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If energy, food and education are the building
blocks of civilization, Greenpeace Cofounder Patrick Moore is using his role
of "sensible environmentalist" to build support for the concept of
sustainable power generation. In this exclusive interview with The Energy
Report, Patrick proposes that industry and government work together to
advance nuclear power in the United States as the most effective way to
supply continuous energy to homes, businesses and institutions.
Companies Mentioned: Constellation Energy Group -
SCANA - Southern Company
The Energy Report: Patrick, you're an ecologist, and
you've got a new book out, Confessions of a Greenpeace
Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist.
What is a sensible environmentalist, and why did you drop out of Greenpeace?
Patrick Moore: I believe a sensible environmentalist bases
environmental positions squarely on science and logic and does
not get caught-up in the pop environmentalism and dogmatic zero-tolerance
approach that is too prevalent in the Greenpeace movement today. I had to
split with Greenpeace after 15 years in the leadership because I could no
longer accept some of the positions of my fellow directors, none of whom had
any formal science training. They are more aptly described as political or
social activists, which is fine in its own right,
but when you are starting to deal with complex issues of chemistry and
biology, you do need a little grounding in science in order to make good
decisions. You don't need a Ph.D. in physics to be opposed to nuclear war,
but you probably do need some science to grapple with issues like genetic
engineering and which chemicals should be restricted for which uses.
Greenpeace tended to take a more black-and-white approach to many of these
issues, and today they are opposed to all nuclear energy, even though it's a
safe and clean alternative to fossil fuels. They are opposed to genetic
engineering even though this could help eliminate micronutrient deficiency or
malnutrition around the world. They are opposed to sustainable forestry, even
though it's the most renewable resource in the world. They are opposed to
farming fish in the ocean, which is a way of taking pressure off of wild
stocks, which are overfished. They have taken so many positions that I
disagreed with that I saw fit to write this book, Confessions of a
Greenpeace Dropout, to explain why a sensible environmentalist would not
go down the path that Greenpeace has gone down in the last 20 years since I
left.
TER: Could you tell me how your journey from Greenpeace activist to
sensible environmentalist began? Was there a light-bulb moment, or was it a
gradual process that just coalesced one day?
PM: It was a gradual process, but there was a light-bulb moment four
years earlier in Nairobi, Kenya at a meeting of international
environmentalists to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the 1972 United
Nations Environment Program Conference on the environment. In Nairobi, I
heard the term "sustainable development" for the first time. It was
uttered by Tom Burke, who was head of the Friends of the Earth, U.K. When I
heard that term I realized that our long-term mission was much broader than
just focusing on the environment alone, that it had to take into account the
social and economic priorities that keep our civilization running. You can't
just say forget about the seven billion human beings because we are only
concerned about the environment, as if the people aren't part of the environment.
We need to be able to adopt environmental policies that take into account the
social and economic priorities that keep us alive every day. If you forget
about the people, then you do come up with all kinds of zero-tolerance
positions—even if it means people are going to starve to death or
suffer from malnutrition or be in energy poverty their whole lives. I don't
think that is the right approach to environmentalism.
I believe in progress and in science and in technology as ways to help us
bring about a better harmony with the environment. When I began to understand
the concept of sustainability, it knocked some sense into me. It's about
balancing social and economic priorities and finding win-win situations.
That's what I've spent the last 20-odd years pursuing, and I believe that the
environmental policy platform that I've set out in Confessions of a
Greenpeace Dropout reflects a much more realistic approach.
TER: A lot of conservative thinkers are probably drawn to you. Do you
ever recoil at some of the people that might want to use you as an example?
PM: Yes, I do have to guard against that because personally I'm
politically centrist. I am not a hardliner on either the left or the right. I
believe that there are solutions on both sides of the political fence. On the
left, the regulatory approach is very often essential in order to control
what people do so as not to harm others. And on the right, the market-based
approach using competition is a way to get the best, most efficient solution
to problems. We need to borrow the best from the left and the right when
fashioning environmental policy. I don't agree with the extremism on the
right, just like I do not agree with policies of the extreme left.
