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@ Demeter,
> The links i offered open doors to much greater information, which can be perused at ones’ own pace.
On an alternative reading, it looks like you’re misdirecting people to other people’s BS musings about tangential topics, and refusing to clarify the points you’re making or to argue in their defence when challenged, while remaining aloof from debate. You’re throwing up chaff, in other words.
>> “Demeter, you apparently ignored my request for clarification”
> Seriously think you want to obfuscate now Clark, posted many links for people info with open minds, your apparent need for clarification hides those comments
If people ask you for clarification, that isn’t obfuscating or obscuring what you’re linking to. Quite the opposite: it’s focusing critical attention on it. It’s the “critical” part you’re really baulking at.
If you post ideas (or links to ideas) that other people think are mistaken, you should be prepared for those ideas to be examined and criticised. Complaining about being asked for clarification does you no favours.
So yes, as you don’t seem to understand or accept the purpose of this discussion forum, I agree it would be an improvement if you stop posting here (at least in the feeble manner you’ve done so far).
> Disagree with left/right brained supposed functions, otherwise people like me are impossible. What’s interesting is children are initially left brained (*oops, meant children are rightbrained*), whichever hand they use, until they enter the conditioning process called school.
If you’re expressing suspicion of simple left-brain/right-brain dichotomies, you’re right to do so, as they’re often misused in pop psychology. But then you immediately proceed to make the same type of mistake.
Actually, the switch in hemispheric dominance has nothing to do with being taught to think that way at school – because it happens before they start school. Studies indicate children are naturally right-hemisphere dominant (finding patterns and making associations between sensory phenomena) until around the age of three, when they start to acquire syntactical language abilities due to the development of more complex compartmentalised neural structures in the left frontotemporal cortex.
It’s true that most traditional educational methods focus primarily on left-hemisphere dominant tasks: classifying phenomena and structuring thoughts with language or symbols. Other educational approaches are also available (e.g. Montessori), but the eventual outcome is much the same: children who are allowed to structure their own thinking end up acquiring similar linguistic and logical abilities to traditionally schooled children. Arguably some of them might enhance their creative, innovative or intuitive skills if they already tend that way, but any pedagogical effects on thinking style are swamped by individual differences and personality factors. And they’re still answerable to the same standards of critical thinking when making factual claims.
So in fact it is you who is obsfuscating – i.e. clouding the core issues by distracting attention with irrelevant nonsense. You’re throwing up chaff instead of engaging in a constructive discussion; so yes, you should drop out if you can’t shape up.
@ Clark, XR doesn’t seem to have a clear approach to nuclear power. They’re obviously advocating a carbon-neutral future, and are against pollution in general, but is nuclear power regarded as a candidate solution? If there’s no organisational position as such, but it’s for the members to debate and decide upon, then it’s vulnerable to bias because the membership isn’t representative of a typical cross-section of society. There’s a discussion about XR’s nuclear policy on Reddit, and the BBC page on XR’s goals seems to suggest the organisation is agnostic on the issue; but an XR spokesperson who favoured nuclear power apparently left the organisation, complaining of peer group pressure from traditional green environmentalists. Has XR been hijacked by a lobby group?
@ Dawg Thanks for your insightful inputs, much appreciated.
And thanks to every one for contributing to this thread.
And special thanks to the moderators for helpful edits / links and setting up this thread – brilliant!
@ Clark, thanks for your kind words too, what I was trying to express is some kind of philosophical ‘I feel at peace with how fast time seems to be the accelerating as I get older’ declaration when I wrote “I’ll be dead soon enough” – not that I am suffering in anyway 🙂 sorry I should have better clarified what I meant. I’m OK with the idea that on the grand scale of life on this planet my life is a tiny flicker that’ll be over in a mere instant. Meanwhile, I’d like to try to be at peace each day as best I can.
@ Clark,
re: citizens assemblies and the ‘shoot the messenger’ logical fallacy:
The GWP article I linked to was one of the most succinctly worded I found when I was researching citizens assemblies a year or so ago. There’s dozens and dozens of other papers and articles with more or less the same analysis. I also researched them when setting up our local ‘Transition Town’ assemblies nearly two decades ago.
If someone from the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWP) shouted “fire” running past your front door at the top of a block of flats, would you doubt them, and go back inside your flat for a quiet cup of tea? Or would you sniff about up and down the corridor checking out independently to corroborate whether there’s a fire or not?
