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Stewart Brand on 'Environmental Heresies'
FleaPlus writes "The MIT Technology Review has an article predicting where the mainstream of the environmental movement may likely reverse its collective stance in the next ten years. The four areas discussed are population growth, urbanization, genetically-engineered organisms, and nuclear power. The article is written by Stewart Brand, known for creating the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL online community, and the Long Now Foundation. Brand also has some interesting comments regarding the sometimes-conflicting interaction between romantics and scientists in the environmental movement. There's an online debate between Brand and former DOE official Joseph Romm on TR Blogs." Frankly, unless humanity decides to undergo a massive collective personality change of not being consumption-focused, I don't see much other way around these particular issues. What we all need is an Arthur to keep us depressed and sleeping in darkened rooms to lower energy consumption.
The whole concept behind the environmental movement is that humans are unable to live symbiotically with Nature. No matter where we go, we act more as parasites that strip our host of life than as beneficial citizens of Nature.
1) Population growth: Humans are the problem. Despite the shrinking birth rate, this does not bode badly for Nature which will theoretically revive itself once we are not sucking nutrients out of the ground and burning it into the sky and water.
2) Urbanization: Cities are the largest contributors to localized pollution. Air quality, sewage overflows, and general griminess ooze from cities. I don't see how environmentalists could come around to see how cities are beneficial to the environment.
3) Genetically-engineered organisms: Knee jerk reactions defines the environmental movement. If they haven't listened to real science thus far, what will convince them otherwise?
4) Nuclear power: Ethical scientists have already converged on this as a plausible renewable energy source. Too bad the environmentalists haven't.
These are issues that are bugs so far up the asses of environmentalists that it is hard to believe that they could change their minds about them. I find it more likely that this one guy came to his senses and sees conservation as a constant management of the environment rather than as political capital. The problem is that the anomie of distancing himself from his old friends is too powerful and he finds himself trying to continue associating himself and his ideas with theirs.
The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities.
as part of his observation that urbanization is slowing population growth (which he contends is slowing growth).
Actually, my observation is exactly the opposite. I seem to hear more sympathy for packing everyone together than for spreading them out in the modern environmentalist rhetoric. That's why "sprawl" has become a cuss-word among this bunch.
For another example, look at the current opinion of Walmart. Just today I heard an NPR story about Walmart that criticized them for their environmental impact (pollution and rainwater runoff from their parking lots, plus the extra air pollution from people driving there, I guess).
I guess my point is that the "environmental movement" is a little conflicted; they apparently either like or dislike centralization and efficiencies of scale, depending on the context.
Have you read my blog lately?
The problem I have is that there aren't any good replacements, nothing renewable comes close to the energy return of fossil fuels or nuclear (at current production).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Animal life came out of the oceans some 500 million years ago. For over half that time the land was dominated by dinosaurs. For perhaps 100,000 years the land has been dominated by humanity.
Yeah, we've done well.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Start your own news portal and steal all of slashdots readership. Good luck.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
one can make similar arguments about oil deposits. in fact, for years, people have been claiming that we'll run out of oil in 20 years, and every 20 years, we still have oil to burn. why? because technology advances. oil reserves that were not economical or feasible to pump from 20 years ago are now very viable. we've got these nifty steam injection techniques that can extract from oil sands which have oil concentrations that are far below what previously would have been considered justification for even installing a well.
I'm sure the same could apply to uranium. What isn't viable today to process, could well be quite viable in 20 years if we approached the problem head on.
This is one issue that's always bugged the hell out of me about the wackier spectrum of environmentalists.
GM crops have the potential, hell, they're *necessary* for a great number of third world countries to be able to grow enough food to feed their people. And these guys are trying to stop that for the sake of nonsensical political motivations.
Then they go about using scare tactics, calling it "frankenfoods" and whatnot, as if there's something horrific about it. Excuse me, but we've been genetically modifying our crops for millenia. We've just gotten more sophisticated about it.
Well, it's about time the biotech companies started providing the plants they keep promising, instead of just creating ones designed to sell more of their own pesticides.
Or, if we distributed the food we already have more fairly, we wouldn't even need genetically modified plants.
Well, (from TFA) he has a degree in biology, and was involved in a Pentagon study on climate change. Oh, and he just got an article published in the Technology Review. You might have heard of it.
Also, eating muesli and selling organically grown tat (what's that?) doesn't disqualify someone from being an expert on these things, so quit the ad hominems.
