Particularly interesting was a brave attempt to think about geo-engineering as an ethically justifiable response to climate change from Nigel Clark, which took on the concept of precaution head on, and did so by recognising that the root of the concerns that underlie precautionary measures is knowledge of finitude and vulnerability, but then pointing out how the human condition is therefore necessarily one driven by the urge to experiment. Central to his argument was an anthropological study of the burning practices of a tribe of Australian Aborigines who, over the course of 7000 or so years, perfected controlled burning as a response to the natural occurrence of wildfires.

So, land management of this sort is a kind of experimental nomad science (in Deleuze’s sense), that is, a science that proceeds on the basis of tacit knowledge, slow habituation of practices, and the kinds of skill that cannot be communicated in the form of rules but have to be learnt by the apprentice alongside the master in a kind of “do with me” fashion. Clark’s bold (and ultimately unjustifiable) move then was to link this practice with modern forays into geoengineering, identifying the experimentalism underlying the managed burning with the “experimentalism” underlying attempts to manage climate change by intervening in complex natural systems.

His presentation therefore ended up by effectively making an argument from retrospective historical necessity of a type which is not unfamiliar to anyone who can recall the typical mid-90s Monsanto booster’s argument for genetic modification, or the arguments more generally of transhumanists for increased technological modification of what, as humans, we’re “given”. These arguments (essentially, arguments in favour of a particular future) always operate by implicitly or explicitly offering a spectacularly total reading of history, which, at the extremes, attributes all human activity within the world to a single cause (such as the transhumanists’ “desire for increase in performance”, or whatever). Once this interpretation has been given, then the future starts to take on the appearance of a necessary reflection of our previously hidden teleology: “this is something we’ve always done, so it’s a familiar (even definitive), human activity; the point now is to do it better“. From this point of view, the widespread use of cheap carbon fuels stands as one of the more widespread forms of experimental geoengineering we’ve engaged in recently as a species.

Like the Deleuzo-Baudrillardian scribbling in his copy of “Postscript to the Societies of Control”, Clark ended up brandishing a fetish: whose experiment, we might ask? And with who, we might also ask where and when? The specificity of what is being done is all-important. The temporality involved in the processes of learning engaged in by the Aborigines of Clark’s example cannot be compared with the times of innovation and venture capitalisation that will drive any future developments in geo-engineering, driving them faster than knowledge of their effects will ever be able to develop.

Because that’s one of the crucial points about contemporary capitalism: action has to outstrip knowledge because there’s profit to be extracted from the uncertainty opened up by action. To claim that experimentation is essential to the human condition is therefore to emphasize only a portion of the story: it’s not definitive in all times and all places, and the times and places where experiment might be avoided in favour of precaution cannot simply be turned into sites of the emergence of another microfascism of the sort that readers of Deleuze and Foucault used to be dead keen on evoking at every opportunity.

Experimentation is a social relationship, and can therefore be inflected in different ways according to how ir expresses power: it can become habituated as a communal practice, it can be adopted as an individualist practice of, say, dandyism, or it can be utilised as a method of extracting surplus value whilst re-distributing the risks and uncertainties of investment, a way of moving faster than the law, regulatory agencies and even scientific knowledge itself.

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The report from NIACE, along with most journalism on the topic, risks disguising another trend in adult education provision however, in a way exemplified by this paragraph of the BBC report:

The government is committed to a major programme of increasing the skills of working adults and youngsters, so that Britain can compete with the fast growing economies of China and elsewhere.

How well such a programme is served by slashing funding is one question. Another consideration however is the effect that the Government’s commitment to certain kinds of education (”training” for “key skills”) has had on the patterns of provision as such: the perceived need for competitiveness has in effect acted as a massive drag on the provision of lifelong learning.

