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Jewish World Review Oct. 3, 2005 / 29 Elul, 5765 Get real, environmentalists By Peter A. Brown
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The environmental movement needs to re-examine some core beliefs before the public-opinion train that forced welfare reform down advocates' throats runs them over, too.
In this era of seemingly permanent higher energy prices, environmentalists' blanket anti-fossil fuel, anti-nuclear power dogma must go.
Unfortunately, we can't meet our energy needs by just driving more fuel-efficient cars or putting up solar panels and windmills, although all are good ideas.
We must geographically diversify our energy industry, which means more offshore drilling and putting refineries in someone's backyard.
And nuclear power is a must.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, welfare-rights advocates resisted any change until public opinion forced an end to the program as they knew it.
Environmentalists should learn that lesson, decide which projects are too dangerous and which ones they can tolerate.
I am not troubled by drilling off Florida's coast, but many are. They should use their political clout to approve drilling elsewhere, like in Alaska, where residents favor it.
When environmentalists challenge every effort to build a refinery, natural-gas terminal or drilling where the risk/reward ratio is favorable, such as off the coasts of states whose beaches are not cash cows, they hurt their cause.
Stop pretending alternative energy sources that have not yet proved economically feasible — such as wind, solar, biomass or ethanol — are the answer.
There is no real alternative to fossil fuels in the short term, and nuclear power is a much better intermediate-term bet.
That's why environmentalists need to become proponents of building U.S. nuclear-power plants. They must abandon the folks who believe that atomic power — even used to heat and light your home — is evil.
That there were no U.S. nuclear plants built in the past 30 years, while the rest of the world had been rapidly doing so, has little to do with science.
It has everything to do with D.C. politics that align interest groups over issues that are not their core concern.
Since the 1979 incident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant in which no one was killed, nuclear power has become politically incorrect.
There has been considerable spillover from the left into the anti-nuclear power camp based on an ideological distaste for nuclear weapons.
Ironically, many of these same folks concerned about global warming — which they allege is caused by burning fossil fuels — have been the fiercest foes of nuclear power.
Which are they more concerned about: nuclear power or pollution?
Nuclear power plants don't pollute the atmosphere, although candidly there must be a decision about where to put spent nuclear fuel.
If not petroleum and natural gas, what is going to power the American economy?
With all due respect to those who argue for solar, wind, etc., they are dreaming if they think such projects can become economically viable on a major scale. Unless, of course, the alternative is $250-a-barrel oil.
Nuclear now produces 20 percent of U.S. electricity, but that figure will fall to 15 percent by 2020 as old plants go offline.
At most, even environmentalists see biomass, geothermal, wind and solar energy as providing only 10 percent of our energy needs by then, and that is a wildly optimistic view.
When combined with the 15 percent from nuclear plants in place, that would still mean 75 percent of U.S. energy needs would be met by fossil fuels.
The anti-nuclear hysteria that followed Three Mile Island failed to acknowledge the fact that the safety system worked.
And in the years since, the safety of nuclear plants has improved dramatically.
How do we know?
Because other countries — even France, whose politics one might assume leads them to be much more risk averse than we — have continued building nuclear power plants.
In fact, not only do the French get most of their power from them, they are building a new one to sell electricity to their neighbors.
Most of the 47 nuclear plants that have come online this century are in Asia, where our commercial rivals of the future, China and India, are building them because they make their economies more competitive.
The energy bill signed by President Bush this summer contains incentives for building nuclear plants.
No one will invest in nuclear power, however, if environmental groups use the courts to delay or defeat those projects.
If there are scientific reasons to avoid nuclear power, let's debate them and compare its risks vs. the other alternatives.
But if it's just an antiquated sense of political correctness, then the knee-jerk opposition to nuclear power is just dumb. Remember welfare reform.
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Peter A. Brown is an editorial page columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. Comment by clicking here. © 2005, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
