I'm way late to the Ask a Scienceblogger of a few weeks ago. So late that the question has come back around in a new Ask for this week (and this after being trumped by last week's Organic query - and both subjects are of great interest to me and soon I will converge them, plausibly, not as a lark). I fear now that I may have waded into a mini-manifesto below.
The actual article referenced in the Global Warming Ask category is not worth addressing, though it is actually kind of funny (by intent, I suppose). But I am concerned that Global Warming talk is becoming the end-all and be-all of environmental conversation. I say that while in agreement that the phenomenon is real, so don't think me a Michaels-ian refuter. (I see that Tim Lambert at Deltoid has a whole section on anti-global warming advocate Patrick Michaels. It's quite a fine compendium. James Hrynyshyn at Island of Doubt, also has a post that Tim too discusses on an industry memo that shows pro-energy constituents offering financial support for Michaels' pro-energy research. Sidebar: funny, this thing the internet, right? Tim's in Australia and has the best run-down on Michaels, even though I'm at UVA, where the Environmental Sciences building where Michaels would work, if he kept an office there, is about 100 yards from me.)
As for the reality of global warming, Naomi Oreskes, a science studies professor at UCSD, had a nice, crisp commentary in Science a few years ago that I quite like. It's here (as a pdf), and in a follow-up letter she specifies that the point of her essay was, in part, this: "Proxy debates about scientific uncertainty are a distraction from the real issue, which is...how to maximize our ability to learn about the world we live in so as to be able to respond efficaciously." (She also had a version at The Washington Post in 2004, and has been continuing studies on the politics of science, as with an excellent presentation on the recent history of the construction of anti-global warming rhetoric, "Representing Climate Science in the Face of Unruly Opposition," at the meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) last year. And Seed's own -- our own -- Chris Mooney interviewed her. Check that out too, on video no less.)
So, I agree with that, but I also am distracted by the thrust of attention that says, since global warming is a concern (which it is) and since it is caused by carbon emissions, then we need to save the earth by doing what we can to curb emissions. Yet, when speaking of environmental issues - history, policy, ethics, health, etc. - there are an entire range of matters that are also important and that would lead us in other directions of action. This is what I have in mind:
I am worried about not just carbon emissions and how they are warming the earth and melting ice, but also about the pollutants in my local water source, the toxics in my food, the mercury in my fish, dirty air caused by untold quantities of emissions that come from more than just factories, the devastation of habitats all over the world (in the US, in Europe, on every continent) - for the sake of the organisms in those habitats (if you want to argue biocentrically for all living things or even eco-centrically for all things animate or not) and for the sake of the humans (us) who live as part of the ecologies (if you want to argue anthropocentrically) and rely upon their health and continued existence - the destruction of mountain ranges, the erosion of barrier reefs, the loss of wetlands, the re-re-definition of nature as something buyable, sellable, and tradable, and more.
Now, working to prevent global warming is obviously an important issue. But what happens when we focus on just that and ignore the wide range of everyday concerns for environmental health (which has "human health" as a subcomponent)? In one increasingly common example, we get arguments for nuclear power. We hear that since carbon emissions are the problem to be solved, solely and immediately, then our only answer is an energy source that does not emit C02. (Britain's New Scientist had a good review of this last year.)
It seems to go like this:
- Global warming = bad.
- Global warming is caused by C0 2 emissions.
- Nuclear power plants don't have those.
- Nuclear power plants = good.
And when we structure the argument that way, we start to connive ourselves that nuclear energy would be great for allowing us to combat global warming. Yet, when we do that, we work towards CO2 emissions while ignoring, and making worse, the host of other problems that I just mentioned. Radioactive fallout won't go away; it gets worse. Spent fuel rods don't help anyone; they hurt everyone. Truckloads of waste being carted across the country, on our highways, in trucks, every single day, through cities, on and off the cloverleaf interchanges, just to the other side of all those fancy urban highway sound barriers, or even in the bucolic Archer Daniels Midland agro-business-owned corn fields of mid-nation, for decades in the future, to get to Yucca Mountain, is not a good situation. It is not something we should invite. Nuclear plants are not environmentally friendly. They do emit waste, and not just in the solid spent fuel form. There's the low-level radioactive waste that collects, as the EPA summarizes it, in "contaminated protective shoe covers and clothing, wiping rags, mops, filters, reactor water treatment residues, and equipment and tools." And, as documented here, "The preparation of uranium for the reactor involves a host of CO2 -emitting processes, including: mining and milling the ore; fuel enrichment and fuel-rod fabrication."
