New Pournelle interview

Glenn Reynolds interviews Jerry Pournelle, at PJTV.

Compare and contrast: Tom Snyder interviewed Jerry Pournelle and Durk Pearson, back in 1979.

Monbiot learning to love the nuke

Good for him. In the Grauniad: Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power. George is coming to see that civilization requires energy to operate. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Of course the Grauniad has to pair this piece with a prime example of anti-nuke hysteria, just for balance. "Fair and balanced," right.

Update: A related item from Seth Godin: "For every person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die due to coal, adjusted for the same amount of power produced..." Thanks again to Glenn Reynolds.

What happened to Greenpeace, and the environmental movement along with it

Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore has written a book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist. (No reviews at Amazon yet; I anticipate a lot of 5's and 1's from those on opposite sides.) In a similarly titled article at the Vancouver Sun, he describes some of the history of the organization and the evolution of his beliefs and program. An excerpt:

Some activists simply couldn't make the transition from confrontation to consensus; it was as if they needed a common enemy. When a majority of people decide they agree with all your reasonable ideas the only way you can remain confrontational and antiestablishment is to adopt ever more extreme positions, eventually abandoning science and logic altogether in favour of zero-tolerance policies.

The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism. The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded. The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings. Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas. To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalization than with science or ecology. I remember visiting our Toronto office in 1985 and being surprised at how many of the new recruits were sporting army fatigues and red berets in support of the Sandinistas.

I don't blame them for seizing the opportunity. There was a lot of power in our movement and they saw how it could be turned to serve their agendas of revolutionary change and class struggle. But I differed with them because they were extremists who confused the issues and the public about the nature of our environment and our place in it. To this day they use the word industry as if it were a swear word. The same goes for multinational, chemical, genetic, corporate, globalization, and a host of other perfectly useful terms. Their propaganda campaign is aimed at promoting an ideology that I believe would be extremely damaging to both civilization and the environment.

The group was infiltrated and taken over by enemies of Western civilization, following the Gramscian paradigm. I would call myself a conservationist, and many others, I'm sure, who are in favor of the continuation and advancement of industrialized civilization would as well. We are not in favor of pollution or environmental destruction, but we do not want to go back to living in huts and reading manuscripts written by hand on parchment.

One way to tell genuine environmentalists, or conservationists, from the enemies of civilization is by their attitude on nuclear power. Energy is the sine qua non of civilization. An abundance of cheap energy is what provides the leisure for all the pursuits of civilization, such as art, science, debate about law and government, and everything else beyond wresting a bare living from the land. Patrick Moore is in favor of nuclear power. How many current Greenpeacers are in favor of it? I'd venture to say very few.

Most of the movement followers are dupes, of course, not consciously enemies of Western civilization. People don't follow through their thinking. If we put the coal companies out of business, if we don't allow new nuclear plants, if we don't allow drilling for oil, all to follow the green mirage, then our energy supplies will dwindle, and we will be on the verge of a new Dark Age, certainly an end to prosperity. But the useful idiots of environmentalism don't think far enough ahead to see their own doom in the policies they espouse.

A contributor at AoSHQ has linked the article in the post State of Fear, 2011. Contributor Andy has worthwhile observations of his own to add, and some videos of Michael Crichton. The whole thing is worth the click.

Nuke the Gulf

See the update to the preceding post.

Enviros vs nukes

Ron Bailey takes a quick look back at an early round in the war of environmentalism against energy production: the breeder reactor.

I was recently at a conference on global warming where I had to read James Gustave Speth's environmentalist manifesto Red Sky at Morning: America and the Global Environmental Crisis. It's an amazingly reactionary and incoherent book. One passage that particularly irritated me dealt with fast breeder reactors. These are nuclear power plants that can produce more fuel (about 30 percent more) than they use. We would never have to mine a single pound more of uranium to produce electricity.…

in an alternative universe in which 200 reactors come online, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would be about 35 percent lower than they currently are. In other words, the reactors that Speth opposed could have been a huge part of the solution to what Speth claims is humanity's "biggest threat." Like I said, really annoying.

Read the whole thing, it's short. Comments are worthwhile also. I like what Oldcrow has to say about the true foundation of environmentalism.

