Sunday, December 26, 2021

The Great Pause Week 93: Critical Justice Theory

"History rhymes"

 

Back in the early 80s we were going through a pretty rough patch at The Farm community, then some 1200 strong — lots of set-backs, and fielding heavy debt from cascading failures from undercapitalized or bad business ideas had us questioning leadership, mission, planning, and governance. Going on a “wing and a prayer” just wasn’t cutting it.

As director of The Natural Rights Center I could not go out en masse with the hero brigades tree-planting, or welding on an oil rig off Houma Louisiana, or to any of the other gigs that were being offered to help us get out of debt because I had so many court cases and was our only full-time staff attorney. Atomic workers and veterans, the Honicker case at the Supreme Court, efforts on behalf of Native peoples for religious freedom and land access, the MX missile EIS, Mount Pleasant’s toxic waste ponds and wells, amicus briefs, appellate briefs of various kinds, all keeping me tied to the small office cabin in the woods with my law library and a dorm for volunteer summer student interns. I had moved my office to that cabin to be next to home while the kids were young.

I was busy every day, filing papers and researching and writing and so it was impossible for me to imagine going off and doing tree planting for a couple weeks. Nonetheless I looked around to see where it might be possible that I could integrate an income stream into my work to help do my part to pay off the Farm’s bills. And that was tricky because my work was entirely supported by charitable donations to Plenty that were allocated and restricted to the Natural Rights Center and could not be diverted to the inurement of The Farm. 

My law license also required diligence in separating the work I did for free from anything for money. If took a paid lawyer job I would have a conflict because as a member of The Foundation I was on a vow of poverty and all earnings went to the communal religious order, not to me personally, and the Tennessee Bar Association might have an issue with that vis a vis who is licensed to practice. I sought an Ethics opinion that clarified the matter, instructing me not give my legal earnings to The Farm. I formed a professional corporation and kept it all tidy.

But going off and doing tree planting for a couple weeks was simply not in the cards. Then I was sitting in court one day and the judge asked, “Mr. Bates, can you handle a case?”

Whenever they had criminal cases come to arraignment and there was no representation, since they didn’t have a public defender, they would appoint someone right there. They would assign it to a local member of the Bar, usually someone who was present in court. And all members of the five-county bar felt an obligation to step up and volunteer if called upon this way, unless they were in trial or otherwise fully loaded down with other appointed cases.

Since I was a newbie there — I didn’t do retail trial work in the county generally, but practiced in the federal courts — I had no experience in the criminal court or had ever studied more than I had needed of that process to pass the Tennessee Bar Exam. But the Farm needed cash so I said okay.

I was appointed to represent a one Mr. Charles Wesley. The pay was something like $600 for the entire assignment, including if it went to trial. For most assigned counsel these were quickies. You cut a deal, pled the client out at arraignment, he was remanded back into custody and led off in shackles, and you went to the cashier’s counter for your check.

No matter how much I might spend or whatever it cost me to bring in witnesses or use an investigator, $600 was the flat fee for representing someone on a felony charge in Hohenwald, Tennessee in the early 1980s. And arguably that was a better system, and less rigged, than an overworked, salaried, 9-to-5 sole public defender with thousands of cases, a 5-year backlog, and perhaps hundreds of clients jailed all over the state, shuttling between available shift-shared beds, awaiting trial unless they pled to something they may not have been guilty of. Thousands just like Charles Wesley, wrong place, wrong time. Driving While Black.

I went down to the basement below the courtroom and met my client in holding and interviewed him. He was a good looking young man, lean, well groomed, athletic, in school, no priors. His face was all puffy and I asked him why. He said the food. It was too salty. He was having a reaction. He had asked to have it salt-free but had been refused. I later spoke with the Sheriff about cutting out his salt.

Some striking passages from this week’s piece in New York Magazine by Kerry Howley: “Gina. Rosanne. Guy. What do you do the day after you storm the Capitol?,” remind me of how little the American gulag has changed since Norman Mailer penned similar descriptions of conditions suffered by the Pentagon protesters in his non-fiction 1968 novel, Armies of the Night that won a Pulitzer and the National Book Award but apparently didn’t change anything. Howley writes

In Grady County, Gina was placed, alone, in a room the size of a basketball court. In the corners lurked something foul and brown, and she didn’t know if it was human filth or the brown towels inmates had and were shedding. She was very cold. She was desperate for a Diet Coke. She had only one pair of underwear, which she washed in the sink, shivering as her hands touched the cold water. The blue mat she was given to sleep on, split in several places with stuffing coming out of it, was so rancid she could not bring herself to use it, so she slept on a hard plastic cot, huddled into a ball to try to keep warm. When she asked for a blanket, a guard said he would have to ask the captain. In a lawsuit filed in 2009, a Grady County inmate said he was so cold he used the Saran Wrap in which his lunch came to wrap up his feet, at which point the guards started dropping sandwiches in his cell unwrapped.
***
Regardless of how we may receive this assessment… a country that protects the right to spin fantasy necessarily risks the well-being of those who easily lose themselves to it. Freedom isn’t free is a true thing the right used to say, and the costs of freedom of speech are real costs, borne, in part, by those unskilled at sifting fact from fantasy: the people who join MLMs, who become Scientologists, who lie awake in bed at night worrying over small children drained of adrenochrome. To spear the fact in the sea of grift is not an act of intelligence, exactly, but a kind of sensibility, a certain instinct for grasping the structure of the social world. We like to think of conspiracy theories as outside the realm of intelligent consideration, but the idea of children trafficked via a discount-furniture retailer is not more strange than a network of cages, built to maintain a centuries-old racial hierarchy and kept so cold that Saran Wrap socks register as an act of resistance, in which white rioters who deny the existence of systemic racism now find themselves.

Returning to 1980, from the police reports and the interview I learned that Charles Wesley was a getaway driver at a QuikStop hold-up. His story was that some friends had asked him to take them for a drive out to the country to see the scenery outside Nashville. They had pulled into a QuikStop off the highway and he waited in the car while they used the restrooms and bought some snacks. Then they came running out, jumped in the car and told him to hit it. He realized they had just heisted the place and so he floored the car and cut a gravel slalom track out of the parking lot. That was witnessed, incriminating him. They were stopped by police a few miles down the road.

His friends had pled and posted bail but he asked for a lawyer so he got me. I confirmed the details of his story as best I could and then went to the D.A. The prosecutor wanted felony accessory, one year, less time served. It was a fair deal and I advised my client to take it, which he did. He did his time and got out early for good behavior, but with a catch.

And his catch caught me.

He was now a felon, and in those days, the Republican voter suppression squads were ramping up a new strategy to keep blacks from voting: felony disenfranchisement. State after state, beginning in the usual bastions of the Confederacy like Florida and moving to places of more subtle elite control like Delaware, were lining up laws permanently revoking the franchise from anyone convicted of a felony, meaning a crime carrying a sentence of one year or more.

I had just pled my young client to lose his right to vote. Forever.

So much for making money for The Farm on indigent arraignments. Now I had a damn constitutional case.