The GWP are a messenger. No doubt they are guilty of all you criticise them for. But its fun to cite them, see how people react, since they have a lot of very robust outputs, which challenges the orthodox ‘Green’ policy space, but which ‘Greens’ will dodge using this same ‘shoot the messenger’ logical fallacy – e.g. Caroline Lucas MP has replied to me with almost exactly the same as your good self knocking the GWP to ignore my request they consider nuclear energy!
Nonetheless the particular message the GWP are delivering this time, is that ‘citizens assemblies are critically and fatally dependant upon their chosen advisors’ which practically everyone agrees with. Some then want to tinker to tune them up. Others, like me largely dismiss them as ‘catnip’ for narcissistic psychopaths, as this wikipedia link describes without using the ‘p’ word!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_assembly#Disadvantages“citizens assemblies are critically and fatally dependant upon their chosen advisors’ which practically everyone agrees with.”
Couldn’t the same criticism be levelled at any decision or policy making entity, (or indeed any entity) that chooses its advisors? Therefore the fault is not inherent in citizens’ assemblies but inherent in the act of choosing advisors, a fault that applies everywhere that advisors are called upon to enlighten (or influence) a debate.
I noted in that wiki article that “A study comparing the debate quality of an Irish Citizen’s Assembly and an Irish parliamentary committee found that citizens showed a deeper cognitive grasp of the subject matter at stake (abortion).”We have a very similar system across the world that appears to function adequately in the jury system. Couldn’t all the criticisms of citizens’ assemblies be equally applied to juries even though we like to think that trial by jury is the most fair way to apply justice. Are not the judges similar to advisors in their role?
Dawg, 11:08 – as you might expect, there are a lot of long time environmental activists and campaigners in Extinction Rebellion, especially among the core of people who initiated it, and traditionally such people are anti-nuclear. There are also a lot of members who oppose the HS2 rail construction, for the similar reasons.
But XR as an organisation has Three Demands, is organised around Ten Principles, and none of these Demands or Principles even mention nuclear power, nor indeed any other forms of energy. The demands are, in essence: tell the truth about humanity’s crisis, act with urgency to decarbonise, and it is the population in general who must wield the power to decide upon those actions, ie. the decisions must be made as democratically as possible.
Incidentally, there are now a lot more people in Extinction Rebellion than the initiating groups, and they have diverse positions on nuclear power.
I have no reason to believe that XR has been taken over by any lobby groups, anti-nuclear or otherwise. No, er, directives or anything have turned up at any of the local groups I am involved with telling us that we’re to oppose nuclear power from now on – but XR doesn’t really work on directives or anything like that anyway. There are regional and national-level coordinating groups, who set dates for coordinated mass actions, and subdivide the space we’re going to occupy, allocating sections to various local groups, but really nothing much has changed since 2019; local groups still plan and carry out their own local actions, the Three Demands remain the same, as do the Ten Principles. It’s not up to members to formulate energy policy, and we never debate such matters – we’re demanding a Citizens’ Assembly to fulfil that function.
I think, rather, that the converse is true; Zion Lights has gone to work for Environmental Progress UK, which is primarily a pro-nuclear lobby group founded and presided over by Michael Shellenberger. It’s completely obvious why Shellenberger’s recommendations are so popular with the corporate media, which is funded by advertising, and why they gave so much publicity to Zion Lights’ rather critical exit from Extinction Rebellion, which causes trouble and disruption to the established order:
– “A self-described ecomodernist, Shellenberger believes that economic growth can continue without negative environmental impacts through technological research and development, usually through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization. A controversial figure, Shellenberger disagrees with most environmentalists over the impacts of environmental threats and policies for addressing them. Shellenberger’s positions and writings on climate change and environmentalism have received criticism from environmental scientists and academics, who have called his arguments “bad science” and “inaccurate”. In contrast, his positions and writings have received praise from writers and journalists in the popular press, including conservative and libertarian news outlets and organizations. In a similar manner, many academics criticized Shellenberger’s positions and writings on homelessness, while receiving mixed reception from writers and journalists in the popular press”
Zion Lights is entitled to her opinion that “any rational, evidence-based approach shows that a strategy including nuclear energy is the only realistic solution to driving down emissions at the scale and speed required” (Dawg’s BBC link), but XR say that such matters should be for the general public to judge. If she’s right, they will presumably come to the same conclusion as her. If they disagree, she’s entitled to think that she knows better, but I hope she’ll respect democracy.
