I was just reading this article and one of the quotes just perfectly sums up my opinion.  "The environment is too important to be left to the environmentalists." You see the problem is that first and foremost, environmentalists are people.  Unfortunately being people...that means on average, environmentalists are just passionate dipshits.  They have a romantic ideal about this and that but like all such idealized concepts...its complete bullshit.  They basically aspire to create a world that's about as realistic as a teenage girl's wish list for her first love

Environmentalists pushed for an increase in the use of biofuels to help (among other things) save the people of the developing world decades down the road and what did it do?  It drove up the price of foodand hurt he people in the developing world NOW.  Greenpeace bitches about carbon dioxide so how do they rate France with 70% of it's power from nuclear?  They count all of France's nuclear plants as being the natural gas fired equivalent...and they consider this GENEROUS (gas is the lowest CO2 emitter of the fossil fuels).  Yes, environmentalists bitch about saving the environment but they want us to use diffuse "renewable" power sources like solar and wind...while at the same time they'll likely bitch about the fact that such power plants would take up about 2% of the land in the US for more for wind.  Heh, to power the UK with wind power it would actually take 1/2 of the UK's land area (BTW, people cannot stand to live within a quarter of a mile of a wind farm).

We really need to just ignore them and deal with things.  If CO2 emissions were a significant problem (they're not) or if we just wanted to wean ourselves from fossil fuels (ok, I can see that one) we'd actually need to go with mostly nuclear. There's a FANTASTIC technology available and they're starting to build plants in some countries.  Thorium reactors are like a magic bullet (for nuclear power anyway).  Due to the way they work they don't need to be shut down to be refueled.  They use molten fuel so it won't develop hot spots and even if it overheats...it just melts a plug and drains into a holding tank that stops the reaction.  They use 100% of the thorium (not just a single isotope).  85% of the fuel is "cold" (no radiation) within 10 years, the remainder is cold within 400 years (way better than the 10000 or so for uranium).  You cannot weaponize thorium.  You cannot make breeder reactors with thorium.  Finally, there's four times as much thorium and it's more widely available.  There is enough thorium to power the entire world for the better part of 1000 years!