What are YOUR qualifications by the way? Good Slashdot karma?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
My problem with a lot of environmental thought is its all tied up in a package of garbage ideas. Efficiency good, but technology bad. Walmart is EVIL! SUVs are EVIL! Globalism is evil! What's wrong with the Nature Conservancy approach? Buy up the land while trying to respect property rights. Look for approaches that make economic sense to the locals so they are sustainable. Be more efficient without hating SUVs or even nuclear power. Why does it all have to be tied to some lefty anti-capitalist, anti-globalist worldview?
Certainly, some environmentalists have financial motives but the majority do not. When scientists are concerned about global climate change, they are publishing these warnings in the hope of drawing attention to what they genuinely perceive as a serious problem. Ditto for polution concerns, supplies of natural resources, biological diversity and ecosystem damage. These are FACTS.
In contrast, the news releases from industry which make their way across television and newspaper spread absolute lies. Examples:
- there is no global climate change (flies in the face of 90%+ of scientific opinion)
- business can continue as usual without worrying about environmental factors (a hope, for short term business as usual)
- the economy can survive $100 oil
- nuclear is the solution to our energy needs
Here's the important point: a lot of scientists work for industry. So they have a distinct bias. In many cases they are providing reports for their employer. So next time you run into a scientific report, check the source... not all scientists are funded equally.Uranium deposits are shrinking at an alarming rate. In a few decades time, the cheap U ores would have run out, and the remaining deposits would absorb more energy to extract a gram of U than that gram can ever hope give back.
Alright, since I don't know the current figures on Uranium deposits/Uranium consumption
I'll accept that that might be true. However even if all Nuclear power gave us was another
two decades woundn't that buy us time to transition from an oil infrastucture to an
infrastucture based on some kind of alternative energy?
"The moment "pride" is lost, "freedom" is also lost." - Ramza.
Flying in the face of reason ?
What problems do GM plants solve ? There already is a worldwide surplus of food.
Food is no problem whatsoever in industrialized nations - and in the third world the problem is distribution and greed not a lack of GM crops, which DO cost a premium to get hold of in the first place.
So tell me please - which problem das GM solve ? The problem of having nothing to worry about ? The problem of having no unproven and potentialy dangerous technology about ?
"radical conservation in energy transmission and use"
He says this like it's an insignificant thing. It's not. We literally throw away approximately 60% of the energy used to produce electricity as "waste heat". And this is at the power station itself (including nuclear)!
We then go on to use most of the 40% of the energy we have actually transmitted to produce more heat. It's not what could be classed as clever.
Changing this single inefficiency in our energy generation sector would do the job. It's not even particularly radical, the solution is a couple of hundred years old, it's just that until very recently it's been cheaper to just pump in more oil, gas or coal.
Deleted
On population, he points out that global population is close to leveling off and is declining precipitously in many countries. Why? Mostly it is the unprecedented worldwide migration from rural villages to cities, where having lots of children is less of an advantage. If those concerned with sustainability get out ahead of this trend and help guide it, it could be an environmental blessing. Cities put people close together, reducing their collective energy use. They free up rural areas for wildlife and wilderness (if protections are put in place).
Regarding biotech: There's truth to this, though it's slightly facile. It does, after all, matter that GM has been developed by giant corporations and has been used primarily for their benefit. But the idea that the technology itself is intrinsically bad ... that doesn't make much sense to me. As Brand says, the proper reaction for greens ought to be to appropriate the technology and use it for their ends, particularly since, embrace or no embrace, it's gonna spread. Open-source biotech seems like a promising way for GM to do some environmental good. Brand offers some scenarios.
Ultimately, I suspect that urbanization, GM crops, and nuclear power are inevitable. If all we do is stand on the sidelines shouting "no, no, no!" the process will proceed without us, guided by the worst actors. The smartest thing that those of us concerned about the health of humanity and the planet can do is get involved and try to steer toward an outcome that is equitable and sustainable.
With increased government levvies, and education on future impacts of piggish consumption, overall demand can actually decrease. But such is not good for business at all, so it is violently opposed (including government lobbies)
Flying in the face of reason?
Well, let's see: GM food--an attempt to take our food supply, which is already dangerously genetically uniform, and make it even more genetically uniform--which, if science is our guide, makes it more vulnerable to pandemic. Yes, short term yields should be great. However, food supplies should be STABLE, not boom-and-bust.
