Free Republic

Sometimes we stumble upon really good stories from others to whom they are just old news. One of those came at the Council of Manufacturing Associations meeting earlier this month (and exhaustively chronicled here), courtesy of NEI President Skip Bowman. In the course of his remarks, he mentioned Patrick Moore. We were scribbling feverishly, spoke to Bowman about it later. Patrick Moore, it turns out, is a co-founder of (fill in adjective of choice) Greenpeace. However, after years of open conflict there, as he says, "It was time to switch from confrontation to consensus, time to stop fighting and start...

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering. He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand. He divides environmentalists into romantics...