BURYING NUCLEAR WASTE SAFELY

Of course NOTHING is ever safe to the Greens

Nuclear power is the only form of electricity generation that will keep us happy. It does not contribute to global warming. It does not spread itself in ugly swaths across remote hillsides. It is by far the safest form of power generation ever devised. It can satisfy large energy demands from an increasingly energy-hungry world. It reduces dependence on oil supplies from the Middle East. Its own raw material is enormously abundant.

The nub, of course, is the waste. It was waste that got all over Karen Silkwood. It is reprocessing waste that has caused all the problems at Sellafield. It is waste that is focused on by all the anti-nuclearist greens and it is waste that has meant governments have been wary for the past 20 years of doing anything about nuclear power. Waste, though, is not a technical problem, or at least does not need to be. It is a political problem, founded on irrational fears of nuclear power. It is those political fears that have starved research into the technical solutions of the necessary money.

An English geologist has come up with one of the most ingenious ideas yet suggested. Dr Fergus Gibb, a specialist in igneous rocks at Sheffield University who has done mould-breaking research into the beautiful columnar dolerites of the Hebrides, has suggested that the really high-grade nuclear waste should be returned to the earth and allowed, in effect, to melt itself back into the rocks from which the nuclear ores were originally mined.

Gibb's idea has a brilliant circularity about it. The very heat that nuclear material generates, which is at the heart of much of the difficulty of storing the waste at all, could actually be put to use. His idea is to drill enormously deep holes right into the granite of the continental crust, perhaps 5,000 metres down, at the bottom of which it is quite hot anyway: about 900C. Add some canisters of high-level nuclear waste and the whole bottom of the shaft turns molten. The waste is then "engulfed", in Gibb's word, by the surrounding rock, which would resolidify in a matter of weeks. The waste would be entombed for millions of years until erosion would again expose it. By then the nuclear material will have lost its potency. Gibb calls his solution "the granite coffin".

And as for the perennial green wish that people would use less energy: that, more than ever, seems like hoping for rivers to flow uphill. Only nuclear power has the capacity, the responsiveness and the cleanness to address this nest of problems. And Fergus Gibb's granite coffin may well be the key.

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SUVS VERSUS COWS

SUVs (sports utility vehicles), also known as 4x4s, are big ugly brutes. Politicians are lining up to insult them, to call for more taxes on them and to demand their exclusion from cities. Ken Livingstone thinks that the drivers are "idiots"..... An apparently more soundly-based criticism comes from Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat MP, who is against SUVs because of their oversize "environmental footprint". The Toyota Land Cruiser has one of the biggest "footprints" of them all, spewing out 277 grammes of carbon dioxide every kilometre.

Shocked? You needn't be. It is not much different from what an ordinary big car produced a decade ago. There has been a wondrous reduction in gas emissions from all cars. But let us assume that Mr Baker truly thinks, as he says he does, that these much-reduced emissions are a serious matter. In that case, Mr Baker must be also, if he is logical, deeply concerned about cows.

A single dairy cow belches and farts 114 kilos of methane a year. It is a methane machine. Methane is far more lethal as a greenhouse gas - assuming that one believes in all this - than carbon dioxide. It is 23 times more potent, although it does not last so long in the atmosphere. The methane produced by a single cow is equivalent to 2,622 kilos of carbon dioxide.

A Toyota Land Cruiser, meanwhile, if driven an average mileage, doles out 3,722 kilos a year. So a cow does 70 per cent of the damage of a Toyota - even more if you add on the methane given off by its manure. Given that a cow does so much environmental damage, anyone sincere about greenhouse gases should be demanding that they are banned or, at the very least, heavily taxed.....

Mr Baker and his ilk should also be demanding the draining of Britain's - and the world's - wetlands. Natural wetlands are an even bigger source of methane than cows. He would harangue farmers in the Third World about their badly-maintained rice paddies. They are number three in the league table of methane production.

He should be calling for the killing of the wildebeest. Wildebeest are ruminants, like cows, and as they migrate across East Africa each year they belch and fart unnumbered tonnes of methane. Yet Mr Baker says nothing about incompetent Third World farmers or killing wildebeest. He is rude only about SUVs. Why? Because his agenda is nothing to do with greenhouse gases. He just hates the rich. It is quite normal to hate the rich. But it is posturing to hate the rich and dress it up as righteous concern for the future of the planet.

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ANOTHER KYOTO FARCE

The United Nations has not had much to celebrate recently. Perhaps that is why it has made such a fanfare about the Kyoto protocol, the UN-brokered treaty on climate change that comes into force on Wednesday. The agreement requires developed countries to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, which produce the greenhouse gases blamed for causing climate change. The treaty, drawn up in 1997, is widely considered the most important international agreement on environmental issues. But it quickly ran into trouble as developed nations balked at the difficulty of complying with it. The US rejected the treaty as unfair and its future looked in doubt until Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, finally ratified it late last year, after pressure from the European Union. Klaus Toepfer, UN under-secretary general, says: "I'm happy that all these pessimists have been proved wrong. We have proved that in this globalised world there is also the chance of globalised action."

