This is a brisk piece of work from Guy Sorman, a French economist philosopher who looks at global energy issues with a beady eye.

He concludes that the main victim of the Japanese nuclear disaster after the tsunami will be not nuclear power but Green Ideology, at least in its luxuriant European form:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government was the first to overreact by deciding to close down all nuclear reactors in the coming years – a radical move driven by domestic politics. Merkel’s government does not include Germany’s Greens, but the Green ideology has become a widely shared national creed in Germany. Indeed, one can relate popular hostility toward nuclear energy to Germany’s traditional romantic cult of nature, not to science.

Germany’s nuclear plants will be replaced by more thermal plants, implying a large increase in German carbon emissions – so much for Green concern about global warming. And so much for intellectual honesty, because a Germany without nuclear power of its own will be compelled to buy it from France, which has no intention of closing its nuclear plants.

Ha ha to that last point. C’est drôle, non? Ils sont fous, les Verts!

Meanwhile Poland digs in its heels and blocks ambitious EU energy emissions targets, an impressive show of Polish defiance just before Poland itself takes over the EU Presidency on 1 July.

Part of the issue here (I think) is that since 1990 Poland has cut emissions drastically simply by ending communism and shutting down value-subtracting heavy industries. Now, of course, it is building a modern economy and does not intend to be held back by other EU member states whose emissions targets make sense (or not) in a quite different context – Poland’s energy use is necessarily very coal-intensive for practical reasons.

All of which goes to expose yet again the inherent stupidity and deceitfulness of the Precautionary Principle. Or maybe we should start to use it in hitting back against Greens and other advocates of ‘healthy organic living’:

According to World Health Organization statistics on E. coli deaths, in just the past two years, more people have been killed by the disease than all fission-related events since the dawn of the nuclear age — even if you include the use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The time has come for even the mighty organic lobby to accept the precautionary principle — the idea that it is better to be safe than sorry when it comes to organic farms’ potentially deadly practices. Until we know for certain that the outbreak could not have been caused by the suspect organic farm, we must act to protect the public from the unknown risks of organic practices.

Shut down all organic farms. Now. They’re a health time-bomb, waiting to explode!

It’s all so … confusing.