Wesley versus Collins

Under the US Constitution, the several states retain the right to regulate voting and set standards, even for federal elections. Nonetheless, my choice of familiar terrain on which to fight this battle would be the federal courts and to do that I needed to establish jurisdiction. 

I argued that the Tennessee statute disenfranchising felons resulted in the unlawful dilution of the black vote in violation of the U.S. Constitution and the 1973 Voting Rights Act as amended in 1982. Prior to ’82, striking a voting regulation required proof of discriminatory intent. After ’82 a plaintiff needed only to show that a challenged statute had the result of denying minorities “an equal chance to participate in the political process.” 

Section 2(b) of the Voting Rights Act Amendments provides that vote dilution in violation of the Act is established if, 

based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by [the Act] in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.

This jurisdictional point was taken up by the courts in 1985 for the first time in my case of Wesley v. Collins. 605 F. Supp. 802 (M.D. Tenn. 1985), aff’d, 791 F.2d 1255 (6th Cir. 1986). The lower court simply ignored the new Voting Rights Act dilution test and concluded:

“Felons are … disenfranchised based on … their conscious decision to
commit an act for which they assume the risks of… punishment.”

The District Judge got lost in a “misdirected search for a causal nexus between the ‘indicia of historically-rooted discrimination and the Tennessee statute disenfranchising felons,’ according to one later law review. He instead should have, under the 1982 law, examined the statistical data showing impact, and weighed “totality of circumstances.” 

Following extension of the felony disenfranchisement laws to a third of the States, the 1990 census reported that blacks accounted for roughly 12.1% of the total U.S. population in comparison to a 80.3% white population. Thanks to the war on drugs, profiling, DwB and similar scams, blacks represented 47% of a total convicted felons and 48% of those convicted of violent crimes. Ninety percent of felons were of voting age. The black voting age population had shrunk to 4 percent. It was a Republican wet dream.

At trial I presented expert evidence demonstrating that:

“the ratio of white felons to the general population of Tennessee whites [was] approximately 1 to 1000, while the corresponding black ratio [was] 1 to 100.” 

Wesley, 605 F.Supp. at 804.

On appeal, standing before the three-judge panel in Cincinnati, I cited the statistics of the time for felony convictions of blacks versus whites and also cited violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments but was cut off that line because if I could not prevail on the dilution point it would be unlikely the other points would succeed. Ultimately the Appeals court endorsed the flawed logic of the lower court:

“[i]t is well-settled … that a showing of disproportionate racial impact alone does not establish a per se violation of the Voting Rights Act”

Wesley v. Collins, 791 F.2d 1255, 1260–61.

So that was it. The federal courts essentially thumbed their nose at the 1982 Voting Rights Act amendment and summarily ended Charles Wesley’s franchise, using the wrong standard of proof.

__________

This is the first of two parts that I will use to close out this, the second year of The Great Pause gifted to us by the covid pandemic. This memoir is part of a book I am developing with a Russian co-author, Тюрин Глеб, to recall for large literary audience of Russian-speaking youth the story of the hippies, and in particular the relevance of the The Farm to today’s ecovillage and ecosystem regeneration movement, now growing strong across the white frosts of that vast, beautiful, and ever-changing landscape.

Next Time: The Great Pause Week 94: Restoring the Felon Vote in Tennessee in 1981: Taking no as the first step to yes, and the big win at the Tennessee Supreme Court.

 ___________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity|

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

 ___________

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

Sunday, December 19, 2021

The Great Pause Week 92: Christmas in the Metaverse

"If you had the money would you pop the pill?"

 


A friend writes from Bali:

Imagine, in ten years, being able to take a pill at a certain age, say 60 or 70, that would allow you to stay the same age for ten or more years.

It may be possible!

Now imagine that it would cost $15,000 USD. And realize that for most people, paying for the pill would not be economically viable. Assuming that such a pill would be unsanctioned by any government—due, let's say, to unforeseen risks—the technology would remain in private hands.

If you had the money would you pop the pill?

Russian-born billionaire investor (Facebook, mail.ru) Yuri Milner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have launched a venture seeking to use biological reprogramming to rejuvenate cells. Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte from the Salk Institute, UCLA professor and pioneer in epigenetic clocks Steve Horvath, and Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka have joined their advisory board; Richard Klausner, the one-time chief of the National Cancer Institute, is CEO.

Milner and Bezos’ Altos Labs hopes to go to the head of the class in Rejuvenation Biotechnology. It is trying to catch Google founder Larry Page’s Calico Labs, launched in 2013. Calico also hired elite scientific figures and gave them generous budgets, although it took until May 2021, for Calico to publish its first preprint , reporting:

… that a transient reprogramming approach inspired by amphibian regeneration restored youthful gene expression in aged myogenic cells. Our results suggest that transient pluripotent reprogramming poses a neoplastic risk, but that restoration of youthful gene expression can be achieved with alternative strategies.

“Neoplastic risk” is biologese for novel tumors, cancers, or mutant cells that could damage either local organ function or compromise life function.

Page and Bezos are not the only Silicon alley actors in this space. Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle), Peter Thiel (former PayPal CEO), Elon Musk (Tesla), and Peter Diamandis (SpaceX, XPrize) are all advocates. Once you have more money than you could spend in a thousand lifetimes (Bezos and Musk are worth half a trillion in the latest Forbes rankings), the tendency is to go for the thousand-year-life pill rather than leave it all on the table. The genetic imperative, to quote transhumanist philosopher, Zoltan Istvan, is to “safeguard one's own existence above all else.”

Agerasia

My friend in Bali next asks:

If we can take pills and live 150 years what will we experience?

And if a 40 year old today could conceivably live to 150 what about the babies being born now? [Would it be] 250 years for those who can afford it?

Even if governments were to get on board with life extension, how will we define terms such as retirement, senior citizens, etc.?

There is no doubt in my mind that entrepreneurs will rush into these potential gold mines faster than they can type telomere.

Noticing the ethical dimensions of extreme longevity is not a new thing in science, philosophy, or literature. Indeed, as Ajit Varki and Danny Brower observed in Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind (2013), magical thinking of life everlasting is the singular common theme found in all religions. See the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh or the pyramid papyri. Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Benjamin Franklin all toyed with the idea of scientific life extension. Robert Boyle (1627–1691), proposed "to replace the blood of the old with the blood of the young.” Defying death was at the heart of Shelley and Stoker’s success in Frankenstein and Dracula, both of whose title characters, one should note, viewed indefinite lifespans (agerasia) as a hellish curse.

It may be helpful to recall that the original subtitle that 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley used when putting Frankenstein to paper that rainy afternoon in 1816 in Geneva, in order to take up a dare from Lord Byron, was The Modern Prometheus. In Greek mythology, Prometheus (Προμηθεύς, meaning “forethought”) was the god of fire, credited with the creation of humanity and civilization. For his unauthorized bequest of sacred knowledge to the unworthy, Prometheus was sentenced by Zeus to be bound to a rock while an eagle came to eat his liver every day, which would then grow back overnight, only to be eaten again the next day. In modern Western culture. “Promethean” is associated with overreaching or unintended consequences. And let’s face it, giving fire to those chattering apes really was a bonehead move.

