The linking of climate change and anti-nuclear politics is not a new development. I criticized it at a seminar four years ago.
http://www.enouranois.gr/english/antinuclear/indexenglish3.htmNUCLEAR DISARMAMENT AND THE CLIMATE CHANGE MOVEMENT: MUST WE BE COMPETITORS?
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his paper was delivered (in edited form) at the 2nd Rhodes Antinuclear Festival
held from September 25-29, 2007Before embarking on the declared subject of this paper, i.e. the climate change movement and whether we in the anti-nuclear movement must compete with it. I would like to make it clear what my proposal is, in other words the bottom line of what I want to say.
It is that if we do not want to be consigned to the dustbin of history, to be replaced by the climate change movement, which will then in its turn, in a rerun of history staged as farce, fail in the same way that we failed at the end of the 1980s, then the nuclear disarmament movement must return to a Europe-centred politics.
Specifically we must take up again the demands put forward in the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament of 28th April 1980 and symbolized by this pretty badge from that time which I show to you again to you to remind you of what we were saying then: “The remedy lies in our hands. We must act together to free the entire territory of Europe, from Poland to Portugal, from nuclear weapons, air and submarine bases, and from all institutions engaged in research into, or manufacture of, nuclear weapons.”
A Europe-centred politics. A Europe-centred proposal.
I will return to these ideas later.
Is the climate change movement a competitor?
MEDIA INTEREST
At the most obvious level competition can be registered in terms of media interest. Media interest in nuclear disarmament these days is small and weak. By contrast climate change is constantly in the media and the activities of the growing climate change movement are correspondingly being given publicity. The Camp for Climate Action that was held last July at Heathrow Airport outside London attracted thousands of participants and gained very extensive media coverage in Britain and Northern Europe. “The CND movement of the 21st century has begun”, said one Indymedia commentator.
Those of us who are old enough to remember the women’s peace camps of the 1980s at Greenham Common in England, where the cruise missiles targeting Eastern Europe were stationed, will recognize the style of Greenham Common in the style of the Camp for Climate Action.
This is what anti-nuclear activist Angie Zelter says at the Camp for Climate Action website:
“Preventing further Climate Change is the one issue the whole world can and should unite on. So many of the solutions to our single-issue campaigns are needed to combat climate change. We have to grasp this opportunity to become true compassionate global citizens and put the millennia of war-fighting and exploitation behind us. We are all one on this fragile planet. Let us engage in the power of non-violent civil resistance and create the change we need.”
If the words “nuclear war” are put in the place of “climate change” this statement could be taken from any one of dozens of press releases of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, CND, or the Greenham Common women.
One young participant in the Camp for Climate Action said this: “The most treasured memory I have from last summer was partying in the evening after we did the mass action at Drax. (Drax is a coal-fired power station). Dancing with my tribe knowing that the action was being reported around the world and feeling that our actions were right. We were part of something much bigger, part of a story far more epic than our modern world has ever given us a role in, we were on the edge of history and it was amazing.”
There must have been many of us in the anti-nuclear movement in the early 1980s who similarly felt that we were on the edge of history and that it was amazing. What do we have to tell these young people in the climate change movement? If we have something convincing, something arresting to tell them, something mind-opening, something they don’t already know, perhaps we will be able to work together with the climate change movement, derive strength from it, give strength to it, and most importantly, achieve some gains from such collaboration. .
CLIMATE CHANGE AND NUCLEAR POWER
A second factor that points in the direction of competition, even antagonism, between the nuclear disarmament movement and the climate change movement is the stance of a section of the climate change movement, the most “respectable” or “realistic” section, in favour of nuclear power. Many of us may remember being impressed a couple of years ago by the radicalism of the statements on climate change of the scientific advisor to the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Sir David King, and wondering how it was possible for such a terrible government as Tony Blair’s to have such an impressive scientific advisor. It turns out that Sir David King was and is an advocate of nuclear power, which he represents as the only realistic way to satisfy growing energy demands while meeting global warming targets.
Of course Sir David King’s pro-nuclear stance is not shared by ordinary members of the climate change movement, but when considering the future prospects for ordinary members to impose their will and preferences on the so-called “realist” section of the movement, the experience of the 1980s anti-nuclear movement is an example of what NOT to do and how NOT to behave if one wishes to succeed in defeating the so-called realists.
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The "Don't Nuke the Climate" initiative seems to me to have started in reaction to the way that the nuclear power lobby seized the climate issue to represent nuclear power as "carbon free" and therefore "clean".
It was a belated attempt on the part of a section of the antinuclear movement to free themselves from the trap they had fallen into by allowing themselves to forget about antinuclear politics at the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union (when they should have been helping Yeltsin get rid of ALL the Soviet nuclear arsenal, whatever the American, French and British resistance to that project) and got diverted into "global warming".
