New form of climate denialism

I have come to the conclusion, along with many other experts, that if global warming is really a serious problem, then nuclear power is the only practical way to provide the necessary large-scale energy without carbon.

Another possibility might be to start World War III in order to de-populate big Third World countries like China and India, or to otherwise cripple their ability to build coal-fired power plants.

Now I learn that this makes me a climate denialist.

Naomi Oreskes writes in the London Guardian:

There is a new form of climate denialism to look out for – so don't celebrate yet

At the exact moment in which we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel, we’re being told that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs

After the signing of a historic climate pact in Paris, we might now hope that the merchants of doubt – who for two decades have denied the science and dismissed the threat – are officially irrelevant.

But not so fast. There is also a new, strange form of denial that has appeared on the landscape of late, one that says that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs.

Oddly, some of these voices include climate scientists, who insist that we must now turn to wholesale expansion of nuclear power. Just this past week, as negotiators were closing in on the Paris agreement, four climate scientists held an off-site session insisting that the only way we can solve the coupled climate/energy problem is with a massive and immediate expansion of nuclear power. More than that, they are blaming environmentalists, suggesting that the opposition to nuclear power stands between all of us and a two-degree world.

That would have troubling consequences for climate change if it were true, but it is not.

Note how she uses the term "climate change" to mean the leftist energy agenda. That is, a nuclear shift might solve the global warming problem, but that would be troubling because that is not the energy plan that the leftists want.

Even in the US, where nuclear power is generated in the private sector, it has been hugely subsidized by the federal government, which invested billions in its development in order to prove that the destructive power unleashed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be put to good use. The government also indemnified the industry from accidents, and took on the task of waste disposal – a task it has yet to complete.

This is not true. The nuclear waste problem is mostly created by govt regulations, and the industry has been taxed maybe $50B to build a waste disposal site. The Nevada site was then killed for Democrat political reasons.

Oreskes was also on Science Friday yesterday arguing that scientists were systematically understating the threat of global warming, and urging a carbon tax.

The host suggested that scientists do not want the public to get too alarmed, or they might panic.

She quoted Ashley Montagu: "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

If it is really so essential that the OPEC oil stay in the ground, then somebody should be proposing a war or embargo to stop the export of that oil. The countries do not have the navies to protect their ships on the oceans. And yet no one proposes this. So I guess it is not that big of a problem.