Where’s the Left Wing Science Denial? Alive and Well in Vancouver I’m Afraid

Chris Mooney at Discover Magazine is optimistic, asking Where’s the Left Wing Science Denial? But in fact, although there are many reasonable voices (and even George Monbiot has belatedly changed his tune and is now quite critical of the anti-nuke crowd), the media is still full of knee-jerk scare pieces like Olson’s in the Vancouver Courier.
Other anti-nuclear voices, like this at the Huffington Post are actually somewhat more reasonable. But although there certainly are real risks (which I have experienced myself) those risks do need to be assessed fairly in comparison with the risks of whatever alternatives are being considered.

[Note: the last paragraph has been modified in response to the first comment below]
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2 Responses to Where’s the Left Wing Science Denial? Alive and Well in Vancouver I’m Afraid

  1. Jinchi says:

    Well I’ve struck out asking for evidence of science denial at Chris’s site, so I checked here.

    So far I’ve got:

    1.) Some guy named Olson doesn’t know how many people died at Chernobyl.

    2.) Alec Baldwin doesn’t think nuclear power is clean energy.

    By the way, what exactly is the science denial part of Baldwin’s column?

  2. alan says:

    Chris was saying there hasn’t been much denial so I wouldn’t look for it there.

    I was responding to a local event so have changed the post title (Olson is a reasonably well respected relatively left columnist in a local Vancouver paper)

    When I saw the Baldwin piece I thought of it as more of the same, but I was wrong about that and so have changed what I wrote.

    I haven’t yet read the Monbiot piece carefully but it may contain some of the examples you are looking for.

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