:: gia’s blog ::

I’ve been pinged for a ‘green meme’ in a blog post entitled ‘The Greenscam Part II’. I’m supposed to “write about the ways in which [I’m] consciously “green”, and also the things [I] know [I] should do in a more ecologically friendly way but don’t.”

First, what I find interesting is how being green has become fashionable. Bruce Sterling’s ‘Viridian Manifesto‘, which when I read it was one of of those ‘wow!’ moments, was the first time I ever heard anyone say that being ‘green’ required the wealthy to find it a desirable way to live. He suggested that energy meters needed to be seen as ‘luxurious’, solar and wind power should be sold at a premium to only those who can afford it and that ‘fouling the air’ when we turn on a light “should be considered the stigma of the crass proletarian”. (When I met Bruce Sterling at LIFT a couple years ago, I told him how important the Viridian Manifesto was to me. A year after that, he and I talked about nuclear power for which he is a supporter, albeit a reluctant one.)

I’m not new to the whole environmental thing, which is why when I’ve been attacked and talked to like an idiot by people when talking about green issues it really makes me angry. It also makes me angry when people who hardly know me, and certainly don’t listen to me, claim that I have ‘entrenched beliefs’ because I support nuclear power. Actually, I’ve been told that when you look in the dictionary for ‘un-entrenched beliefs’ there’s just a picture of me there. I’ve not seen that myself, but it sounds right. I am ALL ABOUT questioning ‘beliefs’ which means that my views change. I allow them to change based on facts and information I learn. What I don’t do is blindly follow something I heard 30 years ago, continue to believe it without question and only look to other believers for information which validates my belief. That’s “religion”. [Read more]

I’m watching at least one TED talk a day as Brian and I are off to TED at the end of next week (he’s talking :).

I saw an interesting one this morning by Amory Lovins. It’s about weaning the US off oil by 2040, yet he talks about building more cars, not less and making sure people who can’t afford cars now, can get them. This is what I’m talking about. So much of the Global Warming discussion is about insisting that we stop living our life in the way we currently do and live like people in a 60s commune and that no matter what we are doing to help the environment now, it really just isn’t enough, we can give up even more. It’s just not feasible at all.

So it’s refreshing to see someone offering solutions that don’t include the ‘this is where a miracle happens’ approach of thinking that everyone in the world is going to give up living their lives how they want to.

I want to explain why I think many proponents of Global Warming are ‘fundamentalist’ in their beliefs and behaviour. This is prompted by my previous post and the conversation with Christian X Burnham in the comments.

I started recycling before it was fashionable. I used to walk carrying bags filled with glass, paper and cans to the nearest recycling containers. Then I used to ride my bike with all the recycling. I did this for well over 10 years before my council started home collections. I used washable nappies with my son. I’ve not used disposable menstrual products for almost 10 years now. I’ve used cloth shopping bags one out of two times I go shopping for almost 10 years now. I filled my toilet cisterns with bottles of water eons ago and when it’s just my son. I have never left the tap running when I brush my teeth and go INSANE when Brian does it. I have a water meter. Half of the lightbulbs in my house are those horrible fluorescent things. I’m obsessive about turning off lights in rooms I’m not using and regularly go around turning off all the lights Brian and my son have left on (and shouting at them about it). I wash my clothes at 30 degrees (C). I’ve never owned a clothes drier. I’ve owned three different cars - two were Fiat 500s, one is Brian’s old Ford Focus- all of them were bought when I was working daily in a place which took 1.5 hours each way to get to via public transport (namely: Sky Sport, Network of the World, Three Mills for Sunshine). When my son was in nursery school I would ride 20 miles a day on my bike taking him to and from school. When he was in primary school, we’d take the bus… until I started on Sunshine. Whereas before I got rid of my other cars fairly soon after finishing my job, I’ve kept this car because I need it. Either I drive him to school in 15 minutes or it takes up to 45 minutes on the bus - each way, there, back, there, back. I don’t have the time for an extra 2 hours of travelling a day to take public transport.

I could go on with my ‘green credentials’, but I hope you get the point.

