Flood defences and nuclear power are expected to receive funding from the green investment bank, according to detailed plans for the new institution set out on Tuesday by Vince Cable, the business secretary.
It\’s sensible of course, nuclear is indeed part of the solution to our climate change problems.
But there is that rather large section of the green movement which insists that nuclear power is the very devil itself. Which is going to make it all really very amusing.
Which head is going to explode first? Please make your bets in the comments.
Makes a change – a ‘progressive’ institution subverted for rational ends, usually the other way around.
What climate change problems?
It really depends on what they’re talking about by ‘funding’. £3billion is not enough to finance even a single new 1GW plant. On the other hand, if the GIB is putting together new financial products for nuclear investors like insurance against sudden capital cost spikes caused by the likes of Fukushima, I can’t see a problem.
Sean beat me to it!
No they aren’t saying they are going to fund nuclear, which doesn’t need funding anyway it only needs government to stop stopping them working. The article says:
“Cable sought to pre-empt such concerns “We are not ruling out [nuclear] forever. But there is absolutely no prospect that nuclear in the near future will be supported by the bank,” he said.”
What they are doing is saying that the “green” bank is going to be fair and impartial and faoily and impartially look at nuclear and then give all our money to their Luddite friends but that once nuclear works they will be able to demand windfall taxes on it on the grounds that they offered funding to it, even though in the end all the individual projects failed to qualify.
We should isolate all the money spent on ecofascism into one Ministry of Luddism/the Environment, including the regulatory costs – look at the whole thing in terms of cost benefit analysis and take everybody involved out to an iceberg and leave them there.
On the head exploding bet – Helen Caldicott. Just putting “green” and “nuclear” in the same sentence will surely generate reverse shock waves through time that have already ruptured a blood vessel in her brain somewhere…
The downside is her supporters will almost certainly claim her as a victim of nuclear power.
I thought the Green Bank was really a slush fund for the Lib Dems? They need some pot of cash to distribute to people who might be minded to donate to them, no?
Ltw – “On the head exploding bet – Helen Caldicott. ”
Surely all the evidence suggests her head has exploded already.
But not to worry, as nuts as that will drive them, this will drive them even more crazy:
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/05/25/video-epa-administrator-confirms-no-fracking-water-contamination/
“At a U.S. House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday, President Barack Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, admitted the environmental risk of hydraulic fracturing is practically nonexistent.”