And the inevitable question: what is it about the culture of “these people” that creates a worldview in which the wholesale murder of strangers is seen as a legitimate act of political protest? I mean, suicide bombing! You just can’t reason with this sort of barbarian, can you…? Etc.

Joseph Stack was a software engineer, so another data point in support of this thesis.

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Mr Pagès kept up the joke last night, saying: “It has never been firmly established that Botul didn’t exist and it cannot thus be ruled out that one day history will prove Bernard-Henri Lévy right.”

Just like the moral case for the invasion of Iraq. Ba-dum tish.

God is dead, but my hair is perfect

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The legacy of GM, when it comes to debates over food uses of nanotech, is notable when public opinion is canvassed: studies in the US, UK and Germany have all shown that people are notably less enthusiastic about nano when nano-enabled “functional foods” or “nutraceuticals” are mentioned. Secrecy is not going to help (although transparency is, by itself, not enough – active public consultation influencing the future directions of the technology according to explicitly chosen social priorities is far more important – a couple of quotations from me to this effect are buried somewhere in section 7 of the report), although there is plenty of fear in the food industry about the possibility of a public backlash against the technology – and also plenty of paralysis, married with worries about whether the kinds of life-cycle risk assessment necessary to understand potential hazards of nanofoods are even possible.

Which is not likely to be helped by efforts like this from – who else? – the Daily Mail.

Pushing the wrong buttons

Nice use of “swamping” from the Mail’s style guide there, as recommended for describing anything that involved the threatening and anxiety-producing crossing of reassuringly rigid boundaries (paging Klaus Theweleit…). The weirdly stubborn use of “grey goo” (in the belief, presumably, that this is the only phrase associated with nanotechnology that most people will have heard – and the Mail has good form on this particular bit of stupidity: see here and here) is perplexing, particularly given that for some reason the writer appears to think (judging by the concatenation in the headline and in the first paragraph) that nanoparticles just are grey goo. Even Michael Crichton didn’t make that mistake.

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If that’s not enough, then why not comprehensively spoil your Sunday morning by listening to me pontificate about high-level nuclear waste, the digitization of information and obligations to future generations on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House this week (20th December, 9-10am)?

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The negative impacts of uranium mining – through the impact of tailings and other forms of waste on watercourses, and other forms of contamination – on the (generally impoverished) communities near mining operations have long been pointed to by activists. Wherever uranium is mined, these impacts are felt – from Africa to Central Asia to Australia.

For the industry, the risks of such impacts are externalities, i.e. costs which others are made to bear. Managing the risks of power generation by redistributing them – in space and in time – so that those who gain the benefits never have to worry about running the risks, is a structurally necessary element of centralised approaches to energy provision, and piggybacks on the legacy of imperialism to boot.

This is what we must accept if we are to continue using nuclear power for our energy needs. The uranium from Niger is used to keep the lights on in France. Nuclear reactors must have uranium. To obtain that uranium it seems that people must suffer.

AREVA has a track record of making others pay for the energy security of France – villagers who live near to the mines in Niger as Justin points out, and also the workers who extract the uranium in the first place: [PDF]

The French state-owned company mines uranium in northern Niger under scandalous conditions: Mine workers are not informed about health risks, and analysis shows radioactive contamination of air, water and soil. In his address, Almoustapha Alhacen, president of the local organization Aghirin’man that represents those affected, spoke of “suspicious deaths among the workers, caused by radioactive dust and contaminated groundwater.”

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Look at any planning issue with an environmental impact, and this becomes apparent – especially where there is a trade-off between some definition of “national interest” and local impact, as with energy infrastructure (wind turbines as much as nuclear power stations). Risk has, for example, been at the heart of so many of the conflicts which sprang up along the length of the South Wales Gas Pipeline while it was being built.

It’s important to understand that risks are not free-floating objects with which we simply collide. They are created through social relationships, and are impossible to understand outside these relationships, which are themselves inflected by inequalities of power. For example, I am a “financial innovator”, and so get to run a risk, if I choose to; whereas, you, as a homeowner, get to have one imposed on you when my flush is busted. Risks which are imposed are typically viewed as less acceptable than ones which are chosen – and the consequences of imposing risks can be individually and socially serious harms: creating social conflicts further down the line (splitting communities, breaking implicit links of trust and so on), and entrenching exploitative and oppressive relationships (testified to by the history of environmental racism and environmental justice more widely, and nicely summed up by William Freudenberg’s remark regarding how often technical planning criteria tend to be satisfied “on the poor side of town”). The sociological and psychological evidence for the damage done by the imposition of risk and the attendant everyday uncertainty it brings is contained in, for example, the work of Peter Marris, Michael Edelstein and Kai Erikson.

This is why it is vital to ensure that there is some kind of mechanism through which explicit consent from those who will bear the risk can be sought and given. But here it is vital that there is transparency about what risks are actually involved. And here the problem of planning often gets entangled with the discourse of “security”, especially when it is energy security that is at issue. Information about installations of “national importance” is now held to be highly sensitive, and is subject to the DA-Notice system, where these installations come under the definition of Critical National Infrastructure. Consequently, transparency – before the issue of whether democratic means of seeking consent are in place – tends to falter at the first hurdle.

