30 years ago I was an anti-nuclear activist. However as I learned more about nuclear power the more I realized I was wrong. I still travel in the same anti-nuclear (anti-gmo etc) circles. Over the last few years I have noticed that I am less of a voice in the wilderness. So to your point I am hopeful.
One argument I use is to remind my eco friends who are critical of "climate change deniers" that they say such people should attend to the scientific consensus. Why then I ask do you reject the overwhelming evidence of the safety of nuclear power or GMOs. At the time of Fukushima I was arguing that more people died every month in coal mining than died from the Fukushima accident
Genetically modified crops seem like another place where environmental groups were successfully able to motivate popular distrust and limit a technology and where we might wonder what could have been. Actual GMOs don't seem too game changing, and certainly genetics in general has failed to live up to the promise it seemed to have in the 90s, but I wonder if the relatively simple and relatively low risk field of plant genetics could have gone much further if it was encouraged rather than restrained.
GMO producers fought hard against labelling and regulation. That lack of transparency leaves a lot of space for conspiracy, and fighting tooth and nail against transparency only emboldens opponents.
What instances of GMOs being regulated out of existence can you think of?
While Europe is, well, Europe, my understanding is that the US has basically been able to get the benefits of GMO crops, and there have not been significant barriers to market entry here.
I don't think they were regulated out of existence. In the US, I think that there was a successful mobilization of public opinion against them that retarded investment and interest in them.
I'm skeptical of how much this matters to deter investment and interest in the absence of regulation. I agree that public opinion was far too hostile to GMOs, but a lot of ag products operate in industrial supply chains where I wouldn't expect this to make a huge impact. For example, as far as I'm aware there was no innovation slowdown for GMOs in corn, soy, or cotton - ~90% of the US crop is GMO.
The area that I think this could make a difference would be produce, or lightly processed foods (e.g. fruits with blemishes that get sent to become juice instead, raisins, etc). Additionally, it sounds like human consumption fears might be partially behind the slow adoption of GMO wheat and potatoes, but I don't know a ton about that. Is this more the direction you were taking? For somebody who's not familiar with the promises of 90's GMO promises, what do you think we missed out on?
I definitely don't want to make myself out to be an expert here, and we're dealing with counterfactuals. I think in general, we were overoptimistic about our abilities to make genetically modified anything and have it be way better than what evolution came up with, and the same might have intractably been true of crops.
But I think the 90s GMO promise was the idea that you could make crops with substantially better yields, better pest resistance, and lower fertilizer use than the natural varietals. And my sense is -- again, not an expert -- that after an initial wave of attempts to genetically modify crops, there was a sense that a backlash was brewing and we only ever got the first generation of attempts, rather than a continuous iteration on what works.
>after an initial wave of attempts to genetically modify crops, there was a sense that a backlash was brewing and we only ever got the first generation of attempts, rather than a continuous iteration on what works.
I don't think this is the case. Bayer (who bought Monsanto), DuPont, and the universities are improving seed yields through further investments in these product lines. New hybridizations and GMOs are released each year.
I think there's a case that there could be more investment and deployment into GMO produce and staples (wheat, potatoes, rice), and there is low-hanging, techno-optimist fruit that hasn't been pursued out of consumer concern. I'm less convinced that continued innovation in existing GMO commodity crops is. Those are established and popular lines of business with farmers and seed science companies.
In so much as I can see a story for less investment in seed science on the corn/soy/cotton branch than might have occurred counterfactually, I think that's more of an industry competition/limited market size thing, rather than a Monsanto being concerned about what the activists think of them type thing. There really aren't that many seed companies, ag's a small part of the economy, and seeds are a small part of the ag sector.
Nov 17, 2022·edited Nov 19, 2022Liked by Brink Lindsey
Another link is that the "Promethean" attitude became associated with a kind of problem denialism in which (to exaggerate) the response to a problem -- safety, environmental harm, inequality -- was not "Right! What's the least cost way to deal with that?" but rather, "Bad messenger! Bad!" This led to an "alliance" between legitimate and illegitimate complainers.
I grant this does not explain the existence of the "illegitimate" complainers, which is a larger cultural phenomenon.
