CityReads│Why Are Cities,Nuclear Power&Genetic Engineering Green
Why Are Cities, Nuclear Power And Genetic Engineering Green?
Stewart Brand challenges green orthodoxy and proposes seemingly unlikely solutions for climate change: urbanization, nuclear power, genetic engineering, and geoengineering.
Brand, S. 2009. Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Viking Adult.
Source: http://discipline.longnow.org/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/Contents.html
In July 2015, NOAA’s Center for Weather and Climate at the National Centers for Environmental Information released a report, the State of the Climate in 2014.
Major greenhouse gas concentrations, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, continued to rise during 2014, once again reaching historic high values. Record temperatures observed near the Earth’s surface. Sea surface temperatures were record high. Global sea level was record high. The Arctic continued to warm; sea ice extent remained low. The Antarctic showed highly variable temperature patterns; sea ice extent reached record high. Tropical cyclones above average overall.
Climate has been a human artifact, a highly sensitive one, for a long time.
Ruddiman notes that “farming is not nature, but rather the largest alteration of Earth’s surface from its natural state that humans have yet achieved.” Furthermore, “A good case can be made that people in the Iron Age and even the late Stone Age had a much greater per-capita impact on the earth’s landscape than the average modern day person.”
We are currently at about 397.2 ppm and rising fast. The most common statement of an achievable goal for dealing with climate these days is leveling off at 450 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The scale of the climate challenge is so vast that it cannot be met solely by grassroots groups and corporations, no matter how Green. The situation requires government fiat to set rules and enforce them. Specifically, the four major energy-using governments—the European Union, the United States, China, and India—have to get tough. If all four do the right thing, there’s hope.
We will be more transformed by our efforts to stabilize climate than by anything else we do in this century. If we fail to stabilize climate, our civilization will either be gone or unrecognizable.
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto examines four that environmentalists have distrusted and now need to embrace, plus one we love that has to be scaled up. The unwelcome four are urbanization, nuclear power, biotechnology, and geoengineering. The familiar one is natural-system restoration.
This book explains why cities are Green, nuclear energy is Green, and genetic engineering is Green. Then it discusses the possible geoengineering schemes.
Why Are Cities Green?
Human being began moving to town ten millennia ago.
The ten-thousand-year flow of people to cities has become a torrent. In 1800 the world was 3 percent urban; in 1900, 14 percent urban; in 2007, 50 percent urban. The world’s population crossed that threshold—from a rural majority to an urban majority—at a sprint.
We are now a city planet, and the Greener for it.
At the current rate, humanity may well be 80 percent urban by midcentury. Every week there are 1.3 million new people in cities. That’s 70 million a year, decade after decade. It is the largest movement of people in history.
Of all human organizations, cities are the longest-lived. The oldest surviving corporations, Stora Enso in Sweden and the Sumitomo Group in Japan, are about 700 and 400 years old, respectively. The oldest universities, in Bologna and Paris, have lasted only 1,000 years so far. The oldest living mainstream religions, Hinduism and Judaism, date back about 3,500 years. But the town of Jericho has been continuously occupied for 10,500 years. Its neighbor Jerusalem has been an important city for 5,000 years, even though it was conquered or destroyed thirty-six times and endured eleven conversions from one religion to another. Many cities die or decline to irrelevance, but some thrive for millennia.
On cause of their durability is that cities are the most constantly changing of organizations.
In 2007 the United Nations Population Fund gave that year’s report the upbeat title Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth. The lead author, Canadian demographer George Martine, wrote, “Cities concentrate poverty, but they also represent the best hope of escaping it.” He declared in a talk that“80 to 90 percent of GNP growth occurs in cities” and that “the half of the world’s population living in cities occupies only 2.8 percent of the world’s land area.” He went on to say, “In cities, concentration and density make it easier to provide social services. Education, health, sanitation, water, electrical power—everything is so much easier and cheaper on a per capita basis.”
A new theory is upsetting our idea of what cities are and can become. Through a phenomenon known as Kleiber’s law, organisms become more metabolically efficient as they scale up. Cities do the same. “One of the basic principles of cities is that it’s more efficient to bring people together,” says physicist Geoffrey West. “You need a little bit less of everything per person.”
Cities are wealth creators. Cities accelerate innovation; they cure overpopulation; and they are good for environment.
