Earth Day 2012 – terrific PSA by Energy-Northwest employees
Happy Earth Day, everyone. Here is a message from the employees at Energy Northwest that should start your day off right. After watching, please celebrate the day by planting a tree.
If planting a tree just does not seem to be enough to make the world the kind of place that you want for your children or grandchildren, here is a more ambitious suggestion. Spend a few minutes thinking of ways to make it easier to initiate and complete atomic fission power plants that can provide emission-free energy for several generations. Then go and start implementing your ideas.
Hat tip to Eric McErlain at NEI Nuclear Notes for pointing to the Earth Day message.
Plant a tree?!
Aren’t you supposed to do that this Friday? (Remember Arbor Day, anyone?)
I thought that one was supposed to spend Earth Day singing Kumbaya and lamenting the coming of the Industrial Revolution.
This is a “holiday” that was created by a Senator who personally fought any and all nuclear power plants on the shores of the Great Lakes (today that’s ten plants with 13 operating reactors, by the way; see here for his legacy; note particularly the lecture on uranium mining) and a professional activist who is still fighting nuclear energy. Do you really want to waste your time celebrating and promoting such an event?
There are other, better holidays that promote environmental awareness and good stewardship, like this Friday’s nearly forgotten Arbor Day. As with “Earth Hour,” let’s skip this misguided, misanthropic, retrogressive, nature-worshiping hippie-fest.
Somehow, a man like physicist Stephen Hawkins should be behind commercials like this. The guy digs pollution and greenhouse and ocean acidification and the threats to the planet from carbon … and is against nuclear!!! and for the wrong reasons.
Why ? because of weapon proliferation. I am not as smart as he is but I wish he could read my lips : The genie is out of the bottle. Might as well do something good with civilian nuclear.
That mental association of nuclear and military applications is just as smart as linking electricity to a chair or petroleum to napalm.
Maybe we should start publicizing stupid mental associations made on the back of civil nuclear applications.
As for Hawkins I think he is a low hanging fruit and could be converted to the cause. Like the Borgs on Star Treck say ‘resistance is futile you will be assimilated’ … Humour could work too.
To add on my previous post, there is a collective shift of mentality regarding nuclear in the UK. Can we poll Hawkins and get him to issue his current position today and explain why he can’t see the positive link between nuclear and all of the foes that he sees from climate change and carbon based energy sources ?
I am sure the guy will debate.
I say we try to convert him. There has to be a way to challenge him through the social networks. Thru this blog.
In a recent interview with Piers Morgan, the influential Tony Robbins addressed education, health care and .. energy.
All he could come up with was gas, clean gas, gas …. Here’s another Californian that would require rewiring.
Well. Talk about timing …
From a few days ago. From Dr Hawking:
A few days ago, the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking gave a speech in London in which he said that nuclear war no longer poses the only threat to humanity’s very existence. According to Hawking, the dangers posed by climate change are now almost equally as great, and we must do everything that is humanly possible if we are to have any hope of averting them.
The guy just stop short of making the connection. He feared that nuclear war was the danger and this is no longer a threat. One down. He still thinks that climate change is an issue. EEUUUHHHH !
MAKE THE LEAP STEPHEN !!!! One plus one.
I say that we are that close to having Hawking say GO NUCLEAR … I can’t believe he did not make the connection a few days ago.
Brian – you have a point, but I do not think anyone would notice if nukes sat out Earth Day. If they did, I do not think they would understand the reason.
Instead, I think it is worthwhile trying to use any opportunity where people, especially young people, are thinking about ways to improve their environment and their economy to sell the benefits of nuclear energy.
I applaud Energy Northwest and hope to be pointing to similar efforts from nuclear energy industry companies. We have to encourage our leaders to take the message that nuclear technology can enable both clean energy and prosperity to the masses.
Well, personally, I liked the PSA from Entergy-Northwest. If it was timed to coincide with Earth Day, then so much the better.
I have no problem with co-opting someone else’s event for my own purpose, but notice that nowhere in the PSA did they mention “Earth Day.”
By the way, years ago, I helped man a booth about nuclear energy at an Earth Day event. I’m not sure how much good it did, but it did give me a disturbing insight into the mindset of many of the people who take Earth Day seriously. Fortunately, nobody was overly hostile to us, but then again TMI and Chernobyl were distant memories by then. I’m not so sure we would have been treated the same way at a post-Fukushima Earth Day event.
If anyone has any recent experience with this, I’d love to hear it.