Quotes from Mark Lynas

I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

Human releases of carbon dioxide are almost certainly happening faster than any natural carbon release since the beginning of life on Earth.

If we are to save humanity and the planet from the worst mass extinction of all time, worse even than that at the end of the Permian, we must stop at two degrees.

At 1.24 am on 26 April 1986 Chernobyl's Unit 4 reactor exploded after staff disabled safety systems and performed an ill-advised experiment to check – ironically enough – the reactor's safety.

I particularly dislike the high-profile switch-off campaigns where whole cities are plunged into darkness for an hour as a supposedly symbolic gesture about energy use. So is the implication that we all need to live in constant gloom to reduce CO2 emissions?

Everywhere I went in Africa it was the same story. Foreign-funded NGOs, supported mainly by donors in Europe, were delaying or blocking the development not just of biotechnology but of modern agriculture generally across the continent.

First, guilt-tripping doesn't work as a campaigning strategy. If you make people feel bad about what they do, you must give them a realistic and feasible alternative. Second, pragmatism beats purism. Every time.

We cannot criticise global warming sceptics for denying the scientific consensus on climate when we ignore the same consensus on both the safety and the beneficial uses of nuclear power and genetic engineering.

It would be easy to laugh this off were it not so obviously counterproductive. The idea that tackling climate change means accepting profound levels of intrusion into our everyday lives – and the economic disaster of dramatic drops in consumption and living standards – is an illusion that is actually shared by the Green left and the libertarian right.

For a brief review of our history to date shows us in a very singular role:that of serial killers.

Calculated globally, human society consumes the equivalent of 400 years' worth of ancient solar energy (expressed in terms of the net primary productivity of plants during previous geological eras) each year through our use of fossil fuels.

We'd do better-if it were possible-just to eat the oil directly. For example, it takes 127 calories of fuel to fly in each calorie of iceberg lettuce from the United States to the UK. According to one estimate, the US food system consumes ten times more fossil energy than it produces in food energy. With

This is classic denial: no one wants to hold a mental image of themselves as bad or evil, so immoral acts are necessarily dressed up in a cloak of intellectual self-justification.

When the Earth was last four degrees warmer, there was no ice at either pole. Global warming of this magnitude would eventually leave the whole planet without ice for the first time in nearly 40 million years.

Either way, nuclear power is the only means by which we can generate prodigious amounts of energy with only a tiny human footprint on the planetary biosphere.

But just as they were spectacularly successful in stopping the growth of nuclear power, they were spectacularly unsuccessful in promoting the use of solar as an alternative

With an Apollo Program scale-up of nuclear and other low-carbon power sources we still – just about – have time to avoid the worst of global warming.

The history of the anti-nuclear movement is therefore not lit by sunshine, but shrouded in coal smoke.

In other words, not only have there been no fatalities resulting from Fukushima, but there have been no radiation-related injuries or medically-identifiable health effects either.

In fact the only documented deaths attributable to Fukushima actually happened through panic-stricken attempts to avoid radiation.

Even if you built your house right at the perimeter fence of your local nuclear plant, you would still receive many times less additional radiation than an airline crew member would consider entirely normal, for example.

Coal-fired power stations in fact release far more radiation into the environment than nuclear power stations, due to trace radionuclides being concentrated into coal ash and blown away in dust and smoke.

The only serious debate in numbers terms is whether the death toll from coal is five hundred times worse than nuclear, or many thousands of times worse.

This means that not only can fast reactors – deployed at scale – "solve" the nuclear waste "problem", but that they can also run entire countries for centuries on uranium which has already been mined and for which there is little other use.