And that inflection in energy use probably IS just a response to oil price shocks. Presumably we should hope to see a re-establishment of the upward trajectory when enough energy production does not require oxidizing carbon atoms.
Good point. If we were to have had an "ecomodernist" environmental movement from the start, it would have needed the embrace and support of major players in industry. But of course, industry's overwhelmingly dominant reaction was to minimize problems and claim that doing anything about them was too expensive. Once again, it's really hard to jump straight from thesis to synthesis -- a lot of zero-sum head-butting and arguing past each other is generally needed first.
Nov 18, 2022·edited Nov 18, 2022Liked by Brink Lindsey
I share Brink’s sentiment. I fully agree with his view of prevailing statism and anti-Promethean backlash. However, I think that he is confused and still does not see the full picture. Statism, risk-aversion, and backlash against the idea that humanity should remake the planet to suit our needs, are all important pieces of this picture. As well as suffocating bureaucracy, which he alludes to here, but fails to clearly discuss.
Signaling is the most important missing piece. As people get richer, they satisfy more and more their immediate physiological needs. So now they are not forced to worry that much about a world of atoms around them and start thinking about other stuff. While Maslow’s pyramid is underrated, it is built on a very idealized view of human nature. The biggest change as you go upward in the pyramid of preferences is a shift from physical and objective concepts to various forms of signaling. Together with economic stagnation, this turns everything into a zero-sum game over relative status.
“Elephant in the brain” by Robin Hanson is a perfect explanation of this point. He argues that as humanity gets richer, it becomes ‘status-drunk’ and abandons growth for the sake of navel-gazing and status-seeking.
50 years ago most kids wanted to build up world around them. That's why they wanted to be builders: inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs. Now kids mostly care about winning in signaling and status-seeking games. So they dream to become influencers with millions of followers, and spending their life talking about food/pets/memes.
I'm a contrarian here. The Techno-utopians have got it wrong. This issue is not our failure to innovate and advance, it is the inability of humans and human systems to keep up. All technology has it upsides and downsides -- Nuclear power, AI, genetic engineering, social media -- all have huge potential for destruction. A slowdown, IMO, is appropriate and welcome. Add to that the fact that human fulfillment goes beyond having enough stuff -- it includes ideas like justice and wisdom and self-actualization -- ideas that technology is unlikely to deliver for us.
In my happy version of human history from here, we eventually get our act together and learn to "live wisely and agreeably and well" -- in which case we can look back on the current age of stasis as a fortuitous pause while we allowed our wisdom to catch up with our knowledge. Maybe!
We really need a very Promethean response to climate change: electrical grid built, geothermal wells drilled, infrastructure to be climate proofed, orders of magnitude more solar wind nuclear plants to be built to power CCS machines, I think the dead weight loss of taxing net emissions of CO2 is relatively low, but it will require a global shift of less consumption to more investment so the cost in consumption will be noticeable
I'm on board with that vision. No need to stop innovating, just turn our innovation toward getting better at solving real problems rather than pushing for straight GDP growth (or "more stuff" if you will). We need to get the incentives right and, more important, decide roughly what we are trying to accomplish (my vote: keep the experiment running). Then I'm good with turning the innovation economy loose to find the balance between sustainability, more stuff, better quality, and more equitable distributions (might as well, while we are talking about happy versions of future history).
Apparently we are not very far apart. I'm just really impressed by how many atoms (as opposed to electrons) will have to be moved to get atmospheric CO2 concentration under control (lots f stuff and definitely part of GDP, though not consumption), and how much fun that could be!
Totally in favor of more good stuff...deciding what's good and distributing it more equitably is the hard part. The point being that stuff is necessary but not sufficient for human fulfillment. Learning about and understanding ourselves and each other and our place in the universe is probably the best part about being human, once our basic needs are met. Also, hot fudge sundaes.
Probably not much different from what you said above. Both are good but I don't see doing things to have more "stuff" done right means we have to give up a lot of non-stuff.