I’ve been pretty keen on cutting down on ‘rubbish’ for a while so have recycled and reused for ages. I’m positive it’s because of this public service film that was always on tv when I was growing up. I grew up in the oil-crisis 70s and so have always turned off lights and kept my heating down. It’s just how I was raised.

So I do all this because I want to, it makes me feel good and because I want the planet to be a nice place to live - I don’t want air pollution and litter everywhere. But that’s really my motivation. I don’t think I have the right to force anyone else to do any of these things. I’d like it if other people wanted to have clean air and less rubbish, too, but I can’t force anyone to want that.

The difference between me and a Global Warming fundie is as vast as the difference between someone who helps an old lady across the road and the Taliban. Let me explain.

Doing good things for other people is hardwired into us. Empathy and selflessness are needed for the survival of our species. Equally we need to be selfish in order to ensure the survival of ourselves as individuals. People constantly have an internal battle between being selfish and selfless. Some lean more towards one than the other.

Many religions worked out that being selfless is better for everyone. If *everyone* helped everyone, no one would need to be selfish. So they wrote all kinds of stuff about loving thy neighbour and helping the poor and giving to charity and forgiving and generally being a good person to everyone. Great.

Now one doesn’t need to be religious in order to do good things for other people, that’s clear, but equally one doesn’t need to be an atheist to do bad things (I wonder what percentage of criminals in jail believe in God?). Still many - not all- religious people think that one can’t truly be a good person unless they believe in God. Most religious people will tolerate non-believers, but when it comes down to it, a non-believer is a bad person because they deny the ultimate Good ie God. For many Christians and Muslims, if you don’t believe in God you are evil and it doesn’t matter if you spend your life doing charity work and giving all your money to the poor, you are, as one of my relatives believes of me, an evil, nasty horrible person who will burn in Hell. Your deeds do not matter, your intention does. This, incidentally, is why it’s perfectly acceptable and desirable for a fundie Muslim to blow themselves and many others up - because their *intention* is good.

One step up from that is the religious person who doesn’t want there to be ANYONE alive who doesn’t believe exactly what they believe. They use physical and psychological threats in order to make other people comply. Some resort to actual violence.

I think where we are at right now is the ‘psychological threat’ stage of the whole Global Warming thing. What is the difference between ‘If you don’t change your whole entire life and do everything inhumanly possible to save the planet YOU WILL DIE A HORRIBLE WEATHER RELATED DEATH!!!’ and ‘If you don’t believe in God and follow every single rule he has decreed YOU WILL BURN FOREVER IN THE FIREY PITS OF HELL!!!’…? And when someone says, ‘Hey, I think there might be a different/better way of doing things’ they are met with cries of ‘HEATHEN!!!’. And if someone says, ‘I don’t want to stop driving my car/wear a burkha’ the fundies try everything they can to force that person to do something they don’t want to do. And we can’t even question things in polite company for fear of being branded an evil person and getting shouted and screamed at by a fundie.

The other week Deek/Dean Whitbread (the guy in this video, Google him, I won’t give him a link) actually told me during a discussion about ‘the environment’ that he couldn’t see any reason why people needed to fly in planes. When I tried telling him, ‘No, you don’t have any reason to take a plane, other people do’, he went mental shouting ‘blahblahlah! No they don’t! anticapitalistnonesense!!! blahblahblah!!’ I tried to say that it was his choice if he didn’t ever want to fly again, but he couldn’t force anyone else to not fly, but that was met with, ‘80ssocialistnonsense!!! blahblahblah!!!!’

I don’t see why that’s any different from someone who is anti-choice when it comes to abortion. Can anyone tell me what the difference is?

