Europe retains strong anti-nuclear sentiment
Near our Paris apartment this afternoon was a decent-sized anti-nuke demonstration. (L'Express said several thousand people, which sounds about right.)
This kind of sentiment seems much stronger in Europe than in the U.S. Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has decided that the risks of nuclear energy are lower than the risks of continuing to use carbon energy. Nuclear reactors emit no carbon dioxide. As this comment from the blog Canadian Energy Issues says, there are more than a few greenies also changing their minds about nukes.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking Patrick Moore is the only apostate anti-nuclear green. Don’t forget James Lovelock or Stuart Brand. Above all, watch the tortuous internal debate inside the German Social Democratic Party over Germany’s legislated nuclear phaseout. This debate rages as Germany grapples with the impossible problem of meeting its own emission reduction targets without massive imports of Russian natural gas.
Comments
Oh dear! Jay, you write that "Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has decided that the risks of nuclear energy are lower than the risks of continuing to use carbon energy." In one sentence you have one error and one crucial omission.
1) Moore was certainly an early Greenpeace activist. However, it is disputed by the actual surviving founders that Moore was a "co-founder".
2). More significantly, you omit any mention that, since early 2006, Moore has been a consultant to the Nuclear Energy Institute's front group, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition.
An editorial in the May/June 2006 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2006/4/editorial.asp noted - referring to Moore and Christine Todd Whitman -- that "Part of the thinking, surely, was that the press would peg them as dedicated environmentalists who have turned into pro-nuke cheerleaders, rather than as paid spokespeople."
"And the press came through," CJR observed.
"We just find it maddening that Hill & Knowlton, which has an $8 million account with the nuclear industry, should have such an easy time working the press," CJR concluded.
Maddening indeed.
Posted by: Bob Burton | July 15, 2008 2:33 AM
Mr. Hancock, Mr. Burton:
I read about the above comment via the Center for Media and Democracy's "Weekly Spin" newsletter, although they seem to have left out the original attribution to CJR. Anyway, as I pointed out to both CMD's site and Lester Holt's blog just now: NBC fell for Moore's scam this evening. Here's my note to Lester:
Mr. Holt:
Another issue concerning tonight's broadcast, if I may.
Not long ago, the NY Times revealed that the Dubya administration had recruited and planted ex-military officers in order to surreptitiously spread propaganda about the Iraq war. If I remember correctly, NBC News was involved in that scandal, but didn't have much to say about the article.
Tonight, the item "Taking a second look at nuclear power" featured a fellow named Patrick Moore. There are some important facts about him that NBC didn't reveal. And by the way, isn't GE a big player in the nuclear power biz?...
Posted by: Gary W. Moody | July 19, 2008 9:44 PM
Hey Bob Burton -
Your point that Patrick Moore is a consultant to the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition is a foolish one. So what? He believes in his cause. Don't you?
That's like saying, Carl Pope takes money from the Sierra Club in the form of a salary. So what? He believes in his cause...and makes a lot of money from it too (and lives in the most expensive part of the California Bay Area).
Or, Bob Burton gets his money from paid positions and book sales from and to other self-styled "environmental" clerics who have caused global warming by forcing us to abandon nuclear power and burn coal for the last fifty years. Again, so what? Bob Burton has made a lot of money from his cause too. RIGHT BOB?
Posted by: Bryan McNally | August 2, 2008 3:48 PM