If you want to argue for nuclear power, you have to assume that nuclear energy only has to be evaluated for its point-specific output--the effluent stream, the radioactive waste or possibility of leaking radioactive waste--not its entire cradle-to-grave chain of existence. And, if we want to fight global warming with nuclear power, then we just set ourselves up for a few dozen generations of work on how to fix all the problems we knowingly create by promoting nuclear power. This is to say, in another way: when I see smoke from a factory or pollution from any other source, I am concerned about global warming, and I am glad that people are coming to appreciate the massive problem our industrial glut has been producing for a century and more. But I am first concerned about local health and environmental viability, and I am first concerned about clean air, water, soil, unpolluted fish and birds and livestock. Safe milk at the store, safe fish at the market, birds that can continue to eat insects, insects that can continue to participate in soil management, dirt that can continue to provide fertile contributions to plant growth.
Introducing occupational hazards, introducing public health hazards, introducing soil-toxifying hazards, introducing dependence and control issues to nuclear hierarchies, introducing new forms of weapons dangers, new targets for vandalism or destruction, just to start the list. And I haven't waded into the political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions that are always shunned in these debates. To wit, the immense 20th century public intellectual Lewis Mumford long ago talked about two tendencies in technological systems, the democratic and authoritarian, and Langdon Winner, in a staple of STS literature, argued for the necessity of a centralized, hierarchical control structure if nuclear power were to be successful. Real quickly: we can't have a democratic nuclear power system. We can't vote on the management of nuclear plants; we can't promote public participation in nuclear production; we can't leave the day-to-day operation of a nuclear plant to unspecified task-masters. Nuclear power production requires a strong, centralized authority system, where the ones in charge know what they're doing from experience and training--"experts"!--and the ones below that leadership follow orders and maintain the sanctity of a hierarchical power structure.
And yet, when someone mentions that we could, oh I don't know, just use less energy, energy advocates fly off the handle. What, us? Be responsible to our future? Ask our fellow citizens to return to energy consumption levels of even thirty years ago? Or how about 15? How dare you question the cherished American value of gluttony? (See here; or here), where the commenter suggests that consumption is a matter of free will, not one of responsibility to humans and non-humans alike)
As the Energy Information Administration put it, "The issue of whether nuclear plants actually present a net positive environmental gain compared to fossil fuels depends on the values that are placed on the wastes that each type of plant produces." (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuclearenvissues.html) Why are we so disinclined to change how we live? We change how we live everyday as it is. But when someone says "we have to change how we live," pro-energy advocates get in a tizzy, even going so far as to suggest that air-conditioning the desert is a morally acceptable thing to do.
Or, we get insanely inane commentaries like Patrick Moore's in the Washington Post last Spring, where he suggests that we need not worry about terrorist attacks on nuclear plants, because the concrete is so thick, no harm would come from a plane crash. In thus, he's ignoring one of the most basic lessons of the Three Mile Island incident - which is that nobody needs to crash a plane into a nuclear plant to do it harm; they need only cut the water supply to prevent cooling to the reactor! Add to that the recent Bulletin of Atomic Scientist's article about a nuclear 9/11, and the story gets a lot more muddied than advocates of a new pro-nuclear power age indicate.
In the end, what I'm thinking is: global warming is bad; so is deteriorating environmental health. Forsaking the latter in efforts to counteract the former is irresponsible. The situation isn't either/or, of course -- either global warming, or nuclear power--but that's precisely why I'm worried. As I read the new pro-nuclear debates, I hear claims that we have but one choice or the other. And I don't believe that.
