Translated from the German
It's official: Somalia has famine.
Officially defined as "2 adults or 4 children dying of hunger each day for every group of 10,000 people".
10 million people are suffering the worst drought of a century; hundreds of thousands are on the move, trekking to refugee camps, some walking for days on end without food.
And the response of the international community?
Today I received a couple of requests to join other Europeans in taking action to ... ban nuclear power.
WTF?!
There have been droughts and famines before, and maybe this one is nothing at all to do with Global Warming.
— Anthropogenic Global Warming.
— Man-made Global Warming
Maybe
But we can be pretty damned sure that AGW will cause more droughts and famines like this one – and wars over resources, exacerbating climate problems.
But who gives a shit?
We've got more pressing things to worry about.
Like nasty, scary, nuclear power.
After all, look what happened in Japan where – remind me, how many millions ... er,hundreds of thousands? ... tens of thousands? ... thousands? ... hundreds? ... tens? ... well surely some people were killed by the Fukushima disaster. Or will be. I mean, by radiation, not just ordinary killed like the other 15,000 or more killed by the earthquake and tsunami.
Surely there must be some? Well, anyway, it'll cost an awful lot to clean up. And we don't want any of that over here. So let's get rid of them. Close them all down. Certainly not build any more. They're too dangerous. If a plant built while the Vietnam War was raging and Apollo astronauts were walking on the moon can't survive an earthquake and tsunami 5 times more violent than they were designed for then obviously nothing designed almost half a century later could be any improvement. And so what if we just burn more fossil fuels instead? It's pretty chilly outside: no sign of global warming here. Pity about Africa but what's the connection? And anyway we are doing our bit for The Environment — look, we've got a wind turbine here in Reading. And we nearly built two more. And we've got low-energy lightbulbs. That must make a difference. Every little helps, doesn't it?
Well, no, actually: every big makes a difference — as David MacKay bangs on about in his book Sustainable Energy – Without The Hot Air. Not just the odd wind turbine here or there but hundreds of thousands of them, all over the countryside and offshore, and wave generators, and tidal barrages, and acres and acres of photovoltaics, and radical energy-saving measures ... and we'd probably still need to burn fossil fuels. So what about nuclear? (At present it provides about a fifth of UK electricity, while wind etc generates about a twentieth.) Well the whole book is about thinking rationally and factually about energy usage, so MacKay discusses it rationally and factually. Environmental campaigner George Monbiot has also weighed up the pros and cons of nuclear. And both have been pilloried for it, subjected to wilful distortions of their words rather than reasoned responses to them[1][2].
Fortunately not everyone who disagrees with MacKay is a pathological bigot: there are rational, numerate critiques of, for example, his estimate of energy demand and of the amount of offshore wind energy theoretically available. It is possible MacKay is wrong in some aspects of his analysis – but the point is that he is not (as his more rabid critics accuse him of doing) advocating any particular solution to the problem based on his figures (though he offers some sample scenarios), but he does challenge those advocating any particular solution to show how it adds up. And to show where they get the figures they use if they differ from his (which he has already shown his sources for).
Whether – or how easily – we could replace all our CO2–producing consumption of fossil fuels with non-nuclear alternatives, we do right now have a large amount of nuclear power generation already installed and working, and producing electricity without releasing CO2 and exacerbating global warming. Even if we (in the UK) installed 20 times as many wind turbines, wave generators, tidal power schemes etc as we currently have – enough to satisfy our current electricity consumption – we'd still be using vastly more fossil fuels for heating our homes and workplaces, powering our cars, buses, trains and ships, in industry and agriculture and, indirectly, embodied in the stuff manufactured for us abroad. If we were generating more electricity than we currently need we could switch some of these fossil-fuel consumers over to using electricity – e.g. electric cars and buses, electrifying currently non-electric trains, using heat pumps for space heating. But until we have more electricity than we know what to do with, if we switch off nuclear we will use fossil fuels instead and that will exacerbate global warming. And that means more Somalias.
It's not the people of the Horn of Africa who have been turning up the central heating rather than putting on a jumper when it's chilly, doing the school run and Tescos in their Chelsea Tractors, and taking cheap jet flights for holidays. We, collectively, choose to do these things. We love cheap energy. To then get faddy over nuclear power and burn more fossil fuels creating climate devastation hell for the poor of the third world, rather than accept the risks that go with our nukes, seems to me obscenely immoral.
[1] For example in 'No Hot Air' About Renewable Energy While Blowing Smoke: David Mackay plays 'Brutus' to the Sun's 'Caesar' Jim Hickey states that MacKay "is predisposed to view nuclear energy as essential", has "an explicit and demonstrable bias in favor of nukes" and that "this predisposition is obvious if one digs a bit", but Hickey offers not a single example of this 'obvious' bias (which is not at all obvious to me: MacKay seems to treat nuclear power, as with other systems he writes about, quite pragmatically and sceptically). Indeed later in the article Hickey concedes "I cannot prove that [MacKay] has for decades found himself favoring nuclear energy" but offers "However, I can show many things that incline me to believe that this is the case". These things seem to include the fact that The Times – which Hickey describes as "The paper-of-record for 'established' England" – published an article on the subject, and the fact that MacKay's disclaimer "Please don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear. I'm just pro-arithmetic" was quoted by a (shock! horror!) pro-nuclear website. He quotes MacKay's opinion that "we should go for nuclear to avert climate change but time and uranium supplies are running short. It is at best a short-term solution for fission reactors" as showing that MacKay "is gung-ho for fission".
[2] In "David MacKay’s ‘Sustainable Energy – Without The Hot Air’… Perhaps A Little Hot Air?" the pseudonymous 'BlueRock' compares MacKay with Josef Goebbels, accusing him of "blatant rhetoric" while distorting MacKay's writing to support his own evident prejudice. For example BlueRock states "“Wind farms will devastate the countryside pointlessly.” – this is how the chapter on wind begins" which, he claims, shows that "Before MacKay even begins to discuss wind power, he has primed the reader that wind power brings devastation without benefit". This is simply not true: MacKay's chapter on wind actually begins: "The UK has the best wind resources in Europe" which, as with the 'devastate the countryside' statement MacKay (unlike BlueRock) attributes as quotes, not MacKay's own words. Whether the quotes illustrate the diversity of opinions on the subject or are a covert attempt by the author to prime the reader, the reader can make up their own mind about by actually reading Mackay's book for themself.
I leave finding attacks on George Monbiot as an exercise for the reader — Google is your friend :-). Whilst, as with MacKay, a few commentators actually engage with Monbiot's arguments, most either ignore them entirely and attack him personally, or either misunderstand or misrepresent his argument and nit-pick at details.
Overall, responses to MacKay's and Monbiot's daring to even consider nuclear power remind me of some of P.Z.Myers' run-ins with creationists and their ilk: people who for whatever reason attack the holder of an opinion rather than tackling their opinion. It seems to me that nukes have become a modern heresy amongst a vocal group of 'environmentalists' who take a religious or pseudoscientific view with no requirement for their orthodoxy to be based on or tested by evidence.
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