Save the Planet. Unleash Godzilla!

It’s time to give nuclear power the Green light.

The Brecon Beacons is a mountain range in South Wales. I have never visited because I live in Central London. So I get anxious anytime I’m more than a few yards away from traditional London things, like an American Candy Store, or a crack head.

But if I did want to go and see what all the fuss is about, I’d better get a move on. Because the Brecon Beacon is changing its name. Refreshingly not because of racism. Or even colonialism. But because of climate change. Yes I know that sounds daft at first, but when you listen to the logic behind the change, it actually makes perfect sense.

You see beacon equals fire. Fire equals smoke. Smoke equals carbon. Carbon equals bad. Bad equals unacceptable.

See? Perfectly sensible.

So we’re going to have to call the  Brecon Beacons something else from now on. Something in Welsh. If you want to know what it is you’ll have to look it up. Sorry, but I’m not prepared to spend twenty minutes battling Spell Check. Just so I can write it down here.

I shouldn’t be cynical of course. It seems that changing the name of the Brecon Beacons from something everyone knows, and has used for years, to something no one understands, and can’t spell or pronounce, is actually widely popular. At least everyone who the BBC interviewed about it seemed super supportive. And that’s good enough for me.

And the good news continues; the bosses behind the change have graciously conceded that people can still use the old name. So that’s a relief. No one is going to prison for deadnaming some hills. At least for now.

And better still, if I want to get some good old fresh air, I won’t even need to expose myself to the hideous racism of the countryside much longer. Because thanks to the Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emissions Zones. The air in London will soon be as sweet as a hideously bigoted mountain stream.

Not that the air quality in London seems that bad now. Anyone living in London in the 1980s will remember coming home from work and blowing soot from their nose. It was genuinely grim. But hardly surprising really when you consider that lead in petrol wasn’t fazed out until 1999, and until 1984 you could still smoke on the tube. Yes. On the actual tube!! Even a freedom loving busybody repellent like me finds the idea of that bizarre. So air quality has definitely improved massively since then.

But let’s not allow ourselves to become complacent, a lot remains to be done. That’s because according to Khan, pollution from cars and other vehicles causes the deaths of 4000 Londoners each and every year. And that’s a lot, almost three times the number of people killed each year in actual road accidents in the whole of the country. In fact it is such a high number of deaths that it seems hardly credible. So I looked into the figures, and it turns out, it’s hardly credible.

I don’t want to baffle you, and myself with the details, it’s all here if you are interested. But essentially the figures come from a report which says that pollution has adverse effects on people. (uncontroversial we should definitely have less of it) And over the course of a year, pollution reduces the life expectancy of everyone living in London by a teeny tiny bit. (OK, makes sense) And if you add all those tiny bits together you would get the equivalent of 4000 deaths. (Riiiiight….) So that’s the same as 4000 actual deaths. (???) So that’s 4000 deaths. (Sorry you lost me.)

It’s a bit like saying stress is a killer which is responsible for thousands of deaths a year. (Absolutely true) But owning a kitten lowers stress. (True again. Kittens are super lovely) And so every kitten contributes towards their owner living a tiny bit longer.(Yes. Sort of maybe)  But because the evil Tories are refusing to allow doctors to prescribe kittens on the NHS. (Booo! Tories. Hurrah NHS!!) The Tories are, once again, killing people. (Slam dunk!)

Pollution in London is obviously real, and we should take sensible steps to reduce it as much as possible. But London is a modern bustling city of almost 9 million people, not an empty windswept Welsh wasteland. (Apologies to The Park Formerly Known as Brecon Beacons) So I think it’s fair to expect there’s going to be a little bit of filth in the air sometimes.

Khan’s solution involves impoverishing working people, making lives miserable, making driving prohibitively expense for all but the rich, putting up taxes, all the while, making London less productive, and less attractive to visitors.

