blogger’ as whatever her activities are or have been, they & she are not well known to VTers. ‘Pronuclear blogger’ would have removed the assurance of professionalism from the event as purpose would have been sheer. Audience would then be heavily pro/antinuclear. Since this would have been counterproductive to its intended purpose not a face worth promoting.

    http://www.blogger.com/profile

  9. Mr. Shaffer professes to be a Christian yet his actions attempting to discredit Arnie Gundersen are anything but Christian-like.  At best he is mean-spirited, which would cause me to think that his evil deeds were rewarded with divine intervention that ended up with him in the hospital.

    One would think that someone as pious as Mr. Shaffer would have known better.

Comments are closed.