A study in Panama showed what happened when people abandoned slashand-burn agriculture to move to town: “With people gone, secondary forest has regenerated. Crucially, if protected from hunters, nearly every bird and mammal species found in primary forest has also been found in secondary.”
While cities are becoming the Greenest thing that humanity does for the planet, they have a long way to go.
Two major campaigns should be mounted—one to protect the newly emptied countryside, the other to Green the hell out of the growing cities.
One idea that could be transferred from squatter cities is urban farming. Well-designed greenhouses use as little as 10 percent of the water and 5 percent of the area required by farm fields. . . . A 30- story farm on one city block could feed 50,000 people with vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat.Upper floors would grow hydroponic crops; lower floors would house chickens and fish that consume plant waste.
The most dramatic gains can come from simply making everything white. A white roof saves the building’s tenant 20 percent in cooling costs.
According to a 2008 study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “If the 100 largest cities in the world replaced their dark roofs with white shingles and their asphalt-based roads with concrete or other light-colored material, it could offset 44 metric gigatons (billion tons) of greenhouse gases.”
In the broad scope of history, growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They concentrate crime, pollution, and injustice as much as they concentrate business, innovation, education, and entertainment. If they are overall a net good for the people who move there, it is because cities offer more than just job opportunity. They are transformative.
Cities are technological artifacts,” Kelly writes, “the largest technology we make.” Humanity pours into cities by the millions for the simple reason that, like all technology, cities offer more options.
Why Are Nuclear Power Green?
With climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened. With nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.
Several Indians (the tribes are called First Nations in Canada) proposed taking the “seven generations” approach to future responsibility. Using the standard number for a generation—25years—that would mean a 175-year time frame for thinking about the waste.
Canada’s nuclear waste policy emerged. It is based on the principle of “Respect for Future Generations: we should not prejudge the needs and capabilities of the future. Rather than acting in a paternalistic way, we should leave the choice of what to do with the used fuel for them to determine.” Accordingly, Canada has an“adaptive phased management” plan, where the spent fuel remains in wet and dry storage at the reactor sites while a “near term” (1 to 175 years) centralized shallow underground facility is built, designed for easy retrieval; that will be followed by a deep geological repository for permanent storage. Future Canadians have options at every step.
“during the 175-year period, the overall radioactivity of used fuel drops to one hundred thousandth of the level when it was removed from the reactors.” Nuclear waste has the interesting property that it loses toxicity over time, unlike many forms of chemical waste, such as mercury.
The emerging rule is: Plan short and option long; take the actions in the near term that preserve the most choices for the long term.
Waste disposal no longer looked like a cosmic-level problem, and carbon-free energy from nuclear looked like a major solution in light of growing worries about climate change.
Baseload refers to the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock, rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of customers.” Baseload is the foundation of grid power. So far it comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and nuclear. Two thirds of the world’s electricity is made by burning fossil fuels, mostly coal. The Green, noncarbon one third is split evenly between hydroelectric dams and nuclear reactors at about 16 percent each.
Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they are intermittent. If some form of massive energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.
A nuclear plant producing 1,000 megawatts takes up a third of a square mile. A wind farm would have to cover over 200 square miles to obtain the same result, and a solar array over 50 square miles.” That’s just the landscape footprint.
More interesting to me is the hazard comparison between coal waste and nuclear waste. Nuclear waste is minuscule in size—one Coke can’s worth per person-lifetime of electricity if it was all nuclear, Rip Anderson likes to point out. Coal waste is massive—68 tons of solid stuff and 77 tons of carbon dioxide per person-lifetime of strictly coal electricity.
Total lifetime emissions per kilowatt-hour from nuclear is about even with those of wind and hydro, about half of solar, a sixth of “clean” coal, a tenth of natural gas, and one twenty-seventh of coal as it is burned today.
In 2008 the world had 443 civilian nuclear reactors boiling up 16 percent of all electricity and keeping a yearly 3 gigatons of carbon dioxide that would have been generated by coal plants out of the atmosphere
A paper in Science in 2004,“Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies,” proposed seven wedges to level off emissions: energy efficiency, renewables, clean
coal, forests and soils (stop deforestation and agricultural tilling), fuel switch, and nuclear.
