Regular readers of my blog already know that I am interested in environmentally friendlier lifestyles. I don’t like the idea of leaving a trail of trash behind me. Unfortunately, once you start searching online for advice on how to avoid trashing the planet as badly, you face a minefield of pseudoscience.
Everything man-made is a “chemical” and a “toxin,” which you must avoid, and, while you are at it, you also have to buy some expensive “detox” products. All plastics “leech toxins,” thus you are recommended to buy some brand new and expensive stainless steel containers instead. Vaccines, conventional medicine, non-organic food, food additives, pesticides, synthetic textiles, 5G, wind turbines, etc. are all killing us. So keep your home and body pure and free of all the “toxins”! Wear only organic cotton clothes (OMFG pesticide residue!); eat only organic food to avoid poisoning yourself; avoid meat, because it contains antibiotics and growth hormones and rots inside your stomach. Worship on the altar of “natural” everything and pray (or pay to predatory quacks) for natural healing once you get sick of some disease that could have been prevented by vaccines or regularly visiting a real doctor who could have diagnosed some medical problem before it was too late.
Science behind Waste Reduction
July (a.k.a. the Plastic Free July) was just now, so I recently wrote about waste and how to reduce it. Waste is a real problem. Your plastic yogurt container and that polyethylene bag in which you bought your sliced bread probably won’t get recycled at all. Your PET soft drink bottle gets downcycled at best and ends up swimming in the Great Pacific garbage patch at worst. Thus reusable grocery bags, produce bags, water bottles, straws, and cutlery are objectively a great idea. Same goes for various strategies for reducing food waste, because all this uneaten food results in avoidable greenhouse gas emissions. So far so good. No pseudoscience for now. Pollution and waste contribute to global warming and kill wildlife.
Pseudoscience: A.k.a. “Natural Equals Good”
Unfortunately, once you start looking for environmentally friendlier alternatives for various consumer goods, the Internet will lead you towards a pit of pseudoscience. Everything natural is good and everything created by scientists is a “toxic chemical.”
In reality, whether some substance occurs somewhere in the nature or whether it was first synthesized by chemists does not determine whether you want it anywhere near your body or inside it.
100% natural, organic, and deadly.
Here’s an example. Death cap (Amanita phalloides) is the deadliest mushroom in my part of Europe. In fact, Amanita phalloides is one of the most poisonous of all known mushrooms. It is estimated that as little as half a mushroom contains enough toxin to kill an adult human. And if you are lucky to survive, you’ll need a liver transplant after snacking on this “100% natural” and “organic” beauty. In order to survive after eating this organic treat, in addition to a liver transplant, you will also need various life-saving medicines, which are created by scientists and are “artificial chemicals.”
Anyway, let’s get back to zero waste lifestyle. Do you need a shopping bag? You will be strongly advised to pick organic cotton. Are you looking for a vegetable broth recipe so that you can use your vegetable scraps and reduce your food waste? The author of some recipe you found online will inform you that you must buy organic vegetables or else you will ingest pesticide residue.
Marketing for organic food and textiles relies on lies and fearmongering. Organically grown plants can be grown with organic pesticides. As long as some substance that is deadly for insects can be found somewhere in the nature and wasn’t first synthesized in a laboratory, organic farmers are allowed to use this substance. And, no, organic pesticides are not safer than non-organic pesticides.
Sure, there are plenty of problems with conventional agriculture, from dead bees to damaged soil to dependence upon nonrenewable phosphorus. But organic agriculture guidelines were not designed to solve these problems rationally and by relying on science. Instead, organic guidelines were designed to appeal to scientifically illiterate consumers who easily fall prey to fearmongering and are attracted to a black versus white mindset. Natural equals good, man-made equals toxic. Yeah right. Life is simple, everything is either black or white, just look for the right buzzword and you will be assured that the thing you are consuming is good for you and the planet; you no longer need to pay attention to subtleties, nuances, and facts; you no longer need to use your brain to, gasp, actually think and learn about scientific research.
Some poorly educated people even go as far as to claim that people shouldn’t ingest any “chemicals” or that food shouldn’t contain any ingredients that you cannot pronounce. Or that there is no acceptable level of how much toxic substances a human can safely consume. In reality, all soil and water everywhere contains trace amounts of substances that are harmful for humans. For example, my own tap water contains <1μg/L arsenic, <0,1μg/L mercury, <0,1μg/L cadmium, and <0,7μg/L lead. That’s normal. That’s the kind of planet we have had ever since life started. If living beings couldn’t cope with a small amount of heavy metals in their bodies or background radiation, then life wouldn’t exist. That’s why scientists have established standards for acceptable levels of toxic substances.
Speaking of food ingredients with names you cannot pronounce—if you fear chemicals, don’t eat blueberries! “Don’t eat foods with ingredients you cannot pronounce” is a funny rule, which would allow me to eat absolutely anything (my boyfriend has a degree in chemistry, I can always ask him how to pronounce any fun name I see; besides, my native language has a much nicer and more consistent spelling system).
Alternatively, do you want to buy a soap bar packaged in recycled paper instead of liquid soap in a plastic bottle? Beware the detox industry and fraudulent health claims. (The whole notion of detoxifying is inherently fraudulent, and some essential oil in your soap isn’t going to cure all your illnesses.)
Do you want a reusable lunch box? Beware sellers who advertise their stainless steel containers by claiming that all plastics are a health hazard due to leeching toxins.
In reality, it depends. There are various kinds of plastics. BPA (bisphenol A) and phthalates are indeed problematic, and you shouldn’t use food containers, children or dog toys, or sex toys that contain those. Anyway, polyvinyl chloride (PVC, #3) can contain phthalates. Polycarbonate (#7) can contain BPA. Polystyrene or Styrofoam (PS, #6) is also better avoided.
Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET, #1) bottles are relatively widely recycled and considered safe for single use, but are not recommended for reusing.
For long term repeated usage, there are plastic containers made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE, #2), low-density polyethylene (LDPE, #4), or polypropylene (PP, #5).
Speaking of people who postulate that all plastics leech toxins and thus cannot be used for food storage containers, they also seem to dislike silicone, which to them appears to be “yet another dangerous plastic material.” Silicone is a “chemical” and paper bags are “natural”? Yeah right. Show me a paper bag growing on a tree! In order to turn wood pulp into paper you need to utilize a complicated technological process that involves a plethora of chemicals, many of which actually are toxic for the environment if disposed of incorrectly.