The area I think most about in this regard is climate change. It looks to me like with the rapid progress in solar, wind, geothermal technologies that we will be able to achieve net zero CO2 emissions without a big dent in the rate of growth of consumption of marketed "stuff." [Admittedly avoiding the harm of CO2 in the atmosphere is itself a kind of "stuff."]
The link or at least A link was the naïve instinct to mitigate environmental harm by controlling, regulating the specific technology that produced the harm rather than controlling regulating or in particular taxing the harm itself. In the naïve "environmentalist" approach one does not weigh the environmental harm against the benefits of the activity of which the harm is a by product, or does so only in the crude way of reducing the harm as much as "feasible."
Thanks a lot. I did read this work some time back, and am also interested in Dan Kahan's related work on cultural cognition of risk. In a fun coincidence, I worked with Wildavsky's son Ben for a couple of years at the Kauffman Foundation.
Very well researched and presented. Our weaponization of guilt from our successes has also played a role. The public self flagellation has manifested itself in oodles of regulations with lists of things we are told we should not think or say.
Have you ever seen the show For All Mankind on Apple TV? It actually explores an alternate history in which this anti-Promethean backlash never happened and imagined some heights we.could have achieved.
Other countries like France and Japan have been making heavy use of nuclear technology for decades. Although it doubtlessly contributes to their prosperity, and the lack of carbon emissions is a solid benefit, it doesn't seem to have been sufficient to bring them much closer to the Henry Adams curve. Exponential change levels off and turns sigmoid eventually (in the best-case scenarios).
It's a good counterpoint, but my understanding is that French and Japanese plants all still rely on 1960s designs. The current nuclear power industry seems content with regulatory and technological stasis. With the US dropping out, any push toward cheaper/more reliable or on to fusion ran out of steam. Perhaps a strong push wouldn't have delivered, but it would have been nice to know. At the very least, we'd be in a much stronger position regarding climate change.
I see your point, but many other countries invested in nuclear energy, from the USSR to Brazil to South Africa to China*. When many different countries with different political systems all have roughly similar outcomes with a given technology, I start to suspect that the limits are more physical and economic than political.
*China uses nuclear power and is currently doing some very sophisticated fusion research, but they still burn more fossil fuels that anyone else. It's possible that the fusion research will pay off. I'm skeptical, and even more skeptical of the economics.
According to wikipedia, in Japan..." In 2022 ten reactors were operational producing about 5% of Japan's electricity."
Regarding France... "By end of April 2022 it was reported that 28 of France’s 56 nuclear reactors were offline. French nuclear energy production has fallen to the lowest level since 1993 and it is expected to fall short by at least 25% compared to usual production levels in the winter of 2022/2023."
France has also never been at the technological frontier, for various reasons. If the US had continued expanding nuclear power it would have done so in a much bigger and typically more dynamic market. Given the US's place in the world, it likely would have inspired other countries to follow suit. Maybe still not the Henry Adams curve, but I don't think France and Japan quite foreclose Brink's argument.
I hate to be critical because I very much follow the spirit of this essay, but referencing "cold fusion" is pretty sus. I've never seen any reason to think the concept is fundamentally nonphysical.
I'm deeply skeptical that cold fusion is a thing. I still found Hall's argument interesting -- like I said, it's a wacky book, but it changed my mind on important questions and, because of that, I found its less successful provocations still worth reading and thinking about.
This post is remarkably perverse. Technologies like supersonic airliners and nuclear power failed because they turned out to have no operational need or business case (and often significant risks or drawbacks). I've told the nuclear story tersely at https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/why-nuclear-power-is-bad-for-your-wallet-and-the-climate, and more fully at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2022.107122. Both explain why the nuclear industry's slow-motion collapse speeds climate protection by freeing up investment, grid capacity, talent, and attention for cheaper, faster, hence more climate-effective competitors. The extraordinary success of modern renewables (~300 GW/y, ~95% share of global net additions of generating capacity) and efficient energy use (about half of past and prospective global decarbonization) should be celebrated, not ignored or denigrated. But apparently Brink Lindsey considers some technologies praiseworthy and others injurious for obscure noneconomic reasons not explained and far from obvious, at least to this lifelong technological practitioner.
