This has long been Michael Shellenberger's viewpoint— basically that conventional "green" advocacy/politics is mostly about erecting arbitrary barriers and prev

This has long been Michael Shellenberger's viewpoint— basically that conventional "green" advocacy/politics is mostly about erecting arbitrary barriers and preventing people from doing or having the things they want. Which is all well and good when it's a rich country setting aside slivers of land as national parks for the common good, but it's pretty unfair when it's rich nations telling the BRIC what they can and can't do with the same kinds of natural resources that the now-rich countries happily strip mined from themselves and have plundered from elsewhere for the past century or longer. Anyway, I don't agree with all of it (particularly his total dismissal of wind and solar), but a lot does ring true, especially when basically the end conclusion is that the route to saving the planet is to get everyone as rich as possible as fast as possible, because that's how to get them to care. And the route to that is cheap energy, and that means nuclear— not vapourware tomorrow-nuclear (thorium, fusion, whatever), but today's nuclear technology, en masse. He's given a few TED Talks on this, worth a listen.