If most of that list sounds weirdly and uncomfortably familiar to even non Londoners, it might be because it’s the same recipe for lack of success that we’ve seen before. Every time anyone in power talks about climate change. Sorry the ‘Climate Emergency’.

Just like pollution in our cities. Climate change is a real problem which we need to tackle. But just like with pollution in London, the solution surely can’t be to ignore the massive progress we’ve already made, over react and destroy our economy, wreck people’s livelihoods and make life more difficult for regular people.

What we need are real, workable and practical ways of tackling global warming.  Wind and solar have their place of course. But it’s clear that even with our current state of advanced technology it will be a very long time before the developed world can create a sustainable, reliable environmentally friendly source of power which can safely provide the majority of our needs. ……. Oh hang on. There’s one.

Nuclear power.

Nuclear power is 100% carbon free technology. Which means that once it’s up and running it produces zero pollution. And no carbon emissions. Plus, since bashing some atoms together doesn’t involve child slaves digging up rare metals, or the wholesale slaughter of wildlife, it’s even greener than solar and wind.

Of course there are lots of reasons people say they don’t like nuclear power. I was going to do a deep dive into the subject but better qualified people have been writing about nuclear this week. So I’ll leave it to them and instead just run through this short list.

Safety. Everyone knows nuclear is unsafe. But that’s not true. Actually it’s about the safest form of power out there. Infinitely safer than coal. Safer than gas. In fact compared with what we’re used to, and the risks we have happily accepted for the last 70 odd years, it’s about as dangerous as nuns running a penguin windmill made of shatterproof rainbows.

But hang about you say, we’ve all seen the Chernobyl TV show, and that was terrifying.

The Chernobyl power station was the equivalent of a rusty roller coaster ride intermittently maintained by a drunk carnie. Of course it collapsed. People watched the Chernobyl TV show and the lesson they came away with is that nuclear power is bad, when the real message is that communism is awful.

It’s expensive. Yes. Building a nuclear power station can be eye wateringly expensive. Especially when you get your government to negotiate the deal. Hinckley Point C is scheduled to cost £33 bn. Ouch.

Nuclear would cost us a lot. But is not nearly as expensive as destroying our economy.

And the good news is there’s a new generation of small modular reactors in the works. Rolls Royce, leaders in this field, reckons they can knock them out for about £3 bn a pop.

Which means we could build 30 of them for the price of a railway to Manchester. Sorry my mistake, another railway to Manchester. I forgot. We’ve already got one.

OK, quickfire round.

Nuclear waste is bad and we have to store it in the ground. Yes. In the ground sounds scary. But then again where do you think we dug up the uranium from in the first place? Also. Advances mean a lot of the waste is actually recycled.

Nuclear bombs. Yes. They are bad. Very. But the uranium you need for a reactor and the enriched uranium you need for a bomb are about as as different as a super safe laboratory that isn’t actually a secret plague factory, and The Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Risk of unleashing Godzilla; Finally a threat we should all take seriously.

Nuclear does have real issues. But the point is those issues are not insurmountable.

At present we seem to be putting our faith in stuff that doesn’t always work, is unreliable, and produces energy that is often of limited value because it is impossible, or too expensive to store. Our strategy seems to be, let’s dump what we know which actually works, cross our fingers, and hope something better turns up.

But if nuclear is clean, safe and reliable why aren’t we embracing nuclear technology as a way to alleviate the energy crisis, and help mitigate the effects of climate change?

And why has Germany just closed its three remaining nuclear power plants even though they could have, by all accounts, carried on producing carbon free energy for years to come?

The main opposition to nuclear power comes of course, from the greens. In fact it was the powerful Green Party in Germany that demanded the closure of the plants.

It seems the Net Zero lobby doesn’t oppose nuclear power because it is unsafe or doesn’t work. But because it isn’t and it does.

There are really two sides to the green lobby. Neither of which actually benefits if we solve the problem of climate change.

