Environmentalists never tire of predicting the apocalypse. We have to stop using fossil fuels now, they say, or our children will not have a planet to grow up on. Despite these warnings, many green activists are firmly against nuclear power – a clean, green source of energy that offers an obvious solution to climate change. Zion Lights is an environmentalist, former spokesman for Extinction Rebellion, and founder of the pro-nuclear campaign group Emergency Reactor. On the latest installment of the Brendan O’Neill Show, she joined the editor of Spikes to talk about the incredible potential of nuclear energy. What follows is an excerpt from their conversation. Hear the full conversation here.
Brendan O’Neill: In your opinion, how problematic has the apocalyptic of parts of the green movement become? When children say that they don’t believe that they have a future and that the world is going to die, it probably creates a culture of fear. Does that rub against the kind of rational discussion we actually need?
Zion lights: It does, and I brought this up when I was a member of Extinction Rebellion. I am pleased that scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have spoken out against the doomsday. It’s not helpful. People are paralyzed when they are afraid, that is, they do not act.
A co-founder of Extinction Rebellion claimed that by the end of the century billions of people would die from climate change. I refused to defend the claim. It became a big internal issue in Extinction Rebellion – there were a lot of people on my side saying we should withdraw the claim, and a lot of people saying that it didn’t matter if it woke people up. And it was never resolved.
I don’t think this is helpful. All that happens is the prediction doesn’t work out and people think the whole thing is a joke.
O’Neill: The central question is whether climate change is an apocalyptic problem or a practical problem that humanity can solve. Something you have done is defend the latter case – that this is something we can solve if we are sensible, and especially if we use the virtues of nuclear power. Why is nuclear energy so important?
Lighting: The decarbonised countries with very low emissions all use a combination of nuclear and hydropower. Renewables can’t do it alone. Germany spent billions on renewable energies in phasing out nuclear power, and emissions have increased. It now has some of the worst emissions in Europe, if not the developed world. But it is the phasing out of nuclear energy before the phasing out of coal. Frankly, it’s immoral at this point.
Great Britain imports coal. We have wind turbines and solar panels, but when it’s not windy or sunny enough, we import coal to fill the gap. The cost of using this coal is exported to other countries where people suffer from respiratory diseases and cancer.
I keep bringing this up, and I find that most environmentalists haven’t even thought about it. They only care about where they live and what happens to their children. There are already billions of people in the world who are living an apocalyptic reality because they are poor and suffer from air pollution. What’s up with them?
NGOs send solar panels to Africa and India. But it’s not fair to give people a little temporary power. You cannot build an infrastructure and thus achieve a high quality of life. It is absolutely immoral to pretend they can.
O’Neill: There is this fantasy among some eco-activists that if you lead a very natural life, if you lead a very humble life, you will be environmentally friendly and happy. But for many very poor people this means that they burn in the house to keep warm, to live in a polluted environment and often to be at the mercy of nature. The fantasy of “natural life” really needs to be challenged. You have described very well how western countries outsource their pollution to other nations. This brings us back to the question of nuclear power. How good is it Isn’t it better than any other form of energy we have?
Lighting: It is really extraordinary. I was involved in environmental activism at a young age. When you are surrounded by environmentalists, you are anti-nuclear. You hear all these really bad stories about radiation and deaths. I believed them for a long time until I started looking at the data. The research done by the IPCC was one of the things that convinced me to support nuclear power. The IPCC says we need nuclear power to get out of there – no question about it. And we need quite a bit of nuclear power. The only way to get away from fossil fuels is to replace them with nuclear power. As simple as that.
Now many fossil fuel companies are promoting renewable energy. It is really amazing. And that’s because these companies know that as long as we are only investing in renewable energy, we will continue to depend on fossil fuels.
O’Neill: The opposition of environmentalists to nuclear power has always annoyed me. You wrote about the exaggerated fears surrounding nuclear power. When I was in school, nuclear power was the epitome of hazardous waste. And of course there was the Chernobyl disaster, which, along with the ghost of nuclear weapons, was in many ways the great ghost of my childhood. My generation was filled with these fears. But this stuff is all over the top, isn’t it?
Lighting: It is exaggerated. But I don’t think that’s only coming from environmentalists. The media reported really irresponsibly about nuclear power. Check out the coverage of the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Nobody died because of the meltdown. People died because of an earthquake and tsunami. The nuclear facility had waste dumped on site, but it didn’t harm anyone because the stuff was so well managed. This is good news – in the worst case, no one was harmed.
There is also the issue of nuclear weapons. There’s an old-school, boomer, cold war environmentalist hangover – the idea that nuclear just means nuclear weapons. The fear is so ingrained. And these voices have long been very prevalent in the environmental movement. They need to be challenged because when an apocalyptic future is ahead, it is they who commit us to it. If we had all done what France did with the transition to nuclear power in the 1970s, there would be no climate change.
If you really believe this is a climate emergency and you don’t want an apocalyptic future, then you have to embrace nuclear power. If not, then you are part of the problem.
Zion Lights spoke to Brendan O’Neill on the latest episode of the Brendan O’Neill Show. Hear the full conversation here:
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