This is the big problem with the whole Global Warming thing, Environmentalists have become Fundamentalists… And really the claims of ‘But it’s too late not to do anything drastic!!’ sound a whole lot like, ‘The end is nigh!’ Don’t believe me? Why not read what Patrick Moore, founder member of Greenpeace, thinks of what the environmental movement he started has become…

I am very, very wary of believing anything I’m told without questioning it. As I get older I analyse my ‘beliefs’ more and more and try and make sure I can rationally justify everything that I do, say or think. Once I started doing that I found a lot of things that I previously believed were built on nothing more concrete than, well, belief. So whereas I see the valid points in the whole Global Warming thing, I’m not a ‘true believer’. The good things I do aren’t motivated by Global Warming and I think there may actually be some other things we need to focus on that are more important than Global Warming. (I don’t think saying that invalidates any of the ‘environmentally friendly’ things I do… does it?)

If you think I’m a bad or evil person for thinking that Global Warming isn’t the single most pressing problem the human race faces, then I invite you to look at your own beliefs and work out what they are built on. Here are some questions to get you thinking:

• Do you want to help all people on the planet or do you think that humans are like a cancer and only do harm to the planet?
• Do the good things people do for the environment, sometimes even unknowingly, count even if they don’t believe in Global Warming, or do they have to support Global Warming for it to really make a difference?
• Do the good things people do for the environment like having their loft insulated and their windows draft-proofed count even if they also do ‘bad’ things like drive short distances they could walk?
• Is there a point at which people are doing enough for the environment or can they always do more?
• Is Western civilisation built entirely upon ’sins’ like money, waste and science?
• Is progress bad?
• Do you think the government should legislate to force everyone to live ‘ethically’?
• Do you think people should be punished for their ’sins’ such as driving cars, taking a plane, using a clothes drier instead of hanging their laundry up?
• Is Jeremy Clarkson the devil in disguise?

That last one is a trick question.

The Lifeboat Foundation is, in their words, “… a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a technological singularity.’

Their advisory boards include people like Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey De Grey, Ian Pearson, Anders Sandberg, Professor Noel Sharkey, Ed Begley Jr (!)… and Brian. :)

It freakin’ RAWKS!

I’ve been into all of this transhumanist, nanotechnology threat, space threat, (un)friendly AI, singularity, existential stuff for years now. They got in touch with Brian after the release of ‘Sunshine‘ (which is all about existentialism) asking if he’d be interested in being on their particle physics board and I encouraged him to accept their invitation. I don’t know what they do exactly other than stay up-to-date on all the research, talk about all kinds of possible scary shit and try to advise companies and governments, but I’m glad they exist.

Anyway, I was catching up on the blog and found the Top 10 Existential Risks post. They asked their readers to put a bunch of risks in order of severity by asking them how much of a hypothetical $100 million they’d give to each risk. The results:

$23.9 Biological viruses…
$17.9 Space Threats asteroids…
$13.9 Governments abusive power…
$10.2 Nuclear holocaust…
$8.8 Nanotechnology gray goo…
$8.6 Other
$8.5 Superintelligent AI un-friendly…
$7.2 Environmental global warming…
$0.7 Extraterrestrial invasion…
$0.4 Simulation Shut Down if we live in one…
$100 million total

I was obviously interested to see just how low ‘global warming’ comes on the list. Similarly when Bjorn Lomborg asked economists to rate various issues based on investment return this is what they found: the highest priority was investment in stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS, the lowest priority (below a ‘migration project’) were three projects addressing Global Warming (optimal carbon tax, the Kyoto protocol and value-at-risk carbon tax).

I guess this is my issue with ‘Global Warming’- it isn’t quite as important to the survival of the human race as other things. I certainly don’t deny that it’s getting warmer or, at least, that the weather is changing. I can’t say for sure that it has anything to do with burning fossil fuels, but I strongly lean towards thinking that it does. That’s merely a ‘gut feeling’ though. There’s been fairly convincing research that states that we don’t have that much of an effect, but it’s best to err on the side of caution… so, you know, just boil enough water in your kettle for your cup of tea, recycle, ladidadida.

The thing I worry about is that far too many people are concentrating on and investing in something that, in the grand scheme of things, really isn’t that big a deal. I’m far more shit scared of Superintelligent unFriendly AI, than I am of it getting a bit warmer in the north. I totally freak out when I think of Nanotech Grey Goo, not when I think that some seaside town they forgot to close down might have to up sticks and move. Asteroids, run away viruses, religious fundies violently taking over, nuclear war- it all shits me up something fierce- far more than the idea of a few more hurricanes (hell, I’ve got a solution: don’t live in Florida).