Extra funding for adult education, as anyone working in the area will tell you, has been provided according to very strict conditions. Accreditation and assessment provide the framework: a higher level of funding was provided for courses claiming accreditation, and accreditation is granted and maintained on the basis of the number of students per course completing a set assessment. This means than non-accredited (and therefore non-assessed courses) become a luxury which only larger and more established adult education institutions can afford to offer. In other words, all courses are assessed for their viability (and “quality”, used in its shiny-eyed, exhortatory, managementspeak sense) on criteria which are derived from the “key skills” class of courses, which are designed to provide GCSE-level training (filling the skills gap that the CBI and Institute of Directors can be counted on to whinge about every summer).

The problem is that (as I remember very well from my own experience in adult education, teaching philosophy classes) the number of students completing accredited and assessed courses tends to be eroded by the imperative to assess, assess, assess. Students who have been out of formal education for thirty, forty or fifty years may feel very intimidated by being asked to write an essay of 1500 words; others may not have the time, or may simply feel that the ethos of learning is actively hampered by defining their participation in terms of a unit of written work designed to demonstrate “learning outcomes” (and who could blame them?). The only (desperate) solution institutions tend to offer is a separate “study skills” module, designed to persuade individuals that they can jump through the hoops placed before them by the course auditors, and can even look forward to receiving a certificate to demonstrate their flexibility in the skills required for hoop-jumping.

Across the four courses I taught each year for two years, the vast majority of students refused to do the assessment. I allowed them to do so, caught between the desire to let them learn as adults and follow their own interests and preferred modes of participation as far as possible, and the knowledge that the end result would be a steady erosion of the viability of provision in my subject at the institution where I taught.

That there are fewer students in adult learning across the board now may well be the case, but I suspect that the Government’s paternalistic zeal for conditionality and auditing may have produced a far more negative result: namely, a reduction in the range of opportunities to try different subjects. Once again, the rhetoric of choice, and the machinery through which “choice” is provided, act to firmly restrict people’s access to genuinely enriching choices - here, ones which allow them to meet with others to think and talk about their daily experiences in a context different to most of those they’ll generally encounter.

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“Last week, this station was 3.51 dollars. Now it’s practically 3.60. So it’s gone up nine cents in one week,” Twyman said as he pumped five dollars’ worth of gas into his thirsty American car.

“Someone’s making a lot of money and it’s really, really wrong,” added Twyman, who founded the Prayer at the Pump movement last week to seek help from a higher power to bring down fuel prices, because the powers in Washington haven’t.

The half-dozen activists — Twyman, a former Miss Washington DC, the owner of a small construction company and two volunteers at a local soup kitchen — joined hands, bowed their heads and intoned a heartfelt prayer.

“Lord, come down in a mighty way and strengthen us so that we can bring down these high gas prices,” Twyman said to a chorus of “amens”.

Lord, please come down with a whole mighty passel o’ divine intervention because we, who already have our greasy mitts on the hog’s share of the earth’s resources and wealth, are desperate to keep hold of it for just a little while longer. Not exactly Matthew 19:21, is it?

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On this kind of understanding, the PP is therefore castigated as a blanket injunction against novelty that paralyses innovation (the Furedi gambit). It’s charged with reducing complex situations of choice to bivalent either-ors (no-risk or uncertain risk), as in this article, in which Professor Don Aitkin is quoted comparing the PP with Pascal’s Wager:

Pascal argued that it made good sense to believe in God: if God existed, you could gain an eternity of bliss, and if he didn’t exist, you were no worse off. Alas, Pascal didn’t allow for the possibility that God was in fact Allah, and you had opted for belief in the wrong religion.”

. Or alternatively, it is accused of not assisting in decision making, as the journalist Dan Gardner, who writes on risk issues, argues here: here:

Many people have looked at this situation and decided that some or all pesticides should be banned. The science isn’t settled. And the harm — if it exists — would be severe and irreversible. Surely the precautionary principle applies. But what would happen if some or all pesticides were banned? Crop yields would decline. Fruits and vegetables would become more expensive and people would eat less of them. And since there is considerable evidence that eating fruits and vegetables in sufficient quantities protects against cancer, it is very likely that more people would get cancer. So there are risks on both sides. What does the precautionary principle tell us about resolving a dilemma like that? Nothing.

All three of these objections are entirely wrong, and telling you why should hopefully gain me some absolution for having played fast and loose for the sake of a dig at Mr Cheney.