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I share your view that both the current fossil fuels and nuclear energy are not the answer to our problems. However, if used wisely, nuclear energy can at least gap the bridge between our current overconsumption of energy and a future awareness, and future improvement of environmentally more friendly alternatives. The current alternatives are technologically not advanced enough to fulfill our demands and it will take time before the consumption of energy will go down. The danger in this is that we will stick with nuclear energy longer then intended because, since those fuel-rods keep producing power, we will be less willing to actually research alternatives.
So the solution is everyone start consuming less? Gee, how about this one: Let's have a worldwide lottery and kill off 80% of the world population. Then everyone can live off of oil and polar bear steaks for generations to come. Your logic is sound, Benjamin, but let's take a realisitic approach to this problem.
We could all consume less, yes. I myself have taken strides in reducing my ecological footprint by riding my bike to work 4 days a week, buying locally grown produce, and using natural household cleaners. But I am still aware that I probably consume more electricity, plastics, and commodities than 90% of the rest of the world's population. I just don't think that we can possibly slow down to a "sustainable" consumptive rate. Oil is not going to provide for the long term (maybe not the short term). Fossil fuels are dirty, expensive, and only short term energy sources.
I think nuclear is the way to go. There are risks, but aren't there with any system that has been proposed. The industry has some problems that need to be addressed, but they aren't insurmountable. I just don't see truckloads of spent fuel being trafficked along highways everyday being a plausible scenario. The only nuclear disaster that has ever happened was Chernobyl, and that was just shoddy design and neglect. Three-mile was not a disaster, only a potential one. That's why there are safeguards. There are potential disasters happening all the time at nuclear facilities around the world, and they have all been averted.
Choices need to be made. A combination of conservation and clean energy sources need to be pursued. Wishing away the fact that we are dependent on mass production of energy is foolhardy.
Rienk and E., Thank you for the replies. My areas of disagreement are with the assumptions you make, not with the purpose of your assertions. Consuming less is not the entire answer, but to cast this as unrealistic is a political move to maintain a status quo that isn't working for the majority of people, nor can it work for the future. In fact, I am generally concerned about the solution to "be more efficient" (which is what "consume less" turns into). Being more efficient is exactly what allows for the continuing and worsening dependence on energy resources. Being more efficient is playing into the game that efficiency is the purpose of anything. But consuming less does not have to be only for the sake of being more efficient.
And who is defining "realistic"? Realistic in what way? A realistic chance that we can live healthy lives in the current state of things? A realistic chance that the water my son and daughter drink in two decades will be drinkable? A realistic chance that we can hold off on nuclear problems long enoguh so that you and I will long gone, but the next generation will bemoan our awful predictions?
Simply put, arguments by reference to "be realistic" are bunk. They work only insofar as the person deferring to reality chooses to ignore their own political motivation for doing so.
To get back to the beginning: Conservation is not the answer. It is like voting. It is the bare minimum we should be doing as active citizens in our culture. We all do it, or should do it. But it isn't the answer to our political problems any more than consuming less is the entire answer to our environmental ones. It's one necessary condition, while we figure out why all of us need so much energy.
A more ecologically sound philosophy of engagement with the non-human natural world is the answer, but try to pound that out in a blog reply.
I hear you. I have little faith that our consumer culture will change except maybe in the face of a crisis. That "crisis" will happen sooner or later, but how critical that crisis turns out to be will be the result of a combination of choices we make now. One of those should be the transition to cleaner and more efficient energy. I think we have a better shot at making that paradigm shift than a reversal of consumptive trends. The West (and humanity as a whole) hasn't even been reactionary much less proactive in addressing future energy and waste scenarios.
At least on an individual level, we can make changes in our lifestyles. The most we can hope for is that we learn by the example of those who live at more sustainable levels, and that a grassroots campaign continues to grow. At the larger political level, we have to take small victories (and I consider the shift from fossil fuel-based energy to nuclear a victory) where we can.
I don't see any chance of getting away from carbon-intensive energy sources without nuclear power. Abstinence-based solutions (reducing consumption) are not going to work, nor do I believe that human beings (or any other living thing) have any kind of moral obligation to reduce the scale of their activity. It is the nature of living things to grow to their limit.
To prevent STDs, put a condom on your wang. To reduce CO2 production, use nuclear energy.
Pretty much everything that happens in the world is driven by the desire for either sex or wealth. No change ever occurs unless it can occur in a way that does not significantly impede those desires. Slavery would never have ended without the cotton gin.