A Spring 2013 Pew Research poll in the United States found 41% believed that radical life extension (RLE) would be good for society, while 51% said they believed it would be bad. Never ones to be swayed by public opinion, and flush with Silicon Valley unicorn droppings, billionaire agerasiastas are now exploring anti-aging drugs, nanotechnology, cloning and body part replacement, cyborgs, cryonics, strategies for engineered negligible senescence, genetic editing, fooling genes, mind uploading, young blood injection, microbiome alterations and epigenetic reprogramming. So one needs to ask, suppose they succeed?

A global population of nearly 8 billion is unsustainable without additional resources, like four more Planet Earths. I could say we are on a collision course with biodiversity, extractable minerals, climate, and each other but we have already collided. It is like watching grey mold grow on an orange. For the longest time, there was none. Then all of a sudden….

Murphy’s Law

USC Professor T.W. Murphy reminds us that the earliest economic theorists—Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill—saw population growth as a temporary phase, ultimately limited by the prime physical resource: land.

Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet:

In that time, land held the key to outputs from farming, timber, mining, and game—thereby dictating economic development. What these pioneering economic thinkers did not foresee was the arrival of fossil fuels, and the technological developments that accompanied this energy explosion.

Now, we have fallen into something of a lulled complacency: having rescued ourselves so far from the end-of-growth predictions of the early economists, the temptation is to conclude that they were just wrong and we have outsmarted natural limits. This is dangerous thinking. In the end, nature is indifferent to how smart we imagined ourselves to be. If we were truly clever, we would start thinking about a world that does not depend on growth, and how to live compatibly within planetary limits.

***

Just because we can point to some completely legitimate examples of decoupled activities and many impressive substitution stories does not mean that an entire economy can be based on indefinite continuance of such things. We are physical beings in a physical world and have non-negotiable minimum requirements for life. The activities and commodities that support critical functions cannot continue to expand indefinitely, and will not become arbitrarily cheap once their expansion hits physical limits. The finite nature of our world guarantees that such limits will be asserted, committing economic growth to stall in turn. Nothing, in the end, escapes physics.

So, while acknowledging that growth in the past has brought uncountable benefits to the human endeavor, we have to ask ourselves: If the end of growth is inevitable, why does it remain our prevailing plan?

To which I would answer, “because that kind of magical thinking is hard-wired, just like denying our own death.”

Orbiting Tech Billionaires

Future tech advancements could erase the energy shortfall being created as we descend back into the safety of renewables after lingering too long in the rare air of the fossil fuel summit death zone, but those advancements could be long in the future, if at all. USAnians’ per-capita use of energy is roughly five times the global average. It is difficult to imagine how much greater might be the energy consumption of our orbiting biotech billionaires. Thanks to oil and gas, today’s humans live the equivalent of 25 billion people on the planet at the living standard of nineteenth century per capita energy use—functionally a quadrillion horses and oxen. Can the planet support an additional demographic category of 250-year-old megaconsumers at 21st century living standards?

Murphy asks a more troubling question.

Let’s say that a given forest can support an ultimate number of deer, labeled Q, in steady state, while the current population is labeled P. The difference, Q - P, is the “room” available for growth, which we might think of as being tied to available resources. Once P = Q, no more resources are available to support growth.

For the megaconsuming, long-living billionaires, a simple solution would then present itself. Is it time to cull the herd? By reducing the draw on resources from billions of short-lived Plebians, the longer-lived, superior Patricians could continue to expand their numbers, and consumption, retaining just enough numbers of their rivals to clean their pools, service their helicopters, and fetch food for their tables.

It seems I have wandered off into a popular meme of recent Sci-Fi dystopias. For the privileged elite, those never end well. Murphy’s textbook provides a better denouement:

Salvaging a decent future requires keen awareness, quantitative assessment, deliberate preventive action, and—above all—recognition that prevailing assumptions about human identity and destiny have been cruelly misshapen by the profoundly unsustainable trajectory of the last 150 years.  The goal is to shake off unfounded and unexamined expectations, while elucidating the relevant physics and encouraging greater facility in quantitative reasoning.

Whether genetic predispositions are as easily purged from our lizard brains as Murphy seems to think they can be is another question.

Another Way

There is fortunately a third alternative, whose real estate and boundaries are currently experiencing a bidding race amongst the tech titans—Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google, Netflix, Forte, Xaya, Roblox and all of their Chinese counterparts. Zuck has already branded it—Meta®. The metaverse of science fiction is now science fact—with wearables coming off the Foxcon assembly lines in Guangzhou like Model T Fords in 1908.


Picture Christmas in the Metaverse. Papa and Mama hear the patter of little feet on the stairs and rouse themselves, donning robes and slippers, and oh, yes, their Oculus soft lenses, as they follow the sounds of mirth to the living room. There, dappled by dawn sunbeams through frosted windows and the twinkling of Christmas tree lights, the children jump around, agog at all the splendid presents in front of the tree. Jonny is playing with his electric hovertrain monorail. Junebug is skipping her musical rope. Even Fido has gotten into the act, finding a beef-flavored bone-treat in his bowl by the fireplace. Then a gloved-hand reaches down from the chimney and the upside-down head of the Jolly Old Elf himself appears laughing a hearty Ho! Ho! Ho! And just as quickly, by laying his finger aside of his nose, and giving a nod, he is up the chimney and gone. The family rushes to the windows and out there, across the breast of the new-fallen snow, Santa gives a whistle, and away his sleigh flies.

Then papa looks at mama and they both turn to look at their googly-eyed children, and it matters not a whit that these babes are entirely artificial, as are the tree, the toys, the fireplace, the whole set. So, later, will be the Christmas dinner with lab-cultured turkey and all the trimmings, or the trip down to the opera house to see The Nutcracker, and finally, the cocktails on the deck overlooking the Bay of Bengal feeling a warm summer breeze before they retire that night.

If world population could be reduced in this way, while resources are still available to support the energy-intensive meta-infrastructure, and, oh, climate catastrophe could still be averted, then why not?

Maybe that would be a better use of those billions.


 

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.


Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works: 

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 

2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 

3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 

4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

Sunday, December 12, 2021

The Great Pause Week 91: The Diaper Index

"In Japan they have a new indicator for the population demographic — adult diapers."


“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” 

― Robert A. Heinlein 

Scientists and engineers like to use charts and indicators to aid in the visual representation of complex data. We all think more clearly when we can visualize something. In Japan they have a new graphical indicator for the population demographic — diapers.

Unfortunately these are not the kind that typically wrap the bare bottoms of babies. These are the kind keeping geriatric genitals sanitary. In rapidly aging Japan, more diapers are used by older, incontinent people than by babies. Were it not for immigration, mainly from Asia and Latin America, the same might be true in the United States. 

