The Complexity of Truth vs The Simplicity of Doubt

When talking about the current economic crisis, climate change, man’s negative impact on the planet, etc, it is often the case that the truth is massively complicated. Climate change, as an example, requires one to understand compliex chaotic interrelationships across much of the planet. The fact that we still have such poor weather forecasting, even over short time periods, is evidence that the systems are so complicated and chaotic that we don’t yet fully understand them. Explaining to people that past average global warming has caused northern Europe to disappear under two meters of ice is tricky, they can’t accept that a lot of the warmth we enjoy comes from the Gulf of Mexico via the Gulf stream. It seems counter intuitive to them that increases in warming over the planet may cause come areas to suffer from incredible freezing incidents.

Doubt, however, is easy. You pick one facet of an idea and take a liberal sprinkle of misunderstanding, whether deliberate or not, and then package it in certainties. You don’t follow the scientific language model, using qualified and uncertain terms. No, you make use of that scientific language in entirely the wrong way. You nit-pick, you poke holes, you highlight where scientific language makes it seem like there is a lot of uncertainty (it doesn’t matter that good science is full of such language, even when reasonably certain). Doubt is easy to generate, because science doubts itself all the time. The scientific method doesn’t prove, it dis-proves. You come up with how you think things are, what would be the case if they weren’t and then experiment. The experiment never proves that things are a certain way, only that they aren’t. If a statement can’t be disproven then it’s not science, it’s a tautology or it’s non-sense. If you have no criteria which would compel you to change your position, then you’re not engaged in science, you’re engaged in dogma and religion.

Both sides of a debate can often be accused of dogmatic adherence to their personal beliefs. Often it’s the case that they don’t admit what it would take for the other side to convince them that they are wrong. Often they don’t admit to themselves that there’s even a chance they are wrong. They believe they have arrived at their position by examining all the evidence critically, so how could they possibly be wrong?

I’ve said it before, but I’d love to be wrong. I’d love it if someone were able to show conclusively that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas. That the nuclear industry is safe. That the economy can grow exponentially forever without negative side effects. That mankind is smarter than yeast. I long for these things to be the case, because it would mean a much, much nicer future to look forward to. Hell, if I’m wrong then there is actually a future to look forward to! Wouldn’t that be great?

Exponential Growth

I have previously echoed Richard Heinberg’s question, are we smarter than yeast? I’ve also previously written about the problems of endless growth within a finite system. However, these seem to be two of the least popular (according to my Dashboard blog stats) of my entries. I asked myself why and it seems obvious. They don’t have a happy chapter.

Unlike many dire predictions about the fate of all of us if we don’t change our ways, I don’t believe there is a way to continue ‘business as usual’ and save the planet. A lot of the time we are told that if we just recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce and recycle we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse and recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse, recycle and invest heavily in renewable energy then we’ll be fine. Business as usual, no worries. Go back to sleep, we’ve got this one sorted.

Recycling requires energy and many, many things cannot be recycled forever. They stop being able to be turned into new things. Even the best recycling in the world will still require influxes of new stuff, new metals, new raw materials. It also takes lots of energy. Machines wear out and will need replacing. Parts break. These are the constants of life. We might make all of the wind turbines, solar cells, tidal barrages, geothermal turbines we need tomorrow, but that wouldn’t be the end of our resource use. We’d need to replace them as they broke. Even if we could get into a steady state with all of the resources we use being reused until they can no longer be reused, we still need more stuff. Even in a non-stone-age, ’steady-state’ society, there will still be the need for more stuff to be dug out and used.

This is assuming that the people who are investing in these things, the governments that are pushing them, the companies profiting from them, are abandoning growth. They’re not, of course. We can recycle, because it creates jobs, but we must grow. We can reuse to a point, but we must buy new as well, we must grow. We can reduce packaging, but not consumption, we must grow. We can invest in renewables, because that creates some jobs, but we must grow. We will invest in nuclear, because that creates tonnes of jobs, and we must grow. The economy must grow, or it will die. The implication of that statement is that the economy is more deserving of life than wild nature, or humans. The economy is master and we are its slaves. We are well-kept slaves (in the UK, US and other ‘Western democracies’, at least), but we are slaves.

