The climate-change crowd’s running on empty

You probably know who the first two are. Browne is the singer-songwriter from California who took the lead in organizing the no-nukes campaign by all those people who play electric guitars. Gore is the former vice president who won a Nobel Prize for campaigning against climate change.

As for Rowe, he’s a corporate executive who until a couple weeks ago was doing a wonderful job employing the views of Gore to combat the views of Browne.

Rowe is chairman and CEO of Exelon Corp., which owns a number of nuclear plants, including Oyster Creek in Ocean County. He wants to build more nuclear plants, and in that regard he has my sympathy.

Not that that will do him much good.

I could fill this space every day with columns arguing that the next generation of nuclear power will be safe. I could argue that we need a source of massive amounts of energy with which to run all those plug-in hybrid cars that will help us cut oil imports.

Will people listen to me? Not a chance. They’ll listen to rock stars. At this very moment, Browne is probably sitting somewhere with a guitar trying to figure out what rhymes with “Fukushima.”

As for Gore, he’s got to be wondering what’s left of his vision of a world in which carbon emissions will be drastically reduced. The former vice president has always been ambivalent on nuclear power, for the simple reason that it is the sole major source of carbon-free energy. Imagine you could eliminate the emissions of 23 million cars, for example. That’s every tree-hugger’s dream. It also offers the equivalent carbon-dioxide reductions achieved by the 17 nuclear reactors owned by Exelon.

As for the CEO of that company, a Forbes Magazine article on Rowe last year told of how he had sold off Exelon’s fossil-fuel-powered plants years ago to concentrate on nuclear power.

“I thought climate legislation would come sooner or later and that I’d rather have my money in the nuke fleet,” he was quoted as saying.

The magazine reported how the Chicago-based businessman has lobbied a certain Chicago-based politician to achieve those carbon caps, either through a cap-and-trade bill or through expanded Environmental Protection Agency controls over carbon.

Sure enough, in January 2008, candidate Barack Obama said this about the effects the carbon penalties in his energy plan would have on coal-fired plants: “It will bankrupt them.”

What was going to replace those coal plants in the president’s plan? Well, Obama’s taste in music runs more to jazz than Jackson Browne, and he’s no fan of Browne’s views on nukes either. Obama’s energy plan calls for the construction of 100 new nuke plants in America. Great idea — till the tsunami.

Obama’s alliance with Rowe provides proof that politics makes strange bedfellows. The nuke crowd and the global-warming crowd have always had an interesting relationship under the sheets, says Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2011/03/post_83.html