On one side are the grifters. The grifters know that if climate change is presented as a never ending Total War then it provides a never ending source of money. Straight from your pocket to theirs, with new green levies, taxes, charges, subsidies and the rest. Net Zero might be set to impoverish you, but it is already making a lot of people, very, very rich.

And on the other side are the true believers. But ultimately they don’t actually believe that climate change is the real problem. They think you are. They see humanity as a sort of cancer, a blight on the planet. And so to them, cheap, abundant energy is like a duty free box of 200 Marlboro lights. Because more energy, and so more wealth, leads to more people, which to them simply means more pain for Gaia.

I don’t think, deep down, they even believe in their own Climate Apocalypse. If they genuinely felt it was an urgent problem that truly represented an existential threat to the world, then surely they would grasp at any solution.

They’re like a doomsday cult, engaged in a ceaseless battle against a wholly imagined Armageddon.  Desperately reaching for ever more weird freaky totems to ward off the end times. ULEZ zones. Fake meat. Eating insects. Heat pumps.

This week Just Stop Oil. Invaded the World Snooker Championships.

It was the most shocking thing to happen in the Crucible since Abigail Williams accused Elizabeth Proctor of witchcraft.

After ruining a table. A JSO spokesperson tweeted.

‘We know new oil and gas will kill millions…Why would ordinary people not try everything in their power to stop that?’

If they really believed that they wouldn’t be attempting to ruin snooker. They would be taking to the streets to demand more nuclear power for the developed world, the roll out of natural gas for the developing world-so they can at least move away from coal, and the fall of the CCP.

But they won’t do that. Because that doesn’t get them on telly. They’re like a neglected toddler in a playground screaming ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ while his distracted mum scrolls through Insta.

Also. They don’t see themselves as ‘ordinary people’, far from it.

They are the chosen ones. If this is a war. Then they have absolutely no trouble imagining themselves as the heroes.

They think they are rebels, outsiders, representatives of the counter culture. But they are not. When your ideology is broadly shared by the actual King of the regime you claim to want to overthrow, then you probably have to take a long hard look at your own revolutionary credentials.

I don’t want to get all WEF conspiracy theory here. Because real life is so much more complex than Klaus Schwab sitting in his lair with a gimp suited Tony Blair on a leash before him.  But it’s clear that we are currently witnessing a shift of power, away from the individual, and into the hands of governments, corporations and NGOs.

And groups like Just Stop Oil are the unwitting foot soldiers of these elite groups. They are on the front line in the battle to persuade us we must impoverish ourselves for our own good. They have become shock troops in the war against abundance. They are the advance guard making the case for bigger and ever more intrusive government. Their role is to ramp up the fear, to help persuade us that the emergency is so severe, the only way to save this teetering eco system is to remove our money and freedoms.

They are foolish, not for thinking they can change the world by arsing about on a snooker table, but for not realising their real place in the hierarchy

This week’s Grand National proved that the police have the powers and the ability to swiftly remove joyless eco protesters when it suits the powers that be to do so. Usually it doesn’t.

If there really is an impending climate disaster then there’s also a pretty clearly marked escape route. But they wont take it. Because finding practical ways to actually mitigate climate change is boring, and takes all the fun out of LARPing Armageddon.

Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and all such self regarding narcissistic groups groups need to promote climate change as an apocalypse, and not simply a problem. Because normal clever people can solve problems. But only heroes can avert an apocalypse.

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Thanks so much for reading this post. I genuinely appreciate your time.

If you enjoyed it please consider subscribing to my Substack. It really helps me grow Low Status Opinions, and it’s absolutely free. I don’t post too often so I promise I won’t spam your inbox!

I try to avoid too many conspiracy theories but the aversion to nuclear really does leave me scratching my head. If you are interested in reading more about this subject I think Michael Shellenberger is v interesting. You don’t have to agree with everything he says. But he really does open up the discussion.

I’ll try as ever to reply in kind to any good faith comments.

Thanks again for reading.