5 ms·

It’s like, what do you call someone who’s absolutely terrified about global warming, and who thinks the best response would’ve been (and actually, still is) a h

by vanusa 5y ago

It’s like, what do you call someone who’s absolutely terrified about global warming, and who thinks the best response would’ve been (and actually, still is) a historic surge in nuclear energy, possibly with geoengineering to tide us over? … who wants to end world hunger … and do it using GMO crops? On first blush, I would say this is someone who is somehow overly attracted to idealized approaches -- dare we say silver bullets? -- without considering secondary effects or big picture, problem-first analysis. Most of his positions / proposals sound a lot better, but something seems off "off" about these first two. The first one just doesn't pass the smell test. Nuke plants are expensive and slow to build, and wishing it were otherwise won't make it so; and from a basic risk analysis perspective, it would be foolish to put most of our eggs in the geoengineering basket, without putting the problem of near-term emissions front and center. And as for the second -- let's just say the problem of global hunger is perhaps more multi-level and multi-factored than the issues that GMO, even in a best case scenario, can ever hope to address.

bawolff 5y ago
Maybe its all in the eye of the beholder, but those two seemed like some of the most common sense mainstream ones to me.
ip26 5y ago
History is littered with silver bullets. Automobiles solved the problem of knee deep horse manure in New York City once and for all. The Haeber-Bosch process quadrupled the productivity of agricultural land. Vaccines played a key role in eradicating smallpox. Etc. There are problems with all these technologies, and great depth to each of the challenges they address, but just as coal was a revolution over wood, and natural gas over coal, so too can imperfect solar, wind, or nuclear be over natural gas. Or perhaps GMOs will help us reverse some of the sins of today’s mono crops.
- vanusa 5y ago
  Automobiles solved the problem of knee deep horse manure in New York City once and for all. In exchange for poisoning the air, killing streetcars, and (with the help of farcically idealistic mid-century urban planning) decimating whole communities, physically and spiritually (not so coincidentally with disproportionate effects on certain disadvantaged groups). A silver bullet to the horse manure problem, perhaps, but to the sustainable public transport problem .. a dull hammer, wouldn't you think? Just as coal was a revolution over wood, and natural gas over coal, so too can imperfect solar, wind, or nuclear be over natural gas. Or perhaps GMOs will help us reverse some of the sins of today’s mono crops. I agree that both nukes and GMOs can potentially be part of the arsenal of approaches to these problems. But to anoint them as our "best" solutions to these problem strikes me as fanciful, to say the least.
  - mlyle 5y ago
    > I agree that both nukes and GMOs can potentially be part of the arsenal of approaches to these problems. But to anoint them as our "best" solutions to these problem strikes me as fanciful, to say the least. I'd maybe call them our best insufficiently-used solutions: things that we can most easily do a bunch more of and make a big difference. They won't get the job done on their own (e.g. nuke plants don't solve the transport / liquid fuels problem, but they contribute to plentiful base load which could even be helpful as part of solving that).
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Each penny spent propping up nukes, instead of building out solar and wind, brings climate disaster incrementally nearer.
      - mlyle 5y ago
        We need to do all the things: Improve grid interconnections to tolerate more renewables; add storage; overprovision renewables; and add non-polluting base load power that doesn't need storage. Nuclear is the latter. And it's a mistake to think that doing more of one necessarily means doing substantially less of the others. Overnight we burn a lot of natural gas here in California. It's not going to be feasible to build enough wind to meet current demand, and storage doesn't look practical to get the job done either. And nighttime demand can be expected to go up a lot as people buy electric cars.
        ncmncm 5y ago
        Money is fungible. Each cent spent on X is a cent not spent on Y. Nuke costs are going up, not down. Lately, it is at $billions for zero watts. "Not going to be feasible", and "doesn't look practical" are not based in fact. Storage is not being built out yet because solar watts still displace NG watts, 1:1, and storage cost is falling even faster than solar. But the iron-air battery factories we will need are now under construction.
- glitchc 5y ago
  Correction: History is littered with improvements that trade one externality for another. Typically part of the improvement is in separating the externality from the user by one additional degree.
tempestn 5y ago
I think a more charitable take on those two point-form statements is that he sees those measures as keys components of solutions, not that he's arguing to use only those measures. I see the first as an argument against the type of environmentalist who argues that global warming is a huge problem, but that it must be solved only by reducing consumption and promoting solar/wind renewables—that nuclear and geoengineering are actually undesirable in that they compete with or distract from these more ideal solutions. Similarly the second isn't necessarily saying that GMOs alone will solve world hunger, but that writing off any GMO food as unnatural and therefore bad is shortsighted, and misses out on an incredibly valuable tool to combat hunger.
- vanusa 5y ago
  I think you're being a bit too charitable -- to the point of spinning his overall message to something different from what he plainly said. Of course he wasn't saying they should be our "only" solutions to these problems. But he definitely did not merely say they should be components of a broader strategy (which I do agree with), or that they shouldn't be "written off". He specifically said they should be our best and primary approaches to these problems -- which again, strikes me as over-idealized, if not outright naive and fanciful.
  - mattcwilson 5y ago
    If we’re niggling over specifics: * He didn’t use the word primary anywhere in the post. * He didn’t say that GMOs are the best response, just that “he wants to [end world hunger] with them.”
    - vanusa 5y ago
      Whether the actual word "primary" was used or not irrelevant. It was a fair enough characterization of what he was saying. He didn’t say that GMOs are the best response, just that “he wants to [end world hunger] with them.” Look, when someone says "I want to solve problem X with Y" and mentions no other approaches -- then clearly they are saying that Y is the best response to X.

