Famed environmentalist James Lovelock believes that humanity and the planet are in tremendous peril, so we ought to use all the technologies available to us to buy time:
One of the reasons why Lovelock has long supported nuclear power is that its impact on the environment has been vastly less malignant, even in cases of disaster such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, than industrial technologies such as coal mining. His view of nuclear power is one that I share – along with Mark Lynas and George Monbiot, among others – but it is anathema to most greens. More recently he has come out in support of fracking, not as a solution to our energy problems but as a way of buying time. Lovelock favours these technologies on pragmatic grounds, but there are deeper reasons why his view of them is at odds with that of most contemporary greens.
