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Nuclear power needed to fight climate change says Al-Khalili »
Sensible man: a proper scientist, not some clueless tree-hugger.
Compare and contrast:
BBC: Global carbon emissions reach record, says IEA
Global carbon emissions reached a record level last year, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
BBC: Germany: Nuclear power plants to close by 2022
Germany’s coalition government has announced a reversal of policy that will see all the country’s nuclear power plants phased out by 2022.
Madness.
BBC: Wind farm ‘kills Taiwanese goats’
A large number of goats in Taiwan may have died of exhaustion because of noise from a wind farm.
A farmer on an outlying island told the BBC he had lost more than 400 animals after eight giant wind turbines were installed close to his grazing land.
The Ministry of Agriculture says it suspects that noise may have caused the goats’ demise through lack of sleep.
The power company, Taipower, has offered to pay for part of the costs of building a new farmhouse elsewhere.
Meanwhile, in other news, the total number of Taiwanese goats killed by nuclear powerstations remains at zero.
Independent: Nuclear power? Yes please…
Britain must embrace nuclear power if it is to meet its commitments on climate change, four of the country’s leading environmentalists—who spent much of their lives opposing atomic energy—warn today.
The one-time opponents of nuclear power, who include the former head of Greenpeace, have told The Independent that they have now changed their minds over atomic energy because of the urgent need to curb emissions of carbon dioxide.
They all take the view that the building of nuclear power stations is now imperative and that to delay the process with time-consuming public inquiries and legal challenges would seriously undermine Britain’s promise to cut its carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050…
Mr [Stephen] Tindale, who ran Greenpeace for five years until he resigned in 2005, has taken a vehemently anti-nuclear stance through out his career as an environmentalist. “My position was necessarily that nuclear power was wrong, partly for the pollution and nuclear waste reasons but primarily because of the risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons,” Mr Tindale said…
“My change of mind wasn’t sudden, but gradual over the past four years. But the key moment when I thought that we needed to be extremely serious was when it was reported that the permafrost in Siberia was melting massively, giving up methane, which is a very serious problem for the world,” he said.
“It was kind of like a religious conversion. Being anti-nuclear was an essential part of being an environmentalist for a long time but now that I’m talking to a number of environmentalists about this, it’s actually quite widespread this view that nuclear power is not ideal but it’s better than climate change,” he added.
Telegraph Wind turbines would need to cover Wales to supply a sixth of country’s energy needs
An area the size of Wales would need to be covered in wind turbines to meet just a sixth of the nation’s daily energy needs, according to a new study that has cast doubt over the Government’s push for wind energy.
(Note how the Telegraph’s journalist bizarrely transforms ‘an area the size of Wales’ into meaning quite literally Wales in the story’s headline.)
Time to stop faffing about and invoke the nuclear option.
Telegraph: Paul Newman – the nuclear secret he took to his grave
Paul Newman, who died recently, took a carefully guarded secret to his grave – something that would have disgraced him in Hollywood.
Did he have a secret mistress? (No, that wouldn’t disgrace him.) Did he have a clandestine fleet of SUVs? (That’s more like it.) Was he addicted to McDonald’s hamburgers? No, Paul Newman was a closet but increasingly open supporter of nuclear power.
This is so bloody infuriating: a prominent environmentalist who listens with an open mind to the arguments and is gradually persuaded to turn pro-nuclear, but who feels he can’t admit it because it will harm his charity interests. Climate change is the most important issue facing the planet, yet people who care passionately about the subject are being gagged by peer-pressure.
This planet really is fucked if we’re not even allowed to mention our last, best hope.
For the record, I am pro-nuclear-power. (But you probably already knew that.)
In the 1960s, the scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock (who is dead right about the relative merits of nuclear and wind power, by the way) proposed the Gaia Hypothesis in which he suggested that the Earth functions as a sort of superorganism, reacting via natural feedback loops to natural and man-made changes in environmental conditions.
It is far from clear whether Lovelock was talking metaphorically or literally when he spoke of the Earth as being an organism. If he was talking metaphorically, Gaia is an interesting and potentially useful hypothesis which might help us to look at environmental change from a different perspective. If he was talking literally, it is, of course, utter bollocks.
This morning, I took some cardboard boxes to compost in my magnificent compost bins. As I was tearing up the boxes, a sudden gust of wind snapped in half one of the pieces of cardboard, the corner of which nearly took my eye out. It smarted. It smarted A LOT.
So that’s what you get for trying to save the planet.
Sod you, Gaia! I’m off to buy an S.U.V!
Stop Press: You couldn’t make this crap up… Not 20 minutes after I had published the above, I went to crush my empty beer can in my trendy new save-the-planet can crusher. Half-way through the crushing process, the can—which was by now a mass of sharp metal edges—fired right out of the crusher and hit me square in the face.
That’s it: the planet’s knackered.