Nuclear power for some

In the Jerusalem Post, May 21:

Obama OKs nuclear deal with United Arab Emirates

President Barack Obama agreed Wednesday to share US nuclear power technology with the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, giving his consent to a deal signed in the final days of George W. Bush's administration.

The pact now goes to Congress, which will have 90 days to amend or reject it.

The agreement creates a legal framework for the US to transfer sensitive nuclear items to the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven Middle Eastern states that wants nuclear power to satisfy growing demand for electricity.

Although flush with oil, the emirates imports 60 percent of the natural gas they use to generate electricity. The United Arab Emerates wants to break its dependence on outside sources for its energy needs and settled on nuclear power as the best option.

But the new head of the FERC says that here in the US we can make do with wind and solar.

Obama's chief energy regulator tells us to prepare to freeze in the dark

In the NY Times:

Energy Regulatory Chief Says New Coal, Nuclear Plants May Be Unnecessary

No new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in the United States, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said today.

"We may not need any, ever," Jon Wellinghoff told reporters at a U.S. Energy Association forum.

He's very blithe.

Wellinghoff said renewables like wind, solar and biomass will provide enough energy to meet baseload capacity and future energy demands. Nuclear and coal plants are too expensive, he added.

"I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism," he said. "Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind's going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you'll dispatch that first."

He added, "People talk about, 'Oh, we need baseload.' It's like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don't need mainframes, we have distributed computing."

The technology for renewable energies has come far enough to allow his vision to move forward, he said. For instance, there are systems now available for concentrated solar plants that can provide 15 hours of storage.

"What you have to do, is you have to be able to shape it," he added. "And if you can shape wind and you can effectively get capacity available for you for all your loads.

"So if you can shape your renewables, you don't need fossil fuel or nuclear plants to run all the time. And, in fact, most plants running all the time in your system are an impediment because they're very inflexible. You can't ramp up and ramp down a nuclear plant. And if you have instead the ability to ramp up and ramp down loads in ways that can shape the entire system, then the old concept of baseload becomes an anachronism."

How modern the thinking! How very cutting-edge. How very senseless.

Wellinghoff has never worked for an energy company. He is a lawyer who has spent most of his life as a regulator and/or "consumer advocate," i.e., one who afflicts energy companies.

In the sidebar of this 2001 interview, he lists two favorite books. The first: Ecological Democracy by Roy Morrison. This one has no Amazon reviews, but here's an approving review. An excerpt:

As industrial civilization spins into crisis, neo-fascist demagogues (Buchanan, Zhirinovsky, for example) offer a return to hierarchical order as the way out. Such alternatives must, of course, be resisted. The third path is ecological democracy, arising "from popular ferment, aspiration for a better life, intolerance of the abuse of power, and collective and personal determination to build a just and enduring community." Only community-based, democratically managed associations have the potential to reconcile human needs for both community and freedom, and to erode the power of industrialism.

That part about the "popular ferment" sounds a lot like the French Revolution, and we all know how well that went.

The second book is Steady-State Economics by Herman Daly. This has one Amazon review, a 5-star that's pure gush, but contains the line, "We live in a finite world with few renewable resouces." You can read what appears to be Chapter 5 at a website with the charming URL of dieoff dot org. Here's something that's more of a précis than a review, at the Negative Population Growth site. Excerpt:

Our first task, Daly persuasively argues, is to stop growth. Only after we have stabilized the economy at or near its present size should we determine, and move to, an optimum scale. For one thing, since our survival depends on stopping growth, it is imperative that we do so as soon as possible. Besides, settling such issues as the optimal levels of population and per capita resource use will be difficult, as it will entail searching public debate over such fundamental questions as the present generation's obligations to posterity and reproductive freedom. Achieving consensus on them will be time-consuming. Meanwhile the economy would still be growing and further damaging the ecosystem. Also, making the economy smaller can't be done without halting growth first.

In order to accomplish the goal of negative population growth and a smaller economy, three "institutional arrangements" will be needed:

(1) Maximum and minimum limits on personal income, and a ceiling on personal wealth. If growing inequality in income and wealth is not reversed, Daly argues, private property and markets will become morally dubious. This will make extending the market to include birth licenses and depletion quotas politically difficult. Moreover, curbing these inequalities would make for more modest, and environmentally supportable, consumption. Daly is committed to social justice as well as sustainability, and income and wealth limits obviously serve that goal.²⁴

Since Daly made this proposal, income and wealth inequalities have exploded. Many large incomes were acquired by gaming the system, e.g., corporation executives paying themselves opulently. This threatens to delegitimize our economic system. What's more, such rapacity sets the wrong kind of example in a limited world.

(2) Transferable birth licenses. Obviously, population growth is a major force driving resource depletion and waste generation. Stabilizing population is therefore crucial. Daly's suggestion, first propounded by economist Kenneth Boulding in 1964, is to issue each person, or perhaps each woman, a quantity of reproduction licenses equal to the replacement fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman. Each woman would get 2.1 licenses, which she could buy or sell depending on how many children she wants to have.²⁵

Daly acknowledged that the directness of the birth license plan might put people off. "It frankly recognizes that reproduction must henceforth be considered a scarce right and logically faces the issue of how best to distribute that right and whether and how to permit voluntary reallocation." Because limiting reproduction is a forbidden subject for many people, they prefer indirect discouragement of reproduction through expanding women's social roles, encouraging consumption of commodities over having more children, and so on. Birth licenses, however, are more efficient. What's more, in his view, "the direct approach requires clarity of purpose and frank objectives, which are politically inconvenient when commitment to the objective is halfhearted to begin with."²⁶

(3) Depletion quotas for resources. The best way to control throughput, Daly argues, is to control the rate at which resources, especially nonrenewables such as fossil fuels, are depleted. Limiting the quantity of resources that enters the economy necessarily also limits how much waste and pollution leaves it. Moreover, since the stock of manmade capital is made from resources, and since the human population depends on resources, controlling the rate of depletion necessarily controls how big the population and capital stock can get.

If these are his favorite books, that says a lot. The man is an Ehrlichite, like Holdren. He wants negative population growth for the US and a smaller economy. When the economy gets smaller, we call that a recession. When it doesn't start growing again, it's a Depression. Jerry Pournelle says,

Low cost energy is the key to economic growth, and nothing the government is doing would have as great an effect as a huge nuclear power program. The TVA was the best investment of the New Deal. It may be that private power would have done as well, but the cheap energy from TVA brought energy to the South. Cheap power is the key to growth; and clearly that will not happen under the Change that we can believe in.

Hold on to your hats, wallets, kids, and groceries — the Deep Greens are taking over. There will be sustainable and fashionable poverty for all, except the Nomenklatura, who will just have to keep on using those jets and living in those big houses, because their work is so important!

Nuclear?

Some have trouble pronouncing it; some can't even think it.

Jerry Taylor at The Corner links to a piece by David Owen (no relation) at The New Yorker, "Economy vs. Environment." Taylor: "[E]conomic growth is the enemy and a return to the pre-industrial age is answer." The recurring refrain of the Deep Greens. Owen goes on and on about how energy prices must be made higher, never mind the hardship that would result. He does have the sense to say

American dependence on fossil fuels isn’t going to end any time soon: solar panels and wind turbines provided only about a half per cent of total U.S. energy consumption in 2007, and they don’t work when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Replacing oil is going to require more than determination.

But the word "nuclear" is nowhere to be found in his effusion.

We have a safe source of power that does not emit carbon. Can we use it, please? The refusal of the Greens (including Obama's science advisors) to admit that nuclear power is a viable alternative to fossil fuels, even as they are trying to shut down fossil fuel production, shows that what they really want is widespread misery. Prosperity is the enemy. Or as David Owen says in conclusion,

The ultimate success or failure of Obama’s program, and of the measures that will be introduced in Copenhagen this year, will depend on our willingness, once the global economy is no longer teetering, to accept policies that will seem to be nudging us back toward the abyss.

Oh, yeah, those policies, what about them, that only "seem to be nudging us back toward the abyss"? I would say that's no seeming, it's an actual nudging, or even a shove.