As Derrick Jensen says, what we need are stories. Stories to tell our children, to warn them and educate them. Stories which will warn of the dangers of taking a steady state system and building from it a system based on growth. The stories will need to be better than just telling them they can’t do it, or appealing to the dictates of some deity or other. There will need to be a web of interconnected, self-supporting stories, a culture, which makes the thought of starting a growth based economy repugnant, insane. These stories will need to be supported by stories about the wonder of nature, its beauty and value. They will need to tell of the death of nature, massive, massive death, horrible death which a machine based on growth causes to priceless nature. They will have to make clear that the death causers also die from the very machine they use to cause the death. In short, they will have to be the exact opposite of the stories we now tell, of infinite growth being logical, necessary and good. They will also need to form the backbone of every culture in the world.

Every culture in the world will need the same core cultural stories because if any one decides that growth is okay, or good, then every other will fall before them. A growth based culture isn’t better because it wins cultural battles, it’s just more violent, more efficient at casting people onto the fire to fuel it. Its greed leads to its hegemony. Winning doesn’t make it right, it makes it repugnant.

Nuclear Power: The Answer?

I’ve read it over and over again. I have heard it time and time again. “Nuclear power is the answer!”

I want to just say at the start here: If you have arrieved at nuclear power as the answer, then you’re asking totally the wrong question.

Nuclear power is arguably even more dramatically wrong than squeezing out the last drops of oil, coal and gas from the planet and burning them all. Although one could form a strong argument that enslavement and potential explosions from fissile material stored incorrectly aren’t as bad as mass extinctions, mass starvation and billions of climate change refugees.

The end product from the nuclear process is horrific. Really horrific. It not only requires intensely specialist skills and equipment to deal with safely due to it’s deadly-dangerous, few-seconds-exposure-and-dead-on-the-spot nature, but it also requires long term care. Thousands of years after we have made use of the last dibble of power possible from the nuclear process our descendents will be training nuclear waste management professionals to deal with the waste of a process they’ve never benefited from.

Nuclear power is slavery. The master (each of us) takes the good stuff (the power) and the enslaved (our children and our children’s children) pay for it with sweat and danger and never see any reward. They are forced to taking care of the cheque because the cost of not doing so is higher still.

One of the larger myths is that you can simply pack radioactive waste up and hide it away harmlessly. You can’t. One major reason is that it’s still capable of creating a very powerful explosion if the containers are not separated properly. The separators degrade as they absorb the radioactivity (as is their job) and must be replaced, so you can’t just leave it all and go ‘ho hum, that’s sorted then’. Also we have to keep a lot of the waste in pools of cooled water, which means that energy produced by future generations has already been ear-marked for use on something we have extracted all of the benefit from.

The injustice makes it hard to fathom. How we treat our descendents at the moment is shocking. It would be many scales of magnitude worse if we not only sucked the fossil fuels dry but then also hacked out the uranium and used it all up as well. Every structure which supports our way of life is based on short terms, quarterly profits, yearly profits, the next election or our five year aim. None of it even thinks about the long term. No company is going to stop making their vast profits today because of damage that they’re doing if they can externalise the cost of dealing with that damage. The nuclear power industry does this. They don’t have to deal with their own waste out of their own pocket because they know they just need to hold the country they’re in to ransom. You deal with it, we’re done. If you don’t then, well, you don’t really want to know what then.

The nuclear process is not clean, don’t for a second believe anyone who tells you that it is. In fact, I have taken to laughing in the face of anyone who says that to me in person. The process releases various gases that are much more potent as greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide and some of which degrade over time into carbon dioxide, so you get a surge of high power greenhouse gas followed by a sustained period of less potent greenhouse gas. It also uses oil in the process of mining, processing and transportation.

