Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore changes his mind, calls for nuclear power

In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That’s the conviction that inspired Greenpeace’s first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands [see Amchitka]. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
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via Dave’s Picks

Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog (and many other admirable initiatives), is another old-school environmentalist who has come around to nuclear power

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power. [link]

Jared Diamond, author and lecturer, also endorses nuclear power. Diamond spoke at a conference sponsored by the Long Now Foundation (another Stewart Brand project). Mark Hertsgaard chronicles the event, and calls both Diamond and Brand to task –

During a public lecture in San Francisco last month [July 2005], Jared Diamond, the mega-selling author of Guns, Germs and Steel, became the latest and most prominent environmental intellectual to endorse nuclear power as a necessary response to global warming.

Addressing an overflow crowd at the Cowell Theater about why some societies fail and others don’t (the theme of his most recent book, Collapse), Diamond three times cited global warming as a threat that could ruin modern civilization. During the question period, he was asked if he agreed with Stewart Brand, whose Long Now Foundation was sponsoring the lecture, that global warming posed such a grave threat that humanity had to embrace nuclear power. It was a delicate moment, for Brand, the former editor of The Whole Earth Catalogue , was on stage with Diamond.

“I did not know that Stewart Brand said that,” Diamond replied. “But yes, to deal with our energy problems we need everything available to us, including nuclear power.” Nuclear, he added, should simply be “done carefully, like they do in France, where there have been no accidents.”

“I did not expect that answer,” Brand said.

Neither, it seemed, did much of the audience. Overwhelmingly white and affluent, they had nodded reverentially at everything Diamond had said thus far—about the self-destructiveness of ancient civilizations that leveled forests (Easter Island) or eroded soils (the Mayans) in pursuit of short-term gain, about the need for America to rethink its “core value” of consumerism if it hopes to survive. They had clapped when Diamond mocked President Bush’s see-no-evil approach to environmental protection.

Yet now here was Diamond urging an expansion of nuclear power, a technology most environmentalists regard as irredeemably evil.

“Deal with it,” crowed Brand as the crowd sat in stunned silence.
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“Crowed” …? Maybe: crows are tricksters, and Brand has long been that.