The most bizarre part of the argument seems to say that using less energy to provide the same or better services, by using it more effectively through smarter technology and design, is somehow harmful to society. I do not subscribe to an energy theory of value. Energy is a means to societal ends, not an end in itself. Using more energy than we need to do the job at least cost is mere waste.
The emergent suite of climate solutions depends strongly on better technology and design, aggressively developed, refined, and deployed. This results not from opposing technological progress, but from choosing technologies that make sense and make money. This essay seems just a fancy stew of sour grapes because the writers' technological preferences were invalided by markets. Sorry. But as you grieve the losers, just try the winners. You might like them.
I like nuclear power, but I am sceptical whether it will ever be really cheap because of the security issues which drive up both capex and opex. Solar is the cheapest power ever connected to the grid, and I can say with confidence that excessive regulation is why we don’t already have more cheap solar both connected to the grid and behind the meter. Same for wind, not quite as cheap but blows more at night. It is a shame for the US that Manchin’s permitting bill didn’t get up.
> how could the dominant reaction have been anything other than horror and anger at the scale of the casual, thoughtless destruction? How could the immediate response to “what is to be done?” have been anything other than to try to restrain the technologies that were causing and threatening harm?
I don't see how it's so inevitable. There aren't really what Lucas would call micro-foundations provided to explain this backlash, so how can we be sure of anything about it? Wouldn't mere change on the margin serve as a null hypothesis?
I'm also skeptical that the Holocaust is to blame. My understanding is that the Nazis themselves were already proto-environmentalists who were also anti-smoking before that cause got taken up in the US.
30 years ago I was an anti-nuclear activist. However as I learned more about nuclear power the more I realized I was wrong. I still travel in the same anti-nuclear (anti-gmo etc) circles. Over the last few years I have noticed that I am less of a voice in the wilderness. So to your point I am hopeful.
One argument I use is to remind my eco friends who are critical of "climate change deniers" that they say such people should attend to the scientific consensus. Why then I ask do you reject the overwhelming evidence of the safety of nuclear power or GMOs. At the time of Fukushima I was arguing that more people died every month in coal mining than died from the Fukushima accident
Genetically modified crops seem like another place where environmental groups were successfully able to motivate popular distrust and limit a technology and where we might wonder what could have been. Actual GMOs don't seem too game changing, and certainly genetics in general has failed to live up to the promise it seemed to have in the 90s, but I wonder if the relatively simple and relatively low risk field of plant genetics could have gone much further if it was encouraged rather than restrained.
Very good point.
GMO producers fought hard against labelling and regulation. That lack of transparency leaves a lot of space for conspiracy, and fighting tooth and nail against transparency only emboldens opponents.
What instances of GMOs being regulated out of existence can you think of?
While Europe is, well, Europe, my understanding is that the US has basically been able to get the benefits of GMO crops, and there have not been significant barriers to market entry here.
I don't think they were regulated out of existence. In the US, I think that there was a successful mobilization of public opinion against them that retarded investment and interest in them.
I'm skeptical of how much this matters to deter investment and interest in the absence of regulation. I agree that public opinion was far too hostile to GMOs, but a lot of ag products operate in industrial supply chains where I wouldn't expect this to make a huge impact. For example, as far as I'm aware there was no innovation slowdown for GMOs in corn, soy, or cotton - ~90% of the US crop is GMO.
The area that I think this could make a difference would be produce, or lightly processed foods (e.g. fruits with blemishes that get sent to become juice instead, raisins, etc). Additionally, it sounds like human consumption fears might be partially behind the slow adoption of GMO wheat and potatoes, but I don't know a ton about that. Is this more the direction you were taking? For somebody who's not familiar with the promises of 90's GMO promises, what do you think we missed out on?
I definitely don't want to make myself out to be an expert here, and we're dealing with counterfactuals. I think in general, we were overoptimistic about our abilities to make genetically modified anything and have it be way better than what evolution came up with, and the same might have intractably been true of crops.