Then there's nuclear (fission) power. Yes, it's clean and safe, relative to, say, coal. But there's the waste disposal issue. It hasn't been solved. Yes, I agree, nuclear is the only way to meet our increasing energy needs in the short term. Yet decreasing our energy consumption seems to be not only a workable solution, but even cleaner than nuclear. Science tells us to choose the cleaner option--use less energy.
Not that I think what you're suggesting isn't where the world is HEADING (there's a lot of money to be made in "sucking it up", perhaps coincidentally), but I think it'll result in a planet that is supporting an unsustainable population with an extremely fragile food supply and an ever-increasing amount of radioactive waste needing to be stored in the few remaining unpopulated areas.
As opposed to a sustainable population with a stable food supply and some relatively minor waste disposal problems, which is a solution only a "romantic" could embrace.
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GM crops make a negligible difference to third world countries. The yields on GM crops are only marginally better than for regular crops, the difference is only significant for those huge agribusinesses who have tens of thousands of acres of the stuff.
It's war, corruption, disease and import tariffs which decimate the farming populations of third world countries. What they need is good stable government and fair trade with the developed world, not GM crops.
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will be the first thing reversed.
It's high time the top brass of the environmental movement admit that stopping Nuclear power was a mistake that has lead to greater devastation of the environment by coal plants.
Even the nuclear waste issue pales in comparison to the the ecological damage coal plants have caused and will keep causing until we replace them (finally) with much cleaner nuclear technologies like Pebble Bed. Coal of course has it's own waste issues.
The anti-nuclear power movement has been one of the best examples of the law of unintended consequences in our times.
So tell me please - which problem das GM solve ?
The problem of dumping gallons of fertilizer and pesticide on each square foot of land?
The ideal purpose of GM (ie, when its not some company using it to sell farmers their "special" chemicals like the roundup-ready series) is not to create more food per acre, its to use less resources doing it.
Additionally in regions where there is a distribution problem, imagine being able to grow food in town, despite the poor land quality.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
"Their answer is "Not much," because they know from their own work how robust wild ecologies are in defending against new genes, no matter how exotic"
"The second greatest cause of extinctions is coming from invasive species, where no solution is in sight. Kudzu takes over the American South, brown tree snakes take over Guam . . ."
So why is kudzu a problem if wild ecologies are so good at defending against new genes?
The limiting factor for population will not be food, but water supply, which is all ready scarce in many areas of the world.
Even if we were to solve this particular issue, however, this is not a good argument for limitless population growth and endless invention to deal with the inevitable consequences that accrue from there being billions of hairless apes walking around this planet, sucking up resources, squeezing out other species, which we actually depend on in this interdependent world, and shitting out various forms of waste and toxins in our desire for a way of life that is at best out of kilter and insensitive to the natural world, and at worst deeply hostile to it (generally for reasons of pure selfishness).
How about we deal with the pressing situation by limiting and managing our populations, our impact on the world, our drain and demand on the limited resources that exist and living in harmony with all the other countless billions of other species (which we depend on directly or indirectly to one extent or another)?
How's that for an "imperfect solution"?
Or is it merely inconventient?
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Why is this marked as troll? This has made the news in both TV and papers recently, about people with enough money to buy off government officials getting offshore wind power turbines denied permission.
CapeWind is one of the local (to me) organizations dedicated to providing actual information about the benefits, rather than the info that the people with more money than sense will give you.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
1) Population growth: Humans are the problem. Despite the shrinking birth rate, this does not bode badly for Nature which will theoretically revive itself once we are not sucking nutrients out of the ground and burning it into the sky and water.
So... the solution to overpopulation is the end to the human race? We will always be "sucking nutrients out of the ground" as long as we continue to eat and/or live on Earth, which is basically as long as there are people. I'm not going to get into the actual feasibility of colonizing the rest of the solar system.
2) Urbanization: Cities are the largest contributors to localized pollution. Air quality, sewage overflows, and general griminess ooze from cities. I don't see how environmentalists could come around to see how cities are beneficial to the environment.
Not all environmentalists are civilization-hating Luddites who want to return to our hunter-gatherer roots. There are many who believe that it is possible to develop in a environmentally sustainable way. There are environmentalists who don't mind admitting that they value human life more than field mice.
3) Genetically-engineered organisms: Knee jerk reactions defines the environmental movement. If they haven't listened to real science thus far, what will convince them otherwise?
Show me the "real science" that proves all GMOs are safe. Yes, there may be no cause for alarm. Still, I think the burden of proof should be creators of these products and the governments that support them to prove that they are safe before they are widely used.
