A segment about my dissertation which I recorded with Stefan Hostetter for The Green Majority is out as of today.
Category: Science
New discoveries, the scientific method, and all matters relating to the scientific study of the physical world
Reading my dissertation, step by step
Step #1: Learn a bit of the context and background to climate change politics
I know throwing a whole PhD thesis at someone gives them a lot to handle, especially if it is written in an unfamiliar academic style. Nonetheless, I took pains all through my PhD process to come up with a product which would be comprehensible and meaningful to the community of climate activists.
Several posts down the line, we will come to the “meta question” which motivates the chapter about the ethics of what ought to be done. As someone new to the document and/or climate change policy, I would start by looking at what I considered important explanatory text but which my committee directed I should remove from an over-long document:
Structural Barriers to Avoiding Catastrophic Climate Change
Basically, why is solving climate change a hard problem? We have governments that do an OK-to-decent job at most things, so why are they uniquely bad at caring for the climate long-term when its integrity is damaged by the use of fossil fuels? This first document explores that question in detail, and elaborates upon why old solutions aren’t working for this problem.
Free dissertation release
Official versions are forthcoming on the University of Toronto’s TSpace thesis hosting platform and on paper from the Asquith Press at the Toronto Reference Library, but I see no reason not to make my PhD dissertation available as a free PDF to anyone who is interested:
I have been fighting for years to get this out into the world, so it makes no sense to wait for an arbitrary convocation date and then through further administrative delays.
If you are studying the fossil fuel divestment movement at universities or climate change activism generally in Canada, the US, and UK you may find the extended bibliography useful.
Personality and system justification
In terms of differences among people, psychological research reveals that people who exhibit lower levels of complex thinking or higher levels of death anxiety or stronger desires to share reality with like-minded others tend to justify existing institutions and arrangements more than others. In other words, people who—for either chronic or temporary reasons—are especially eager to attain subjective states of certainty, closure, safety, security, conformity, and affiliation are especially likely to accept and rationalize the way things are and to embrace what contemporary scholars would recognize as politically conservative ways of thinking. In contrast, individuals who enjoy thinking in complex terms, or who are less sensitive to external threats than others, or who value uniqueness over conformity, are more likely to criticize the social system and to approve of insurgent movements aimed at changing the status quo. Thus, in addition to a general tendency for people to adapt to unwelcome realities, there are individual differences in personality as well as situational triggers pertaining to epistemic, existential, and relational motives that increase or decrease the likelihood of participating in system-challenging collective action.
Jost, John T. A Theory of System Justification. Harvard University Press, 2020. p. 7-8
Related:
System justification and politics
After his thought-provoking podcast discussion with David Roberts, I will need to read John Jost’s two books on how our psychological needs for stability and respected position in the social order drive us to defend the status quo political, legal, and economic order as natural and just, regardless of our personal position in that social order’s specific distribution of burdens and benefits: Why social change is so excruciatingly difficult
Satellite to satellite espionage and warfare
One inescapable but confounding element of trying to understand politics, international relations, and history up to the present day is that we don’t have access to what governments are doing in secret. We will need to re-write the history of these times decades from now, if circumstances and freedom of information laws permit historians to learn about the skullduggery of this era.
One potentially important example is happening now in space. Satellites have become crucial to everything from time synchronization for high precision activities to navigation and communication. They also can’t really be hidden. Perhaps there are satellites with optical stealth that are hardly or never visible, but even top secret spy satellites of the conventional design can have their orbits determined by civilians with stopwatches and binoculars.
That is why we know that Russia, among others, has been experimenting with satellites that approach others and can potentially disrupt or destroy them, or monitor their activity. An article on China’s program includes the intriguing phrasing: “non-cooperative robotic rendezvous” between spacecraft. Russia’s Cosmos 2542 is known to have approached USA 245: an American spy satellite believed to be one of the largest things in space.
One can only speculate on how such capabilities are influencing world politics and the unfolding of events.
Arithmetic of power and plutonium
The first pile at Hanford generated 250 million watts—250 megawatts or MW—of thermal power and produced each year about a hundred kilograms of plutonium. A rule of thumb is that a megawatt of fission heat in a natural uranium reactor accompanies the production of about a gram of plutonium-239 per day. About six kilograms were sufficient to make a bomb.
