There’s good and bad today. This is fun, a repudiation of Magnus Linklater yesterday.

The myth about nuclear energy’s “hidden” carbon
emissions, recycled on these pages yesterday, is provenly absurd. Yes,
if you take the whole fuel cycle, from mining to decommissioning, there
are CO² emissions involved; so there are in chopping down a tree — it
involves an axe. But they are minute compared with coal or gas and
amount to less than 1 per cent of the fuel the reactors produce. Give
this extensively rebutted CO²-guzzling thesis a rest. If we don’t get
adult about nuclear power as our (short-term) salvation, the lights
will go out sooner than we think.

However, this is really rather confused:

Jonathon Porritt does a good job of trying, in his weighty new book Capitalism as If the World Matters.
He argues that to take on today’s “dominant ‘I consume, therefore I am’
mindset” will require positive messages from the green movement rather
than predictions of doom. This reflects today’s Blairite thinking. Mr
Blair told his officials more than a year ago that there was no hope of
convincing America to do anything on climate change that would mean
sacrificing lifestyles or GDP. Shortly after Gleneagles, he seemed to
imply that he thought the same was true for Britain.
…
Porritt is right that only capitalism can solve the environmental problems it has got us into.

There are multitudes of us, known as free market environmentalists, who have been screaming this sort of stuff at Porritt (and others) for decades. It isn’t that Porritt has come up with some clever new idea, it’s that he’s just noticed it.

It’s a very simple idea. There are indeed physical limits to what we can do, some of those being imposed by matters environmental. But they key thing is some. When we have these sorts of physical limits we find that some of the things we want are scarce, scarce resources in the jargon. What is the best method we know of to distribute such scarce resources?

Markets.

Now, it may be necessary for us to create markets in these things, it may be necessary for us to regulate them (there is no such thing as a truly free market. All are regulated, by law, by custom, somehow), but within these limits we should allow markets to flourish.

As I say, there’s nothing new to this, the revelation is that Porritt has just noticed it.