TER: What about climate change?
PM: I am a skeptic on climate change. I know the climate is changing,
and it always has been. I've studied this intensively over many years. I
started what I call the Carbon Project here in British Columbia back in 1989
in order to bring everybody together to discuss this subject and figure out
the facts behind it. Since then, I have watched as hysteria has grown, as if
the whole world is going to come to an end and civilization is going to die
because of humans causing this climate change. I don't buy that, and I certainly
know we don't have any proof of it. I'm not denying that we might be playing
some role, but the natural factors that have always caused climate change
have not suddenly disappeared. I'm very skeptical of the alarmist nature of
climate campaigning.
TER: You describe yourself as a founding member of Greenpeace, but the
organization says you are not a founder or co-founder of that organization.
Can you square this for us?
PM: Up until about 2007 I was named as a founder of Greenpeace on the
Greenpeace International website, and that had been there for a long time. In
February 2007, they just simply erased my name from their website. But they
recognize other people as being co-founders of the Don't Make a Wave
Committee, which was the precursor to Greenpeace, at exactly the same time I
started and did not stay in the organization anywhere near as long as I did.
I became a senior spokesperson for the organization for many years, a
president for a few years, and then one of the six international directors of
Greenpeace International. I am a co-founder of Greenpeace by any stretch of
the imagination. I've actually written an essay in
answer to this question.
TER: You're a proponent of nuclear energy. We all know it is clean
energy—until it's not. Could you describe your proposition for nuclear
energy for our planet?
PM: I was against nuclear energy when I was with Greenpeace, but I've
changed my mind. You'd think from listening to them that I'm calling for
resumption of hydrogen bomb testing and the killing of whales. I am not. I
still stick to all of the positions we took then, except nuclear energy,
because I think we made the mistake of lumping nuclear energy in with nuclear
weapons. Our original campaign was against nuclear war, and we painted
everything nuclear as evil. Today that makes no sense at all to me. Nuclear
medicine is obviously not evil. Those nuclear isotopes used in nuclear
medicine are created in nuclear reactors. That's one of the things we can do
with nuclear technology. Another one is to make energy that's clean and safe.
"Safe" is a relative thing. People ask about Fukushima and
Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. All of those combined are nothing compared
to the death toll of other technologies like fossil fuels and even
hydroelectric. One hydroelectric accident resulted in 126,000 people dying in
China in 1975. Another one just a couple of years ago in Russia killed more
people than the nuclear industry has killed in its entire history. So we need
perspective. Every year 1.2 million people die in vehicle accidents, but we
don't ban vehicles. Nuclear is one of the safest technologies we have, even
for workers in the industry. Columbia University did a study published in
2004 of 53,000 nuclear plant workers showing that they have fewer cancers,
less disease and live longer than the average American.
The other thing about nuclear power is that fossil fuels are limited,
although we do seem to be finding more of them. Long after the fossil fuels
are depleted, there will be nuclear energy for thousands of years. That's one
of the main reasons we should be working very hard today to perfect the
technology and make it even safer than the original reactors built in the
1960s and 1970s. Unless some totally new discovery is made, we know there are
only a limited number of things from which you can make energy in this world,
and nuclear is the most sustainable. Fusion energy, another form of nuclear
power, may become a reality, but I do believe that nuclear is the most
important energy source for the continuation of civilization.
TER: What about solar and wind technologies?
PM: I don't believe that solar and wind are
going to solve our energy problem. I think they are a bubble, and they are
extremely expensive. They are unreliable because they are intermittent in
nature and cannot form base-load power for our civilization, which needs
24-hour power to run factories, hospitals, schools, homes and businesses.
Countries that have overdone it with wind and solar are finding it very
difficult to balance their grids and predict their future energy supply.
TER: What are some of the for-profit companies moving this process
into the right direction?
PM: Those electric utilities that have nuclear energy— Southern Company (SO:NYSE) is certainly a leader in this
area and also SCANA (SCG:NYSE).
These are the two leading developers in the U.S.