But I think the 90s GMO promise was the idea that you could make crops with substantially better yields, better pest resistance, and lower fertilizer use than the natural varietals. And my sense is -- again, not an expert -- that after an initial wave of attempts to genetically modify crops, there was a sense that a backlash was brewing and we only ever got the first generation of attempts, rather than a continuous iteration on what works.
>after an initial wave of attempts to genetically modify crops, there was a sense that a backlash was brewing and we only ever got the first generation of attempts, rather than a continuous iteration on what works.
I don't think this is the case. Bayer (who bought Monsanto), DuPont, and the universities are improving seed yields through further investments in these product lines. New hybridizations and GMOs are released each year.
I think there's a case that there could be more investment and deployment into GMO produce and staples (wheat, potatoes, rice), and there is low-hanging, techno-optimist fruit that hasn't been pursued out of consumer concern. I'm less convinced that continued innovation in existing GMO commodity crops is. Those are established and popular lines of business with farmers and seed science companies.
In so much as I can see a story for less investment in seed science on the corn/soy/cotton branch than might have occurred counterfactually, I think that's more of an industry competition/limited market size thing, rather than a Monsanto being concerned about what the activists think of them type thing. There really aren't that many seed companies, ag's a small part of the economy, and seeds are a small part of the ag sector.
Sounds like you're better informed than I, I cede to your understanding of the situation.
Another link is that the "Promethean" attitude became associated with a kind of problem denialism in which (to exaggerate) the response to a problem -- safety, environmental harm, inequality -- was not "Right! What's the least cost way to deal with that?" but rather, "Bad messenger! Bad!" This led to an "alliance" between legitimate and illegitimate complainers.
I grant this does not explain the existence of the "illegitimate" complainers, which is a larger cultural phenomenon.
And that inflection in energy use probably IS just a response to oil price shocks. Presumably we should hope to see a re-establishment of the upward trajectory when enough energy production does not require oxidizing carbon atoms.
Good point. If we were to have had an "ecomodernist" environmental movement from the start, it would have needed the embrace and support of major players in industry. But of course, industry's overwhelmingly dominant reaction was to minimize problems and claim that doing anything about them was too expensive. Once again, it's really hard to jump straight from thesis to synthesis -- a lot of zero-sum head-butting and arguing past each other is generally needed first.
There is a nice anti-anti-Promethean rant by David Deutch on the recent podcast with Razeb Khan at "Unsupervised Learning."
I share Brink’s sentiment. I fully agree with his view of prevailing statism and anti-Promethean backlash. However, I think that he is confused and still does not see the full picture. Statism, risk-aversion, and backlash against the idea that humanity should remake the planet to suit our needs, are all important pieces of this picture. As well as suffocating bureaucracy, which he alludes to here, but fails to clearly discuss.
Signaling is the most important missing piece. As people get richer, they satisfy more and more their immediate physiological needs. So now they are not forced to worry that much about a world of atoms around them and start thinking about other stuff. While Maslow’s pyramid is underrated, it is built on a very idealized view of human nature. The biggest change as you go upward in the pyramid of preferences is a shift from physical and objective concepts to various forms of signaling. Together with economic stagnation, this turns everything into a zero-sum game over relative status.
“Elephant in the brain” by Robin Hanson is a perfect explanation of this point. He argues that as humanity gets richer, it becomes ‘status-drunk’ and abandons growth for the sake of navel-gazing and status-seeking.
50 years ago most kids wanted to build up world around them. That's why they wanted to be builders: inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs. Now kids mostly care about winning in signaling and status-seeking games. So they dream to become influencers with millions of followers, and spending their life talking about food/pets/memes.
You'll need to read my next essay, which has to do with the very point you're making here.
I'm a contrarian here. The Techno-utopians have got it wrong. This issue is not our failure to innovate and advance, it is the inability of humans and human systems to keep up. All technology has it upsides and downsides -- Nuclear power, AI, genetic engineering, social media -- all have huge potential for destruction. A slowdown, IMO, is appropriate and welcome. Add to that the fact that human fulfillment goes beyond having enough stuff -- it includes ideas like justice and wisdom and self-actualization -- ideas that technology is unlikely to deliver for us.
