E3G

Is Nuclear Inevitable? Policy and Politics in a Carbon Constrained World

By Tom Burke

The 2007 Environmental Law Foundation annual lecture was held on 17th May at The Law Society.

E3G Founding Director Tom Burke gave the lecture – the full text follows below and is also attached in pdf format for download.

Is Nuclear Inevitable?
Policy and Politics in a Carbon Constrained World

The Environmental Law Foundation David Hall Memorial Lecture, The Law Society, London.

Address by Tom Burke CBE, 17th May 2007.

Thank you very much for the invitation to speak to you this evening. I am honoured and pleased to have received this invitation. I am honoured to have been included in the distinguished company of the previous givers of this lecture. I am pleased to have been given a reason for remembering David and reflecting on his life and accomplishments.

These days many more people are called visionaries than actually warrant the honour. David was one of those who really earned it. He had remarkable foresight, looking long and hard for the paths to an energy future that would press more lightly on the planet.

He had a remarkable store of knowledge about the role renewable energy could play in meeting human needs. But he wore his knowledge lightly, with good humour and great enthusiasm. That made him a much more effective advocate than many of the environmental community’s more ponderous true believers.

He would have been glad to see that the renewables are taken much more seriously now than they once were, but sad to see that we were still far from reaching their full potential to improve human well being.

I now want to do something rather innovative. It is normal at this point for lecturers to reframe the question in their title to answer the one they would have liked to have been given. I am simply going to answer the question. Is nuclear inevitable? No. What is more, it is irrelevant to both climate security and energy security.

We could, of course, stop here and go directly to the drinks. But this would short change the promoters of the lecture and pass up too good an opportunity to poke fun at some favourite targets of mine. So, instead, we are going to take a journey for a while through the fascinating, but sometimes bewildering, worlds of climate and energy policy and nuclear power.

Climate change is a bad problem that is getting worse. For the moment, it remains a manageable problem. But it is now clear that within the next few decades it will become an unmanageable problem unless we act decisively.

Bad as it is, climate change is a problem that is well within the envelope of our technical and economic competence to solve. If we fail it will be because we have failed to muster the political will to apply the knowledge and resources we have to tackling the problem. This would be a moral failure on a scale unmatched in history.

Some people have compared the magnitude and complexity of climate change to the Cold War and argued that we need to mobilise our energies and resources on a similar scale if we are to defeat it. I prefer another reference from history. Winston Churchill, looking at the threat to civilisation posed by Adolf Hitler, warned of the gathering storm.

He was talking about a threat that might have adversely affected the lives of tens of millions of people. Climate change is a threat that we now know with great certainty will undermine the prosperity and security of many billions of people.

Churchill once remarked that ‘If something be not done, it will do itself, and in a way that pleases no-one’. If we leave the climate to ‘do itself’ we will be roundly, and rightly, condemned by our children for our feckless disregard of their future.

It is a striking paradox that a problem which – unlike any other – will directly affect the well-being, security and prosperity of literally every single one of the six and a half billion people on the planet should produce such rancorous division between and within nations.