Natasha, I’m not ignoring your comment, but it is going to take me a while to catch up. For now, it’s more that I deployed a heuristic than made a logical fallacy; obviously GWPF might be entirely right about citizens’ assemblies, but time is limited and I expected them to be biased. Had you acknowledged their bias, but explained that this specific article of theirs was particularly clear and accurate (as you have since), I’d have been more inclined to read it than to criticise the GWPF.
Natasha, also to save time…
I agree that “citizens assemblies are critically dependant upon their chosen advisors” – I’ve deliberately left out the word “fatally” because it is merely polemic. This problem can be addressed in a number of ways, so the dependency is critical, but not fatal.
Dawg, returning to nuclear power briefly, I have some concerns.
Firstly, I love the high energy density of nuke. I’m a space exploration fan, and beings should never venture far from their home star without some decent nuclear reactors.
But us humans are not very nuke experienced yet, and we’re changing our biosphere very fast. France has run into big problems with its nuke fleet, firstly when rivers got too warm to serve as the cold end of the attached primitive and inefficient heat engines, and then even worse this summer when those same rivers actually dried up in the AGW-driven record-breaking drought.
Likewise, there are about 440 nuclear power reactors on Earth, and I think about 90% ie. 400 of them are near sea level. Most unfortunately, AGW is destabilising the polar ice sheets, sea level has already risen due to thermal expansion and the rise is accelerating, and the decade commencing in 2030 will see exaggerated tidal range due to orbital dynamics. A coastal US reactor nearly got flooded in one of the mega-storms a couple of years back; its roads were cut off and staff had to remain on site to tend it for several days. Nuclear weapon warheads each contain a few kilos of nuclear material whereas each power reactor contains tonnes, ie. one bad power reactor accident can have the contamination potential of an entire nuclear war.
And I do wish we didn’t put so much U238 in our reactors. It isn’t a fuel, it’s an impurity, and it’s included far more for political than engineering reasons. It gets irradiated and turns into actinides which we can’t destroy and don’t really know that we can dispose of safely – and can’t know, for several thousand years. Since U238 comprises about 97% of the “fuel” load (and the plutonium produced contributes only about 30% of the energy produced) we generate about 25 times more nuclear waste than we need to. And the nuclear “ashes” from proper fuel (U235 or U233) contain a tiny fraction of the actinides, so their radioactivity falls much faster presenting a far easier disposal problem with much lower risks. But we have two orders of magnitude less experience with this nuclear technology than the PWRs and BWRs that are already so beset with problems.
It’s best not to make plutonium and other actinides if we can avoid it; recommended reading: The Curve of Binding Energy by Ted Taylor, US wizard nuclear bomb designer turned anti-proliferation campaigner.
Finally, before reading Natasha’s links, I’d like to endorse ET’s comment at 15:21, and Natasha’s thanks to everyone contributing to the thread, including the moderators.
There. I’ve caught up!
Natasha, I’ve started reading your links, but in the mean time…
In reply to your GWPF raising an alarm, I counter that they have repeatedly cried “there’s no wolf” when there is in fact a wolf.
I don’t understand what you mean with your catnip remark. Do you mean that citizens’ assemblies are likely to include some psychopaths, and these will inevitably dominate them?
OK, that didn’t take long. The initial page at GWPF (which these days redirects to http://www.netzerowatch.com) is merely a polemic, by just one person, with no analysis whatsoever.
It links to a 38 page PDF, which repeatedly displays graphics depicting the citizens of the assembly as puppets. However, on PDF page 5, a quote of an assembly member shows him/her to be definitely no puppet. This is immediately followed on page 6 by yet another graphic of a puppet.
I don’t read glossy but self-contradictory **** like this, especially not as a first document about anything new to me. And it’s derogatory of ordinary people, so it can get stuffed.
Natasha, I’m more than happy to debate with you. But remember, had you served on this (I agree, probably badly convened) citizens’ assembly, the GWPF would have been depicting you as a rather simple-minded looking puppet. You are no such thing; you are my equal, and I welcome your debate.
Actually I did read some of the Global Warming Policy Forum’s PDF study of the Climate Assembly. Though I recognise and agree with some of the criticisms, it seems a confused document, due to its underlying objective being to argue that there is no mandate from the population for net zero emissions targets, and that such targets are driven purely by governments and lobby groups. The reality of humanity’s predicament and scientific assessment of how to address it barely get a mention. Furthermore, a large part of its reasoning is circular. I could go on to explain this latter point, but see my concluding sentence.
