The Anti-Promethean Backlash
brinklindsey.substack.com
brinklindsey.substack.com
1. Attribution of the slower growth in energy usage to a environmental backlash by showing a correlation but no evidence of causation
2. > Indeed, as is now becoming clear in the context of climate change, it is only through the continued development of our technological powers that we can hope to arrest and reverse the immense damage we have caused.
Or, you know, stop continuing to cause damage
3. Somehow, this article seems to ignore “risk-adverse” policies that have great harm to the environment, like not re-regulating fishing and grazing rights
I mean, there’s a kernel of something here. We need to be learning what technologies enable us to protect ourselves and the environment, and we’re being too slow to do that. But just building a bunch of nuclear power plants isn’t it - that just doubles down on our expectations of endless growth and increases the likelihood of nuclear proliferation. Instead we could be investigating geothermal or even thorium reactors. Or better yet, figuring out how to end our reliance on a system that requires constant economic growth.
Note that the article said "and reverse" the damage. You even quoted it!
If you get a patient with a bullet wound, the first step is indeed to stop the guy next to him from shooting him again and again. 100% agree. But after you've done that it's time to stop the bleeding, dig out the bullet(s), stop infection, etc.
Cutting CO2 emissions is "stopping shooting the patient". Super important and the firs step to be sure! But not nearly enough. Not even by a long shot (pun intended).
And how do you accomplish that economically? What technological progress helps stop continuing damage? What sort of policies to stop the damage are politically viable? There's 8 billion people who need to work, eat, move about, etc.
> But just building a bunch of nuclear power plants isn’t it
I would have been better than relying on coal plants, and would have helped electrify economies faster.
> Or better yet, figuring out how to end our reliance on a system that requires constant economic growth.
The world's population is still growing, and the developing world is still developing. How do you propose handling those two issues, while funding cleaner technologies, and finding an alternative economic system?
Why can't growth be sustainable with the right technologies? The sun emits vast amounts of energy. There's tons of resources in the solar system. Human civilization could exist for a very long time. We've hardly achieved everything achievable.
Real activity on earth has much stricter limits. Humanity could expand into space, but growth on earth can't exceed various limits of commodities and ability to reject waste heat.
The growth is always good mindset is the same logic that would have you see a starving man fed being good and then concluding that shoving a firehose of glucose syrup down every person's throat must be better.
Growth is bounded. Resource use is bounded. Consumption levels in the worst polluting countries are past optimal for quality of life. The solution is to improve efficiency and reign in waste whilst uplifting those who don't yet have enough.
Because resources are finite. Sure, we haven’t tapped all the energy the sun shines on earth. But if we did, we would be doing the equivalent of painting the earth black, absorbing all possible light and making everything a scorched wasteland. Space travel enables a form of sustainable growth, but if you want to stick around here, the growth needs to stop eventually. I, and many people, believe we’re bumping up against the upper limit of humans the earth can support.
* child mortality is lower nowadays, therefore there is usually a temporary population boom in industrializing societies. This is because
* in preindustrialized societies, people are aware that their children are their primary means of economic support in old age. Pension schemes have eliminated this incentive in industrialized countries, but a collapse of such schemes will force people to reconsider this point. People might consider to re-prioritize children over other life goals.
The nuclear energy movement in the 1970s was closely affiliated with the nuclear weapons movement. As one indicator of the latter, the phrase "ban the bomb" was already peaking in 1963, as the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was being proposed: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ban+the+bomb&y...> (Google Ngram viewer)
A similar search for "anti-nuclear movement" shows a later peak, in the late 1970s, which would correspond with the Three Mile Island incident (1979): <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=anti-nuclear+m...>
Essentially, nuclear power had a significant public-image problem, and it got markedly worse just as embargo-based oil shortages were peaking for a second (and far more significant) time, with the Iranian Oil Embargo (also 1979): <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_oil_crisis>
I think the reason why the investment in nuclear power did not increase is because nuclear is very much not an attractive investment.
Such project needs a LOT of money just to start, and that will take YEARS to be finished. But the success of this project depends on variables that are extremely hard to predict: in 10 years, what will be the electricity demand curve, what will be the import and export market with other countries, or within the same country, what will be the environmental surrounding (if it turns out the river you use to provide cooling is changing, or if the site turns out to not be exactly as predicted during the initial survey, ...). If you have just one small problem in the chain, you have very expensive consequences. For example, defects in the structure may render the whole plant totally useless. And what about the workforce: you build a plant in 10 years, and when it is finished, you have only a handful of people knowing how to make it works (you cannot force people to choose specific studies if they don't want to, and forming people takes ages), so you need to increase their salary and, again, you end up with a situation were you lose money. And what if the laws change, and some subsidies that you were including in your planning disappear, or some local governance comes up with some restrictions, ..?
