Climate Gamble Quotes

“Anyone arguing against nuclear energy on the basis that perfect guarantees of safety are impossible to come by is actually subscribing to a magical or homeopathic view of radiation.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“George Monbiot noted[37] in the aftermath of Fukushima that “while nuclear causes calamities when it goes wrong, coal causes calamities when it goes right, and coal goes right a lot more often than nuclear goes wrong.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“The most pessimistic peer-reviewed analysis on the health impact of Fukushima pegs the nuclear damage worldwide during the next 40 years to be less than what can be expected from particulate pollution caused by one large coal plant in one year of normal operations”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“Because the average background radiation dose in Japan is only about two millisieverts per year, this means that two thirds of the evacuees received total doses equal to, or less than, what they would have received had they lived in Finland for a year.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“Nuclear power is statistically one of the safest, if not the safest, way to produce energy – even accounting for accidents, nuclear waste and such.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“Average evacuees from Fukushima got a radiation dose that roughly matches the dose an average Finnish person gets just by living in Finland for a year.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“Nuclear is dangerous because potential deaths are so much worse than actual deaths.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“the IPCC, among others, views nuclear power as one of the cleanest energy generation options available.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“Somewhat ironically, the rare earths required in solar PV, electric cars and wind turbines even leave radioactive waste at scales comparable with uranium mining required for equivalent energy production.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“Vast amounts of biomass are needed each year to satisfy the demand of these biomass-fired power plants and biodiesel refineries. In WWF's plans, by 2050 we would need, for energy alone, 30 percent more forest wood than is currently used for all purposes together.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“Any coal burned in Germany simply so they could shut down their perfectly good nuclear power plants is coal that should have been burned in a developing country to help raise their people from poverty.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“No need to ask the poor themselves what they want: after all, they might give the wrong answers.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“WWF makes similar assumptions in their report, giving those with no electricity access at all today less than one percent of the electricity that the average Finn uses today.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“Greenpeace’s Energy Revolution report plans that entire continent of Africa will use less energy than North America alone will use by 2050, despite the fact that Africa will most probably be home to more than five times as many people.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“As mentioned above, these scenarios assume that 9 to 11 billion people living in 2050 will altogether use less energy than seven billion or so living today are using.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“The very-low energy scenarios tend to forget the very real phenomenon called Rebound, and often expect that the poor of the world agree to remain poor.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“The solutions the public is left to believe will do the job – renewables and energy conservation – have not been able to even stop the growth of coal use, let alone reduce it.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“as fast, efficiently, deeply and cost-effectively as possible. Because we have spent so many pages exploring some of the weaknesses of renewable energy sources, one might think that we are somehow opposed to these energy sources. As we wrote in the introduction, this is not the case. Even though readability prevents us from stating this at every juncture, we wish to categorically state that we support (within environmental limits) all truly low-carbon energy sources and nearly all the energy efficiency proposals we've seen so far. Both of us have even invested our own hard-earned money in renewable energy generation. We will most certainly need a lot more renewable energy, and we are certain that they are being built. The question whether or not renewable energy sources could play a major role in our energy system has already been answered: we know that they will be important sources of energy in the future. The only question is how important. We, of course, hope for the best and are excited about the potential and various benefits of renewable energy, and believe that solar and wind energy are amongst the most important tools for successful climate change mitigation.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“What about the costs of opposing nuclear?”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“replace, and there is definitely too little public discussion on this matter.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“Such creativity with statistics is by no means an isolated incident, as revealed by The Climate Change Performance Index[20] published by Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe in 2014. Again, the wrong countries were at risk of becoming the top performers, and again, the situation was fixed with creative carbon accounting for nuclear. This particular index went even further than WWF did and declared nuclear electricity to have the same emissions as the dirtiest mainstream electricity, coal power. Given that this was an especially climate oriented index, it is interesting to note that a country could improve its score by replacing nearly emission-free nuclear with practically any mix of fossil fuels. One really cannot make this stuff up. We are sure that similar creative ”indices” are already in preparation somewhere. Using deliberately falsified indices and reports for actual, sensible real world policy is of course impossible, as they simply seek to distort the reality to conform to an ideologically preconceived position. We believe that environmental organizations are in fact never going to tell us which countries have historically cut their carbon emissions the fastest and the most. The leaders in this game are those countries that built a lot of nuclear in the 1980s, like France and Sweden. It is worth noting that these cuts were accomplished with technology from the 1970s, and were achieved completely by accident, as a by-product of energy policy enacted for completely different reasons. There was no active climate policy, but the results were many times better than what Germany has managed with its Energiewende since the early 2000s. It is worth imagining what an active and evidence-based climate policy that pushed aggressively for renewables, energy savings and nuclear could therefore achieve. Image 10 - The best ten years of emissions reductions in four countries. A major part of Germany’s reductions, called “Wallfall”, are due to the country’s unification and the following closure of many of ineffective power plants and industry in eastern Germany. In addition to these countries, also Belgium and Finland have cut their emissions markedly with nuclear power.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“Such creativity with statistics is by no means an isolated incident, as revealed by The Climate Change Performance Index[20] published by Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe in 2014. Again, the wrong countries were at risk of becoming the top performers, and again, the situation was fixed with creative carbon accounting for nuclear. This particular index went even further than WWF did and declared nuclear electricity to have the same emissions as the dirtiest mainstream electricity, coal power. Given that this was an especially climate oriented index, it is interesting to note that a country could improve its score by replacing nearly emission-free nuclear with practically any mix of fossil fuels. One really cannot make this stuff up. We are sure that similar creative ”indices” are already in preparation somewhere. Using deliberately falsified indices and reports for actual, sensible real world policy is of course impossible, as they simply seek to distort the reality to conform to an ideologically preconceived position. We believe that environmental organizations are in fact never going to tell”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“For example, in order to increase wind and solar capacity significantly, we would need to increase the production of concrete, steel, copper and numerous other materials considerably. Even with increased material efficiency, this will mean more mines and more environmental damages in the form of open cast mines, tailings ponds, smelters and pollution. Somewhat ironically, the rare earths required in solar PV, electric cars and wind turbines even leave radioactive waste at scales comparable with uranium mining required for equivalent energy production. Even when uranium”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“When we broaden our view from electricity to the energy sector as a whole, we find ourselves staring at a gaping problem. Liquid, crude oil-derived hydrocarbon fuels like gasoline and diesel are essential to keeping our society and economy running. Almost everything that moves runs on the internal combustion engine, which uses liquid fuels. Whether we want it or not, the choices made decades ago made sure that this will also be the case for many decades to come. We built a world that runs on liquid fuels and is slow and difficult to change to other power sources, such as electric vehicles[15] running on batteries.”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?

“We also believe that the widespread, relatively approving public treatment of renewable energy sources will end up harming the growth of renewable energy in the long run.  These energy sources have very real problems that are in most cases inherent in their very nature, and ignoring or downplaying these issues will make the problems only more difficult to understand and to solve. Lack of honest discussion will also erode peoples’ trust in renewables as well as their proponents. The same goes for the environmental movement: their often dishonest anti-nuclear rhetoric, including but not limited to deliberate falsification of statistics, which we will discuss more later, is already undermining their overall”
― Rauli Partanen, Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future?