Life is complicated. Nothing is black or white. In order to compare the environmental and health impact of two different competing products, you have to take into consideration numerous variables. Glass or stainless steel food storage containers aren’t always better than plastics. Organic food isn’t always better than non-organic food. Paper bags aren’t always better than plastic bags. In each case, you’d have to take two alternative products and examine exactly where and how they were produced, stored, transported, used, disposed of.
An Unhealthy Obsession with Purity
One nice thing I generally see in zero waste blogs is an attempt to embrace realistic goals and expectations: less waste is good enough and zero waste is practically impossible, so don’t feel bad about yourself and don’t be guilty about the waste you do produce. So far so good.
Nonetheless, I often hear about people feeling guilty, because they bought some snack in a plastic bag. I also hear about people who are determined to eliminate all traces of plastic from their homes. If you already own a Teflon cooking pan, you will be encouraged to get rid of it and buy a cast iron cooking pan instead. The planet will benefit from your decision to buy new stuff that required non-renewable resources to manufacture! Yeah right.
I occasionally see what looks like an obsession among people who attempt environmentally friendlier lifestyles. I have heard about people counting and weighting all their trash (even beyond the reasonable goal of figuring out what kind of waste your household produces so that you can tackle it more efficiently). Or people being unhappy, because they got some gift packaged in plastics, which made their “plastic tally” soar for that month. Or refusing to go to parties or eat with friends in situations where this would require utilizing single-use food containers or disposable packaging.
Obsessing about keeping your body or home pure and free of whatever you classified as “bad” can become problematic in itself. I inherently dislike any ideologies that require people to preserve their purity. From religions that say “you cannot have any sex outside of wedlock or else you become impure and worthless” to diet cults that say “you cannot consume this ‘bad food’ ever, under any conditions, even in trace amounts, or else it will make you sick or impure or a bad person.” (Yes, I will never be vegan or vegetarian, nor will I ever follow any other restrictive diet that tells you to completely avoid some food.)
Personally, I cannot support obsessing about reducing your environmental footprint. Paying attention to your habits and choices, yes. Feeling terrible about that soft drink in a PET bottle you had last month, no.
Conclusions
There is too much pseudoscientific nonsense getting propagated among environmentally conscious people.
During July, I contemplated writing another blog post about how to reduce waste in your personal life. Then I realized that in such a blog post I couldn’t put links to various resources. For example, I would like to link to a recipe for how to make vegetable broth from various vegetable scraps that people usually throw out. Unfortunately, said blog also contained pseudoscientific nonsense about herbal remedies.
Can you give me a link to peer reviewed, double blind clinical trial (published by a reputable medical journal), which demonstrates that peppermint alleviates headache and insomnia better than a placebo? If yes, then I will consider that as moderate evidence that peppermint might be useful as medicine, but I’ll still want to see a systematic review of multiple studies examining the benefits of peppermint, because occasionally a single study turns out to be flawed or yields weird results due to random chance.
The point is: I cannot promote a blogger who publishes non-scientific content. Even if I like their vegetable scrap broth recipe, I still cannot promote their blog due to other questionable content found there.
And I run into these minefields everywhere I look for tips on how to stop trashing the planet so badly.
For example, on the surface, ecovillages sound like a great idea. Sharing things with your neighbors and striving to reduce your ecological footprint is great. But then I take a look at a book about ecovillages only to find a chapter on how to build homes according to feng shui rules. Ouch!
Or those conferences about waste I have attended. For example, I once went to an event about fast fashion and the environmental impact of clothes that are disposed of long before being worn out. There speakers promoted natural fibers as the only acceptable fabrics and emphasized organic cotton so much that I got sick of it and asked for their thoughts about life-cycle assessment. Only then they finally admitted that maybe organic cotton isn’t the right choice for some purposes. Who knew!
Something sounds natural, so people like it. And for some it doesn’t matter what the facts actually are. That’s a pity.
Actually, I do prefer cast iron pans instead of Teflon-coated ones, but not because of any fear of “chemicals” (though I’m told that if you overheat Teflon enough, it gives off a rather toxic gas.)
My experience with Teflon pans is that they don’t stay non-stick for all that long (and they especially don’t stand up to being heated to the right temperatures for certain kinds of cooking), so after a while, that cast iron pan is actually more “non-stick” than the Teflon one. Teflon-coated pans are usually aluminum, and IMHO aluminum doesn’t spread or hold the heat the way cast iron does.
The only problem is that the only kind of cast iron frying pans I can find these days have a rough surface — what you get if you just sell the pan the way it comes out of the mould and don’t grind the surface smooth. I’ve only found one manufacturer here in the USA for cast iron pans with a smooth-ground cooking surface (WagnerWare), and they’ve been out of business for decades. (You’ll have to pry my WagnerWare frying pans “from my cold, dead hands.”)
BTW, I know someone whose main business is checking buildings that have “sick building syndrome,” which is usually caused by something 100% natural — molds. And remediating it is messy and expensive, usually involving gutting the rooms in order to get at and remove the mold (esp. the spores.)
On the other hand, some “modern chemical” things really are nasty. For a while in the US, people were adding insulation to previously uninsulated homes by pumping an insulating foam into the space between the inner and outer walls. But it turned out that the foam outgassed significant amounts of formaldehyde for years, and if there was a fire (most USA homes are wood), the foam would release some highly toxic chemicals, much worse than what a burning wood building does (and that’s bad enough.)
Ultimately, you have to examine things on a case-by-case basis. And think things through.
Love this post. It seems to go with a basic tenet I have in life. “Everything in moderation, even moderation.”
I’m pretty sure a label like the one you posted for blueberries would be considered misleading in the US, as nobody dissolved sugars and the rest in water to make the product being sold. Blueberries are single-ingredient foods (unless they come coated with something). The composition of the blueberries is relevant for the nutritional content label, where indeed all sugars get added up regardless of how they got to be part of the product being sold.
Re: Organic agriculture: The list of organic pesticides approved by the USDA It is inefficient to grow food on any large scale without killing pests.Which means there are plenty of toxins in organic produce. Just wash all your vegetables and fruit very well, regardless of labels.
Also some of the regulations in US organic farming are completely illogical. I understand forbidding routine use of antibiotics on farm animals – it is an important cause for the proliferation of antibiotic resistant bacteria. It also enables raising animals at high population densities as in factory farming. But in the US if an animal on an organic farm is sick, it cannot be given antibiotics to treat an infection, unless the farmer is willing to sell the meat as conventionally raised.