In my happy version of human history from here, we eventually get our act together and learn to "live wisely and agreeably and well" -- in which case we can look back on the current age of stasis as a fortuitous pause while we allowed our wisdom to catch up with our knowledge. Maybe!
We really need a very Promethean response to climate change: electrical grid built, geothermal wells drilled, infrastructure to be climate proofed, orders of magnitude more solar wind nuclear plants to be built to power CCS machines, I think the dead weight loss of taxing net emissions of CO2 is relatively low, but it will require a global shift of less consumption to more investment so the cost in consumption will be noticeable
I'm on board with that vision. No need to stop innovating, just turn our innovation toward getting better at solving real problems rather than pushing for straight GDP growth (or "more stuff" if you will). We need to get the incentives right and, more important, decide roughly what we are trying to accomplish (my vote: keep the experiment running). Then I'm good with turning the innovation economy loose to find the balance between sustainability, more stuff, better quality, and more equitable distributions (might as well, while we are talking about happy versions of future history).
Apparently we are not very far apart. I'm just really impressed by how many atoms (as opposed to electrons) will have to be moved to get atmospheric CO2 concentration under control (lots f stuff and definitely part of GDP, though not consumption), and how much fun that could be!
"Having more stuff" seems more likely to advance justice and self actualization (and require more wisdom) that the contrary.
Totally in favor of more good stuff...deciding what's good and distributing it more equitably is the hard part. The point being that stuff is necessary but not sufficient for human fulfillment. Learning about and understanding ourselves and each other and our place in the universe is probably the best part about being human, once our basic needs are met. Also, hot fudge sundaes.
I just don't think the trade-off between stuff and non-stuff is very steep if it exists at all.
Just now looking at this again. Tell me more about what you mean by this stuff/non stuff trade off.
Probably not much different from what you said above. Both are good but I don't see doing things to have more "stuff" done right means we have to give up a lot of non-stuff.
The area I think most about in this regard is climate change. It looks to me like with the rapid progress in solar, wind, geothermal technologies that we will be able to achieve net zero CO2 emissions without a big dent in the rate of growth of consumption of marketed "stuff." [Admittedly avoiding the harm of CO2 in the atmosphere is itself a kind of "stuff."]
Thanks! I think you are right...
Now that's a deep question!
The link or at least A link was the naïve instinct to mitigate environmental harm by controlling, regulating the specific technology that produced the harm rather than controlling regulating or in particular taxing the harm itself. In the naïve "environmentalist" approach one does not weigh the environmental harm against the benefits of the activity of which the harm is a by product, or does so only in the crude way of reducing the harm as much as "feasible."
Suggest you read about Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky’s work in the 1970s about their cultural theory of risk perception.
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520050631/risk-and-culture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_theory_of_risk
Thanks a lot. I did read this work some time back, and am also interested in Dan Kahan's related work on cultural cognition of risk. In a fun coincidence, I worked with Wildavsky's son Ben for a couple of years at the Kauffman Foundation.
Very well researched and presented. Our weaponization of guilt from our successes has also played a role. The public self flagellation has manifested itself in oodles of regulations with lists of things we are told we should not think or say.
Have you ever seen the show For All Mankind on Apple TV? It actually explores an alternate history in which this anti-Promethean backlash never happened and imagined some heights we.could have achieved.
Yes I love it!
Other countries like France and Japan have been making heavy use of nuclear technology for decades. Although it doubtlessly contributes to their prosperity, and the lack of carbon emissions is a solid benefit, it doesn't seem to have been sufficient to bring them much closer to the Henry Adams curve. Exponential change levels off and turns sigmoid eventually (in the best-case scenarios).
It's a good counterpoint, but my understanding is that French and Japanese plants all still rely on 1960s designs. The current nuclear power industry seems content with regulatory and technological stasis. With the US dropping out, any push toward cheaper/more reliable or on to fusion ran out of steam. Perhaps a strong push wouldn't have delivered, but it would have been nice to know. At the very least, we'd be in a much stronger position regarding climate change.
I see your point, but many other countries invested in nuclear energy, from the USSR to Brazil to South Africa to China*. When many different countries with different political systems all have roughly similar outcomes with a given technology, I start to suspect that the limits are more physical and economic than political.