And to those who might suggest thorium as a less nasty way of generating nuclear power than uranium I have this to say:

* We have no thorium reactors in the world that currently work as the theory intends. There a couple that have been shown can potentially work, possibly, maybe, but they are not being used as thorium reactors, they are being used as normal reactors because the thorium reaction process has a great many bugs to solve before it is commercially viable. Indeed, it is arguable whether it is possible to actually make it commercially viable at all.

* Thorium reactors take a long time to get up and running. A long time. From my research it’s time measured in decades. So even if we were to decide on thorium reactors we may not have time from our current energy sources to actually get enough reactors up and running and make the change over smooth.

* Thorium still produces deadly-dangers, long-lived end products. They are still deadly to anyone who spends a hand full of seconds in their presence and they still require the enslavement of future generations into waste management. Nothing you can do will change that, it’s a fact of the process.

* Finally the maths do not make sense. There is quite a lot of thorium available, which is its major attraction. There’s many times more thorium available than there is uranium. However, if you take into account the whole fuel cycle, from construction of the reactor, to processing the raw material, to safe storage of the end product, to deconstruction and safe storage of the radioactive elements of the reactor at the end of its life, the whole process uses more energy than it makes. If you start to put into the equation the harder to access thorium then it’s many orders of magnitude worse. Indeed, some of the proposed thorium fuel sources require more energy to mine and process than they produce, not even considering every other stage of the fuel cycle.

The reason we are likely to get nuclear power is that it creates many more jobs than renewables do. Sorage and management of the waste employs people, the nuclear power plant employs people, the transportation system required to bring the mined and processed material to the plant employs people, the mining and processing employs people. Maintainance of the wind turbine/solar grid/barrage/etc employs people, transporting the parts employs people, producing the components employs people. I think this quick comparison shows the difference in the number of employees necessary in each process. Shipping parts in the renewable process isn’t steady like shipping the mined and processed fuel is in the nuclear process. Maintaining the fields of units doesn’t require as many people as maintaining and running a complex power plant. Etc.

Nuclear power also has a much more powerful lobbying body, as there is (arguably) much more money to be made in the short term (the only term that matters in capitalist society as can be easily seen from the fact that we even have to discuss nuclear power).

And as a final thought, the tailings from the mining processes for all forms of nuclear reactor technology are themselves poisonous (as are the tailings from all mining operations, but radioactive tailings have an added kick) and are allowed to sit around so they can pollute rivers and other sources of water. The mining companies have promised to fill in the mines after they have finished with clay and the tailings they have extracted, but have yet to actually do this anywhere.

The framing of the discourse of our mass media makes it so most people don’t know enough to arrive at the right questions. The discourse is such that these questions don’t actually make it into the core premise of the reporting, leaving people with nothing but the wrong questions and thus the wrong answer. If every time someone suggested nuclear power as an alternative they were made to explain their position on the enslavement of future generations there might be some sensible debates. If every time someone suggested we need to secure our energy supplies and so need to build nuclear power plants they were asked how relying on other countries (since the UK has no uranium of its own to mine and use) is securing our energy supplies, we might have a sensible debate on the matter. If every person who suggests nuclear power were faced with the impossible to answer questions, the impossible to ignore reality, there might be hope for us.

We’re living on a very windy, wave battered island. We should make use of that. NIMBYs should be given a choice, wind power or no power. Neither isn’t an option, unless they want to disconnect their electricity supply they should be forced to accept that some places are windier than others, some places are better sites for wind farms and so some places must lead the way and have those farms built. We need some form of energy and we need to all take it on ourselves to see that the energy we get is as sane and responsible as possible.

Peak Oil

Some reading for those not familiar with the concept of ‘Peak Oil’: Wikipedia’s Peak Oil Page.

As with so many things in the world today, the USA is leading the way on modeling what happens to a countries oil demand after the easy to access oil it uses from its own fields starts to let it down.

