Defining Energies: Greenwashing by the European Union

 

      Waste at Union Carbide Uranium Processing Plant, 

on a tributary of the Colorado River, 1972 

Courtesy of the US National Archives

The EU has decided that burning natural gas and atomic power plants are "transitional" green energies. This is nonsense. 

Take gas first. Natural gas drilling is anything but a green activity. with large amounts of gas escaping into the atmosphere. Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Vast sums are also required to build and maintain the infrastructure of gas pipelines and storage facilities. Cost estimates vary, but it requires about $3.5 million to build one mile of pipeline. To put this in perspective, for $3.5 million one could erect a 2-3 megawatt windmill. A one hundred mile gas pipeline would cost as much as windmills with c. 250 megawtt capacity. And if one factors in the cost of gas exploration, drilling, storage, and all the rest of the expenses, building gas infrastructure is a stupid investment. Calling it transitional means that the plan is to spend all that money and then shut the system down in one generation. But that would not really happen. Once a massive infrastructure is built, it acquires technological momentum, and it is difficult to shut down.

But gas is a winner compared to nuclear power. The big problem with it lies in the waste, which is a very long term deferred cost imposed on generations to come. The EU tasks individual national governments with the costs of nuclear waste, but this is a very large and expensive can to kick down the road to the future. An American example may be helpful here. The US has generated a lot of nuclear waste, and most states and localities fiercely resist becoming the depositories. I devote chapter eight of Conflicted American Landscapes to the mining and refining of uranium, its transformation into plutonium, and the vast amount of waste generated at every step of the process. 

Consider the effects of mining. In the words of the US Environmental Protection Agency: “From 1944 to 1986, nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from Navajo lands under leases with the Navajo Nation. Many Navajo people worked the mines, often living and raising families in close proximity to the mines and mills.” This left, “a legacy of uranium contamination” at more than 500 abandoned mines, “as well as homes and drinking water sources with elevated levels of radiation. Potential health effects include lung cancer from inhalation of radioactive particles, as well as bone cancer and impaired kidney function from exposure to radionuclides in drinking water.” Thousands of uranium mine workers and their families developed cancer and whole communities were devastated.

The EU produces almost no uranium, so this highly polluting activity is off-loaded on other nations. That hidden environmental destruction is not discussed by the EU administrators who want to call nuclear power "green." But the waste is created in Europe, and it will remain radioactive for not just centuries but for thousand of years. 

To get a sense of what this means, consider this American example. The US government built a massive underground facility to contain radioactive materials inside Yucca Mountain, Nevada. But it remains empty, because Nevada refused to be the nuclear dump for the rest of the country. Instead, at scattered sites nuclear waste is stored “temporarily,” including 40,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel in above-ground tanks in Utah on the Goshute Tribe’s reservation. 

Other nuclear waste has been embedded in a thick layer of salt at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico, in man-made caverns 2,150 feet underground. What began in uranium mines ends as the reverse of mining, in a labyrinth of man-made caves, each as long as a football field and one third as wide. These chambers cover three square miles and they can hold 850,000 barrels of “lightly contaminated items” When waste shipments are packed into these salt formation until every cranny is full, the entrance will be closed and covered with earth. The facility is to last for 10,000 years, but the materials entombed will decline in radioactivity for 240,000 years. Twenty-ton granite markers, a bit smaller than the vertical stones at Stonehenge, will warn away future generations in seven languages. Long before the site is safe, these languages will be incomprehensible to all but a few linguists and historians, so there will also be warnings in pictographs.

Our descendants will need to avoid these waste sites for as far into the future as we have a written history stretching back into the past. Indeed, 10,000 years is not long enough. The areas where this waste are stored will be "sacrifice zones" that no one can live in or farm. They will require protection for more than 100 generations. How can anyone think that this waste storage is "transitional" or "green" or good policy?

 

Why did the 2009 UN Copenhagen Climate Summit Fail?

Denmark and Global Warming, part I

Fall in water level, Paraná River, between July 1, 2019 (left) and July 3, 2020 (right)
Satellite photographs courtesy of NASA

In 2022 the dire state of the world's climate has become starkly clear. The image reproduced here shows how drastically drought has reduced the water level of the Paraná River in Argentina. The Paraná is the second largest river in South America, stretching more than 4880 kilometers from its mouth near Buenas Aires in Argentina into Brazil, and it normally is navigable in large ships from the sea to Paraguay. However, due to an extended drought, between July 1, 2019 and early July 2020, it shrank into a small stream. NASA has posted many such images of drastic climate change from all parts of the world, showing shrinking glaciers, rising flood waters, expanding deserts, and other consequences of global warming. The evidence is overwhelming, and the need for immediate action is clear.

