Luddism and the greens
From Michael Hanlon Sir: George Monbiot (Letters, 13 August) misses the point of my article, which is that the rock of modern environmentalism is infused with a thick anti-scientific and Luddite vein. Of course technology will not solve all our problems. Of course there are terrible dangers involved with nuclear power, and of course many of these proposed technologies will not work. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t give them a try. People like Monbiot want to turn the world back to some sort of mythical pretechnological nirvana. A nirvana where we will all starve.
Mind you, for what it’s worth, I share some of his misgivings about hydrogen fuel cells — they will only ‘work’, in an environ mental and economic sense, if we can find some cheap way of generating and transporting hydrogen without producing carbon dioxide.
Michael Hanlon
London SE5
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