As the national production of oil declined the US didn’t start to think of new products to replace oil, it just started to buy it from other countries. The reason Americans complain about $3 (approx. £1.50 or 33 pence a litre) a gallon prices is because they are used to much, much cheaper prices from their own fields. The US peaked in 1971, so the old, cheap petrol is still very much in the memories of a lot of motorists who are much more used to a dollar a gallon or less. While those in the US complained about their $3 a gallon, in the UK we were paying $8 a gallon.

If anyone has tried to push their car for any sort of distance they will understand what petrol provides us. As Richard Heinberg points out in this short clip, a gallon of petrol can push a standard car 20 miles (more efficient cars will get more, less efficient will get lesss). If you’re going to try to push your car 20 miles you’d better be exceptionally fit. But a gallon of petrol does that work and is exceptionally cheap for the work it does. Imagine trying to find someone or a group of people to push your car 20 miles. It’d cost you a lot more than £4.50. I doubt you could regularly find people willing to do it for less than a few hundred pounds. This is just an illustration of what petrol provides us with and why it’s so insanely cheap.

Here’s another Richard Heinberg clip which I think is interesting and on-topic.

As the graph above nicely demonstrates, we can demonise China all we like for their use of oil, but the US is still head and shoulders above them. The crown of world energy user is still firmly in the West.

The amount of oil an OPEC nation is allowed to drill and sell is directly proportionate to the amount of reserves that country has. A measure designed to stop the market getting flooded with cheap oil and so keep prices at a level that makes insane profits for a few massive companies. As you can imagine, this means that OPEC member states have a big impetus to lie about their reserves. The years after this rule was adopted most OPEC members revised the size of most of their oil fields upwards quite sharply so they could pump more oil and earn more money. This makes the information on this Wikipedia page doubly dubious, but it gives an indication that the largest oil fields in the world are starting to or have already peaked.

This problem isn’t one that might see fruition, maybe, possibly. It’s a fact, a certainty. From the instant the first drop of oil, the first flake of coal, the first whiff of natural gas was extracted and burnt to provide energy it was inevitable that one day we would be here. This is because of the simple fact that coal, natural gas and oil all take millions of years to form and are finite. We know this, it’s a fact we have known for a long time.

Yet the answers to peak oil have been electric cars (powered by electricity generated by fossil fuels), hydrogen fuel cells (created using electricity generated by fossil fuels), and bio-fuels (grown on fields which use a lot of petro-chemicals^[1] in order to make their yield higher and harvested by machines using fossil fuels). The point I’m making is that the solutions to the peak oil problem is invariably using other fossil fuels or the oil in a less efficient way. Insanity.

Then there are the people who say we can run our cars on electricity generated by nuclear power. Forgetting, perhaps by accident, perhaps on purpose, that nuclear power doesn’t just appear from nowhere by magic and that uranium is also finite and a lot more scarce. Estimates are that the Earth has about enough for the use of humans for 12 years. A real good alternative, I think you’ll agree.

Maybe we could make enough renewable energy sources, such as wind, tidal, hydroelectric, solar, etc, to run our cars in the future. Since these sources, especially the sun, will be with us for as long as we can live on the Earth, they are a good alternative to be thinking about. Yet NIMBYs are allowed to stop the production of these simply because they don’t like the look of them! Oh, also many of the materials needed for their production come form oil so we’re still screwed as it’s another short term fix. Once we’re out of oil we wont be able to make any more of them and wont be able to repair the ones we’ve made already.

Finally, the catch-22? The worst possible outcome is that we find large reserves of oil to exploit. Allowing our current business as normal to continue. Allowing the exploitation and destruction of natural environments to continue. Allowing the release of yet more carbon dioxide. Allowing the further pollution of our planet. Allowing the further increase of our population and further population overshoot to happen.

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[1] The ratio of calories out in the form of food and calories in in the form of fossil fuels for many agricultural methods is in the region of 1:25, or 25 times more energy used than produced. Sometimes this can be as bad as 1:150, if the food is air-freighted. Interesting reading about how food is oil.