Nuclear energy is the only energy option available for large-scale base-load energy production that allows us to get away from fossil fuels while still delivering growth on the wealth side of the equation, so it's the only feasible alternative. In fact a nuclear-electric economy could grow much larger than an economy constrained by systemic fossil fuel dependence.
Adam: "Nuclear energy is the only energy option available for large-scale base-load energy production that allows us to get away from fossil fuels while still delivering growth on the wealth side of the equation, so it's the only feasible alternative."
This is loaded with a number of questionable assumptions, and I'd push you to explain more. I don't folow your reasoning on "the wealth side of the equation," (how wealthy are you? how wealthy is your child's teacher? how wealthy is your congressperson? how wealthy is the technician running this future nuclear plant?) on "feasible alternative," (who defines "feasible"? You assume it's a static term to be deployed in argument, when in fact it's your argument only that makes it a legitimate term to use), on this claim to it being "the only energy option," (have you explored the innumerable energy production options? should there only be "one" answer? should we be driving towards one solution? can there be no range of alternatives?) and on a few other brought forth by the other repliers above.
I don't mean for my reply to be acerbic -- I appreciate the thoughts above, I'm serious. But I am stunned when people make claims about "only solutions," without demonstrating that they've looked into all the possible solutions and understood the great many downsides to this supposed nuclear solution. How can we be offering such easy answers so loudly?
BRC:
Just try and imagine that some of us have actually been looking at this problem for several years.
When it comes to wealth, it is a fact that people wish, generally, to improve their material situation, and certainly not to see it grow worse. Good luck trying to get people to vote themselves poorer.
When it comes to feasable, it is simply defined as keeping the light switch working. The 'innumerable' alternative scenarios usually fail on this test on an engineering basis. I'm not sure what your whining about 'hierarchical power structures' has to do with anything. Do you think that professional expertiese is bad? (Is that your professional opinion?) Where do you think wind turbines and solar cells come from? Why is it democratic to buy an object from a central factory, but not electricity?
We could, indeed, use less energy. Indeed, here in Europe we use about half as much, per capita, as the US. Great, except that if the whole world was like us then we'd still be facing disaster. If the whole world had the energy consumption half that of Europe, we'd still be facing disaster. 'Just using less energy' isn't an answer, it's pretending that the problem is vastly smaller than it really is.
I'm not sure what your comments about TMI mean, either. TMI didn't actually kill anyone, despite multiple errors and failings. If chernobyl had had the big concrete dome we have on western reactors, the name would still be barely known.
The really glaring error in this article is, however, the fact that you complain about the pollution of air, soil and water without apparently realising that a huge part of this comes from coal and oil. The absolute first priority of the 'Nuclear future' is to stop all coal burning. Amongst the others, the replacing of oil based transport with electric would be another large step.
How would you get rid of oil and coal? Not achieve small reductions, not pretend that a great social awakening will remove all demand, but actually replace them with something that isn't going to poision the earth and atmosphere?
I think, Andrew, that the point of Ben's post is to broach statements such as the above (in which its conclusion as it pertains to nuclear energy I won't comment on here). It assumes a fix and, perhaps most prevalent, implies simplicity to the fix. True, nuclear power is part of the solution, and I think lots of smart people who have thought heavily on this, feel this is so in terms of timeline and in terms of current choices, even maybe in terms of ideology. But it's certainly not simple, and comes with it a domino effect of other concerns real and accustom to the passage of "progress" yet to be real. This doesn't mean it's a bad course of action - it just means the need to step back a little. It's good that you're skeptical over Ben's thoughts and comments, but you get the sense that maybe those same powers of skepticism aren't being used to attack the other perspective.
The part to be examined:
"How would you get rid of oil and coal? Not achieve small reductions, not pretend that a great social awakening will remove all demand, but actually replace them with something that isn't going to poision the earth and atmosphere?"
