Whole Earth Discipline_An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

by Stewart Brand

  • Baseload. Footprint. Add portfolio—the idea that climate change is so serious a matter, we have to do everything simultaneously to head it off as much as we can. The first definitive portfolio statement came from engineer Robert Socolow and ecologist Stephen Pacala in 2004. Their paper in Science, “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies,” introduced the idea that a set of “stabilization wedges,” made up of already proven technologies and practices, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a tolerable level, but only if all the wedges are pursued extremely aggressively at the same time, starting yesterday.

  The paper proposed seven wedges to level off emissions: energy efficiency, renewables, clean coal, forests and soils (stop deforestation and agricultural tilling), fuel switch (coal to gas, oil to heat pump, etc.), and nuclear. Tripling the world’s current nuclear capacity to 700 gigawatts a year over fifty years would reduce carbon emissions by 1 gigaton a year at the end of the period, for a total of 25 gigatons over the fifty years. (In 2008 the world’s carbon emissions were over 7 gigatons a year and rising fast. To convert Socolow’s carbon emissions to carbon dioxide emissions—the more common measure—multiply by 3.67; thus the 7 gigatons of carbon equals 25.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide.) There’s nothing heroic or unusual about that rate of adding nuclear capacity. The Socolow/Pacala paper noted, “The global pace of nuclear power plant construction from 1975 to 1990 would yield a wedge, if it continued for 50 years.”

  Al Gore’s climate movie, An Inconvenient Truth, featured Socolow’s diagram with only six wedges, leaving out nuclear.

  • Of all the wedges, energy efficiency and conservation come first, last, and always, as far as I’m concerned. You get the most result with the least cost at the greatest speed. As Amory Lovins has been proving eloquently for decades, saving energy doesn’t cost money; it makes money, and it can be carried out at every level, from individual behavior to global programs. Those who argued that conservation would do economic harm have been thoroughly refuted by events. Europeans and Californians use half the energy per person of most Americans, and they are doing fine. In the 1970s, the Jerry Brown administration in California set in motion an array of programs that kept energy use dead level for the next three decades while the state’s per capita income grew by 80 percent, and while the other states’ energy use went up by 50 percent. California’s greenhouse gas emissions per capita are less than half of what the other states put out.

  How did California do that? A physicist named Arthur Rosenfeld at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was inspired by the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 to shift his career to energy efficiency. Through his advocacy, California pursued “technology forcing” (specific mandates on efficiency in refrigerators and cars); new regulations on heat efficiency in buildings; tax credits for solar panels; and a decoupling of profits from sales in energy companies, so corporations like Pacific Gas & Electric were suddenly motivated to reward energy conservation in their customers and not motivated to build new power plants. My gang was in the thick of that. While I served on the governor’s personal staff, one Whole Earth friend (Huey Johnson) was secretary of resources, another (astronaut Rusty Schweickart) chaired the Energy Commission, two (Sim Van der Ryn and Peter Calthorpe) were running the State Architect’s office, and still another (Wilson Clark) ran the Office of Appropriate Technology .

  (Jerry Brown is still at it. Elected attorney general of California in 2006, he immediately focused the office on climate change, with several creative initiatives. One will require that new projects in the state prepare a climate impact report as part of their environmental impact report. Another recognizes that the worst polluters of air and atmosphere are the world’s totally unregulated ships burning the vilest of fuels, called bunker. Brown set up a coalition of West Coast attorneys general, who will insist that the Clean Air Act applies to all shipping within the two-hundred-mile limit, so the ships will have to shift to cleaner fuel systems, such as diesel-electric, and scrub what comes out of their stacks if they want to do business on the West Coast.)

  Efficiency improvement has already accomplished a lot. From 1975 to 2004, the world decreased its “energy intensity” (the amount of energy consumed per dollar of GDP) by 32 percent (44 percent in the United States). There is a great deal more where that came from. We have barely begun to wring the last wasteful joule out of our buildings, vehicles, infrastructure, cities, farms, power lines, ships, armies—the whole apparatus of civilization.

  But energy efficiency, crucial as it is, can’t replace all the coal-fired plants that have to be shut down, and it can’t generate power for the burgeoning energy demand of the growing economies in China, India, Africa, and Latin America. That takes us back to baseload and the choice between coal and nuclear.

  • A fourth consideration, along with baseload, footprint, and portfolio, is the role of government. In recent years, environmentalists have largely given up on governments, preferring to work with global and local NGOs, with businesses, and among the grassroots. But infrastructure is one of the things we hire governments to handle, especially energy infrastructure, which requires no end of legislation, bonds, rights of way, regulations, subsidies, research, and public-private contracts with detailed oversight. Energy policy is a matter of such scale, scope, speed, and patient follow-through that only a government can embrace it all. You can’t get decent grid power without decent government power.

  These arguments, plus others I’ll come to, have persuaded a surprising number of prominent environmentalists to become pronuclear, some enthusiastically, some grudgingly; some noisily, some quietly. Is there any pattern in who they are and why they espouse nuclear? I think there is.

