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LONDON - Climate change experts are on a collision course with environmentalists over proposals to fight global warming with more nuclear power and using genetically modified crops to boost biofuel production.
The third United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will this week outline the measures needed to save the planet from the worst of rising temperatures.
The proposals come as Australia commits itself to nuclear power with Prime Minister John Howard promising at the weekend to remove all excessive restrictions on the mining, processing and exporting of uranium as a possible step to nuclear power generation.
The IPCC insists it is "technically and economically" feasible to stabilise greenhouse emissions - but only if countries are prepared to pay the extra costs of transforming everything from energy supply networks to agriculture to waste.
By 2030, it estimates, the cost of stabilising greenhouse gases at levels considered the maximum for avoiding catastrophe would be 0.2 per cent to 0.6 per cent of global wealth.
As well as plans for more nuclear power, genetically modified biofuels and carbon capture and storage, the report sets out a vision of the future that mixes existing policies, such as energy efficiency and renewable energy from wind and wave farms, and more futuristic ideas for hydrogen car fleets and "intelligent" buildings which can control energy use.
It says developing nations, in particular India and China, will have to play major roles.
However, Friends of the Earth executive director Tony Juniper said far more fundamental lifestyle changes were needed than the UN group had considered.
"Simply replacing one set of technologies with another set of technologies won't work, especially when there are such big downsides with some of them."
Nuclear reactors were dangerous and land clearance and chemical pesticides and fertilisers used to grow fuel crops could cause huge environmental damage.
"Structural change to the economy, behaviour change and culture change - those have to be elements in a world of decarbonisation."
However, other groups criticised the IPCC as insufficiently robust in its support for technological fixes to the world's climate problems. Bruno Comby, president of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, said nuclear power should provide an even bigger proportion of energy than envisaged by the panel.
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