Just Released! Order “Waking Up to Climate Change” by George Ropes, and receive 25% Discount. Learn More

HOME          CATEGORIES          OUR TAKE

Bernie and Greta ARE Saving the Climate by ClimateYou Senior Editor George Ropes

An article in Forbes by Michael Shellenberger, who writes on energy and the environment, reveals his antipathy to climate change activists and a biased sense of the crisis. He attacks Bernie Sanders, Greta Thunberg, and the Extinction Revolution as alarmists, and disparages their calls to close all natural gas and nuclear plants. He cites selected statistics to argue that adopting those measures would make the climate crisis worse, not better. He’s wrong.

Natural gas, long touted as a lower emission “bridge” fuel between coal and zero-carbon renewables, is now considered to be even worse than coal, given the large amounts of methane (86 to 105 times more heat-trapping than CO2) vented in its production. Nuclear’s widely perceived threat of an accident is rare but real — witness Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi. Moreover, it has yet to solve how and where to store its radioactive waste for thousands of years. Besides, nuclear doesn’t come close to competing economically with renewables on a total cost basis. As the permits for nuclear plants to operate expire, they should close.

https://elpais.com/sociedad/2019/12/10/actualidad/1576011896_293446.html

Sanders and Thunberg are right about the climate crisis. It is an existential threat to life as we’ve known it. Resolving it entails reducing carbon emissions as far and as fast as possible, rapidly building out low cost – low carbon energy sources, developing and deploying means to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and restoring the environment to sustainability. Closing natural gas and nuclear plants are reasonable steps toward controlling climate change. The world needs climate activists to overcome the skeptics and denialists. Go, Bernie. Go, Greta.

 

Comment on this article

ClimateYou moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (New York time) and can only accept comments written in English.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


The reCAPTCHA verification period has expired. Please reload the page.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE


More Posts Like This

OUR TAKE

Art Inspired by Climate Change Data

Last week about 20 students stood next to small, blank canvases placed on tables. They were about to pour paint of various colors onto the canvases as part of a unique approach to understanding climate change. The students were in their weekly Natural Disasters class taught by Professor

ART & CLIMATE SCIENCE

When Art & Science Collide

What happens when artistic creative energies are inspired by raw, scientific data? Experimenting with this very idea in 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic, the Climate Impacts Groups at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies started the “Science & Art Initiative,” seeking to challenge scientists

OUR TAKE

Youth Activists Triumph in Groundbreaking Climate Trial

A landmark legal decision has overwhelmingly justified every human being’s right to a healthy environment. The huge victory by young climate activists in Montana is a win for young people all over the world whose future will undeniably be shaped by the effects of climate change. The case,