Even if you take as an assumption that all current modes of sociopolitical organization, economic configurations, and existential understandings are "good", or "necessary", or "unchangeable", or "the best we've got", and that such things are only possible through the electric grid (and obviously those are problematic assumptions), there is still a pretty substantial question to be answered. And that is, why is global warming so bad? I'm not being glib. If it's bad because it merely threatens the current establishment and wealth dispersement and other such concerns, then there are clear differences in interests and the whole "one world" rhetoric needs to exposed as fraudulent. It's the rich world rhetoric - let me stay rich.
If, however, there's an ethical component here - keeping the world habitable for as many people and other species as possible, now and in the foreseeable future - then the idea of nuclear substitution is in some ways laughable. Especially if we concentrate on the risks involved. Merely substituting nuclear for fossil validates existing consumption patterns, requires no substantive personal sacrifice for the enabled, and perpetuates the kind of dispersal of human settlement that has proven disruptive for ecosystems and habitat. It also transforms the attendant risk from one of a warmer planet to one of a planet that becomes a radioactive waste dump - piecemeal through the accumulation of waste in designated death zones or catastrophically through technological mishap or terrorism. Which is more poisonous - a common element created in larger quantities, or a heretofore unknown element (with no natural process of recycling on a human time scale) created at all, and in larger and larger and longer lasting quantities? How is nuclear waste not going to poison the earth? More to the point, whose earth will nuclear waste poison (both geographically and temporally - eons and eons hence)...
David Ng -
Actually, the idea - beguiling though it is - the we could do a drastic power-down of the economy would involve environmental disaster to make the current impacts look relatively minor. Conservation can only happen in the context of overproduction; a cold and starving person sees meat and firewood where a warm and full one sees endangered species and pristine forests.
It's an unplesant reality that, unless we find a way to deport 5 billion people off of this planet, we cannot reverse progress.
WJG -
If you are asking 'Why is global warming so bad?', it's not about wealth effects. It's about the hundreds of millions of third world people who stand to lose their homes and probably lives; large scale damage or destruction of agricultural systems, especially those based on rivers; and more minor effects like disease and heatwaves. So in fact it's pretty much the opposite; it's the poor who are going to get stomped by this (as usual).
Indeed, the risks involved in nuclear power are generally visited in the country that benefits from it, wheras the risks of fossil fuels (at least the CO2 risk) tends to be visited on those who benefit least.
I have to ask - outside pollution concerns - what is wrong with current consumption patterns? Why should people have to make personal substantive sacrifices? The greatest single destructor of habitat worldwide is agriculture; I'm not sure how this would be changed by energy source, at least in the medium term. In the long term, high intensity energy sources offer at least the possability of synthetic food largely replacing agriculture with the consequent return of most of the planet's surface to wilderness; I am not aware of any other way of achieving this without the extinction of the human race.
To answer your questions on nuclear waste; the dose makes the poision. Your body is radioactive, as is your food, your water and even the air you breathe, and this has always been the case. So on a global scale, we already know that the background radiation of the planet could be increased by a small amount without any effects. It isn't a case of introducing something new.
The idea that a known such as CO2 is a priori better than, for instance, an unknown such as plutonium, is just wrong. No other way of putting it; it's in the same category as 2+2=5. (scalar).
There is a reason why you would want to use a closed nuclear cycle, in that the short half life of the end products (30 years) means that you don't accumulate ever larger amounts of waste, plus you minimise mining. So the whole idea of 'eons' is, again, wrong.
I tend to look at this as an engineering problem; how do we power society (at any intensity) with the lowest possible impact? This isn't the same as lowest price, and it is certainly not automatically lowest intensity.
The thing I find most flustrating here is that you are implicitly assuming that there is (to paraphrase) a 'third way', without detailing exactly what this entails. It is, after all, easy to criticise solutions or partial solutions, and easy to claim that problems are all the result of 'the system'. The great irony is that such a position is of great comfort to those who profit from poisioning the planet, since the absence of any positive program acts as implicit support for the status quo.
Just try and imagine that some of us have actually been looking at this problem for several years.
I tend to look at this as an engineering problem; how do we power society (at any intensity) with the lowest possible impact? This isn't the same as lowest price, and it is certainly not automatically lowest intensity.