*China uses nuclear power and is currently doing some very sophisticated fusion research, but they still burn more fossil fuels that anyone else. It's possible that the fusion research will pay off. I'm skeptical, and even more skeptical of the economics.
According to wikipedia, in Japan..." In 2022 ten reactors were operational producing about 5% of Japan's electricity."
Regarding France... "By end of April 2022 it was reported that 28 of France’s 56 nuclear reactors were offline. French nuclear energy production has fallen to the lowest level since 1993 and it is expected to fall short by at least 25% compared to usual production levels in the winter of 2022/2023."
France has also never been at the technological frontier, for various reasons. If the US had continued expanding nuclear power it would have done so in a much bigger and typically more dynamic market. Given the US's place in the world, it likely would have inspired other countries to follow suit. Maybe still not the Henry Adams curve, but I don't think France and Japan quite foreclose Brink's argument.
Excellent point, Jay. Your last sentence captures my reaction to Brink’s interesting essay.
I hate to be critical because I very much follow the spirit of this essay, but referencing "cold fusion" is pretty sus. I've never seen any reason to think the concept is fundamentally nonphysical.
I'm deeply skeptical that cold fusion is a thing. I still found Hall's argument interesting -- like I said, it's a wacky book, but it changed my mind on important questions and, because of that, I found its less successful provocations still worth reading and thinking about.
Thorium Remix 2009 - LFTR in 16 Minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk
The owners do NOT want energy to be distributed FREELY.
We could have inexpensive, safe and non polluting nuclear but...
Great article - thanks!
This post is remarkably perverse. Technologies like supersonic airliners and nuclear power failed because they turned out to have no operational need or business case (and often significant risks or drawbacks). I've told the nuclear story tersely at https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/why-nuclear-power-is-bad-for-your-wallet-and-the-climate, and more fully at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2022.107122. Both explain why the nuclear industry's slow-motion collapse speeds climate protection by freeing up investment, grid capacity, talent, and attention for cheaper, faster, hence more climate-effective competitors. The extraordinary success of modern renewables (~300 GW/y, ~95% share of global net additions of generating capacity) and efficient energy use (about half of past and prospective global decarbonization) should be celebrated, not ignored or denigrated. But apparently Brink Lindsey considers some technologies praiseworthy and others injurious for obscure noneconomic reasons not explained and far from obvious, at least to this lifelong technological practitioner.
The most bizarre part of the argument seems to say that using less energy to provide the same or better services, by using it more effectively through smarter technology and design, is somehow harmful to society. I do not subscribe to an energy theory of value. Energy is a means to societal ends, not an end in itself. Using more energy than we need to do the job at least cost is mere waste.
The emergent suite of climate solutions depends strongly on better technology and design, aggressively developed, refined, and deployed. This results not from opposing technological progress, but from choosing technologies that make sense and make money. This essay seems just a fancy stew of sour grapes because the writers' technological preferences were invalided by markets. Sorry. But as you grieve the losers, just try the winners. You might like them.
GMOs are a more complex issue, but for those interested, my views from 22 years ago still seem valid: www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/botanies.html.
I like nuclear power, but I am sceptical whether it will ever be really cheap because of the security issues which drive up both capex and opex. Solar is the cheapest power ever connected to the grid, and I can say with confidence that excessive regulation is why we don’t already have more cheap solar both connected to the grid and behind the meter. Same for wind, not quite as cheap but blows more at night. It is a shame for the US that Manchin’s permitting bill didn’t get up.
> how could the dominant reaction have been anything other than horror and anger at the scale of the casual, thoughtless destruction? How could the immediate response to “what is to be done?” have been anything other than to try to restrain the technologies that were causing and threatening harm?
I don't see how it's so inevitable. There aren't really what Lucas would call micro-foundations provided to explain this backlash, so how can we be sure of anything about it? Wouldn't mere change on the margin serve as a null hypothesis?
I'm also skeptical that the Holocaust is to blame. My understanding is that the Nazis themselves were already proto-environmentalists who were also anti-smoking before that cause got taken up in the US.