In Japan population change is becoming a waste problem more than an immigration issue. Waste from adult diapers is growing by tens of thousands of tons per year and most municipalities just incinerate the contaminated plastics. A few draw the heat off for buildings and hot water systems. In Houki, a town of just over 10,500 people in Tottori Prefecture, adult diapers represent about a tenth of the town’s trash. Houki makes its dirty diapers into fuel to reduce natural gas heating costs of the municipal-owned swimming pool. 

The amount of adult diapers entering the waste stream in Japan has increased by nearly 13 percent, to almost 1.5 million tons annually, in the last five years, according to data from the environment ministry. It is projected to grow a further 23 percent by 2030, when those 65 and older will represent close to a third of the population.

 — The New York Times, December 3, 2021

The larger issue that diapers wrap is human scale in a finite space. As the Japanese population both ages and shrinks at the same time, incontinence products for seniors grow, just as do the needs for senior health care, retirement homes, and morticians. 

At the recycling plant, he and his co-worker, dressed in Tyvek body suits, rubber boots and helmets, dump the diapers into a vat the size of a small trailer. They are sterilized and fermented for 24 hours in 350-degree heat, which cuts their volume to a third of their soiled weight. The process converts the diapers into a fluff that is processed through another machine and turned into two-inch-long gray pellets.
The operations slightly evoke the factory scenes from “Soylent Green,” the 1973 dystopian thriller in which nutrition wafers are made from human remains. Despite ceramic and charcoal filters designed to remove foul odors, the machinery emitted a faint yeasty, toasted smell as pellets rained down from a bright orange chute into a large plastic box.

One smart company is seizing the opportunity to bring diapers into the new carbon economy that will reverse climate change. Iwamoto Inc. developed its line of Super Stone Clean. The evolving generations of its patented Z series pyrolyzers advertise high-volume on-site diaper processing, municipal solid waste reduction, energy and secondary product creation. By pyrolyzing (carbonizing in the absence of oxygen) rather than incinerating (burning or oxidizing), Iwamoto makes biochar rather than ash. Although it likely contains plastic residues unsuited for agricultural uses, this kind of biochar can be applied in applications like biocrete or wallboard for buildings. It can also be made into plastics. Unicharm, one of Japan’s largest diaper manufacturers, has built a pilot plant in Kagoshima, in southern Japan, where it is recycling diapers back into more diapers.

In 2021, after a summer of small-scale testing, the enterprising Norwegian company Snøhetta teamed up with experienced contractors, researchers, producers and suppliers within the concrete and biochar industries to erect Norway’s first carbon negative precast concrete wall. A Snøhetta press release said: 

The construction industry is an industry with significant greenhouse gas emissions, and concrete alone makes up about 8% of CO2 emissions globally. However, it is challenging to imagine that we will build less in the years to come, and even more so to imagine that we will find a material as versatile as concrete. Therefore, we must find more environmentally friendly solutions that allow us to build for the future without contributing to making it less liveable for future generations, and the construction industry must be a part of this green change. Hence concrete seemed like an obvious place to start, and wood waste from the construction industry a sensible resource to utilize. This is the idea that grew to become our Biocrete project.

Now imagine the cities of the future cast from your grandfather’s soiled diapers and energized by your own toilet wastes. To paraphrase Heinlein, “a human being should be able to change a diaper and plan a building at the same time.”

_____________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity I have been involved with since its inception in 1974. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

_____________

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

Sunday, December 5, 2021

The Great Pause Week 90: Sympathy for the Detail

"Sixty million people are involved in some way in separatist movements within China today."

Image after photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters, Vocational Skills Education Center in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, 2018


When mentioning my trips to China to teach permaculture and ecovillage design, I often encounter a knee-jerk response, wherein my friends feel it necessary for them to bring up the punishment of Uyghurs to even have a conversation of any kind about China. And of course it is impossible to say anything kind about ethnic cleansing and mass detention so I just tend to agree and continue the conversation. Occasionally, I feel a loss of nuance that erodes our shared understanding of things and I will wade in with a deeper analysis. That seldom goes well. There is a purple fog that descends when hypnotic triggers implanted by popular culture are squeezed.

Given the way digital media has been accelerating and amplifying civil discord, and how that has been profitably weaponized by various governments and non-state actors, I don’t think losing nuance is a good idea. Illiberality is dangerous. Indulge me for a moment in my digression.

In China, tensions had been growing — driven in part by the universality of smart phones and apps like WeChat — between the Confucian majority and the Muslim minority in Xinjiang province, formerly East Turkestan, a stone’s throw from all the other ’Stans. There is nothing remarkable in that, and ethnic predjudices go back to the Great Golden Horde. This is just your usual tribal allegiances, with their racism and religious bigotry, topped off with a cherry bomb of violent fundamentalism. It spilled over into bloodshed in July 2009, in riots led by Sunni Muslim Uyghurs in Ürümqi, capital of Xinjiang, when 197 ethnic Han Chinese died, with 1,721 others injured, and again on March 1, 2015, when Uyghurs took their frustrations out by murdering 31 Han and wounding more than 140 with knives and machetes in a bloody rampage in the southwestern city of Kunming, capital of Yunnan, far from the Uyghur homeland. 

The mention of machetes brings to mind the Tutsi and Hutu reciprocal genocides in Rwanda 1994, deaths estimated: 491,000–1,006,354, or Bosnia ’92-’95 with 104,732 casualties, spread among Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs. I also remember the deaths of over 331 people, including 186 children, in the 2004 school siege by Sunni Muslim Chechen separatists in North Ossetia and the 2002 Moscow theater attack that ended with 117 hostages and 50 Chechens killed by Russian special forces.

In the United States, tensions had been growing — driven in part by the universality of smart phones and apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — between a poorly educated Christian white majority and black, latino and Asian minorities, together with a wealthier corporate elite that institutionally keeps disadvantaged, poorly educated factions down for its own benefit, without even thinking about it. Control primarily resided in coastal cities while discontent grew and festered in heartland flyover states, exploited to political advantage by unscrupulous blowhards and the algorithm manipulation businesses of third parties, foreign and domestic. 

This is, again, your usual tribal allegiances and religious fundamentalism, but in 2021, doused with the accelerant of data-directed, eyeball-harvesting, trillionized social media, it spilled over into violence. On January 6, an aggrieved group of white MAGAdiots took revenge for a foregone election loss by storming the Capitol and murdering and wounding police with bats, lances and tasers in a bloody uprising in the District of Columbia.

The two countries reacted very differently. In China, the president called for “all-out efforts” to “prevent Xinjiang’s violent terrorist activities from spreading to the rest of China.” China would not become Rwanda, or India-Pakistan. He said that violent acts had already spread to other regions of China and could grow like a virus unless checked. He called for “a crushing blow to buy us time.”

Across the Xinjiang border in Pakistan, in otherwise school-less regions, 40,000 Sunni madrasas funded by Saudi Arabia train physicians, administrative officials, judges and teachers with Deobandi and Wahhabist versions of sectarian Islam, including a militant view of jihad. Expansion of madrasas into Afghanistan during the 1980s contributed to the rise of the Taliban, where the Afghan fighting season coincided with Pakistan madrasas’ Spring Break. This has to concern Beijing. Kandahar was not Cancún. Beer bongs and wet t-shirt contests never really caught on.

