SUNDAY TIMES
Green rebels march to a techno beat
They don't hate nuclear, GM or even fracking. A group of British environmentalists is changing the green debate
Michael Hanlon
24 June 2012
'Nuclear power — yes, please!" Could it be true? Are the greens about to embrace nuclear power? Hard to imagine, perhaps, but a revolution is taking place in the environmental movement. After decades of fervent, often hysterical, opposition to new technologies such as genetically modified (GM) food and atomic energy, a new generation of technocratic greens is rejecting the tenets of the campaign. There are even hints that the most influential environmental organisation of all may be about to make a historic U-turn on nuclear power. In fact, all this is looking like environmentalism's clause 4 moment, akin to when the Labour party ditched its pledge on nationalised industry.
In March, George Monbiot, the arch-green and veteran anti-nuclear campaigner, wrote an article in The Guardian in which he called for an atomic renaissance as the only way to combat climate change — to the horror of his fellow greens and much of the newspaper's readership. The chairman of the Environment Agency, Lord Smith of Finsbury, the author and campaigner Mark Lynas, the Green party activist Chris Goodall and the former Greenpeace UK director Stephen Tindale had previously announced that they too were going to lobby for atomic power. The tide is also turning on GM food. Last month an organisation called Take the Flour Back,
greens from the traditional mould, organised a demonstration at the Rothamsted plant research institute in Hertfordshire. It was a damp squib.
Two things seem to be going on: first, the overwhelming threat of climate change is focusing the minds of the more technologically minded greens, who are coming round to the view that nuclear power is the lesser of two evils; far from perfect but a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels that promises a quicker and cheaper climate-change fix than wind or waves. Second, there is the growing realisation that two hated technologies — atomic energy and genetic modification — are turning out to be far less harmful than was believed. Nobody has ever been harmed by eating GM food. In the case of nuclear power, a catastrophe last year had an unlikely effect: persuading many that we must learn to love the atom.
As Monbiot says: "The event which converted me to the cause of atomic energy was, paradoxically, the Fukushima disaster. A crappy old plant with antiquated safety features was hit by one of the biggest earthquakes and biggest tsunamis on record, yet it remains the case that no one has yet received a dose of radiation known to be lethal." There is also a growing realisation that by focusing on atomic power and GM food, the greens have allowed far more important threats to pass almost unnoticed. "If all the effort expended on opposing nuclear power had been directed into contesting habitat loss and biodiversity depletion," Monbiot says, "we might have got somewhere."
Lynas, who used to be a hardliner, says he cannot recognise his former self. "I never questioned the orthodoxy on either GM or nuclear for many years as an activist," he says. "To differ from the mainstream would have been unthinkable. For me this changed when I left the activist bubble and began to write science books . . . I began to ask for evidence to back up assertions and actually check up on references."
As Tracey Brown, managing director of the think tank Sense about Science, says: "Working out how to solve those problems inevitably means having to look at the world — the natural world — as it really is, rather than as you'd like it to be." Is this techno-greenery spreading to Friends of the Earth, the biggest green organisation of all? Ten days ago Mike Childs, its chief scientist and head of policy, seemed to suggest that the organisation was no longer wedded to the abolition of nuclear power in Britain. In an interview published on Lynas's blog, he said Friends of the Earth had commissioned a review by the Tyndall climate change research centre in Manchester to decide what its nuclear policy should be.
"They'll go through a process of pulling together the arguments for and against nuclear power, both new nuclear power stations, extending existing stations, and some of the fast breeder [a type of reactor] ideas on the table," he said. Since then, Friends of the Earth, while admitting that Childs had been quoted correctly, has denied that it is about to become pro- nuclear, saying nothing has been decided, the organisation is strictly "evidence-based" and it will wait for the Tyndall report before reassessing its policy. However, even the possibility that Friends of the Earth UK is questioning its nuclear stance will horrify many of its supporters.
The green tectonic plates may be shifting in Britain, but abroad they seem to be as fixed as ever. In America, the environmental movement tends to be a localised affair, concentrating on individual habitats and species. Although Al Gore, the climate change campaigner and former vice-president, has spoken of his "scepticism" about nuclear power, this is prompted by concern about the proliferation of nuclear weapons rather than environmental threat. In Germany, the power of the hardline green lobby is shown by the fact that Chancellor Angela Merkel — a physicist by training — last year cancelled her country's civil nuclear programme in the wake of Fukushima. This, it has been calculated, will lead to an increase in carbon emissions of more than 70m tonnes a year.
In France, the green movement is almost silent on nuclear, but fervently opposes GM food. Indeed, it is likely that a quiet deal has been reached to placate environmental sensibilities, to allow the French nuclear programme to run unopposed while keeping "natural" French food and farming sacrosanct. Many of the protesters at Rothamsted last month were French. In some ways what is happening is not new. While the green movement has, since the 1930s, been dominated by people who seem to reject the modern world and its comforts, there have always been dissenters.
Indeed the man many see as the high priest of modern environmentalism, the nonagenarian British scientist James Lovelock (who coined the word "Gaia" to describe the Earth and its biosphere) has championed nuclear power as the only solution to climate change. Last week Lovelock endorsed fracking, a controversial process to extract gas supplies, saying Britain rushed too quickly into trying to develop renewable energy sources with
schemes that are "largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant".
The new generation of heterodox greens clearly have their work cut out, when their home country is as wedded to the old romantic orthodoxies as ever. Heretics never have it easy. Both Monbiot and Lynas confirm that they have lost "good friends" after their public recantations. As Lynas says: "Some people have their green ideology as such a deep identity issue that they can't move beyond it, and are very hostile, which has been difficult for me and others. Speaking out on this has been a big emotional drain for many years, and very painful at times."
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