I’m more of a “do it, not just say it” person. Some examples (as a bit of background, which is relevant to some of the examples, I moved from Ireland to France at about the turn of the millennium):
● I gave up my car shortly after the move, and modulo four-ish short-term rentals (needs must; two-ish in France, others elsewhere), have not driven since. I now do not live in a major city, but instead in a Mediterranean seaside village, where walking, bicycling, and the local and regional bus services suffice. For elsewhere, there is the train, which is excellent in France (and, generally, throughout Europe). Excepting taxis (rarely used), these non-car alternatives are all actually fairly cheap. (Investing in some seriously good shoes, socks, and boots also helps!)
● I’m still using the same cookery set I purchased in California way back in the last millennium. Yes, it was (then) expensive, and I admit to having no clear idea about it’s then-environmental cost of production, etc., or future-cost when(? if?) the kit ever becomes unsatisfactory — no sign of that yet, very very little wear-and-tear or damage to-date, despite (nearly-)daily use.
● I do most of my food shopping at local outdoor markets and a few (generally specialist) shops. Recyclable (heavy-duty plastic) bags, provided by me, are the norm; conveyed home in my rucksack (also dates back to the last millennium. albeit it has come time to replace it). One glitch is some of the vendors do travel a fair bit, albeit others are local and feature local produce.
● My mobile is a Fairphone, and is housed in a case made of recycled leather.
● Glass, plastic, paper / cardboard, etc., recycling is the norm. So much of my waste is recyclable — and goes into the recycling bins — I put out a (rather small) “trash” bag less than once a week, on average. No idea of the weight, but by volume, c.20 litres for one person less than once a week. (I do not, however, compost; if there was a “collection bin” for compostable “waste” I would consider using it.)
● All LED-lighting (sole exception the mirror), and all-rechargeable batteries (most, now, also made from recycled batteries). However, the insulation in the building (which I do not own) is shite, albeit it is more-or-less traditional construction for the area, keeping it cooler than one might think during the hot summers.
Prior to the LED-lighting, it was all CFL. I was an fairly early adopter of CFL, installing when they first become “affordable” (in London), in the last millennium. Those early CFLs were very robust, and modulo a few cases of the yellow-ish startup disease, lasted until the switch to LEDs (one failed and one I broke, but all the rest served, yellow-startup or not, until retired). I have used a “green”-tinted energy scheme, where you pay a bit more to assist the power company to switch to more sustainable sources (there are various checks and audits to ensure the extra money is being used as intended). albeit I am not currently on such a scheme.
What else can I do? Well, I do have a high water consumption. There’s more plastic in my waste than I’m comfortable with. Electricity in France is largely nuclear, from aging (and excessively secretive) stations. The local buses are (mostly) diesel / petrol. My bicycle is (currently) out-of-action. I eat a fair amount of seafood, but am (mostly) clewless as to how sustainably-fished it is. Is there some kind of composting scheme I could participate in? And so on… (And it helps that I can afford the above things, now and over time; I do realise I am “privileged” in that sense…)
#1 as to cast iron. I have a few. My primary frypans. I do have stainless I use a lot too. My largest, and main, cast iron is a 12″ Lodge. I do agree it has nowhere near a nice a finish as my 9″ Wagner, but the anti-stick properties are very similar. The key is the seasoning and daily care. Most of the time all I have to do is wipe out the pan with paper towel. If it needs to be cleaned, hot water and a plastic scrubby to get the food bits off. If it needs a little extra effort just a touch of dish washing liquid. A little bit of soap will not hurt the seasoning. Then heat on the stove to dry, then a thin coating of vegetable oil. Good to go.
This morning I made bacon and eggs. Heat it a little then a little spray oil. Cooked the bacon, then scrape of what stuck to the pan with a heavy metal spatula. Pour of most of the grease, add a little butter. Cook the eggs. No sticking at all. If I am just cooking one egg or an omelet, I just use my small stainless pan.
I do keep my body pure by completely avoiding the consumption of okra and bitter melon. Okthey disgust me, but my primary motivation is to keep my body a temple to the consumption of tasty things 😉
Allison
Take a look at cast aluminium, it has all the advantages of cast iron including even heating, but is obviously far lighter than cast iron. It is however eye-wateringly expensive, but if I was starting out again it’s what I would buy. As it is I have cast iron enamelled cookware that I have been using since I bought it or it was given me or I inherited in the 80s to early 90s. Some of it has been severely abused, as in had several millimetres of carbonised food stuck to it, but the application of a grinder to it eventually solved that problem and all the pans continue to work well. My favourite pan I inherited, made by Husqvana it has the classic thick base, but the sides are far thinner than is usual in cast cookware so the pan is lighter than it otherwise would be for it’s size. It also has a completely flat lid, so if you had more than one you could stack them for cooking in the oven or for storage I have no idea when it was made, but I remember it from being a small child, so at least fifty-five years ago, a brilliant design that appears to be unavailable anywhere these days.
Allison@#1: a small sanding disc and a die grinder or electric drill and you can mirror polish a pan in a couple hours.
Since several people mentioned that, I’ll clarify:
I have nothing against cast iron pans. I have one cast iron pan, and it is nice. My point was that if somebody already has perfectly functional cooking pans, then throwing them out and buying new ones is not the greenest thing to do, because producing and transporting stuff requires natural resources.
I have two cooking pans. The smaller one is cast iron. At 20 cm diameter, it is small and light enough that I can lift it without too much effort. My family has had it for 20 years. My larger pan is Teflon. Large cast iron pans are just too heavy.
My Teflon pan is PFOA-free (made after it was phased out), I intentionally picked a high quality pan, I am careful to not heat it too much, I have no pet birds, and I only use wooden spatulas. (I use a wooden spatula for all my pans and pots, I don’t want to risk scratching any of them.) So yeah, I’m not worried about toxins leeching from my pan.
Allison @#1
Sure, some manmade substances are pretty terrible, especially if used for the wrong applications. Examples: DDT, lead in fuel, asbestos. Or phthalates in sex toys for an example of something that is still legal but shouldn’t be.
I try to approach this on a case by case basis. Each time evaluate what exactly is going on with some chemical and make an educated decision about whether I want to use it. It’s wrong to make generalized statements like “all natural things are better/worse than artificially made alternatives.” It depends.
Yep.
anat @#3
That was never meant as a label. The point was to illustrate that berries contain the same “scary” chemicals that people fear once they are added to some food.
“Marketing for organic food and textiles relies on lies and fearmongering.”
So, basically, marketing business as usual 😀
But snark aside, a great post. I had/have the same problems, mostly with my local green group. Sadly lot’s of quack and fearmongering and few who actually read up on the science :/ And to few practical solutions. Striiving for less waste, less negative impact is good, it is not “all or nothing”.
