Eighteen years ago, on this day, September 7, 2005, Greenpeace, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Australian Greens call on the gov to rule out nuclear energy and release a report “Nuclear Power: No Solution to Climate Change.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 379.4ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was the Howard government had asked a pro-nuclear scientist to do a review of nuclear power. This was after Howard and Bush had had one of their periodic meetings. The review made the same point that nuclear power was not going to be economic for Australia, and take too long to develop.
But it was also a useful “dead cat” strategy for Howard because he could wedge greens – he knew that some of them are pronuclear. Further, he knew it will take up time, energy and bandwidth and therefore distract from what he was (not) doing on climate.
But this is tricksy, and eventually the magician plays the same trick so many times that people spot how he does it and stop being impressed or even amused. And so it came to pass…
What I think we can learn from this is that nuclear is always a good “go to” if you want to avoid talking about what needs doing in the here and right now. And allow you to keep doing what you’re doing.
What happened next
Nuclear was not developed. It will not be developed in Australia because the population is not big enough and there aren’t enough big electricity consumers and anyway everyone has got wind and solar and the nuclear boat has sailed (and I don’t think the nuclear submarines will sail either. But who knows.)
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs..