Left-wing Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes endorsed a “pussy boycott” to save the planet, in a “conversation on climate change” with Jane Fonda.
But even if all the world’s women joined her “pussy boycott,” it would do nothing for the planet, because the policies Oreskes supports are counterproductive: They would cause poverty and make it harder to produce enough clean energy. For example, Oreskes is a big critic of nuclear power, based on myths and double standards about energy. And Oreskes supports biofuels that are even worse for the environment than fossil fuels, and increase energy costs to consumers. (As the New York Times has noted, biofuels mandates have been an environmental disaster).
A recent study found that nuclear power is best for the environment. Yet anti-science green activists in places like Germany have still forced the closure of nuclear power plants. And they have done so even though “every major study, including a recent one by the British medical journal Lancet, finds the same thing: nuclear is the safest way to make reliable electricity,” says a long-time environment activist. “Solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste,” such as “dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.” Unlike wind farms, nuclear power plants don’t kill birds. And “wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants.” “Nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced,” notes Yale University professor Steven Novella.
Nuclear plants generate most electric power in countries like France and Slovakia, but in the U.S., nuclear power plants provide only about 18% of all power. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission makes it very expensive to construct a nuclear plant — even the application process is incredibly costly and usually takes years of unnecessary delay. The longer an application takes, and the more NRC staff hours are devoted to an application, the more the NRC charges the applicant, giving it an incentive to take many years processing an application: “NRC staff time is currently charged at almost $300/hour and applicant costs can reach tens of millions of dollars for a new reactor application discouraging development of pioneering advanced reactors to meet national clean energy goals.”
Even when nuclear plants are already operating safely and providing badly needed power, anti-nuclear activists sometimes get government officials to shut them down. Recently, however, the NRC approved the construction of a nuclear plant with an innovative design and a non-water cooled reactor.
As mainstream liberal publications like The Atlantic have noted, ideologues like Naomi Oreskes promote Malthusian ignorance and backward left-wing policies. As a scientific website notes, Oreskes and her ilk are “deeply suspicious of the role for modern technology in addressing environmental challenges such as climate change” and “global food security.” By elevating left-wing “ideology” at the expense of”pragmatism and cost-benefit analysis,” people like Oreskes promote policies that would leave the world poorer and dirtier. They are “downplaying the transformative role of the revolution launched by biologist and Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug,” which saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in India through new agricultural technology.
The agronomist Norman Borlaug, who pioneered the Green Revolution, saved perhaps a billion lives in the Third World by developing high-yield, disease-resistant crops through biotechnology. For this, he received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Medal of Honor. Yet he was smeared in the left-wing magazine The Nation, which had an irrational phobia of biotechnology, as being “the biggest killer of all.”