An important thing to look at with “organic” food is calories per acre. If these are substantially lower with the organics, then it simply won’t scale — we would need to clear more farmland to feed the same number of people, which is probably a net environmental loss. Of course, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and the like do take an environmental toll as well — it’s all infuriatingly complicated.
I’m suspicious of the “locavore” movement as well. Someone asked “Which uses more gas — a semi driving 500 miles from the distribution center to your supermarket, or 50 farmers driving pickups 50 miles each to your local farmers’ market?
It seems as if it would almost be a full-time job to truly minimize your impact on the environment.
brucegee1962 @#12
Come on, it is not that simple. You have to take into consideration packaging (maybe farmers have different food packaging than the supermarket), storage (how food is stored, for how long), how each of the farmers produces food, etc.
Yep. That’s why I often settle on admitting that I do not know which alternative action is better for the environment. Sometimes it seems simple (cycling being better than driving a car or reusing stuff being better than not reusing the same stuff). But often it is complicated enough that I settle on admitting that I don’t know.
Re: eating local: How to reduce your food’s carbon footprint, in 2 charts – The answer is not “eat local.”
Maybe we can skip the math problem brucegee1962 raise in @12, because gas from transportation is too small a component in the carbon footprint of most foods (unless they are transported by air). So just skip delicate fruit from across the globe, but otherwise don’t focus on distance that much (unless you feel obligated to support local farmers for other reasons).
I am stuck with having to use a car since my parents have limited mobility and both train and bus suck where I live in addition to being over 1 km away from the house. So the only way to get them to and from various doctor appointments or to do shopping is to drive. But we all wear mostly pure cotton clothes because I cannot stand anything synthetic on my skin, especially not a shirt. I am currently trying to use reusable bags for shopping for veggies. They are still plastic (PP), but they should outlast hundreds of those flimsy PE bags that have to be used in pairs and still rip and spill the contents regularly. We have always mostly used re-useable shopping bags, and if we have to buy a plastic one, it is then used as long as it holds together.
It is unavoidable to buy food in various plastic containers since some foods are unfortunately only sold in those (like margarine, yogurt), but those containers are, if at all possible, used several times for other purposes before being thrown away – either as a storage for frozen goods, or storage for various small parts in the workshop or as a pot for growing vegetable seedlings in the spring.
Recycling plastic is, unfortunately, a scam. No amount of “individual action” is going to save the world. Without worldwide systemic and legislative change – which is unlikely, due to USA being the leader of the daft world – the problems will grow. So we are basically fucked.
Agreed with almost everything.
A few nits:
Actually, specifically about the lead, possibly not. It’s quite plausible that even these levels mostly come from human sources.
Specifically, trace lead at current levels on basically everything is from leaded gasoline. Go back a few hundred years in ice core samples, or lower ocean waters, and you don’t see anywhere near as much trace lead on basically everything. They cover the details and history of this in the new Cosmos show in an episode dedicated to this. All praise to Clair Patterson.
And speaking of lead being everywhere:
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/violent-crime-lead-poisoning-british-exportI see others nailed this already, but I’ll add in:
It’s not better for the environment to replace, but when it comes to personal health… I personally avoid Teflon pans because of the off-gasing at high temperatures. It’s significant enough that it can kill birds in typical household situations (because most birds are more sensitive), and at such doses, it’s easy to imagine damage from chronic exposure. IIRC this is true even for PFOA-free teflon (which itself AFAIK encompasses several proprietary blends of chemicals).
PS:
Can’t help it:
No, we’re fucked because the people who want to do something about the problem(s) are also typically the strongest opponents of the necessary actions, such as increased fertilizer use and modern high yield agriculture techniques, and lots and lots of conventional nuclear fission power plants. We need to be building like 1 new large nuclear power plant every few days, around the world, for the next 40 years, to be really serious about CO2 levels.
GerrardOfTitanServer @#16
Instead I simply avoid heating my Teflon pan too much.
When it comes to cooking, people have different preferences, they like or dislike different things, they are willing to make different tradeoffs. Thus there can be no such thing as a single right cooking pan that’s everybody’s favorite. I’m not arguing against other people’s preferences, I understand why many people don’t like Teflon, and they are welcome to use whatever pans they do like; it’s just that I dislike it when people engage in fearmongering and pretend that the danger is much greater than it actually is. Reminding people about the downsides of some product and necessary precautions they need to make while using said product is fine; exaggerating the risks is problematic. (I’m not criticizing what you said here, I’m talking about all those Teflon critics who have made ridiculous claims about how a pan will give you cancer or make you infertile, I have heard from plenty of those.)
Where I live, “environmental activists” adamantly oppose building new wind turbines. We are talking about a country in which roughly 50% of electricity comes from hydro power plants and the other 50% comes from thermal power plants that burn fossil fuels. The new wind turbines would reduce the amount of fossil fuels we need to burn for producing enough electricity. (A nuclear power plant wouldn’t be practical in a country with 2 million people and a relatively small GDP.)
A different set of “environmental activists” pushed for a deposit refund scheme for PET bottles. The way they implemented it just plain sucks. Only a few manufacturers participate in this scheme, it costs a fortune to maintain, and ultimately you still need a parallel system for collecting all those PET bottles from manufacturers who do not participate in this silly and costly scheme. How are two parallel PET bottle collecting systems with two different sets of waste collection containers better than one system that collects all PET bottles? But hey, for those people who manage the new deposit refund scheme it is really profitable and creates new jobs, especially for the management who earn pretty nice salaries.
@GerrardOfTitanServer, I agree with you that building new nuclear power plants is necessary. Unfortunately, that won’t happen too. Coal kills more people per megawat produced than nuclear power does, but those deaths are not as visible as one nuclear disaster because they are spread over time and masked by other conditions they do not cause but worsen (like asthma etc.). I am not involved in any “green” activism exactly because those organizations are infested with pseudoscientific notions, just as the green lifestyle blos mentioned in this article are. And opposition to nuclear power is one of the milder ones at that, in that there is at least some real danger to consider and real risks to try and mitigate.
Sure. Sounds good. I don’t know the risks, but no one does, and thus I would urge a little bit of caution. I think it’s also hard for most to not overheat the pan by accident, but yea, otherwise everything you say in this matter is correct and I applaud it.