Compare the discussion in comments about the Tata Nano.

Hey, Joe, I think it's 867-5309

Where you goin' with that cellphone in your hand?

I cannot, will not, try to collect all the Bidenisms here. But this one's a beauty (video at the link):

While discussing Recovery.gov, the taxpayer's stimulus guide The Ticket wrote about this morning, on CBS' "Early Show" today, Biden was asked what the address for the website was.

His clueless response undoubtedly put a smile on the faces of tech-savvy viewers.

"You know, I'm embarrassed," Biden said. Turning to someone off screen, he asked, "Do you know the website number?"

Oh, I know, it's pretty trivial, compared to some of his other silly bits. But it's just one thing after another.

And after that speech from Obama last night, in which he mentioned "energy" 14 times, and "nuclear" only once, and then in the phrase "nuclear proliferation," which as you know, Bob, always refers to weapons, I am beginning to doubt that the Obama team is quite as savvy as they would like people to think. Winging it. They're winging it.

Green, green, rocky road. Promenade in green. Who do you love?

Thanks as so often to the indispensable Instapundit, who says, "I mean, it’s not as if you’d put Biden in charge of something you wanted to succeed . . . ."

Stimulate with one hand, strangle with the other

Of course you need two left hands. Calling all Moties! Oh, that's it — we've been infiltrated by space aliens from beyond the Coalsack Nebula! (Oh, all right, the Moties have two right hands. So they are mirror Moties, from a parallel universe.)

Regulating industry does not serve to stimulate the economy. If we had people in government with any real-world experience at all, they would realize this.

NY Times:

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet, according to top Obama administration officials.

The decision, which most likely would play out in stages over a period of months, would have a profound impact on transportation, manufacturing costs and how utilities generate power. It could accelerate the progress of energy and climate change legislation in Congress and form a basis for the United States’ negotiating position at United Nations climate talks set for December in Copenhagen.

That would be a profound negative impact. Where are the nukes? Has anyone explained to these people that while plants take in CO2 and give out O2 during the day, they do the reverse at night? Maybe if we put grow-lights in the forests to keep the plants awake, they could do photosynthesis all the time. No, the Democrats would not like that either. Sleep deprivation is torture. And the electricity would have to come from somewhere. No, wait, we don't need grow-lights — we need space mirrors! No more night! That's the answer. Hope, change, and light. Oh, well, anything to get the space program re-activated. Though I'd rather see a bunch of private enterprise space projects.

If California and Florida weren't already full, I'd be thinking about moving to a warmer climate. Rather than waiting for it to come to me.

Who likes Obama, and why?

Also at Hot Air: prominent on the wall of the newly opened Obama office in Houston is a Cuban flag, decorated or defaced with the iconic high-contrast Che-in-a-beret image. The Hillary! ad below is pathetic and sadly funny; the Obama decor, sinister, and worrisome in a more serious way. It is indicative of the emptiness of the Obama campaign that any rebel with or without a cause feels attracted to it. "We want the world, and we want it NOW!" Everything for everybody, except of course the people we're taking that stuff from, for the greater good; or we're gonna hold our breath, or raise a lot of taxes, or something. (Aside: It is universally agreed that the way to stimulate the economy is to loosen credit, or as with the current bill, just hand out cash. Why do Democrats and Socialists and such think that doing the reverse, i.e. raising taxes, making it harder to do business, will not slow down the economy? To campaign on "the economy is bad, so we must raise taxes" just makes no sense. And see No Recession by Larry Kudlow.)

Update: Make that two of those Che-in-a-beret Cuban flags and a "peace sign" flag. Why would the office of a US Democratic Party candidate have Cuban Communist Party symbols as decor? It is a puzzlement. I wonder if any readers remember that the peace sign stands, not for peace, but specifically for nuclear disarmament, and is still claimed as their logo by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. (Who also oppose nuclear power; which means they must support coal-burning, right? But I'm sure they are opposed to global warming.) History of the symbol.

