Will the Climate Bill Nuke Earth Day?
by Harvey Wasserman
The Climate Bill is due on Earth Day. By all accounts it will be a nuclear bomb.
It will be the ultimate challenge of the global grassroots green movement to transform it into something that can actually save the planet.
For the atomic power industry, the bill will cap a decade-long $640-million-plus virtual cleansing of its radioactive image.
It will have the Obama Administration and Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC) embracing very substantial taxpayer subsidies for building new nuclear plants.
Ditto new offshore drilling and “clean coal.” The markers have been laid for a greenwashed business-as-usual approach toward pretending to deal with global climate change and the life-threatening pollution in which our corporate power structure is drowning us. All without actually threatening certain corporate profits.
From “An Inconvenient Truth” to Obama’s impending Earth Day address, the official emphasis is on each of us, as individuals. To be sure, we ALL must consume smarter, use less and recycle more. Since the first Earth Day, all these great green ideas have had an undeniable impact.
Some corporations have also learned that pollution is by definition a form of waste, and that to actually go green is to become more profitable.
But some technologies and fuel sources have proved simply unworkable on a survivable planet. Topping the list is atomic power.
Once sold as “too cheap to meter,” atomic reactors are too expensive to matter—except for massive taxpayer subsidies.
The first commercial reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1957. Since then, the industry has failed to solve its radioactive waste problem, failed to find meaningful private liability insurance and failed to find unsubsidized private financing for new reactors.
The handouts in the Climate Bill are sorry testimony to all that. But there’s more.
All reactors are indefensible targets for terror and error. As at Fermi, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the potential for disaster is apocalyptic.
All reactors kill nearby living things—human and otherwise—from “normal” radiation releases.
All reactors also emit substantial toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases in mining, milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication, transportation, waste storage and other related operations.
Reactors in France, Alabama and elsewhere which have been forced shut because they super-heat rivers and lakes—all in the name of “fighting global warming.”
Selling the falsehoods that atomic energy is “carbon free,” successful in France and can “fight climate change” has been dirty and expensive.
Along the way, the industry has hired a bevvy of flacks with marginal green credentials.
But on Earth Day we may see its crowning achievement.
Already the Administration has pledged $8.33 billion in loan guarantees to fund a double-reactor project in Georgia. The designs have not yet been certified, the price tag is soaring, there’s bitter debate over where the cash will come from and what fees should be attached, and the state’s ratepayers are on the hook even if the plant never generates electricity.
But the Administration wants more than $50 billion in loan guarantees to repeat the process elsewhere. Kerry-Lieberman-Graham have toyed with even bigger subsidies, in various forms, ranging to $100 billion and more.
Offshore drilling and “clean coal” also seem poised for new handouts.
It’s not clear what the Earth gets in exchange. Cap and trade, once the centerpiece of the whole deal, is gone. A carbon tax does not seem to be on the table. There will certainly be subsidies for various Solartopian technologies, and a headline-grabbing “surprise” or two.
But exactly what the barons of fossil/nuke will offer to justify their massive cash infusions is not yet clear.
All that’s certain is that this Earth Day, the Climate Bill will jack the debate to a whole new level.
Given soaring global carbon levels and a wasteful, obsolete economic infrastructure in serious decline, we are clearly at the precipice.
The Administration, the Congress and the country will have to decide: will we continue to subsidize failed atomic technologies and catastrophic fossil mining and drilling whose corporate backers have apparently unlimited funds for lobbying and PR?
Or do we finally turn to the truly green technologies and ways of living that can save both our planet and our economy?
The final battle starts Thursday. The outcome is up to us.
Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.
I found this comment to the orginal article on Common Dreams. Posting it here as I thought it was a good comment and one that got me thinking, lol.
Visiting Professor April 18th, 2010 11:25 am
They are doing to the climate bill what they did to the health care bill: packing it full of a variety of outright gifts to corporations, and dressing it up with a few green environmental throw-aways to fool the population.
That is why all of these things are crammed together in one big bill–it helps hide the corruption and outright taxpayer theft.
Each of these different issues should be considered in stand-alone legislation, so that clear arguments can be made about each one of them and nothing is snuck in behind the scenes, and pork barrel deals are averted.
In the current political climate, that would not guarantee a positive (democratic) result, but it would at least put legislators on record about their support of these individual items.
Ah, to live in such morally bankrupt times is such a huge spiritual burden.
Professor,
There is some basic truths in your comment. It is a sad day when corruption wins over doing things the honest way. Unless we get real election campaign reform there will be nothing that we the American people can do to change things. If the system is broken because of corruption and greed than it doesn’t matter who we send because in this environment they too will become corrupted. The question becomes how are we going to achieve our goal of real election campaign reform to make sure that we have honest government?
Health Care Bill, Climate Change Bill, or anything else are Bills that are being passed by people in many casees who are just voting the way they are told to vote. That too is something that no one wants to talk about. Do we even have honest men who take the time to do their own research on the Bills and voting the way they feel is best and not because he is told to vote for it by those who hold the real seat of power in this country.
So do we overcome all the struggles that are in our way to stop us from winning? I think we must at least try to fight and do the right thing. The children deserve that we adults fight for their future.
I have hanging in my room the first American flag or as it is better known as the colonial flag. That is the flag my ancestors fought for and were willing to die for. Those American patriots were willing to loose life and fortune for. That is the flag I fight for. Everyone has a flag that they fight under. Some of us have more than one flag they fight for.
Do you have a pic of this colonial flag, I’m keen to see it.