By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek
Patrick Moore is a critic of the environmental movement-an unlikely one at that. He was one of the cofounders of Greenpeace, and sailed into the Aleutian Islands on the organization’s inaugural mission in 1971, to protest U.S. nuclear tests taking place there. After leading the group for 15 years he left abruptly, and, in a controversial reversal, has become an outspoken advocate of some of the environmental movement’s most detested causes, chief among them nuclear energy. Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria spoke to Moore about his sparring with the green movement, and why he thinks nuclear power is the energy of the future.
Question: Why do you favor nuclear energy over other non-carbon-based sources of energy?
Answer: Other than hydroelectric energy-which I also strongly support-nuclear is the only technology besides fossil fuels available as a large-scale continuous power source, and I mean one you can rely on to be running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Wind and solar energy are intermittent and thus unreliable. How can you run hospitals and factories and schools and even a house on an electricity supply that disappears for three or four days at a time? Wind can play a minor role in reducing the amount of fossil fuels we use, because you can turn the fossil fuels off when the wind is blowing. And solar is completely ridiculous. The cost is so high-California’s $3.2 billion in solar subsidies is all just going into Silicon Valley companies and consultants. It’s ridiculous.
Question: A number of analyses say that nuclear power isn’t cost competitive, and that without government subsidies, there’s no real market for it.
Answer: That’s simply not true. Where the massive government subsidies are is in wind and solar. I know that France, which produces 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear, does not have high energy costs. Sweden, which produces 50 percent of its energy with nuclear and 50 percent with hydro, has very reasonable energy costs. I know that the cost of production of electricity among the 104 nuclear plants operating in the United States is 1.68 cents per kilowatt-hour. That’s not including the capital costs, but the cost of production of electricity from nuclear is very low, and competitive with dirty coal. Gas costs three times as much as nuclear, at least. Wind costs five times as much, and solar costs 10 times as much. Read more here.
By Stephen Dinan, Washington Times
President Bush is poised to change course and announce as early as this week that he wants Congress to pass a bill to combat global warming, and will lay out principles for what that should include. Specifics of the policy are still being fiercely debated, but Bush administration officials have told Republicans in Congress that they feel pressure to act now because they fear a coming regulatory nightmare. It would be the first time Mr. Bush has called for statutory authority on the subject.
“This is an attempt to move the administration and the party closer to the center on global warming. With these steps, it is hoped that the debate over this is over, and it is time to do something,” said an administration source close to the White House who is familiar with the planning and who said to expect an announcement this week. The source requested anonymity to be able to speak on a sensitive matter still under debate. Given the arguments at the White House over the extent of the action to take, it is not clear exactly what Mr. Bush will propose, the adminstration source said.
The administration also is trying to head off what it sees as a regulatory disaster. Environmentalists say greenhouse gases can be regulated under existing rules under the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act or the National Environmental Policy Act, and have filed lawsuits to try to force action. The Bush administration and others want to avoid a web of rules and regulations for businesses. Read more here.
Commentary by Marc Morano
Prominent hurricane scientist (MIT’s Kerry Emanuel) has publicly reversed his view on global warming’s impact on hurricanes. (See: Hurricane expert reconsiders global warming’s impact).
Emanuel told the NY Times: “The models are telling us something quite different from what nature seems to be telling us. There are various interpretations possible, e.g. a) The big increase in hurricane power over the past 30 years or so may not have much to do with global warming, or b) The models are simply not faithfully reproducing what nature is doing. Hard to know which to believe yet.”
Houston Chronicle Reporter Attempts to Interpret Emanuel’s Reconsideration of hurricane views (April 11, 2008). On his SciGuy blog, Eric (Berger reporter for the Houston Chronicle) tried to downplay the significance of Emanuel’s conversion in the global warming debate. Berger wrote: “This should put to rest a lot of the nonsense about a global warming conspiracy among scientists. Emanuel, faced with new evidence, has moderated his viewpoint. That’s what responsible scientists do, and most are responsible. [Note: Yes, Mr. Berger, it is quite impressive that Emanuel looked at the hard evidence and reconsidered his views. The scientific community still awaits “responsible” reconsideration of climate views from many prominent promoters of warming fears. Paging James Hansen, Michael Oppenheimer, and Stephen Schneider, to name a few.] Berger wrote: “The amount of scientist-bashing when it comes to global warming is generally quite deplorable.” [Note: Agreed. Sadly, it is almost exclusively one-sided and emanates from the promoters of man-made global warming fears. See this report for full details on the well funded smear machine that the climate alarmists employ.]
Berger wrote: “If you’re a skeptic, and you welcome these results, please remember that these are the same climate models you bash when they show global temperatures steadily rising during the next century.” [Note: Nice try Mr. Berger, but you came up way short on this point. Emanuel himself speculated that “the models are simply not faithfully reproducing what nature is doing.” Which do you believe; models which even the promoters concede are not “forecasts” or real world data? You see, Mr. Berger, evidence based data trumps the virtual world of computer models every time.]
[Note: Emanuel’s conversion is a very important new development in the climate debate. First, 2007 turned out to be the “tipping point” for global warming fears, 2008 continued appears to be the year of vindication for skeptics as many prominent scientists reversed their climate views and more and more skeptical scientists speak out and new data debunked man-made climate fears. Now another major scientist reconsiders his views on a significant aspect of man-made climate fears. MIT’s Kerry Emanuel’s views on hurricanes and global warming have been prominently cited by Gore and other promoters of climate fear. With the new evidence based data flowing in, it is no wonder Gore is being forced to spend $300 million to attempt to once again scare the public. An Oscar, a Nobel and a compliant media all proved woeful at convincing the public to believe in Gore’s “climate crisis.”
The Earth’s failure to continue warming has also confounded promoters of man-made climate fear. Here is a sampling of inconvenient developments for climate alarmists in 2008 alone: 1) Oceans Cooling! Scientists puzzled by ”mystery of global warming’s missing heat” 2) New Data from NASA’s Aqua satellite is showing ”greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide."3) Former NASA Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer found not one peer-reviewed paper has ‘ruled out a natural cause for most of our recent warmth’ 4) UN IPCC in ‘Panic Mode’ as Earth Fails to Warm, Scientist says 5) UN IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri ”to look into the apparent temperature plateau so far this century.” 6) New scientific analysis shows Sun “could account for as much as 69% of the increase in Earth’s average temperature. 7) An International team of scientists released a March 2008 report to counter UN IPCC, declaring: “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate” 8) MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen’s new analysis finds the Earth has had “No statistically significant warming since 1995.”