Also, even if it were a decent study, studying the Climate Assembly would tell us very little about proper citizens’ assemblies.
For these reasons I think there are more productive things we could be discussing than this study. It could possibly teach us a little about citizens assemblies, but we’d do better to examine decent ones, studied in their own right rather than to make some irrelevant and fallacious argument.
Returning to nuclear power reactors, there is a problem shared by all solid-fuelled reactors called the iodine pit or xenon poisoning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit
This means that reactor power output often cannot be varied at will, for instance in response to changes in demand, and attempting to compensate for it played a part in the Chernobyl disaster. But fluid-fuelled reactors overcome this limitation because xenon is a gas, which will just bubble out of fluid fuel, rather than being trapped within solid fuel rods.
(I’m getting a bit embarrassed about dominating this thread, but at least I’ve run out of relevant things to say. For now.)
Acronyms –
PWR = Pressurised Water Reactor.
BWR = Boiling Water Reactor.These two reactor types make up the majority of current nuclear power reactors. They are solid-fuelled reactors using water as the coolant. There is also CANDU, a Canadian design with a better safety record. It is a solid-fuelled design but uses (expensive) heavy water as the primary coolant.
Clark, that’s some interesting information you’ve posted, both about XR and about nuclear reactors. I would like to add come intelligent commentary and debate to help give the impression of a balanced conversation, but sadly this stuff is beyond my knowledge and above my head.
I appreciate learning about how XR works, as I know nothing about the movement beyond the snippets appearing in the mainstream news (where they’re portrayed as single-minded eco-terrorists) or on some oddball fringe forums (where they’re portrayed as a brainwashed death cult). So it’s good to know that they’re actually sensible, inclusive and democratic at the core.
Regarding the info about nuclear technologies, it’s not just a school day for me – it’s more like a packed schedule of university lectures: I’m not sure I know enough about it to understand what I’m being told. As I don’t have a mature view on the ethics of nuclear power or alternative technologies, I think I’m best not to proclaim a firm opinion on it. But if I ever need to look like I know what I’m talking about, I can tag this page to mug up on the subject – and rather than improvise my own opinion, I can simply borrow yours (sneakily uncredited, but who’s to know?) and try to bluff it out that way.
Much the same goes for Natasha’s contributions (and recently congenial attitude); I can try to synthesise a considered declaration on that too – at least to give the impression that I’m already aware of possible alternative stances, which I don’t need to debate in depth (and therefore risk exposure of my lack of comprehension).
It would be good to have another informed perspective on this, mind you. IIRC*, there was a commenter called “nevermind” who took a more radically anti-nuclear position and was pretty forthright in defending it. Is there any way to alert him to this discussion thread? (Maybe attach a link in response to one of his recent comments in the main blog?) Or if you’re already aware of his opinion, Clark, maybe you could represent it and expound on it – albeit on pain of being perceived to dominate the discussion even more.
* IIRC = If I Recall Correctly
Dawg, thanks for the compliment.
As things go, nevermind is someone I know in the real world, though he lives best part of a hundred miles from me. I texted him inviting him to this thread, and he just texted back that he’ll look in when he’s finished fixing his shed. As it goes, nevermind is one of the environmental activists to whom I have put pro-nuke arguments, though years before the start of XR.
I started learning about nuclear tech shortly after the Fukushima disaster. I commented here at Craig’s that “you shouldn’t build them things (PWRs); they’ll get too hot and blow up”. A commenter called Angrysoba (a westerner, I believe, living in Japan) took my comment to be irrational, and asked whether I would support nuclear power if it was perfectly clean and safe. I replied that of course I would, and started looking into it. That’s when I discovered the story of Alvin Weinberg, the Aircraft Reactor Experiment and the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. I got fascinated with the whole topic.
You and everyone are welcome to ask questions. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll say so.
To learn more about XR, look up your local group and attend one of their meetings. I have heard of the odd cranky group but never encountered one.
Actually, the three reactors that blew up and melted down at Fukushima were BWRs rather than PWRs, but the principle is really very similar in both cases. From memory, PWRs circulate water at 150 atmospheres of pressure, whereas BWRs require “only” 75 atmospheres. Any breach of the coolant circuit and nearly all the water will instantly flash to steam, after which it is difficult to prevent meltdown. I find this inelegant.
Totally agree with your post Clark, very rare i say that, Knew you’re a good dude, keep shining me darling.
Meant your post on September 9, 2022 at 15:04, replied to that but my penultimate post to this one, showed up as a new post.