Charles has a follow-up to a tendentious response by James Joyner: Outside the Beltway and Off the Rails. You wouldn't fly a hammer-and-sickle, it would be a historical curiosity. Likewise the noise some are making about Confederate flags here and there: the Confederacy has been out of business for going on a hundred and fifty years. Cuba is still currently Communist. And another followup: We Got Mail! In which letter-writers reveal that, as I suspected, there are those about who have no clue about the historical Che Guevara, but have faith in the mythical one.

Another update: Ace of Spades adds a comment. And still more on this at Lone Star Times (one, two, three, four posts so far.) Maybe it's just one flag, relocated between TV shoots.

Fausta has a (Che-flag-free) Obama roundup: Foreign millions for Obama.

And another update: Daniel Henninger in the WSJ, by way of Glenn Reynolds:

Listen closely to that Tuesday night Wisconsin speech. Unhinge yourself from the mesmerizing voice. What one hears is a message that is largely negative, illustrated with anecdotes of unremitting bleakness. Heavy with class warfare, it is a speech that could have been delivered by a Democrat in 1968, or even 1928.

Here is the edited version, stripped of the flying surfboard:

"Our road will not be easy . . . the cynics. . . where lobbyists write check after check and Exxon turns record profits . . . That's what happens when lobbyists set the agenda. . . It's a game where trade deals like Nafta ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart . . . It's a game . . . CEO bonuses . . . while another mother goes without health care for her sick child . . . We can't keep driving a wider and wider gap between the few who are rich and the rest who struggle to keep pace . . . even if they're not rich . . ."

Here's his America: "lies awake at night wondering how he's going to pay the bills . . . she works the night shift after a full day of college and still can't afford health care for a sister who's ill . . . the senior I met who lost his pension when the company he gave his life to went bankrupt . . . the teacher who works at Dunkin' Donuts after school just to make ends meet . . . I was not born into money or status . . . I've fought to bring jobs to the jobless in the shadow of a shuttered steel plant . . . to make sure people weren't denied their rights because of what they looked like or where they came from . . . Now we carry our message to farms and factories."

[sarcasm] What an awful country we live in. Let's just tear the whole thing down and start over. Change! This "freedom" business really is not working. Let's try something else. Like taking billions away from the people of this country to give to the governments of other countries, as specified in Obama's pet legislation, the Global Poverty Bill. [/sarcasm off]

Ann Althouse posts on the Henninger article: Obama's message is just too depressing. She quotes parts of the article that I omitted, and omits the parts that I quoted.

And an important post from Neo-neocon, about hope and false hope: Obama: too young at heart.

Yes, there is such a thing as false hope, and it can be as dangerous as a cancer patient’s refusal to undergo a difficult chemotherapy that offers decent odds of survival in favor of a course of laetrile that offers nothing but empty promises. And yet, hope springs eternal—false and otherwise.

My goodness, this post is going on much too long. But one more update, a sidenote on Che Guevara: It seems he was a Galway man! Or a grandson of Galway, at any rate. (Via a commenter at The Jawa Report.)

Oh, what the heck, one more: In Focus: The Sickly Deification of Obama.

Micro-nukes coming even sooner than minis

Or, a nuke on every block. Who needs a nationwide grid when you can have local power anywhere or everywhere?

The Toshiba micro-nuke.

Thanks to Instapundit, who asks, "Where do I order one?"

What mini-nukes? These mini-nukes.

Can we have mini-nukes?

SteveF at Daily Pundit links to the greatest thing since cold fusion.

Nuke to the Future
By Dave Maass

Published: November 21, 2007

The portable nuclear reactor is the size of a hot tub. It’s shaped like a sake cup, filled with a uranium hydride core and surrounded by a hydrogen atmosphere. Encase it in concrete, truck it to a site, bury it underground, hook it up to a steam turbine and, voila, one would generate enough electricity to power a 25,000-home community for at least five years.

The company Hyperion Power Generation was formed last month to develop the nuclear fission reactor at Los Alamos National Laboratory and take it into the private sector. If all goes according to plan, Hyperion could have a factory in New Mexico by late 2012, and begin producing 4,000 of these reactors.

Not quite a Shipstone, but awfully good! Ever since the local power company shut down our local (coal-burning) power plant, then was bought out by the big regional power company, I have hoped to see local nodes return to the grid. In the old days, when the coal-burning plant was still on line, regional blackouts did not affect the island, since we had local power.

