The Real Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need RenewablesVad säger du om Michael Shellenberger's ståndpunkt?Michael Shellenberger Contributor
I write about energy and the environment.Feb 14, 2019,12:05pm EST...
Why is it that, from the U.S. and Canada to Spain and France, it is progressives and socialists who say they care deeply about the climate, not conservative climate skeptics, who are seeking to shut down nuclear plants?
After all, the two greatest successes when it comes to nuclear energy are Sweden and France, two nations held up by democratic socialists for decades as models of the kind of societies they want.
It is only nuclear energy, not solar and wind, that has radically and rapidly decarbonized energy supplies while increasing wages and growing societal wealth.
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True — many renewable energy promoters are in it for the money, and show no reticence in their alliance with natural gas interests. Even Amory Lovins grew wealthy working for big corporations.
But most renewable energy advocates, and progressive and socialist leaders, are motivated by deep beliefs, not just money. What is it?
How Nuclear Threatens Renewables
After World War II, the working class in developed nations become materially rich, undermining the case that only a radical, socialist transformation of society could end poverty.
"All the problems which had haunted capitalism," acknowledged Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, "appeared to dissolve and disappear."
What could Marxism mean, Hobsbawm wondered, to workers "who now expected to spend their annual paid vacation on the beaches of Spain?"
In response, radical critics of capitalism shifted their focus. The problem was no longer that capitalism was causing material poverty but rather that it was destroying the environment.
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But they had a problem: nuclear power. Everyone had known since the 1940s that it could power industrial civilization while slashing pollution and shrinking humankind’s environmental footprint.
In the 1970s and 1980s, France and Sweden proved they could decouple air and water pollution from electricity production simply by building nuclear plants, which replaced their coal and oil-burning ones.
The problem posed by the existence of nuclear energy was that it proved we didn’t need to radically reorganize society to solve environmental problems. We just needed to build nuclear plants instead of coal-burning ones.
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The problem with nuclear is that it doesn’t demand the radical re-making of society, like renewables do, and it doesn’t require grand fantasies of humankind harmonizing with nature.
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All nuclear does is grow societal wealth, increase wages, and decouple the economy from pollution and environmental destruction.
No wonder they hate it so much.
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