I strongly disagree. I’ll first let leading climate scientists speak for more here:
Leading climate scientist Kerry Emanuel has said “The anti-nuclear bias of this latest IPCC release is rather blatant, and reflects the ideology of the environmental movement. History may record that this was more of an impediment to decarbonization than climate denial”. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/29/top-climate-scientists-warn-governments-of-blatant-anti-nuclear-bias-in-latest-ipcc-climate-report/
James Hansen, the preeminent climate scientist, said that believing that renewables could replace fossil fuels is like believing in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.
https://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/jim-hansen-presses-the-climate-case-for-nuclear-energy/
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110729_BabyLauren.pdf
James Hansen has also said that the Green movement is quasi-religious. Transcribed by me:
https://youtu.be/KnN328eD-sA?t=2041
Quoting James Hansen some more: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110729_BabyLauren.pdf
See also:
Several other preeminent climate scientists have also come out in favor of nuclear power: Dr James Hansen, Dr. Ken Caldeira, Dr. Kerry Emanuel, and Dr. Tom Wigley. https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/index.html
Dozens more scientists who are regularly cited by the IPCC have also come out publicly in favor of nuclear power. http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/10/25/open-letter-to-heads-of-state-of-the-g-20-from-scientists-and-scholars-on-nuclear-for-climate-change
The best survey that I can find of scientists show that there is a slim majority of scientists in favor of nuclear power. http://www.pewresearch.org/science/2015/07/23/elaborating-on-the-views-of-aaas-scientists-issue-by-issue/#energy-issues
…
Now, let me speak. Take my new home state of California just for an example, birthplace of the modern Green movement. When the fossil fuel lord Jerry Brown was governor the first time, he worked with the newly born Green movement to stop and kill enough building and planned nuclear power plants, and build coal plants instead, that if it were otherwise, today California would have practically zero greenhouse gas emissions from its electricity.
There are plenty of reasons to build nuclear that don’t involve climate change. We should be building lots of nuclear for climate change alone, but there are other reasons why it would have happened like 40-50 years ago if not for the Greens which largely were – and largely still are – a front for fossil fuel money to smear their only real competitor aka nuclear power. Nuclear power is cheaper. It’s safer for humans. It has less impact on the environment. It uses less land. Its fuel supply is practically infinite. Except for the real connection to nuclear weapons (which is more tenuous than some think), and except for the relatively minor harms from a severe reactor accident (relatively minor compared to what Greenpeace et al say happened), nuclear power is strictly better (compare: 1 million dead according to Greenpeace, vs a few thousand dead according to the WHO and UNSCEAR, aka the United Nations equivalent of the IPCC for the Chernobyl accident). (And yes, I left out disposal of nuclear waste, because that problem is a political creation and a scientific health-safety fiction.)
When Greens get to power, they kill nuclear, and build fossil fuel plants. It happened in California. It’s happening now in Germany, which just finished a new coal power plant, Datteln 4 (sp).
For more information on the hidden motives of many Green leaders, and sources showing a lot of fossil fuel money funding a lot of the leading Green orgs and scientific experts, see:
http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/1/11/jerry-browns-secret-war-on-clean-energy
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/11/if-nuclear-power-is-so-safe-why-are-we-so-afraid-of-it/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/09/anti-nuclear-bias-of-u-n-ipcc-is-rooted-in-cold-war-fears-of-atomic-and-population-bombs/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/14/the-real-reason-they-hate-nuclear-is-because-it-means-we-dont-need-renewables/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/28/the-dirty-secret-of-renewables-advocates-is-that-they-protect-fossil-fuel-interests-not-the-climate/
https://atomicinsights.com/how-important-has-oil-money-been-to-antinuclear-movement/
https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/
https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-sierra-club-admits-donations-targeting-a-natural-gas-competitor/
https://atomicinsights.com/stanfords-universitys-new-natural-gas-initiative/
https://atomicinsights.com/following-the-money-whos-funding-stanfords-natural-gas-initative/
PS:
The same anti-human anti-progress regressive Luddite views of the Greens, through some of the same Green orgs, is also one of the primary causes for ongoing world hunger, especially in Africa. From a story about the greatest human being to ever live, someone whom you have probably never heard of.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/01/forgotten-benefactor-of-humanity/306101/
GerrardOfTitanServer @#19
Yes, I agree with the overall attitude. Yet this one always seems complicated for me. Where do I draw the line between reasonable caution versus unjustified paranoia?
This depends on what you cook and how. With some foods it is hard to overheat the pan, because then you would have to also burn and ruin the food.
@#20
Three decades ago in Latvia environmental activists opposed a proposal to build a new large hydro power plant. (Granted, there was also an ethnic conflict there, people didn’t want an influx of Russian speaking guest workers from other parts of the USSR).
Nowadays we have environmental activists protesting against wind turbines.
And, yeah, they also wanted to close Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (in Lithuania, next to Latvian border). It was closed back in 2009; there were plans to make a new nuclear power plant in the same location, but that idea was dropped due to environmental concerns.
I find it ironical that fossil fuel burning thermal power plants seem to be the only thing against which nobody protests on environmental grounds where I live.
You don’t even have to go to developing world to witness the fact that, on some level, organic farming is yet another status symbol for the wealthy. Millions of impoverished people who live in USA or European Union cannot afford to double their food budget in order to pay for food that is supposedly more “pure” and “natural.” (This includes me, I don’t earn enough money to pay for organic food.)
And then there’s also lack of education and people having no clue what they are talking about. I grow part of my own food (I have appropriated my boyfriend’s backyard for my food production needs), and my garden would not qualify as organic. Rules like “no pesticides, ever” are just ridiculous. I’m perfectly happy to eat an apple with a worm inside, but at some point you will encounter a situation when pests destroy your entire harvest or even kill deciduous trees. Hence the loophole that allows organic farmers to use “organic” pesticides. Yet rationally this loophole is ridiculous, because pesticides deemed organic are not safer or better than non-organic pesticides. Or fertilizer. What to do about fertilizing depends of what kind of soil you have and various other circumstances.
The idea that people could grow “pure” food naturally is just wishful thinking when we have a planet with limited arable land and billions of people.
Worse, even. We’re all of us indoctrinated into believing that consuming the “right” stuff makes us “good” people. It’s what every second advertisement tries to ingrain in us. Your choice of consumptions defines your identity and worth as a person. The important part is that you keep consuming Product™, lest the economy suffer! And then where would we be? (idk, but it can’t be worse than this…)
Exactly! As a German I am truly exasperated with the boner my country currently has for electrical cars. Why the hell do we need even more cars? In order to sustain the same amount of traffic as we have now, except electrically, we’d have to increase Lithium production by 800% globally. Those batteries would then be powered by Polish coal energy (Hey, as long as we are carbon-neutral!).
If we, as a species, have any intention of surviving the next thousand years of climate apocalypse, we (westeners, anyway) are going to have to change tack and drastically reduce our rate of consumption across the board (and stop having children). Which is not going to happen anytime soon. As the saying goes: “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”
@GerrardOfTitanServer
Seriously, another nuclear rant? How are you not tired of repeating yourself yet?