TER: What can government do to jumpstart the process?
PM: There is a pressing need to get nuclear energy back on track in
the United States. Many other countries, including Russia, China, India,
South Korea and France are way ahead now in moving forward with this next
generation of nuclear construction. There are over 60 nuclear plants under
construction globally, and not one has gotten started in the U.S. yet.
There's one being completed or restarted. There are two plants being planned
by Georgia Power (a unit of Southern Company) at Plant Vogtle
in Waynesboro, Georgia. They've got the preliminaries for the foundation, but
they don't have a license to build from the NRC yet. It is yet to be seen
whether a new round of nuclear construction can be accommodated by the U.S.
regulatory framework.
Also, loan guarantees have not panned out. In Maryland, Constellation Energy Group
(CEG:NYSE) pulled out of a plan to build another reactor at
its Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, but when the terms of the loan
guarantee were disclosed, it was going to cost so much to get the loan
guarantee that the finances made no sense. So Constellation pulled out of
that, and now it's in limbo.
Also, can new construction be accommodated solely with private capital taking
all the risk? What we really need is for the government of the United States
to decide if it really wants to have nuclear energy come back into the
picture. It's got to put forward a better risk-sharing package among the
private and public entities involved. Look at France, for example, where the
government basically owns the whole nuclear energy industry. It takes all the
risks and lets out contracts for companies to do the work. In the United
States, if the government takes any risk it's suddenly called a subsidy.
TER: Where is innovation coming from now? Are there small companies
where investors might get some leverage?
PM: I'm not a financial advisor or analyst to any extent, but I would
say that what Bill Gates is doing with small reactor technology is very
interesting with his investment in a startup called TerraPower,
but that's fairly far out and it's research and development-level stuff.
TER: Are you hopeful about the future of humankind?
PM: I am very hopeful for the future of humankind. We are obviously a
very intelligent species. We make mistakes, and we learn from them. I believe
that the key to wealth creation and population management is mechanization of
agriculture. All you have to do is look at the industrialized countries where
today less than 5% of the population is engaged in producing food, leaving
95% of the population to do other things like making stuff and providing
services. This is what creates a wealthy and modern society, whereas in
subsistence agricultural societies, up to 80% or more of the population is
involved in growing food. They are living on subsistence income with
generally very little education, where large families are desirable under
those conditions because labor is an asset. When you mechanize agriculture,
farmers have better access to education, and they have fewer children,
bringing the population down and in turn further improving access to
education for women, who can then become educated and empowered. That is my
vision for the future, of how this world is going to become wealthier and
smarter and where population is going to stop growing unchecked.
TER: I want to thank you for taking this time with us today.
PM: Likewise. Thank you very much for such a nice interview.
Patrick
Moore, Ph.D. has been a leader in the international
environmental field for more than 30 years. He is a founding member of
Greenpeace and served for nine years as president of Greenpeace Canada and
seven years as a director of Greenpeace International. As the leader of many
campaigns he was a driving force shaping policy and direction while
Greenpeace became the world's largest environmental activist organization. In
recent years Patrick has been focused on the promotion of sustainability and
consensus building among competing concerns. He was a member of British
Columbia government-appointed Round Table on the Environment and Economy from
1990–1994. In 1990 he founded and chaired the BC Carbon Project, a
group that worked to develop a common understanding of climate change.
Patrick also served for four years as vice president, Environment for WaterFurnace International, Inc., the world's largest
manufacturer of geothermal heat pumps for residential heating and cooling
with renewable earth energy.
As Chair of the Sustainable Forestry Committee of the Forest Alliance of
BC, he leads the process of developing the "Principles of Sustainable
Forestry," which have been adopted by a majority of the industry. In
1991 he founded Greenspirit, a consultancy focusing
on environmental policy and communications in natural resources,
biodiversity, energy and climate change.
In 2000 Patrick published Green Spirit: Trees are the Answer, a
photo-book that provides a new insight into how forests work and how they can
play a powerful role in solving many of our current environmental problems.
The
Energy Report
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