The Australian Labour party have a new pair of leaders who are much more friendly towards nuclear energy. They have put the ex-lead singer of Midnight Oil Pete Garrett in charge of environment. He has strong green credentials, but has been making statements like this:
Journalist: Are you going to set Labor in the opposite direction on nuclear power?
Peter Garrett: The criticality of climate change is of such an order it affects us in the environment, it affects us economically, it affects us socially; it’s a huge national and international issue and the solution to addressing climate change is not to build nuclear power plants in ten or fifteen or twenty years time. It’s to start reducing greenhouse gas emissions now. The Prime Minister has had eight years to put in place a national emissions trading scheme in carbon dioxide and he’s sat on his hands and done nothing. He bears the responsibility for the failure to act on climate change. The Prime Minister has sat on his hands and done nothing about climate change; he’s fiddled while Australia burns. He’s ignored Kyoto, he doesn’t provide support for the renewables sector that it so badly needs, and he won’t even take the necessary step of introducing Labor policy. Labor policy to have a national emissions trading scheme. All he’s done is create yet another taskforce. It’s nowhere near sufficient. Labor’s policy is there. The Prime Minister is very slow to take it up. It’s time he acted now.
Quite a statement, which can be read as either:
- "let's not build nuclear power plants in 10 or 15 years time, build them now and by doing such reduce greenhouse gases"
or
- "building nuclear power plants in 10 or 15 years time can be avoided by reducing greenhouse emissions using other methods now"
But I'm not sure that the second is a particularly strong argument, so I think he means the former.