4) Nuclear power: Ethical scientists have already converged on this as a plausible renewable energy source. Too bad the environmentalists haven't.
Nuclear power may be a good addition to our range of power options. From what I have read, it is not ready to be a total replacement for other sources of energy. Also, it has been billed as safe before, before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Things rarely work out as well in practice as they do in theory.
It sounds like you believe that there is a single, unified environmental movement, and that it has only one set of beliefs. Furthermore, you seem to believe that the most extreme views represent the views of everyone. Sounds like you should try looking into what environmentalists are actually saying - not just reading news reports and jumping to conclusions.
Unfortunately I fear you've shot your whole argument with the stuff inside the parenthesis. I also fear that I need to alter it, for the worse:
The "real world" purpose for GM is to increase the profitability of those companies in that market.
That's the marketplace in action, and unfortunately reducing resources has little to do with it, unless the resources reduced are procured from a competitor. I suspect similar reasoning is why medical cannabis is has been an issue between the DEA and alternative medicine anecdotes. IMHO, it should be in FDA studies, but there's just *no profit* in it compared to synthetic drugs.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
And that is the problem with the environmental movement. I don't see the millions of environmentalists giving up electricity or their homes in the suburbs or the country.
All that we hear is some bleating about how we need to "stop consuming" or look for "solutions" to population growth.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Has the waste disposal issue been solved for coal power plants? As far as I'm concerned, pumping that stuff into the atmosphere does not constitute safe disposal...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
1) Population growth will settle just as starvation, disease and other 3rd world issues will settle as those countries liberalize and develop their economies so they can distribute goods and services.
2)Cities are far more efficient places for people to live than suburbia. If there were no cities, land use and pollution would skyrocket as each person took his 40 acres and a SUV. Look at LA. That's what the entire east coast would be like w/o cities.
3)Genetically engineered food is better than no food...
4) Nuclear power is a no brainer to anyone except NIMBY types.
"Environmentalists" are politicians. Most of their organizations are basically just law firms. I equate them with oil execs. We really need more publically funded independent research in vertical solutions to improving the environment.
bp
It doesn't sound like the Africans are too concerned about starvation, either, huh? Maybe they should, like, do something about it, like every other civilization has had to at one point or another in its history.
You may have heard about the embargo? Long gas lines? Why, would the embargo hurt, if the US oil production didn't decline after the '70's? Answer: US domestic oil production has been in decline since the 1970's. Wake up, there will be plenty of oil, but no more cheap oil as global production is peaking. Can Saudi still provide swing capacity? Why is solar, wind and conservation a "rickety tripod" ? Does hydroelectric count as solar? (think hard here, what drives the water back to the resevoir?) Asteroids for uranium source? Can I get what you are smoking? I can't speak to U ore supplies, but oil has peaked in the US. This is a fact. What makes you think it won't peak in the other oil producing counties?
Ehrlich may have underestimated the ability of technology to increase food production on the short term but I think he was right in principle. It is my understanding that the large fish population in the Atlantic is a minor fraction of what it was only 30 years ago. That is an epic planetary die-off that has already occurred in an extraordinarily short time. World-wide human starvation hasn't been seen (yet) because we are still in the transition process of stripping the planet bare. Why do we need _any_ population increase to finish the job?
Haven't people heard the story about passenger pigeons:
"It was Alvin Jones who told us about the Pigeon Roost Prairie which was near the Jones homestead. He said so many pigeons stopped to roost in the pines in this are that they broke the limbs off the trees and the trees died, so there was a prairie there. There wasn't a living tree for 150 acres, and it was called Pigeon Roost Prairie. That was virgin pine timber they killed. The pigeons were almost as big as a chicken, not the homing pigeon; they were two or three times larger, about the size of a pheasant. Not thousands of pigeons but millions of pigeons! I tried to learn all I could about this pigeon migration. I was interested in it. It was something to think about. There would be so, many they would darken the sun for three days, all going north."
http://www.ulala.org/P_Pigeon/Texas.html
Aren't people curious about how primitive cultures were able to feed themselves with sharpened sticks? I suspect it was because going down to the brook to spear a carp was only somewhat more inconvenient than going down to the freezer to find something to thaw.
Like boiling frogs, the human lifespan is only 70+ years. Perhaps it is too short for people to actually experience ecological change and ingrain any feeling for the issue. As long as there is soylent green, some people will call it a balanced ecology. Others think more diversity is valuable.
The point is that the planet was already damaged by population and industry before anyone on Slashdot was born. We should be discussing whether we are at the planetary coup de grace stage, not congratulating ourselves on how population isn't a problem.
