19 October 2020
Dear Sir David Attenborough,
A Life On Our Planet
I have seen your beautiful film describing Your Life on Earth and as I have followed you throughout the years from The Crowded Planet to Population Matters, I admire your attitude and stamina. I am 83 and can feel my human decay as I can also follow the decay of our civilization. There is only one thing where you have been misguided – as many others have today, but as it is a vital element you should look into it.
Your talk about renewables is wrong as the unstable wind and sun can only deliver as long as they both have a backup – and today the backup consists mostly of biomass from trees. In Denmark the wind energy is 7% combined with 60% biomass, and 90% of it is imported tree from many countries like the US, Amazonas, Ghana, Russia, Estonia and others. It was a big mistake when the EU in 2009 decided to call tree biomass as CO2 neutral, as it is 140% worse than coal. Denmark is in front with windmills and is burning millions of trees. Michael Moore illustrated it well in his film Planet Of The Humans, which you can see on my website www.earthissue.com
We have to include nuclear power as being recommended by the UN IPCC, and new thorium minireactors are being developed and will be on the market within a couple of years (also by Roll-Royce in the UK). They will be as cheap as wind and solar, and they can replace the fossil fuels – if only there it the political will for it.
You have an enormous power to influence people, and that is why your statement about renewables is so fatal for the trees in the world. Do you want them to be burned in power plants or do you want a world with more trees to sustain the biodiversity?
Concerning waste the new thorium reactors can use most of the fuel and waste – and there is on the other side a huge problem with waste from wind mills and solar cells. Just now tons of wings are being buried in an American desert, as it is difficult to reuse them. We have a big problem in Denmark, but nobody talks about it, because renewables is like a holy cow, and the windindustry has a great power! Money talks!
In the southern part of India close to Chennai they have built a big sun power plant but due to the dust they have to wash them clean very often and use a lot of water – and it so happens that in that part of India they have a shortage of water! They have the same problem in South Africa.
Please do study the latest news about the thorium minireactors – without nuclear it will be impossible to stop the global warming. It is true that Chernobyl was a disaster and a human error – but only about 43 died from the catastrophe!
Yours sincerely
Jonna Vejrup Carlsen
