Earth's Nuclear Future: What Difference Does Ethics Make?

Abstract

The deliberate exclusion of the nuclear option from the official Protocol issued at the Kyoto conference on global warming demands a credible explanation. A fundamental conflict in visions between Green Crusaders versus Wealth Creators is one explanation. But it may also be explained by a political agenda for Global Governance requiring strategies for substituting global environmental pollution as an alternative to a war system with the ultimate goal of supranational control over divergent sources of geopolitical power. Although the more palatable rhetoric of sustainable development has replaced limits to growth slogans of the 1970s, this shift only masks the intransigent anti-natalist objective of downsizing the human population to fit a mythical carrying capacity for planet earth. Crisis entrepreneurs have short-circuited public understanding of how energyresources are being held hostage by an unelected, elitist, unrepresentative global bureaucracy. Nuclear energy advocates must adopt an aggressive strategy that can decisively counteract decades of regulatory ratcheting driven by bureaucratic vestedinterests.