When, finally and belatedly, the chief representative of farmers in Australia, the leader of the National Party, did speak about global warming, something that his government had ignored for 10 years, it was not to announce a new way of seeing the world, but to demand that Australia move to nuclear power generation. That is, to demand that business continue as usual, just with a new source of power.
It is curious that the calls for nuclear power stations have suddenly re-emerged as the climate is worsening so markedly that even the leader of the National Party recognises that something is wrong. At one level the explanation is simple. Following Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and other examples of poor maintenance, dangerous leaks, polluted water, radioactive dust, and the sheer impossibility of storing nuclear waste safely for even a decade, let alone 50,000 years, the nuclear power industry was dead in the water.
It is said that every cost for one person is an opportunity for another and global warming has proved no exception. While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity. Global warming? No worries, let us take care of that for you (and sell you a used car and a packet of cigarettes while we are at it) for a small price. Suddenly it seemed, if explained in the right way, explosions, leaks, pollution, genetic damage and cancers, terrorist risks, all lasting thousands of years, could be made to seem a little tiny itsy bitsy problem compared to the frying of the whole planet. 'Clean Energy', as Tony Blair described it recently.
The marketing campaign has been so blatant and dishonest that you would think people would take no more notice of it than of a cowboy on a horse happily and healthily smoking a cigarette in the wide open spaces of the natural world. But certain right wing scientists and conservative politicians have rushed to leap on to the bandwagon, and the reasons for this are not immediately obvious.
In the first place such people need to avoid any recognition that what environmentalists have been saying all these years is right. To come out in favour of solar energy and wind power and reducing consumption would be to admit that when they were heaping scorn on the conservation movement they were wrong.
Secondly, to recognise that growing and excessive consumption and development, all fueled by population growth and the media, has to stop, that there is no such thing as sustainable development, would be to go against everything they have ever believed in. Continuing growth is an article of faith. And it is a religion, the religion that sees domination and management as that which makes us human. To call for decreased energy consumption would be to admit defeat, as they would see it, retreating and letting nature win. They can't do this, any more than the farmer's federations can recognise regrowth of cleared trees from seed as a last attempt of the ecosystem to survive, before it is destroyed permanently. Just as in a war, god is on their side and there will be no retreat - he wants them to win and defeat nature, and to retreat would be to have a loss of faith.
Finally nuclear energy is, like coal power stations, and the oil industry, and land clearing, a sign of masculinity. These are the occupations of real men. These are the tools of the stern father, defeating nature for the benefit of the whole world. Renewable energy - wind and solar and tidal and geothermal - is the field of the nurturant parent. These are soft and wussy forms of energy. They hum away quietly, responding to the rhythms of the earth. They don't involve brute force and monumental buildings. The hard men of the Right could no more adopt renewable energy than they could consider social support for the poor, or the decent treatment of refugees, or drug addiction to be a medical matter. Real men have big prisons and big power stations. And just recently, there was the macho George Bush, fueling India's nuclear power program, and this week macho John Howard agreed we would probably soon be selling masses of Australian uranium (40% of the world's supply) to India and China. Hell we are so keen we will let the Chinese come and dig it up themselves, perhaps with John Howard, shirt sleeves rolled up, taking a shovel himself to help.
Conservatives believe that we can keep running the economy faster and faster and bury the wastes somewhere, anywhere. The wastes are of no concern (just as the civilian casualties of Iraq, or those who die from drug overdose, or the starving children of Africa, are of no concern in a world of big business) and can be dealt with, somehow, sometime, somewhere, hopefully at a huge profit by a private company - everyone is a winner.
Except the losers - you and me.