Sunday 3 February 2008

Union leader and a nuclear Australia

The new leader of the AWU wants security for Australian manufacturing businesses and jobs. That means high quality, reliable power - and lots of it, which probably means nuclear in the coming, low carbon world.

See the full report from The Age.

Paul Howes is the new national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, the nation's biggest and most powerful blue-collar union. He was recently invited to the University of California, San Diego, and Stanford University to take part in the Australia-America Leadership Dialogue.

These days he insists Australia has to have cheap energy to ensure it maintains a manufacturing industry and advocates a bipartisan debate on whether Australia should embrace nuclear power. "No one with any credibility disputes climate change," he says.

"If we are going to be a country that makes things — and we have to be — then we need power, we need power that doesn't produce excessive greenhouse gases, and so we have to look at nuclear power.

Paul is not alone in his left-leaning support for nuclear power. Gweneth Cravens, Stewart Brand and Patrick Moore as well as bloggers NNadir at DailyKos, Left Atomics, Robert Merkel and Nuclear Green [added after receipt of the comment below - thanks Charles] are some other examples.

More and more left-leaning political, social and environmental leaders are coming to appreciate the true potential of safe, reliable nuclear generated electricity.

2 comments:

  1. Hay Nuclear Green (tp://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/ )
    is to say the least moderately to the American left. I am really pro environment to. I see ideological "Greens" as being extremely anti-progressive, and as having betrayed environment values.

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  2. I think the point, Charles, is that those mentioned are *not* ideologically conservative, a designation almost always, deservdly or not, applied to those who oppose the so-called environmentalists who are themselves, as you point out, hardly progressive.

    I think it's important to note, as the NEI has done, that pro-nuclear sentiment can run the gambit from moderate left and liberal to harder leftists like myself.

    David

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