Garwin, Richard L. and Charpak, Georges. Megawatts and Megatons: The Future of Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons. University of Chicago Press, 2002. p. 33
Renewable energy has drawbacks and environmental consequences
Renewable energy sources — wind, wave, solar, and the like — are generally the preferred energy sources of environmentalists. At the same time, there is no way to produce energy without some sort of environmental impact, and the more people you need energy for the greater the impact will be.
Some examples of environmental impacts from renewable energy:
- Mesmerised brown crabs ‘attracted to’ undersea cables
- How do tides and turbines affect sealife? Fundy study hopes to find out
Nonetheless, unintended side effects of renewable energy sometimes lead environmentalists to oppose it. In my view, they are missing how every energy source will have drawbacks and the question is how they relate to the drawbacks from alternatives, chiefly fossil fuels. Environmentalists can be too easily inclined to become perpetual and reflexive critics, always emphasizing the problems with any course of action and effectively acting as a blockage to any action.
Related:
Renewable energy options:
- The efficiency of solar
- Energy from the oceans
- Solar panels at 30 metres a minute
- Quantity of solar energy
- Google and geothermal in Canada
- Geothermal in Alberta
- Big potential for offshore wind
- Ways to generate electricity
- Grouse Mountain’s 1.5MW wind turbine
- The Desertec solar plan
- Possible doctoral topic: can renewables power the world?
- Open thread: the cost of renewable energy
- New big dams in Canada
Environmentalist / NIMBY opposition to renewable projects:
- Renewables, land, and trade-offs
- Artificial geothermal and earthquakes
- Rejecting solar in California
- The climate movement and “100% renewables”
- Keystone XL uncertainty and the environmental movement’s proficiency at saying no
- Open thread: British Columbia’s Site C Peace River dam
- Saying no to climate solutions
- Reading about the resistance dilemma
Energy storage:
- Compressed air for mobile energy storage
- Pumped hydroelectric storage in Wales
- Pumped and multi-lagoon tidal systems
- Proposed pumped hydroelectric storage in Australia
- Batteries for large-scale energy storage
- Open thread: energy storage
Transmission and grid interlinkage:
- KombiKraftwerk
- HVDC transmission for renewable energy
- Tomorrow’s electrical generation: distributed or concentrated?
- Grid technologies to support renewable power
- Rail electrification and power transmission
- A pan-European electricity grid
Demand shaping:
Politics of renewables:
- Google’s commitment to renewables
- The only question on renewables is when
- Canada’s new 90% target for non-GHG emitting electricity
- Increasing renewable capacity is much harder than increasing energy consumption
- A renewable energy plan for the UK
- Renewables in Germany
- How not to use feed-in tariffs
- Renewable energy and the budget
- Responding to Kenneth Green on renewable energy
Open thread: long COVID
Researchers at Canada’s Western University have used an MRI technique to identify the physiological nature of long COVID:
What we saw on the MRI was that the transition of the oxygen into the red blood cells was depressed in these symptomatic patients who had had COVID-19, compared to healthy volunteers.
The topic is important both at the individual and societal level. For individuals, the potential severity of getting COVID is much worse given that a debilitating long-term condition can arise from it. For society, the presence and extent of long COVID mean that the total costs of the pandemic can still rise by a great deal.
20 million saved by COVID vaccines
It is being reported today that a study at Imperial College London “modelled the spread of the disease in 185 countries and territories between December 2020 and December 2021, [and] found that without Covid vaccines 31.4 million people would have died, and that 19.8 million of these deaths were avoided.”
That is a staggering, historical achievement. At the same time, it reminds me of how bad people are at basing their beliefs on evidence. If we could effectively update our beliefs based on empirical information, people around the world would be celebrating this achievement and hosting parades for vaccine scientists. As things are, I have to wonder if with the political lessons taken from this pandemic we would even make such an effort in the future. Quite possibly through political polarization and the linkage of beliefs about medical facts with personal identity and ideology the world at large has become more fragile rather than more resilient through this experience.