This has undoubtedly been the experience of campaigners against the LNG terminals at Milford Haven and those fighting the South Wales Gas Pipeline. In particular, the tortuous battle fought by campaigners at Milford to get the authorities to release copies of risk assessments undertaken on the full spectrum of risks (and uncertainties) surrounding the use of LNG tankers in the Cleddau estuary demonstrates that the basic elements of proper consent are ignored and suppressed by the conjunction of corporate and political interests that defines energy policy in terms of “energy security”. But now, the long, hard-fought campaign has struck a major blow thanks to a demand by the European Court of Human Rights.

The court has said it wants more details. It has asked the government which bodies had responsibility for assessing the risks and advising the planning authorities, and how responsibility was divided. In particular, the court wants to know if the relevant authorities “properly assessed the risk and consequences of a collision of LNG vessels, or other escape of LNG from a vessel in Milford Haven harbour or while berthed at the jetty”, and if “relevant information on the nature and extent of the risk posed by the hazardous industrial activities has been disclosed to the public”.

The UK Government has until February to respond, and to enable some of the questions which have gone unaddressed since 2004 to finally get an answer.

(meant to write this up earlier in the week, but have been hit by the lurgy)

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The difficulties of measuring exposure are based on the complexity of the processes into which a chemical enters over time.

The highly variable nature of exposure poses a major challenge to exposure (and risk) assessment: It means that exposure assessment must be an ongoing activity, with the scope and frequency of its measurement sufficient to characterize the variation (spatial and temporal) in, as well as magnitude of, exposure. That’s but one reason why exposure assessment is often called the “weakest link” in risk assessment.

First, it’s difficult for public agencies to collect, collate and assess the kind of information necessary to establish whether humans or ecologies are undergoing exposure, given the distribution of exposure scenarios in time and space (production of chemicals, transportation, incorporation in products, use of products, disposal, degradation). Second, imagining exposure scenarios often relies on assumptions about the underlying processes which turn out to be wildly inappropriate:

Phthalates are very widely used in products ranging from plastics to cosmetics and other personal care products. They exhibit a range of toxicity, including to the liver, kidney, and male reproductive system. The first CDC National Report demonstrated surprisingly high levels of di-butyl phthalate (DBP) and di-ethyl phthalate (DEP) in U.S. residents in general, and for DBP, in women of child-bearing age in particular (see the first two letters here). Indeed, these data demonstrated high-end levels of DBP that were an order of magnitude higher than a prior estimate that had been developed based on industry-provided use data and expert judgment.

The political angle here is important: producing the required data, interpreting it and setting up appropriate monitoring programmes requires transparent, legally enforceable and long-term relationships between private and public bodies in order to monitor stuff, and thereby promote the common good. But there is a basic and familiar conflict of interest here:

It simply must be acknowledged that industry has a strong interest in maintaining that exposure to its chemicals is low, so the ability to independently measure and verify exposure data is critical. Yet physical access to many exposure “settings” (e.g., workplaces) is very limited and infrequent at best, even for government officials.

In other words, industry has an interest in being irresponsible, in limiting the scope of risk assessment to relatively simple, acute, and short-term scenarios. But such a focus elevates managing short-term uncertainty for competitive advantage by private interests over the need to manage longer-term uncertainty for the common good.

Not that such an approach is endemic to the economic system or anything.

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Mass motoring effects an absolute triumph of bourgeois ideology on the level of daily life. It gives and supports in everyone the illusion that each individual can seek his or her own benefit at the expense of everyone else. Take the cruel and aggressive selfishness of the driver who at any moment is figuratively killing the “others,” who appear merely as physical obstacles to his or her own speed. This aggressive and competitive selfishness marks the arrival of universally bourgeois behaviour, and has come into being since driving has become commonplace.

Unlike the horse rider, the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was going to depend for the fuel supply, as well as for the smallest kind of repair, on dealers and specialists in engines, lubrication, and ignition, and on the interchangeability of parts. Unlike all previous owners of a means of locomotion, the motorist’s relationship to his or her vehicle was to be that of user and consumer-and not owner and master. This vehicle, in other words, would oblige the owner to consume and use a host of commercial services and industrial products that could only be provided by some third party. The apparent independence of the automobile owner was only concealing the actual radical dependency.

It’s easy to see the parallels here with Ivan Illich (an extract from Energy and Equity is also up). Through their critique of the symbolic potency of the car, both show how managerialism and/or technocracy replace striving for a just political community with the never-ending quest for the most efficient reproduction of the social order. The limits on political freedom appearing as the guarantee of personal liberty.

Participatory democracy demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle.

Bikes and open-access publishing or death!

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A report by the UK Energy Research Council (UKERC) last month said worldwide production of conventionally extracted oil could “peak” and go into terminal decline before 2020 – but that the government was not facing up to the risk. Steve Sorrell, chief author of the report, said forecasts suggesting oil production will not peak before 2030 were “at best optimistic and at worst implausible”.

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