Carbon tax is all very well but let’s not rule out the nuclear option

But antipathy to nuclear power has become a kind of secular religion, based almost entirely on superstition and bad science. It is the sine qua non of what Lenin once called ‘infantile leftism’. Nuclear power was opposed at least partly because it seemed to imply a commitment to a nuclear military industry and thus nuclear weapons

WINSTON Churchill once said there was no such thing as a good tax. Perhaps, but some taxes are infinitely preferable to others. One of the better recommendations by the Commission on Taxation is for a carbon tax. Whether or not you entirely buy into the idea of massive, harmful man-made climate change, discouraging businesses and citizens from emitting pollution is in all our interests. No one in Ireland wants to live in the same toxic soup that they do in Shanghai or Moscow or Tehran.

What’s more, we all know that fossil fuels are a finite resource. The wells in the Middle East are drying up. Yes, new sources come on stream all the time — in the Caribbean, in central Asia, in Africa — but we still have to prepare for the day when mankind will have to give up its crude oil habit and, even sooner, its natural gas habit.