Demeter – if you are sticking around, how about actually engaging in the discussions and items you brought up, instead of condescending to us with the patronising drivel that is all you have managed to date?
Go on, try it. You might learn something.
@Clark writes that the article I linked to above, criticising Citizens Assemblies, is biased since the organisation that published it, Global Warming Policy (GWP) has an
“underlying objective […] to argue that there is no mandate from the population for net zero emissions targets, and that such targets are driven purely by governments and lobby groups.”
Let’s examine this.
What does the phrase: “net zero emissions targets” actually mean?
It means humans must stop using fossil fuels (carbon capture is a net energy sink). However, thermodynamics dictates fossil fuel energy density has enabled 8 billion people to be alive today. So, at what ever rate fossil fuels are removed from civilizations, by natural depletion (peak oil already happened in 2018) or political “zero emissions” policy, global population will decline at that same rate, back to what it was before fossil fuel age, circa 200 years ago, i.e. under 2 billion global population, by end of this century at the latest, since so-called renewables (and indeed all other possible replacement energy sources) are net energy sinks, and even if you massage the numbers they still can’t be built or maintained (thermodynamics) without fossil fuels?
What does the phrase: “mandate from the population” mean, given the above described physics and fossil fuel depletion will cull over three quarters of global population no matter what flavour of “mandate” the GWP say the people do, or do not have about “zero emissions”, which will only accelerate in aggregate the people’s own decline?
And why do those who do promote “zero emission” as a policy option FAIL to mention axiomatically they are calling for global population to shrink even faster than depletion on its own, had we not implemented a “zero emission” policy?
Like the GWP, I suggest that “net zero emission targets” are deeply – and yes fatally – misguided, or some form of dishonest propaganda grooming by vested interests profiteering by hiding the real depletion issues, whilst inevitably modern civilizations collapses.
This leaves the question of how do ‘we’ best ‘manage’ our dwindling reserves of fossil fuels? Share it round equally and fairly to slow and cushion the descent as best as possible? Or mess about letting billionaire financiers and banksters maximise short and medium term profits from trying to sell us anti-scientific “net zero emission targets” technological mirages?
Natasha: I’m not sure why you’re insisting that fossil fuel is required for renewables? Steel can be made without burning fuels, all construction and maintenance requires is energy. Obviously we cannot get there immediately.
Also, I don’t think anyone is seriously proposing a mass cull of the population (dire warnings from conspiracy nuts notwithstanding). But the population certainly does need to decline considerably in order to be sustainable. A one or zero child policy, encouraged strongly through the tax system, would go a long way to achieving this.
Failure to take the initiative to reduce our reproduction rate ourselves will mean nature will do so, in a manner most definitely not of our choosing.
Natasha, with respect, I think I have looked more deeply into humanity’s crisis than you have (and I doubt I know the half of it). Fossil fuel depletion is merely one aspect of a set of interlocking problems, most of which affect several of the others.
Some people get fixated on carbon dioxide, some on economic collapse, some on fuel depletion, some on habitat loss, some on population growth, some on animal farming, some on ocean acidification, some on war and nuclear weapons, some on rising extinction rates, etc. etc. etc. But actually, physical reality is a unified (though diverse) system – everything affects everything else.
It’s a bit like one of those games (eg. Kerplunk!) where players in turn have to successively remove a part from a structure that is supporting something above, making as little of it fall as possible. It’s hard to guess which stick will provoke the biggest collapse.
There are also various facts you need to get straight; please try reading more widely. Wikipedia is often dismissed as a “tool of the establishment” or something, but it does actually get edited by large numbers of very diverse people, many of them promoting contradicting points of view. In consequence it contains very diverse citations.
– – – – – – – –In answer to your final question, from which I shall truncate the distracting pejorative you concluded with:
– “This leaves the question of how do ‘we’ best ‘manage’ our dwindling reserves of fossil fuels? Share it round equally and fairly to slow and cushion the descent as best as possible? Or mess about letting billionaire financiers and banksters maximise short and medium term profits…”
I’m for the first option. However, massive wealth confers massive power, and power never cedes itself voluntarily. We, the people, need to get organised, and that’s why I’m with Extinction Rebellion – we teach, and practice, how to self organise, and how to resist.
And Natasha, I prefer your apparent narrow-focus panic over Lapsed Agnostic’s apparent broad-focus complacency. I agree more with you: disaster is coming, whether some human pushes the nuclear war button or not.