  Start with Jim Lovelock, Gaia’s prophet. Gaia theory itself is almost a Green religion, and Lovelock’s 1957 invention of the electron capture detector led first to the pesticide measurements behind Rachel Carson’s revolutionary Silent Spring (1962), then to the detection of environmental PCBs, then to the discovery of atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons and their role in ozone depletion. Lovelock has been pronuclear all his life, ever since his medical research with radioactive isotopes back in the 1940s. He promoted nuclear to my reluctant ears when I first met him in 1985. In a much quoted op-ed in England’s Independent in 2004, he wrote:By all means, let us use the small input from renewables sensibly, but only one immediately available source does not cause global warming and that is nuclear energy. . . . Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywoodstyle fiction, the Green lobbies and the media. These fears are unjustified, and nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. . . . I am a Green and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrong-headed objection to nuclear energy. Even if they were right about its dangers, and they are not, its worldwide use as our main source of energy would pose an insignificant threat compared with the dangers of intolerable and lethal heat waves and sea levels rising to drown every coastal city of the world. We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear—the one safe, available, energy source—now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet.

  Pronuclear public opinion in England went from below 5 percent to over 40 percent. In a reversal of previous policy, the government is planning ten new reactors to replace and add to the nineteen reactors that currently provide 20 percent of England’s electricity.

  Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, convened a pioneering conference on climate change back in 1979. He originated the idea of decarbonization, noting the two-hundred-year trend of humans using fuels with ever fewer carbon atoms—wood to coal to oil to gas, down to zero carbon with hydrogen and nuclear. In 2007 he published a paper in the International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology in which he declared, “Nuclear energy is green. Renewables are not green.” His arg
ument was based on footprint analysis. “As a Green,” he wrote, “I care intensely about land-sparing, about leaving land for Nature. . . . Considered in watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors.” The solar energy equivalent of a 1-gigawatt nuclear reactor, he projected—with his own variation on Saul Griffith’s and Gwyneth Cravens’s calculations—would require 150 square kilometers (58 square miles); the wind power equivalent, 770 square kilometers (298 square miles); the corn biofuel equivalent, 2,500 square kilometers (965 square miles).

  Patrick Moore, a Canadian who got his PhD in ecology, was a cofounder of Greenpeace in 1971 and became its president in 1977. He left in 1986, declaring that the organization and the environmental movement had become antiscience. Still a strong proponent of forestation, he is best known as a Green spokesman for nuclear power, with a paid role these days as cochair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, founded by the Nuclear Energy Institute, a U.S. lobbying organization.

  • The late Anglican Bishop Hugh Montefiore had been a trustee of UK Friends of the Earth for twenty years when he became convinced by climate dangers that as an environmentalist he had to support nuclear power. Told that he could not stay on as a Friends of the Earth trustee if he did that, he resigned, and wrote in a 2004 article,The future of the planet is more important than membership of Friends of the Earth. . . . The real reason why the Government has not taken up the nuclear option is because it lacks public acceptance, due to scare stories in the media and the stone-walling opposition of powerful environmental organisations. Most, if not all, of the objections do not stand up to objective assessment.

  Tim Flannery is a world-renowned Australian biologist and conservationist who wrote what is considered one of the best books on climate, The Weather Makers (2006). In a 2006 column for a Melbourne newspaper, he posited thatOver the next two decades, Australians could use nuclear power to replace all our coal-fired power plants. We would then have a power infrastructure like that of France, and in doing so we would have done something great for the world, for whatever risks go with a domestic nuclear power industry are local, while greenhouse gas pollution is global in its impact.

  The next year he amended his view to support nuclear in places like China, Europe, and the United States that don’t have Australia’s renewable energy resources. Australia should keep selling its abundant uranium to those markets, he declared, but should not build its own nuclear plants.

  John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, is an energy and environment heavyweight. He has been an expert on nuclear weapons proliferation, a professor of environmental policy at Harvard, a director of Woods Hole Research Center, and long a coauthor with Paul Ehrlich of ecopolicy texts. His stature gave him cochairmanship of the National Commission on Energy Policy, and he wrote the commission’s authoritative 2004 report, Ending the Energy Stalemate. It recommended, among other things, that Congress expand support for developing a new generation of nuclear reactors, and it pushed for centralized “interim” storage sites for spent fuel—a detour around the Yucca Mountain roadblock. Holdren told a New York Times reporter, “I’m often asked, ‘Can you solve the climate problem without nuclear energy?’ And I say, ‘Yes, you can solve it without nuclear energy.’ But it will be easier to solve it with nuclear energy.”

  Jared Diamond, biologist, conservationist, and author of Collapse (2004), had read Holdren’s report closely, so when he was asked by an audience member at a San Francisco talk if he “agreed with Stewart Brand in supporting the revival of nuclear,” he surprised the audience and me by saying yes: “To deal with our energy problems we need everything available to us, including nuclear power.”

  James Howard Kunstler, fervent opponent of suburbs, wrote a book in 2004 titled The Long Emergency. I’m persuaded by neither his expectation of how peak oil plays out nor his views on the fragility of big cities, but many environmentalists are, and they should note that he ends his “Beyond Oil” chapter with the words, “Nuclear power may be all that stands between what we identify as civilization and its alternative.”