President Xi Jinping was not keen on reviving the re-education and detention camps of the Cultural Revolution. Many of his closest advisors were camp survivors from that era and strongly opposed such measures. Xi called for reform through education, but left open to interpretation by local authorities how to go about that. Hardliners, led by Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, started rounding up Uyghurs and building “education centers” that resembled massive prisons. Xi could try to distance himself, but as supreme leader, it was on him.

Xi also fell back on the policy used by his predecessors in Tibet to deal with “imbalances in the distribution of the ethnic population.” It was the same policy employed after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 in the conquest of Scotland and Ireland and by Josef Stalin in the resettlement of populations from the Baltics — separate families from their connection to their lands and pack them off to the Chinese equivalent of Siberia or Saskatchewan — the sweatshops of Shenzhen — and then resettle the Western region with 300,000 Han from Eastern China. It was a cultural blender approach to break apart the tribes, just as the Dukes of Argyll broke apart the highland clans. If Sharks started marrying Jets, Xi hopes, West Side Story could have a happy ending. 

One could contrast China’s approach with that of Gandhi’s India or post-war Transjordan, where ethnic divisions led to national partition. At present the Balkanization of the West Bank and Gaza is a transition step towards eventual assimilation of all Palestine into a Jewish Caliphate, with apartheid just a growing pain— a low-budget version of re-education centers. Resettlement of populations is done voluntarily, by enticing wannabe Israelis, recruited from orthodox sects, to make Aliyah.

In the United States a few small fish were netted by the FBI and given short jail sentences for the attack on the Capitol. Congressional investigations were begun, but were emasculated by the minority party and will likely be disbanded after the midterm elections. Polls suggest the country is even more divided now than it was in January, with a majority of Republicans saying they would vote for Donald Trump and think the normal primary election season should just be suspended so he can be proclaimed their candidate. There is a substantial minority who feel those arrested for the Capitol attack are patriots who do not belong in jail at all. In contrast to the Chinese policy of “de-extremification,” social media in the United States, including cable news, continue to polarize the population. The right is portrayed by the rightward media as beleaguered, oppressed and endangered and needing to stand up and fight. It is 1859 in America, pre-John Brown’s raid.


Polarization extends along the same political and demographic lines into vaccination mandates — giving new life to the Covid pandemic through the 60 million adamantly unvaccinated USAnians (not coincidentally the same number of vaccine doses the US has promised to release for use in the undervaccinated 2/3 world). Equally polarized are opinions about critical race theory, gun control, abortion, religious instruction in public school, active shooter drills, the prison industrial complex, access to health care, or the rewriting of history. Tribal polarization gnaws away at the bare bones of civil discourse, even in the halls of Congress, until it regurgitates spontaneous outbursts of random violence like school and workplace shootings or cars driving through crowds of innocent people.

Separatist regions of China

 

Sixty million, coincidentally, is also the number of people involved in some way in separatist movements within China today, in 2021. If you are a hawkish hegemon in Foggy Bottom, you might want to clandestinely encourage the independence campaigns in East Turkestan, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Hong Kong and Macau. If you are their counterpart in Russia or China, you might feel a need to counter that by unloosing a few hackers to sow discord in the “United” States. Cyberwars are not limited to the big three, however. Anyone can join.

So I ask, which policy makes more sense? Forced homogenization or unlimited polarization? To tribe or to untribe? China and the US are taking very different approaches. It is a vast social experiment on a grand scale. Unless you like sleeping with a machete under your pillow, you might want to rethink the Vocational Skills Education Centers in Xinjiang.


The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”
 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.


Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
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Sunday, November 28, 2021

The Great Pause Week 89: Martians in Wyoming

"Imagination is not messy. Reality is."


One of the more humorous aspects of Clubhouse, the social audio platform, is that it was heavily seeded at the start with Silicon Valley insiders, and although it has since gone far broader in its audience reach, it can still have that hermetic feel of a Valley Be-in. Perhaps I should say a hermeneutic feel, because it is built upon shared semiotics, presuppositions, and pre-understandings, tracing a line through Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Ayn Rand, Black Boxes, and the metaverse: libertarian capitalism über alles. Clubhouse parodies the HBO parody, Silicon Valley.

As Karl Marx put it in Das Capital, “what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this: that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” Reality is messy, imagination is not. Where it gets dangerous is when money has gotten so funny that even the wildest follies can be brought into reality without the usual laws of physics or social consent having to apply. 

Valley thinkers have a liturgical devotion, if not to Elon Musk the person, then to the Blue Origin/Space-X/Virgin Galactic ecosystem that considers colonization of other planets a manifest destiny. If not Musk, then Bezos, Branson, Gates, or Buffet. Films like The Martian are seen less as fantasy than as future.

History is replete with examples of civilizations that placed their equivalents of deca-billionaires or centa-billionaires at the top of the decision-making pyramid. That did not end well.

Fail Forward

Who could have imagined anyone would dredge up the old 1950s canard of “safe, clean, too cheap to meter” that floated the nuclear boat on its lake of lava before the ring of fire blew up Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima? “Poorly designed” seems to be the excuse de jour for those minor mishaps. Just “fail forward!” 

Valley thinkers envision a new generation of modular thorium salt reactors. Bill Gates recently bought Kemmerer, Wyoming, a frontier-era coal town, for a prototype. Berkshire Hathaway Energy — Warren Buffet’s latest venture — will operate the plant with Rocky Mountain Power. The reactor will cost $4 billion, a third the cost of a typical nuclear reactor today, and generate 345 megawatts baseload, a third the rated capacity of standard reactors. Half the price will come from the U.S. Department of Energy, a.k.a. you and me. Gates and Buffet plan Kemmerer One to be operational by 2028. Most nuclear projects take decades. 

U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the Biden administration sees the project as a starting point for replacing fossil-fuel-generated power in the U.S. in a way that doesn’t leave mining communities in the cold. “As with the president’s proposal, the American Jobs Plan, this administration will see to it that we launched more nuclear energy demonstration projects across the country.”

 — Joel Funk, WyoFile, June 2021

Gary Hoogeveen, president and CEO of Rocky Mountain Power, the Wyoming, Idaho and Utah business unit of PacifiCorp, said

We know as a utility in the utility industry, like everyone else does in the utility industry, that you can’t do 100% renewable and battery power and serve 24/7 — not with the current technology that we have,” he said. “That’s what’s so exciting about today, because this technology can allow us to provide carbon-free electricity 24/7, 365. And that is amazing. There’s no other word for it.
Amaze: from the Old English verb amasian; “confuse, perplex, surprise.” 

The new design uses liquid sodium as a coolant, which will be stored in a central tank, or heat battery. Molten sodium can absorb more heat than water, hence hold significantly more energy. It reacts explosively with water and even the moisture in air is enough to detonate a catastrophic blast should tanks or piping ever leak, which of course can never happen. 

