Science Quote by James Lovelock

Lovelock is doing two things at once: poking a thumb in the eye of environmental orthodoxy and reminding you that energy politics is never just about “values.” The line is almost offhand gossip - “I have heard” - but it’s weaponized gossip, the kind that doesn’t need a footnote to land. By framing it as hearsay, he keeps one hand clean while letting the insinuation do maximum work: if Greenpeace can be financially nudged into opposing nuclear, then the moral high ground of the anti-nuclear movement suddenly looks like rented property.

The subtext is a Lovelock staple. As the Gaia hypothesis guy who broke with mainstream green groups to defend nuclear as a low-carbon necessity, he’s arguing that fear of radiation has been politically cultivated, not merely discovered. “Saudi Arabians” isn’t a random villain; it’s a synecdoche for petro-state leverage, the quiet logic that oil exporters benefit when rich countries reject dense, scalable alternatives. The target isn’t just Greenpeace, it’s the broader ecosystem of activism and philanthropy where messaging can be steered without an explicit memo.

Context matters: Lovelock spent decades warning about climate disruption and grew impatient with symbolic environmentalism that, in his view, couldn’t grapple with industrial-scale decarbonization. The sentence is calibrated cynicism from a scientist who believes the physics are unforgiving and the politics are compromised. It works because it flips the usual suspicion - that nuclear is the industry with hidden motives - back onto its loudest critics, forcing readers to ask an uncomfortable question: who profits from our preferred moral panic?