(AND, if we didn't have so many people, there would be one less argument for both GMO and nuclear.)
"And that is the problem with the environmental movement. I don't see the millions of environmentalists giving up electricity or their homes in the suburbs or the country."
That is a very trite response. It is a common tactic in a debate to immediately jump to an extreme position. People aren't being told to give up electricity, just use less and be more efficient. This should be a laudible goal by anyone's standards. To say "but you use it!" is an asinine response. We have to function in the society we are born in, that includes having to use a car and electricity. It doesn't mean we can't push for change.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Should the environmental movement favor nuclear power?
Who cares!
The four subjects he raises are fringe distractions from the major policy questions which have the largest impact on our environment, which are merely a symptom of wider deficits in our nation's democratic culture.
Population growth is becoming a non-issue.
I favor nuclear power as long as the details are right - if the public is going to take all the risks, we shouldn't allow some private entity to reap the profits off of it.
I favor genetically modified organisms which are designed in a way that benefits farmers and/or the environment, rather than maximizing the profits of entrenched power.
Likewise, urbanization is fine if it leads to prosperity, but as a result of people being driven off of the land by thugs (e.g. Columbia) it is a bad thing.
The devil is in the details, as has always been the case. In ten years time the details may have changed enough that the present situation becomes unrecognizable; so I think trying to predict what we will be trying to do ten years from now is futile and silly.
This isn't to bash futurism generally - we can't know what to work towards now if we don't have some concept of what the future will be like. But trying to predict the future of activism? Waste of time.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
No, just because you don't do it, doesn't mean other people don't.
the layman's guide to computer science
I don't know what it means to "corrupt" the gene pool. The genes of all organisms are changing all the time and are selected for or against by environmental pressures. We're adding another type of "mutation" - GM - and using the same kind of environmental pressure farmers have been using for thousands of years to select for it. Nothing is different, qualitatively.
In any case, our best bet for saving the planet is decreasing the population. I don't know what a sustainable number might be but it's got to be a lot closer to 1G than 6G
It might have helped if you'd RTFA. It covered many of the issues you are complaining about.
Population is the most important issue in politics for me, so I read the section on this topic (but skipped the rest). I'm so tired of the descriptions of "doom and gloom" that will happen with low fertility rates and a shrinking population - these authors are a mirror image of the mistakes they claim that past environmental authors have made in predicting the future.
o rder/2127rank.html, you will see there are still quite a few countries that have fertility rates above 2.1. (By the way, saying 2.1 is steady state assumes an average infant mortality rate that is pretty high. If you want the human race to all move into a the modern industrialized world, something under 2.05 is required). Granted, I don't have the plots of all countries fertility rates over time and some of these countries near the top may be declining, but I see absolutely no way we can declare success now. I expected better out of Technology Review, the magazine where I first learned about fuel cells for automotive use.
There are some scientific facts on population that are rarely disputed:
1] The earth has a finite carrying capacity
Actual numbers will vary anywhere from 1 to 10 billion people, but it's obvious that constraints on food, water, energy, pollution sinks do constrain the number of us. My opinion is that the number is less than we are now, but we are getting by (some of us anyway) because of unsustainable oil and water use. Perhaps we could get by on renewable energy with around 2 billion people.
2] Large numbers of humans cannot leave the earth
There is no way we could move even 1/1000th the world population off the earth even if there was someplace to go. The resources/pollution needed to do this make it a non-starter for addressing population growth.
3] Adjustments need to be made to run an economy with a declining population growth
Not impossible, but obviously it is harder to operate a system that is shrinking instead of growing. Tricks like using lots of workers to support fewer retirees won't work. Any pyramid scheme seems great when you are on the growth side, but I'd prefer not to have the human race crash like a big pyramid scheme.
4] Fertility rates can be adjusted by government action
Coercive measures while espoused by some as necessary have been avoided in very successful transitions to lower fertility (e.g. Iran). We have less experience with going the other way, but some countries (e.g. Singapore) are trying incentives to raise the fertility rate. I see no reason that these rates can't be successfully adjusted if for some reason, 50 years from now, the world wide fertility rate dips down well below 2 and stays there so long that our population goes below 2 billion.
Now, back to the article:
In each country listed: Japan, Germany, Spain, Russia (I think) and Italy, they could stand to lose 30% of their population anyway. I think the U.S. is too crowded and Europe has much higher densities (and Japan is worse) in terms of population per arable land unit.
