The accident at Fukushima was a test for the global environmental movement. Concern about global warming over the past decade led many greens to reconsider their long-standing opposition to nuclear power. But old habits die hard. Caught between their anti-nuclear sentiments and their increasingly apocalyptic fears of global warming, environmentalists have mostly made the wrong choice.
With global energy and fossil fuel use continuing to grow, and international efforts to place a cap on carbon emissions in shambles, many greens viewed the Fukushima as a seemingly straightforward environmental menace – and one that chalked-up quick victories, as Germany turned its back on nuclear, and China announced a moratorium. Within days of the accident anti-nuclear greens began making outsized claims about the danger to the public.
Many of these claims were wildly inaccurate, but they had their intended result. Green campaigners fell back in line. Fukushima showed that, for most environmentalists, nuclear’s low-probability risks trump both the existential threat of climate change and 2m deaths annually from air pollution. Green campaigners have, ironically, fallen prey to the same misperception of risk they all too often see in a public indifferent to global warming: an obsession with dramatic but infrequent threats, while ignoring those that are banal but far more deadly.