News from the New Party

Greens face backlash on nuclear power

Jeremy Clarkson wishes us to know that he has a poor opinion of environmentalists - he calls them "a small army of communists and hippies":

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.

I’ve argued time and again that the old trade unionists and CND lesbians didn’t go away. They just morphed into environmentalists. The red’s become green but the goals remain the same. And there’s no better way of achieving those goals than turning the lights out and therefore winding the clock back to the Stone Age. Only when we’re all eating leaves under a hammer and sickle will they be happy.

Meanwhile, Sir David King, who has just stepped down from his post as the government's Chief Scientific Adviser, has also expressed his frustration:

The scientist credited as being the first to convince Tony Blair of the urgency of the climate crisis has accused green activists of being Luddites who risk setting back the fight against global warming.

In an interview with the Guardian today Sir David King, who stepped down last month after seven years as the government's chief scientific adviser, says any approach that does not focus on technological solutions to climate change - including nuclear power - is one of "utter hopelessness".

He says: "There is a suspicion, and I have that suspicion myself, that a large number of people who label themselves 'green' are actually keen to take us back to the 18th or even the 17th century."

He characterises their argument as "let's get away from all the technological gizmos and developments of the 20th century".

"People say 'well, we'll just use less energy.' Come on," he says. "And then there's the real world, where everyone is aspiring to the sort of standard of living that we have, which is based on a large energy consumption."

Nick Cohen thinks that the green movement has been an exclusively middle class phenomenon, and has not considered what impact green ideas might have in less affluent circumstances:

Perhaps the general confinement of green thinking to the comfortably off is unavoidable. Maybe people can only worry about the environment when they are not worried about how to make their pay last until the end of the week. It’s certainly easier to live off organic food if you have a comfortable income and to recycle if you can afford a house with a garden for a compost heap. But even if the rich have greater scope to be greener than the poor, the possibility that the momentum behind the environmental movement will dissipate with a crash is exacerbated by the failure of its leaders to think hard enough about how the policies they recommend hit those in straitened circumstances.

I’ve heard officials with homeless charities deride Friends of the Earth for its opposition to Gordon Brown’s plans for a house building programme - ‘bearded nimbies’ is their only printable comment. The fashion for counting ‘food miles’ and feeling righteous if you buy locally produced food doesn’t concern itself with the question of how farmers in poor countries will be affected if consumers in rich export markets make a virtue of boycotting their products.

But the greatest scope for a backlash comes from hardline attitudes to energy. In successive weeks, Greenpeace has denounced proposals for new coal-fired power stations and a new generation of nuclear power plants. It may be true that clean-coal technology is a long way off, but whatever other complaints can be made about it, nuclear power is an alternative to fossil fuels and honest greens are hard-headed enough to admit it. James Lovelock, the greatest environmentalist of our time, describes it as ‘the one safe, available, energy source’ and despairs at the green movement’s ‘irrational’ objections.

Those suffering - and in some cases dying - this winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes may not care about the technical arguments. They are more likely to see the green movement as their enemy if every time a new source of power is proposed an environmentalist pops up to explain why it can’t be built.

Could it be that at last some sanity is beginning to return to discussions around climate change and the appropriate response to it?  The response of the environmental movement to recent developments on nuclear power appear to be eliciting a backlash as the realisation dawns that green politics is ideology - and ideology is not science.  If so, this development is clearly to be welcomed.  The hijacking of "Science" by Clarkson's "communists and hippies" has gone on for too long.  A meaningful and rational response to the issue of climate change may yet be achievable.