More Global Warming Hypocrisy

Deroy Murdock hits on something we brought up awhile ago:

If Al Gore is right and global warming is genuine, grave, and the fault of mankind, why do he and so many environmentalists oppose measures that would reduce those pesky carbon-dioxide emissions? Power sources that could cut atmospheric CO2 rarely seem good enough to satisfy the greens.

Unlike oil and coal, nuclear power does not generate CO2. It may be the most practical, atmosphere-friendly power source now available. And yet the former vice president seems unimpressed.

“I’m skeptical about it playing a much larger role,” he said in London’s Guardian newspaper last May 31. “I don’t think it’s going to be a silver bullet.”

True, nuclear plants produce radioactive waste that must be stored somewhere. Despite an impressive safety record in America, where nuclear power meets 20 percent of energy demand — and even more so in France, where 75 percent of power is nuclear — the potential remains for catastrophic accidents or sabotage. But as Gore and his pals should understand, life involves trade-offs between low-risk options and clear-and-present dangers. If global warming truly is the unfolding horror show that environmentalists say it is, then why do they consider atomic energy even more dangerous?

Indeed, Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar Chris Horner wonders why environmentalists reject alternatives to fossil fuels if they agree with Sir David King, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s science adviser, that global warming is “the greatest threat facing mankind” and is “worse than terrorism.”

“It is hypocritical that Kyotophile greens almost unanimously still oppose nuclear power and that [the Kyoto treaty’s] own terms exclude greenhouse-gas-free nukes from its permissible sources of gaining ‘credits,’” Horner writes in his forthcoming Regnery book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism.

Green groups are almost comically conflicted on this issue. “Climate change is the greatest threat of all,” Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth U.K. told the Guardian last March 3. But then FOE’s website declares: “Nuclear power…cannot be part of the solution to climate change.” So, apparently, some threats are greater than “the greatest threat of all.”

Wouldn't it be great if Bush responded to the envirowhackos by beginning an enormous nuclear power plant construction program?

The Algore 2000's head would explode, so intense would the for-do loop be.