Joshua S. Goldstein and Steven Pinker opine that Congressional Republicans make an easy target for their denial of climate change ... I am not a scientist is the new Drill, baby, Drill. But denial also infects large swaths of the environmental aka adversarial movement. Environmentalists deserve enormous credit for calling the world attention to the threat to humanity posed by climate change. But precisely because this challenge is so stupendous, we need an uncompromisingly focused plan to solve it. Instead of offering such a solution, traditional greens have been distracted by their signature causes, and in doing so have themselves denied some inconvenient truths.
The first is that, until now, fossil fuels have been good for humanity. The industrial revolution doubled life expectancy in developed countries while multiplying prosperity twenty-fold. As industrialization spreads to the developing world, billions of people are rising out of poverty in their turn ... affording more food, living longer and healthier lives, becoming better educated, and having fewer babies .... thanks to cheap fossil fuels. In poor countries like India, citizens want reliable electricity to power these improvements, and stand ready to vote out any government that fails to deliver it. When American adversarialists tell the world to stop burning fossil fuels, they need to give Indians an alternative that delivers the prosperity they demand and deserve.
That brings us to the second inconvenient truth: Nuclear power is the world most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source. In the today world, every nuclear plant that is not built is a fossil-fuel plant that does get built, which in most of the world means coal. Yet the use of nuclear power has been stagnant or even contracting some as some would say, while others say it is on the build again.
Nuclear power presses a number of psychological buttons .. fear of poisoning, ease of imagining catastrophes, distrust of the unfamiliar ...
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Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-