“Ooooo nobody needs to fly in planes…” “Ooooo nobody needs to drive a car…” Piss off, yes, I do. You mightn’t, but I do. End of. This is the other problem I have with the whole Global Warming thing - it’s created a new kind of fundamentalist. Why oh why oh why does *anyone* think that they can force other people to live by their own personal beliefs? I think being a ‘liberal’ means that you search for solutions which allows everyone to live the way they choose, with some restrictions obviously. It doesn’t mean forcing everyone to live like a freakin’ granola-eating hippy…

Steve Packard at Depleted Cranium wrote an interesting article a few weeks back (which Sizemore sent to me), ‘The Top Ten Things Environmentalists Need To Learn‘. It deals with Environmental Fundamentalism and offers some good advice and information.

The day there’s a global concert/awareness-raising event about the serious risk, no, not serious risk, the inevitable destruction of the human race due to an asteroid impact (cue Madonna: ‘So, hey, yea! Invest in space exploration! And let’s learn how to manage those risks from space!! Now, do you wanna daaaaance?!’), is the day I will believe that we just might survive…

It seems that everyone’s going mental about the fact that we’re going to get some new nuclear power plants built in the UK. Apart from believing the inaccurate information relayed by the media, I suspect the reason some people are against nuclear power is that they don’t understand things like risk or radiation.

I thought I would use the opportunity to re-post some of the articles I wrote for the Potential Energy project I did 18 months ago (Here are all of my articles)

This one is about RADIATION and was originally posted here on May 30, 2006.

Radiation is the one thing that scares most people about the whole idea of “nuclear”. Radiation Sickness, Radiation Burns, Radioactive Fallout… Again, I think most people’s ideas about “nuclear” were formed during the Cold War when, quite rightly, we all had a lot to fear from the threat of nuclear war. Let’s all just get one thing straight:

Nuclear Power Is Not Nuclear War.

They are as different as Jedis and Siths in ‘Star Wars’. Both Jedis and Siths use the Force. Jedis use it for good, Siths use it for evil. The Force itself is not inherently evil nor inherently good. Likewise, nuclear fission itself is not a moral nor immoral process. To approach it as anything other than amoral is as daft as believing there is some innate goodness or badness in ‘water’.

Anyway, the question ‘what exactly is radiation’ was top of my mind over the bank holiday weekend as my husband- a high-energy particle physicist at CERN- and I wandered around picturesque villages in the Pennines. While downing pints in the pub he gave me a first year physics course on radiation. This is what I learned:

Very basically, radiation is energy that is emitted in the form of electromagnetic waves or particles. There are lots of different types of radiation that you may have heard of: Solar Radiation, Thermal Radiation, Cosmic Radiation, Hawking Radiation… The most well-known kind of radiation, however, is Electromagnetic Radiation.

Electromagnetic Radiation is what allows you to listen to the radio or to quickly cook your food in your microwave oven as Radio Waves and Microwaves are on the low frequency end of the Electromagnetic Radiation spectrum.

Another type of Electromagnetic Radiation is Light - Infrared, Visible and Ultraviolet Light. Visible light is, of course, the light we see, Infrared is the type of light used in night vision equipment and Ultraviolet light is what tans our skin when we are outside.

If you’ve ever had an Xray at the doctor or the dentist, you’ve been bombarded with Electromagnetic Radiation. Xrays pass through the soft tissues of your body, but are blocked by dense tissues such as teeth or bones.

The highest frequency Electromagnetic Radiation is called Gamma Rays. Gamma Rays are produced in PET scans, astrophysical phenomena such as Gamma Ray bursts or in radioactive decay.

It’s important to point out that the boundary between what one calls Xrays and what one calls Gamma Rays can be vague - for example, a photon with an energy of 10 keV can be called either an Xray or a Gamma Ray. ALL types of Electromagnetic Radiation are photons, the only difference being the amount of energy carried by the photon.