Why Are Genetic Engineering Green?
Humanity’s first venture into genetic modification—agriculture—was a global event. We exploited the genetic malleability of dozens of plants in at least ten independent centers of agricultural innovation. The process was gradual, progressing from selective gathering to small-scale and then large-scale clearing and tilling, to techniques such as irrigation and crop rotation for what were by then exquisitely designed cultivars.
Geneticist Nina Federoff has described maize as “arguably man’s first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering.” The pre-Mexican Indians converted an unpromising grass into the world’s most efficient and popular food plant. Somebody who did that today would get a Nobel Prize.
Botanist Klaus Ammann points out that good old wheat, fashioned through good old breeding, has modifications that include “the addition of chromosome fragments, the integration of entire foreign genomes, and radiation-induced mutations.”
Transgenic blending is an old story in agriculture. As philosopher Johann Klaassen argues, “We don’t feel revulsion at the thought of a mule, an unnatural cross between horse and donkey; at a rutabaga, an unnatural cross between cabbage and turnip; at triticale, an unnatural cross between wheat and rye.”
Some anti-GE activists talk of defending the “intrinsic integrity” of crop-plant genomes. What integrity? Crop plants have no integrity of their own; they are products of human tinkering and only remotely resemble their wild cousins.
Opponents of genetic engineering are right to suspect GE crops of being ecologically harmful, because all crops are ecologically harmful. The question then becomes: How do GE crops compare with traditional crops in terms of doing ecological damage or ecological good?
About 40 percent of crop yield in the world is lost to weeds and pests every year. GE crops can lower those losses due to its herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. GE crops help mitigate greenhouse gases and are more ecologically benign than non-GE crops.
To meet the appetites of the world’s population without drastically hurting the environment, requires a visionary new approach: combining genetic engineering and organic farming. Genetic engineering can be used to develop seeds with enhanced resistance to pests and pathogens; organic farming can manage the overall spectrum of pests more effectively.
One of the most cited statement of the precautionary principle came from a meeting of environmentalists in Wisconsin in 1998. It goes: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof”.
That is an illusory, unattainable goal. Nothing is fully established scientifically, ever.
The precautionary principle, as currently applied, is deliberately one-sided, a rejection of what is called risk balancing. One consequence of the precautionary principle is that, in practice, it can be self-canceling. It says to wait for the results of further research, but it declares that the research is too dangerous to do.
The precautionary principle by itself seeks strictly to stop or slow new things, even in the face of urgent need. I would shift its bias away from inaction and toward action with a supplement—the vigilance principle, whose entire text is: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Precaution plus vigilance would seek to move quickly on new things.
Viewed always in the context of potential opportunity, a new device or technique would be subjected to multidisciplinary scrutiny and then given three probationary categories for ongoing oversight: 1) provisionally unsafe until proven unsafe; 2) provisionally safe until proven safe; 3) provisionally beneficial until proven beneficial. As the evaluation grows more precise over time, public policy adjusts to match it.
There is a common sentiment among environmentalists that everything made by nature is good and everything made by man is bad. “Four legs good, two legs bad.”
What “nature” are we talking about, exactly? You can’t do anything against nature, if your idea of nature includes physics, chemistry, and mechanics. Anything you can do you can only do because nature allows it. Nuclear fission is so natural it occurs geologically. Horizontal gene flow is so natural it is the norm among microbes.
Apparently what people mean when they say “against Nature” is “against my understanding of Darwinian inheritance and traditional breedline agriculture.” Or what people mean by “against Nature” is “something I’m not used to yet.”
In looking for guidance on ethical issues, notions of abomination don’t help much. What does help is a sense of how harms and benefits are distributed.
Geoengeering
Like it or not, we are all finally inhabitory on this one small blue-green planet. It’s the only one with comfortable temperatures, good air and water, and a wealth of living beings for millions (or quadrillions) of miles.
There is harm to undo in this place. Earth as a whole is the most ambitious and necessary restoration project of all.
As soon as climatic conditions become frightening and urgent, geoengineering schemes are “dangerous but we have no choice.”
Ecological balance is too important for sentiment. It requires science. The health of natural infrastructure is too compromised for passivity. It requires engineering. What we call natural and what we call human are inseparable. We live one life.