First, the PP has not to date clogged up the wheels of applied scientific research, despite being adopted by the EU as a central plank of public policy. It tends to be applied in piecemeal fashion in focusing on the regulation of new technologies, and is most often used as a way of refocusing research on questions which have not entered the frame of scientific risk assessments due perhaps to financial and time constraints, or other limiting factors. Its implementation to date reveals a central aspect of its original inspiration, that it would be a countervailing influence which could be called on to temper the pro-risk behaviour of hi-tech producers, and get them to think a little more about what they were trying to do.

Secondly, operating (as it tends to) as a pause in the process by which products come to market, it is designed to allow policy makers to think about the multiple alternative solutions which could be applied to a particular problem, and perhaps choose between alternative technical responses - or expand the terms of the choice to include socio-economic responses alongside new technologies in order to avoid plumping for “magic bullets”. In other words, the PP is not about an illusory choice between no-risk and uncertain risk. Rather, it seeks to balance the economic power of private producers to impose risks on society with the right of society to give informed consent to these risks, through a process of scrutiny which is not limited to the terms of the risk assessments to which the producers choose to submit their products.

Finally, the PP, being simply a demand to halt for a moment and think more widely about the potential effects of a product, does not itself provide a solution to a problem; rather, it invites us to consider whether the “problem” (how we make decisions under uncertainty”) has been adequately posed when it comes to product X. Traditional risk assessment methodologies tend to focus on formality, standardisation and repeatability, with the goal being to come up with universally-applicable algorithms into which data about severity of consequences and expectation values can be fed. However, if we lose the capacity to ask wider questions about just how applicable an off-the-shelf method is in a given case, then we have simply assumed that the problem we want to solve is amenable to the kinds of solutions some of us (i.e. large technology companies) tend to prefer.

The PP is not itself a decision procedure - it’s a caveat that is meant to prevent producers from dictating the pace at which new technologies are put on the market and adopted, thus allowing a broader weighing of benefits and harms, bringing in angles which would otherwise not be represented in the decision to allow a product to be sold.

Now the problems with the PP are many, it’s true. But these have to do with how far the three central motivations behind it that I’ve explored here are not expressed in practice. Given that the PP is, at bottom, a mechanism designed to stimulate the search on the part of government for informed consent to the use of new technologies, it demands ultimately a more democratic oversight over how socially-available knowledge is used in the production of technologies. As oversight, in the EU, is basically down to what the relevant regulatory bodies decide is worthy of notice, we’re therefore hardly significantly better off just because the PP guides EU regulatory policy. The PP is not, for example, available to EU citizens as a means of bringing legal challenges.

Which suggests the inevitable conclusion: a genuinely effective implementation of the PP would ultimately mean democratic control over the means of production and the social purposes for which they’re used.

Happy May Day!

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The toys and the distraction of playing with them are a particularly valuable benefit, especially given what happens when risks get “taken”. Taking large financial risks is generally a luxury that comes with economic power, as adding to the vast uncertainties with which human lives are hedged about is not something most people feel inclined to do. Further, if risks are “taken”, this generally means they don’t just get picked up, they get carried around for a while before before being dropped somewhere else, with the aid of a variety of implements. Take, for example, the complex investment instruments used by corporations. These spread risk so far around the network of global financial institutions that by the time the ruinous effects of bad guesses reverberate back through the wires to you, you’ve probably had time to offset them with another round of spread betting. Unfortunate for all those who happen to hold rather marginal mortgages, work in industry, or depend on next year’s food crop, but them’s the breaks.

Alternatively, you can simply cut the costs of innovation as far as possible by letting someone else pick up the tab somewhere downstream by living with your pollution, unexpected side-effects of undertested pharmaceuticals, or whatever. Even better, you could make sure that the main bearer of your risks is nature, in which case maybe you’ll get to hang on to the profit margins for a bit longer until the message comes back from the network telling you you’ve gone too far, and you suddenly find yourself needing to build the costs of terraforming another planet into your forecasts for next year.