But amid today's celebrations there are signs that key provisions may never work properly. Chief among these is the clean development mechanism, which allows developed countries offset some of their own greenhouse gas emissions by financing projects that cut those in developing nations. In theory, clean development projects cut overall greenhouse gas emissions but there are fears that projects are not gaining approval quickly enough, jeopardising the treaty. Kyoto binds developed nations to cut emission levels by 2012, compared with those of 1990. Recognising that developed countries' emissions are greater than poorer counterparts', the protocol placed reduction targets only on rich countries. But poorer nations are rapidly industrialising, shifting the balance of carbon dioxide output.

The Pew Centre on Global Climate Change, a US-based research organisation, found China was the second-biggest emitter in 2000, responsible for 14.8 per cent of the world's emissions against the US's 20.6 per cent and the EU's 14 per cent. Persuading developing countries to sign up to emissions reduction is difficult. They resent the idea that the developed world grew rich fuelled by coal, oil and gas while they might be denied the chance to do so.

The clean development mechanism allows companies and governments in developed countries to buy emissions reduction "credits" by investing in projects in developing countries that reduce emissions. Curbing the use of fossil fuels requires renewable energy sources--hydroelectricity, wind, wave and tidal power--and in the longer term, developing new power sources, such as hydrogen. Poor countries lack the funds for such investments, so the clean development mechanism helps bring these technologies to the developing world. The World Bank estimates the potential value of clean development investment in the developing world at between $12.5bn and $25bn.

The UN says so few have been approved because companies have been waiting until the Kyoto agreement came into force. Others discern a different reason. Non-governmental organisations feared the clean development mechanism would become a loophole, allowing polluters to continue to pollute at home while claiming credit for foreign projects that would have gone ahead in any case. Hence schemes qualify for clean development status only if their backers can show they would not be viable without the financial investment they will receive as part of the mechanism.

James Cameron, partner at the boutique investment bank Climate Change Capital and a lawyer involved in the protocol negotiations, says everyone failed to recognise that this extra burden vastly reduced the number of projects likely to go ahead. "You are forcing investors in these projects to lie; as they have to tell their financial backers that the projects are going to make lots of money, but you have to tell the [UN] that they wouldn't be financially viable, because then they could have gone ahead anyway," he explains.

He says the clean development mechanism should be redefined at the annual Kyoto meeting in November, likely to be held in Canada, to allow projects that would have been financially viable without the added assistance of the UN. But modifying the protocol is a painful process and time is running out. This stage of Kyoto expires in 2012 but clean development projects need years to come to fruition.

The World Bank estimates it takes about five years to design, finance, gain approval for and build a project, such as a wind farm or geo-thermal plant. Unless many more such projects are rapidly approved, the Kyoto protocol may yet come unstuck.

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The new religion is Global Warming

The UN finally got what it wanted. The Kyoto Climate Change treaty becomes international law this month on Wednesday. The treaty went into full effect with the approval by the Russian Federation, even without the support of the United States. Time will tell if and when the treaty will begin to affect the U.S. economy. What is certain is that truth and reason had no part in the process. Global warming has become a new religion. No one is supposed to question whether it is a fact. I did in the December 2004 issue of The DeWeese Report ("There is no man-made global warming," Volume 10, Issue 12). For my trouble I was labeled a "moron," a "liar;" one who wants to "blow up the world," and just plain "evil" to name a few from a mass of mail I received.

In particular, my article stated that there is no scientific evidence to support claims of man-made global warming. I pointed out that there is division among scientists and that there is no "consensus" among them. I also reported that there are scientists who promote political agendas over truth to keep the grants coming in. And I said that the UN's 1996 report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was edited at the last minute to remove two very important paragraphs that specifically said science showed no clear evidence of man-made climate change. Those were all facts.

Apparently I'm a moron for reporting them because as one letter said, "Everyone knows global warming is real." In response to these Luddites, I simply present this: A federal hurricane research scientist named Chris Landsea has resigned from the UN-sponsored climate assessment team because his group's leader had politicized the process. Landsea said there was little evidence to justify Kevin Trenberth's assertion in October that global warming was responsible for the strong hurricanes experienced this past year and that "the North Atlantic hurricane Season of 2004 may well be a harbinger of the future." Said Landsea in his resignation letter, "It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity had been due to global warming. My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy." Landsea closed his resignation letter by saying, "I personally cannot in good faith contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound."

There you have it. Two kinds of scientists. One standing for true science based on the facts. The other pushing a political agenda that says science be damned, our global religion is at stake. Global Warming has become a religion that the faithful have vowed to follow no matter what the true facts may show. Global Warming is a theory, nothing more, and large numbers of scientists around the world are beginning to question its validity. There is no consensus of support.

The fact is the Kyoto Protocol will have absolutely no effect on climate change, but the faithful demand that it be implemented anyway, because "we have to do something." In 1990, Timothy Wirth, who later became Bill Clinton's Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs said, "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong we will be doing the right thing."

Global Warming is nothing more than a euphemism for redistribution of wealth from the rich, development nations to jealous dictatorships who refuse to allow their citizens the right to gain their own wealth through free markets. It's about political redistribution from strong, independent sovereign nations into the hands of a power-hungry global elite cowering in the United Nations. These are the same cowardly scoundrels who used to try to rule the world through global communism. Today they pretend that the same lies have something to do with protecting the environment.

The truth is there is no man-made global warming. There's only the scam of an empty global religion designed to condemn human progress and sucker the feeble minded into worldwide human misery. I rest my case. Amen.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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