by vanusa 5y ago

bawolff 5y ago

Maybe its all in the eye of the beholder, but those two seemed like some of the most common sense mainstream ones to me.

ip26 5y ago

History is littered with silver bullets. Automobiles solved the problem of knee deep horse manure in New York City once and for all. The Haeber-Bosch process quadrupled the productivity of agricultural land. Vaccines played a key role in eradicating smallpox. Etc. There are problems with all these technologies, and great depth to each of the challenges they address, but just as coal was a revolution over wood, and natural gas over coal, so too can imperfect solar, wind, or nuclear be over natural gas. Or perhaps GMOs will help us reverse some of the sins of today’s mono crops.

vanusa 5y ago
Automobiles solved the problem of knee deep horse manure in New York City once and for all. In exchange for poisoning the air, killing streetcars, and (with the help of farcically idealistic mid-century urban planning) decimating whole communities, physically and spiritually (not so coincidentally with disproportionate effects on certain disadvantaged groups). A silver bullet to the horse manure problem, perhaps, but to the sustainable public transport problem .. a dull hammer, wouldn't you think? Just as coal was a revolution over wood, and natural gas over coal, so too can imperfect solar, wind, or nuclear be over natural gas. Or perhaps GMOs will help us reverse some of the sins of today’s mono crops. I agree that both nukes and GMOs can potentially be part of the arsenal of approaches to these problems. But to anoint them as our "best" solutions to these problem strikes me as fanciful, to say the least.
- mlyle 5y ago
  > I agree that both nukes and GMOs can potentially be part of the arsenal of approaches to these problems. But to anoint them as our "best" solutions to these problem strikes me as fanciful, to say the least. I'd maybe call them our best insufficiently-used solutions: things that we can most easily do a bunch more of and make a big difference. They won't get the job done on their own (e.g. nuke plants don't solve the transport / liquid fuels problem, but they contribute to plentiful base load which could even be helpful as part of solving that).
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Each penny spent propping up nukes, instead of building out solar and wind, brings climate disaster incrementally nearer.
    - mlyle 5y ago
      We need to do all the things: Improve grid interconnections to tolerate more renewables; add storage; overprovision renewables; and add non-polluting base load power that doesn't need storage. Nuclear is the latter. And it's a mistake to think that doing more of one necessarily means doing substantially less of the others. Overnight we burn a lot of natural gas here in California. It's not going to be feasible to build enough wind to meet current demand, and storage doesn't look practical to get the job done either. And nighttime demand can be expected to go up a lot as people buy electric cars.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        Money is fungible. Each cent spent on X is a cent not spent on Y. Nuke costs are going up, not down. Lately, it is at $billions for zero watts. "Not going to be feasible", and "doesn't look practical" are not based in fact. Storage is not being built out yet because solar watts still displace NG watts, 1:1, and storage cost is falling even faster than solar. But the iron-air battery factories we will need are now under construction.
glitchc 5y ago
Correction: History is littered with improvements that trade one externality for another. Typically part of the improvement is in separating the externality from the user by one additional degree.

tempestn 5y ago

I think a more charitable take on those two point-form statements is that he sees those measures as keys components of solutions, not that he's arguing to use only those measures. I see the first as an argument against the type of environmentalist who argues that global warming is a huge problem, but that it must be solved only by reducing consumption and promoting solar/wind renewables—that nuclear and geoengineering are actually undesirable in that they compete with or distract from these more ideal solutions. Similarly the second isn't necessarily saying that GMOs alone will solve world hunger, but that writing off any GMO food as unnatural and therefore bad is shortsighted, and misses out on an incredibly valuable tool to combat hunger.

vanusa 5y ago
I think you're being a bit too charitable -- to the point of spinning his overall message to something different from what he plainly said. Of course he wasn't saying they should be our "only" solutions to these problems. But he definitely did not merely say they should be components of a broader strategy (which I do agree with), or that they shouldn't be "written off". He specifically said they should be our best and primary approaches to these problems -- which again, strikes me as over-idealized, if not outright naive and fanciful.
- mattcwilson 5y ago
  If we’re niggling over specifics: * He didn’t use the word primary anywhere in the post. * He didn’t say that GMOs are the best response, just that “he wants to [end world hunger] with them.”
  - vanusa 5y ago
    Whether the actual word "primary" was used or not irrelevant. It was a fair enough characterization of what he was saying. He didn’t say that GMOs are the best response, just that “he wants to [end world hunger] with them.” Look, when someone says "I want to solve problem X with Y" and mentions no other approaches -- then clearly they are saying that Y is the best response to X.