But as a risk-taker, you of course recognise that with great power comes great responsibility. Which means that you feel obligated to soberly weigh up the benefits of your new product, or rather, what your marketing department imagines people might potentially believe are its benefits (based only on 30 seconds of sexualised imagery poking away at their insecurities), against all those complicated internal and external costs that are so hard to guess at.

All this needs to be done before you decide whether you should demiurgically depress the big red button marked “Innovate!”, and settle back to watching the Wheels of Creation start to turn. Who knows what new wonders will spring forth to exalt the dignity and boundless imagination of humanity?

And that’s how we just ended up with another nine brands of toothpaste on the market, only this time they contain largely untested free nanoparticles.

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It does take resolve to prevail in an epic clash of civilizations, granted, but it also takes resolve to nail your dick to a tree. Telling yourself that you’re nailing it to the Tree of Liberty with the Hammer of Freedom is a logical way to proceed, but that may not be enough, in itself, to protect you from the equally logical consequences.

After last week’s IAAST report, which argued that GM food cannot help solve global food shortages by raising crop yields (and that the problem isn’t a lack of food anyway, but the inefficiencies of liberalised global trade), a study conducted at the University of Kansas suggests that GM soya actually produces lower yields than non-GM. Monsanto reacted immediately by pointing out that actually-existing GM isn’t true GM, and that the hyper-productive version is - once again - just a little further ahead along the highway of inevitable progress - presumably having lunch in a motorway service station with nuclear fusion, molecular assemblers and “stable growth”.

Critics doubt whether the company will achieve this, saying that it requires more complex modification. And Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington – and who was one of the first to predict the current food crisis – said that the physiology of plants was now reaching the limits of the productivity that could be achieved.

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It was inevitable, however, that, just as the old socialism imploded because it simply didn’t work (except for its rulers and their hangers on) so the new socialism would also grind to a halt.

Always amazing how freemarketarians are keen to play around with the language of vulgar Marxism when the slightest opportunity presents itself, the kick from taking a ride on the back of a historical Absolute obviously too juicy to resist. But what’s interesting here is how Foster’s use of traditional anti-capitalist tropes goes further than this, to the point where he effectively lambasts all manner of institutions for greenwashing.

Criticizing the more or less random application of the word “sustainable” to anything which isn’t intended to automatically self-destruct the day after tomorrow means that Foster is on the same page as, for example, Wolfgang Sachs. Whether “sustainability” itself as a goal is incoherent (in the terms of the Brundtland Commission’s definition - which Foster fails to fully quote - ensuring that present needs are met without preventing the fulfilment of future needs, a statement which doesn’t appear to involve an obvious performative contradiction) is not something we’ll discover from reading Foster, who only manages to revert to that other well-established status-quo defender’s tic, trying to connect a concept one doesn’t agree with to some kind of mental disorder.

Meanwhile, a report is released which notes that food production is currently sufficient to feed the population of the world (so no need for yield-raising technical fixes, then - no wonder the US, Canada and Australia, champions of GM, are annoyed at its publication), but that trade liberalisation is responsible for making sure that ruinous inequalities of distribution persist.

Opening national markets to international competition can offer economic benefits but can lead to long term negative effects on poverty alleviation, food security and the environment without basic national institutions and infrastructure being place.

Hmmm, shades of Karl Polanyi.

Foster offers as a reason for the attractiveness of sustainability-language the “counterintuitiveness” of free-market economics. This it has in common with post-Newtonian natural science, of course. However, the difference is that some predictions made by post-Newtonian natural science have been, on occasion, verified.

Lim Li Chung, of Third World Network in Malaysia, said: “It clearly shows that small-scale farmers and the environment lose under trade liberalisation. Developing countries must exercise their right to stop the flood of cheap subsidised products from the north.”

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Some of D& S’s other work tends to focus on the impersonality of nature, contrasting the rhythms of the human world with geological time and so on. But Source seems to want to get beyond the opposition between feeble humanity on the one hand and the cosmos sub specie aeternitatis on the other, by employing the figure of the boy as a reference point within nature without, as Searle tritely insists, reducing the natural world that surrounds him to a monocentric plane of tragic human concerns (with a bit of the old in-out, in-out added for good measure).