And, on top of that, a failed nuclear power plant project will still cost you money for decades. If it never runs, you will have huge debt with absolutely nothing that can give you a bit of money back. If it runs a little bit, you will need to pay a lot to dismantle it properly.
I think it's the main reason why investment in nuclear power did not increase as much as one could naively think: investors, when they look closely at it, see that it is still a huge gamble, with a big probability to be disastrous for them.
You could say the same thing about chip fabs or large mines. I'd say chip fabs face even more uncertainty. While baseload electricity will always be in demand, in the chip industry your 3 billion $ fab could be completed at the bottom end of boom-bust cycle and lead you into bankruptcy.
My point is not that nuclear plants are unique, and that no other industry shares some similarities, my point is that nuclear plants are a risky investment, and that it explains why the investment does not simply increased when the oil starts to be a problem, especially if there are strong competitors like renewables (they also have their problems, but they are competitive: their problems are not bigger than the ones of the nuclear).
If fact, I could even have started my paragraph with "like chip fabs or large mines ..." without changing anything to the point I was making.
That being said, I still think that even for chip fabs, small bits of a failed chip fab can still be resold more easily in order to compensate part of the loss. Same for mines: I'm sure there are uncertainties, but mines do not accumulate all the disadvantages of a nuclear power plant.
[1] https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metacrs9912/m1/1/... See table 3.
"in the context of climate change, it is only through the continued development of our technological powers that we can hope to arrest and reverse the immense damage we have caused."
homer simpson:
"Here's to alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."
But we have damage from them, they've stopped nuclear power. Maybe the risks were too high, maybe they did save us, but we will never know. But we do know that it was the solution to their number one problem for decades and they stopped it.
Sounds like environmentalists to me
On the very slim chance that you're not trolling, let me explain that "environmentalists" don't live somewhere else. They too are people, that like everyone, live on this planet. They are also voters (at least in the countries where that's possible). Nevertheless, they (the subset you're keen to tag) are not the only people living on the planet nor are they the only voters. Nor, most importantly, are they the only or best funded lobbyists.
Your whole premise is blaming those who fight for "being losers". How about all those folks/groups lobbying against environmental controls? Do they bear no blame in your world view?
I think its reasonable to point out that the environmental movement has fought the best chance they've had the past few decades to end the reliance on fossil fuels and has accomplished very little of their stated goals or what you'd expect them to hope to accomplish. The goal isn't to fight, at least not if you're serious about what you claim to care about.
https://nitter.1d4.us/380kmh/status/935965568670273537
>if your idea of a future city involves:
>- towers inna park >- flying cars >- flashy geometric buildings >- few or no people
>then it is not a very serious idea
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>what do people do in these cities? walk around in the Green Space (tm), or sit in their Glass Box (tm) and admire the Futuristic Cityscape (tm)
>work? lol of course not
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>as architecturally implausible as they are, one thing I love about Imperial Boy's cityscapes is that they actually look like, you know, SOCIETY
>there are shops, there are workers, there are improvisations and decorations, there are cheap structures and ornate ones, etc etc
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> most important of all, they focus on how the city looks from the perspective of the people who live in it
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>The sterile glass renderings earlier in the thread suggest an artist who
>1) doesn't understand why people live in cities, and/or >2) doesn't understand what people do for fun
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(back to me now) the "towers inna park" quip is really at the heart of it; these kinds of places exist in real life and they're just terrible. it doesn't matter how much grass and greenery there is in between the gigahuge buildings if there's nothing to do there. it's not a new idea[1], we tried it and it sucks[2]. it looks good in concept art until you think about it for five minutes and imagine living in this place at ground level. it's utopia as imagined by some omnipotent top-down planner (literally, we nearly always see these places from above).
it really has nothing to do with environmentalism one way or the other; they just look like awful places to be.
when people move to off-grid solar cabins in the mountains, support laws that make it impossible to build nuclear power plants, or take up organic farming, they're not just trying to save the planet; they're seeking refuge from that unrestrained power of destruction, which they have come to see as malignant
they are seeking autonomy in which to construct a harmonious life
but the power to destroy, pouvoir de nuisance, overlaps greatly with the power to create; you cannot build a hydroelectric power plant without destroying the land upstream, you cannot build pruitt-igoe without bulldozing poor neighborhoods, and you cannot invent nontoxic firesafe refrigerants without taking the risk of destroying the ozone layer
so, when these 'environmentalists' seeking autonomy look at high-modernist 'cities of the future' visions of towers in a park whose polyhedral geometry is a boast of the architect's rationality, they correctly see them as the epitome of central planning with the unrestrained power to destroy
which, to return to the alternate history imagined at the beginning of the article, really doesn't have a great track record, even aside from environmental damage
Whether we can do that or not is a moot point, because - from the opponents view point -
1. numerous historical attempts to solve things with tech have led to more problems down the line
2. "We'll solve it with tech" has also been used as an empty promise and excuse by those with vested interests who want to continue the status quo