Environmental Luddites
The followers of Ned Ludd are alive and well. And they wear green. Jeremy Clarkson describes the antics of the environmentalists in Britain this week in today's Sunday Times.
A couple of weeks ago, plans for a wonderful new coal-fired power station in Kent were given the green light and I was very pleased.
This will reduce our dependency on Vladimir’s gas and Osama’s oil and, as a bonus, new technology being developed to burn the coal more efficiently will be exported to China and exchanged for plastic novelty items to make our lives a little brighter.
It’s all just too excellent for words, but of course galloping into the limelight came a small army of communists and hippies who were waving their arms around and saying that coal was the fuel of Satan and that when the new power station opened, small people like Richard Hammond would immediately be drowned by a rampaging tidal swell.
They argued with much gusto that if Britain was to stand any chance of meeting Mr Prescott’s Kyoto climate change targets then we must build power stations that produced no carbon emissions at all.
You’d imagine then that last week, when Gordon Brown announced plans for a herd of new nuclear power stations, they’d have been delighted. Quiet power made by witchcraft, and no emissions at all. It’s enough, you might imagine, to make Jonathon Porritt priapic with pleasure.
But no. It turns out the eco-mentalists don’t like nuclear power either for lots of reasons, all of them stupid. They worry about what would happen if a reactor blew up. Which is a bit like worrying about living in a house in case a giant meteorite lands on it. They claim that people who go within five miles of a reactor die of leukaemia instantly. (They don’t.) They wonder where the plants will be built. (Wales?) And they ask what we will do with the waste. Simple. Put it in the Rainbow Warrior.
The fact of the matter is this. The decision to go nuclear has exposed the whole environmental cause for what it is: not a well intentioned drive for clean power but a spiteful, mean-spirited drive for less power. Because less power hits richer countries and richer people the hardest.
That about wraps it up. Without energy, the West will collapse. Which appears to be exactly what the extremists are pushing for. Having worked in the nuclear energy field, I know just how safe and clean those plants really are. One can also point to France where their energy needs are filled primarily by nuclear power plants and where they safely recycle used fuel to create more fuel. As Clarkson points out, the Luddites are only in favor of energy production that doesn't work - and never can, the laws of physics being what they are.
Energy, Environment, World news | Gaius Sunday, 13 January , 2008
By Rich Horton, Sunday, 13 January , 2008 @ 7:47 pm
It is amazing that these exact same people still bitch & moan about Thatcher closing the coal pits in the 80’s, when they should be praising her as a visionary by their own (supposed) standards.
Typical.
By Marybel, Monday, 14 January , 2008 @ 12:03 pm
Repeating this lovely tidbit from somewhere, wish I had thought of it first…while proper conservationists are basically a good thing, the environmental whack job folks are “watermelons”….green on the outside and red on the inside.