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Greenpeace Co-Founder Patrick Moore Thoughtfully Advocates Nuclear Power

A founder of Greenpeace who left that organization and found himself opposing his former comrades on more than one issue, Patrick Moore has since founded Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. and become a staunch advocate for nuclear power as a substitute for coal and fossil fuel sources of energy. In the following MIR interview, Moore makes the case that the fear of nuclear power is a thing of the past as countries like Canada, France, and Japan expand their nuclear power generation capacities.

Published Wednesday June 3, 2009

1866 words

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Patrick Moore

You’re a co-founder of Greenpeace. You’re an internationally renowned ecologist and environmentalist. Now you believe nuclear power is the energy of the future. Elaborate on how all of these efforts have come together and how your attitude regarding climate change has changed.

I’ve had a couple of epiphanies in my time. The first one came when I was in University and found out about ecology. Back in the late ’60s ecology was not known in the popular lexicon. It was an obscure academic discipline that really came to the forefront when environmentalism began in the late ’60s. I was probably the first person to take a PhD in ecology in Canada at the University of British Columbia, starting in the 1968-69 academic year.

My second epiphany was in 1982 when I first heard the term “sustainable development.” It didn’t come into popular usage until 1987 when the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development published the report, “Our Common Future,” in which the term “sustainable development” was used explicitly as a way of describing the kind of development we need to do in order not to damage the environment. That is what eventually caused me to leave Greenpeace: I wanted to get on the solution side of things and figure out how we make our industries and our civilization, as a whole, more compatible with the environment from which we get food, energy, and material.

I’ve come to define sustainability as continuing to obtain our food, energy, and the things we need to survive from the environment while, at the same time, working to reduce our negative impacts on the environment through changes to our practices and technologies. I don’t buy into the myth that the more material, energy, and food we produce, automatically the more damage is done to the environment. It’s very clear to me. The shift from coal-fired electricity to nuclear electricity simply makes sense from a purely environmental point of view.

You recently spoke at the VerdeXchange Green Marketmakers Conference and addressed the nuclear energy option. In doing so, Newsweek has labeled you as a sort of renegade against Greenpeace. Why do you believe nuclear energy to be such a crucial option for energy production?