Political miscalculations on the part of global warming alarmists
have opened the way for a renewed commitment to nuclear power
that will find expression within the next few years, Joe Bast,
president and CEO of the Heartland Institute observed just as his
organization’s fourth International Conference on Climate Change
concluded.
The growing “climategate” scandal that involves emails leaked to
the Internet from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the
University of East Anglia in Great Britain has confirmed the
skeptical view of man-made global warming theories and “put in a
stake in the heart” of the pseudoscience that fuels alarmism,
Bast said in an interview on the final day of the conference
in Chicago, Illinois.
As an added benefit, he expects U.S. policymakers to divorce
themselves from “cap and trade” schemes and to move more
forcefully in the direction of sensible energy polices,
especially after the November elections.
“I think one unintended consequence of this whole debate has been
the re-examination and re-legitimization of nuclear energy,” Bast
suggested. “I’m sure the left must be kicking itself for allowing
this to happen. They should have thought ahead and asked
themselves what would happen if they lost on global warming. As
it turns out, they have helped to endorse and validate nuclear
power. You are going to see a lot more nuke plants built over the
next 20 to 30 years.”
Some of the key developments that occurred in the climate debate
since last Heartland Conference in Washington D.C. are as
follows:
- Last November, emails and other documents from the Climatic
Research Unit at the University of East Anglia revealed a pattern
of mismanagement of temperature data, interference with
peerreview, and overt efforts to suppress academic debate on
global warming;
- In December, negotiations in Copenhagen over a
successor to the Kyoto Protocol collapsed, leaving the
world without a binding international agreement after Kyoto
expires in 2012;
- In January, major errors of fact and forecasts in the reports
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were
acknowledged by the agency’s staff and supporters;
- In February, Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research
Unit, admitted there has been no statistically significant global
warming since 1995 and that “the vast majority of climate
scientists” do not believe the debate on climate change is over;
- In March and April, The Christian Science Monitor and many
other respected sources uncovered evidence of massive fraud in
the operation of cap-and-trade programs, raising doubts about the
workability of such programs as well as the ethics and
objectivity of Al Gore and others who have made millions of
dollars by creating firms that buy and sell carbon credits.
Despite a growing body of scientific evidence that points to
natural as opposed to man-made factors that fuel warming and
cooling cycles, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Sen. Joe Lieberman
(I-Conn.) introduced a repacked version of “cap and trade” bill
earlier this month that would impose carbon reductions on
industry. However, Bast does not expect the legislation to gain
any traction in the U.S. Senate.
“Cap and trade is dead,” he said. “We are finally on the downhill
here, we are victorious. Now is great time to be a skeptic, now
is a great time to be a libertarian. The vibe at this conference
was fantastic.”
