The Biggest Blind Spot of the Climate Movement: Nuclear Energy
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 March 2026
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Zion Lights used to be deep inside the environmental movement: protests, arrests, road blockades, the whole thing. Then she started looking closely at the evidence around nuclear power and found that much of what she'd been told about energy, risk, and climate solutions didn't hold up.
In this conversation with Michael Shermer, she explains why anti-nuclear politics has done real damage, and why reliable energy matters far beyond moral posturing. She speaks from experience about Extinction Rebellion, energy policy in Germany and France, fear around Fukushima and Chernobyl, energy poverty, overpopulation, and why modern environmentalism so often attacks the very technologies that could help both people and the planet.
Zion Lights is a British science communicator, writer, author, and former environmental activist known for her pivot to advocacy of evidence-based environmental policy, particularly her support for nuclear energy as a tool for decarbonisation. She is a prominent voice in debates about climate change, energy policy, humanism, and the role of scientific reasoning in public discourse. Her new book is Energy is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear.
Transcript
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| 0:32.4 | That's meundies.com slash comfort code comfort. So walk us through your transition from Treehugger, environmentalist, to where you are now. |
| 0:38.2 | How did that, whatever you want to call that detransition or reconversion or whatever experience? |
| 0:43.1 | Nuclear was the thing that kind of pulled me out because I had heard so many, like, almost |
| 0:48.0 | everything that I had heard about nuclear technology was false. |
| 0:51.0 | Almost every single thing about waste, about pollution, about the industry, workers, |
| 0:56.9 | like every single thing. And that was it. Penny drop. I thought, if they're lying to me about |
| 1:01.8 | this, what else are they lying about? It sounds absurd, but I mean, Thomas Malthus was saying this |
| 1:06.5 | way back when, wasn't he? And he was literally writing kind of academic papers that people took |
| 1:10.8 | very seriously saying, we need disease to wipe people out. It will be a good thing if that |
| 1:15.7 | happens. We will not be able to save people. There will be famine. And this is actually where |
| 1:20.3 | the root of environmentalism come from, which is why there's that kind of misanthropic thread |
| 1:24.8 | through a traditional movement. You grow up with this idea that the good people are the environmental activists. |
| 1:30.6 | And I suddenly went, these are not the good guys. |
| 1:32.6 | These are not the good guys at all. |
| 1:39.4 | All right. |
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