This is not a surprise. The problems were understood and widely discussed before 2009, when the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Summit (COP-15) failed to reach binding agreements. Seen from the outside, Denmark would appear an ideal venue for such a meeting. It is a highly developed country whose economy has continued to grow even though it is a cradle-to-grave welfare state with high taxes on gasoline and new cars. It has stringent insulation standards for new buildings. Even in the international economic downturn of 2008, its unemployment remained under 5% in 2010. It is largely energy self-sufficient, with its North Sea oil and gas. It has no atomic power plants (though it occasionally buys power from such plants in Sweden). It is a world leader in wind power, and more than half of its electricity comes from alternative energies. Its citizens all own and regularly ride bicycles to work and to the shops. Denmark seemed to demonstrate that energy restraint and prosperity go hand in hand.

Seen from the inside, however, Denmark was not such an ideal venue for the Climate Summit. In most nations the global warming debate finds a large majority of scientists agreed that the problem is real and urgent, even if businessmen and politicians are often reluctant to recognize the problem or its possible consequences. These generalizations also apply to Denmark. When it took power in 2001, the new government (with a prime minister from the Venstre Party, which shared power with the Conservatives) was just about as skeptical about global warming as George Bush. The new coalition wanted to prove they were different from the Left coalition they had defeated, and they chose to show this in the area of the environment. The Conservative-Venstre coalition embraced Bjorn Lomborg, a home-grown skeptic about global warming. Not a scientist but a statistician, Lomborg had been an obscure Associate Professor until his 2002 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press) was a worldwide bestseller, praised by the business press, notably The Economist. The Danish Government seemed keen to undercut the emerging consensus on global warming, and therefore it created and funded a think tank just for Lomborg, who called it the Copenhagen Consensus Center. It was not placed within a university, but directly funded by the government. This provided Lomborg with a generous budget and a platform from which to attack environmentalists and question the wisdom of spending funds to combat global warming. At the same time, the new government shut down Denmark's less expensive humanities research center (created in the 1980s), which promoted peer-reviewed academic research and had no particular political agenda. (Unhappily, the government's general treatment of universities proved to be no better than this decision suggests.)

Being officially skeptical about global warming had its drawbacks, however. Denmark has large windmill manufacturers, including one of the world's largest, Vestas. Alternative energies were also popular among Danish voters. Furthermore, already by 2004 the evidence for global warming was becoming so strong that inaction based on skepticism was becoming an untenable posture. Greenland belongs to the Danish crown, and international teams of scientists doing research there continued to observe unmistakable signs of global warming, notably the accelerated melting of glaciers. They also could document changes in the world's air quality, using the snow deposits for several thousand years to measure pollution since well before the industrial revolution. The warming of Greenland also mattered to Greenlanders themselves, who send two representatives to the Danish Parliament (Folketing). The coalition government had only a narrow majority, and Greenland's representatives had the potential to become crucial in certain voting situations. In 2004, the Venstre-Conservative coalition decided it wanted to look a bit greener, even though it still funded Lomborg's skeptical enterprise. A similar shift took place in Great Britain, where David Cameron embraced some environmental issues in order to give the Conservatives a new look. 

In Denmark, this policy shift had a human face, and her name was Connie Hedegaard. One of the youngest people ever elected to the Danish Parliament, she had left to become a journalist for some years, before returning to become the Minister for the Environment in August, 2004. The public knew her as an on-camera television journalist for the national network. Hedegaard spent several years working up enthusiasm for holding the Climate Conference in Copenhagen, and in the process she literally traveled the world. She remade the image of the Conservative Party in Denmark, and spearheaded an ambitious Danish program to increase alternative energy, reduce total energy use, double the funding for energy R & D, and raise taxes on CO2 emitters. She then became the European Commissioner for Climate. It appears in retrospect, however, that while Hedegaard excelled at photo opportunities and at charming important foreign politicians, she was not particularly adept at laying the groundwork for a climate agreement. 

Furthermore, the governing coalition did not entirely support her green objectives. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the canny Prime Minister from 2001 until he left to become general secretary of NATO in the summer of 2009, often dragged his feet when Hedegaard wanted environmental reforms. Indeed, despite her appointment, the coalition government's two main parties still appealed to different constituencies, with Venstre remaining skeptical on the environment, while the Conservatives seemed greener.