  There is a category of prominent environmentalist that I predict will increase in coming years—the reluctant tolerators. When they express support of nuclear, they are careful to use sentences too complex to be quote-worthy. Al Gore is one such; he told a Congressional hearing what he usually avoids saying in public, that he is not opposed to nuclear power and expects it will grow somewhat. My old teacher Paul Ehrlich says that climate issues have made him more supportive of nuclear. Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, penned a friendly review of Gwyneth Cravens’s Power to Save the World in the environmentalist publication OnEarth. “Environmentalists need to understand that times and circumstances change,” he wrote, “and they need to rethink priorities. It’s not enough for greens to say that nuclear power is risky and comes with consequences; everything comes with consequences.” McKibben said he goes along with the IPCC proposal that nuclear “should provide 18 percent of the planet’s electricity, up from 16 percent at the moment.”

  Looking at these Green nuclear proponents—twelve, if you include me—what is the pattern? All but one are obsessed with climate (Patrick Moore is not), and all but four are scientists (Montefiore, Kunstler, Gore, and McKibben are not). With everyone I’ve encountered who is really immersed in climate issues, the common view of nuclear is “the lesser of two evils” and “take nothing off the table.” As for scientists, Gwyneth Cravens reported in her book that they invariably poll high in support of nuclear, ranging from 89 percent among scientists in general up to 95 percent for energy scientists and 100 percent for nuclear and radiation scientists. (Those who know the most are the least frightened.)

  • And there is a generational element. For a fine piece of journalism about the nuclear debate within the environmental movement, Jason Mark, editor of Earth Island Journal, did his research online. As he reported in his 2007 article, “The Fission Division,”The anti-nuclear consensus among environmental policy professionals . . . does not extend to the grassroots. A review of some of the most popular green news and opinion Web sites reveals a lively discussion about the merits of expanding nuclear power generation. For example, when Grist.org asked readers, “In the light of the mounting threat of climate change, does nuclear power deserve another look?” 54 percent of respondents voted “Yes.” A poll on Treehugger.com showed 59 percent of readers conditionally in favor of atomic energy.

  Whenever the issue comes up in green forums, an energetic back-and-forth ensues. During one online discussion, a visitor to a blog hosted by Earthjustice Legal Defense wrote: “I have been an ardent foe of nuclear power generation for over three decades. . . . However, in the last two years I have reversed my position, and now support the building of a new generation of nuclear plants in the USA. The reason is that global warming is such a huge and imminent issue, that I think we must accept the lesser evil of nuclear power generation.” When the subject came up on the Web site WorldChanging. com, readers were split roughly 50-50.

  A generation gap has emerged. For younger Greens, cold-war nuclear fears are ancient history, and Chernobyl is not part of their personal experience. The threat of climate change is what dominates their world, along with accelerating technology, with which they are comfortable. From the perspective of the young, nuclear is just another technology, to be judged on how well it works, not on antiquated obsessions of their elders.

  In 2009 the Director of Greenpeace UK from 2001 to 2007, Stephen Tindale, told the Independent he was now supporting nuclear, and he wasn’t alone:My change of mind wasn’t sudden, but gradual over the past four years. But the key moment when I thought that we needed to be extremely serious was when it was reported that the permafrost in Siberia was melting massively, giving up methane, which is a very serious problem for the world.

  It was kind of like a religious conversion. Being anti-nuclear was an essential part of being an environmentalist for a long time but now that I’m talking t
o a number of environmentalists about this, it’s actually quite widespread—this view that nuclear power is not ideal but it’s better than climate change

  Older environmentalists talk about nuclear power exclusively in terms of what they see as the four great problems that condemn the technology—safety, cost, waste storage, and proliferation. Those four have no form of positive, only degrees of badness, and they are treated as absolutes. If a reactor accident is possible, then nuclear power is impossible; if the capital costs are high, then nuclear power is impossible, and so on. Absolutes are potent. Once something is seen as a capitalized Absolute Evil, it functions as a premise; everything has to exist in relation to your opposition to it.

  By contrast, the four considerations I began with—baseload, footprint, portfolio, and government-scale—are logics rather than problems. They are relative rather than absolute, which means they invite thinking in terms of trade-offs and risk balancing. And they are open to the positive, treating nuclear as one potential tool to help head off climate change and end poverty worldwide.

  Holding all eight logics and problems in mind simultaneously nets out, for me, to a strong argument for expanding nuclear power. From that perspective, I see the four problems of safety, cost, waste handling, and weapons potential differently than I used to. I’ve learned to disbelieve much of what I’ve been told by my fellow environmentalists, and I now think of the four problems the way an engineer does, as design problems. Define them, frame them in a way that is solvable, solve the damn things, and once you’ve got a solution, act on it.

  Reactor safety is a problem already solved. In 2008 the world had 443 civilian nuclear reactors boiling up 16 percent of all electricity and keeping a yearly 3 gigatons of carbon dioxide that would have been generated by coal plants out of the atmosphere. Year after year, the industry has had no significant accidents, having learned hard lessons from the three that got away—England’s Windscale fire in 1957, the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979, and the Chernobyl steam explosion in 1986.