In yesterday’s Groanyaid, George Monbiot, that leader of the green movement, said that everything was about beating coal and if that meant nuclear, so be it. Surprising really.
Surprising because the green’s hatred of nuclear has always been far more because of their political roots rather than any environmental logic. The vast majority were involved in CND and, therefore, hate nuclear. The fact that it doesn’t produce CO2, after the building process etc, really doesn’t concern them – nuclear is bad, atomic power means weapons and mutants and cold war. So they reject it.
Even though his caveats mean his ‘turning’ is not really as it first appears, Monbiot (him of the Tory party grandee family) has at least stated the obvious: if you want lower emissions, you need nuclear.
On Newsnight last night the argument raged and the language was at times worrying. Every time nuclear was mentioned, the lefty green cited efficiency as the only way forward. This in itself could only be satisfied by one method, the complete restructuring of the economy.
This was a constant phrase ‘it is the outdated structure of our economy that has brought us here’, both in the studio and in the fields where some dropouts were protesting against coal (China and India are going to use coal no matter what, if we don’t produce the cleaner coal technology, then no one will and they will use the old versions instead. Deaf ears), they even attacked the last ten years.
And this is the problem with the green movement.
Their solution is a socialist re-structuring of the nation, the world in fact, through the use of fear. It was once the fear of the land owner, the oppressive nobility holding the workers down. Now it is global warming causing total destruction.
In order to achieve this, there can be no solution. There has never been a solution worth their campaigning for it, their support of bio-fule has been forgoten since it ony achieved wiping out food crops.
Coal and gas produce in the region of 70% – 80% of the UK’s energy. The target is for renewables to reach 20% and that is ambitious. I want more renewables, no matter my views of the global, sorry, ‘climate change’, lobby, because it makes sense. We produce it ouselves, we aren’t reliant on foreign powers and it will make the air cleaner. Lovely.
They somehow propose that efficieny and renewables will fill this gap. Bollocks. The projected 20% simply fills the gap left by the de-commissioned nuclear power stations.
They know this, at least the people at the top know this, the ones in the fields always strike me as dogmatic brainwashed quasi-religious ’searching for a cause’ types. They are up there with animal protesters and the like.
It is this knowledge that their aims are simply not going to happen that shows them to have much deeper rooted objectives, that being a worldwide alteration of power. It is why we have the new 100 month target, a target so clearly unachievable and plucked out of nowhere it’s laughable.
Efficiency is a code. What it means is anti-consumerism. How do you achieve, in the 21st century, less household usage? By scrapping the TV’s in every room, by binning the computers, the white goods, the DVD players, the consoles….all of it. This in turn collapses the companies that produce them, bringing about the economic restructuring they crave. This is then married to the removal of air travel and car travel (they never talk about trains do they? The users of vast amounts of electricity).
Nothing is ever good enough. It will take decades to change power production to more sustainable methods and they know it. Nuclear would fill the gap completely, a la France, for the next 40-50 years. In that time we can breath out, develop the tidal and wind technologies and the hydrogen fuel cells that will transform how we power our homes and transport.
Then, in say, 2060, we would have a transformed energy market with very low CO2 emissions and would probably not have to rely on nuclear. But this is too late they cry! Prove it. Because the planet hasn’t warmed for over a decade and most of the lobbies arguments are becoming more and more desperate.
They don’t want the technologies developed. They can’t accept the trade off of clean coal technology instead of dirty coal, because they don’t want it full stop, even though their is nothing to replace it with except….nuclear. Surely it’s better, seeing as coal isn’t going to disappear globally any time soon, to have clean coal production replacing the old stuff?
And round and round we go. They will not be satisfied until the world has become a socialist paradise, despite the obvious solutions staring them in the face. Someone like Monbiot speaks common sense and he is treated like a heretic. Because that is what this has become, this green thing of ours, a religion. A dogma to be followed.
It is this intransigence that is making people turn against them. But they will never learn.
Filed under: 1, In The News..., Political Comment, Political Rants, Random Thoughts | Tagged: China, climate, climate change, cnd, coal, energy, environment, george monbiot, global warming, green, green movement, guardian, hydrogen cells, india, monbiot, newsnight, nuclear, renewable energy, tidal power, uk, uk news, wind power
On the basis of the recommendation James Hansen made on page 7 in one his generally circulated emails ( http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080804_TripReport.pdf ), I read Tom Blees’ book “Prescription for the Planet”.
Blees is touting a breeder reactor design from the US Argonne National Laboratory which he calls an IFR (Integrated Fast Reactor).
The design can burn all the high level existing nuclear waste everyone is worried about. Why store what you can burn, says Blees.
According to Blees, 99% of the potential energy in the fuel used by current reactors is still in the waste, which is why it is so dangerous. The waste from the Argonne design, because all the long lived elements have been fully burned, decays within a few hundred years until it is less dangerous than typical uranium ore.
The vision Blees is laying out is for a program to completely replace all fossil fuel power electric power generators by building thousands of reactors to a standard design at less cost than any other planned power development or replacement. He says even building this many reactors wouldn’t require any more mining of uranium for several centuries, as there is so much energy in the uranium and other nuclear material above ground already.
It sounds like its worth pursuing research into this to me.
I’m a former Green Party leadership type who was thrown out of the British Columbia Green Party for trying to tell them they should support Proportional Representation. So I wouldn’t take it too seriously that Greens vilify someone for anything. What, they’re totally against Monbiot because he’s for solving climate change? Why not? I thought they were insane to oppose PR here, as every Green Party in the world that ever elected anyone did it under a system of PR, but oppose it they did. I was thrown out for daring to show up at an AGM to merely speak my mind as an ordinary member.
Its weird to have to conclude this, but the green movement is going to be an obstacle if civilization is going to try to solve climate change. In BC, polling showed Greens to be majority against a carbon tax when it was put in because it increased gas prices by a few cents, they are opposed to new hydroelectric power, they oppose carbon capture, they favour huge subsidies for solar a la Germany, etc.
Green Party policy documents in Canada don’t even call for stabilization of the atmosphere at the level James Hansen recommends or as Gore called for at Poznan, i.e. 350 ppm, because, who knows, I suppose they don’t want to appear to be too “unrealistic”. So they call for a steady increase in the forces driving climate change for every year until 2050 at which point the global emissions would be higher than they are now, if you add up what their policy means.