A CARPENTER WHO CAN'T SEE STRAIGHT

WHEN they were younger, Patrick Moore and Alan Carpenter would have been natural allies. Today, the man who founded the Greenpeace conservation movement and the Premier of Western Australia are poles apart – and the reason, according to Dryblower, is that one of them has grown up.
On Thursday, the mining world will get an opportunity to judge just how far apart these two old lefties have drifted. Moore will be a keynote speaker at the annual AMEC National Congress in Perth, and his topic will be nuclear power.A few kilometres away, safe from the words of a man who has undergone the greatest conversion since St Paul saw the light on the road to Damascus, Carpenter will be sitting in comfortable isolation, probably wishing that Moore and the nuclear debate would disappear.For miners, the positions of Moore and Carpenter should be immensely funny – if the topic wasn't so serious.On the one hand we have a leading light in the conservation movement saying that nuclear power is the way of the future, that fossil fuels are the greatest enemy of the environment, and that it's time we all moved forward and made the switch.On the other, we have the Premier of an Australian State which contains some of the world's great deposits of uranium, saying nothing has changed, uranium is bad for you and, while you're at it, would you please stop the world, because I want to get off.By now you should have correctly interpreted Dryblower's position on the Moore v Carpenter situation – and worked out who has grown up, and who has not.Moore has recognised that mistakes have been made. He's man enough to admit that going down the coal and oil road was a blunder of massive proportions, and that wind, solar, tidal and all the alternative forms of electricity generation that currently exist are generations away.Carpenter hasn't.Even with his roots set deeply in the green world, Moore has become an advocate for nuclear, not because he particularly likes it, more because it's the least damaging source of readily-available power.Carpenter, however, is firmly rooted in the past. He has made a pact with the green movement (yesterday's division) that says nuclear is bad, and that we're not to be trusted with it – no matter what evidence to the contrary.If this was just a case of one man seeing the light, and the other refusing to open his eyes, it would be a non-story. But, this is a case of a scientist seeing the results of a world-class, 50-year old, experiment (burning fossil fuel) and saying: "oops, sorry".Carpenter, however, refuses to budge. He was sworn that WA will never have nuclear power, and never mine uranium. Over time, his position will become untenable simply because he's wrong, and because the world wants Australia's uranium, and it's prepared to pay for it.What Carpenter will discover is that his impersonation of a human roadblock will be a complete waste of effort, just as the French discovered with the Maginot Line when it came to keeping the Germans out of their backyard.Rather than waiting for Carpenter to shift, the political and business world (and a large chunk of the environmental world) will simply go around, over, or under, him.First steps in the by-passing have already been taken. Moore is an example, the debate initiated at a Federal level by Carpenter's colleague, Martin Ferguson, is another example – and the national nuclear inquiry launched by the Prime Minister, John Howard, a third example.In time, the stance of people like Carpenter, and their failed arguments against uranium and the nuclear fuel cycle, will be drowned up, and exposed for the sham they are with the ideal person to start demonstrating just what a sham being the man who once subscribed to those arguments; Patrick Moore.
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