Kemmerer is 180 miles due south from the edge of Yellowstone’s 45-mile wide caldera. Yellowstone averages one earthquake every 5.1 hours. A USGS station near Norris Geyser Basin is now showing signs of uplift — the station has risen by about 1 inch over the past few months. It is as yet unclear if this is a seasonal signal or related to magmatic or hydrothermal processes at depth. 

The fuel that K-1 uses is called high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, which is not yet available for commercial scale. Wyoming thinks it can cash in on a new wave of uranium mining because there is a global uranium shortage that deepens by the year. Russia is melting down old nuclear warheads to fuel its reactors. Valley thinkers believe uranium is inexhaustible because it can always be harvested from seawater. There is an energy equation somewhere in there if you care to build the algorithm. Gates says his reactors would produce two-thirds less waste than conventional water-cooled plants because he assumes the transuranic nuclear waste normally lost to coolant water or evaporated to the atmosphere will be captured and collected in the sodium salt. Maybe that can be reprocessed into fuel some day. Another algorithm needed.

Lost Memories

For some reason, and I have my suspicions, there is a modern discussion void surrounding the biological effect of ionizing radiation. The tragedy of Hiroshima survivors, radium dial painters, Navaho uranium miners, Kazahk, Nevadan, Bikini and Palau downwinders, and the detailed epidemiological studies of atomic workers and residents in or near power plants have all vanished down a convenient memory hole.

Manned missions to Mars will be a different story. On the international space station, trips to the Moon and eventually to Mars, astronaut crew members are continuously exposed to highly energetic particles and waves of cosmic rays. Earth’s ionosphere spares our terrestrial lifeforms from these, as do the meters of radiation shielding that allowed life to arise in Earth’s ocean. Cosmic radiation consists of alpha particles, protons, electrons, positrons, and high atomic number ions, stripped of their electrons.

Neutrinos and quantum-tunneling electrons may pass straight through the Earth and keep going but ionizing radiation — alpha, beta, gamma and x-rays — is captured by biological tissues, breaking apart DNA helices and leaving long ionization tracks, with strongly clustered damage to information molecules in our brains and to the blockchain coding that is our genetic heritage.

On missions outside of LEO, SPE dose inside a spaceship can be as high as 100 mGy/h, but can reach peaks of 500 mGy/h during extravehicular activity. Due to the high flux and relatively low energy, SPE radiation is absorbed by the most superficial tissues. 
***
GCR nuclei span a wide range of energy and linear energy transfer (LET). The major components consist of hydrogen (87%), and helium (12%) nuclei, with the remaining 1–2% of particles are comprised from Z = 3 (Li) to Z = 28 (Ni). High-Z and energy particles (HZE), such as iron (Z = 26), are particularly challenging, because every particle can cause damage to cellular DNA which is difficult to repair and no reasonable thickness of shielding material can safely stop them. GCR particle energy allows them to penetrate very deeply into biological tissues, as well as other organic and inorganic materials. In particular, HZE nuclei are an outstanding threat to body cells, which may strongly contribute to the cumulative equivalent dose absorbed by astronauts beyond LEO. Shielding is only partially effective to reduce the doses experienced inside a spacecraft, but increasing shields’ thickness leads to the production of high levels of secondary radiation, which can be absorbed even more easily by biological tissues. HZE nuclei may strongly contribute to the carcinogenic risk to which crew members are exposed. Indeed, even at relatively low energy, iron ions are shown to be potent inducers of ovarian tumors formation in rodents. Due to their high penetration power, GCR can efficiently reach CNS cells and pose a major risk to CNS function.*

 — Onarato, et al 2020.

To translate: “LEO” is low-earth orbit. “SPE” is solar particle events. “GCR” is galactic cosmic radiation. A “mGy” is a milliGray (0.001 Gy), or unit of radiation in dry air equivalent to one mRad. To get the biologically active dose one would need to convert Grays to Sieverts or rem, which factor in tissue absorption and exposure pathway. For people who work with ionizing radiation, the limit is set at 100 mSv (10 rem) for a set of 5 consecutive years, where the maximum for one year must not exceed 50 mSv (5 rem). There is no safe dose; all doses carry risk. There is evidence that lower doses may carry a higher risk of cancer and birth defects because they allow damaged cells to survive and propagate, even to later generations, whereas higher doses simply kill cells and the damage stops there, unless the damage is in a vital organ and the end result, 20 or 30 years later, is death. Based on drosophila experiments by Mueller in the 1930s, genetic damage is known to propagate for a minimum of 70 generations.

Oak Ridge physicist J.W. Gofman, later director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, reported in 1960 that: 

The best estimates are that approximately 400 rads of whole-body radiation, if delivered rapidly, are sufficient to cause 50% of the exposed humans to die within a period of days to weeks. This is the so-called acute radiation sickness. 

On any space trip beyond low earth orbit, astronauts would likely receive cosmic and solar storm radiation of 100 mGy per hour inside the spacecraft and 500 mGy during extravehicular activity. This converts to 0.1 to 0.5 rads per hour. If a trip to Mars lasts 4382 hours, their dose would be north of 432 rad in each direction. That would be 100% lethal to 100% of astronauts.

To shield from ionizing radiation in a power station or submarine requires several inches of dense metals like lead and steel alloys or meters of water. Journeying space capsules are designed to be made from very light alloys to conserve weight, which is critical on launch. Even if such heavy metals could be ferried to space and assembled in low earth orbit, they would then pose an even greater risk to astronauts because of neutron activation, turning the shielding into radioactive sources within the spacecraft itself. The same would apply to shielded metallic habitats assembled on the Moon or Mars. 

The same phenomenon will occur with the buildings Gates and Buffet are erecting in Wyoming.

The observations from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter indicate that a 6-month mission to Mars would induce a radiation dose equal to 60% of the lifetime limit afforded to atomic workers. We know from the experience of atomic workers and x-ray-induced cancer and leukemias that individual sensitivity to radiation is dependent on genetic traits. Women are more sensitive than men, for instance. Teens are more sensitive than adults. Assuming we could improve genetic screening, our knowledge of sensitivity to the cosmic radiation of deep space is still very limited and won’t improve until there have been thousands of long exposures with guinea pigs of one species or another. 

Lax in Space

Of the health concerns for astronauts — acute radiation syndrome, carcinogenesis, degenerative tissue alterations, and central nervous system (CNS) loss of performance — the last is of greatest concern to NASA. If a lifetime dose (or life-ending dose) is shrunk down to a 6-month voyage, what guarantee is there that the mission will not degenerate the CNS of crews even before arrival?

I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you. Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Stop, Dave. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. 

 — Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey

 

After arrival, there is no safe haven. Mars does not have an ionosphere or an ocean. Each month spent on the surface would elevate the risk of irreversible cellular damage, especially CNS damage. And then there is the trip home. Even if a Mars veteran successfully returns to Earth, his or her future may be only a short hospital stay followed by quick burial with honors.