"It turns out that population decrease accelerates downward just as fiercely as population increase accelerated upward, for the same reason."
What does this mean? If you measure the increase or decrease of an exponential function (what he's talking abut here) as a percentage, then of course they have the same fierceness, but there is no concept of acceleration (percentage growth is constant). If you measure the amount in absolute numbers, then exponential increase is accelerating, but exponential decrease is always decelerating.
As far as fertility going down everywhere, we in the U.S. are now at 2.08 and this is going up (albeit slowly). We were closer to 2 about 5 years ago I think. If you look at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rank
Dara
Problem solved decades ago.
Drop your emotional dogma and the human race can get somewhere.
In the US, yes. I gather you are from the UK, where population density is much higher. The average ex-urb hippie in the USA probably has no access to public transport. They quite likely do not have solar water-heaters. They probably recycle, but they have to drive to a recycling center because their communities don't have municipal recycling. They shops are probably a 40 minute walk. So I don't doubt you live that way. But the american hippies don't and they drive me batty. I work between Denver (2 million people) and Boulder (100,000 white, privledged "environmentalists"). I carpool to work, I can walk to the shops. They can't, yet I have often had conversations with these people maligning my urban lifestyle. The UK, compared to the US, is basically completely urban. People don't drive 45 minutes to work in a 2 ton (1.84 tonnes) "car" that gets 7 miles to the gallon (3km/litre). It is hypocracy and it really can get annoying.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Look up dwarf wheat sometime, and the difference it has made in the Indian subcontinent.
GM is little more than deliberately engineered advantageous mutation.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Changing it at the genetic level through fancy techniques is not incredibly different than isolating a strain for its characteristics and cross pollinating it.
Corn isn't anywhere near what its original form is, being modified for years and years to be the tall vegetable we're accustomed to.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I don't see the millions of environmentalists giving up electricity or their homes in the suburbs or the country.
Perhaps you need to look closer. Those dorks riding scooters and bikes to work might actually be environmentalists. Live downtown? Same thing. Work from home? Entirely possible. You don't have to live off the grid in a house made of recycled tires (although I know someone who does) to be an environmentalist. It's not an all-or-nothing proposition, and not dedicating your entire life to being environmentally friendly does not make you a hypocrite. You don't have to have front-row seats to every single game/concert/whatever to be considered a fan of a sport/a band/whatever, but I see that logic applied to environmentalists, vegetarians, and plenty of other things all the time. It doesn't seem particularly fair to me.
Random and weird software I've written.
Nuclear power is the environmental answer because it is the most dense source of energy.
Tidal generators and wind power require huge amount of dispersed equipment. The environmental damage they cause will be spread over a wide area. We already know that wind power actively kills flying animals. I suspect that tidal generators will also be damaging to sea life.
Another example is hydroelectric. Dams are now causing more greenhouse warming due to their emmissions of methane than they save in reduced CO2 emmissions.
Nuclear power is, of course, a dangerous thing if not done carefully. But most non-dense sources of energy are, by their non-dense nature, inherently environmentally damaging.
You are correct that we can feed all the people on the earth if given the will - it is a matter of universal acceptance of capitalism. Hundreds of millions of people have now been brought out of absolute poverty in China and India because of free market reforms since the 1980's.
You just identified yourself as one of the romantics instead of one of the rational scientists. Spouting off your silliness has a negative impact on your movement because people will tend to assosciate reasonable scientific thought with your emotional non-thought.
Your unsupported assumptions that "natural" is somehow ideal and that humanity should be limited suggest that you are basing your opinions on some mysticism, superstition or religion, rather on scientific skepticism.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Reprocessing is not banned due to fears of contamination - it is banned, mostly, due to nuclear proliferation concerns. The next generation of anti-proliferation reactors might help alleviate this.
;) No water, no liquid sodium; anti-proliferation; efficient breeding; hot enough for direct hydrogen generation in some designs; can operate on convection alone (although to be efficient you want to assist the convection process); etc. A great design, really.
Of course, ideally, you'd have a breeder reactor that burns the Pu as it makes it. I'm a big fan of lead-bismuth designs - if something goes wrong, the very worst case is that your nuclear material gets encased a dozen or two feet inside a giant block of lead
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
I have always felt that environmentalist should embrace urbanization. However, I feel that it is more important for industry to exist in urban settings then people. This is because when industries cluster in a single location it becomes immediately clear what the environmental effects of these industries will be. The combined results of these industries waste products can be seen much easier than those of decentralized and well insolated (by natural or artificial blinds) industries. The addition of people into the mix makes for incredible political force for change in industrial policies and practices. If you look at some the most tragic environmental disasters (such as Woburn, MA and Three Mile Island) they happened in places where the there was not as much political pressure for change because there were not as many people.
