KEY POINTS:
Think globally, act locally, goes the green mantra. But that may be difficult, in this country at least, when it comes to nuclear power. This week the Prime Minister has been in Britain where she went back to the Oxford Union debating chamber, scene of David Lange's celebrated performance, and described New Zealand's nuclear-free stance as the cornerstone of our foreign policy.
She said we were passionate about the environment and active internationally with commitments that covered saving whales and the Antarctic to seabird protection and the Kyoto protocol. Then she visited Britain's new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and climate change was high on their agenda.
He was reportedly very interested in her Government's newly announced greenhouse emissions trading scheme and invited New Zealand to join his effort to devise a London-based international emissions trading market, which it will happily do. The Government's trading scheme is intended to be compatible with others and allow emission units and carbon offsets to be traded across borders.
But in that event, what are we going to do about nuclear power? If the world is serious about reducing carbon dioxide emissions as drastically as global warming predictions would require, it will be hard for some countries to resist nuclear generation of electricity. Leading environmentalists have already espoused it.
New Zealand may resist nuclear energy for its internal needs. The country is too small, Helen Clark points out, to need the output of more than a single nuclear station and it would be unwise to rely on a single power source. But what is her Government's view when it thinks globally?
If we are, as she told the students at Oxford, "natural partners in a globalising world" might this country soon have to recognise the environmental benefits of nuclear technology? If we are to be part of an international emissions trading scheme might we need to let New Zealand companies buy carbon offsets in the form of nuclear conversions elsewhere in the world? The Government seems not to want to consider this. At the Apec meeting in Sydney it agreed to a clause in the communique acknowledging the role of nuclear energy in climate change solutions but insisted it be hedged with the provisions on risks and costs of waste disposal. This is rearguard argument; the risks and waste problems probably will be manageable if people really are worried about global warming.
The Government may not want to contemplate this but the National Party should. National's latest foreign policy announced this week was politically short-sighted on nuclear issues. Anxious to endorse the nuclear weapons ban yet again, it said nothing worthy of note on nuclear energy.
This is the party that when last in power commissioned a proper study of the safety of ship reactors which reported the safety risks to be infinitesimal. Had National acted on that advice, the Anzus rift might have been on the way to repair, since the United States had by then removed nuclear weapons from its surface fleet. But the party lacked the courage to act on the advice then, and still does.
"Nuclear-free" may be now part of the national identity, as Helen Clark told the Oxford Union, but it has been an easy, convenient stance so far. Had we needed a nuclear alliance in a security crisis these past 20 years, it would not have survived. Soon it could face a different challenge.
If good global citizenship and economic interest come to require recognition of a nuclear response to climate change, let us hope a New Zealand Government has the sense to see it.
