From no nukes to pro-nukes

Star Ledger ^ | 07.10.07 | Paul Mulshine

[Coleus]

About 2 billion people were said to have watched the Live Earth benefit concerts to end global warming. I imagine that perhaps 1,999,999,999 of them made at least one wisecrack about the hypocrisy of rock stars burning up all that energy to make the point that we shouldn't burn energy.

Similar charges of hypocrisy dogged that 1979 "No Nukes" benefit concert in Madison Square Garden, when dozens of rockers plugged their amplifiers into electrical current provided by nuclear power so they could express their wishes that such power would be eliminated from Earth.

As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for; you might get it. And the anti-nuke movement did indeed get its wish that nuclear plants would be effectively outlawed in America. That led di rectly to our current reliance on fossil fuels, primarily coal, for power generation. And that in turn filled the atmosphere with countless billions of tons of the carbon dioxide the environmentalists now claim is the leading threat to the planet.

You might argue that no one could have foreseen way back in 1979 that pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide might be a bad idea. But you would be wrong. Way back in 1969, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Glenn Seaborg, made that exact point. During a speech extolling nuclear power, Seaborg said that those who opposed it "have just not considered the facts ... nor weighed those facts in terms of realistic alternatives." According to a New York Times article on the speech, Seaborg said that although there were technologies for mitigating pollution from fossil fuels, there were "no methods known of eliminating the carbon dioxide that re sults from combustion."

There was no indication that Seaborg made any connection between carbon dioxide and the climate.

[uglybiker]

And they only feel good when they have something to b*tch about.

[agere_contra]

You might argue that no one could have foreseen way back in 1979 that pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide might be a bad idea

No-one is pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide. Anthropogenic Global Warming is a myth.

[sittnick]

No-one is pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide.

Well, we kind of are, but the trees and algae keep on using it all up.

[The Great RJ]

I remember the bumper sticker from the 1970’s that said “Split Wood Not Atoms”....usually found adorning a dilapidated VW van with a hippy type driver. Ironically those environmentalist wackos who espoused burning wood and other renewable fuels, today would be viewed by the global warming zealots as rapers of the planet with their CO2 pollution.