What exactly do you envision is going to happen once we all agree with you?
@GerrardOfTitanServer, seriously, dude, what is your beef? I agree with you and you did not write anything in that wall of text that opposes anything that I have said, yet you are under the impression that you disagree, somehow with something. Do you really think it helps to promote the benefits of nuclear power by trying to start nitpicky comment fights with people who agree with you? WTF? What is your point? At this moment, are you actually actively trying to harm your cause by pissing people off?
Sorry.
@Charly:
Maybe you should be more critical about what he writes. I think his propaganda posts show how well he examines his own POV. He sound like a DDT fan to me.
E.g. Germany has a lot of problems with fertilizer over-use and the resulting costs to treat water for consumption. The kind of agriculture that is done in large parts of the EU and the US has also seriously harmed their ecosystems. Apparently a non-issue.
ChrisE84 @#25
A DDT fan? WTF? Nobody is a DDT fan in 21st century. By now the world had figured out that DDT was pretty terrible.
Sure. Phosphorus is a non-renewable and finite natural resource. Nitrogen fertilizer synthesis requires lots of fossil fuels. Fertilizer runoff immensely harms rivers, lakes, and seas. We know all that. But what’s the alternative, really? How do you propose feeding billions of people with zero artificial fertilizer? Chopping off more forests and increasing the amount of land used for food production? This is so going to work!
Of course, feeding human population doesn’t have to be turned into a stupid dilemma with DDT for one alternative and “no fertilizer or pesticides, ever” as the other alternative. Examine the soil you have and grow plants that can naturally thrive in said soil. Use as little fertilizer as possible without compromising the size of your harvest too much. Be careful with pesticides and use them only when essential and don’t spray them when bees are pollinating nearby plants. Do crop rotations. And so on. There are a lot of actions people can take in order to reduce how much agriculture harms the environment. Also—reduce food waste. A lot of food is currently wasted resulting in immense and avoidable greenhouse gas emissions.
Anyway, I recommend you to abstain from creating ridiculous false dilemmas and accusing strangers of something silly like being a DDT fan. Moreover, you don’t know who some stranger who types an online comment actually is or why they write the way they do, so calling them names and accusing them of whatever is generally a bad idea.
Anyway, I have no clue who GerrardOfTitanServer is and I don’t know them. I have zero interest in defending them and maybe you know about them more than I do. Still, since you argued against an opinion I happen to have (that sometimes fertilizer, pesticides, and nuclear power plants are necessary, because we don’t have better alternatives), I am responding to you now.
@ChrisE84 , I agree with GerardOfTitanServer on the point that nuclear power is very probably necessary because we won’t be able to ramp-up other means of energy production fast enough to mitigate AGW. I have seen myself some arguments against nuclear power, as used by the Green Party in my country, that were counterfactual and even downright lies.
I am not saying that I agree with him on everything he wrote, ever, everywhere, just this one point.
Anyhoo, I have given up on humanity, especially on arguing with people on the internet. So when I disagree with someone, I usually just roll my eyes silently and leave.
Current practice can be improved. Feeding 7+ billion people with the hypothetically possible farmland of the planet without modern inorganic fertilizer is impossible.
To klatu
This rant right here is everything wrong with the modern Green movement. It’s not an environmental movement. It’s a de-growth, de-industrialization, anti-progress, anti-technology, ideology. It romanticizes a past that never existed, a past where humans live in harmony with nature, which makes that it’s an inherently conservative and regressive ideology. It places the blame on everything unnatural, including science, industry, better standard of living, progress. It believes that the only way to fix the system is to burn it down and go back to a “more natural” way of living, while ignoring brute facts about available farmland and yields without inorganic fertilizer.
This ideology is also based on catastrophe predictions from a long time ago, starting with Malthus, and continuing to famous books like “The Population Bomb”, which were usually phrased in quite explicitly racist terms. White people were not the problem. It was those colored people who kept having too many kids that were the problem.
Aside from the naked racism and colonialism and elitism, what makes this aspect of the ideology truly pathetic is that it’s both wrong, and actually a self-fulfilling prophesy. Those “colored people” of the world are indeed having more kids, and in large part because they’re poor. Rich people don’t have as many kids. You can look at current birth rates per woman in practically every western and industrialized country, and they’re already below breakeven. Plotting simple GDP per capita vs birth rates show a very clear trend. The real story is probably a little more complicated, and probably also involves emancipation of women to pursue a life other than being a mother and housewife, plus access to contraception.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy because it says that the solution is to keep poor people poor, and make rich people become poor. By keeping them poor, their birth rates stay high. Instead, we should be focusing on improving their quality of life, and emancipating women specifically to have access to contraception and the option to live a life other than a mother and housewife, which obviously comes with all sorts of associated benefits.
This branch of the Green ideology on display here is cruel. It’s inhuman. It’s also based on a hundred year old falsified racist pseudoscience.
PS: That purported “cofounder” of Greenpeace or whoever who left to become a shill, he was right that it stopped being an environmental movement and become an anti-corporate movement.
PPS: This racist and fear of overpopulation from colored people is also one of the huge reasons why Norman Borlaug and his program was defunded, because those elitist racist Greens in the west didn’t want Africa to have more food because then they would have even more kids. They literally want to plan for these non-white people to starve.
Ex:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
This is the historical origin of the Green movement, and it still serves as a semi-hidden foundation today. You can see it pretty clearly with the almost naked racism of klatu. Take a look again at what they said:
There’s a pretty clear implication that westerners (white people) are are having too many kids (false), but that we can do better. They contrast this situation with the rest of the world, and implies that the non-white people of the world are too stupid or undeveloped or something to follow the same path of reducing number of kids. I fail to see any equally plausible and coherent meaning behind these words except the same naked racist that we see from the authors of “The Population Bomb” and “Famine 1975”.
PPPS:
Sorry, to really drive it home. Compare it to some modern rightwing racist loons and how they worry aloud that “those people” are overpopulating the white people, and that white people need to do something about it. It really is the same cliche racist shit that’s been said for as long as there has been racism. What we have here is genuine radical leftwing racism and promotions of genocide.
GerrardOfTitanServer @#29
Your interpretation of klatu’s words is weird. They haven’t stated any of the things you accuse them of saying.
Anyway, here’s how I see this question and what solutions I’d like.
—Reduce birth rates everywhere in the world.