These internal tensions mirrored the problems at the Copenhagen Summit itself. In its first days, Connie Hedegaard chaired the general sessions. She knew many of the delegates and had spent years thinking about the intricacies of the issues. She knew where the different national delegations stood. No one doubted her desire to reduce greenhouse gases, and she had identified herself with resolving the problem of global warming. However, part way through COP-15, as foreign heads of state began to arrive, Hedegaard ceded the chair to the Danish Prime Minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen The official reason given was that he was the appropriate chair for a meeting of so many presidents and prime ministers. In terms of protocol, this seemed logical. 

But switching to a new chairman halfway through the conference was a mistake. Few of the delegates knew the Danish Prime Minister. He had only been in office a few months and lacked international experience. He did not speak English particularly well. Worse still, Lars Løkke Rasmussen was not an elegant speaker or diplomatic personality. His own supporters compared him to a bulldozer, but he could not even begin to steamroll China, Russia, or Saudi Arabia. When the Prime Minister tried to hold back the draft of the final agreement, the delegates became angry. He wanted to pull a final compromise out of the hat and get the assembled nations to sign it. He also wanted to be both the official host and serve as the leader of debate. The latter took so much time, however, that he missed the all important dinner with the Queen, attended by most of the important leaders. Worse still, the process of writing a compromise agreement behind closed doors took not hours but precious days of COP-15's final week. The conference ground to a standstill until, too late, Connie Hedegaard again took the reins.

The divided Danish government that supported both Bjorn Lomborg and Connie Hedegaard was not unlike the conference as a whole. The foreign delegations at COP-15 had not oreoared a nearly complete agreement  over the preceding two years. On arrival for the two-week meeting they were not even close to a final statement. A few industrial nations, like Norway and the Netherlands, were prepared to make comprehensive commitments. But most nations were less ready to make legally binding promises, and some did not want controls on carbon emissions, notably Poland with its extensive coal mines, the oil producers, Russia, Venezuela, and Nigeria. The Middle Eastern states were already hurting from lower energy prices after the global downturn that began in 2008, and they wanted compensation for any future "lost" oil sales. The newly developed economies of Brazil, India, and China resisted requests to slow down their recently achieved growth. 

In particular, China had not come to Copenhagen with any intention of cutting back. Their offer was to increase CO2 emissions by "only" 40%, and they were not willing to allow in-country monitoring of this increase. The Americans were willing to cut their emissions by close to 20%, but starting from a 2005 baseline this would only take them back to where they were in 1990. The Europeans and the Japanese offered substantial cutbacks from the 1990 level, but only if other nations made sacrifices as well. Otherwise, they feared putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Add to this cocktail the demands of African nations for huge subsidies to help them to develop without becoming major CO2 polluters. Several nations made generous offers to help, notably the Japanese, but there was no agreement on how such donations ought to be calculated or distributed. Unhappily, the quite different agendas of the participants, on a large scale, mirrored the divisions within Denmark itself. The lack of skilled diplomatic leadership from the Prime Minister made a bad situation worse, but it was probably not crucial to the Copenhagen Summit's failure.  The discord was probably irresolvable, with the EU and Japan on one side verses the oil producers, the new industrial economies led by China, and the self-proclaimed "victim economies" in Africa and Asia. In the waning hours of the meeting, the United States attempted to navigate the middle ground between these intransigent parties, but to little avail.

The Summit was not a failure for everyone. China emerged with free hands to develop as fast as it could. It could invest in solar power and windmills and build atomic plants with no requirement to seek energy efficiency. China got to throw its weight around and show it could not be forced to allow inspectors in to see just exactly how much CO2 it was producing. Other beneficiaries were those who doubt the reality of global warming, notably most of the American Republican Party. The Republicans apparently never asked themselves why they sided with the Chinese on this issue. The socialist opposition to the current Danish government also was a potential winner in this fiasco, as the Danish Prime Minister hardly distinguished himself. With the two Danish political blocs in a virtual dead heat, his diplomatic ineptitude had the potential to tip the balance and let the Left coalition win the next election. The Copenhagen Summit did nothing to enhance the standing of current leaders, except possibly Connie Hedegaard, who soon went off the Brussels to be an EU commissioner. 

President Obama emerged as a bit of a winner too. After years on the sidelines, he brought the US into an active discussion of global warning, and proved adept at speaking to all parties in the search for a compromise. He was hampered, however, by the scientific ineptitude of the Republican Party, which 13 years later still is genuinely challenged by the theory of evolution, physics, genetics, modern biology, and global warming itself. Given America's slow pace of environmental legislation and its position as the most polluting nation in world history, even with Obama as leader, the United States had difficulty being a leader on climate issues. This limp became a broken leg once Donald Trump entered the White House.