I actually can imagine that people have been looking at this problem for a several years some even more! Langdon Winner, as Ben mentioned in the original post, has actually been looking at issues such as this for decades. Political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, writers or nearly every ilk have been grappling with many of these issues for years! The problem seems to be that most people havent been listening. But, now that weve allowed things to get to a catastrophic scale (maybe not catastrophic, but definitely a holy shit we better do something scale), we have all of these new experts coming in to tell us how to engineer our way out of this jam. So, I ask, where were most of these people 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago? Some certainly saw what was going on, but Ill hazard a guess where the others were back then: looking at this as an engineering problem, trying to figure out how to power society (at any intensity) with the lowest impact at the lowest cost (or, more accurately, the highest profits for their corporate patrons). So, why should I be convinced by them this time around? If theres one thing fairly certain in this debate, its this: we are not dealing with merely or only an engineering problem, unless of course were talking about social engineering.
I had the wonderful opportunity to listen this past spring to a VP from GE give a talk about alternative energy sources for the future. The talk was ostensibly about wind power, and its possibilities for supplementing current grid demand. But, the presenter just couldnt stop talking about nuclear power. It became absolutely clear that GE has simply been biding its time waiting for the next go ahead to start construction on new nuclear facilities. Someone asked her about the possible problems associated with nuclear. Not to worry, she replied; those problems like we saw at Chernobyl and TMI, those were addressed years ago. Then someone had the audacity to ask what would happen to spent fuel rods. She quickly replied that GE hasnt been doing any research on that, its not their job. They leave that up to the national laboratories. The short of the story: GE can have multiple facilities up and running at the word of the president, but they have no idea (and no concern) about what to do with the leftovers. Sounds like sloppy engineering to me. And it sounds like business as usual: distract us with one wonder while hiding the other variables that were interfering.
One last quote:
the dose makes the poision
Paracelsus said this about 400 years ago. It gets deployed a lot, usually by folks trying to dismiss arguments against them when someone is accusing of them of toxic poisioning. Its true, of coure, in one of those obvious ways. The question is really, but do we have any idea of what that dose is? We used to think most substances in the parts per million range. Then we got better equipment, and we started testing things at the ppb range. And, lo and behold, many regulated substances turned out 1) to be far more toxic at much lower doses than had previously seemed possible and 2) the ways in which the toxicity expresses itself offered a whole host of new surprises and complications.
It seems audacious to simply right off the question of what else we might get from nuclear power besides less carbon dioxide. And to simply dismiss these questions, these interrogations, by claiming authority to reality stifles precisley the conversations we ought to be having the ones that havent happened in the past; the ones that might help us avoid reproducing the problems we currently face in new forms for future generations. Instead, shouldnt we be embracing some sort of creativity, the same creativity that is flaunted everytime someone engineers us a new solution? I applaud E. Powers for the lifestyle changes s/he chose to make. I also share the frustration. Its like the feeling I had when I left a viewing of An Inconvenient Truth. You mean *I* can really stop global warming if I just change my lightbulbs and drive a hybrid car? Surely you jest Mr. Gore! But that doesnt mean we go running to the other side of the equation: that *no* lifestyle changes need to be made; that we can simply go on doing what we do and wait for someone else to fix our problems. Thats patently absurd! Someone commented that Bens post amounted to an ignoring of the problem. How more ostrich-like can we be if we just assume we dont have to actually change; we can just wait for the technical fix? Thats not just ignoring the problem, its failing to see the connection between ones actions and those problems were all innocent! Its those mysterious coal plants that have grown from the earth and spew toxic dust and mercury! To deny the link between the way we live in the world and the problems we seek solutions to is only to delay the inevitable. Call it sustainable degradation if you will, but its still degradation.
One of the problems with making energy decisions for the future is that we don't understand our energy present very well. As an example, few of the experts commenting on the national stage have ever worked in electic power generation - and like most everything else, the real world is much different than what's found in books. I've been doing in the generation field for over twenty years, in nuclear power, and I've tried to present an accurate picture of the how-and-why, the good-and-bad of this energy source, in a techno-thriller novel. "Rad Decision" is available at no cost to readers at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com - and they seem to like it, judging from their homepage comments.
"I'd like to see Rad Decision widely read." - Stewart Brand, founder of "The Whole Earth Catalog"