Reply #18: How do you know?

[NNadir]

You claim to speak for Al Gore now?

I'm quite sure that you can't interpret his speeches, since you frequently quote a speech in which he explicitly says that he's not against nuclear power. Then you assert that he is against nuclear power.

I am supporting Al Gore because he is rational. If I thought he embraced the kind of tortured dogmatism that characterizes the anti-nuclear movement, I wouldn't vote for him. Of course we are all aware that he knows all about climate change, which is enough for me. The options for addressing global climate change are very limited. One must use every climate change technology available - including those that are of lowest risk and lowest cost and the most commercial success. That would be nuclear energy. I completely trust Mr. Gore to see what is obvious, just as the the world, from the Romanians, to the Chinese, to the Japanese, to the French, to the Finns have recognized what is obvious.

Should he take the office to which he was elected, he will be required to embrace policies that work.

If Al Gore serves in the office of the United States Presidency he can either assert that "nothing will work," or he can enact policies that will not work. In both cases he will be a failure. That will make him just another politician. If he wants to succeed he will have to be bold and visionary and that automatically assumes that he will participate, with the rest of the world, in the full exploitation of the only new primary source of energy discovered in the last century, nuclear fission energy.

Even if Al Gore was going around saying, "I loathe nuclear power," - and he clearly isn't - history - for those who can comprehend history - is full of Presidential candidates who seemed to reverse themselves after elections. Woodrow Wilson ran in 1916 on a platform of keeping the US out of the World War. Likewise Roosevelt in 1940. Abraham Lincoln ran on a platform of not interfering with slavery where it existed. Richard Nixon ran on a "fight Red China" and support Taiwan policy. Lyndon Johnson ran on a peace platform.

I have always despised Richard Nixon, but I agree with the historical interpretation that he was probably the best man for opening US relations with the most populous nation on earth. If there is any good in Nixon's history, it is that in that one place, he did what was necessary. It may not have been ideal - and he may not have been able to secure his party's nomination had he made such plans explicit - but it was necessary. He did what was necessary. I don't think Hubert Humphrey could have pulled that off quite so easily.

I have no doubt that if there is one man who can pull off the necessary broad commitment to nuclear energy, it is Al Gore.

Now, I don't speak for Mr. Gore. I would never presume to do so. If however he comes to office - should he come to office - and begins muttering like a member of Greenpeace, I will be sure that the United States will fail. I am confident, however, that he will not do so. Why? Because his whole career has been about change, and change is what must come in this disaster.

There is still a (shrinking) fragment of the Democratic Party, regrettably, that mutters inanities about renewables and conservation in the face of the current emergency - and responds with rote denunciations of nuclear power. I think of them as our equivalent of the Repuke's religious fundamentalists.

However, I've been a pro-nuclear power Democrat for decades, and I very much sense that many of my political allies have experienced a sea change in response to the very clear and unavoidable realities of the times. Sure I can come hear and listen to you, JPak, and a few others recite your thirty year old litanies about so called "nuclear waste," and a picocurie of tritium in some groundwater somewhere, but increasingly such thinking is irrelevant. You have been discredited. But the mere fact that I can go to Democratic websites and state my case and receive support for my ideas is in itself something. I would have had much more difficulty even ten years ago.

Should Al Gore or some other Democrat be seated in the White House, I do not worry that your old dogmas will weigh policy down very much.

The best and most successful Presidents exhibit flexibility of mind. That is all we can ask of a successful President. It should be the primary criteria by which we elect Presidents. It is certainly superior to reading a laundry list of issue statements. I'm quite sure that Al Gore is readily aware of what is involved in the expansion of nuclear energy - even as those who assert things about him as you do - are not. He is not a scientist, but he knows how to glean information from scientists, which is his claim to fame. Most scientists understand the laws of thermodynamics, including the first law. The first law places some restrictions on what is possible and what is not. Specifically it says that energy is neither created nor destroyed - it doesn't come from prayer, but from physical principles. There are only a few primary energy sources available on earth right now. At least one set of them - fossil fuels - is too dangerous to continue to use. Mr. Gore knows that. It's his cause celebre.

You don't speak for Al Gore. Al Gore is an urbane man with wit and insight and broad exposure, a man who regularly reinvents himself and responds to his experience. He is certainly not a person fixated on repeating 1970's era - or any other - dogma. Our media, of course, represents this as being "wishy washy" but I think the American people are heartily fed up with our media's interpretation of the world.