The winners at the Cop-15 were strange bedfellows: Middle Eastern sheiks, Danish socialists, Hugo Chavez, the American Republican Party, coal mining corporations, Russian oil interests, the Nigerians, and the Chinese oligarchy.  As for the losers, that would be everyone else, particularly anyone living in low lying nations like the Maldives, most of Africa, and the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Possibly some nations will disappear beneath the waves and millions of people may one day die or be displaced because of this failed summit. 

Perhaps the only good thing about the Copenhagen Summit was that few seemed to question the science. There was a general agreement that global warming was real and that the problem was rapidly getting worse. Or was there? Bjorn Lomborg emerged from the summit with funding for his think-tank unscathed, and he remained the darling of coal mining companies, oil executives, and financiers. On December 23, 2009, he made fun of the failed summit in an article for the British Financial Times. Ironically echoing Al Gore, he declared, "The fact that the Rio-Kyoto-Copenhagen approach to global warming was clearly getting us nowhere was apparently one of those inconvenient truths that people prefer to ignore." 

Meanwhile, some nations remained threatened with fatal floods, and millions living in coastal zones from Bangladesh to Copenhagen to Louisiana may still have to relocate. The President of the Maldives, an island nation barely above sea level, Mohammed Nasheed, declared in Copenhagen, "We are all Maldivians now."  

The sequel to this article will look at Denmark and global warming in 2022.

 

Technologies Matter

Editorial Statement

This blog is produced by myself, David E. Nye, and it is devoted to technologies understood as part of culture. It is not exclusively about one nation, but it does focus to some degree on the United States, where I am a citizen, and on Denmark, where I live. The word "technology" is not often clearly defined and explained. Therefore, I begin this blog with a brief definition of the word.

Technology

The word "technology" emerged into English from Latin during the seventeenth century to describe systematic study in the applied arts. It was not a widely used term in the eighteenth century, when it was defined as a description of the mechanical arts. In the United States it became a bit more familiar after the publication of Elements of Technology in 1832. It was written by a Harvard University professor, Jacob Bigelow, and for the next decade one finds references to the term primarily in citations of his book. As Leo Marx has observed, "through most of the nineteenth century, the word technology referred to a kind of book," typically a manual that described a particular branch of mechanical knowledge. A few engineering colleges embraced the term, notably the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but it remained unusual. Only at the end of that century did a few sophisticated writers such as Thorstein Veblen begin to use the word to refer to the practical arts collectively, and this conception was not widely adopted until c. 1920.

Before that time, Americans employed other terms to speak about what would later be called technology. They spoke of the "mechanic arts" or the "useful arts" or perhaps "science" in contexts where one might use "technology" today. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that the word began to mean entire systems of machines, and even so at times it is used as an annoyingly vague abstraction that is both cause and effect. More recently, during the 1990s, the unstable meaning of the word was further complicated when journalists and stock market trades began to use "technology" as a synonym for computers, information systems, and digital devices of all kinds. This blog will not use the term in that way.

Within the field of the history of technology, the term is generally understood to refer to techniques, tools, and machines embedded in cultural contexts. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine human beings as pre-technological. All peoples seem to have some tools, such as traps, clothing, weapons, pottery, baskets, ovens, or irrigation systems. All cultures seem to have developed tools to provide shelter, protection, food, warmth, music, art, and entertainment. These devices pre-existed the relatively recent technology of writing, which emerged thousands of years later. Technologies are inseparable from verbal, visual and kinetic systems of meaning, which vary from one culture to another. In short, technologies are inseparable from what it means to be human, but they vary from one group to another. Even within one country, considerable variations are common.

When so defined, technology does not refer to a deterministic system of machines that marches inexorably toward some inevitable result. Rather, technologies are socially constructed, malleable, and constantly evolving. While some authors still espouse deterministic ideas about technology, these are seldom scholars in the history of technology. They do not agree with Karl Marx that new forms of production force society to develop a certain class structure. It is a misguided notion to think that society passes through inevitable stages, such as "Taylorism" and "Fordism,"  Nor do they agree with Marshall McLuhan or others who argue that systems of communication have a decisive effect on the shape of society. 

Through technologies, people can enable diversity, but governments and monopolies can also use technologies to impose uniformity. There is noting inevitable about their adoption and use, whether windows, fences, street railways, light bulbs, radio, computer games, or the Internet. Each can be manufactured, adopted, and used in different ways. The process of incorporation is not only a question of invention, development, and manufacturing but also political, gendered, symbolic, and psychological. 

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For a detailed history of "technology" see Eric Schatzberg, Technology: Critical History of a Concept. University of Chicago Press, 2018.

I reviewed this book in Technology and Culture 61:4 October, 2020, 1212-1213.

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