A
Call Of Desperation:Go For Nuclear Power To Combat Global Warming
By Michael McCarthy
24 May 2004
The Independent
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."
His appeal, which
in effect is asking the Greens to make a bargain with the devil, is
likely to fall on deaf ears, at least at present.
"Lovelock is
right to demand a drastic response to climate change," Stephen
Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said last night. "He's
right to question previous assumptions.
"But he's wrong
to think nuclear power is any part of the answer. Nuclear creates enormous
problems, waste we don't know what to do with; radioactive emissions;
unavoidable risk of accident and terrorist attack."
Tony Juniper, director
of Friends of the Earth, said: "Climate change and radioactive
waste both pose deadly long-term threats, and we have a moral duty to
minimise the effects of both, not to choose between them."