How to lose your faith in the environmental movement.

The Greens have always suffered from a bad image outside the urban middle-class. They are seen as supported by lefty latte-sipping yuppies, a charge I've always thought rather harmless (what's wrong with drinking latte anyway?) A more serious accusation in my view is the common opinion that the Greens are watermelons, green on the outside and red on the inside. Another way of saying this is that if you dig through the envirnomentally-friendly exterior, the Greens are rabid socialists who are bent on destruction, and desperate to start waving red flags around before seizing control of the state and returning control of the means of production to the workers. Followed by bloodbath.

While I don't think there's much truth in this, it appears to me now incontrovertible that the Green movement is compromised by ideology. The Autralian Greens embody this as much as anybody. Their ideology is 100% in line with a vague 'harmony with nature' position that is never really thought through, and which in many cases actually causes conflict with efforts to improve our environment and work towards a sustainable global future.

The regrettable blindness of the Greens is demonstrated in a video debate which featured, amongst others, the leader of the Greens Christine Milne, and the nuclear advocate Ben Heard. The video can be seen here and her answers clearly demonstrate that the Green oppositon to nuclear power is ideological and not rational. The same applies to her clearly unrealistic hopes for renewable energy to produce massive amounts of reliable power in the future.

I have seen and fought the whole Fukushima debacle from the very beginning and it gets my goat to see it brought up as a negative. Even more disconcerting is the realisation that the ultimate source of the Green objection to nuclear power is the natural fallacy. When the natural fallacy is allowed to overrule scientific reality, well, it's all downhill from there.

The whole thing is so regrettable because environmentalists should be rushing to support and demand nuclear power. There is hardly anything in the world which could have such a beneficial effect upon the Earth's environment as the widespread adoption of nuclear technology.