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The sun sets on windmills in northern Gratiot County - but are wind and solar power as environmental an energy source as nuclear power?

(MLive file photo)





Princeton scientist Freeman Dyson is “

one of the world's most distinguished physicists,” according to famed Oxford biologist and author Richard Dawkins.



Fellow physicist

- a Nobel winner - has stated the Nobel committee has “fleeced” Dyson by never giving him the nod. You get the picture: This is a very serious and historically significant man who arrived on the University of Michigan campus to deliver the Winter 2005 Commencement address.





He spoke to grads about the importance of scientific heresy: Not marching lock-step with consensus because heretics promoting unpopular ideas often turn out to be right. Dyson’s heresy that day was to say that climate change may be real, but that the alarmism surrounding its impact is “grossly exaggerated.”



In a

, he chided the “holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models.”



“The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand,” he said, noting that climate models explain the present but don’t predict the future as well as their designers would like to believe.



His concern is that fixation on an exaggerated crisis takes “money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans.”



I had Dyson in mind two weeks back when I mentioned

was the only economically realistic policy choice for climate change alarmists. Mankind in caves burned wood for fuel, yet that highly obsolete option

than wind, and a whopping 22 times more than solar.



Despite decades of experiments and lots of subsidies, neither rays of sunshine nor pleasant breezes come within a decent fraction of the current availability and potential of zero-carbon nuclear power.



To be clear: I’m not convinced we need any subsidized energy programs. But if the climate alarmists get their way, fewer taxes spent on something that really works (nuclear energy) is vastly more reasonable than the choices now made regarding wind and solar power.



Like Dyson’s warning about ignoring “urgent and important” items, unproductive spending on “renewables” drains resources from many worthy causes, while politicians treat the more logical nuclear solution as an inconvenient stepchild.



Being a skeptic about the threat of climate change makes tons more sense when money is seen thieved away for windmills rather than cooling towers.



After writing that article, I learned of Pandora’s Promise, a new documentary produced by climate change alarmists who argue for … nuclear power. One of its subjects, according to a

, is Michael Shellenberger, a 2008 Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment.” He notes the following about the ‘wind and solar is the solution’ crowd:

“I’m honestly quite angry at others who were propagating that myth.”



The Post quotes him further as saying that it is a “hallucinatory delusion” that the world will cut down on carbon emissions by paying the huge financial costs associated with developing non-nuclear alternatives.



Lots of corporations make a ton of money from those hallucinatory wind and solar delusions, and most climate alarmism true believers and politicians give them cover. But some heretics within the climate change movement are now preaching against the myth. And as Dyson said, they’re probably the ones with the better ideas.