Or you could be a middle aged, Bush-voting, ex-military, pickup truck owning redstater, basically your uber anti-hippie, and still ride a bicycle to work.
How, you ask? Because I like to ride my bike to work.
Actually, this usually has more to do with harvesting things prematurely for long-haul shipment, and then force-ripening (with gas exposure, etc) just prior to sale. The fruit, or vegetable in question doesn't have as long to properly ripen and generate the compounds that we enjoy as the familiar mature tastes.
This is driven mostly by the demand from less well educated (in culinary terms) shoppers wanting to see/feel crisp-looking produce of every variety on the shelf through every season, or with their unwillingness to pay what it costs for the more immediate transportation of those same items if they were left to ripen on the vine/tree, etc. Spend a little more on the same varieties at a higher-end store, and you'll get your flavor back. But you'll also be burning more fuel, because the produce was probably flown to you (unless it's grown locally).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I don't know who modded you up, but you don't deserve it, as your logic is fundamentally flawed.
They're not going to dump herbicides with "wreckless abandon" because doing so takes time and money. Farmers, like most people, don't want to spend either unproductively.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Yes, and I live in Alabama. In can be over 90 and 99% humidity for over 100 days. I have summered here many years without A/C. But I'm young. I think that climate control as implemented in the US is very wasteful. Central heating and air, while nice, heats and cools a lot of empty rooms in the peoples' McMansions. And large office buildings are empty half the time (or more) yet are heated and cooled as if someone were there all the time. We need to think of better ways to live and work. I just don't think it was a fair comment that some of the alternate energy sources are "rickety". There are numerous examples of self sufficient homes. It costs alot, as much as some of the SUV's and cars that people drive, but unlike them, it would pay for itself. Large cities, are a whole different problem. Granted, I heat with natural gas, and sometimes I've been known to use a window unit A/C. But I have to wear a sweater at work (in a very cool office) in the summer. I think people have grown soft, but I guess it is only a sign that we are a prosperious nation. That gets cheap oil overseas. Things are the way they are because it has been the path of least resistance, I suppose. To do otherwise takes foresight and thought. I ride my bike as transportation as much as possible. We need (and in my opinion, should want) mass transit and more bike lanes. Fewer automobiles. We could simultaneously tackle obesity as well. But I'll have trouble getting the rednecks to give up their big ass trucks (the ones that need them are good ole boys BTW).
Did you miss the part of the article that said that this rice actually removes herbicide from the ground? Once your weeds are killed the rice sops up the excess and processes it into harmless chemicals. The rice had 20x less herbicide in it than conventional rice, plus the growing medium had nearly zero of the applied herbicide in it, while with conventional rice, the growing medium still contained 25% of the orginial herbicide. One of the main problems of irrigating otherwise fallow croplands is that evaporation leads to concentration of the residual herbicides and fertilizers that are applied to the ground. These run off into lakes and streams, further polluting the environment. If we can eliminate herbicide runoff from this, then we should be behind this wholehartedly, regardless of if it sells more herbicide or not.
a containment structure is primarily a one-time cost
So is a wind turbine. You still have to amortize it.
A PBMR is more economical no matter how you build it
No. PBMRs are small reactors - in fact, a PBMR will cost you a little over a hundred million instead of the several billion that you'd pay for, say, a CANDU. The lack of a containment structure is *how* they make it economical. They instead use a "confinement structure", which is not positive-pressure.
serious heat
PBMRs operate about 4 times as hot as PWRs
serious pressure
Pressures are roughly equivalent to PWRs
radiation
It is just as radioactive, mass for mass.
shock issues
Shock is bad in any reactor.
Of course, containment structures aren't related to any of the above. They're related to *containment* in the event of an accident; which is what must be discussed here.
There are many PBMR designs
They all use graphite as a moderator and call for air to be used as an emergency coolant, as I said above. I'm not cherry-picking - that's part of what a PBMR is. The other parts of what a PBMR is include helium as primary coolant, a mix of microspheres of fuel and graphite, a pellet recycling method that monitors decay, and a few other basic features. The technical details vary - many designs even include a secondary water cooling loop, which is just asking for problems.
