“Reborn” by Jonathan Thompson in your Sept. 4, 2006,
issue beautifully displayed the intellectual dishonesty of the
environmental movement, as exemplified by Greenpeace founder
Patrick Moore.
Neither friends nor enemies of the
environment want to reduce demand by “talking about population
control or conservation measures. …” Instead, they want to build
nuclear power plants to generate the projected needed electricity
because nuclear power does not emit greenhouse gases.
It
is the growing populations of the West, the U.S. and the World that
are responsible for the increase each year in the emission of
greenhouse gases, and no probable construction of nuclear plants is
likely to reverse this. And, as Thompson points out, the completion
“of one nuclear plant each week for the next 25 years” will present
an enormous portfolio of new problems.
Thompson was kind
when he said “it is difficult to believe that Moore’s choice
is the only one.” Moore’s choice is a clear disaster. All
proposals to slow global warming or to move toward sustainability
are serious intellectual frauds if they do not advocate reducing
population to a sustainable level at the local, national and global
scales. Will environmentalists ever learn?
Albert Allen Bartlett
Boulder,
Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Enviros avoid the real problem.
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