For our purposes the only other types of radiation we need to be concerned with are Alpha Radiation, Beta Radiation and Neutron Radiation- all occur as result of nuclear fission either natural or man-made.

Alpha Radiation is essentially the same as a helium atom. The only difference being it doesn’t have any electrons. It only travels a few centimetres in the air and can be stopped by a piece of tissue paper.

Beta Radiation is the release of an electron from a neutron rich element. They have a range of a few metres in the air and can be stopped by a few millimetres of aluminium.

Neutron Radiation is made up of ‘free’ neutrons. It is a concern as it is very good at making almost everything it encounters radioactive. Neutron radiation is very penetrating, but can be shielded by water, plastic, borated metals, and concrete. No little animation, I’m afraid.

We are all immersed in naturally occurring radiation- from the buildings we live and work in, the food we eat, Cosmic Rays from space, medical treatments. Radon Gas makes up the majority of our annual radiation dose.

The levels of Radon Gas fluctuates depending on things like the geological make-up of the area or whether you open your windows or not. Simply by spending two weeks on holiday in Cornwall, you will receive more radiation in a year than you would living next to a nuclear power plant.

Too much radiation, as we all know, can be harmful…. but how much is ‘too much’ and do the different types of radiation have different effects on our bodies? My next post I will look into the effects of radiation on the human body.

Also read: Half-Term Half-Life and Kylie, Cornwall or Reactor Cores?.

I’m getting a bit tired of the so-called ‘Environmentalists’. They’ve become blinkered, dogmatic and mindless. Somewhere along the way they got confused and are now no different to me than the people who blow themselves up in the name of religion. Enviro-Fundamentalists.

Like all Fundamentalists, the Enviro-Fundies seem to want to send us back to a time in our mythical past where everything was ‘good’ and ‘clean’ (when exactly was that?). They insist that everyone view the world through their eyes and will accept absolutely *no* questioning or debate. Also, they have confused ‘energy’ with ‘pollution’ and seem to base all of their proclamations and demands on this mistake.

I have already stated that insisting that the only way we Humans can Save the Planet is by ‘Conserving Energy’ will be the end of our civilisation. I genuinely can’t see how conserving energy can be good. If we don’t continue exploring space and learning about the Universe, WE WILL DIE OUT. End of. As ‘they’ say: If the dinosaurs had a space programme, they’d still be here. Conserving energy is not the way to ‘boldly go’.

Let’s use the human body as an analogy. The Enviro-Fundie want us to be someone who eats only beans and pulses (solar and wind power only with no thought of a clean baseload energy source) and is therefore so weak that they can’t actually do anything other than sit indoors and tell each other stories lit by a fricken ugly energy-saving light bulb. If they tried to go for a run, they collapse out of exhaustion within 10 minutes. So, they just sit indoors, wear jumpers and do pretty much nothing. Except maybe juggle by candlelight.

I, however, want us to be a person who had an unlimited amount of high quality fresh and varied food (a nuclear baseload with personal solar or wind sources so that people can cut their bills a bit), who is fit, runs 30 miles a week, has 2.4 kids and a gorgeous partner, sends their elderly parents to ‘warmer climes’ for the summer, takes their family on at least two big holidays a year, throws great parties AND is the CEO of a multi-national company. You can’t do that living off beans.

Conserving energy is for losers.

Now, I’ve got a question: why did everyone go so fricken crazy over the heatwave in 2003 which killed 30,000 across Europe? It was seen as a ‘taste of things to come’ when Global Warming really takes hold. But every winter in the UK alone there are approximately 40,000 deaths due to the cold. Why are deaths due to heat in the summer deemed as far worse than the far more deaths due to cold in the winter? Oh yea. ‘Dying from the cold’ doesn’t fit in with their fundamentalist views of the risk of Global Warming…

I assume that Enviro-Fundies are equally concerned about preventing deaths due to cold, too, right? So I wonder how they propose to keep old people in the UK warm during the dark, cold winter months in order to keep them from dying? Solar power?