Instead, the piece reminded me of Winnicott, or Bachelard’s childhood-evoking idea of intimate immensity, giving us a vulnerable human figure who was yet entirely at home within the sensory worlds afforded him by his environment. It seemed very brave as a consequence, and an affirmation of faith in the non-human.

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Britain’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said on Monday it had received proposals from over 30 parties interested in land surrounding 18 nuclear sites — all potential locations for new power stations.

There’s a big conditional rising up within this story, of course. Nuclear power is proof that not all new technologies ride in on a big wave of uncertainty before, after a while, becoming part of the accepted backdrop, delivering a modest set of benefits and occasionally visiting marginal harms. Rather, as time goes on the benefits become less and less certain, against a background of unpredictable decommissioning costs, undealt-with high-level waste, and unsafe mining operations overseas.

So, energy companies making sure they have the option to build in no way indicates that, by the early 2020s, we’ll be looking at a brand new herd of shiny white elephants. Even a determined assault on democracy through the ‘reform’ of the planning laws might not magic a comfortable investment environment out of nowhere.

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Via correspondence, I’m informed of some of the choicer titbits amongst the evidence given to the MEPs to peruse. When I first wrote on this topic back in August 2006, I noted that the chosen specifications for the pipeline brought into play questions of scientific uncertainty as well as risk - where said uncertainty implies that possible outcomes of a particular action are reasonably well-understood, but that specific probabilities are not available. The decision by National Grid to have a larger- than-normal-bore pipeline bearing gas at pressures of 94bar meant that they were employing a technology which, whilst certainly not being subject to the exotic uncertainties of novelties like nanotechnology or synthetic biology, still implied some factors which could not be included into standard risk assessments as they could not strictly be quantified, due to a lack of empirical evidence. Often in the face of these kinds of uncertainties, invalid extrapolations are made from another body of available evidence. From the evidence presented to the MEPs, it seems that taking this shortcut is exactly what National Grid has done.

As part of demonstrating that the specifications of the pipeline were adequate from a safety point of view, NG had to come up with an adequate testing regime, which they based on the exclusive use of hydrostatic testing (in which a vessel is filled with a liquid and then examined for deformations). However, in doing so, they justified their conclusion with reference to tests done on smaller-bore pipelines made of different steels (as they had no experience themselves of pipelines with a diameter comparable to that of the South Wales pipe). Not only is the South Wales pipeline larger than usual, it is constructed from steel which (the evidence also alleges) is thinner than it should be. As a result, the use of high-pressure hydrostatic testing could have resulted in serious deformations - and all this as a consequence of the safety testing regime itself, before the pipe even became operational (which of course it still is not, as the construction of the LNG terminals at Milford Haven is still running behind schedule).

The problems extend to some known risks as well, however - which NG appears to have failed to take fully into account in its headlong haste to get the pipeline finished before opposition could really get organised. For example, at some points along its length, the pipe has been laid close to high tension overhead electrical lines, for several miles. It was discovered in 1998 that laying steel pipelines close to overhead power lines can result in AC-current-induced corrosion - at a pipeline laid in the North of England in this manner, investigations showed that the thickness of the steel had been reduced by 40% in places, due to the rapid onset of corrosion.

The main thrust of the evidence is that the claims by NG that its contractors have constructed the pipeline in accordance with the relevant international engineering standard for gas pipelines, IGE/TD1, are very much to be doubted. Over a hundred photographs have been produced to show that this standard has been breached multiple times during the hasty laying of the pipeline, and that the charges laid in this report [PDF, 104Kb] concerning the mishandling of pipes during construction, the laying of pipes in unsuitable ground, and (given the choice of route) the possibly unsafe use of tunnels, are demonstrably true.

UPDATE: Hello once again to the guys & gals visiting from National Grid over in Coventry, and their friends from NG USA’s subsidiary, Niagara Mohawk Power Corp., over in Frankline, Mass.

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