—In the rich countries: reduce consumption. People don’t need to own several cars per family, they don’t need to live in oversized houses, they don’t need to buy new clothes every week, they don’t need to eat beef in every meal. We do need education, healthcare, technology, but we should stop with all this conspicuous consumption we have. For example, we could live with one phone for five years rather than buying the newest model every year. We could improve public transportation infrastructure. We could share stuff so that each family no longer needs to own all those tools they use maybe once per year. Rich people are the ones who create the most greenhouse gas emissions, and we can change our lifestyles without losing the benefits of technology like access to medicine or facilitated communication.
—In the poorer countries: make sure everybody has enough food, access to healthcare, contraceptives, education. Make sure elderly people are taken care of regardless of whether they have kids who can support them. Especially focus on making sure women get education and a choice about how many children they want.
I my opinion, we need a better standard of living in poorer countries and less consumerism in the wealthier countries.
Personally, I do think that westerners have to reduce our rate of consumption and have fewer children. This doesn’t mean that I embrace some weird de-growth, de-industrialization, anti-progress, anti-technology ideology. Instead, this means that I believe that nobody needs to buy a new iPhone every single year. I have zero interest in some idealized lifestyle in harmony with nature, because such a thing has never existed and life without technology is nasty and harsh, and I do enjoy good healthcare and I like having a phone. I just don’t need a new phone every single year. Nor do I need a personal car (I prefer trains and a bicycle for shorter travels).
If I say that “westerners have to reduce our rate of consumption and have fewer children,” in this sentence I have said absolutely nothing about non-westerners. You cannot interpret such words as promoting famines among non-westerners.
As for birth rates, it would be beneficial if those dropped quickly and everywhere (in both richer and poorer countries). In most western countries birth rates already are below 2 kids per woman, but they could go even lower. It wouldn’t hurt. It’s not like humanity is dying out due to low birth rates. And currently refugees and immigrants are begging to be allowed into countries with low birth rates.
Also, since you have a tendency to interpret people’s words in weird ways: when I say “it would be beneficial if birth rates dropped quickly and everywhere,” I am not promoting famines or totalitarian dictatorships. I am promoting accessible contraceptives, sex education, gender equality, and overall education.
At this point global warming cannot be stopped anymore. My pessimistic prediction is that growing enough food to support the current human population will become much harder due to changing weather patterns. Thus lower birth rates anywhere and everywhere seem like something that cannot hurt and is likely to be beneficial.
To Andreas
Yes, I am imagining what klatu wrote with a very negative perception. In particular, I want to draw attention to:
You might not be endorsing an anti-science, anti-industry, back-to-nature, de-growth agenda, but I’ll be damned if klatu isn’t.
I’m a card carrying radical Marxist. The solution is not “end capitalism”. That’s foolish. It was just as foolish when Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, and it was just as foolish when the Soviet Union tried it, China tried it, North Korea tried it, etc. Whenever I see someone talking about ending capitalism, being anti-nuclear, and talking about how only the west has a possibility to survive, I go immediately to the roots of the Green environmental and energy movement which is inescapably intertwined with this sort of elitism, colonialism, and racism. See end for some sources and quotes:
Thus far, everything you say Andreas is pretty reasonable. I’m still a little confused about how low you want the birth rate to go for western countries. For Europe as a whole, it’s like 1.55 births per woman. With radicalization of immigration, e.g. open borders, which I generally support, the birth rate could go much lower without destabilizing society, but I do want to bring up Japan as an interesting country with a very low birth rate, and extremely difficult immigration, as a problem to be concerned about.
PS:
Historical context: Circa 1960, the Sierra Club was the most influential environmentalist organization in America by far, and possibly even in the whole world. David Brower left the Sierra Club around this time to found Friends Of The Earth for the sole reason that the Sierra Club at that time was pro-nuclear. David Brower succeeded in pulling the entire environmental movement into the anti-nuclear camp, including the Sierra Club, in just a few years. Amory Lovins was a key player in this anti-nuclear de-growth agenda as well.
http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2018/1/11/jerry-browns-secret-war-on-clean-energy
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/14/the-real-reason-they-hate-nuclear-is-because-it-means-we-dont-need-renewables/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/11/if-nuclear-power-is-so-safe-why-are-we-so-afraid-of-it/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/10/09/anti-nuclear-bias-of-u-n-ipcc-is-rooted-in-cold-war-fears-of-atomic-and-population-bombs/
Keep in mind that these are the same forces that kept Africa in food shortages for decades because of their racism and western entitlement. The Green movement of the world really is among the shortlist of the most harmful and dangerous movements to humanity.
So yes, whenever I see people like klatu knowingly or unknowingly repeating these racist pseudoscience talking points, it sets me off.
@GerrardOfTitanServer
Regarding the “end of capitalism”: I believe that capitalism as in, for example, USA isn’t working for ensuring human flourishing and happiness. Personally, I tend to favor social democracy as seen in Scandinavian countries. I’m fine with private businesses, but I want state-owned schools, universities, hospitals, power plants, drinking water infrastructure, railroads, etc. And corporations shouldn’t have so much lobbying power and money that they basically control entire countries.
I don’t know. If the number of humans on this planet was sustainable, then about 2.1 kids per woman would be great. That being said, I’m a pessimist. I anticipate terrible weather patterns caused by global warming, which will result in crop failures and food shortages. I cannot predict how many people will have food on their table 60 years from now. That being said, I guess something between 1 and 1.5 kids per woman shouldn’t result in very severe social problems caused by too rapidly ageing population. (Yes, an ageing population causes problems, but in comparison famines sound even worse.) Of course, nobody can dictate how many kids others must have nor can they determine what birth rate some country should have. I absolutely cannot support forced sterilization or forced abortions. But personally I have chosen to have zero kids, so that at least my offspring do not contribute to global warming. In Latvia birth rate has fluctuated between 1.1 and 1.7 kids per woman during the last few decades, and I don’t think that’s too low, so I have chosen to do what I can (aka sterilize myself) so as to contribute to this rate going lower.
People can mean different things when they say “end of capitalism.” If they talk about people in western countries needing to change their lifestyles, this doesn’t mean they implied that “only the west has a possibility to survive” or that they want famines in poorer countries. Most people who say whatever buzzword triggers you haven’t read the books you are talking about and don’t support some specific ideologies that you are opposing.
I get the impression that you are interpreting other people’s words way beyond what they actually said. Personally, when interacting with strangers online, I try to not interpret their words beyond what they actually said and not imagine what they could have meant by some vague phrase that can have multiple meanings. We are a global community here. To a person living in a different country and a different culture than you who has read different books than you have vague phrases like “end of capitalism” can mean different things.
