Where is the public discussion of the role of nuclear power in the global warming debate?

The following is a translation of some paragraphs from chapter 2 of Benjamín Otálora’s forthcoming Essays at the Close of the Twenty-First Century, to be published by the Aleph Zubehr Press (Teheran).

After a clever start following the Second World War, a series of public-relations disasters struck the pocketbooks of the clandestine, powerful group of western capitalists who had bet large fortunes on nuclear energy. Although briefly politically disorganized, especially confounded by the refusal of oil reserves to decline - in fact by the ever-increasing estimates of those reserves, - the nuclear cabal finally restructured itself. Jettisoning the discredited notion of "limits to growth," which the cabal had heavily subsidized, the nuclear power interests finally adopted as their public-relations ploy the notion of manmade global warming.

Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming had the advantage of being superstitiously apocalyptic but irrefutable in the space of many decades, in contrast to the theories testable in the memory spans of the befuddled public. Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, and so many other doomsayers on which the nuclear cabal had put their marketing trust and invested millions, had been embarrassed in the space of decades. The western socialist chattering class, for a variety of ideological reasons, had also invested in these discredited doom mongers. And so they quickly dropped from the public's view once it became clear that the apocalypse would not arrive via limited resources. But CAGW fit the nuclear cabal's interests well: Every weather-related disaster, or even widespread discomfort with the day's humidity, could be blamed on global warming. Ask the great mass of Americans: Too cold, or too hot? No matter: it was related to weather wasn't it? And climate and weather, aren't they the same thing? Once the public had become aware of the idea of global warming, anything dissatisfying, large or small, could be connected to the believed-in phenomenon.

As with the acceptance of the limits-to-growth apocalypse, which had won its short-lived public credibility after several spikes in oil prices, global warming really became a useful marketing tool only after the American public could be impressed with supposedly unusually hot summers. Once this hot-summer impression was accomplished, the public relations campaign appeared to work like a charm. The campaign could take a particularly cold winter and, with a few expert pronouncements ex cathedra, confirm the belief in apocalypse-by-carbon-emissions. The nuclear power interests were delighted and were more than glad to continue subsidizing this public-relations wonder.

But cabals are only cabals, and conspiracies ultimately have their finale when they emerge from the shadows to appear commonplace banalities, or fall forever into unrecoverable obscurity. What the nuclear power group failed to anticipate was the variety of interests that might make a dollar on their invented apocalyptic stampede. And once the scent of easy money is in the air, other cabals with sharper knives will have their way. After having invested so much to begin the momentum of climatic superstition, to what miserable grief the nuclear interest came? This sad affair is the subject of the next chapter. And so now we begin the sordid and richly profitable tale of Archers Daniels Midland.