Decent PBMRs don't present these issues
They sure as heck present a number of accident risks. The very testbed for PBMRs in Germany led to a minor leak of radioactive material and a huge economic setback when the pellet feeder jammed, and it took weeks to restore it. This is one of the most minor accident scenarios, however. The most major accident scenarios are on plants that use water secondary cooling and use water for hydrogen generation; water reacts explosively with hot graphite via hydrogen generation, so any water/steam penetration of the core is an immediate, serious accident situation. As for oxygen in the core loop, while fresh nuclear grade graphite is considered incombustable (this is debated), even proponents admit 1-2% erosion at the temperatures PBMRs operate before it cools, and since the graphite will not be fresh (but will have been bombarded for long periods by high intensity radiation and eroded by decay products), the risk is much higher of flammability/erosion. Worse, however, is that unlike the graphite that spread radioactive waste from Chernobyl, this graphite will be in direct contact with the fuel. The contamination of the eroding graphite will be quite severe as a consequence.
While radical environmentalists will try and convince you that every nuclear power plant is a Chernobyl waiting to happen, the converse can be said about nuclear proponents. It's not a ticking time bomb, but it's not some benign power source. Containment structures have prevented about at least a dozen nuclear accidents in the US alone which had the potential to be significant region contaminators. There's no reason to trust a graphite-moderated reactor with such a risk just because it has a negative void coefficient and inert primary coolant.
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
Your grandparent is only superficially plausible in a situation isolated from reality, and incorrect even then. Since your grandparent's claim requires setting aside those reasons that play a large part in governing the reality of the situation, let us examine things under those conditions--just for fun.
:p. It is common for environmentalists to highlight the worst possible scenario of anything they oppose through the "But Think of the Idiots!!" catch-all. "So what if pebble-bed reactors are meltdown proof, they could still spell disaster in the hands of the idiots that allowe
The farmer *can* soak as much or more pre-emerge herbicide into the ground, as is the current practice, than he adds roundup due to GMO crops. "Barring economical or social (or environmental) issues" (I'm sure you realize that this qualification to the argument immediately removes all relevancy therefrom) there is no hard limit to either practice short of physical saturation of the ground. Of course, doing so with either herbicide would destroy your entire crop due to toxic overdose, over-irrigation (depending on the method of delivery), side-effects of the surfactant (in the case of roundup), or a combination of these and various other reasons. It would be illegal (but that is a social issue), render the land unfarmable--uninhabitable for most organisms for quite some distance around, even--but that is an environmental issue, and cost obscene amounts of money and destroy your product, but, that being an economic issue, is simply another that we are conveniently ignoring for now. Even in this made-up world where we ignore such things, the limit to the amount of herbicide used--the physical volume of herbicide that the ground can absorb--does not change in either situation.
So we see with this ridiculous thought experiment that neither makes possible the use of more herbicide than the other in the absolute sense. When we add those constraints which are present in reality, the scales are tilted heavily in favor of roundup-ready crops for reasons that many other posters have already elaborated.
Your argument that roundup-ready crops will eventually lead to roundup-resistant weeds requiring heavier dosages to kill has some valid ground to stand on (is inevitable, in fact), and has been voiced numerous times before, but cannot be extended as a solid premise for the argument that roundup-ready crops will necessarily lead to greater herbicide use than previous methods, as there are economic limits--namely the previous methods themselves. If it becomes more economical to do so, farmers will simply revert to the old pre-emerge/cultivation practice for weed control. Round-up is expensive. Roundup-ready seed is very expensive--and comes with onerous licensing terms (e.g., allowing Monsanto the right to inspect your crops--possibly destructively--at any time of their choosing, etc.), and even restrictions on the sale of the product to boot. To make a long story short, should the farmer be required to use ridiculous amounts of herbicide to maintain the roundup-ready method of weed control, he won't, simply because he cannot afford it.
I don't rely at all on 'confidence about the inherent wisdom of american farmers' in supporting my position. In fact, I know a few of my neighbors (also commercial farmers) who appear to lack any shred of it. They do, however, understand the bottom line. If they did not, they would not be farming--they'd be bankrupt.
I'll concede that there are bound to be instances where excessive amounts of roundup are used, as there are idiots everywhere who will run any type of business you care to name into the ground. However, the cause of this, the existence of idiots, is not unique to weed control, the business of agriculture general, or any particular segment of humanity (aside from the case in which you group humanity into the sets of idiots and non-idiots).
This is not relevant to your argument, but let me rant on a bit, since I've warmed up to the subject