This is the future Gates and Buffet, and other nuclear boosters like James Hansen, James Lovelock, Jennifer Granholm and Joe Biden are blindly laying on the 3000 residents of Kemmerer, Wyoming. Blissfully ignorant of the biological effects of ionizing radiation, they would condemn us all to a future where we jump out of the frying pan of climate change into a fire of cancer and brain disease.

Don’t Nuke the Climate 

Statement to COP26 signed by 460 Non-Governmental Organizations in attendance: 
We are especially worried about the nuclear power industries plans in Africa. Nuclear power is not an alternative anywhere, and especially not in Africa. Nuclear plants are enormously expensive, and the costs are exponentially increasing with the needed new security measures. They are slow, and want to take away funding from renewables. They can cause radioactive catastrophe earlier than the climate catastrophe comes. In African countries, there is also a high risk of accidents and radioactive leakages of waste; caused by failure in building and in maintenance, because of lacking capacity, technical knowledge, and of high corruption. Moreover, they can be targeted by terrorist actions, used by the military. They indebt a country for 30 years, and the costs emerging in case of an accident is enormous and not included in any budget. 
We would like UNFCCC to prioritize the presence of the UN agencies of IRENA promoting renewables, rather than IAEA, which is lobbied by countries where the nuclear industry is based, misunderstanding its role and promoting unsafe nuclear technology instead of safeguarding the existing ones. Renewable technologies are flexible as decentralised, available at competitive decreasing prices, much cheaper than nuclear, and the climate funds must be used on the real solutions and not on unsafe, false solutions such as nuclear, geoengineering etc. In Africa, there is also abundant renewable resources and potential for local solutions with mini grids with solar and wind, improved efficient cookstoves using less firewood, household biogas for cooking, solar collectors, dryers, solar cookers etc. In Africa, there is much more sunshine to produce solar power, which might be difficult to imagine in the cloudy Britain in November.

One of the great honors of my life was getting to personally know John W. Gofman, MD, PhD, co-discoverer in 1941 of Uranium-232 and -233, the same isotopes that will power Kemmerer-1. In an interview late in his life, Gofman said

Many people think nuclear power is so complicated it requires discussion at a high level of technicality. That’s pure nonsense. Because the issue is simple and straightforward. There are only two things about nuclear power that you need to know. One, why do you want nuclear power? So you can boil water. That’s all it does. It boils water. And any way of boiling water will give you steam to turn turbines. That’s the useful part.
The other thing to know is, it creates a mountain of radioactivity, and I mean a mountain: astronomical quantities of strontium-90 and cesium-137 and plutonium — toxic substances that will last — strontium-90 and cesium for 300 to 600 years, plutonium for 250,000 to 500,000 years — and still be deadly toxic. And the whole thing about nuclear power is this simple: can you or can’t you keep it all contained? If you can’t, then you’re creating a human disaster. You not only need to control it from the public, you also need to control it from the workers. Because the dose that federal regulations allow workers to get is sufficient to create a genetic hazard to the whole human species. You see, those workers are allowed to procreate, and if you damage their genes by radiation, and they intermarry with the rest of the population, for genetic purposes it’s just the same as if you irradiate the population directly. 
So I find nuclear power this simple: do you believe they’re going to do the miracle of containment that they predict? The answer is they’re not going to accomplish it. It’s outside the realm of human prospects.You don’t need to discuss each valve and each transportation cask and each burial site. The point is, if you lose a little bit of it — a terribly little bit of it — you’re going to contaminate the earth, and people are going to suffer for thousands of generations. You have two choices: either you believe that engineers are going to achieve a perfection that’s never been achieved, and you go ahead; or you believe with common sense that such a containment is never going to be achieved, and you give it up.
If people really understood how simple a problem it is — that they’ve got to accomplish a miracle — no puffs like Three Mile Island — can’t afford those puffs of radioactivity, or the squirts and the spills that they always tell you won’t harm the public — if people understood that, they’d say, “This is ridiculous. You don’t create this astronomical quantity of garbage and pray that somehow a miracle will happen to contain it. You just don’t do such stupid things!”

In Silicon Valley stupid is as stupid does.

References:

Bates, Albert K., The Karma of Kerma: Nuclear Wastes and Natural Rights, Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation, Univ. of Oregon School of Law Vol 9, Page 3; February 1988.

Gofman, J.W., MD, Radiation and Human Health, Sierra Club Books 1981.

Onorato, Giada, Elia Di Schiavi, and Ferdinando Di Cunto. “Understanding the effects of deep space radiation on nervous system: the role of genetically tractable experimental models.” Frontiers in Physics (2020): 362. 

Ratcliff, D.T., John W. Goffman, His Life, and research on the heath effects of exposure to ionizing radiation, Rat Haus Reality 2015.

Full disclosure:

During a long career as an environmental litigator I successfully represented victims of nuclear radiation from atmospheric nuclear tests, nuclear plants, uranium mines, and national laboratories. I unsuccessfully sued in 1978 to shut down the entire U.S. nuclear fuel cycle on constitutional grounds, a case that went before 22 federal judges and four times to the United States Supreme Court. I reviewed and consulted on more than 700 medical claims by atomic veterans at the V.A. I assisted in drafting legislation to extend the range of covered diseases. I testified to Congress. I attended meetings of the National Academy of Sciences. I have written a law review article and two books on this subject. I am not neutral on this subject.

 


The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”
 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.


Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

Sunday, November 21, 2021

The Great Pause Week 88: Lucid Water and Lush Mountains

"When the COP concluded in Glasgow it had given coal a pass for the next 40 years."

In the days following the close of the 26th meeting of 200 countries to reverse climate change, I am still trying to understand what went wrong and whether it can be corrected. Extinction Rebellion, the Sunrise Movement and others are asking themselves, as they should, whether their strategies and tactics are adequate to the task. Other movements started by activists in the 90s continue to grow, iterate, and cross-pollinate: the Great Green Wall; ecovillages; transition towns; ecocities; ecosystem restoration camps. As Lennon said, “You say you got a real solution/Well, you know/We’d all love to see the plan.” But then we need to ask ourselves if any of these plans has the speed needed.

Bottom-up street protest is not change. We also need change from the top — government policy. I am left with images in my head of the closing plenary when COP President Alok Sharma shed tears as he accepted the compromise to water-down the final document. At the last minute, the representative of India, Bhupender Yadav, interposed a block to consensus with the backing of China, Brazil and South Africa by declining to go along with the complete phase out of coal that 196 countries had taken two years of negotiations to agree to, including hazardous shuttle diplomacy during the pandemic by Mr. Sharma and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. The look on Mr. Yadav’s face is one of smug satisfaction. The mood in the hall was grim.

There are good governments and bad governments, just as there are good people and criminal sociopaths. It is not entirely binary, there is a spectrum, but the premise of the United Nations is that dialogue and peer-pressure are better tools than barbed wire, poison gas and atomic bombs.

 India remains an outlier, its position having changed little since the Kyoto COP in 1995 — “the wealthy countries polluted their way to riches and India must be allowed to do the same; after that, we can talk.”

I paraphrase.

