The one reason I don't buy The Nation

[Mabus]

Two words: Alexander Cockburn. I've even told Katrina to her face he's the reason I don't buy her magazine. Cockburn is a global warming denier of the first magnitude and he hates Gore.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071105/cockburn

beat the devil by Alexander Cockburn
The Real Al Gore



Line up some of the more notorious Nobel Peace Prize recipients, such as Kissinger, and if you had to identify the biggest killer of all it was probably Norman Borlaug, one of the architects of the Green Revolution, which unleashed displacement, malnutrition and death across the Third World. If the Kyoto Accords were ever implemented, and they never will be, the net impact on greenhouse gases--99.72 percent of them natural in origin--would be imperceptible, but the devastation to Third World economies and life expectancies would rival that caused by Borlaug's seed strains.

Already the hysteria about anthropogenic global warming stoked by Al Gore and the Big Lie gang writing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's press releases has done enormous damage to vital environmental cleanup, sidetracking attention and money from work on sewers, toxic waste sites, filthy smokestacks--not to mention the vast disaster of agricultural pollution. Two other consequences of the hysteria will be deadly. Biofuels will steal the meals of the Third World poor and put them in First World gas tanks. Nuclear power is the hysteria's prime beneficiary. As Peter Montague describes it in our current CounterPunch newsletter, "The long-awaited and much-advertised 'nuclear renaissance' actually got under way this fall." NRG Energy, a New Jersey company, applied for a license to build two nuclear power plants in Bay City, Texas--the first formal application for such a license in thirty years.

more of Cockburn's "global warming is a myth and Al Gore is evil" rant at the link above.

He also accuses Gore of being a shill for the nuclear industry. Gore is on the record as saying that nuclear energy has problems and is often tied to terrorism. Here's what Gore, himself, recently said about nuclear power:

Q: Let's turn briefly to some proposed solutions. Nuclear power is making a big resurgence now, rebranded as a solution to climate change. What do you think?

answer: I doubt nuclear power will play a much larger role than it does now.

question: Won't, or shouldn't?

answer: Won't. There are serious problems that have to be solved, and they are not limited to the long-term waste-storage issue and the vulnerability-to-terrorist-attack issue. Let's assume for the sake of argument that both of those problems can be solved.

We still have other issues. For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal -- which is the real issue: coal -- then we'd have to put them in so many places we'd run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale. And we'd run short of uranium, unless they went to a breeder cycle or something like it, which would increase the risk of weapons-grade material being available.

When energy prices go up, the difficulty of projecting demand also goes up -- uncertainty goes up. So utility executives naturally want to place their bets for future generating capacity on smaller increments that are available more quickly, to give themselves flexibility. Nuclear reactors are the biggest increments, that cost the most money, and take the most time to build.

In any case, if they can design a new generation (of reactors) that's manifestly safer, more flexible, etc., it may play some role, but I don't think it will play a big role.

http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/05/09/roberts/