The brighter side of global warming

One of Jerry Pournelle's readers points out a paper in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons [Yes, it's a right-wing mag for capitalist doctors. So?] by, among others, Arthur Robinson of Access to Energy (started by Petr Beckmann, who was previously mentioned here in Al Gore's electric bill). Robinson's quite an interesting character, you might say eccentric, but clearly brilliant for some value of brilliant. This paper has plenty of graphs and footnotes. It is in .pdf format. There's a small version, just under a megabyte, and a high-res color version, about 5.5 megabytes. I'll quote the conclusion here:

CONCLUSIONS

There are no experimental data to support the hypothesis that increases in human hydrocarbon use or in atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are causing or can be expected to cause unfavorable changes in global temperatures, weather, or landscape. There is no reason to limit human production of CO2, CH4, and other minor green house gases as has been proposed (82,83,97,123).

We also need not worry about environmental calamities even if the current natural warming trend continues. The Earth has been much warmer during the past 3,000 years without catastrophic effects. Warmer weather extends growing seasons and generally improves the habitability of colder regions.

As coal, oil, and natural gas are used to feed and lift from poverty vast numbers of people across the globe, more CO2 will be released into the atmosphere. This will help to maintain and improve the health, longevity, prosperity, and productivity of all people.

The United States and other countries need to produce more energy, not less. The most practical, economical, and environmentally sound methods available are hydrocarbon and nuclear technologies. Human use of coal, oil, and natural gas has not harmfully warmed the Earth, and the extrapolation of current trends shows that it will not do so in the foreseeable future. The CO2 produced does, however, accelerate the growth rates of plants and also permits plants to grow in drier regions. Animal life, which depends upon plants, also flourishes, and the diversity of plant and animal life is increased.

Human activities are producing part of the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere. Mankind is moving the carbon in coal, oil, and natural gas from below ground to the atmosphere, where it is available for conversion into living things. We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of this CO2 increase. Our children will therefore enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed.

It's a pleasant change to see someone looking on the bright side.

Colder:

Warmer:I know which picture I'd prefer to be in.

Al Gore's Electric Bill

Looks like Al Gore is using enough juice to warm a fair portion of the globe himself.

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Via Glenn Reynolds.

More at Captain Ed's, with discussion of "carbon credits" in comments. Concerning which Ecototality points out a Nashville Tennesseean article which mentions that

Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, through which he and others pay for offsets. The firm invests the money in solar, wind and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe…

Translation: Gore isn’t just buying carbon offsets - he’s buying them through his own investment firm, perfectly demonstrating how the rich will get richer via “cap and trade” by posing as friends of the earth.

Gore uses polluting energy and then “punishes” himself by investing in his own green-energy investment fund. [But see update, below.]

Al Gore has been using the environment as a hobby horse, and he has ridden it pretty far. Some of those who arrived at the party sooner are leaving, now that it's become a riot. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, now runs Greenspirit and Greenspirit Strategies. An article in the NY Times today about Stewart Brand, Mister Whole Earth, shows that he like Moore has become an advocate for nuclear power, no longer an opponent. Via Glenn Reynolds, who says

Environmentalism should be about good planetary hygiene and honest science, not romantic Luddism.

I agree. On nuclear power, a persuasive book that should be right next to Helen Caldecott's Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, is Petr Beckmann's The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear. There was also an Ace edition with a much prettier cover.

Update March 7 2007: Well, maybe he's not exactly buying them from himself. This story just has me more confused:

Gore's Company Says He's Not Profiting from 'Carbon Offsets'

… Al Gore is not profiting from his crusade against global warming, a spokesman for an investment firm co-founded by the former vice president said Tuesday. … The confusion, Campbell said, arose because GIM pays to offset the energy use of its operations and the personal emissions of its 23 employees, including Gore.

So, the firm will cover the cost to offset the energy use at Gore's home, or his global jet travel, as it would the offset cost of any other employee, Campbell said.

But Iain Murray at NRO seems able to make sense of it:

So he, himself, personally is not actually paying for any carbon offsets at all.