John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

“Keep it in the ground” is a modern Luddite expression. We don’t need slogans. We need intelligent scientific work and patience.

In twenty years or so, the way technology is going, we will be greatly off-oil, even with no special efforts.

But pushing premature efforts is just religion and may prove dangerous.

Windmills, for example, in many applications, are a poor source of electricity, but they have been pushed on people in many countries in large numbers because they are vaguely understood as being “green.” But costly and rather unreliable electricity cannot be green, rightly conceived. Costliness and unreliability are waste, and waste is never green, and it deprives us of our ability to supply other needs.

Windmills cannot supply base-load electricity (that capacity which allows you to turn on the lights anytime in 24 hours), and they are horribly expensive over their useful life expectancy. Maintenance is costly, as for example each time some minor matter goes wrong, you must get a specialized truck that reaches very high up in a remote place just to service one unit.

They also have been demonstrated as not standing up well in extreme conditions of cold and wind. And because you require base-load power, you still need conventional generators to back up windmills, no matter how many of them you have. So they require redundancy automatically, if you will. That also is not green, rightly conceived. I’m all for experimenting with them, but just rushing out to throw up thousands of them, as some jurisdictions have done, seems foolish.

Solar is showing new promise, but we are not there yet for most applications. I think we are getting close to being able to have a practical roofing or siding material for houses, a great concept, which will greatly reduce demands on the grid, with all the reductions in infrastructure that implies.

Storage batteries for homes, another great idea, are coming along, and I suspect will be quite important in not too many years. They too will remove demand on the grid as well as reducing waste.

If electric cars are to come into their own, we need a different way of distributing and/or storing electricity on a widespread scale. We do not have that yet.

As to the matter of global warming, I think caution is extremely wise.

Only recently, a very able mathematician discovered a couple of serious mathematical errors in the world’s main climate model. The errors make carbon dioxide seem far more important in warming than it is without the errors, thus greatly exaggerating its role in climate. The results seem dramatic but will need to be confirmed.

Now, if we run off and spend countless billions on a threat which may not indeed be quite such a threat, we will deliberately impoverish our societies, robbing our children. That too is not green.

Climate change has been happening for 4.5 billion years. It is actually a part of our evolution.

I don’t in the least doubt that climate change is occurring, but I rather doubt we are responsible for it, and I doubt even more that we can seriously alter it with deliberate plans of global scope. Such schemes resemble too much the old Soviet grand engineering schemes of the 1960s for altering rainfall in a region or for altering the course of vast rivers. Global engineering is potentially quite dangerous.

When you talk about a great and immensely complex thing like the earth, I think it more than a little foolish to pretend that we really do understand it enough to be playing with its mechanisms and fine-tuning this or that. It is as complex as the human brain, an organ we understand only in fairly rudimentary fashion even today, and with which our best medical people have made many errors over decades.

Further, we are entering a solar-minimum period over the next decade or so, and this will undoubtedly make things colder for a while. It might actually prove a useful offset to a general tendency to warming as we continue developing our approaches to energy. Again, show some patience and let our brightest creators do their work. Let’s have no slogans and no crash programs we will almost certainly regret.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

YET FURTHER POSTED RESPONSES TO COMMENTS ON DOUG SAUNDERS’ COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“It is clear that western societies have sublimated their culture to accomodate [sic] new ones. Christmas trees and prayer rooms in schools, for example. And it is a powerful argument…”

The writer misses the point.

We are in a new era of massive global migration, but there is nothing new about migration over time changing the norms and practices of a society. It’s just happening more quickly now, just as everything else is happening more quickly with ever-speeding technological (and that driving economic) change.

Take just one example, Britain. We could equally well choose just about any other old European country, but Britain is very familiar.

In the era BCE, Britain was populated by Celtic and other tribes.

Starting with the Emperor Julius Caesar’s expeditions in 55 BCE and extending beyond Emperor Claudius’s invasion of 43 CE, Britain began centuries of becoming a Romanized society.

After the fifth century CE, the Anglo-Saxon tribes – Germanic people began to conquer. Britain became an Anglo-Saxon country then for hundreds of years.

In 1066, as we all learned in school, the Normans conquered Britain, and it became a Norman society for centuries.

There were many other changes of varying importance over the centuries in Britain, but these big steps in each case meant an entirely new culture and language and political norms and even religion being established.

People have gone from speaking Celtic languages to Latin to German to French, and they now speak the true hybrid, English.

The nation state as we know it is a relatively new thing, mainly a product of the 19th century. Most of human history has not even known nation states, but empires and kingdoms which viewed any new people or territory as a fair gain.

Already in many respects, the 19th century concept of nation state is fraying at the edges. Europe once defined its modern states by language and culture, but already we see them becoming migrant states, the kind of states we have always had in the New World.

This is an unavoidable consequence of a globalized world with relatively cheap transportation and communication and huge movements of goods and services around the planet.

Taking a view anything like the writer of this comment, despite the reasonable tone of most of his remarks, is to enter into a debate defined by the Anders Breveiks of this world.

The only response that makes any sense in the Norwegian response, not the response of the United States or that garrison state Israel, which is fighting a pointless and losing battle with the forces of modern society.

Breveik is a kind of modern murderous Luddite – the people who used to smash machines in the Industrial Revolution in order to keep things as they were – only he smashed people hoping to keep things as they were.

Whether violent or not, these are futile, doomed-to-lose battles.

The future we already have glimmers of: A world of multi-cultural states amongst which a great deal of human migration occurs (just as goods and services move now), and it will require more international governance and treaties, all of which will slowly erode the nation state as we’ve known it.

There is no alternative, unless you want to build fortress states and give up the economic potential of globalism, but even if you do that, you will have to surrender in the end because the forces at work are real and simply overwhelming.

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“Therefore, the fiction that they are Muslim therefore they breed is plain WRONG!”

Of course, the notion is garbage.

Promoting that nonsense is just one more aspect of the Islamophobia being vigorously promoted by special interests.

Any decent economist or demographer can refute the nonsense.

Demographic Transition, the phenomenon of falling birth rates in response to falling death rates, is an established fact.

The death rates fall through the growing prosperity of economic development and all that that entails. Then people automatically have fewer babies since almost all will survive.

The theory explains why countries like Canada or France or Britain cannot replace their own population. Migration is essential unless you want economic decline.

And Israel, too, a western implant with western concepts, cannot replace its population, and it is surrounded by poor nations with high birth rates.

Which only goes to prove how much more intelligent would have been a policy of assisting your neighbors instead of attacking them and spending unholy amounts on the military.

The United States, too, acts quite stupidly in this regard. It should have been dropping dollars on places like Afghanistan or Iraq instead of bombs.