Sorry if this is just repeating, but …
I called myself a mainstream European social democrat. However, social democracy still involves quite a large amount of capitalism. Not unfettered capitalism, but a lot of capitalism nonetheless.
Klatu says that the only solution is to, quote, “drastically” reduce consumption, and strongly implies that we must do away with capitalism. Their claims are simply not true. These claims are part and parcel of the bog-standard Green ideology talking points, and these days I simply do not have the time or patience for putting up with these extremely harmful, counterproductive, racist, colonialist, regressive, conservative, pseudoscience beliefs.
One of my problems with people like klatu is that they have a hard-on for destroying the system and building it from the ground up. They don’t just want to fix the problems of global warming. Instead they see modern society as fundamentally corrupt and evil, needing to be completely destroyed and replaced with something new. It’s this kind of rhetoric that scares away most normal people. It makes most normal people wrongly believe that we need this level of radical change to fix the problems. IIRC, we have good studies that show that if you scare someone too much and claim that the solution is so so hard, it doesn’t motivate them. Rather, it makes them give up. We need to stop exaggerating the amount of changes that we need to fix the problem of global warming, and we need to stop lying to ourselves and the public that fixing global warming requires a radical restructuring of society. The changes that we need in society are actually rather moderate to fix the problems, and we should be trying to sell the moderate solutions to the public instead of the solutions that are “let’s tear up everything and start from scratch”.
And again, I’m definitely for certain kinds of radical restructuring, but I’m for those things because of the moral benefits of social justice. I don’t wrongly argue that we need those things to stop climate change, ocean acidification, sea level rise, etc.
I am also very afraid when anyone says that we should take society, burn it down, and start over in this new glorious utopia based on political and economic models that have never been tested at scale. That’s again why I keep making comparisons to the Soviet Union and Lysenkoism, and China’s Great Leap Forward, etc.
Sure. But across the globe people can use different words to refer to similar political ideas. I know people who argue against capitalism and claim that they want to abolish capitalism even though they want to replace it with something akin to what we have in Scandinavian countries (which is still capitalism).
Unless somebody elaborates what exactly they meant with vague and relative words like “drastically,” you cannot know what exactly they are proposing. For example, for people who live in a McMansion neighborhood, own several cars per family, and send to the landfill about a third of all the food they buy, even something as trivial as using public transportation and composting their organic trash can feel like a drastic lifestyle change. Never mind learning to cook without creating so much food waste, which might seem like an impossible mission.
In a global community, people are different. If somebody says something vague that could potentially be problematic, a smarter strategy is to ask for a clarification instead of assuming that they must adhere to some weird and strict ideology hardly anybody has ever heard about. And typing thousands of words arguing against this standard ideology when you don’t even know whether the person against whom you are arguing supports said ideology in the first place, well, that just sounds like poor and inefficient communication to me.
Notice how somebody in this conversation called you a “DDT fan” even though you never indicated that you support DDT usage and hardly anybody still wants to use DDT in 21st century. They made about you unsupported assumptions with zero evidence. They tried to put you in a neat box they have created for “bad people” whom they can easily dislike. I get the impression that you are doing the same thing here.
People don’t come in bog-standards.
By the way, personally, I have only vaguely heard about the specific ideology against which you try to argue right now, for me it seems that it is not widespread or even prevalent in every culture on this planet.
I see it all the time, on Reddit, on Pharyngula and elsewhere on FTB, on Patheos, and it’s often much more clear than it is here.
It’s not like I’m creating this out of whole cloth. The quotes that I supplied above from David Brower, Amory Lovins, and others from the birth of the Green movement, are really telling. These are the people who accepted a lot of fossil fuel money in order to swing the entire conservation movement (as they used to call environmentalists back in the day) to a radical anti-nuclear position. I don’t think that they were just shills – most of them anyway. I believe that most of them were just Liars For Jesus ™ style of preachers. Again, let me quote from above: “No, I really didn’t care [about nuclear power plant accidents] because there are too many people anyway … I think that playing dirty if you have a noble end is fine.”
Or look at the Green New Deal. It’s not about the environment. It’s about an ideological commitment to the idea that modern society is fundamentally flawed and fixing the environment is fundamentally impossible without doing all sorts of other things – many of which are great ideas on their own merits, but which have little to nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions. The fix for most of climate change is obvious, and not terribly hard or expensive:
Put a giant greenhouse gas emissions fee-and-dividend in place, ratcheting it up every year, plus commensurate tariffs on products from countries without equivalent greenhouse gas emission taxes.
Continue government R&D – but not necessarily commercialization nor commercial subsidies – into all of the above, including all renewables, but also many next-gen nuclear designs. We’ve spent many billions of dollars on renewables R&D. I’m just asking for a few billion for a few next-gen designs.
Build lots and lots of nuclear for electricity and process heat. Crank out contemporary designs like crazy until the aforementioned R&D comes up with a clearly better design and then switch. Contemporary designs are good enough, but we can do a lot better.
Move all indoor heating and cooling to electricity or district heating. Move all industrial process heat to electricity or direct nuclear heat.
Probably nuclear power plants directly in the large seagoing cargo ships. (Alternatively, use some of the synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuel mentioned below.)
IIRC, that’s like half of all human greenhouse gas emissions right there. And it’s easy.
Continue R&D and commercialization of alternate fuels / storage for vehicles which can be powered indirectly by nuclear electricity and/or heat, such as batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuels, so we can indirectly use nuclear to power our vehicles. I don’t have a clear answer here. The real answer may be a mix of solutions. More R&D is required.
That’s most of human greenhouse gas emissions right there. The vehicle fuel problem is harder to solve, but there are signs for hope for aviation and long-distance trucking via synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuels via direct CO2 air capture or direct CO2 ocean capture.
We probably need more. So, continue R&D and commercialization of negative emissions technologies. There might be cheaper ways, but there is a simple solution that should be pretty safe from unforeseen side effects: heating limestone to produce quicklime, capturing the CO2 stream and pumping it into basalt deposits, and grinding up the quicklime and dumping it in the ocean to absorb CO2. It’s a massive undertaking to use this method to reach the negative emissions that we need, requiring lots and lots of nuclear electricity and/or heat, but the scale here is comparable to current human activities for mining coal and oil.
To Andreas
I was poking around Reddit, as I am wont to do, and I saw this thread, and it reminded me of this conversation. Here’s an example of a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork, making very explicit arguments in favor of genocide of poor non-white people because of overpopulation, basing their arguments on bog-standard Malthusian arguments.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/innggc/til_that_norman_borlaug_has_been_credited_with/