John Schwartz, of the NY Times, opines that by just about any measure, the movement to battle climate change has grown so large that the truths of the Al Gore decade-old movie now seem more mainstream than inconvenient. In Paris, 195 nations agreed to reduce greenhouse gases. In the U.S., 70% of Americans say that climate change is real. Pope Francis has joined the call for action. Hundreds of thousands of people have come together for climate marches in Paris and New York, and demonstrators recently held fossil-fuel protests on six continents.
But the movement that started with a straightforward mission, to get more people to appreciate the dangers of climate change as a precursor to action, is feeling growing pains. What may seem like a unified front has pronounced schisms, with conflicting opinions on many issues, including nuclear power and natural gas, that are complicating what it means to be an environmentalist in this day and age.
The factional boundaries are not hard and fast, with groups shifting their positions as the science and waves of activism evolve. The environmental (adversarial) movement has always been a congregation of many (ill-informed) voices, and some disagreement should be expected on such complex and intractable problems as saving the planet. Still, the tensions remain strong.
There are sharp disagreements over whether nuclear plants should be part of the energy mix to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Disasters (NOT..Incident YES) like that at the Fukushima plant in Japan shook confidence in the technology at the time, but it remains attractive to Japan and now to the Obama administration and many in the environmental movement, including James Hansen, a retired NASA climate scientist.
Supporters argue that nuclear plants can produce enormous amounts of power (safely) without the carbon dioxide that burning coal and natural gas produce, (at a better levelized, stable cost.....unlike natural gas).
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