h/t Instapundit
[Forbes] Why is it that, from the U.S. and Canada to Spain and France, it is progressives and socialists who say they care deeply about the climate, not conservative climate skeptics, who are seeking to shut down nuclear plants?
After all, the two greatest successes when it comes to nuclear energy are Sweden and France, two nations held up by democratic socialists for decades as models of the kind of societies they want.
It is only nuclear energy, not solar and wind, that has radically and rapidly decarbonized energy supplies while increasing wages and growing societal wealth.
And it is only nuclear that has, by powering high-speed trains everywhere from France to Japan to China, decarbonized transportation, which is the source of about one-third of the emissions humankind creates.
For many people the answer is obvious: ignorance. Few people know that nuclear is the safest source of electricity. Or that low levels of radiation are harmless. Or that nuclear waste is the best kind of waste.
To a large extent, I agree with this view. In order to address widespread fear and ignorance, my colleagues and I have created The Complete Case for nuclear, which summarizes the best-available science.
But ignorance can’t be the whole story. After all, the leaders of the anti-nuclear movement are public intellectuals ‐ Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein. They are highly-educated, do extensive research, and publish in fact-checked publications like The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times.
Is the problem that progressives unconsciously associate nuclear energy with nuclear bombs? Without a doubt that’s a big part of it. Psychologists have since the seventies documented how people displace anxieties about the bomb onto nuclear plants.
But anti-nuclear Millennials like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 29, grew up more in fear of climate change than the bomb.
And few things have proven worse for the climate than shutting down nuclear plants.
THE UNCONSCIOUS APPEAL OF RENEWABLES
Ordinary people tell pollsters they want renewables for the same reason they buy products labeled "natural": they are in the grip of an unconscious appeal-to-nature fallacy.
The appeal-to-nature fallacy is the mistaken belief that the world can be divided into "natural" and "unnatural" things, and that the former are better, safer, or cleaner than the latter.
In reality, solar farms require hundreds of times more land, an order of magnitude more mining for materials, and create hundreds of times more waste, than do nuclear plants.
And wind farms kill hundreds of thousands of threatened and endangered birds, may make the hoary bat go extinct, and kill more people than nuclear plants.
But because of our positive feelings toward sunlight, water and wind, which we view as more natural than uranium, many people unconsciously assume renewables are better for the environment. 
|
