[extropy-chat] Green Gaian nuclear power call

[Damien Broderick]

<http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=524313&host=3&dir=58>'Only 
Nuclear Power Can Now Halt Global Warming'

By MICHAEL MCCARTHY
Environment Editor
The Independent (U.K.)

Only nuclear power can now halt global warming'

'The ice is melting much faster than we thought'

Guru who tuned into Gaia was one of the first to warn of climate threat

James Lovelock: Nuclear power is the only green solution

Global warming is now advancing so swiftly that only a massive expansion of 
nuclear power as the world's main energy source can prevent it overwhelming 
civilisation, the scientist and celebrated Green guru, James Lovelock, says.

His call will cause huge disquiet for the environmental movement. It has 
long considered the 84-year-old radical thinker among its greatest heroes, 
and sees climate change as the most important issue facing the world, but 
it has always regarded opposition to nuclear power as an article of faith. 
Last night the leaders of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth rejected 
his call.

Professor Lovelock, who achieved international fame as the author of the 
Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the Earth keeps itself fit for life by the 
actions of living things themselves, was among the first researchers to 
sound the alarm about the threat from the greenhouse effect.

He was in a select group of scientists who gave an initial briefing on 
climate change to Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Cabinet at 10 Downing 
Street in April 1989.

He now believes recent climatic events have shown the warming of the 
atmosphere is proceeding even more rapidly than the scientists of the UN's 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thought it would, in their 
last report in 2001.

On that basis, he says, there is simply not enough time for renewable 
energy, such as wind, wave and solar power - the favoured solution of the 
Green movement - to take the place of the coal, gas and oil-fired power 
stations whose waste gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), is causing the atmosphere 
to warm.

He believes only a massive expansion of nuclear power, which produces 
almost no CO2, can now check a runaway warming which would raise sea levels 
disastrously around the world, cause climatic turbulence and make 
agriculture unviable over large areas. He says fears about the safety of 
nuclear energy are irrational and exaggerated, and urges the Green movement 
to drop its opposition.

In today's Independent, Professor Lovelock says he is concerned by two 
climatic events in particular: the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, 
which will raise global sea levels significantly, and the episode of 
extreme heat in western central Europe last August, accepted by many 
scientists as unprecedented and a direct result of global warming.

These are ominous warning signs, he says, that climate change is speeding, 
but many people are still in ignorance of this. Important among the reasons 
is "the denial of climate change in the US, where governments have failed 
to give their climate scientists the support they needed".

He compares the situation to that in Europe in 1938, with the Second World 
War looming, and nobody knowing what to do. The attachment of the Greens to 
renewables is "well-intentioned but misguided", he says, like the Left's 
1938 attachment to disarmament when he too was a left-winger.

He writes today: "I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to 
drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy."




<http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=524663&host=3&dir=58>Scientist's 
Plea to Use Nuclear Energy Starts New Climate Change Debate by Green Groups

By CHARLES ARTHUR
Technology Editor
The Independent (U.K.)

A former Labour energy minister and the nuclear industry both welcomed the 
call by the scientist James Lovelock yesterday for a massive expansion of 
the nuclear industry to combat global warming.

They also forecast that Professor Lovelock's dramatic call, in yesterday's 
Independent, would force more environmentalists to consider whether nuclear 
power really posed a greater threat to humanity than climate change - and 
that they too would eventually agree with the celebrated scientist.

Professor Lovelock's radical suggestion provoked widespread debate 
yesterday, with both Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace rejecting his claims.

However Brian Wilson, who stood down as energy minister last year to become 
the Prime Minister's special representative on overseas trade, said 
Professor Lovelock had had the courage to address the question of global 
warming honestly. "I hope that many others will follow him in questioning 
the basis of their hostility to nuclear power in the age of global warming."

Mr Wilson said it was "a self-evident nonsense" for the UK to run down its 
nuclear capacity at the same time that there was an unprecedented emphasis 
on the need to reduce carbon emissions.

"Nuclear power is our only significant source of non-carbon electricity. It 
is the bird in the hand yet the Green lobby wants to shoot it."

At the Nuclear Industry Association, which lobbies in favour of nuclear 
power, Simon James said: "It's self-evident to us that nuclear power can 
deliver large amounts of energy without producing the carbon dioxide that 
contributes to global warming.

"We believe we are winning the argument. Increasingly people are looking at 
this and saying 'Hang on, if we're serious about global warming we need to 
do something serious about converting large amounts of energy to 
non-carbon-producing sources.

"Environmentalists are seeing this. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this 
article means more environmentalists come out backing Professor Lovelock," 
Mr James said.

As the creator of the Gaia hypothesis - which suggests that the Earth acts 
as a single organism - Professor Lovelock, 84, has a mythic place in the 
Green movement.

But in yesterday's Independent he argued that a massive expansion of 
nuclear power as the world's main energy source is necessary to prevent 
climate change overwhelming civilisation in the next 50 years.

Some environmentalists see that as a dramatic volte-face, because nuclear 
fission produces radioactive waste that remains dangerous for thousands of 
years and requires special storage and disposal. Environmental groups have 
thus lobbied - and frequently acted - against nuclear power wherever possible.

However, a growing number of scientific bodies, including most recently the 
Royal Academy of Engineering, have concluded that nuclear power does 
represent the best compromise between risk and power output, given the 
world's growing demand for energy.

In his article calling for a fresh look at nuclear power, Professor 
Lovelock considers - and rejects - other options for generating power and 
criticises the Green movement's rejection of it. He also accuses the group 
of forgetting the lesson of the Gaia concept.

"Every year that we continue burning carbon makes it worse for our 
descendants and for civilisation ... The Green lobbies, which should have 
given priority to global warming, seem more concerned about threats to 
people than with threats to Earth, not noticing that we are part of the 
Earth and wholly dependent upon its well-being."

Public attention to global warming and climate change has been heightened 
by Sir David King, the Government's chief scientist, who has repeatedly 
said that global warming poses a greater threat to the world than terrorism.

A new Hollywood blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow, also uses dramatic 
effects of global warming as the essence of its plot - a move that 
environmentalists have said should raise the importance of the topic in 
people's consciousness.