Ramirez Cartoon

Thanks to No Left Turns.

Finally Seeing the Light

It only took Patrick Moore 35 years to learn what most people have known all along:

In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.

Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions -- or nearly 10 percent of global emissions -- of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely.

Every argument Mr. Moore adduces in the rest of this article in support of nuclear power has been in circulation for over three decades. They're certainly not new. Meanwhile, because of the efforts of radical environmentalists like him, our energy efforts have focussed on carbon-based fuels which have filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and acid and lined the pockets of Arab sheiks. When future historians consider the number of lives lost because of pollution and the toll taken by terrorism funded by oil-rich Muslims; when they consider the economic cost of both the damage caused by pollution and the attempts to control it; when they consider that a relatively clean and cheaper (in the long run) method of energy production was all the while available in nuclear fission, they will shake their heads at our stupidity.

We can be happy that Mr. Moore has finally seen the light, but we're entitled to ask, what took him so long?

Screwing in a Light Bulb

The question debated is "How many Darwinists does it take to screw in a light bulb." Check out Cartago for a humorous bit of satire at the expense of some of the major players in the ID/Darwinism debate.

Israel's Three Choices

Another Palestinian suicide murderer claims seven Israeli lives. Hamas justifies the atrocity by calling it a legitimate act of self-defense. Evidently, in the radical Palestinian mind, such as it is, Israeli restaurant patrons are serious threats to the safety of the Palestinian people.

Israel cannot allow the slaughter of their citizens to continue. The Palestinians have clearly shown they're not interested in living in peace with Israel. Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters puts it this way:

The Palestinians will never disarm under their present political structure. They have proven over and over again to have Israel's annihilation as their national goal. The only hope that the world has in ending this conflict is either to allow Israel to complete its withdrawal and border wall to seal off the Palestinians altogether, or to allow both sides to fight an open war with the entire area as a winner-take-all. The Palestinians have voted for this approach twice. They will not change until they understand that they still have something to lose in the process. Until the impulse for peace and rational co-existence comes into being in the West Bank and Gaza, we have to acknowledge the reality that the Palestinians do not want either.

There is a third alternative for the Israelis. They could pack up and move to Greenland. Their choices are wall, war, or walk. The last isn't likely, and the left, by opposing the first, makes the second almost inevitable. War would be tragic, but that's what the Palestinians voted for when they voted for Hamas.