This is premised on the idea that a consumer society of 2 billion Indians, each with the footprint of a modern USAnian, is a desirable end — and indeed, inevitable.

China, never a human rights paragon, has been gradually migrating its climate position, due to one Xie Zhenhua. A little over a decade ago, China had exactly the same diplomatic position as India — strongly arguing against any restrictions on their coal-fueled economic growth, eyes looking skyward to a Pizza Hut on every corner. They said the overdeveloped nations should be leading the way to a medium standard by shrinking their share of the pie, not pushing underdeveloped nations to underdevelop faster. China made a lot of friends with that line. Eat the rich.

“Xie is not a bureaucrat. He has the style of Chinese officials in the 1980 and 1990s when they had the guts to shoulder risks and take initiatives, which you can’t see in today’s Chinese officials. That is not because the officials today don’t want to [have that style], but because the current system doesn’t allow them to,” said Li Shuo, senior global policy advisor at Greenpeace East Asia, who has met Xie in person at climate conferences. “Talking to Xie feels like communicating with a real human being, whereas speaking to other Chinese officials feels more like talking to robots.”

 — Jane Li, "China’s Xie Zhenhua is the most important person attending COP26," Quartz, Nov 11, 2021

Xie has been a close advisor to Chinese president Xi Jinping since 2004 when Xie crafted the policy known as “Green GDP” — shifting China away from a polluting parrot of Western countries and towards a more traditional circular economy grounded in natural regeneration (see: Farmers of Forty Centuries). In 2005, Xi gave his famous “lucid water and lush mountains” speech that radicalized environmental thought in China. In 2015, the Party Congress enacted a comprehensive regime of federal laws under Xi’s slogan, “Eco-civilization.” Xie became Xi’s climate restoration architect and led the Chinese delegations in Copenhagen and Paris. He has given up all his other offices and climate is all he does now. 

Since last year, China has made a series of important pledges. At the UN in September 2020, Chinese President Xi said China’s emission would peak around 2030 and it would achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. The country’s cabinet laid out more details about these plans on Sunday (Oct. 24).
This year, Xi announced China was ending financing for coal-fired power plants abroad. China also plans to expand the reach of its nascent carbon-trading market.

And yet, we have the specter of two perennial adversaries, India and China, joining at the end of COP26 to block the complete phase-out of coal by 2050. The political move here for China is to give a little and get a little. Three days before the end of the summit, China and the U.S. — the world’s two largest climate polluters — said they would commit to “enhanced climate actions” to keep global warming to the limits set in the Paris agreement. The statement included a commitment to “phase down” (not eliminate) coal. 

Writing for The Los Angeles Times, Susan Joy Hassol and Michael Mann said: 

The final COP26 decision statement, for the first time in a COP agreement, contains language directing all nations to increase efforts toward phasing down unabated coal and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, though it gives no firm deadlines. Yes, the last-minute change from “phase out” to “phase down,” at the behest of India, was disappointing, and the reference to “unabated coal” leaves a dubious “carbon capture” loophole.

“Unabated” meant clean coal technology, yet to be developed, would replace the dirty kind. “Inefficient” was a euphemism for “corrupt,” unsupervised, underregulated subsidies. Fossil subsidies could continue as long as they became “efficient.” 

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan.

Katie Worth is an investigative journalist and the author of Miseducation: How Climate Change is Taught in America. She writes

In reporting for my book “Miseducation,” I visited schools in more than a dozen communities. I found many points of friction: Teachers who disagree over whether to teach the subject. Students who want to learn about it but are not taught. Others who are taught about climate change but reject what they learn. District officials who struggle with teachers who refuse to teach it, or with those who insist on teaching it. Parents who rage that their children are taught it, or that they are not.
Since America has no national curriculum, these tensions also tend to play out in statehouses. Legislators insert adult politics into the domain of schoolchildren by tweaking their states’ academic standards. As a result, an education in modern climate science is required in some parts of this country and nonexistent in others.
***
I spoke with five teens whose families had immigrated from the Marshall Islands, a nation famously endangered by sea level rise. Four of the five said I was the first adult they’d ever heard say the words “climate change” on school grounds. “It’s kind of disappointing. Because, like, a real thing is happening,” said 17-year-old Eve.
In Arkansas, I met an environmental-science teacher who tells his students it’s too soon to say whether pollutants are warming the Earth — it could be sun cycles, coronal mass ejections or magnetic force fields. I asked if he accepts the data showing that carbon dioxide levels have risen. They probably have, he said, but “what kind of impact does that have on global climate? I don’t have a clue.”
***
Youth activists — including, famously, Greta Thunberg — have become the moral and organizing force behind recent protests for climate action. Nonetheless, fully a quarter of American kids surveyed in 2020 rejected the idea that global warming was some kind of emergency, more than in any other country surveyed in Western Europe or North America. And a 2016 survey led by Eric Plutzer of Pennsylvania State University found that one-third of American science educators teach students that “many scientists believe” global warming is natural, when in fact, a recent count found the number of climate scientists who believe that to be exactly zero.

Given the schizophrenic, politically warped content teens are getting from the authority figures in their lives, it should come as no surprise that the Children’s Hospital Association reports teens going to hospitals with mental health emergencies jumped 31% from 2019 to 2020. The number of teen girls showing up at ERs after suicide attempts were up more than 50% early this year compared with the same time period in 2019.

Even before the COP had concluded in Glasgow on Saturday, giving coal a pass for the next 40 years, mainstream media had shifted attention to more captivating banter. The talk at the table on Thanksgiving will most likely be inflation, even though the US is experiencing far less than are Europe or China. Putting that issue in the echo chamber has dragged down President Biden’s approval ratings, empowered Senators Manchin and Sinema, and fueled still more tribal conflict among Americans — potentially switching control of the federal government back to climate deniers in 2024. 

Katie Worth interviewed a schoolteacher in Paradise California whose school had burned in the Camp Fire in 2020. He was teaching science classes in a repurposed hardware store. 

The day it ignited, he piled a group of terrified eighth-grade boys into his car and tried to keep them calm as they idled in a traffic jam of evacuees, flying embers converting the dry grass alongside the road into flames.
“The boys were incredibly quiet, and I just tried to talk the whole time,” he told me. “Like: ‘Wow, look at the colors in the sky. That’s amazing, isn’t it? That’s so cool. Oh, look at all those taillights. Yep, we just gotta get down this hill and then we’ll get there and we’ll be fine.’” A couple of miles behind them, people were burning alive in their cars.
The teacher gave his class, all fire survivors, a quiz on climate change. 
How has climate change affected your life so far? And what effects do you think climate change will have on your life in the next 50 years?
The boy whose every possession had burned in the most destructive wildfire in California history wrote that climate change hadn’t affected his life thus far. He went on, “I don’t know if it will do anything to my life in fifty years because I don’t know if I believe it yet.”

That is pretty much the official position of India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia. That is why it is astonishing anything was accomplished at all, although a number of good things were. In 20 years time, the generation Katie Worth interviewed will be the ones running the talks.




The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity I have been involved with since its inception in 1974. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.


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